Richard Holeton

Cult. Magazine No. 2 • Summer 2023 • 15th July 2023

"Henry Revisited"

Featured in CULT #2, now available at Cult.Mag > Store. "Baba's threatening to maim herself with the IED she made with her Replicator," says Junior. "And you know she can do it! Even if she's faking a schizoid episode. The QuickResponders are surrounding her condo."

Neon Garden • Mannequin Haus • 3rd February 2023

"Ham Again and Again"

With apologies to Samuel Beckett, Dr. Seuss, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. A short one-act play composed by erasure/redaction of Beckett's "Endgame."

Gargoyle Magazine • 12th September 2022

"Counting"

The Goreman Gelders had been undeterred by the groans that followed every BEEP!, or the shivering of grak-enhanced suppressed laughter, or the tear-streaked cheeks of their audience. They resolutely completed the 33-slide filmstrip and opened the floor for questions, but hearing none, they quietly packed up their projector and screen, smoothed down their skinny ties and rebuttoned their nondescript suit jackets. “Nice tapestries,” said the younger Gelder, somewhat longingly . . .

Made with Craiyon.com

15th August 2022

"The Winograd Matrix"

In this interactive fiction, a gaming-industry couple are confined together in a near-future, post-pandemic world of Favatars, Syndics, and roving bands of Ferengi thugs. Unlike other Choose-Your-Own-Adventure type stories, the reader navigates the narrative by making grammatical (or meaning-making) choices rather than by choosing different actions. #interactive fiction #elit #pandemic fiction #experimental fiction

Litro Magazine USA • 3rd July 2022

"Tunneling"

Weasel is following me, panting, on hands and knees, through a passage we call Route 66, even though it’s only a hundred feet long, the diameter of a barrel hoop, and made of clay. “Do you think I want to die in here?” I say. #experimental fiction #futurism #survival #dystopian

Cult Magazine • 20th April 2022

"Chance Meeting Between Cambodian National Amputee Volleyball Team, Stephen Hawking, and Black Mothers Displaced by Hurricane Katrina, 2006"

“The future… of humankind… is in outer space,” Hawking says, grinning obliquely. He tells them he’s been invited to orbit the earth on Sir Richard Branson’s SpaceShipTwo for free. “It won’t cost me… an arm and a leg.”

Tupelo Quarterly • 16th March 2022

"June Swoon, 1994"

Why did Eva “swoon (desmayó?) & run away” at the motel? June Swoon. You might think this is a baseball phrase, something that every team has to hear when they go on a losing streak in June. I say this is a wild dream—but it is this dream I want to realize. Life and literature combined.

yunews • 26th July 2021

Four Poems at Poetry Hotel

Three poems ("Knuckleheads!", "September Spam Pantun," and "2034 Q&A"), and a prose-poem ("Waif OD," which first appeared in F(r)iction), have been given a room at YU News's Poetry Hotel.

Electronic Literature Lab, WSU-Vancouver • 23rd May 2021

Figurski at Findhorn on Acid — 20th Anniversary Edition

A mechanical pig, a commune in Scotland, the Holodeck, Spam, psychedelic drugs, a shower stall in a Florida trailer with the image of Jesus, an international spy—all this and more are back for the 20th Anniversary Edition of Richard Holeton’s "cult classic" hypertext novel.

revue bleuOrange #10 • 24th February 2021

"Postmoderne"

"Postmoderne" est un poème en prose et une saynète multimédia prenant la forme d'un diaporama en ligne, avec un texte constitué uniquement d'anagrammes provenant du mot postmoderne.

The Fictitious Press • 1st September 2020

MYNEXTDOORS DOT COM

MYNEXTDOORS DOT COM THE PRIVATE LOCAL NETWORK WHERE
YOU CONNECT WITH YOUR NEIGHBORS TO CREATE AND BUILD
BETTER STRONGER SAFER HAPPIER HEALTHIER COMMUNITIES

Art by Julian Mateus

NOMINATED FOR BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES OF 2020 • F(r)iction No. 16 • Summer 2020 • 16th July 2020

"Waif OD"

"Waif OD" is an "erasure fiction" composed by redaction of the text of Samuel Beckett's WAITING FOR GODOT. It transforms GODOT's claustrophobic world of five male characters into a flash fiction about an abused woman.

The Brautigan Library • 28th April 2020

LUMBER WORLD: The Podcast

(Part 4 available as of August, 2020.) A group of counterculture workers at a lumber yard battle with capitalism, family life, and modern existence. Read by Phoenix Crockett.

Notre Dame Review • 11th January 2020

"Afterword(s): Take a Book/Leave a Book"

Welcome to the special &NOW issue of the NOTRE DAME REVIEW. Now in its fifteenth year, &NOW is a festival that brings together poets and novelists, fiction authors, artists, critics, musicians, programmers, performers and creators of visual, found, electronic, multimedia and other hybrid forms in a celebration of readings, panels, and other performances of innovative writing.

The Brautigan Library • 1st November 2019

LUMBER WORLD: The Rejection File

In addition to my unpublished novel manuscript, The Brautigan Library is making available a volume of historical letters, postcards, and other documents, comprising a record of my extensive attempts to publish the novel during 1984 and 1985—and the results of those efforts in dozens of rejections. I've annotated the correspondence, highlighting the careers of many celebrated (and some notorious) literary agents and editors.

Photo by Bill Collins

The Brautigan Library • 1st November 2019

LUMBER WORLD: A Novel

"Going to the Lumber Yard may never be the same again!" proclaims the fictional book jacket for my unpublished 1984 novel. "Big business and government agents team up, with their banks of computers and surveillance satellites, for an immense top-secret energy project in the Sahara Desert; as they become entangled with a small band of nomads and, halfway around the world, the eccentric crew of a California lumber yard, the results offer both analysis and antidote for modern times."

Notre Dame Review #48 • 1st September 2019

"Afterword(s): Take a Book/Leave a Book" (slideshow)

"The piece is symmetrically structured and frantically inventive." Multimedia slideshow poem, inspired by Joan Retallack's (c. 1990) "Not a Cage," in which she appropriates the first and last lines of books she was discarding.

The Fictitious Press • 22nd May 2019

Transcript: A Further Redaction of the Mueller Report

I created this text by erasure or "blackout" of the Tables of Contents, Introductions, and Executive Summaries of the official Department of Justice Mueller Report. As erasure fiction (vs. erasure poetry), it's been edited for punctuation and capitalization, in order to create syntactical prose sentences from the found text. Contains adult and X-rated language.

Image by Flickr user trendingtopics (modified)

The Fictitious Press • 22nd May 2019

In Denial: A Further Redaction of the Mueller Report

This is an X-rated erasure text composed from the official Mueller Report. The story consists of the words left unredacted, intended to be read as a continuous narrative. Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction—an artistic adaptation of a public document. Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0. #muellerblackout

Forklift, Ohio Issue #37 • 29th March 2019

"Afterword(s): Take a Book/Leave a Book" (print)

The first poem consists of lines appropriated from the endings of 10 books I was recycling. Using a local "Take a Book/Leave a Book" library, I swapped out one book at a time for a new (used) book, appropriated text from the ending of the "new" book, and replaced one line in the poem with the newly appropriated text to make a new poem. I then repeated this process 10 times to make 10 new 10-line poems.