Emily Dickinson’s poems went unpublished during her life and for decades after her death. When they were published, nearly all of her creative, idiosyncratic punctuation and personal notation marks were deleted or changed to more familiar, standardized, comfortable, and boring marks.

Jen Bervin’s huge quilts (up to 40 feet by 8 feet!) flip that script: she has removed nearly all the words, leaving patterns of crosses, dashes, underscores, and strikethroughs. Bervin’s pieces give prominence to the marks most of us have never seen.

What elevates these past curiosity up to artwork, for me, is that they use craft and materials to prompt worthwhile questions. For instance: Are these marks as insignificant, as non-signifying as they seem, spattered up there in red thread? Or, are they a thoroughly personal writing method (and how would I feel if my notebooks were turned inside out and shaken for weird punctuation like this?) Or, are…