When I first opened Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue, the words “Follow me” pulled me in. I remember pausing over that phrase, realizing that I wasn’t just being invited to read, but to move, to let myself be carried somewhere unknown. Those opening words became a promise that I would be taken on a journey, one that might unfold beyond my understanding, and that my navigation, the simple act of clicking, was already shaping the story I would receive.
Reading Twelve Blue felt like drifting in and out of moments, sometimes clear and vivid, sometimes strange and elusive. One thread brought me into September, with a girl in new blue Mary Janes repeating the rhyme, “September’s embers never ending.” The scenery shifted from winter to fall, and I felt as though I were traveling through both time and space. When the link asked, “As if the seasons were whose fault?” I laughed a little inside because, in that moment, it felt like I was the one responsible for where the story carried me. I was no longer just a reader, I was also complicit in the movement of its seasons.
Another passage led me to Samantha, who dreamed of hosting a tea party, her imagination blurring between memory and delirium. She saw the tin cups with blue flowers, the kind passed down from her mother. This part lingered with me. In my own culture, tea is the answer to everything, headaches, stomach aches, even heartbreak. Reading Samantha’s memory, I was struck by how the hypertext asked me to carry my own memories and associations into it. I wasn’t just following links; I was weaving my world into Joyce’s fragments, letting my own history seep into the story.
And then I arrived at a finale that felt more like a chorus than a conclusion: every surface, every silence, every river, every lover, every daughter, every death. A list that seemed to gather everything, objects, bodies, gestures, whispers, into a single woven tapestry. It was overwhelming and beautiful, a reminder that every detail carries a story, that nothing is too small to be part of the whole.
Reflecting on this experience, I think of Jessica Pressman’s ideas about navigation in electronic literature, how moving through hypertext is not just a way to read but a way to produce meaning. That felt true with Twelve Blue. Each click was a choice that opened one thread and closed off another, reminding me of all the paths I wasn’t taking. Sometimes I felt lost, uncertain if I was missing something important, but that disorientation became part of the story itself. The work isn’t meant to be held all at once, it’s meant to be drifted through, to remind us of the patterns that form when fragments come together.
For me, Twelve Blue was less about “understanding” and more about surrendering to the weave. It taught me that navigation is not just about moving through a story, it’s about noticing the ways our choices, our memories, and even our frustrations shape the experience of reading. And maybe that’s what makes electronic literature so powerful: it doesn’t just tell stories, it reminds us that stories live in every thread we choose to follow.
