Nicholas Grider is a writer and artist whose work moves among short fiction, poetry, visual art, photography, procedural writing, performance, and experimental book forms. His story collections include Misadventure and Forest of Borders. He has also published the visual book Thirty Pie Charts and the poetry chapbook Get Excited, MF under the name Owen Merth.
Grider studied at the California Institute of the Arts and has shown visual work internationally. His writing has appeared in publications including Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, Guernica, Hobart, Caketrain, and The Collagist. Across these contexts, he repeatedly treats form as a system that can be exposed, redirected, or made strange.
“Magic” and performance
“Magic” treats a cheap theatrical setting as both scene and conceptual frame. Cardboard, curtains, props, hired help, crowds, and rehearsed confusion turn performance into a social condition. The speaker’s own presence remains unstable, caught between participation, observation, and the desire for an event to acquire meaning.
Theatrical illusion is especially useful for Grider because it depends on visible apparatus and managed attention. A curtain hides preparation; a prop stands in for something else; a crowd agrees to watch according to conventions established by the event. The poem can therefore examine how people cooperate with illusion while remaining aware of its construction.
This interest connects Grider with Jeremy P. Bushnell’s procedural and game-based writing, where rules, instructions, props, and systems similarly become engines for imaginative participation.
Performance and social role
Performance extends beyond the theatre in Grider’s work. Social situations also contain scripts, expectations, gestures, and roles. A person learns how to behave in a gallery, classroom, workplace, party, or intimate encounter through conventions that often become visible only when someone violates them.
Grider’s writing is attracted to those moments of exposure. A scene can feel ordinary until its underlying structure is made explicit, at which point behavior begins to resemble choreography.
That tension gives his work a comic and unsettling quality. Characters may know the rules of a situation and still feel uncertain about what the situation means.
Misadventure
Misadventure, published in 2014, established Grider as a short-fiction writer working with obsession, violence, ritual, fantasy, and uncertainty. The title suggests an event shaped by error, accident, or a plan whose consequences exceed intention.
Stories organized around misadventure naturally invite attention to structure. A sequence of decisions produces an outcome, and the reader looks backward to understand where the path changed.
Grider’s experimental approach makes that architecture visible. Repetition, unusual sequencing, procedural constraints, and shifts in perspective can become as important as plot itself.
Fiction and alternative structures
In interviews around Misadventure, Grider has discussed the influence of writers such as David Markson and Walter Abish and his interest in breaking conventional story structures. That interest extends naturally into his poetry and visual projects.
Alternative structure changes the reader’s role. A fragmented story asks the reader to infer chronology; a repeated scene invites comparison; a conceptual system encourages attention to the rule governing the sequence.
The form becomes part of the fiction’s subject because characters and events are experienced through the architecture chosen to contain them.
Forest of Borders
Forest of Borders continues Grider’s interest in unstable boundaries. Its title combines organic density with division. A forest suggests multiplicity, paths, concealment, growth, and difficulty of orientation; a border creates separation, jurisdiction, and a line whose significance depends on agreement and enforcement.
Bringing these ideas together creates a useful image for Grider’s practice. Genres remain recognizable while their boundaries become porous. Fiction can behave like conceptual art; a diagram can operate as literature; a book can be read as a designed object.
Thirty Pie Charts
Thirty Pie Charts uses the familiar visual language of data graphics as a literary and conceptual object. Pie charts usually promise clarity: a circle is divided into measurable proportions, and the viewer is invited to understand a whole through labeled parts.
Grider turns that familiar informational form into an artistic structure. Once the chart enters a literary context, classification itself becomes visible. The viewer begins to ask what is being measured, who decided the categories, and what kinds of experience resist proportion.
John Mercuri Dooley’s visual and typographic writing offers a neighboring practice in which graphic arrangement changes how language is interpreted and turns the page into an active spatial field.
Visual writing and procedure
Grider’s work repeatedly crosses the boundary between image and text. Photography, charts, typography, and experimental books treat framing, sequence, and classification as compositional tools.
Procedure gives this cross-media practice a durable structure. A rule can determine how an image is selected, how a text is arranged, or how a series develops. The artist creates the conditions and then discovers what those conditions produce.
This places Grider within a broad field of experimental poetry and prose in which composition can begin from systems, constraints, diagrams, and conceptual operations.
Photography and framing
Photography makes selection literal. The frame includes one area and leaves everything else outside it. Focus, distance, exposure, angle, and sequence determine what kind of world the viewer encounters.
These choices have clear literary analogues. A narrator frames experience through selection; a short story omits most of a character’s life; a poem isolates a few images from an unlimited field.
Randy Thurman’s cross-media practice offers another example of visual attention, distortion, sound, and ordinary objects moving among artistic forms.
Experimental book form
The book itself becomes meaningful in Grider’s practice. Sequence, page size, graphic organization, image placement, and repetition determine how a reader moves through the work.
An experimental book can ask to be read linearly, browsed, compared across pages, or understood as a single visual system. This range expands literary form beyond the sentence while preserving language as one of its central materials.
Cross-genre practice
Grider’s fiction, poetry, visual art, photography, charts, and performances belong to a coherent practice because each asks how structures direct attention. A story controls sequence; a photograph controls framing; a chart controls classification; a performance controls duration and audience relation.
This gives Grider a distinctive place within contemporary American poetry and experimental prose. His work keeps genre open by treating every form as a set of choices that can be exposed, tested, and recombined.