I have an interdisciplinary background in writing, communications, and the media arts. In both my creative and critical work, I explore media in transition, a range that encompasses film, video, print, digital arts, and the Web. I'm interested in what artists and writers are doing and in what critics and scholars are saying. My recent work focuses on personal and cultural memory.
Recycled Memories: A Multimedia Quartet includes the following four books:
(fiction, 280 pages, 2012)
The novel begins as Arella prepares for 2000 and the fresh start it represents. More at home in cyberspace than anywhere she has actually lived, she reinvents herself and her life story for readers of a multimedia web diary she calls Arella's Repertoire, a blend of memoir, travelogue, and blog. Characters who star in this virtual drama recapture worlds Arella has known and weave together the memories, dreams, and imaginings that have contributed to her development as a woman and a writer in postmodern America. Framed as an online text that she posts incrementally throughout the month of December 1999, the narrative explores personal and cultural memory. (Read the prelude online.)
Vagabond Scribe (Leah’s Backstory)
(fiction, 122 pages, b/w graphics, 2007)
The young Leah as a woman archives traces of her life. She begins the first stage of her retrospective in the mid-1980s, at the opening of Vagabond Scribe. The paper trails that she follows lead to real and imagined places she has visited as a child, a teenager, and a young woman. Aware of blind spots and exclusions, she works through the texts, looking for clues to unwritten histories and forgotten stories. She creates a collage of textual fragments, traces of where she has been. Readers glimpse a look behind the scenes at a memory bank in the making, a resource for ideas and inspiration as well as for stories to come. (Vagabond Scribe can be read as a prequel to Arella’s Repertoire, since Leah, an alter ego that Arella creates, appears as a character in both texts.)
Video-Graphic Alchemy: Transforming "Dear Diary"
(artist's book, 56 pages, color & b/w graphics, 2012)
In this retrospective, I explain the unconventional methodology I used to “compose” Vagabond Scribe (Leah’s Backstory), a literary experiment I began in the late 1980s while under the spell of video art and emergent digital technologies. That literary experiment influenced my approach to Arella’s Repertoire, the novel I later wrote that elaborates on and takes to new levels the earlier work of fiction.
Video-Graphic Alchemy also brings together the artistic, multimedia, and literary work from my personal repertoire that inspired the retrospective. On some level all these projects resonate with one another, as well as with my critical work, and invite readings greater than the sum of the parts. The book includes reproductions of more than twenty color and black-and-white images. (Read a copy of the book online.)
VirtualDayz: Remediated Visions & Digital Memories*
(nonfiction, 160 pages, 2008)
This “blook” preserves the musings on media and memory that I posted on my blog, VirtualDayz, from June 27, 2005, to July 15, 2006. Both private and public archives inspire my reflections, which explore media in transition, a range that encompasses film, video, print, digital arts, and the web. Cover images are from a multimedia art project documented in Video-Graphic Alchemy, and that book is based on a blog entry I wrote.
*VirtualDayz is also available as an e-book for the Kindle and an ePub for other digital formats.
Read excerpts online:
"Annette Kuhn and Memory Work: Reflections on Family Secrets"
"Recollecting The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, a novel by Umberto Eco"
Related Articles:
“At Home in Cyberspace: Staging Autobiographical Scenes,” article published in the peer-reviewed journal Biography: An International Quarterly, 26.1 (Winter 2003): 84-119. This special issue examines “Online Lives.” (about 14,000 words)
United by a common tendency to raise questions about the meaning, recollection, and locus of “home” in a digital age, the five hypermedia websites on this virtual tour open up arenas for staging autobiographical scenes differently. Broadening the scope of The Home Project that the trAce Online Writing Centre maintains, and drawing on theories of spatiality and cyberculture, the survey of Family Portrait, Grandfather Gets a House, The Family Album Project, Home Maker, and Heard It in the Playground shows how these networked experiments with collaborative storytelling transform personal home pages into new spaces for cultural intervention. While merging “private” and “public” spheres, these examples also provide forums in which culturally diverse casts of characters showcase theatres of recollection for heterogeneous audiences around the world.
“Dear Diary Revisited: Transforming Personal Archives, Flag and Trick or Drink,” article published in the peer-reviewed journal Screening the Past: An International Refereed, Electronic Journal of Visual Media and History, v. 13, Dec. 2001. (about 16,000 words)
The essay links the independent videos Flag (USA 1989), by Linda Gibson, and Trick or drink (USA 1984), by Vanalyne Green, with traditions of women’s autobiographical videomaking in the United States that blur boundaries between “private” and “public” spheres to politicize the personal. The essay focuses on how Flag and Trick or drink interweave personal, social, spatial, and historical strands to tell the story of a woman’s life. The personal archives that the videos showcase suggest how diaries that the videomakers kept when they were adolescents instigate the adults’ remembrances of the past. The essay suggests that Flag and Trick or drink open up directions for others to explore further in a range of old and new media.
See My Collections on Scribd.