Off Margin

New Substack post: ‘Reading, and being read, in community’. A longer-form text on carving out pathways for allowing others ‘in’ and myself ‘out’, in order to be read (literally, physically, emotionally) in writing, body, and mind. Read here: /p/reading-and-being-read-in-community Image: Louise Bourgeois, Self Portrait

Wrote about an admittedly weird Pilates class I had today (a highly top secret weekly activity of mine) with a big splash of poetic license. Read here: /p/returning-to-life-through-contrology

Anyone who knows me knows I am always, always late to a party. Now I get to be late to two, hehe. Substack ✅ and an end of year reading list 9 days into January ✅. So here goes introducing Off Margin on Substack… Off Margin will continue on @radio.worm across 2026 to explore text that moves off the page. But it is also now cloning itself (sort of) onto Substack where I will be (hopefully) sharing all manner of writing, as part of this growing and expanded practice I am painstakingly honing. Off Margin (Substack) will focus on a multitude of reading and writing lives, and texts that move both off and back on (uh oh) the page. To kick off, I wrote about the role reading and writing has had in my life across the past year and how this has completely transformed my approach to them both as interconnected, active practices that are far more intuiative, embodied, and experiential than I previously gave them credit for. I’m talking about waiting room and insomnia companions, temporal passages, portals to place and space, self-flagilating vulnerability sticks, holistic soothing balms, and much more. Also, as part of a vow to move away from strictly ‘consuming’ books and move into a space of engagement (which can also, sometimes, feel very vulnerable!) this first post is a way of paying homage to all the people, places and books who knowingly, but mostly unknowingly, shaped my reading and writing life in 2025. I hope those who this speaks to will enjoy reading! Link to post here: /pub/offmargin/p/life-reading-life-writing?r=4wa8x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true Subscribe to Off Margin Substack here: /offmargin

Off Margin s2/ep6 - ‘Language Loops’ @radio.worm   Tuesday 09 December, 2025 8-9pm CET ‘Language Loops’, is an exploration of the use of repetition, distortion, inversion, mirroring, and möbius strips in literature, text-based art, and sound performance. With these ‘loops’ - of varying formats and scales - acting as tools and techniques that create hypnotic, meditative, and/or disruptive effects. In turn enhancing the meaning and perception of the materiality of text, and showcasing how language can be used as a physical, sensory experience as much as it can for expressive and communicative means. This episode of Off Margin will look at how circuitous disruptions in linear approaches to text-production can provide new and revised understandings towards time, narrative, space, value, knowledge, and power. Evoking the mundane to the spectacular, the humdrum to the theatrical, whilst simultaneously integrating qualities of the absurd, the fantastical, the joyous, and the damn right repetitive. Featuring newly written works by Amy Gowen and Andy Norstrom, alongside readings, snippets and sonic interludes from Sheila Heti, Agnes Varda, Cheri Knight, Kate Briggs, Inger Christensen, Hanne Lippard, Alvin Lucier, Kristin Oppenheim, Rita Dove, and more! Join us 8-9pm CET on radio.worm this evening.

Off Margin s2/ep5 - ‘The Fact in the Fiction’ @radio.worm Tuesday 28 October, 2025 20.00-21.00 CET ‘The Fact in the Fiction’ is a sonic entanglement of fictions nested within, or calling back to, factual or ‘real-life’ works and scenarios. A blurring of the boundary of what, Ben Lerner refers to as ‘the unstable mixture of fact and fiction’, or, what Danielle Dutton, quoting Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky, in her book ‘Prairie, Dress, Art, Other’ calls, ‘the process of defamiliarisation or estrangement’. This episode of Off Margin will look at how fiction (and often fictions within fictions 🌀) hold the potential to reproduce, reconstitute, or distort the ‘real’, whilst the imagined and the concocted so seamlessly enter into our perceived understandings of ‘real’, simultaneously. All to create an enthrallingly shaky grey zone that confuses and confounds where the real ends and the imagined begins…   This episode will feature newly written work, alongside readings and sonic interludes gratuitously borrowed from Marguerite Duras, Claire-Louise Bennett, Ben Lerner, Danielle Dutton, Graham Lamkin, Jean-Marie Mercimek, Benedict Dew & more.

In ‘The New Art of Making Books’ (1975), Ulises Carrión proclaimed that books exist, “as objects in an exterior reality, subject to concrete conditions of perception, existence, exchange, consumption, use.” For Carrión, a book needed to be created and read as a spatio-temporal entity in which language was complementary to the object, a part of the structure, in the process of creating meaning and, crucially, producing specific reading conditions. This upcoming episode of Off Margin will pick up on this idea to delve into ‘Textures of Writing’, and explore the textual landscapes in which writing can emerge, be generated, present itself, and be circulated, as well as the environments in which texts find themselves mirrored, in response or repellent to, or that they embody or act in friction towards. If a textual environment is one in which the contexts and settings from which we speak or write language are also consumed, and interpreted - encompassing both the physical and social factors that influence the meaning and understanding of a text - what is the direct relationship between a text and its environment? What are the settings, terrains, and conditions from which texts can emerge? And how much does the environment influence how a text is produced and received? Tune in today at 20:00 for Off Margin w/ Amy Gowen !! ( design credit: @sudo_wu )

Off Margin s2, ep4 Textures of Writing // Textual Environments @radio.worm Tuesday 22 July, 2025 20.00-21.00 CEST In ‘The New Art of Making Books’ (1975), Ulises Carrión proclaimed that books exist, “as objects in an exterior reality, subject to concrete conditions of perception, existence, exchange, consumption, use.” For Carrión, a book needed to be created and read as a spatio-temporal entity in which language was complementary to the object, a part of the structure, in the process of creating meaning and, crucially, producing specific reading conditions. This upcoming episode of Off Margin will pick up on this idea to delve into ‘Textures of Writing’, and explore the textual landscapes in which writing can emerge, be generated, present itself, and be circulated, as well as the environments in which texts find themselves mirrored, in response or repellent to, or that they embody or act in friction towards. If a textual environment is one in which the contexts and settings from which we speak or write language are also consumed, and interpreted - encompassing both the physical and social factors that influence the meaning and understanding of a text - what is the direct relationship between a text and its environment? What are the settings, terrains, and conditions from which texts can emerge? And how much does the environment influence how a text is produced and received? For this upcoming episode, Off Margin host Amy Gowen will explore differing textual environments and landscapes, to the backdrop of recent environmental field recordings and textual works she has been playing with, which inspired the idea for the show. Catch the episode on Tuesday 22 July from 8-9pm CEST on radio.worm. - Off Margin, the literary radio show with a twist scratches the writing off the page and explore how text manifests visually, sonically and texturally, through different formats and spaces, as visual, rhythmic, and performative material. Design by @sudo_wu

Upcoming: Off Margin S2, Ep3: Longing for Marginalia w/ Xingyun Shen @yunsq 📄 Tues 27 May, 8-9pm @radio.worm For its upcoming episode, Off Margin is thrilled to welcome to the show Xingyun Shen, whose practice moves within (and out of) the bounds of ‘longing for marginalia’: the structurally ephemeral nature of text in the margin of institutional frameworks, pencil annotations in the pages of library books, the books we leave behind, and the words we highlight and then make mini illustrations in the margin. As part of her longing, Xing convenes the Marginalia Book Club, a book club with no required reading, as any textual material that serves the reader as a literary guide is worthy to be talked about. Each session, readers convene with a text of choice, and together look at the marginalia that may have been written in page margins or await to experience the ones they will write and annotate in space through conversation. For Xing, marginalia is a space for unlearning, learning, hearing, and holding. An act where the conversations exchanged turn into writing in space…Fleeting, yet momentous… In this upcoming episode, Xing and Amy will engage in performative activations of the live marginalia of a series of textual materials on-and-off the page including (but perhaps not limited to?) correspondence forms, literature, and interview. To, together, become the reading and writing bodies that act as accomplices and comrades to marginal objects and their annotations. Catch our episode on Tuesday 27 May from 8-9pm CEST on radio.worm. Design by @sudo_wu

Upcoming: Off Margin S2, Ep2: Ghostmending w/ Amy Suo Wu @sudo_wu 🪡 Tues 25 March, 8-9pm @radio.worm For its upcoming episode, Off Margin is thrilled to welcome to the show Amy Suo Wu @sudo_wu whose practice spans the textual seen, unseen, spectral, and labyrinthine. Amy’s recent interest and practice circles around literal and metaphorical approaches of mending, design as remittance and self-fulfilling prophecy, and how text and textile might be woven together to form embodied publishing. She is currently researching intergenerational mending together with her mum Maria Ling Qing Huang under the auspicious title of Serenity Department, where they have embarked on a process that engages with the ruptures of language, distance, sickness, time and culture, torn by experiences of migration and intergenerational trauma. During our episode together, we will be incorporating sonic and written annotation in dialogue with a number of Amy’s written and spoken textual works, weaving real and spectral threads within and between Amy’s own writings, as well as those from a selection of writers who echo related tangents and themes. Through the interlacing of these materials we will delve into the topics of mending as a practice of interdependency, ghostwriting, labyrinthine tactics, coded language, spectral publishing, motherhood and more… To make this episode an extra special one, it is coinciding with the release of Off Margin’s new visual identity, conceptualised and designed by none other than Amy herself. Thanking Amy for the perfect visual accompaniment to the show 💌 Catch our episode Tuesday 25 March from 8-9pm CET on radio.worm. Slide 2 📷 by @roel_van_tour at @wereldmuseum.rotterdam —— Off Margin, the literary radio show with a twist, scratches the writing off the page to explore how text can manifest visually, sonically and texturally, through different formats and spaces, as visual, rhythmic, and performative material. The show incorporates a mix-mash of fragmentary text, performance, short and long-form readings, recorded interview, conversations with guests, sonic annotation, and musical accompaniment.