Saturday, November 24, 2012

Geonarrative and Craft

One thing that interests me about Geonarrative (or should that be geonarrative, or GeoNarrative?  probably all lower-case, geonarrative) is the way it points directly towards the tension between form and content.  As I envision it -- because this is all still a little hypothetical -- not every story would make a good geonarrative.
What aesthetic challenges will I give myself as a writer?  To these things I will attend:

1.)  The story has to lend itself to fragmentation.  The first geonarrative I've written but not yet installed can be read in any order, because I wanted it to be more accessible (though accessibility is another blog-post), and I wanted it to be perhaps extendable -- if someone on the Kickstarter campaign (still running until December 20th, 2012) gets involved at a high enough level, I could conceivably be traveling to them and installing a piece of the story pretty far afield from the other pieces.

1A.)  On the other hand, a localized, ordered reading experience seems to me the more fulfilling one.  Something that more carefully orchestrates the progression of language through landscape.

2.)  Language through landscape.  And language *in* landscape.  One thing I've crafted for the first piece is a kind of visual rhyme -- that the story  fragment will somehow echo or resonate with the landscape that surrounds the reader as she reads for the first time.  Not every story can be installed as a geonarrative if every story piece needs the urgency of the geographical rhyme.

3.)  There is something about the form -- the way one needs to seek out what is hidden, the one one needs to physically journey to assemble the story -- that suggests certain thematics.  Perhaps too pointedly.  The challenge would be to find subtler correspondences between form and content, but to make sure that the narrative vibrates with those correspondences.

What other issues of craft or aesthetics do you think should be considered?

2 comments:

  1. Hmm, perhaps you could somehow incorporate the senses of sight, sound, feel, smell and taste outside of the written words at the story locations?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Not sure how that would be done, but I'm interested! Example?

    ReplyDelete