Why is Geonarrative?, Part One

1.)  It's fun.

2.)  A story read in a book or on a screen is like a long silk scarf pulled through a knothole.  A story read in Geonarrative is a dance of scarves.  A traditional text unfurls in time.  A Geonarrative unfurls in time AND space.

3.)  Degrees of active engagement.  A story read in a book asks you to translate marks on page/screen into words into language into image into story blooming in mind.  A Geonarrative asks you to locate those words (and translate them into language into image into story in bloom) and not only read them, but read them in context, read the surroundings, read the text and the surroundings together, and read your self in those surroundings reading those words.

4.)  A page/screen story is a single blossom.  A Geonarrative is a field of flowers.

5.)  Leaves of grass.

6.)  Stories on page/screen render technology invisible (to some degree, to the degree one enters a fictional dream, that is to say, how much language to image to story makes one forget the spine of the book the press that put letters on the page the pixels the waves the illumination (to the degree of realism, to the degree to which even experimental fictions do not resist the tidal pull of narrative)).  Geonarratives render your relationship with technology quite visible.

7.)  Geonarratives make landscape visible.

8.)  A page/screen story is to some degree patriarchal.  A Geonarrative wants to interrogate the patriarchy.

9.)  A Geonarrative (assuming caches with logs, with prizes, with something you take and something you leave) reminds you of a community of readers.

10.)  Your legs move.  Your heart pushes blood.  You take in air.  Your legs and heart and lungs are part of the reading of this Geonarrative.

11.)  Gotta catch'em all.

12.)  Geonarrative reminds us that there are hidden narratives all around us, in the faint scar of abandoned railroad tracks, in the cracked sidewalk, in the park and the neighborhood and forest and rock.  The narratives we impose upon ourselves, and the landscape, and each other.  Story fizzes and sparks about us.

13.)

14.)  It's kind of fun.