Terminal

For three days, on April 3-5 of this year, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC hosted an exhibition, readings, and talks on electronic literature. Electronic literature, according to the Library of Congress website, is something different than traditional print literature:

More than a computer screen and different from an ebook or a digitized text. It is hypertext narrative, literary games, interactive fiction, kinetic poetry. Not just a new way to display the written word, electronic literature exploits the digital world’s capacity for multiplicity and interactivity to create new forms of literary expression that can’t be fully replicated in print. Like all literature, it explores the human condition—but as “born digital” content it is now mediated by underlying computer code, often combining the written word with sound, images, animation, and video.

The event, “Electronic Literature & Its Emerging Forms,” created by guest curators Dene Grigar and Kathi Inman Berens, was a milestone for the electronic literature community, and a philosophical leap forward for the Library of Congress. Sure, the LOC has all of the 400 million tweets sent by Americans each day, so they’re not hurting for new media, but judging by the reactions of librarians at the event, electronic literature is alternately something they had originated themselves, or a first glimpse at a brave new world unimagined by Thomas Jefferson.

Either way, electronic literature is here to stay. Over the three days of the event, approximately seven hundred people wandered, nudged, and jostled their way through the Whittall Pavilion. They played, studied, and explored “twenty-seven works of electronic literature by American authors, relevant printed works from the Library of Congress collections, readings by select authors featured in the exhibit, and hands-on creation stations.” They watched elit authors do live performances of their work. They saw an exhibit of rare books, heard a keynote address, and listened in on a panel discussion about electronic literature. In the event’s most retro moment, young children discovering a manual typewriter for the first time were puzzled by the unresponsiveness of the keys. Why don’t they work? they asked, and upon being told to push them harder, learned that typing is still possible without a computer. At the end of it all, the question in the air wasn’t “What is electronic literature” but “Where can we find more?”

The answer is everywhere. Not just in Facebook posts (where people use multimedia all the time to tell their stories). Not just at the Webby awards, where a work of electronic literature won in the Net Art category in 2011, and another was an honoree this year. And not just in museums, galleries, festivals, online journals, and college classrooms around the world, where elit is no longer an emerging form, but a full-blown phenomena.

But for the purists, there are a number of databases on the web where you can familiarize yourself with the form. One is the Electronic Literature Organization’s and there’s the database for Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP).

To learn more about the event at the Library of Congress, go here.

(1) Are there any prerequisites to being a digital writer?

 To be a digital writer, it’s probably best if you like to write, or at least not hate it.  Then, if you can pull as many muses into your corner as you can, that might help: history, music, dance, astronomy, and art….

Patience is a virtue with digital writers, as you will have to explain what you do to a great many people who have never heard of it….

Having a thick skin and (again) more patience will help protect you from the slings and arrows of outrageous critics.  Critics love to criticize, and when it is something new and without precedent, they will laugh and grind it under their heels….

(2) Do I need to take a class in digital writing to be a digital writer?

Most of the digital writers working today teach courses they never took when they first started out.  A truism of the avant-garde: there are no teachers in your field, so you have to teach yourself, so you can become a teacher.

(3) Is it true that digital stories were on the web back in prehistoric times, when humans lived in caves?

This is totally true. Plato writes about it in his “Allegory of the Cave.”  Caves were a perfect place for projecting digital works, and cave dwellers were among the first to recognize this (before them, it was nomadic tribes, who used deer hide tents).

The web back then was less sophisticated than it is now–being constructed of stone, goat’s intestines, elk horns, and camel hair–but its reach was global, with fewer system outages and faster download times.

In the Middle Ages, this technology was lost, and only recently reconfigured through electronics.

(4) Are digital writers flesh and blood people, or are they virtual, like their stories.

It depends where you meet them.  If you meet them online, they are virtual, and their primary substance is electrons and code…

If you meet them in the flesh, their virtuality plays second fiddle to the fact that, at any moment, they could spill coffee all over your favorite carpet.

(5) Is it easy to be a digital writer?

 If answers were songs, try this (sung to the tune of “Yesterday,” by the Beatles):

Digital

All it takes is
lots of time

and what you make

may be fine
if going digital

is on your mind.

(And so on, with feeling…)

(6) Does it cost a lot of money to be a digital writer?

After you have made the initial investment in a good computer, some software, a sound recording device, and whatever other tools you need to make multimedia works of literature, the overhead is remarkable low.  It would be best (to build branding and reader loyalty) to have your own website, so add about $10 a year for the registration of a domain name.  Then add another $10 a month for server costs (provided you don’t go viral, in which case you’ll need a bit more than that).  Finally, if you use them, there’s the periodic cost for royalty-free images or audio files purchased online–most of the code you’ll need will be free–so tack on another $200 a year.  At these rates, your total for a year of publishing digital literature is approximately $330, which is cheap compared to most other businesses.

Since you won’t make much (or any) income, it’s money down the drain, but don’t worry: you can list it as a business expense on your income tax (I’d love to hear your conversation with the IRS agent).

(7) Can I make any money being a digital writer?

Let’s do the math:

Expenses a year (see #6 above):            $330
Income publications:                                 $0
Income readings:                                      $0
Income exhibitions:                                   $0
Work sold:                                                $0
––––––
TOTAL:                                                  -$330

Your talent and self-satisfaction? Priceless.

(8) Is there a website where I can find links to digital literature, and learn more about new media?

Do a Google search on “Electronic Literature” or “E-Lit” or “Hypermedia” or “Digital Literature,” and here are some links (a very few of many!):

Atticus Review: http://atticusreview.org/

Born Magazine: http://www.bornmagazine.com

Counterpath Press: http://counterpathpress.org

Dreaming Methods: http://www.DreamingMethods.com

Drunken Boat: http://www.DrunkenBoat.com

Electronic Literature Directory: http://directory.eliterature.org/

Electronic Poetry Center: http://epc.buffalo.edu/e-poetry/

Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice: http://elmcip.net/

FILE (Electronic Language International Festival): http://www.file.org

Grand Text Auto: http://www.grandtextauto.org/

Hyperrhiz: http://www.hyperrhiz.net

I ♥ E-Poetry: http://leonardoflores.net/

netpoetic.com: http://www.netpoetic.com/

New River Journal: http://www.TheNewRiver.us

nt2: http://www.labo-nt2.uqam.ca/

Rhizome.org: http://www.rhizome.org

SpringGun Press: http://www.springgunpress.com/

Turbulence.org: http://www.turbulence.org

Unlikely Stories: http://www.unlikelystories.org/

Vispo: http://www.vispo.com

Word Circuits: http://www.wordcircuits.com/index.html

WRT: Writer Response Theory: http://www.writerresponsetheory.org/wordpress/

And the list goes on…

(9) Are digital writers happy people?

You can’t get much happier than a digital writer.  Because they practice in an emerging form, they have nothing to lose.  This makes them reckless, and beyond sadness.

(10) If I wanted to be a digital writer, how would I begin?

Read the FAQs above. If you have any questions, make up your answers.