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.
From Miami to LA: Personal Storytelling in the Digital Age
Reimagining The Twilight Zone: A Young Fan’s Stories (2021) and Curated Memories: A Boomer’s Personal Retrospective (2023) are now part of a new series I created called From Miami to LA: Personal Storytelling in the Digital Age. The two books complement each other and may be read in any order. I plan to experiment with audiobooks next.