Elayne Zalis, PhD, MA
Writer, Editor, Author
“A Wondrous Land of Imagination”
You are invited on a journey into “a wondrous land of imagination.” Next stop, my personalized Twilight Zone.
Imagine Jordan Peele’s reboot of The Twilight Zone as a speculative memoir that could appeal to adults and young readers alike. Reimagining The Twilight Zone: A Young Fan's Stories is likely to attract fans of The Twilight Zone, baby boomers who identify with the popular culture addressed in the essays, and readers who appreciate creative approaches to autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, and other forms of life writing. Beyond simply recounting one person's stories, the twenty essays in this collection provide new models for framing personal and cultural memories.
Shifting Mediascapes
Curated Memories: A Boomer’s Personal Retrospective explores links between the television, popular culture, music, and diary writing that spark my imagination when I’m a young girl in South Florida and the creative pathways that independent video, personal computers, the internet, and social media later make possible. My expanding repertoire fuses twentieth- and twenty-first-century sensibilities, and my move to Southern California in the mid-1990s provides fresh vantage points from which to dream and imagine. Curated Memories sets in motion a creative interplay of voices and visions from a multimedia range of my own work.
By exploring traces of a fleeting past, I hope to add my stories to our collective memory banks and pass on what I have learned. I also instigate a dialogue with my younger selves, who come alive once more in my mind and on the page. Imagination picks up where memory leaves off.
Voices and Visions
Beyond the Spotlight: A Multimedia Preview sets in motion a creative interplay of my writing and multimedia work within a broad social, cultural, and historical context. The voices and visions of my younger selves inspire my reflections. This abridged version of Curated Memories: A Boomer’s Personal Retrospective includes an original introduction and is designed to stand on its own.
Otherworldly Adventures
My remixed variations of “Little Girl Lost” (1962), “Black Leather Jackets” (1964), and “The Bewitchin’ Pool” (1964) transcend the bounds of the TV shows that Rod Serling introduced every week. More than simply creating alternative casts—or bringing together characters from different episodes—the stories in A Child’s Personal Twilight Zone: Imagining New Possibilities highlight the otherworldly adventures of young protagonists who learn to imagine new possibilities. An audiobook is now available on Audible, Amazon, Apple Books, Spotify, and other platforms.
“A Child’s Personal Twilight Zone highlights the imaginative dimensions of a young girl’s world. It also celebrates creativity across the life span. Looking backward empowers me, the adult narrator, to imagine new possibilities of my own in art and life. . . . Once again, The Twilight Zone serves as a springboard to creative thought.” (from intro)
From Miami to LA: Personal Storytelling in the Digital Age
Reimagining The Twilight Zone: A Young Fan’s Stories (2021), Curated Memories: A Boomer’s Personal Retrospective (2023), and Beyond the Spotlight: A Multimedia Preview (2023) are now part of a new series I created called From Miami to LA: Personal Storytelling in the Digital Age. These books complement one another and may be read in any order. Both Curated Memories and Beyond the Spotlight include full-color images. A Child’s Personal Twilight Zone: Imagining New Possibilities (2023), the latest volume in my autobiographical quartet, shifts the focus from speculative memoir to speculative fiction.