For many years, I’ve scribbled in notebooks. Sometimes drawing, sometimes writing. When my scribblings capture an idea for a potential story or piece of short fiction, I think of them as notions. During the year of the turning of the Millennium. I collected the notions I’d written while sailing with friends on a schooner off Nova Scotia during the summer of 1998 into a single metafictional piece called “Notions” -- which I was fortunate enough to have published in the U.K. in the magazine, Tank.

Here’s a link to the full text of Notions. [Link to Notions]

Josh Maremont, a San Francisco-based musician who records and performs electronica under the name, Thermal, and I decided to use this text as the basis for a collaboration.

We got together six readers and recorded different people reading different sections of the text at various locations in SoMa, including:

• the playground at Yerba Buena,
• the pedestrian bridge between Zeum and Metreon,
• several discreet corners of Howard Street,
• the downward ramp of a basement parking garage,
• inside a tapas restaurant and brewery, The Thirsty Bear, and
• on Second Street underneath the Bay Bridge.

Thermal mixed and edited the recordings, then wrote music.

And so “A Walk Through N” came into the world.

In May 2004, a live performance of “A Walk Through N” was given as part of the Archipelago series at the San Francisco Musicians Union Hall.

The final mix of A Walk Through N is on Thermal's website, Boxman Studies. [Link Coming Soon]

A chapbook containing the complete text of Notions that was given to the attendees of the performance at San Francisco Musicians Union Hall. [Link to PDF]