It has been a long road since I started senseshaper.com after I lost my mind and tried to rebuild it through these pages. In 2011, I abandoned my PhD at the University of Virginia when I had a manic crisis that disintegrated my academic career, deluded my mind and senses, and led to a loss of self.
I recovered, to an extent, through shaping sense in these pages and shaping wood into the art of the woodcut, with assistance from the pharmakon, Platonic and pharmaceutical, enough to get my master’s from UVA in 2015.
I got a new job and started a ten-year career.
I left that job in 2026.
And I return, like a prodigal son, to the scholarship of a failed academic and art, fortified this time by ten years of working life and a new medication.
I may be a failed academic and flailing artist, but it’s time to shape a new self. A better self. By shaping sense out of my life experiences, my [treated] disease, and my love of learning, through words, wood, and family.
This is the return of the repressed from the fields of the Lacanian Real.
Here endeth the account of Zachary Fisher, the Senſeſhaper, who loſt his mind in 2011 and has been ſhaping it again ever ſince, in words and in wood. Set forth at senseshaper.com in October, 2026.
Here beginneth a guide to the uſe of theſe pages: how they are numbered, gloſſed, cited and printed; made at his requeſt by Claude, an artificial intelligence of Anthropic’s making, and ſet down the ninth day of October, 2026.
How to Use This Site
Shaping Sense is built like an early printed book that happens to live on a screen. A few things work differently from most blogs.
Numbers in the margin
Every paragraph of an essay carries a number: 10.3 is the third paragraph of essay X. The numbers never change. When an essay is revised, a new paragraph takes a letter (10.3a) rather than pushing the others down, so a citation to 10.3 always points to the same words. Click a number for a direct link to that paragraph; the “Cite as” at the end of the essay updates to match. Pictures and videos are numbered in their own series (fig. 10.1).
Glosses
The notes in the margins are glosses, as in a sixteenth-century book: short comments, cross-references, sometimes a small picture or clip. A pointing hand, the manicule ☞, marks something worth noticing; a gloss set between rules is a longer comment. On a phone, glosses drop into the text, marked by a thin line.
Notes, digressions and sources
Footnotes sit beside the text on a wide screen and are gathered at the end of each essay. An excursus is a digression folded out of the way: open it if you want the detour. The Works Cited page collects every source cited across the site, and “Where Cited” at the end of an essay lists the books and articles that have cited it.
The end of an essay
Each essay closes as early books did: a colophon set in a narrowing triangle, saying what the essay is and when it was set forth; the press’s device, the two faces; and a “Cite as” with the essay’s permanent numbers. A revision history shows what has changed since, and Open Review invites signed responses.
Numbers and threads
Essays are numbered in sequence (Numb. X), and the small capitals above each title are its threads, the subjects it belongs to. Follow a thread to read the essays on the same subject; “Also in this Volume” suggests what to read next.
Dedigitize this essay
The button beside each byline prints the essay as a document: numbers, glosses, notes and colophon, without the website around them. The last page carries the date it was printed and a QR code that leads back to the essay as it stands now, so the paper copy can always find its way back to the screen.
The woodcuts
The cuts that illustrate these pages are carved, inked and pulled by hand. They have a home of their own at shapingwoodcuts.com, with the sources that shaped each one and a Cabinet of the early woodcuts behind them. Prints and shirts are on the Consume shelf, and “Patronize me” supports the press.
The essays are free to read, share and cite under CC BY-NC 4.0.
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