I’ve long been fascinated by the Oulipo movement, founded in the 1960s by a group of French artists whose work all incorporates some kind of playful game-like constraint. Sometimes I find it infuriating, like the experience of reading Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, but I really like the idea of constrained writing as a way to have essentially structured play. I don’t know if Jedediah Berry would consider this project Oulipo, or if Oulipo would consider it so, but it sort of doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks—to me, it’s a short story built into a deck of playing cards, endlessly shuffleable. I was so taken by this project that I wrote my own story-in-cards for my wife for our first wedding anniversary. I think I’ll always find myself coming back to a shuffleable story in my own writing practice; it’s just such a fun constraint. 

First published by Ninepin Press, 2015