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....

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?

Why Kickstart It?

Geonarrative Kickstarter Campaign


1.  One lovely thing about geocaching and by extension Geonarrative is the sense of community that's engendered.  When one finds a cache, one signs a log, takes a little treasure, leaves a little treasure for the next seeker. 

2.  When I was younger, I used to leave little notes --story scraps, messages to the future -- tucked into the pages of library books for the next reader to find.  Hello, unknown reader, I would scribble on an index card.  Don't you love page 47?   

3.  With a geonarrative, you have the chance to add to the reading experience, interact with other readers.  You can leave them a token, leave them a note.  This text has wide margins in which you can write, and you will know that many others will read your marginalia.

4.  Built into the Kickstarter campaign is the notion the impulse to build community -- to thread communities with stories, to lace together readers and writers and region.

5.  Also built into the Kickstarter campaign is the possibility for real author-reader interaction -- the names of participants built into narratives, sometimes narratives tailored to the participant, the line between character and reader smudged.  

6.  Geonarratives work to interrogate the gap between the space we inhabit and the story-space we explore.  This Kickstarter campaign allows for this to happen in perhaps a very direct manner.

7.  Because everything we write and read should be all or nothing, shouldn't it?  Let's go all in for each other just this once, okay?

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.