By Aurelea Mahood
This Friday (10 October 08), CultureNet will be hosting our first e-guest writer J.R. Carpenter. She will be talking with students about “The Cape”, a 2005 piece anthologized in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1, and answering the questions that emerge from this discussion. Happily, we are catching her just before she changes locations and heads down to Providence from Montreal to participate in the Interrupt digital literature festival being hosted by John Cayley at Brown University.
On Friday, J.R. will be posting an entry on “The Cape”, its composition, and its positioning in the ELC1. This piece will orient our discussion with J.R. and our analysis of “The Cape” as well as the questions that she in turn will field from us.
Given the attention paid to place/geography in much of J.R.’s work, it feels appropriate that my initial exposure to J.R.’s work and J.R. herself – her physical self – are firmly rooted in settings central to my own geography.
I first met J.R. in the other Vancouver – Vancouver WA – a much smaller Vancouver, but nevertheless a city with ghost echoes of its bigger sister to the north, at the Electronic Literature Organization conference. The mouth of Fraser becomes the mouth of the Columbia. Fort Langley becomes Fort Vancouver. And cafes become beauty supply stores. Quite unaccountably, there are a curiously high number of beauty supply stores in downtown Vancouver WA. It was pleasure to meet her as I had been impressed by her Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams project for The Capilano Review.
And so now this Friday, a virtual encounter building a physical encounter building on a exploration of electronic or digital communities and literature.
’til Friday then . . .
CultureNet @ CapilanoU 