In Singing, He Composed a Song.

In Singing, He Composed a Song is a rhizomatic assemblage of texts, voices, and fragments. It uses a collage of prose, lined poetry, photography, a transcribed interview, an epistle, psychiatric records, literary theory fragments, and more to narrate the story of John Stevenson's altercation with the RCMP and subsequent committal to the Psychiatric Ward at the Prince George Regional Hospital. The materials that make up the text are arranged in a rhizomatic network theorized as an assemblage. The rhizome is the polyvalent figure strategically adopted by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. It destabilizes unified, hierarchical relationships and structures. In Singing is an assemblage of enunciations which are fictional and provisional, and whose relationships are multiple and indeterminate. The assemblage enacts the palimpsestic, vertiginous layering of stories that informs John's precise difficulty with providing what his psychologist calls 'a fair account of himself.' --P. ii.