Textile artist Jen Bervin has created something wholly peculiar and wonderful in her project The Dickinson Fascilies. During her lifetime Emily Dickinson tried to avoid publication, referring to it as “the auction of the mind,” and yet she continued to write, completing some 1,700 poems.

Between approximately 1858 and 1864, Dickinson grouped her poems into small handbound packets, later called fascicles. They are very humble bindings: stab-bound with twisted red and white thread and tied off teeteringly near the folded edge. The stitch held the stacked folded sheets together but made them a harder to open. […] Her fascicles and fragments were dismembered, regrouped, scissored, and marked by her various editors as they changed hands and often her poems have been restructured and changed considerably for print.

Interested in the editorial patterns Bervin abstracted the editor’s notes, punctuation and other details from Dickinson’s poems and used cotton and silk thread to embroider the marks on enormous cotton sheets nearly 6′ tall by 8′ wide. I’m seriously geeking out over these. A fascinating idea. (via quipsologies)