Creative Writing Commons^™

(Fun)Ction: Developing Games From A Narrative Standpoint, Julian Barocas

English and Creative Writing Summer Fellows

My goal with this project has been to deepen my understanding of why people play games, how to make games narratively compelling, and what technical methods are effective in play. This has allowed me to investigate both the technical, scholarly assessments of board game dynamics while also exploring their real-world applications, successes, and weaknesses. Building on my research, my project has culminated in a full prototype of an original board game that has both narrative structure and an engaging gameplay structure. I have also produced a reflection paper on the experience and an annotated bibliography of my research texts and …

(Fun)Ction: Developing Games From A Narrative Standpoint, Julian Barocas

English and Creative Writing Presentations

My goal with this project has been to deepen my understanding of why people play games, how to make games narratively compelling, and what technical methods are effective in play. This has allowed me to investigate both the technical, scholarly assessments of board game dynamics while also exploring their real-world applications, successes, and weaknesses. Building on my research, my project has culminated in a full prototype of an original board game that has both narrative structure and an engaging gameplay structure. I have also produced a reflection paper on the experience and an annotated bibliography of my research texts and …

We Are Also Home, Mustafa Abubaker

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

In the opening scenes of “We Are Also Home,” the novel’s symbolic character Farishtay Mahdi allows a man by the name of Syed Janmohamed into her house. He pays her for sex and counseling. She does not love him. Instead, she loves what he gives her. Syed is not only after Farishtay for sex. He is also driven mad by the commanality found in both Farishtay and his daughter: invisibility. He has heard of Farishtay’s hushed-up condition through the grapevine. His performance, initially informed by societal norms, is almost instantly seen for what it really is by Farishtay. Irony plays …

Breathe The Machine, Matt S. Roberts, Terri Witek, Teresa Carmody, Dengke Chen

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Breathe the Machine

interspecies morph edition featuring a video conference and solo or synched blow-ins

Teresa Carmody Dengke Chen Matt Roberts Terri Witek

The FaaS were future-oriented. Every day, they contemplated the question: what kind of ancestor will you be?

A collaborative group composed of a prose writer, new media artist, 3-D animator, and poet enter your personal computers and suggest that in this particularly viral moment, individual breaths + machines may be the closest we get to community touch. An animated video conference offers the project's conceptual framework, including questions about invasive species and intimacy in this new world …

Landscapes Of Light And Text And Layer: A Projection Poetry Performance, Jason Nelson Dr.

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

A digital poetry performance in seven locations. This online performance mixes pre-recorded video of projection poetry in seven places/landscapes around SE Queensland, Australia with a live digital poetry reading.

The theme of this performance is landscapes of change, exploring places in SE Queensland impacted by bushfires, deviated by floods, altered by drought, damaged by weapon testing, trees thousands of years old, home of non-human creatures and the revealed geology that roads carve.

Using pico/portable projectors, digital poet Jason Nelson, will add a poetic light-based skin to these landscapes, recording the results, replaying them during the performance. As the projection videos …

The Tenders: Embrasures In The Fort’S Collapse, Judd Morrissey, Abraham Avnisan, Mark Jeffery

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

The Tenders: Embrasures in the Fort's collapse (zoom edition) is an simultaneous multi-channel mixed reality performance that engages with structures of the fort and the home, combining remote live performance and augmented reality poetics with 3d scans of the site of Fort Dearborn, an early American garrison out of which the city of Chicago was incorporated. Juxtaposing excavations of urban monuments with scans of the bedazzled home of self-taught artist, Loy Bowlin, who embodied the persona of "the original rhinestone cowboy", The Tenders seeks to invert and queer colonial narratives lodged deep within the American imaginary.

To Drown Or Not To Drown: Self Discovery Through The Lens Of Formalist Theory, Sierra Correia

Capstone Research Projects

The purpose of this project was to discover whether or not using creative nonfiction writing as a strategy in narrative therapy can aid in the process of self-discovery, self-awareness, and self-reflection. To begin, I selected creative nonfiction pieces for analysis: Underwater Blue, Forever Blue, and The Knowing, all of which come from a portfolio completed in Fall 2019 and contain traumatic subject matter. Literary formalist criticism, the Narrative Process Model, and narrative themes and the concept of self were the chosen methods of analysis. I found commonalities in writers' craft tools as well as in themes and self in all …

Tweet Your Shared Adventure: An (Un)Continuous E-Lit Jam, Sarah Whitcomb Laiola

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

ABOUT:

For this virtual engagement session of ELOrlando, participants will create and play a collaborative work of e-lit on Twitter, modeled after Choose Your Own Adventure-style hypertext fiction. This e-lit jam will run the course of the conference, from Thursday July 16-July 19, on the hashtag #TYSA (T[weet] Y[our] S[hared] A[dventure]). All Twitter users in the ELO community are invited to join.

HOW THIS JAM WILL JAM:

On the first day of the conference, the session’s organizer (Sarah Whitcomb Laiola, @DrSarathena192 on both Twitter and Discord) will tweet out on #ELOrlando and #TYSA the beginning of an adventure story. …

Square American Apple Pie, Karen Zheng

I2

No abstract provided.

Stop Fighting The Coronavirus, Pranay Sinha

Journal of Wellness

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the refrain of war has echoed across the world. It has tainted the way we speak about the pandemic and shaped the way we think about it. Metaphors can direct thought and action. This essay reflects on the ways in which the metaphor of war is disrupting the way we relate to the pandemic, to our society, and to each other and concludes with an alternative metaphor.

Lulling Waters: A Poetry Reading For Real-Time Music Generation Through Emotion Mapping, Ashley Muniz, Toshihisa Tsuruoka

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Through a poetic narrative, “Lulling Waters” tells the story of a whale overcoming the loss of his mother, who passed away from ingesting plastic, as he attempts to escape from the polluted oceanic world. The live performance of this poem utilizes a software system called Soundwriter, which was developed with the goal of enriching the oral storytelling experience through music. This video demonstrates how Soundwriter’s real-time hybrid system was able to analyze “Lulling Waters” through its lexical and auditory features. Emotionally salient words were given ratings based on arousal, valence, and dominance while the emotionally charged prosodic features of the …

Glitch Reading: [Re]Mediation And The Protocols Of Reading, Jacob Reber

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

In this paper, I outline a methodology for reading poetic works that operate between media environments, noting the subtle shifts and failures that mark the material changes. The space between mediums and processes of remediation produce residue from the various material substrates and protocols of reading that adhere to works moving through networks. The attention to the residue can be understood as glitches, which proliferate the possibilities of reading and reveal the construction of imbricated reading environments. This is a practice I want to consider through the framework of glitch reading. Drawing on Rosa Menkman's theorization of glitches and Tan …

Digital Orihon (デジタル折り本): The (Un)Continuous Shape Of The Novel., David T.H. Wright

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

In ‘The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-first Century Literature’, Jessica Pressman (2009) proposes that the aesthetic of ‘bookishness’ is as old as the book form. The Tale of Genji (源氏物語) by Murasaki Shikibu is often considered the world’s first modern novel. The text is presented as an ‘orihon’ (折本): a ‘long strip of paper that is pleated into a stack, with a cover pasted at each end of the stack’ (Atwood, 10). ‘Orihon’ is a combination of the Japanese word for ‘fold’ (折) and ‘book’ or ‘source’ (本). The orihon is often also referred to as an ‘accordion’ book.

Digital …

Twine And The Challenge To Reading, Stuart Moulthrop

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

The article considers the Twine story-game platform in relation to important critiques of earlier forms of electronic literature (specifically hypertext) from which it descends. Arguments for the significance of Twine are made based on aesthetic approaches (the fusion of literature and game culture) and the refinement of writing itself.

Play this paper in Twine

“Decolonize” E-Literature? On Weeding The E-Lit Garden (A Riposte To Anna Nacher's "Gardening E-Literature"), Kathi Berens

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

This essay, a RiPOSTe to Anna Nacher's forthcoming "Gardening E-Literature" in Electronic Book Review (5 July 2020), asks: Should the e-literature community include third-generation works in collections, syllabi, databases, prizes? A related question: do third-gen makers have a role in “decolonizing” e-literature? Who or what “colonizes” e-lit? E-literature began as a coterie and has become a scholarly field. Using the comparison of a field versus a walled garden, the essay examines critiques of e-literature and variations on field definitions. It ends with two ideas about how to "decolonize" e-literature; about how equity and inclusion work in tandem with decolonization; and …

Autopia And The Truelist: Language Combined In Two Computer-Generated Books, Nick Montfort

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Autopia (Troll Thread, 2016) and The Truelist (Counterpath, 2017) are computer-generated literary books. I reported at ELO 2014 on two of my text-generating “novel machines” (Montfort 2014). The two projects discussed in this paper are about novel-size, but are different sorts of projects. Autopia’s text consists of headline-style sentences made entirely of the singular and plural names of cars. This project manifests not only as a print-on-demand book from a post-digital publisher, but also as a web project and a gallery installation. The Truelist’s 140 pages of verse are available in offset printed book form and also as a …

Non Infinite Stories: How Digital Allow To Create Infinite Reconformations Of A Text?, David Núñez

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Last year I presented at ELO, in Ireland, the Artistic piece "Bastard" a digital fiction that combine a fragmented novel to create 10x149 differents texts and optimized in 4 billions coherent stories with narrative structures. In Orlando we want to explain how the system works, theory and functioning, and invited all the members to produce they personal "infinite" fiction.

Non Infinite Stories is an electronic publishing house that creates a dynamic hyperliterature system to give each reader a unique book by using a digital combinatorial processes, specific narrative rules and optimization of fragmented works in chapters of short narrative blocks, …

Letter To Society, Maria Pomales

Calliope

No abstract provided.

Don’T Stop Swimming, Abbigail Davis

Calliope

No abstract provided.

I Grew Up Reading House On Mango Street, Catalina Londono

Calliope

No abstract provided.

Monsters Of Wellington Forest, Lauren Pauley

Calliope

No abstract provided.

Heartline, Alexandra Persad

Calliope

No abstract provided.

Tempest, Macy Kile

Calliope

No abstract provided.

Mom’S Late-Night Calls, Cameron Ferguson

Calliope

No abstract provided.

Grey, Melissa Reynolds

Calliope

No abstract provided.

Holdfast, Michael Dibacco

Calliope

No abstract provided.

Holler And Heaven: In Response To George Ella Lyon’S “Where I’M From”, Isabella Tennant

Calliope

No abstract provided.

Sofrito, Maria Pomales

Calliope

No abstract provided.

Jesus Wasn’T White, Maria Pomales

Calliope

No abstract provided.

Almas Gemalas, Maria Pomales

Calliope

No abstract provided.