lapsus linguae

E-Poetry Festival – Barcelona 2009

Next week I will present in absentia at the 5th edition of the E-Poetry Festival, which will take place in Barcelona May 24th-27, 2009. Artistic and academic events will take place at key Barcelona venues such as the the University of Barcelona, the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture (CCCB) and the Caixaforum, providing authors the opportunity to present their works to a public curious about new poetry and artistic trends employing technology and communication during the Setmana de la Poesia.

The event is organized by UOC’s research group Hermeneia, with the collaboration of Electronic Poetry Center (University of Buffalo) and the Laboratoire Paragraph (Univ. Paris VIII). Keynote speakers will include Roberto Simanowski (Brown University) and Jean Clément (Université Paris 8).

E-Poetry is an international biennial conference and festival of digital poetry. It is the most significant digital literary gathering in the field, bringing together an impressive roster of Electronic Literature’s most influential practitioners from around the world. Authors and researchers will present the latest research and the newest, most important works of electronic literature will be presented. Presenting at E-Poetry will bring my work to the attention of an influential international audience of critics, academics, practitioners and the public.

For more information or to register, please visit: http://www.e-poetry2009.com/

in absentia is a web-based project that uses fiction, digital images, historical maps HTML, javascript and the Google Maps API to address issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. The result is an interactive non-linear narrative map of interconnected “postcard” stories written from the point of view of former tenants of Mile End. In recent years many long-time low-income immigrant and elderly neighbours have been forced out of their homes by economic decisions made in their absence. The neighbourhood is haunted now, with their stories. Our stories. My building was sold during the production of in absentia. Faced with imminent eviction I began to write as if I was no longer here, about a Mile End that is no longer here. The Mile End depicted in in absentia is a slightly fantastical world, a shared memory of the neighbourhood as it never really was but as it could have been. The sterile and slightly sinister “developer’s-eye-view” of the neighbourhood offered by Google Maps satellite imaging has been populated with stories, interrupted with silhouette voids, intimate traces of the sudden disappearances of characters (fictional or otherwise) from the places (real or imagined) where they once lived.

At E-Poetry I will present the piece by giving a brief contextual overview of the work and then read aloud from a number of the stories contained in the work.
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soirée de performances hypermédiatiques bleuOrange

Vous êtes cordialement invitées, invités à la soirée de performances hypermédiatiques bleuOrange, mettant en vedette J .R. Carpenter, Jason E. Lewis et David Jhave Johnston, trois artistes reconnus pour leurs pratiques d’écriture faisant usage des technologies numériques. Ils seront suivis d’une prestation du groupe Graffiti Research Lab – Canada.

J.R. Carpenter est la récipiendaire du Carte Blanche Quebec Award décerné par la Quebec Writer’s Foundation, elle a remporté deux fois la CBC Quebec Short Story Competition, ainsi que, plus récemment, le Expozine Alternative Press Award dans la catégorie Best English Book pour son premier roman, Words the Dog Knows. Ses œuvres de littérature électronique ont été présentées partout dans le monde. Elle est présidente du conseil d’administration du Laboratoire des Nouveaux Médias OBORO à Montréal.
http://luckysoap.com

Artiste du Web, David Jhave Johnston a débuté sa pratique comme poète avant d’intégrer les outils informatiques et numériques à sa production. Il est engagé dans de nombreuses collaborations, notamment avec le collectif torontois Year01 dans le cadre duquel il agit régulièrement à titre de commissaire. Son travail a été présenté notamment aux Biennales d’art contemporain de Montréal, en 2003, et de Toronto, en 2004. Diplômé de l’université Concordia en 2004 en Sciences informatiques, il a également complété une maîtrise en Arts interactifs à l’université Simon Fraser (Vancouver) en 2005 et est actuellement doctorant à Concordia.
http://www.glia.ca

Jason E. Lewis est un artiste des médias numériques et un designer de logiciels. Il est le fondateur de Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, où il est le directeur des projets de recherche et de création. Leur objet est de trouver de nouvelles manières de produire et de lire des textes numériques, de développer des systèmes permettant un usage créatif de la technologie mobile, d’assurer le design d’interfaces alternatives pour des performances artistiques en direct et d’utiliser des environnements virtuels afin d’assister les communautés aborigènes dans la préservation, l’interprétation et la communication de leur histoire culturelle. Obx Labs est dévoué au développement de nouvelles formes d’expression en travaillant simultanément sur le plan conceptuel, créatif et technique. Les œuvres et les écrits de Jason E. Lewis sur les médias ont fait l’objet d’expositions et de conférences sur quatre continents. Il est présentement professeur associé au département des arts informatiques de l’Université Concordia.
http://www.obxlabs.net

Graffiti Research Lab – Canada. Quand la voix du peuple ne peut se faire entendre par les moyens traditionnels, la population doit opter pour des méthodes subversives. Entraîné dans les profondeurs de la plus grande jungle urbaine de la planète, le Graffiti Research Lab déploie un groupe d’agents canadiens de niveau Splinter Cell élite pour combattre l’establishment et pénétrer la conscience des masses. Extrêmement efficaces dans l’utilisation d’Armes de Défiguration Massive, ces agents dévoyés travaillent à la libération du peuple, et contre la guerre psychologique des agences de publicité. Leurs armes? Peindre avec la lumière et diffuser avec des lasers.
http://www.GraffitiResearchLab.ca

Les performances auront lieu le samedi 2 mai 2009, à 20 heures
à l’Agora Hydro-Québec du Coeur des sciences de l’UQAM
175, avenue du Président-Kennedy, Montréal
Métro Place-des-Arts, accès entre l’UQAM et l’église au toit rouge

Entrée libre
La revue bleuOrange (http://revuebleuorange.org) profitera du colloque international Histoires et Archives, arts et littératures hypermédiatiques (colloque2009.nt2.uqam.ca) pour tenir une soirée de performances d’œuvres hypermédiatiques le 2 mai 2009 à 20 h, et souligner le lancement du second numéro de bleuOrange, revue de littérature hypermédiatique.

bleuOrange est un projet soutenu par le Laboratoire NT2 : Nouvelles technologies, nouvelles textualités et Figura, le Centre de recherche sur le texte et l’imaginaire, tous deux rattachés au Département d’études littéraires à l’Université du Québec à Montréal.

INFORMATIONS
Alice van der Klei
Rédactrice en chef
bleuOrange, revue de littérature hypermédiatique
514 987.3000 poste 1931
info@revuebleuorange.org
http://revuebleuorange.org

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A Slow Reveal… at The Art Gallery at the University of Maryland

Two of my recent web-based works – Entre Ville and in absentia – have been included in a new exhibition at The Art Gallery at the University of Maryland at College Park. A Slow Reveal… launched on March 25, 2009. Over the course of several weeks, the site will reveal projects developed for the internet that employ a variety of forms: from digital narratives, online gaming, open source programming, and database art, to traditional methods of documentary filmmaking in virtual environments.

The first section in A Slow Reveal… explores how the Internet is transforming narratives, through electronic literature, gaming, mash ups, blogging, and transmedia fiction. In these works, the narrative unfolds in RSS syndication through text, still images, video, animation, and sound. The Internet provides individuals and collaborators opportunities to publish innovative re-imaginings of text and image to a potentially large audience, while reaching the smaller niche audiences some works might attract and never reach through traditional print or video distribution. The internet allows for new level of interactivity, from simple navigation and shaping of text to participating as reader/writer/composer/actor. Through mouse clicks and arrow keys, the experience is more like a performance than viewing a static material object.
– Jennie Fleming, The Art Gallery, Associate Director

So far, A Slow Reveal… has revealed works by Kate Pullinger, Chris Joseph, J. R. Carpenter, Andy Campbell, Judi Alston, Annette Weintraub, Roderick Coover, David Clark, Mark Amerika and Jody Zellen.

View A Slow Reveal…
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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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NON-LINEAR NARRATIVES & MULTI-MEDIA POETICS: AN INTRODUCTION TO ELECTRONIC LITERATURE

I am teaching an electronic literature workshop through the Quebec Writers’ Federation on Saturday, March 28, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. 1200 Atwater Avenue, Suite 2 (2nd-floor computer lab). This workshop is ideal for experienced writers interested in expanding their existing practices to include web-based forms of non-linear, interactive, intertextual and/or networked literature

The one-day workshop will provide an introduction to reading and writing web-based electronic literature. Electronic literature combines literary and new media practices, resulting in multi-media literary works that couldn’t exist in print form. Consideration of technology at the level of the creation of the text distinguishes electronic literature from e-books, digitized versions of print works, web publishing and other products of print authors ‘going digital,’ none of which will be discussed in this workshop. Unbound by pages and the printed book, electronic literature moves freely across the web, through galleries, performance spaces, and museums, yet does not reside in any single medium or institution. Electronic literature often intersects with conceptual art, web art and sound art, but the reading and writing of electronic literature is situated within the literary arts.

This workshop will begin with a brief historical background of the genre, including a discussion of some of the pre-web literary forms that digital writing evolved from. We will focus on looking at, reading and understanding works of electronic literature. I will show some of my work and explain how it was built, then propose a number of ways for beginners to approach the web medium for the creation and dissemination of texts. In particular, we will look at ways to use existing Web 2.0 structures to create distributive literary works. Writing exercises will include: writing 140-character stories in Twitter and writing postcard stories in Google Maps. There will be some technical discussion of how these works function, but prior knowledge of web programming is not required.

If participants have electronic literature projects in mind, we can discuss strategies for creating these works. Visual and new media artists who use are using text in their work and wish to learn more about the literary aspects of digital writing will also find this workshop useful, as will avid readers of experimental literature from Calvino to Borges, and anyone interested in audio/video mashup, performance, remix culture, etc., who wishes to learn about this exciting new hybrid, hypermedia genre.

A list of links to online resources, further technical resources and venues for reading and submitting electronic literature will be provided. For registration information, please visit: http://www.qwf.org/workshops/spring2009/carpenter.html.

J. R. Carpenter is winner of the QWF’s 2008 Carte Blanche Quebec Prize and the 2003 & 2005 CBC Quebec Short Story Competition. Her electronic literature has been presented at Jyväskylä Art Museum (Finland), Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), Electronic Literature Collection Volume One Web Biennial 2007 (Istanbul), Rhizome.org and Turbulence.org. Her short fiction has been anthologized and published widely. Her first novel, Words the Dog Knows, was published by Conundrum Press (Montreal, 2008). She serves as President of the Board of Directors of OBORO New Media Lab in Montreal.
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In Search of A New(er) Digital Literature

Entre Ville is in an new exhibition called In Search of A New(er) Digital Literature curated by Alan Bigelow, which opened in Gallery 108 at Austin Peay State University, Tennessee, USA, January 15, 2009. The exhibition is also online on < terminal > a space sponsored by the department of art and the center for the creative arts at Austin Peay to showcase and examine internet and new media art. As Bigelow writes in his curatorial statement:

the works in this exhibition, and many like them, find their life, and major readership, on the web. The web is not just a quick and expedient way to find an audience for digital literature, a way to self-publish at minimal cost, and a path to self-promotion; it also offers worldwide access to a multimedia platform for which these works can be created, and provides a place for them to thrive.
[read more]

View In Search of A New(er) Digital Literature online.
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I’m in Karlsokrona, Sweden.

It’s dark at the moment, and very far from Montreal. It took one taxi, two planes, two passport controls, two trains, eighteen hours and six time zones to get here. The taxi took the best route to the airport. The first plane was empty. It took me to Washington DC. The second plane was full. It took me to Copenhagen. It took eight hours. A long-haul red-eye spent in seat 46B – on the isle in the last row. Right next to the toilet. Which is right next to where the food comes out. I was enraged about this arrangement until I met my seatmate. 46A happened to be a Norwegian novelist named Astrid, a woman around my age who was on her way back from Mexico City. We instantly became Team Last Row and determined to make the best of it. We talked for hours about books and writing, socialism and publishing, travel and translation. I got the low down on the lay of the Scandinavian literary landscape. And an invitation to write an article for a Norwegian authors’ website that Astrid edits. Astrid got a copy of my novel. She is going to be the first person in Norway to read Words the Dog Knows. Sadly, none of her three novels have been translated into English yet. We wrote reading recommendations for each other in our matching black notebooks and got extra free wine because we were in such good spirits despite how hard our seats sucked. The flight crew knew enough to be grateful for our good humour.

We parted ways in Copenhagen. I followed my Swedish host Talan’s Map and How to Catch a Train instructions to the letter. They were excellent instructions, which included such all important details as which ticket booth will take Canadian cash and the amazing (to someone from Quebec) fact that the conductors on Swedish trains are required by law to speak English. The instructions sort of fell apart when none of the automated ticket machines were working and long lines formed at the ticket booths. I eventually managed to procure a ticket to Karlskrona and soon I was on a train speeding through the Swedish countryside. Technically the train was going to Karlskrona, but not all the way. I wound up waiting for an hour in a freezing cold station somewhere half way between Copenhagen and Karlskrona for another train to take me the rest of the way. Once I figured out where the one hot water heater was hiding in the cavernous cold, and huddled up to it, I was free to be amused by the waiting room cast of small town characters culled from the casts of My Life as a Dog and Mon Uncle. An old man spent the entire hour meticulously washing the flagstone floor by pushing a rag mop along with his boot, for example.

On the second train, a man came by interviewing passengers about their use of the train system. The whole car listened with attention as the questions were translated into English for me. I’m sure I skewed the survey’s demographic considerably. Where did you board the train? Copenhagen. What was your point of origin? Montreal. What is your final destination? Karlskrona. What is the purpose of your travel to Karlskrona? To give a lecture. And how often do you use this train service? This is my first time. By this time the whole train car was listening. Soon a second interview ensued, this one from my Swedish seatmate, a gap-toothed affable chap, who found it incredible that I would travel all this way to give one lecture and then go home. Well, I’m giving a workshop too, I explained. He apologized for the cold, lifted my suitcase into the overhead rack for me, lowered the blind so the sun wouldn’t blind me, let me sleep for a while, then tapped my knee to say good bye when he got up to leave. Because we were old friends by then I guess.

Speaking of friends, my friend Talan met me at the Karlskrona train station and walked me too my hotel. I have Talan to thank for being here. When he first invited me, over a single malt scotch in a hotel bar in the small town of Vancouver, Washington, I never thought it would actually happen. And then there we were walking through the streets of cold Karlskrona. Once I was checked into my hotel, Talan left me alone to recuperate from my travels. He ran off to a meeting and then home to prepare a welcoming reception for me set to take place at his place later this evening. Which is almost now.

Now I’ve had a nap and my brain is clearer, though body has no idea what time it is. I’m starving. I’m sucking on a cough drop trying to stay alive the next 50 minutes until Lissa comes to pick me up to take me to the reception at Talan’s, being thrown in honour of my having come all this way. Rumor has it there will be smoked baltic salmon and caviar and cheese and crackers and single malt scotch! Come on cough drop, keep me in this thing!
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Guest Lecturer at de Montfort University, Leicester, UK

The week of November 3rd, 2008, I’ll be a Guest Lecturer at de Montfort University. De Montfort is in Leicester, UK. But I’ll be in my office in Montreal. And the students will be tuning in from the UK, Gambia, and Canada. How is this possible? De Montfort offers an online MA in Creative Writing and New Media.

The Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media is designed for writers interested in experimenting with new formats and exploring the potential of new technologies in their writing. This 95% distance learning course has a unique commitment to the connections between writing and new media and offers an excellent online experience combined with one week’s intensive study at the De Montfort campus. The course is designed by Professor Sue Thomas, writer and former Artistic Director of the trAce Online Writing Centre, and Kate Pullinger, acclaimed novelist and new media writer. It has extensive links with important initiatives including DMU’s Institute of Creative Technologies, research into digital narratives and new media writing, and the creative, digital and publishing industries.

This degree is informed by contemporary thinking on transliteracy, meaning the ability to read, write and interpret across a range of media from orality through print and film to networked environments. Creative Writing, indeed the very nature of text itself, is changing. No longer bound by print, there are many opportunities for writers to experiment with new kinds of media, different voices and experimental platforms, both independently and in collaboration with other writers or other fields and disciplines. Not only is writing evolving, but writers themselves are developing broader expectations and aspirations. Novelists are learning about the potential of hypertext and multimedia to change the ways in which a story can be told. Journalists are finding that blogs and wikis are radically affecting their relationships with their readers. Community artists are discovering powerful collaborative narratives. And the commercial world is finding new and creative ways to interact with its employees and customers in the fast-growing attention economy of the internet. While digital media have altered the way we disseminate and gather information, readers – both online and offline – still hunger for compelling narratives. As readers, we want to be told stories; we want complex and interesting ideas and characters; we want vivid pictures in our heads. As writers we want to communicate. We need good stories well-told, whatever our choice of delivery platform. The MA in Creative Writing and New Media provides an opportunity to focus on developing work at the cutting edge of the new technologies and enables new ways of thinking about narrative.

To visit the current students’ course website and to see examples of the guest lecturers on the programme and successful applicant profiles visit: http://www.creativewritingandnewmedia.com

To read the lecture I’ve prepared for the MA in Creative Writing and New Media visit: Mapping a Web of Words.

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in absentia in Finland – Live Herring 08

Live Herring ´08 Media Art Exhibition will be in shown at Jyväskylä Art Museum October 29 – November 23, 2008, in The Lower Gallery, Holvi. Opening hours: Tue-Sun 11-18. Free entrance to The Lower Gallery. http://www.liveherring.org/

Live Herring ´08 media art exhibition presents media art as diverse phenomenon, with a concentration on new media art. The exhibition space will be filled with reflections and sounds. At the same time as interactive art works invite visitors to participate, in the Net dot lounge visitors can explore net art in privacy. In the exhibition there are pieces from nine artists living in Nordic countries. For Net dot lounge and Flash lounge there was an open call for submission for artists from all over the world.

Artists in the exhibition (selected from submissions):
Heidi Aho (Finland), Päivi Hintsanen (Finland), Tomi Knuutila (Finland), Mari Keski-Korsu (Finland), Antti Laitinen (Finland), Jone Skjensvold (Norway), Video Jack (Portugal/SFinland), Bjørn Wangen (Sweden), Nora Westerberg (Finland)

Net dot Lounge presents following artists:
Chris Basmajian (USA), Jeroen van Beurden (Netherlands), Filip Bojovic & Vladimir Manovski (Russia), Martin John Callanan (UK), J. R. Carpenter (Canada), Annabel Castro (Mexico), David Clark (Canada), Juliet Davis (USA), Andy Deck (USA), Jason Freeman (USA), Sami Heikkinen (Finland), Päivi Hintsanen & Noora Nenonen (Finland), Yael Kanarek (USA), Sara Milazzo (Finland), Adam Nash & Mami Yamanaka (Australia), Jason Nelson (Australia), Oskar Ponnert (Sweden), Rafael Rozendaal (Germany/Brazil), Silas FONG Sum-yu (Hong Kong//China), Sérgio Tavares (Brazil), Martin Wattenberg (USA), Ant Ngai Wing-Lam (Hong Kong/China)

Live Herring ‘08 exhibition net artworks (via submission + invited) can be viewed from:
http://www.liveherring.org/08_web/net_exhibition.htm

Flash Lounge, animations from following artists:
Anni Kinnunen (Finland), Jonna Markkula (Finland), Aku Meriläinen (Finland), Santeri Piilonen (Finland), Petri Tiainen (Finland), Väsyneistö (Finland)

The Exhibition expands outside of the museum building when the artist Antti Laitinen continues his art project Walk the Line in Jyväskylä. Laitinen will realize this self-portrait for the first time as a live performance. He will walk at the streets of the city with the GPS –navigator. The performance will start on October 27th, 2008 at 12 p.m. Helsinki time (gmt +02:00) / 10 a.m. London time (gmt +00:00) and it can be followed on the internet. The link for this performance will be announced on the Live Herring website on October 24th. The outcome will be his self-portrait drawn with the help of navigator into the map of the Jyväskylä. This work will be exhibited in the exhibition along with the other pieces from this series.

Another guest artist of the exhibition is media artist Mari Keski-Korsu. She will arrive for afternoon tee to Jyväskylä on Nov 7th at 4.30 p.m. She will tell about her work Mega with which she is participating to the exhibition, but also about art project Mikropaliskunta.

Live Herring ´08 will be visible also in outside of the museum building. As a part of the exhibition there will be also short screenings of media art from the window of Jyväskylä Art Museum to the Kauppakatu each Wednesday and Friday at 5 p.m. In November Live Herring visits The Arctic & Fabulous film festival and House Games exhibition.

If you have questions about media art or you want guiding to exhibition, we invite you to meet “Live Herring media art adviser” who is on a call on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday afternoons at exhibition. Public guiding will be also organized on Saturday Nov 15th and on Sunday Nov 23rd at 2 p.m.

Live Herring working group is cooperating for the exhibition with local enterprises. Exhibition has been supported by AudioCenter, GPS-seuranta and Kopijyvä. For exhibition cooperation is also done with University of Jyväskylä, Department of Art and Culture Studies. Live Herring ´08 exhibition has been financially supported by Arts Council of Finland and The Finnish Cultural Foundation.

The name Live Herring comes from the Online Net Art Gallery Spirited Herring – the first Finnish open-to-all net art gallery, online since 1997.

http://www.liveherring.org/
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Response to English 214’s Questions on The Cape

Here are my responses to the questions posed by the English 214 Question Collective after their class discussion of my guest blogger post, THE CAPE: THE BACK STORY, on CultureNet @ CapilanoU on Friday, October 10, 2008:

English 214 Question Collective: As you stated in your “Back Story” guest blog, physical photographs possess a certain authority. As the transformative process of selecting a medium for publication moves “The Cape” from print-text to hypertext, does the message/meaning of your story change?

J.R. Carpenter: Yes. In every retelling, every story changes slightly. In oral story telling, it is the storyteller who wilfully alters and hones her details and delivery based on the immediacy of audience response. I came to writing through spoken word and performance. I still struggle with the finality of print publication. Once something is published in print it is fixed in time, and, like a physical photograph, cannot easily be altered. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing – I’m saying I struggle with it. The web is infinitely more fluid, flexible, updateable, and alterable. I’m not saying that’s a good thing – I’m saying that I’m more comfortable with publishing when I know I have the possibility of adjusting any part of the text, images or code in response to audience reaction. These slight editorial changes do not always change the message or meaning of they story, but they can influence the reader response in subtle ways.

The real question is: Is the print iteration of “The Cape” different from the hypertext iteration, and how? As I wrote in “The Cape: The Back-Story,” I spent a long time trying to expand “The Cape” into a “real” short story. It was hard for me to believe that a story could be so short. In print, the story passes by very quickly. An attentive reader will realize this, slow down, and take the time to fill in the blanks.

In the web iteration of “The Cape” there are only ever one, two, or three sentences on a page. The white space around the sentences, the entrespace created between the text and the images, the meta information to be read in the images (including additional text, in some of the diagrammatic images), the pause created by duration of the moving images, and the time lapse between clicking from one page to the next – all these hypertext elements serve to expand the terrain of story. On the other hand, given the visual-centric tendencies of the general web-viewing audience, the visual elements could potentially overshadow the text. Some may read the sentences as merely captions.

My favourite iteration of the “The Cape” is the mini-book version. In this small (approx 2 x 2.75inches), inexpensively reproduced, intimate format, the images and the text carry equal weight, being so close in size. The act of turning the page after every sentence adds time and reflective space to the story. And the miniature scale of the book refers subtly to childhood and the children’s book. It is my dream to publish a children’s book iteration of “The Cape” one day.

English 214 Question Collective: You mentioned that the Geological Guide photographs interest you more than your own family history. Do you find using fact with fiction allowed you to create a more authentic story?

J.R. Carpenter: Yes. True and false are binaries, opposites. Fiction both contains and confounds the either/or of truth and falsehood. This, to me, is more representational of real life than any idealized notion of either historical accuracy or pure fantasy. “The Cape” addresses certain presuppositions – that we all have fond childhood memories of our grandmothers, that little girls want certain things and behave in certain ways, and that Cape Cod is a lovely place to visit – by conflating observations to the contrary of those statements with other irrefutable facts: I never learned to Whistle. I wish I’d asked my uncle to teach me how to spit instead. The Cape, as Cape Cod is often called, is, as you may know, a narrow spit of land.

Writing a first-person child narrator is always tricky. No one takes a serious kid seriously. Arming the child narrator of “The Cape” with facts and charts and maps was the least I could do for her. Not that it does her much good. That no one is listening to her is what makes it an authentic story. The older we get, the more we convince ourselves that our memories are true. Why do we trust our own memories of childhood, yet doubt the perceptions of children? These are questions best left to fiction.

“Life as described in fiction … is never just life as it was lived by those who imagined, wrote, read, or experienced it but rather the fictional equivalent, what they were obliged to fabricate because they weren’t able to live it in reality and, as a result, resigned themselves to live only in the indirect and subjective way it could be lived: in dreams and in fiction. Fiction is a lie covering up a deep truth: it is life as it wasn’t, life as the men and women of a certain age wanted to live it and didn’t and thus had to invent.”

Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist, trans. Natasha Wimmer, NY: Picador, 2002, page 8.

English 214 Question Collective: As the work is entitled “The Cape”, the importance of place and memory – as you imply – are highlighted by the imagery in the erosion of the Maritime shorelines and how memories dissipate. This seems to create a strong sense of sublimity within your work. Is this something you have reflected on?

J.R. Carpenter: Yes. Notions of place have long pervaded my fiction writing and electronic literature works. In my web-based work the images of place are literally images. Maps figure prominently – operating, often simultaneously as images, interface, metaphors for place, and stand-ins for non-existent family photographs. My parents were immigrants. I grew up in a different country than everyone I was related to. We moved around a lot when I was a kid. I think my early adoption of the internet was due in part to my attraction to it as a placeless place. Many of my works may be read as web “sites” of longing for belonging, for home.

The sense of sublimity you mention emerges most strongly when I am writing about long-ago places, and pasts that could never be mine. I barely knew my grandmother Carpenter and can lay no ancestral claim to being “from” Cape Cod. I don’t even know if she was from there. Maybe she just retired to there. Somehow, historical aerial photographs of the coastal erosion of the Cape Cod National Seashore seemed to be the perfect, most sublime representation of this elusive, tenuous, quasi-fictional relationship.

For another example, take a look at one of my earliest works of electronic literature: Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls [1996]. Mythologies is a non-linear narrative about a first crush as experienced by two children left to their own devices while the grown-ups are presumably busy elsewhere. A map of Nova Scotia operates as the interface and central image of the piece. I used geological images and terminology to further distance myself from rural Nova Scotia, and childhood in general. In this case, plate tectonic theory seemed to best represent the cataclysmic, renting split between the end of childhood obliviousness and the beginning of adult knowing.

At fault, as it were, seemed to be the sea,
always the sea, putting another meter between
Africa and the Americas every hundred years,
pushing Europe further and further away from
the Canadian Maritimes, in dutiful geology.

I will also suggest, for a print example of the evocation of the sublime through intertwined images of memory and place in my fiction, the very short story Precipice [2003]:

A habitual stomach-sleeper, she dreams of falling. Face down, the falling is more like flying; she never hits the ground. Often in her dreams of falling there is a precipice: a clearly defined line before which, perhaps for acres on end, grow grassy, sloping fields of thistle, pock-marked by dry caked dung. And after? Arriving at the precipice all fields and fences end abruptly and fall away. Forty feet below, there lies a beach of stones; a vague sense of bottom. And beyond: an inordinate amount of ocean.

In closing, let me thank you once again for your close reading of “The Cape” and you’re your thoughtful questions. It has been a pleasure. Very best, from Montreal,

J.R. Carpenter || Luckysoap & Co.
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