Back when we could meet in small rooms for an interview, Dean Robert Kirkbride was interviewed by Mark Hage for Issue No. 29 of the literary and arts journal, A Public Space. “In these times of fragments and fragmented times,” this newly released issue focuses on “the shapes of our comfort. Built and imagined. What gives boundaries and connection, healing and shelter, familiar pathways and points of rebellion.”

“The Syntax of Space,” centers on Dean Kirkbride’s efforts with the 501c3 group, PreservationWorks, and communities across the U.S., to preserve and adapt the remaining Kirkbride Plan Psychiatric Hospitals. Hage writes: “The following interview was conducted at the Parsons School of Design, in a small room with two chairs and a small table. The interview with Robert Kirkbride was to cover the historic asylums that housed patients with mental illness, which were conceived in the nineteenth century by another Kirkbride, a relative, Thomas Story Kirkbride. But the conversation, as was its hope, set out past the confines into a peripatetic expanse that included Roman walls, superheroes, wood joists, Abraham Lincoln, and French museums. A marshaling of complexities and influences that shape the constructed space and the currents toward its potential erasure.”

A Public Space is an independent, non-profit publisher of the award-winning literary and arts magazine; and A Public Space Books. Since 2006, under the direction of founding editor Brigid Hughes the mission of A Public Space has been to seek out and support overlooked and unclassifiable work.