About me
The problem with bios is that they demand coherence in a way that actual human lives refuse to provide. On paper, I am a writer, academic, educator, and publisher born in South Africa and based in the UK. I specialise in autofiction, autotheory, fragmented narratives, visual culture, and literary criticism. In practical terms, that means I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how personal stories work, how identity is constructed, and whether anything we write about ourselves is ever really true.1
I am interested in the tension between personal experience and critical theory — the ways in which memory and storytelling shape each other, and why certain narratives persist while others fade. My work explores liminal spaces: where personal narratives dissolve into cultural critique, where theory becomes lived experience, and where traditional genres fail to hold the complexity of what they are trying to contain. If that sounds abstract, it is only because reality itself is.
My academic background is, by conventional standards, usefully scattered. I have a BA in Media Studies, an MA in Sociology and Global Change, and a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from York St John University, where my doctoral research explored experimental memoir, fragmented narrative, and a practice I developed called photo-sketching — using photographs as a doorway into writing about the past.2 I have taught undergraduate modules in English Literature, Creative Writing, and Media Studies, and I continue to work as a private tutor and creative writing mentor.
I also run Analog Submission Press, an independent small press I founded in 2017 to publish experimental writing in hand-assembled, limited-run editions. The press has published over 160 titles, which demonstrates either commitment or a particular kind of stubbornness that I prefer not to examine too closely.
I write about the craft of life writing at Written from Life, and publish micro-essays, fragments, and short cultural criticism at Semiotic Drift. The two speak to each other. One asks how a self gets written. The other asks how that self is shaped, unsettled, and revised by culture, media, memory, and history.
Outside of writing, teaching, publishing, and research, I like cats, travel, walking, and tea — which is another way of saying I enjoy things that are quiet and best appreciated in solitude.
About this site
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All writing is © Marc Brüseke unless otherwise noted. You are welcome to quote or share excerpts with attribution.
