PD (Petey) Edgar MFA, MA

every other issue I do a little intro for our new followers! I'm @pdedgar30.bsky.social ; I edit re•mediate and bring on guest editors every so often. I started the lit mag right as I was starting my PhD, and I describe my work with this journal now as an experiment in research-creation!

There's a reason why sports teams don't chant "I believe that we will lose" before a game, a reason so obvious that I'm pretty sure it needs no explanation in that context. Words have power. They not only describe but shape reality; we take vows – spiritual vows, marital vows, oaths of office, become accountable for our words when we testify under oath in court or in Congress or just make a verbal commitment. Our words shape reality when we tell someone they're worthless or valuable, beautiful or ugly, beloved or unloveable, which is a bit like chanting "I believe that you will win." Or lose. A friend of mine reminded me that the word encourage literally means to instill courage; we can do that or its opposite with how we speak, with what we say, with how we show up. It's not the only work we can do during this emergency, but it's an important part of it. It's a big part of how we express a spirit of defiance, of resoluteness, how we act with the knowledge that emotions and attitudes are contagious, be they fear or courage, strength or weakness, kindness or cruelty. Which is why it makes my head explode – picture this head as a volcano and these words as lava – when people surrender in advance verbally, which they do all the time about politics. There's a lot of "I believe that we will lose" on social media and in the news. One way it shows up is when journalists report on some of the rubbish spewing from the mouth of the geriatric clown/felon we have to call president as though his every utterance had the weight of law, as though words will become actions, as though the actions will succeed, as though they will not be met with opposition, as though they believe he will win.

Seems like time to re-up:
There's a reason why sports teams don't chant "I believe that we will lose" before a game, a reason so obvious that I'm pretty sure it needs no explanation in that context. Words have power. They not only describe but shape reality....

18 years ago, we started ProPublica to do hard-hitting, rigorous journalism that exposes wrongdoing and injustice.

If you have a tip related to the Trump administration, we want to hear it.

Here's how to contact our reporters securely: www.propublica.org/tips/

Sorry to everyone I commented more than I questioned today at #mla2026 it’s a sign of deep respect and admiration for your work

I took it earlier before seeing this!! Seems like in very good company :))

Did you know our Submissions queue opened December 1? We welcome new work for an un-themed issue to be published March 2026. Consider sending us your work today! Each one will be carefully considered by this human (@pdedgar30.bsky.social), with guaranteed decisions between Mar. 1 & 15.

I heard there was a secret verse
That David used to make AI worse
But you don't really want to pub that, do ya

little did I know when we wrote "ummm you can make it write poems about anything especially problematic stuff" that a paper would come out eight months later that says "ummm they all do it actually"

Issue•4 of Re•mediate, [MachineWitness], is live! We are so excited to bring you this collection of new work in line with our call for work that "captures capture," that watches our being watched watching.

Gather with us on Saturday to celebrate the launch of MachineWitness! Join editor @pdedgar30.bsky.social and more than half of our contributors to hear and see original work and learn more about the pieces and process notes! DM or subscribe to our Substack to receive the link day-of!

You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out that what a country values can change over time. Sometimes, though, there’s a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you’ve actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word – but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass – and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island – even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.

Great piece by Zadie Smith. When the right talks about classics or "Western" culture, these works are only important to the extent that it demonstrates their superiority, they have no interest in art in and of itself beyond that www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

5) My four (4!) pieces in @michiganquarterly.bsky.social Computer-Generated Text issue are coming out! sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/current-...

4) Huge thanks to Prof. Acie Clark for inviting me to a virtual conversation at the University of Central Arkansas! I had such a fun time catching up and sharing how I have been learning to apply Critical Making approaches to my writing, editing, and scholarly work!

3) I accepted and galleyed several pieces for the next issue of Re•mediate Lit Mag, which are coming out Saturday (and you're invited to attend our launch reading over Zoom! You can find the link by following the magazine on Instagram or Substack:)
substack.com/@remediateli...

2) Two interviews between me and Katherine Parrish were published in Periodicities: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics!
periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2025/11/kath...

1) At the Creative Writing Studies Conference, I presented a work-in-progress that is a collection of distantly-coded text-deforming tools (in conversation with Kyle Booten's idea for Word Gyms) that facilitate generative chop-and-cook approaches to remixed creative writing on an incredible panel!

The last two weeks have incredibly confluent for thinking about responsible and resistive approaches to AI in the Creative Writing space. I'm so grateful for my colleagues who are thinking critically along with me and for the literary/scholarly organizations we get to partner with! 1/6

Thank you SO MUCH !! Part 2 is about @remediatelitmag.bsky.social, and Part 1 is about my work in @ailiteraryreview.bsky.social and @michiganquarterly.bsky.social <3

if i closed all 81 tabs in my browser would my life be better, worse, or the same

Our first information session is TONIGHT, October 15, at 6pm. Come learn about the T&T PhD!

Call for Submissions The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) seeks submissions for Volume 5 of the Electronic Literature Collection.

I am thrilled to announce the opening of the Call for Submissions for Electronic Literature Volume 5.

eliterature.github.io/elc5-info/

I am serving along with @zachwhalen.bsky.social, @elikaortega.bsky.social, and Dani Spinosa.

This call launches with translations in 12+ languages!

Our first information session for the T&T PhD is in ONE WEEK on Wednesday, October 15. Be sure to sign up to learn more about our program!

This may explain why there’s an aggressive response to people who merely post Kirk’s own words. It threatens the existence of the alternate Kirk - the motivational speaker that had been marketed to young kids and white Christian groups through selective quotation & clips.

I wish i knew of this sooner! Excited to see what comes of it

GitHub - pdedgar1/borges-taxonomy: A fun minigame made to illustrate the taxonomy that Borges made and that tickled Foucault enough to write The Order of Things! A fun minigame made to illustrate the taxonomy that Borges made and that tickled Foucault enough to write The Order of Things! - pdedgar1/borges-taxonomy

And I talk a little more about the process in the ReadMe file below. There's a minor interest in providing categories and asking for examples of them to think about mapping semantic space/categories as a kind of exploratory gesture, but really this is just for fun

github.com/pdedgar1/bor...

I read this translation of the original story:
www.alamut.com/subj/artifac...

idk if anyone's teaching Borges but I Distant (Claude) Coded a matching game for the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge's taxonomy! (Bigger screen better)

lmk how it makes you feel — I still haven't gotten it perfect

pdedgar1.github.io/borges-taxon...

They asked me about spark notes. I proceed to go off on learning theory and cognition.

If you know someone who would be interested in Re•mediate and hearing about what we're up to, but is disengaged from social media, I hope you'll send them this link to our new monthly newsletter (first drop this Friday!) — We'll keep you up to date on our calls, events, features, and contributors<3

Launched a monthly newsletter starting Aug 15! Follow us at remediatelitmag.substack.com