Quebec Writers' Federation Workshops

Spring Session 2010

Develop your writing with the mentorship of an acclaimed professional writer and feedback from your peers.

Workshops take place at the QWF office, Suite 3, Atwater Library unless otherwise indicated.

NON-LINEAR NARRATIVES & MULTI-MEDIA POETICS: AN INTRODUCTION TO ELECTRONIC LITERATURE*

TWO SATURDAYS, March 6 and March 13, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Atwater Library Computer Lab, second floor
Workshop leader: J. R. Carpenter
$140

This workshop is ideal for experienced writers interested in expanding their existing practices to include web-based forms of non-linear, interactive, intertextual and/or networked literature and media artists exploring textual practices in digital work.

When registering, please indicate whether you can bring a laptop computer and an Ethernet cable.

The two-day workshop will provide an introduction to reading, writing and performing web-based electronic literature. Electronic literature combines literary and new media practices, resulting in multi-media literary works that couldn’t exist in print form. Consideration of technology at the level of the creation of the text distinguishes electronic literature from e-books, digitized versions of print works, web publishing and other products of print authors ‘going digital,’ none of which will be discussed in this workshop. Unbound by pages and the printed book, electronic literature moves freely across the web, through galleries, performance spaces, and museums, yet does not reside in any single medium or institution. Electronic literature often intersects with conceptual art, web art, performance and sound art, but the reading, writing and performance of electronic literature is situated within the literary arts.

This workshop will begin with a brief historical background of the genre, including a discussion of some of the pre-web literary forms that digital writing evolved from. We will focus on looking at, reading and understanding a wide range of electronic literature produced in various media over the past 20 years. I will show how some of these works were built, give an introduction to HTML, provide a number of web resources and tool for further investigation, then propose a number of ways for beginners to approach the web medium for the creation and dissemination of texts. In particular, we will look at ways to use existing Web 2.0 structures to create distributive literary works. Writing exercises will include: collectively creating a hypertext narrative, remixing Python story generators, writing 140-character stories in Twitter and plotting postcard stories in Google Maps. There will be some technical discussion and experimentation, but prior knowledge of web programming is not required.

If participants have electronic literature projects in mind, we can discuss strategies for creating these works. Visual and new media artists who use are using text in their work and wish to learn more about the literary aspects of digital writing will also find this workshop useful, as will avid readers of experimental literature from Calvino to Borges, and anyone interested in audio/video mashup, performance, remix culture, etc., who wishes to learn about this exciting new hybrid, hypermedia genre.

A list of links to online resources, further technical resources and venues for reading and submitting electronic literature will be provided. Participants are strongly encouraged to familiarize themselves with the following resources before the workshop:

J. R. Carpenter: http://luckysoap.com

in absentia: http://luckysoap.com/inabsentia

Entre Ville: http://luckysoap.com/entreville

Electronic Literature Organization: http://eliterature.org/

Electronic Literature Collection Volume One: http://collection.eliterature.org/1/

Exhibition - In Search of a New(er) Digital Literature:

http://www.terminalapsu.org/exhibitions/digitalliterature/index.html

Led by J.R. Carpenter is winner of the QWF Carte Blanche Quebec Award 2008, the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition 2003 & 2005 and the Expozine Alternative Press Award for Best English Book for her novel, Words the Dog Knows, published by Conundrum Press (Montreal, 2008). Her electronic literature has been presented at Jyväskylä Art Museum (Finland), Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), Electronic Literature Collection Volume One Web Biennial 2007 (Istanbul), Rhizome.org and Turbulence.org. Her short fiction has been anthologized and published widely. She serves as President of the Board of Directors of OBORO New Media Lab in Montreal. http://luckysoap.com

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