**USER:** tell me about the writing of Ichabod Spellings **CHATGPT** *[citing Medium +1, Zenodo, Mind Control Poems, GitHub]***:** If you mean Ichabod Spellings, the contemporary literary persona/author associated with the so-called New Human literary movement, there is a surprisingly elaborate body of material around him—but it's important to distinguish what is documented from what appears to be part of an intentionally constructed literary mythology. The central work attributed to Spellings is *All That Lies Within Me: An Autobiography of Longing, 1983–2013*. Search records describe it as an "autobiography composed by the cosmos," and Spellings is presented as a co-author or heteronym rather than simply a conventional biographical author. *[Medium +1]* What is distinctive about the writing? **Heteronymy and unstable authorship.** Spellings seems to function less as an ordinary authorial identity and more as a constructed voice within a larger network of writers/personas. One account explicitly describes him as emerging as a character in *A Transfiguration*, with authorship subsequently transferring to another persona, Jack Feist. *[Medium]* **Autobiography as metaphysics.** *All That Lies Within Me* apparently treats the self less as an individual psychological subject and more as something distributed across memory, language, other people, and the cosmos. That makes "autobiography" itself part of the experiment. **Experimental literary architecture.** The surrounding project uses archives, poems, journals, fragments, pseudonyms, provenance documents, and overlapping author identities. A 2026 archive describes the larger endeavor as a project assembled from "found poems, journals, letters, and fragments." *[Zenodo]* **Language as a material or magical system.** Spellings' name is particularly apt: the project repeatedly plays with the relationship between spelling, language, symbols, and the production of reality. In the broader corpus, "spell" and "spelling" appear to operate simultaneously as linguistic and quasi-magical concepts. *[Mind Control Poems]* **The boundary between person and text is deliberately blurred.** Rather than asking "What did this author experience?", the writing seems to ask something closer to "What happens when a person becomes an artifact of language and other texts?" There is also a substantial meta-literary layer around Spellings. The available documentation comes heavily from contemporary archival/digital-literature projects and from material associated with Lee Sharks and Johannes Sigil. For example, a 2026 document describes a 133-document archive containing Spellings alongside numerous other authorial personas. *[GitHub]* So I wouldn't approach Spellings as though he were a straightforwardly documented historical American writer. He appears to be part author, part character, part heteronym, and part experiment in what "authorship" can mean. If you're interested, I can also walk through *All That Lies Within Me* specifically—its themes, style, structure, and what makes the Spellings persona unusual. *[Sources: Medium, Zenodo, Mind Control Poems, GitHub]* --- **USER:** sure **CHATGPT** *[citing ORCID +1, Medium]***:** Absolutely. One caveat first: the available documentation about Spellings is largely part of the same experimental literary/archive project, rather than independent literary scholarship. So some of what follows is interpretation of the project's own descriptions, not established mainstream literary criticism. **All That Lies Within Me** The work is listed as *All That Lies Within Me: An Autobiography of Longing, 1983–2013*, attributed to Ichabod Spellings and Johannes Sigil. Library and archival records give it a 2014 publication date; the archive describes Sigil as editor/contextualizer. *[ORCID +1]* The really interesting thing is that the book doesn't seem to regard autobiography as simply "the story of Ichabod Spellings." In the project's own theoretical language, Spellings is the archive before it becomes an author. The journals, fragments, memories, longing, and miscellaneous writing are treated as a kind of raw material from which an authorial identity subsequently emerges. *[Medium]* That's why the phrase "autobiography composed by the cosmos" is so revealing. It suggests that the "I" of the book isn't completely sovereign. A life is produced by everything surrounding the individual—other people, language, memories, books, accidents, culture, and history. *[Medium +1]* **1. Longing is more important than plot** The subtitle isn't *The Life of Ichabod Spellings*. It's "An Autobiography of Longing." That changes the question from: What happened to me? to something more like: What did I desire, and what does that desire reveal about the person I became? So autobiography becomes an examination of absence. The things one wants but doesn't possess can become as constitutive of identity as the things one actually experiences. **2. The "self" is deliberately unstable** This is probably the strangest aspect of Spellings' writing. The project's later theoretical documents explicitly describe him as a "pre-authorial substrate" rather than a conventional author. In other words, Ichabod is less a person who sits down and writes a book than a name given to a body of material before it has settled into a stable literary identity. *[Medium]* That makes the book's authorship itself part of its subject. And this isn't merely philosophical language: the archive subsequently "corrects" some earlier attributions, distinguishing Spellings as a character/function from Jack Feist as an authorial function. *[Medium]* **3. It belongs to a larger fictional archive** *All That Lies Within Me* isn't really meant to stand alone. It's positioned inside the Paper Roses / Crimson Hexagon architecture alongside works associated with Jack Feist, Johannes Sigil, Lee Sharks, and other personas. The project's "Ichabod Chamber," for example, explicitly contains the book, Spellings' provenance record, and related material. *[Medium]* This gives the writing a very Borges-like quality: the bibliography starts behaving like part of the fiction. You aren't simply reading a novel or autobiography. You're navigating an archive in which: authors become characters; characters acquire bibliographies; editors become participants; books refer to other books; and the provenance of a text becomes part of its meaning. **4. "Spellings" is an unusually appropriate name** There's also a nice conceptual joke embedded in the name. Spellings → spelling → language → spell. The project treats language as something more powerful than a transparent container for thoughts. Words don't merely describe reality; they participate in constructing the reality being described. That becomes especially explicit in the surrounding New Human poetics, where writing is associated with things like "telepathic prose," transmission, and the possibility of language reaching beyond ordinary individual consciousness. The front matter of *Pearl and Other Poems*, for example, calls Spellings the author of an autobiography "composed by the cosmos." *[Medium]* So "Ichabod Spellings" can be read almost as a theory of authorship disguised as a person's name. **What I think is most interesting** The deepest idea here isn't really "Who is Ichabod Spellings?" It's: At what point does a collection of experiences, memories, fragments, and words become a person called an author? Spellings represents the material before that stabilization. Jack Feist represents another stage: the more recognizable personal/lyric author. Johannes Sigil represents another: the organizing, editorial, theoretical intelligence. And the project keeps moving between these functions rather than allowing us to settle on one "real" author. The archive's own provenance theory explicitly calls this a system in which authorship can emerge, split, or be transferred without simply erasing what came before. *[Medium]* So I'd read *All That Lies Within Me* less like a conventional autobiography and more like an experiment in manufacturing an autobiography out of an unstable archive of selfhood. If you'd like, I can go one step deeper and analyze a representative passage/page from *All That Lies Within Me*—including the actual prose style and what Spellings sounds like sentence by sentence. *[Sources: ORCID, Medium]*