NON-LINEAR NARRATIVES & MULTI-MEDIA POETICS AT THE ATWATER LIBRARY

Early Saturday morning, March 28, 2009, I packed a suitcase full of books and headed down to the Atwater Library to lead a six-hour long workshop on electronic literature. For the record, although the Atwater Library is the oldest lending library in Canada, their computer lab is state of the art. Also worthy of note: even the smallest of suitcases, when full of books, is way too heavy to carry up and down the perverse number of stairs leading in and out of the Montreal Metro.

NON-LINEAR NARRATIVES & MULTI-MEDIA POETICS: AN INTRODUCTION TO ELECTRONIC LITERATURE was a one-day workshop presented by the Quebec Writers' Federation. This being the QWF's first venture into the realm of electronic literature, I had no idea who, if anyone, would sign up. The turnout was excellent, and students' backgrounds extremely varied. Which was both exciting and terrifying. Picture it: A poet, a printmaker, a journalist, a video artist, an installation artist, an anthropologist, a professor of Intermedia and a Pearl programmer walk into a room. And I'm standing there with a suitcase full of books.

It's amazing how quickly six hours can fly by. We covered some but not all of the course outline and discussed many more things besides. I referred excessively to my own work, and pillaged bits and pieces of talks and workshops taught by friends. A subjective chronology of electronic literature from Stuart Moulthrop here, a dash of film history from jake moore there. Victoria Welby's notes on animation and remediation sure came in handy. A remixology writing exercise lifted from Mark Amerika crossed with an intro to HTML led to a re-mix of Nick Montfort's The Purpling, a poem recently published on the Iowa Review Web.

The Purpling has ten pages, each with eight to nine sentences, each sentence linked to a different page. We were nine in the class, so we each re-mixed a page and left the index page the same. The only rules, that the first sentence of the re-mixed page start with the same first two words as the original (to correspond with Nick's file naming system), and that the re-mixed page have the same number of sentences as the original. We took blueing as our theme: blueing of mood, of sky, as whitening agent. And here's what we came up with: The Blueing.

Thanks to all the re-mixers and re-mixees, and to Lori, at the QWF, for bringing e.lit into the mix.
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