Experiments in Text

Lance Olsen writes experimental fiction.  He teaches this form at the University of Utah.  He's interested in theory and has explored in his writing hypermedia text.

Using structured collage, he creates books from assembled small text units that he calls narraticules. These small, finely written paragraphs of about five sentences are building blocks and can create interesting juxtapositions and provide polyphonic effects.

In Olsen's book,  Head in Flames, he uses these units to reflect shifts in voices, time periods, and consciousness.   Changes in font are used as well.  Readers can read the work in a linear fashion, or in a horizontal fashion (following the same font).

 He's interested in remixing other writers' texts in the form of quotation, saying he likes "how it cuts up and cuts off what it’s quoting, and by doing so releases new meanings and contexts that can and do surprise author as well as reader.

His work reminded me of the Piglia's: "Theses on the Short Story."  Piglia focused on story within a story in short forms.  Olsen works in long forms, and he brings together disparate elements in interesting ways.  In "A Long Note on New Narrative" by Robert Glück identifies and defines a method of literary practice termed New Narrative:

We were thinking about autobiography; by autobiography we meant daydreams, night dreams, the act of writing, the relationship to the reader, the meeting of flesh and culture, the self as collaboration, the self as disintegration, the gaps, inconsistencies and distortions, the enjambments of power, family, history and language.

The new hybrid writing, reflected recently in Claudia Rankine's Citizen and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, offers an engaging, elastic form that appeals to the way we think these days.  Some say we have a new brain, influenced by the internet and its devices.  All of us in the culture have attention that is further and further divided, and all of us must face complex and developing tensions and rifts in our growing population. This new narrative form provides ways to bring forward multiple threads: history, memoir, philosophy, art, and what-have-you.

In an interview published in Rain Taxi, Lance talks about his influences and forms.

Push yourself. Take chances. Remain curious. Remain crazy. Don’t do the same thing twice. Try to fail in interesting ways. Ask yourself: what forms and fictions comprise the realism our culture understands? Don’t rescript yesterday. Always write what you want to read, not what you think others do. Don’t compromise. Realize if you’ve got an answer, chances are you’re not a writer. Realize, along with John Cage, that you shouldn’t be frightened of new ideas; it’s the old ones that should scare you. Realize, along with T. S. Eliot, that only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. Reach out and support other writers. Realize you write because you don’t know what you think until you do, and then you know it even less. Understand this writing thing isn’t a competition; all of us can win all the time. Think of yourself as part of an oceanic conversation about life and narrative that extends across time and space, and ask yourself where your voice fits in, how you can help other voices be heard. And if you plan to write for fame or fortune, do something else immediately. Seriously.

As I explore my own presentation of new work, to be published in a transmedia form, I find his thoughts useful.  Instead of narraticule, I consider the building blocks to be stanzaic. I too want to avoid linear readings, preferring a multi-verse in which the reader chooses his or her own path.  I want to express the process of this new work.


For the interview with Lance Olsen: http://www.raintaxi.com/o-for-a-muse-of-fire-an-interview-with-lance-olsen/

For notes about multiverse stanzas in transmedia: http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-multiverse-stanzas-in-transmedia.html

Casting More Than One Shadow

Mary Oliver has described poetry as writing that casts more than one shadow.  By this phrase, she refers to the way that poems can yield more than one meaning. Recently, I found a corollary regarding short stories by Ricardo Piglia.

A short story [cuento] always tell two stories [historias].  In the classic short story, there is a visible story that has another secret story embedded inside of it. At the end, the secret story comes to the surface, producing an effect of surprise.  The two stories often operate with two different "systems of casuality."  The key elements function for both the presenting and the secret story.  The modern short story, according to Piglia, "abandons the surprise ending and the closed structure; it works the tension between the two stories without ever resolving it, telling "two stories as if they were one."  

Piglia, Ricardo.  "Theses on the Short Story."  New Left Review 70. 2011.  https://newleftreview.org/II/70/ricardo-piglia-theses-on-the-short-story

Loose Narratives: The Art of ParkeHarrison

Today, I had the opportunity to listen to the two artists talk about their process. Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison collaborate to create haunting and magical realist images. Their work is narrative, and they explore the connections between humans, nature, and technology. Along with Bob's focus is on photography and performance art, Shana brings her experience with choreography and painting.  See this link to view images: http://parkeharrison.com/artistInfo/parkehar/biblio/2.pdf?1968 and https://fstoppers.com/portraits/amazing-surreal-work-robert-shana-parkeharrison-4009

As a writer, I was curious about how they created such deep narratives. Their approach is theatrical, and each image is like a still from a movie. Each series begins with a long period of research and planning. They bring props. They choreograph. They manipulate the photograph to add or subtract color, to blur or obscure elements, and highlight certain things.  This is a slow and painstaking process. Each year, they create about eleven individual works.
 reclamation from Catherine Edelman Gallery on Vimeo.

The protagonist, "Everyman," expresses valiant effort and ineffectual attempts to address environmental damage.  The character often has his back to the viewer, and in this way, brings the viewer toward the world inside the frame. There are many odd elements: a man wears a suit to do things nobody would wear a suit to do. He holds clouds on a string, or he sprouts seedlings from his body. There are machines or laboratory equipment used in curious ways. Veins become roots, and plants are spindly and reaching. Cones are prevalent as are clouds. He attempts to mend the crack in the landscape by stitching with an oversize needle. The narratives strongly connect to the body, and they are piercing.  There is foreboding and magic. All this--such rich narrative--exists in image, object, body, atmosphere.

More:
https://vimeo.com/15810566
Artist Talk with Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison (2010) Introduction from Catherine Edelman Gallery on Vimeo.


.

Experimental Histories & The New Narrative

Recently, I've been interested in using experimental forms of story within my creative work. Of course, this is not new in the field of literature (poetry, fiction, drama, or memoir), and it also isn't new in the field of history. Historians grapple with narrative, and they search for ways to convey several, even conflicting, perspectives. In historiography, the writing of history, some use experimental methods to provide a more complete story. In an article about designing a college course in experimental history, Martha Hodes wrote "complexity is a crucial component of sound historical analysis." It's also a crucial component of story-telling.

History archives offer rich resources for details, characters, settings, and plots; the story I've been working on recently mines historic archives to create a world that explores the effect of the past on contemporary life.

Stephen Muecke. "Experimental history implies a gap between what has made sense in the past, and what no longer makes sense, whether it is past events or new ones demanding to be gathered into the fold of meaning."  It used to be that people believed "objectivity" could be achieved. But now, no longer can readers accept "one story" that may reflect the dominant group in power. There is more than one gaze: male, female, and in between. There are many cultures on any point on a map, and many political perspectives. There are many species. There are class differences. Multiple subjectivities bring all of us closer to "the truth." The experimental form allows for more points of view and more connections.  

Of course, the historical record should reflect the materials in the archives and empiric evidence. Initially the juxtaposition of the word experimental with the word history may seem problematic, but certainly it is a more sensible approach.  Experimental does not need to mean fictitious. It refers to the process and structure of the narrative. Perhaps it might bring together old sound recordings with artifacts, images of now extinct species (for it is not only humans who have cultures), and old documents. Perhaps it might overlay maps and narratives and crop reports to reflect changes over time. The writer of fiction and poetry often embraces juxtapositions, a variety of voices, and other surprises. In the final form, the story must be believable.

What does experimental history look like?  Merle Patchett kept a blog, Experimental Geography in Practice: exploring correspondences between geographic research and experimental and artistic practices.  She wrote:

Through my PhD research I developed an experimental historiography that drew creative resource from the purposeful assemblage and rehabilitation of diffuse historical fragments to form unorthodox archives. My adoption of a form of historical ‘assemblage method’ (Law 2004) is to be read as a challenge the historian’s fidelity to conventional empirical and archival evidence, in that I attempted to make the materials I assembled count precisely by not forcing them to fit within a pre-determined narrative, recognising instead that materials themselves can create knowledge, or at least encourage open and imaginative thought. 

In this way I sought to craft a form of historiography that is alive to the ultimate alterity of past lives (human or otherwise), events, and places, recognising that what remains of them is always going to partial, provisional, incomplete and therefore what is being presented is always already, to invoke Derrida, “sous rature” – under erasure. 

I am now attempting to develop my form of experimental historiography into a form of curatorial presentation.

The phrase "the ultimate alterity of past lives" suggests that each historic personage holds a degree of complexity.  One version or one interpretation can be discarded over another version or interpretation. This scholar of geography and creative artist brought together sound recordings, old photographs, and excerpts of documents into beautiful and haunting presentations that allowed her to interrogate the cultural bias and assumptions of past explorers. These disparate elements, when placed in close proximity, express much more than a single-threaded narrative. They serve as collaborating evidence, and even more, the reader/viewer grasps possibility, tension, and meaning in the gaps.

Narrative has also a potential for healing. For awhile, the term "cultural competency" was used in human service organizations as they attempted to understand and provide services to diverse populations. A better term is now arisen: cultural humility. We should not presume that we can know enough about a person, a culture, or a landscape to make blanket statements. Deep listening helps a writer build believable characters and good poems. In poetry, a spare style will evoke multiple meanings.  It's best to avoid assumptions, and to listen to the gaps and silences.

Creativity can be a transformative force that gives breath and sustenance to people who are suffering. Artistic and activist memory work recognizes the effects of past atrocity on landscapes and their new inhabitants.  Mapping Spectral Traces is a group of scholars, writers, artists, and activists who attempt to address trauma in communities. The Creativity and Madness conference in Sante Fe, intended for mental health professionals, investigates the psychology of art and artists. Madness is analyzed in relationship to creativity.

Lewis Mahl Medrona, MD, PhD, spoke about the power of story-telling and history in the practice of narrative medicine. This practice can be surprising. He related a case study, the mental health treatment of a Native American man who suffered from alcoholism, diabetes, and post-traumatic stress from childhood.  Medrona's brilliant intervention involved a ceremony giving the man a new childhood. The line doesn't necessarily have to be drawn between fiction and nonfiction. What he offered this man was a new interpretation of his life, and new possibility. Interpretations of a real event demonstrates vastly different perspectives among eye-witnesses; different possibilities evoke different outcomes.

In "A Long Note on New Narrative" by Robert Glück, the author identifies and defines a method of literary practice termed New Narrative:

We were thinking about autobiography; by autobiography we meant daydreams, night dreams, the act of writing, the relationship to the reader, the meeting of flesh and culture, the self as collaboration, the self as disintegration, the gaps, inconsistencies and distortions, the enjambments of power, family, history and language.

This writing acknowledges multi-faceted life. If we lack imagination, we lack life's necessary tools. New narrative is conscious of meta-data, similar to other experimental forms. Many writers and poets employ these methods to present a more complex and bigger story. Experimental history, or literature, or music offers us new perspectives and new patterns. This dynamic and creative field brings new gifts.

Night Train / Red Dust

About the project:

Night Train/ Red Dust began as a quest for my grandparents' stories. I grew up on the Vermilion Trail, also known as Highway 4, the road that runs through the Lake Superior National Forest, through the community of Island Lake, and to the Iron Range.  I learned this road was the original route to Lake Vermilion, and it was used since 1000 AD (by the Woodland Indian tribes whose burial mounds are found near Lake Esquagama). There is evidence of early mining among the Woodland Indians. In 1856, gold prospectors came to Lake Vermilion. The gold was there, but too difficult to extract from the quartz. Then iron ore was discovered. Around the small town of Biwabik (population 1500), the town where I went to elementary and high school, ten iron ore mines were working by the early 1900s and trains ran the length and breadth of the region.