Infinite Text Collective

Our Ethos

  • Theory is for everyone

  • Creative writing generates its own forms of knowledge

  • The abstractness of theory thrives when brought into vital contact with lived experience

  • Dialogue and collaboration generate creative sparks

  • Experimentation engenders new ideas

  • Silence and opacity are as crucial as words, rhythm, atmosphere

  • Writing takes place in relation to the self in systems, the systems in self, and the self in relation to others

ways to work with us

  • Virtual Workshops

  • Online Classes

  • Project Consultation

About Us

Our Story goes here!

About Us

The Infinite Text Collective exists to nurture the kind of writing capable of anchoring political praxes and lives. We aim to create space for critical-creative experimentation and the conversations that thrive beyond the bounds of institutional pressures, disciplinary constraint, and the late-capitalist crises that can leave even the most vital ideas feeling useless and dead. Our sense of purpose and pedagogy grows out of a decade-long friendship built on shared writing and rambling talk. We talked about whatever was currently lighting up our brains: the feminist silences of Clarice Lispector, maybe, or quantum computing as a metaphor for collective processing. These conversations weren’t academic or aimed at professional advance; they sought inspiration and solace and a deep, playful camaraderie premised on questioning as an ethics and way of life. This is the spirit of collaboration we hope to cultivate in our classes, workshops, and project consultation. We bring our personal-political histories of ideas and let them bounce around with the personal-political histories of ideas of those that join us. Our name is borrowed from one participant’s estimation of the enlivening and often-surprising result: “a loving community” pursuing conversation and insight through “the elaboration of infinite texts.”

The Founders & Collaborators

  • Paige Sweet, PhD

    Paige Sweet has a PhD in Comparative Literature and a Certificate in Psychoanalysis. She held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. Her articles on literature and art interweave queer, feminist, race, and psychoanalytic theory and have appeared in The New Inquiry, Parallax, ARIEL, darkmatter, and other journals. She’s faculty at the Bard Prison Initiative and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She also serves as a consultant to writers, filmmakers, and artists. She’s also Chair of the Sexuality and Gender Initiative at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis where she completed psychoanalytic training

  • Miranda Trimmier, MFA

    Miranda Trimmier is an essayist who’s made homes in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York, and Tucson. Each place shapes her writing, which pays attention to the everyday ways that history lingers in bodies and landscapes. She received her MFA from the University of Arizona and has published essays in Places Journal, Terrain, The New Inquiry, Boom California, and other outlets. In 2020 her book-in-progress, Strange Machinery, was shortlisted for the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. She has taught creative writing at Marquette University and the University of Arizona and edits for academics, specializing in political ecology, STS, and critical geography.

What our participants are saying…

  • "The class offered a space to gather in the spirit of a loving community where one can write, read, and reinvent language ... to gather in critical discussion and to practice a pedagogy of freedom, without judgment. Enamored with the pleasures of language, its endless possibilities, and the elaboration of infinite texts, this is a place to reimagine the world and to dream the future of language."

    Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa, author of History, Anti-History, and the Face that is Other

  • “I loved the reading assignments and their discussions, the writing prompts were productive as well. The range of styles presented in the readings exposed me to writing that I normally would not actively seek out, therefore leading to a sort of "neural stretch" that felt a lot like a good brainstorm. This class spurred on new ways of thinking and writing for me, particularly on the axis of ‘being moved,’ or Barthes' punctum. I was ‘pierced’ by this class."

    Emily Klamer MEd, LPC, NCC, a psychotherapist in private practice and analytic candidate in St. Louis, Missouri

  • “The suggested readings, the intriguing prompts, and the encouraging attention from Miranda and Paige, gave me tools to move into original writing practices. The powerful exchange of texts and ideas propelled me to dare broader territories in my collage and painting work.”

    Patricia

  • “Best class I’ve ever taken.”

    J. H.

  • "I've been really lucky to work with Paige over the last couple years: taking her feminist and auto-theory seminars and then working one-on-one to flesh out research trajectories for ongoing projects. Paige's subject matter expertise in literary criticism, psychoanalytic theory, and gender studies make her insights and workshops suited to mapping out unanticipated approaches to creative scholarship."

    Kara, MFA Candidate

  • “Miranda Trimmier’s writing sensibilities in the realms of the natural sciences, political economy, and the fine arts make her a keen writing coach and teacher. I had the pleasure of working with her; she helped me wrangle my rhizomatic, detail-laden draft into a socio-ecological essay that was still expansive yet also had a keen structure. I recommend her services wholeheartedly.”

    Maya Weeks, PhD, Marine Geographer