The writing on the wall

The narrator in Thomas Rayfiel's new novel, In Pinelight, is an old man attempting to piece together fragmented memories of a small-town life.

Responding to questions from an unseen interrogator, the elderly man's sentences are presented as an uninterrupted, often rambling stream. With little punctuation and a gushing flow of natural, emotional consciousness, Rayfiel's unconventional writing style seems to leap off of the page. And for a few months this fall, the novel's words were unbound from the book and transformed in a New York exhibition called "Scrolls from In Pinelight."

Thanks to the dedicated, steady hand of actress Rebecca Spiro, 8,452 words of In Pinelight were written out on a half-mile of thermal receipts, a quarter of which lined the walls of Maybelle's, a small cafe in Brooklyn, New York.

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"The idea was to capture and transmit the meandering current of the narrator's voice, while toying with the way readers encounter stories," writes publicist David Bukszpan in an email.

"It needed to be direct, honest, and intimate. Plain, handwritten words, one after another, unbroken as much as possible by line-breaks or page-breaks, seemed the appropriate way not only to convey the unusual poetry found in the narrator's stream of words, but to echo the run-on sentences and sentence fragments that comprise the novel's unconventional style."

Bukszpan's first vision was to line the Brooklyn Bridge with the half-mile of scroll. But when government red tape obstructed that plan, Bukszpan turned to the more intimate space.

In Maybelle's, the scrolls unfurled and wrapped around and around the small, boxed, brick space. The edited installation — 2,568 words, or 1,000 feet of scroll — start at the beginning of the novel, but depending on where you stand in the cafe, you might pick up any number of threads. Such as this alluring nugget:

Read more about the installation of the "Scrolls from In Pinelight" here.

Click here for more of Thomas Rayfiel's novels or click here to order In Pinelight.