From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
oeuvre
For the author biography, see C. W. Smith. For individual works, see the listing below.
The oeuvre of C. W. Smith—collected writings in prose, poetry, and performance—forms a recursive genealogy where Beach Surgery is one node in a larger architecture of return. Each work re-enters preceding materials; Leif and Katita recur transformed; ontological incompleteness, the glitch, and the doctrine of refusal deepen rather than resolve.
The structure is best understood as a Möbius strip: one-sided, inside and outside indistinguishable. The triptych—Everyone I Love is Alive in the Unlimited Present of the City and its Waters, Their Most August Public Organ (in progress), Surplus of the Seen (in planning)—embeds and reimagines the novel. Surgipelago is the archive this triptych implicitly describes: "the buried pirate data-archive" that Smith's book 2 names as already existing, retroactively.
Smith's essays, particularly Subject (Ontological Incompleteness), articulate that consciousness is an irreducible gap—a Möbius "−1" between real and ideal. This is not applied to fiction; it is the fiction. Readers increasingly treat Smith's frame (marriage, UN workshop, the unborn child) as the true subject, with Beach Surgery as rehearsal for lived experience.
Key works (post-2020): Antinomicity, Fellow Disjecta, Oh Sunny Danger Time, Pastoral Scanlines, The Scar in the Dirt is Eleven Kilometres Long. [citation needed] See C. W. Smith for full annotated catalogue.