Video-Graphic Alchemy

My latest Substack post provides a context for my ongoing experiments with life writing across a range of media, from print to the web and beyond. I include a downloadable excerpt from Video-Graphic Alchemy: Transforming “Dear Diary,” a book I published in 2012 that includes a multimedia retrospective. I’ve independently published several books since then that elaborate on themes my early work explored. My experiments continue.

From the back cover:

“Video-Graphic Alchemy: Transforming 'Dear Diary' documents the multimedia experiments with personal and cultural memories that Elayne Zalis began in the late 1980s while under the spell of video art and emergent digital technologies. Blending fact and fiction, the illustrated retrospective brings together artistic, videographic, digital, and literary texts to explore life in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. A childhood diary that Zalis kept in the mid-1960s inspired her multimedia experiments. These early forays into multimedia paved the way for Arella’s Repertoire, a novel Zalis wrote in the early twenty-first century.

“As Zalis writes in Video-Graphic Alchemy, ‘My excursions into new creative territory served me well. I learned that when I reached an impasse with one medium, I could always turn to another medium or even create hybrids of my own. This approach stimulated my imagination and opened me to unconscious stirrings that I might have otherwise missed. By working through privately written texts in new spatial, temporal, and discursive contexts, I expanded my repertoire and rechanneled memories. Intermedia convergences played into the stage-by-stage construction of my stories.’”

#memoir #autobiography #lifewriting #storytelling #diary