While many of his colleagues were more renowned for their poetic and sound-based investigations, Riddell clearly shared both Nichol's fondness for the doubleness of the visual-verbal pun and Steve McCaffery's technical virtuosity and philosophical sophistication. In his magazine publications, small press ephemera, and trade publications, Riddell created a conversation between these two sets of poetics and extended it to the realm of fiction (exploring a truly hybrid form that is poetry as much as it is fiction). Riddell's work as fiction works to explore the development and accretion of narrative in time-based sequence, a fiction of visuality and media. Writing Surfaces is the documentation of Riddell pushing his own writing to the very limit of what conceivably counts as writing through writing. While it's true that the title "writing surfaces" carries with it the doubling and reversibility of noun and verb, reminding us how the page is as much a flat canvas for visual expression as it is a container for thought, the first title we proposed for this collection was "Media Studies." The latter, while admittedly too academic-sounding to describe writing as visually and conceptually alive as Riddell's, could still describe Riddell's entire oeuvre ; the term not only refers to the study of everyday media (such as television, radio, the digital computer and so on) but it can -- in fact should -- encompass the study of textual media and the ways in which writing engages with how it is shaped and defined by mediating technologies. In other