Quick tour to the land of digital literature

At the Symposium on Manitoba Writing held in Winnipeg last week, I signed up for a 3-hour “Reading digital literature” workshop, which wasn’t strictly Manitoban but a bonus opportunity because of the presence of Manuel Portela of Portugal, a scholar of the field. (He did a paper at the conference on “typographic notation” in the poetry of Dennis Cooley.) Having signed up, I almost regretted it, because the abstract was full of words like modularity, permutational, kenetic, audiotextuality, materiality, hyperlinks, nodes, and more. But once in the room, I found Mr. Portela not nearly as imposing as his words and his presentation accessible and informative.

In sharing my foray into digital literature via this workshop, I’m afraid I’ll sound very much the tourist, impressed to be sure but still mostly ignorant of the scene. I learned that digital literature is a hybrid form, using simultaneously cinematic and literary techniques. All literature, it’s probably fair to say, deals with perception — invites to new perceptions — but digital literature challenges us in ways that are often unfamiliar and for which we do not yet have an adequate vocabulary. To the question whether the reader is required to be more active in digital literature, Portela said, firmly, “No, readers are always active, but the nature of the seeing and reading is different.” The reader may have to struggle to “conquer” the text (have I read it all? come to the end?).

I was struck by how differently the body is involved in such reading: the hand has to read with the eye, becomes directive in a sense. And none of it happens without code. The www is a publishing space but, as Katherine Hayles notes, “electronic text remains distinct from print in that it literally cannot be accessed until it is performed by properly executed code.”

Well, there was a lot more, but better to simply look for oneself. Two pieces of digital literature that delighted and/or intrigued me this morning were “Fitting the Pattern” (memoir) and “Faith” (poetry). There’s lots more to see/read/hear/embody (whatever the word one uses) at the two volumes of work (60 pieces each) in the Electronic Literature . I’ve bookmarked it and will return to explore some more, so at the very least I sound and act less like a tourist.

(Additional brief notes on the symposium at my author site.)

A splendid idea, wouldn’t you agree?

One evening last week I attended a poetry reading. Four local poets read, but it was Joanne Epp’s evening in particular, as she launched her chapbook, “Crossings,” a lovely collection of 17 poems in two sets: reflections on a train trip and on places in Saskatchewan.

            We stay close to the ground
            so the wind will not blow us away. (from “Wild Strawberries”)

I enjoyed the evening, the poets, and their poems. Joanne reminded us that the poet’s job is attentiveness, “to be captivated… and to captivate others.”

What I want to highlight in this post, however, is that the evening also celebrated Joanne’s four months as writer-in-residence at St. Margaret’s Anglican Church (Winnipeg). I’m familiar with writers-in-residence in city libraries and universities and writers’ colonies/houses, but I’d never heard of a writer-in-residence in a church. (It was a first for St. Margaret’s too.) What a splendid idea!

Books “near final” and finished

Yesterday I completed what I promised to do when I applied for and got a Manitoba Arts Council grant last fall – and only one day beyond the five months (December through April) I’d projected! What I promised was a “near final draft” of [tentative name], a novel in which [one sentence description]. It exists now, a manuscript of some 114,000 words, and needs a rest. As do I, to take some distance so I can see what “final” may involve, and to gather energy for the steps beyond that, which include others deciding what I’ve got and if it’s any good. In the meanwhile, I’m deeply grateful to MAC for the financial support and affirmation, and for the powerful motivation that external expectation provides!

A blessing with blood

When Gregory Orr was twelve years old, he killed his younger brother Peter in a hunting accident. He screamed, then he cried, but he got very little help with his grief and guilt, not then, not later. His identity and his brother’s seemed eventually to merge “into a single tangle,” the two of them “inextricable” in his thoughts.

Orr tells this story in The Blessing: A Memoir, which I mentioned in my previous post. (He was speaker at the Mennonite Writer/s VI conference in Harrisonburg, Virginia.) The difficulties and shame – the mark of Cain, as he saw it – that seized his life because of this event were compounded by his mother’s unexpected death when he was fourteen and his father, who was charming but unreliable and addicted to amphetamines.

Orr sought various ways through his despair, including involvement in the civil rights movement, with its potential martyrdom. This brought him no relief but nearly to the end of himself instead, and barely holding on.

Some notes on Mennonite/s Writing VI

It was a privilege to attend, and be a reader at, the Mennonite/s Writing VI conference held in Harrisonburg, Virginia this past weekend.  What a rich and stimulating event! The schedule was full and there were many concurrent sessions. Here follow some informal notes and observations on the sessions I attended.

Biggest personal takeaway: I was informed and inspired by the presentation of keynote speaker Gregory Orr — “Ethics, Aesthetics and the Lyric.” Orr is a poet, something of a master of the short lyric, and while I don’t write lyric poetry (which can be defined as a poem or song about experience, often involving an “I”, a form omnipresent in history, he said) his words offered much to me also as  a writer of fiction. As writer, period. He spoke of the reality of disorder, and the human need for some kind of order. There’s survival value in poetry, he said: “you can and should make a poem.” If you can’t, well someone else has; there’s a “lyric invitation,” and “the classic caress of author and reader.” Orr championed the power of subjectivity to determine beauty, to bestow meaning.

Gregory Orr

I’m looking forward to reading Orr’s memoir, The Blessing. At Facebook, Shirley Showalter alerted to a guest post by Orr at the blog Narrative, in connection to memoir, and I’m passing on the link  as well if you’re interested in his thoughts on the topic above, including references he made in his talk.

Notable quote: “I, I, I is not the same as me, me, me.” The I stands (in, under, against  the “over-culture”?), is a position, a naming in one’s own words, calls the other beautiful. The me grasps.

My mother turns 90

Tina Doerksen, now 90.

My mother turned 90 yesterday, and my seven siblings with spouses, as well as several granddaughters and great-granddaughters, travelled to Winnipeg  to mark the milestone. Mom was born in the former USSR, in today’s Ukraine, in 1922, and fled Russia with her parents as a small child. She grew up on a farm near Winkler, Man. She enjoyed school. Her father was somewhat unusual in the Mennonite community of the time in that he insisted his five daughters get an education and profession. Three of them chose nursing, and two, including Mom, chose teaching. Mom left her teaching career when she married, but her teaching gifts continued to be exercised in various ways, not least of all as mother of eight children.

Holding the world

I’ve never done this before. Caressed a globe, I mean. We’ve had a globe in our house for a long time, purchased in the days before maps were finger-tip accessible on the computer, when we had young students in the house who needed to see where countries in the news or homework were. But holding it in my lap? No.

That, however, is what the Lenten Prayer Guide I’m following asked me to do this week: Settle into your comfortable place with a map of the world or a globe. Hold [it] in your hands as you breathe deeply.

A Certain Woman: for IWD

A small stop along our Lenten journey to celebrate International Women’s Day — with a poem, first published in Sophia in 1999, slightly revised here.

Guest post: When Lent coincides with dying

Leona Dueck Penner

Leona Dueck Penner is a long-time writer, especially in Mennonite media. Most recently, she was national correspondent for Canadian Mennonite magazine. She and I were in a writing group together for several years and the friendship formed there has continued. I’m so pleased that she is willing to share her reflections on Lent as a guest post here: 

When M. asked me what I was committing to or giving up during Lent this year,  I replied spontaneously: “Well, I haven’t really been thinking about Lent very much up to now in relation to Jesus’  journey to the cross because we’re quite literally experiencing an ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’  journey ourselves, with pauses at varying stages of the cross, as my brother-in-law L.  continues on in his slow journey towards death.”

Cross in hand

My husband and his siblings knew their father had written some kind of diary in his younger years, but the notebooks were tucked away in one of the sister’s closet after the parents’ deaths. She had intended to transcribe them, but she became ill with cancer and died in 2009. After that, my father-in-law’s papers came into another sister’s possession. She set to work on them. Just last week, we received a transcript of “Papa’s Tagebuch [diary]” from December 1929 to December 1932.

For me, this is a great treasure, because I can “hear” Heinrich Dueck for the first time. My father-in-law died suddenly – on my birthday, in fact – before we were married. I lived a continent away. All who married into the large family had come to know him, except me, spouse of the youngest. I’ve heard much about my father-in-law, of course, gathered stories, viewed pictures, but I feel a hole in my experience of this second family of mine. Here in his diary, however, is something of his voice.