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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

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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.

Electronic literature (or digital literature, as it is sometimes called) is difficult to define. It is described by Kathi Inman Berens and Dene Grigar, co-curators of a recent exhibition of electronic literature at MLA 2013 in Boston, as “literary works involving various forms and combinations of digital media, such as video, animation, sound, virtual environments, and multimedia installations, for desktop computers, mobile devices, and live performance.” This definition seems a concise and useful one,

and among the best of the many circulating online and in conferences, festivals, galleries, and classrooms around the world.

One result of its slippery nature is that electronic literature, when it is recognized as such, is often misunderstood. So here are

Ten (Or More) Misconceptions About Electronic Literature

that you might

hear while out and about:

(1) Digital literature is dead.

I was at the eNarrative5 Conference at MIT in 2003, and a Canadian critic claimed to a packed conference room that electronic literature was dead. He said it like the corpse was

lying at his feet, and if we only looked down, we would see it.

He was wrong, of course. But even today, the claim still surfaces despite new generations of digital writers, the increasing number of online (and offline) venues for digital literature, demands for digital writers and theoreticians in colleges and universities, and international media notices.

So is electronic literature dead? If so, then the world missed its funeral.

(2) Electronic literature may not be dead, but

what’s the difference if no one reads it?

Chances are, if you went to your local pub, or

a gallery opening, or a church social, and asked how many people read digital literature, the answer would be few, or none. Most would not even know what digital

literature is.

But if you are wondering who reads digital literature, maybe the answer is found in the virtual world, not your neighbor’s backyard. Loosely speaking, if you are on Facebook, you are reading a form of electronic literature every day. People are sharing their stories with images, video, text, and audio. They are using multimedia to tell their tales. This is digital literature, of a sort, and most of us are reading it.

A related question is, What about the digital writers, not the ones who are solely on Facebook, but the ones who have higher pretensions for the world of online electronic literature? How do these web-based writers compare in terms of readership to the average writer in traditional print format?

Let’s say you are a digital writer on the web (which means you might actually write for the web, or your work appears in another medium but is available on the web). Let’s say you get twenty visitors a day—that’s visitors, not hits. Let’s

remove the visitors who made it to your website by mistake, and the ones who took one look and fled in horror (or confusion), and the ones who read a bit and didn’t like it. Then let’s get rid of the multiple visits from a single reader—we’ll only count him or her once.

That leaves, say, five readers a day, which equates to 1,825 readers a year. I personally know a dozen traditional print writers who would kill for that kind of readership.

So is anyone reading digital literature? Don’t ask at the nearest art opening; check Facebook or the number of your web visitors.

(3) Digital literature is all about hypertext, and nothing else.

Anyone who knows digital literature knows that—with new developments in HTML5, more sophisticated web browsers, interactive video, and enhanced technologies for new media installations and performances—digital literature now finds outlets in many related forms, and in diverse venues.

To say digital literature finds its voice

just in hypertext is like scanning your radio and expecting to hear the same station every time. Why would you want to?

(4) If you read digital literature, you are at a

higher risk for strokes, brain tumors, car accidents, or insomnia.

Well, insomnia, maybe. Once you start to read it, you can’t stop.

(5) If you write digital literature, you are at a higher risk for strokes, brain tumors, car accidents, or insomnia.

This is undoubtedly true. Most writers, in any form, are driven. Unfortunately, digital writers are no

different—they are doing the driving, and it’s at breakneck speeds on roads that are off the map.

(6) The next generation(s) of digital writers, and readers, are few or non-existent.

Let’s try a syllogism:

Antoine Anyone is on Facebook;

All users on Facebook use text, images, audio, or

video in their posts;

Therefore, Antoine Anyone reads, or writes, with multimedia.

(7) You can take a book to the beach, but what about digital literature?

Rowling, Collins, Robbins, King, L’Amour… Add sand, surf, a Kindle, and a beach chair, and you’re at home with approximately two billion other people who have read these authors.

Mix in an iPhone or Droid, and soon, if not already, you’ve got all the digital literature you need, for free.

(8) But I like the feel of turning pages in a book. How can digital literature beat that?

Imagine a book that feels like a book, looks like a book, and has pages that turn like a book. But all the pages are browser-enabled, online, and infinitely refillable with any content you want.

This technology is already here.

(9) Digital Literature is a

flash in the pan.

Flintlock muskets used

to have small pans to hold charges of gunpowder. A “flash in the pan” was when, upon firing the musket, the gunpowder flared up without firing a bullet.

The metaphor endures today, even though the technology does not. Which is to say, bullets are still fired, but from different guns, and for a digital purpose.

(10) Digital Literature is the death of the book.

The book isn’t dead—books will always be around. Now, they must share the stage with other ways

of reading a poem or a story.

(11) Add your misconception here…