Elayne Zalis, PhD, MA
Writer, Editor, Author
The Memory Channel: My Personal Retrospective
Curated Memories: A Boomer’s Personal Retrospective serves as a companion to Reimagining The Twilight Zone: A Young Fan’s Stories, a speculative memoir I published in 2021. Both books pay tribute to my first novel, Arella’s Repertoire, and complement the visual storytelling I document in Video-Graphic Alchemy: Transforming “Dear Diary.” While also resonating with the musings on media and memory I preserve in VirtualDayz: Remediated Visions & Digital Memories (an experimental “blook”), Curated Memories and Reimagining The Twilight Zone together set the stage for future work in the digital age. A Child’s Personal Twilight Zone: Imagining New Possibilities inspired my first audiobook.
From Miami to LA: Personal Storytelling in the Digital Age
An Autobiographical Quartet (four books, 2021–24)
Curated Memories: A Boomer's Personal Retrospective
The young TV fan portrayed in Reimagining The Twilight Zone: A Young Fan’s Stories grows up in Curated Memories: A Boomer’s Personal Retrospective. From the vantage point of the early 2020s, the author sees with fresh eyes not only her younger selves but also the era in which she and her baby boomer peers came of age. Television, music, and other popular culture of the 1950s and ’60s open up portals to their shared past—while also reminding us all we have our own stories to tell. Elayne Zalis once more orchestrates fact, fiction, and fantasy to explore personal and cultural memory across a range of media, including film, video, print, digital platforms, and the web. This book includes full-color photos. [2023, 376 pages]
Reimagining The Twilight Zone: A Young Fan’s Stories
In this speculative memoir, Elayne Zalis contemplates how The Twilight Zone sparked her imagination when she was a young girl growing up in Miami, Florida, in the late 1950s and early ’60s. She considers selected episodes of this classic television series from the child’s perspective and includes remixes and mash-ups of the shows, similar to fan fiction. A portrait emerges of a writer as a young TV fan in the Kennedy era. In the process of telling these stories, the adult narrator reinvents both the child she was and the woman she has become. The Twilight Zone serves as a springboard to creative thought. [2021, 297 pages]
A Child's Personal Twilight Zone: Imagining New Possibilities
The three stories in this abridged edition of Reimagining The Twilight Zone: A Young Fan’s Stories feature children and young adults in leading roles. More than simply creating alternative casts—or bringing together characters from different episodes—these intersecting stories highlight the otherworldly adventures of young protagonists who learn to imagine new possibilities. At the same time, the collection celebrates creativity across the life span. An audiobook is now available on Audible, Amazon, Apple Books, Spotify, and other platforms. [2023–24, 134 pages]
Beyond the Spotlight: A Multimedia Preview
While curating her memories for future generations, Elayne Zalis chronicles her evolution as a late-blooming writer who finds comfort beyond the spotlight. Guided as much by a child’s longing for fantasy as by a woman’s desire for truth, she explores personal storytelling in the digital age. This full-color photo edition highlights selected strands of Curated Memories: A Boomer’s Personal Retrospective, a creative autobiography Zalis published in 2023. Like that book, Beyond the Spotlight: A Multimedia Preview recounts a journey of discovery and invention that begins in South Florida in the early 1950s and concludes in Southern California in the early 2020s. [2023, 88 pages]
Autobiographical Fiction: Transforming Personal Diaries and
Other Archival Treasures (five books, 2008–14)
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. Like her Russian forebears, who immigrated to the United States at the turn of the previous century, she imagines belonging somewhere. Motivated as much by a child’s longing for fantasy as by a woman’s desire for truth, she highlights scenes from Miami, where she came of age in the 1960s, and Los Angeles, where she settled in the mid-1990s after many stops along the way. The narrative explores personal and cultural memory in the digital age. [2012, 280 pages]
A visit to South Florida in 1995 prompts Leah to reflect on her early years in Miami, beginning with her childhood in the mid-1960s. A troupe of imaginary dancers stand in for her at key stages of her life. Diaries and archival treasures inspire their performances. Blending the real and imagined and combining genres, the story Leah tells unfolds chronologically, yet each “act” can stand on its own. A travelogue, a memoir, and a screenplay all in one, When We Believed in Magic can also be read as a preliminary script for interactive digital platforms or as a sketch for an actual dance performance. This retrospective highlights the performative strands of Arella’s Repertoire, a novel by Elayne Zalis. [2014, 50 pages]
Video-Graphic Alchemy: Transforming “Dear Diary”
This illustrated text explains the unconventional methodology Elayne Zalis used to “compose” Vagabond Scribe (Leah’s Backstory), which she began in the late 1980s while under the spell of video art and emergent digital technologies. That literary experiment informed her approach to Arella’s Repertoire, a novel she wrote that elaborates on and takes to new levels the earlier work of fiction. Video-Graphic Alchemy brings together her retrospective essay and the artistic, multimedia, and literary work from her personal repertoire that she references. The book includes reproductions of more than twenty black-and-white and color images. [2012, 52 pages, updated cover]
VirtualDayz: Remediated Visions & Digital Memories
This “blook” preserves the musings on media and memory that Elayne Zalis posted on her blog, VirtualDayz, from June 2005 to July 2006 (see http://www.virtualdayz. blogspot.com/). Both private and public archives inspire her reflections, which explore media in transition, a range that encompasses film, video, print, digital arts, and the web. She is interested in what artists and writers are doing and in what critics and scholars are saying. (Cover images are from a multimedia art project documented in Video-Graphic Alchemy, and that book is based on a blog entry she wrote.) [2008, 160 pages]
Vagabond Scribe: (Leah's Backstory)
In this literary experiment, 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. [2009, 122 pages]