Theft is a choose your own adventure artists book I created for an Experimental Graphic Texts workshop I took in my senior year at UCSD taught by Anna-Joy Springer. It was made as both a creative project and also a research project in UCSD’s extensive archive of artists’ books. Theft won an honorable mention for UCSD’s Library Research Prize. The book is in the tradition of such works as the Fluxus books and Jackson Mac Low’s Doings, which seek to put form and content in conversation with one another. Each page of the book contains its own small artists book which is unique to all others, and includes a poem, instructions for an interactive practice, or both before instructing you where to go based on choices you make, as with old choose your own adventure children’s books. Theft offers an illusion of choice, as each decision you make brings you inevitably back to the beginning in a grand cycle. This cyclical form, paired with the games and practices contained in the book challenges the readers to question the capitalist systems they live in, while fostering kindness and generosity.

Experimental literature is often inaccessible, but in the works of Jackson Mac Low, and Fluxus, I found that the interactive aspect of literary "games" makes experimental work immediately accessible and inclusive. The games in my book can be played by anyone. One game instructs the reader to make a tea from the cut up fragments of a poem and "use it to water those tough plants which grow in cracks in the sidewalk and noxious roundabouts." Another has a reader cut the words of a poem up, and use the words to name the stars in the night sky, before burning them in a campfire and setting the stars free. I hope that the playfulness, and accessible spiritual practices of the games in Theft challenge the notion that, in order to take part in experimental art, a person has to be wealthy and educated.