Secret Origins, Part One

Each Spring, the College of Arts and Sciences holds a Colloquium on a different topic -- one year it was Thinking about Evolution, one year it was Thinking About America.  And for every Colloquium, creative writing faculty and students get together and run a lightning-round reading, ten or eleven readers in about fifty minutes. I like writing something new for each topic.  I work well with formal constraints, and deadlines.  If you are an editor and want to get me to write something for you, please issue the challenge of a title and a word count and a deadline.  And the promise of payment.  ;)

In 2012, the topic was "Thinking About Space."  I started writing at first in a typical vein for me, pop culture mashups, blenderized prose.  Here is my first start:

Will Robinson is an old man on an asteroid wearing a crinkly spacesuit and sitting in a recliner watching the stars.  Behind him The Robot is singing in his deep baritone while he refines fuel out of asteroid rocks.  When I say that Will Robinson is an old man I mean that he has outlived his parents and Don and Judy and Penny and Gleep the space monkey.   It is hard to know if he has outlived Dr. Smith since he disappeared in the Unfortunate Incident with the Space-Time Continuum Box. Sometimes a TARDIS wobbles by overhead.  Sometimes the sky is filled with TARDISII, though they are all the same TARDIS.  Sometimes thinking about time is thinking about space. 

I was that kid obsessed with Lost in Space, in love with my fuzzy orange and black velour shirt because it made me feel like I was one of the Robinsons.  For a while, I toyed with something essayish:

My very favorite show when I was a boy was Lost in Space.  I would watch it wearing my favorite orange and black striped velour shirt.  The Space Family Robinson were marooned again and again, planet after planet.  Each time they set up gardens, mined ore, repaired their vessel, made a little identical home of each new space.  

Did I mention how much I loved that shirt?   But all of this seemed kind of easy, expected -- I was getting a little tired of my slipstreamy pomo riffery, and the obviousness of the Lost in Space essay.  I started thinking about story, about space, about the ways that narrative was almost always in temporal motion, but fixed in space (book, computer screen, Kindle, etc.).  I jotted down these notes:

A spot on a map is a marker of space, a fixed point, unwavering.  Time is like the silk scarves knotted together which we pull from the empty sleeve of space. A page is a space, and sentences are the silk scarves that we pull through it.

That was a starting point, a way for me to start thinking about a new way to tell stories.  What if space was as central to the narrative as time?  What would that look like?

That would look like Secret Origins, Part Two....

Son of Geonarrative

Where the heck is my Geonarrative?, I hear you thinking.  Indeed!, we here at Geonarrative Headquarters exclaim!  Also, fasten your seatbelts!  Geonarrative ahoy.

Also, note to self, do not be disingenuous on official Geonarrative Project Blog.  So:

During a particularly dysthymic winter, I struggled with a particular writing problem.  The first drafts of the first story I had in mind had to do with several characters in a particularly adult, post-divorce love triangle.  There was a specifically sexual dynamic to the triangle, and some of it as written was a little bit explicit.  

Normally, I wouldn't think twice about publishing a story with explicit sexual scenes.  I'd send it to a literary magazine, knowing that magazine would have an adult audience well-versed in reading literary fiction that might need to explore particularly sexual relationships on the page.

But one of the Kickstarter backers asked me if she could take her daughter on a geocache hunt for the story, and I realized immediately that I was making a narrative that anyone with a GPS device could and would access.  My sense of audience shifted rather radically.

And once I started writing for an all-ages, open-access audience, the content changed, and once the content started to move around, my conception of the narrative as a whole shifted around.  And then I started thinking about teh ways that Geonarrative as a medium could and should shape the narrative, and the story changed again.

So.  It's warm again.  My dysthymia seems to have abated.  There's a new narrative almost done.  Tomorrow, I'll give a sneak preview to the backers of one of the pieces I'll be installing.  And in the next week or two, with a camera-person by my side, I'll record the installation of the first piece, and the Zombie-Proof Thank You.  Welcome back.  Geonarrative is greenlit once again.

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.

What is Geonarrative?

Geonarrative is a new way to put stories out into the world, an experiment in "publishing" that also pokes and tugs at form and the reading experience.  It combines the art of storytelling with geocaching technology.

Geocaching is a supercool high-tech treasure hunt.  Geocachers download a geocaching app to their electronic device, which gives them a longitude and a latitude for a hidden cache, plus clues to locate that cache.  Caches can be anything -- boxes, tubes, other weather-proofed containers that hold surprises and logs, so that searchers can record their discovery.  

I plan to write stories or essays that are broken apart and hidden and can be discovered by anyone who's interested in geocaching.  The first piece I plan to install will be a story in 7 self-contained fragments, so that they can be read in any order.  I'll install them in a walkable distance from each other around the LeClaire historic district in Edwardsville, IL.  Once all the fragments are read, a larger narrative will emerge.