Marc Brüseke

About me

The thing about bios is that they apply pressure to a life until it begins to resemble a line. My own has moved through Cape Town, England, years of travel, academic study, university classrooms, and the repetitive physical labour of making small books.

Place enters my work as memory, inheritance, estrangement, and distance. And the question of where a person belongs tends to become harder once several answers are available.

My academic route began with a BA in Media Studies, followed by an MA in Sociology and Global Change, then a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing. On paper, the sequence looks orderly. In practice, each field leaked into the next.

Research and writing

My research begins with the problem of the self: how it is written, remembered, photographed, mediated, and revised.

My doctoral thesis, Cape Town/International: The Preparation of a Memoir, combined creative practice and critical enquiry to explore experimental memoir, postcolonial identity, family history, travel, and the instability of autobiographical ‘truth’¹.

Within the thesis, I developed photo-sketching, an image-text method that uses photographs as points of entry into personal history. Fragments sit beside criticism, memory, dreams, and images. And meaning is created through proximity, absence, and recurrence.

I continue to develop two longer works from this research. The first returns to childhood in South Africa and the afterlives of apartheid within personal and family memory. The second draws on years of travel to examine displacement, landscape, and the search for belonging. A related practical project develops photo-sketching as a method for writers and creative practitioners.

At Semiotic Drift, I publish fragments and short critical pieces on media, culture, theory, visual life, memory, and personal history. Some pieces begin with an argument. Others begin with a dream, a photograph, a television programme, a film, a video game, or something overheard or read, and remembered incorrectly.

AI literacy and pedagogy

AI literacy has become a newer branch of the same research. Generative systems intensify questions I have pursued for years about authorship, representation, identity, and the forms through which thought becomes visible.

My current work examines AI in relation to research, academic writing, creative practice, feedback, assessment, and higher education pedagogy. I am interested in critical use: stronger research habits, sharper judgement, transparent authorship, and a clear recognition of the places where automated fluency flattens thought.

Generative AI also returns me to media studies. Every technology carries its own assumptions about speed, usefulness, knowledge, and human attention. These assumptions soon become habits. And after a while, the habit becomes difficult to see.

Life writing remains the ground from which this work grows. Both areas ask how a self comes into language and what becomes lost through mediation.

Teaching

Before I began working independently, I taught undergraduate modules across English Literature, Creative Writing, and Media Studies at York St John University. My teaching covered close reading, narrative form, visual culture, digital identity, research methods, and critical theory. I also introduced photo-sketching within creative writing pedagogy.

I now provide one-to-one tuition and mentoring for undergraduate and postgraduate students. The work includes essay development, close reading, dissertations, research design, theoretical frameworks, creative portfolios, critical and creative thinking, and reflective writing.

AI use has also become part of this teaching. I help students use generative tools to test an argument, expose a weak assumption, organise research, and question sources while retaining responsibility for every intellectual decision. The machine may produce the sentence but the student still needs to know whether it deserves to exist.

Analog Submission Press

I founded Analog Submission Press in 2017 and continue to run it from York.

The press publishes poetry, prose, and hybrid writing in hand-assembled, limited-run editions. More than 160 titles by emerging and established writers have passed through the printer.

My role covers editorial selection, author communication, design, typesetting, print production, fulfilment, and distribution. Through the press, I have built an international network of writers and readers with an interest in experimental literature and independent publishing.

ASP has also shaped my research into alternative literary cultures, small press ethics, and the book as a physical object.

About this site

This site runs on Bear Blog, a minimalist platform built for writing rather than metrics. It supports independent developers, loads quickly, remains deliberately spare, and keeps the focus on text.

All writing is © Marc Brüseke unless otherwise noted. You are welcome to quote or share excerpts with attribution.