The (Dead) Skin Project

When you become a word and your author orphans you

I love tattoos because of the stories and commitment they carry, the catalogue of what matters most etched on actual skin. Every inch of ink offers the chance at connection between a viewer asking and the bearer sharing the tale of its significance.

Or, in my case, there’s a simple two-letter word—“to”—on my left forearm whose meaning has remained elusive even to me for nearly 20 years. Until some days ago when I finally stalked and sleuthed my way to some resolution, the story was: I am desperately seeking the story.

Brooklyn, NY author Shelley Jackson’s short story “Skin” will never exist on paper. A secret companion to her compelling short story collection of 2002, The Melancholy of Anatomy, “Skin” is 2,095 words long and if all happened the way it should have when the project launched in 2003: 2,095 participants of the so-called Skin: A Mortal Work of Art would have written to her, gotten accepted, each receiving one word (and sometimes adjacent punctuation) to tattoo on their skin. Together the “words” would comprise the story—a string of 2,095 different lives from the world over forming this unique living art piece. The participants would be mapped, the author would celebrate her words and even mourn their deaths, and the words would receive, of course, a copy of their story—to keep, as contracted, to themselves.

As a writer who always wanted some kind of linguistic body art but wouldn’t know how to begin to choose it, I thought Jackson’s idea was astounding when I heard about it and wrote her with my plea to participate immediately. At the time I was deep (over my head) into owning and operating the funky East Williamsburg, Brooklyn arts lounge Stain and her website was called the Ineradicable Stain, so I guess I was aligned enough to woo her and get a word early on when things were still active. When the word “to” arrived via snail mail in March 2007 I was so relieved it wasn’t “umbrella” or something. (Participants can’t choose the word but they can choose not to participate; if you don’t want it, you don’t get another one.) Rules of the game are: you get inked in black in a standard book font wherever and however big (but legibly) you like and send back a close up photo of the tattoo as proof of follow through, and another of you without showing the tattoo, for Jackson to do what she will with, which at the time I believed might involve someday a private showing for we “words” in a gallery of all the tattoo pictures lined up to reveal the story in full.

“To” might seem a throwaway word, but it means everything to me. “To” can be whatever it wants, open-ended to infinity it is full of potential, progress, forward-motion, growth. I am always on the move, always ripe with projects, plans and ideas. I am not the only “to” but a specific one that falls at a certain word count in the grand text. Maybe I’ll come upon another “to” someday and we can bond about how we drift without context or awareness of our sentence. Maybe we can bond over how we had to impose our own meanings on our little word-worlds since our author with her bigger-picture answers seems to have forsaken us.

I recognized the mastermind of this Skin Project herself one day when we shared the same subway platform (she too taught at NYU and lived in Brooklyn and was waiting for a train to ferry her home), and I saw her sleeve rise up her wrist and reveal her telltale “Skin.” She got the title word of course; I recognized it from the anonymous photo on her website. I wanted to announce myself as a “to” to her, but I was too chicken. At the time, my tattoo was fresh and I was still patiently anticipating my story in the post.

Over the years, every handful of years, I’ve written to Jackson, very deferentially, asking whatever became of the Skin Project. Admittedly, the whole venture is risky since it requires over 2,000 people do what they say they will in a major commitment (getting an actual tattoo!) kind of way, and for the author herself to have the kind of stamina of answering emails, sending real mails and maintaining lots of tedious data to keep things going. At last count, when her website seemed to stop updating and maybe she herself just lost interest (at unknown year perhaps circa 2011), she numbered 10,000 volunteers, 1,875 words accepted, 1,449 releases received back, 553 actually inked, 372 stories sent out to those inked, and—here’s the problem, 21,194 emails received about this project (three or so including my own).

It seems besides the emails received which must be many more thousands now, the project stagnated—or as many participants bemoan, “died”—and I’m left out there in Jackson’s bloated inbox, just another “to” waiting for its origin story, refusing to bury my hope.

There was an off-shoot project along the way that brought some of the words to life in a new form, a dizzyingly-spliced spoken word video of people showing and saying their words, rearranged into a new story (an 845-word story from about 200 participants), that includes me on rotation along with the likes of author Rick Moody and others.

Unfortunately, the video is really indecipherable with this hodgepodge of voices, so I was grateful in my recent digging to discover English Professor Marie Bouchet in Toulouse, France was kind enough in her intensive Academia.edu article on the project to transcribe it, here in part:

They are in print, but we are not like them. We are certain of it. No, our skin is inhabited. We are swelling with our story, even if we don’t remember it. We go into one of the glass houses. There we face one another. Who are we anyway. On one of my ankles is a breath. In your cuticles, dirt. The glass is rippling like water and I start, and know we came from water once. Remember, floating on water like a leaf, floating on life. Like leaves on water or rippling through it. Vivacious water is like us. It has a certain internal life, and a skin, so certain beetles can even go across it if they like, and not fall through. On it scenes of life are floating, like the one rippling across your eyes. I meant to stop there, but we have to go on. This is the law, to go. After the water we came to a different landscape, and fell into a different life. This world is hard. Like beetles we go in the dirt. This place has water but it’s just visiting, like we are just visiting. It’s not hard to leave. After the world of water and the world of dirt, we fell through a tube of the like into this place. Call it a world of skin.

This ever-enduring water theme brings me back to my recent water-fixated post and the subsequent one about launching messages in bottles. And finding this transcription to help me finally decipher this related side-story was satisfying enough (but not fully) to set me off the other day on a newly determined mission: I would not get out of this chair until I found the Skin story, dammit.

Professor Bouchet posited that the project “died” because a word died—the first word—and that put a stop to all of it. In my romantic imagination I figured that meant Jackson lost her lover (to whom she gifted a first word) and she couldn’t go on with this project—too raw and painful!—after this devastating loss. I found on the documentation link of Jackson’s website for the project, the pictures and stats from the Bowery Tattoo parlor in Sept. 2003 with her getting “Skin” (the title) and Sarah Kamens, “first word,” getting an unknown word on her back—the photo is too fuzzy. But as far as I can tell, a Sarah Kamens, clinical psychologist, seems very much alive in 2023. And the project was never meant to die with one death, only forever change. From the original project description:

From this time on, participants will be known as “words”. They are not understood as carriers or agents of the texts they bear, but as its embodiments. As a result, injuries to the printed texts, such as dermabrasion, laser surgery, tattoo cover work or the loss of body parts, will not be considered to alter the work. Only the death of words effaces them from the text. As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died. The author will make every effort to attend the funerals of her words.

Jackson herself seems to attest that the story will go on, death or not, when an interviewer asks in Electronicbookreview.com in 2019 if she had followed through on her promise to attend any funerals:

No, I haven’t been to any funerals yet, but I have been informed by family members of the deaths of a few of my words. It’s a strange and solemn thing. Any death is that, of course, but my intimate-yet-distant relationship to my words makes these deaths particularly strange for me. I have a bodily involvement with my participants, and they with me, but at the same time I don’t truly know them. I did write a poem for one of them, to be included in a collection of memorial tributes. I spun it out from the word he had been tattooed with, and that made me feel even more clearly that my story was bound to him, his particular life, and that part of it went with him to his death.

And later she says:

This also involves letting go of what happens to my story—controlling less of how the reader encounters it than most writers are willing to do. In the case of “Skin” I quite literally cede the investiture of meaning in my story over to my readers, who are also my participants, and those they allow to be their own readers, i.e. those to whom they show their tattoos.

I found a bit more about Sarah, only 23 at the time and maybe just a legit lucky stranger to Jackson, with the reveal of her word—“if”—which I can now also look for in the video, in this little clip on NBCnews.com. Here they mention the project has a different word count (maybe the story has had some edits or it’s an odd typo?):

Kamens was the first American to answer last month’s call in Cabinet magazine to participate in a unique project. Jackson wanted to publish her newest short story one word at a time—on human volunteers. Since then she’s had 64 people sign up for the 2,301-word story. From couples wanting to be linked not just romantically but syntactically, too, to those who just aspire to become human magnetic poetry, volunteers are slowly (and painfully) publishing the work. Want to read it? Too bad. Jackson’s not releasing the text—only her “words” get the whole story. But she may publish a book of photos of her volunteers (tattoos not showing). “I like the idea of the story encrypted as people,” she says. “Maybe they will meet. Sentences will form that I never wrote.”

My newly rekindled determination to seek closure led me to looking for more like-minded lost words. I found my way to a moribund “Mortal Work of Art” forum at LiveJournal.com. In it were a handful of others like me, surfacing through the years to ask what’s up, what became of all this, where the heck is the story. One participant pointed people to a Facebook group that had formed called The Skin Project. The group, started in 2007, numbers some 40 orphaned words (41 with me now) all of whom seem to have been slighted and disappointed by Jackson’s unresponsiveness through the years. In 2010, someone posts: “just waitin’ for my word…” I mean this lady promised the moon (attending our funerals even!) and those hundreds of us who did this spent money, experienced pain and broke skin/bled for her, altering ourselves permanently, but we can’t even get the actual story 20 years in, let alone hear a peep? Barring the death of a dear lover, I don’t really see any good excuse, which is perhaps why Jackson’s kept mum on majorly dropping the ball. I’d like to believe she feels so guilty every time she glances at “Skin” on her wrist it just paralyzes her.

Someone in the forum also mentioned a more recent Instagram project, “Snow” where Jackson has been mildly active since 2014 writing another story word by word, when it snows, in snow. (“A story, weather permitting.”) At least this medium doesn’t have feelings or expectations or require a complicated tedium of many thousands of emails and real mail and waivers, but maybe worse: it depends on snow when now we don’t seem to get much here in lower New York. “Jackson plays a long game” said one forum member. Clearly! Or she stops playing, and you may not know the difference. One of the words in the snow is “to” so I loved that image on Instagram, of course, and then DMed the author. Yet again, I wrote to her all light-and-chummy, not revealing the truth of my gritted teeth. Oh Author, where art thy skin story?!

Holly, of the FB group (who actually founded the group), announced she had done the same and gotten a response that Jackson would be updating the website. That was in March 2022 and there seems to have been no further update. I did see when I dug deeper though, after some deliberating among the group if it was the “right” thing to do, that Holly would be willing to share the story via email with those who DMed her a picture of their tattoo. OMG yes! I wrote to Holly, I posted my “to” picture to the group, I joined in the comment chorus of others whining that they were still awaiting their story or the cool “certificate of authentication” (guess I need that too!), or raising their hands that they would be happy to take up the torch and help finish the project—I know I would.

And just when you think this saga will finally produce a happy ending, guess what—I’m in limbo on the Facebook group that hold the keys to the kingdom. My comments are “pending approval.” My message to Holly remains unseen and unanswered. Is this all just a big Waiting for Godot farce?

I meant it when I said I wouldn’t get up from my chair until I had closure on this. So I kept going. Deeper in the same FB group, I soon found another member, “mine.” (including period), who said she was so grateful to get a copy of the story from that same Holly-not-responding to the group of her creation (irony). So I wrote to this Shelly Ann. And now having done all I could do—I do have my limits and needs (to eat, to pee)—I did allow myself to get up. I knew by one SOS sent out or another, I was finally going to lay my eyes on this story. Soon!

Shelly Ann responded later that day, and said she could send the PDF when she got home that night! We chatted about what we think may have happened and how disgruntled we deserve to be. I mentioned the death theory, but Shelly Ann said she heard that Jackson “had surgery on her elbow/forearm that put her in a cast and unable to send stories/work on the project right when it went big. She at one point was looking for volunteers to help but then didn’t use anyone who offered and the project flopped… I heard it wasn’t making her any money, and it was taking too much of her time. And I mean, when you live in New York, you need to be able to make money.” Yes, but. I do still wonder if the project isn’t dead at all, but truly just indefinitely in limbo. No matter the legit reasons, wouldn’t anyone in their right mind want to say SOMETHING to their loyal minions? It’s the silence I find mystifying and yet allows me to retain my ounce of hope. Really any excuse at all would do, even just a simple sorry.

As promised, this other Shelly sent me the story via messenger attachment, a scan of the original meant for Holly with Holly’s word, “a”, circled at position number 648. I printed it, and printed it again so I had an extra copy. My new best friend was like, “READ IT NOW!” But I didn’t want to, and was at work. I needed to make finally arriving at this long-anticipated destination a special moment, and in the meantime reenact at length to everyone within earshot (my earnest high school intern and a jaded highly-tattooed traffic sergeant) the dramatic and suspenseful story about the quest for the story; I needed the reading to be surrounded in ritual and savor it like a celebration. While I knew the story might not even be good, I also knew that in my world that didn’t matter and I’d love it no matter what; I was going to drink a rare beer and hold my pen and notebook, as I sat perched on my couch overlooking the tall grass outside my upstate RV. It was a long week leading up to this moment, complete with gasping on Canadian death-smog; I was beat. After so many years of waiting, and now finally with a copy of this story in my hot hands…

I fell asleep.

I shook myself awake and struggled to keep reading, knowing it was a perfectly fine—even lovely and surprising—story but that I was missing a lot of the meaning in my exhaustion. I underlined some phrases, and continued to nod off like a heroin addict. In the morning, I woke up at 7 am and read it again. It is Good. But more importantly, it sparked all kinds of tangential brainstorming. What if I write my own story—fiction next time—about being a word abandoned by my author. My kids said that premise sounded hokey, but I’m fired up to make it work. It could be my first fiction in an unknown number of years. Whatever I do, I’ll share it with—can we please be first-name friends now?—Shelley. But more importantly with Shelly without an “e”, who offered to read a draft.

Was the story worth waiting so many years for? Yes! Not because it’s mind-blowing (though I honestly quite like it) but because it was all about the anticipation and how the journey became the story (premise of my first novel). How my concept of “Skin” has morphed through the years. How I’ve stretched with pregnancies and scarred and gotten more tattoos along the way and arrived at the place where I refuse to let unacceptable things be as they are without my aggressive intervention. And only then can I can make peace with it, when I’ve done all I can. Such as: I definitely would say something to the author if I happened upon her again in the real world. Reading “Skin” was like no other reading experience because I knew I was privy to something for members-only, a private club of a story. And knowing each word is an intended or existing tattoo had me picturing each particular chosen word methodically inked as if on skin. I couldn’t help but wonder who got the unfortunate “bacteria” or “worm” or “subpoenaed” and was word refusal part of the problem. Did Jackson dole words out in order no matter what, or try to tailor each word to its recipient? Was there something about me that screamed “to”? Was she awaiting the perfect person for “mite”? (Shelly says no, the words came strictly in order, and the fine print from my first email from Shelley with an “e” agrees. Still, I choose to believe I’m the perfect “to”—among others.)

I love this comment from Anne-marie on the FB group that sums it up with artistic zen:

I think it’s totally fine that Shelley has gone on to other things—ultimately, we words exist both within her story but also within our own (as was always the experiment). So sure, the hyperlinks might be broken, as it were, to the original site that was the nexus of our purpose, but we continue to create new chains and intersections and confluences. I have met a number of fellow words randomly in life, which was an unexpected thing considering how far afield we are spread. I have also enjoyed the interaction non-words have with my word and their guesses at interpreting its meaning. Shelley was the catalyst but we are “The Skin Project” and who we are and how we live continues.

Yes, and. I am still the sort of person who will not be satisfied with crumbs. I want my original story on paper, with what looks like real stitching along the seam and my name handwritten on top of my special numbered copy. I want the authentication certification I didn’t know existed before. I want to know what word number I am, which “to” is circled. I want to know why this project died and I want to help revive it. Now that I know my story, I need my sentence. I suggested to Shelly Ann that we rearrange the 41 words in the group into some sort of a ransom note.

And no, sorry, I can’t share any of this Skin story with you, dear Readers, because I am also the sort of person who holds up my end of the contract, or shall we say, keeps my word.

But stay tuned for the fictional account.