My Writerly Blog

Me, lately I spent my PhD years going to many, many  conferences. When you're in a small department in an isolated part of the world, they're kind of a necessity. You go to meet anyone - anyone  - who is doing similar stuff, and who won't stare at you blankly when you describe your research. You go to try out your ideas, to make sure the academic community you'll be pitching them to don't think you're an absolute waste of space ( imposter syndrome is for real). Also, you go just to go somewhere (though I think I went to Leicester far too often). In the last few years, as I've gained contacts and confidence, I've gone to fewer and fewer conferences. I know the ones that best suit me now, and where I'll get to meet and/or catch up with my peeps. I also know the ones, of course, where I've never made any headway at all. I was pleasantly surprised this week to be wrong about that last one. MIX Digital - Bath Spa University Let me back thi...

I've been thinking quite a lot lately about the use of "found" art, as in re-appropriating images, video, code, etc., in stories.  Obviously, in my case, that means digital fiction, though I don't really think it's tied to any one communication genre or medium.  After all, there are plenty of news stories I see that use stock images that either really enhance the piece, or freakishly contrast with it.  It affects the piece, one way or the other. I also think it's related, but a bit different, from palimpsest (as defined by Genette) .  I recently supervised a fantastic MA dissertation on how everything we create (specifically speaking about creative writers) is palimpsestical: re-envisioning our lives, what we've read, what we've written.  It may be done on purpose - those intertextual references we love to embed so much - and it may be done entirely subconsciously, but in the end, the idea boils down to that frustrating and yet liberating adage that ...

I seem to only do my blog writing on trains lately.  Must see to that... I presented at the Great Writing new-and-improved-London-edition conference this weekend, a talk that focused on one of the finer points of my current research: how writing with the intent to mediate a story in multiple media changes the fundamental aspects of the story itself (character, structure, perspective), as well as how it affects the writer's (my) composition process. The talk consisted of several readings, sections drawn from my prose fiction in chronological order, from my MFA novel (2005) to my most recent compositions for the PhD work (November 2011 - rough draft).  The progression from straightforward, MFA-mill produced fiction (i.e., literary, navel-gazing) to postmodern, multiple narrator, layered, rhizomatically structured fiction was dramatic, and I was pleased that my audience saw the same things in the work that I did.  What was even more rad was that they were actually interested in it. I...

Fresh off mid-semester vacation, our New Media Research Circle had a mini-poster session today.  I threw together mine based on the method I'm using to take my stories from print to digital, pompously titled "From Pen to Screen: Remediating Stories from Print to Digital Media."  It's a process in development, as that 4th step you see in the image there only emerged a couple of weeks ago.  It will be a major portion of my PhD writeup, far too much to go into here.  The abstract gives the basic gist: Ubiquitous and mobile applications such as SmartPhones and Tablets are attracting growing numbers of readers to digital stories. Many experienced print writers may see this trend as an opportunity to direct their storytelling skills toward an emerging genre, but lack the skills and knowledge needed to remediate their own print stories into digital form; they may also prefer a remediation methodology that begins in their comfort zone (print), and moves step-by-step tow...

We all toss around the word 'interdisciplinary' like it's a good thing. "We're an interdisciplinary department", "I'm doing interdisciplinary research", blah blah blah. But when it comes down to it, we often just mean we'll look at papers in different disciplines to see what's interesting, or even what directly applies to us. We don't really mean we want to participate in a bunch of different stuff. I come off all weird pretty frequently, for various reasons, but it is interesting to see people's faces when they find out I was once a biologist, or that I trained to work in artificial reproduction. It's a strength of my experience that I've written everything from plays to nuclear facility safety documents, that I participate in activities from stage productions to drinking games. I didn't think my latest foray out of my comfort zone would be quite so inspiring. I showed up to the "Labyrinth Theatre Workshop...

One week. Seven glorious days. The equivalent, for me, of a snow-in. I got s**t done , people. My husband signed up to attend a conference in Erice, Sicily for a week in the end of May. I said, "Sicily? When teaching is done and my conferences haven't started yet? Put me in your luggage, dude." So I hitched on to his conference, and spent a week in a mountaintop stone city that was once home to the Cult of Venus. The sun was shining brutally, which means my sorry white bum was restricted indoors on threat of dire illness. Oh, darn. Trapped in a monastery-turned-hotel with my computer, my current project, and not enough touristy stuff to fill a morning, much less seven days. Sweet. I outlined. I storyboarded. I edited images and animated and chose fonts and decided what parts of my print story my digital reader would get. I discovered the initial stages of creating digital fiction: that even with a heavily edited and revised short story, the creation of its digi...

Which I left to more supremely capable people to actually carry out, as is my habit, of course. When I did my MFA, we had a monthly Student Reading Series, which was created during my time in the program (through none of my own effort), organized entirely by the students, and is still going today, if the listserve is any judge. It was a great time to socialize, talk about our work, our professors, our SOs, our lack thereof...oh, yeah, and to share what we were writing. Uh, there was wine involved. When I found nothing much like that here, I thought "Well that blows. We totally should." And so we did. The NIECI family (NIECI is bigger than we know, but there's just the core family that participates in most of our shindigs) got together to display our wares. We dressed up in our finest frocks and gathered for wine (duh) and a wide display of work, from critical papers and radio shows to short stories and film. We chatted, drank, showed off some more stuff, drank some mor...

I won a coloring contest in the second grade. The item was a lily, and I won not for my extreme crayon skills, but because I was the only one in the class to use the correct shade: white. No one else had ever seen a lily. Neither had I, for that matter; I was just somewhat more literate than my peers, and had likely seen a picture or read a description of lilies in a book. I'm from New Mexico, you see. Our state color is brown. Apart from a few blooms on a prickly pear cactus, hearty scraggly flowers, or greenhouse-spoiled imports, the desert doesn't do flowers. My favorite flower most of my life has been the Indian Paintbrush, the only colorful wildflower the desert really produces. Even then, it's in spotty patches, so seeing one is akin to the excitement of spotting a rainbow. Boy am I in a different world here. Wales does flowers. In multiples. I live in a tiny village in North Wales, without even a post office or a convenience store. We don't have much in ...