Patrick Keller

Patrick (James) Keller is a novelist and surfiction scholar based in Long Beach, California, who teaches in the Composition Program at the University of California, Irvine. He grew up in Claremont, California, and at UC Berkeley double-majored in English and Psychology, the Psychology degree undertaken, by his own account, on the mistaken hunch that it would be the secret weapon for writing novels.

Keller went on to UC Irvine for graduate work in English, where a mentor's offhand gift of a Steve Katz book redirected his research entirely toward surfiction, the autobiography-and-fiction hybrid associated with Raymond Federman, Ronald Sukenick, Steve Katz, Clarence Major, and Gilbert Sorrentino. The result was his 2011 UC Irvine Ph.D. dissertation, Subversively Personal: Surfiction As Communication in Vietnam War Era America, which argued that surfiction worked as a communicative mode rather than mere formal provocation. A condensed spin-off, "Contemporary Surfiction: Wideman, Kaufman, and Maddin," appeared in 2014 in the Romanian journal Word and Text, reading John Edgar Wideman, Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, and Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain! against three criteria for the surfictional.

Alongside the scholarship, Keller has been developing a creative-theoretical project he calls Pescetarealism, coined in 2010 and framed as an attempt to extend Federman and Sukenick's egalitarian ideals from performance to persistence, from the writer as virtuoso to the writer as quiet, sustained presence.

JEF Books published his debut novel, Those Brave As the Skate Is (followed by the appended manifesto Pescetarealism), in 2021 as Journal of Experimental Fiction Vol. 86. The novel won the 2018 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel; the judge, the late novelist Jonathan Lyons, called it a visionary work that challenges form and content. It is currently his only JEF title.

Start with Those Brave As the Skate Is, the Patchen-winning novel and manifesto that gathers his surfiction reading and his Pescetarealism into a single volume.