ABOUT MARK LEACH

He Was Writing Like a Machine Before the Machines Could Write

Mark Leach is a Texas experimental writer who has spent more than three decades trying to make literature behave like a machine.

Long before generative AI could produce a sentence, Leach was building books from appropriation, cut-ups, repetition, substitution, procedural systems, recursive structures, found language, and extreme scale. His 17-million-word MARIENBAD MY LOVE pushed those methods toward an absurd conclusion: a novel too large to be conventionally read, assembled from language treated less as personal expression than as raw material.

Then the machines learned to write back.

Rather than treating generative AI as a threat to literary authorship—or merely as a faster way to produce conventional fiction—Leach began incorporating it directly into the methods he had already been developing. The result is what he calls machine-native literature: writing that does not hide the machine as a shortcut but exposes machine processes, generated language, recursion, appropriation, hallucination, visual disruption, and unstable authorship as part of the form.

His recent books trace that transition. WOUNDED TACO turns narrative into what Kirkus Reviews called “a nonlinear, recursive broadcast system.” JFK SMILES pushes the method into UFO religion, Kennedy mythology, television, AI, retirement, posthumanism, fake scholarship, and recursive criticism. I WANT TO BE A MACHINE makes the argument explicit, asking what becomes of literature once the distinction between human writing and machine writing is no longer the most interesting question.

Leach's central claim is simple:

Artificial intelligence did not introduce machinery into literature. It revealed machinery that was already there.

Genre, formula, inherited language, corporate speech, publishing conventions, media repetition, algorithms, and cultural memory were already systems. Generative AI merely gave the system a voice.

Leach's work asks what happens next.

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Space Writing, Machine-Native Literature, and the Recursive Novel

Mark Leach writes books that behave less like conventional novels than literary systems. His work explores space writing, machine-native literature, recursive authorship, collage, appropriation, persona writing, visual disruption, AI-assisted composition, and the collapse of conventional narrative form.

His books are not designed simply to deliver plot. They function as fields of signals, masks, fragments, systems, recurring figures, visual disruptions, and unstable author-personas. The work moves across experimental fiction, postmodern collage, Texas mythology, corporate language, machine process, absurdist comedy, metafiction, and the strange afterlife of narrative in a media-saturated world.

This page serves as a guide to Leach’s major works, recurring systems, critical reception, and theory of writing in a machine-mediated culture. 

Mark Leach, the Texas experimental writer and author of Marienbad My Love, is not Mark W. Leach, coauthor of Ben Fainer’s 2012 memoir Silent for Sixty Years. They are two different authors. 

Space Writing

Leach describes his practice as space writing: a method built from expansion, collage, substitution, recursion, appropriation, repetition, fragmentation, and the construction of large-scale textual systems. Rather than treating the book as a closed story, space writing treats the book as an expanding field of signals, voices, images, documents, machines, and masks.

Space writing does not ask the reader to move neatly from beginning to middle to end. It asks the reader to enter a system.

In Leach’s work, narrative is often interrupted, repeated, contradicted, reassembled, or overloaded. The result is fiction that behaves less like a road and more like a broadcast zone: recursive, unstable, damaged, comic, and alive with signals.

Machine-Native Literature

Leach uses the phrase machine-native literature to describe writing that does not use artificial intelligence merely to imitate conventional fiction. Instead, machine-native writing incorporates machine processes, generated language, recursion, unstable authorship, visual disruption, and self-commentary into the form of the work itself.

The question is not simply whether a writer used AI.

The question is whether the machine is hidden as a shortcut or exposed as part of the form.

For Leach, artificial intelligence did not introduce machinery into literature. The machinery was already there: in genre, formula, market logic, institutional taste, inherited language, corporate speech, media saturation, and the recursive systems that shape human identity. AI makes the machinery visible. It gives the system a mouth.

Major Works

MARIENBAD MY LOVE

MARIENBAD MY LOVE is Leach’s 17-million-word experimental megatext, a maximal work of appropriation, recursion, cinematic memory, dream, theology, hoax, repetition, and textual overproduction. The work has been described by poet and academic Bradley J. Fest as “a complex theoretical statement about the novel in the digital age and a meditation on the present and future of literary writing.” 

For Leach, MARIENBAD MY LOVE is not merely an unusually long novel. It is the first large-scale demonstration of space writing: a literary system that exceeds ordinary reading, challenges the boundaries of the codex novel, and anticipates many of the questions now associated with AI-era authorship, machine process, and digital-age fiction. 

WOUNDED TACO

WOUNDED TACO is a GenAI-era literary experiment built from Cowboy Mark, robots, tacos, Texas mythology, severed heads, platform censorship, recursive criticism, visual disruption, and unstable timelines.

Kirkus Reviews describes WOUNDED TACO as “a nonlinear, recursive broadcast system rather than a plot-driven narrative” and “a strange and deeply self-aware literary experiment.” A four-star Reedsy Discovery review by Gregg Sapp calls the book “both inane and profound, and thoroughly hallucinogenic” and says it “isn’t read so much as interpreted.”

Leach describes WOUNDED TACO as writing for a machine-mediated culture: a damaged transmission, a metafictional machine, a Texas myth system, a severed-head comedy, and a book about shame, aging, authorship, censorship, bewilderment, and narrative collapse.

In Leach’s broader body of work, WOUNDED TACO functions as a compact, volatile extension of the megatextual logic of MARIENBAD MY LOVE. 

I WANT TO BE A MACHINE

I WANT TO BE A MACHINE is Leach’s forthcoming collection of essays on AI, Space Writing, machine-native literature, recursive authorship, and the collapse of the handmade myth of literary purity.

The book argues that the future of literature will not belong to the handmade merely because it is handmade. It will belong to writers willing to think with systems: machines, archives, fragments, appropriations, personas, recursive structures, visual artifacts, and unstable forms of authorship.

I WANT TO BE A MACHINE extends the argument behind MARIENBAD MY LOVE and WOUNDED TACO into a broader theory of writing in the GenAI Era.

Recurring Figures and Systems

Leach’s work often returns to unstable author-personas, especially Cowboy Mark, a comic, damaged, recursive figure who moves through Texas mythology, corporate memory, machine systems, shame, aging, authorship, and post-narrative collapse.

Cowboy Mark is not a traditional character. He is part narrator, part mask, part literary system, part damaged transmission. He recurs across Leach’s work as a way of exploring authorship, masculinity, failure, media saturation, and the strange comedy of being human inside systems that no longer feel fully human.

Core Themes

Leach’s writing frequently explores:

• Machine-native literature

• Space writing

• Recursive authorship

• Collage and appropriation

• AI-assisted composition

• Texas mythology

• Cowboy Mark and unstable author-personas

• Corporate language as literature

• Media saturation and broadcast culture

• Visual disruption and page-as-artifact design

• The collapse of conventional narrative form

• The boundary between human and machine writing

Working Principles

1. Narrative is optional. Systems are not.

2. Language is infrastructure before it is expression.

3. Authorship is not purity. Authorship is process.

4. The machine is not outside the room.

5. Texas is not a place. It is a myth engine.

6. The page is not a window. It is a transmission surface.

7. Incoherence may be diagnostic.

8. Repetition is not failure when repetition is the structure.

9. The book is not a container. The book is a field.

10. The work continues until the system stops responding.

Selected Links

WOUNDED TACO — book page and reviews hub https://www.marienbadmylove.com/wounded-taco 

I WANT TO BE A MACHINE — forthcoming essay collection https://www.marienbadmylove.com/i-want-to-be-a-machine

MARIENBAD MY LOVE
https://www.marienbadmylove.com/marienbad-my-love

Kirkus Reviews on WOUNDED TACO
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/mark-leach/wounded-taco/

Gregg Sapp / Reedsy Discovery Review of WOUNDED TACO
https://reedsy.com/discovery/book/wounded-taco-mark-leach#review

Bradley J. Fest on MARIENBAD MY LOVE as a megatext
https://bradleyjfest.com/tag/marienbad-my-love/   

Medium Essay - "Kirkus Reviews the Machine" https://medium.com/@markleach2023/kirkus-reviews-the-machine-b0509059db76 

Medium Essay - “Why WOUNDED TACO Is Writing for a Machine-Mediated Culture” https://medium.com/@markleach2023/why-wounded-taco-is-writing-for-a-machine-mediated-culture-a09f1ab9468d

Contact

For media inquiries, review copies, interviews, or questions about WOUNDED TACO, MARIENBAD MY LOVE, I WANT TO BE A MACHINE, Space Writing, or machine-native literature:

Mark Leach
markleach2023@gmail.com
X: @marienbadmylove
Website: marienbadmylove.com