NOÖ Knows Stories #1: Guest Post by Ken Baumann

"A short story from another Mike–M Kitchell–possessed my computer. And Blake Butler's. We were laying out his story (Paul Garrior in Jacques Riverrun's "The Abyss Is The Foundation of the Possible") for the third issue of No Colony. This was the most difficult document we've ever built. I proffered myself at the altar of Word. I think I nearly killed a neighbor's dog, to appease this story. Blake had done most of the work, and then passed it to me, finished and ready to print, and then I opened it up and it garbled into some new fucked iteration. I had to manually address every space, every margin, flex and touch the images nicely. I thought about crushing my computer, I thought about headbutting the keyboard (I did do that, actually). Again, FINALLY, it was done, and then I opened it up to check it one more time and all the page numbers disappeared. I saw them go. There was a ghost in there. I don't know how I fixed it; I've heard many people go into fugue states under great duress. The story, though, Kitchell's short story, is one of my favorites and creates a zone of horror and confusion unlike anything I've read. But goddamn." — Ken Baumann, co-editor of No Colony and author of Solip