I want to take a moment to thank my Electronic Literature classmates for welcoming me into a world that was completely new to me. This course was an unexpected learning experience, and a deeply appreciated one. I walked in unsure of how I would fit into a space filled with such creative writers and thinkers, but each of you taught me something. Your projects, your interpretations, your willingness to experiment, and even the way you discussed the readings pushed me to grow in ways I didn’t anticipate.

I am especially grateful to Dr. Zamora. She is an extraordinary professor: engaged, encouraging, patient, and genuinely invested in her students. She mentored me through material that felt foreign at first, and she helped me believe I could actually do this work. My only regret is that we met at the very end of my graduate journey rather than at the beginning.

This class opened up a part of literature I did not realize existed. Interacting with electronic literature, and with all of you who approach storytelling so differently, expanded my understanding of what writing can be. It challenged me to think beyond traditional forms and to participate in a creative conversation that felt alive and unpredictable and above all CREATIVE (something I have missed from my life).

I would recommend this class to every graduate student, but with one caveat: you have to be willing to push yourself. There is a lot of reading, a lot of writing, and a lot of thinking. It asks you to stretch, to experiment, and sometimes to sit in confusion until something clicks. But it is absolutely worth it.

Thank you all for helping me discover something new at a time in my degree when I thought I already knew what to expect. I’m leaving this class more open, more curious, and honestly, a little proud of myself for making it through. I hope you enjoy playing/reading/experimenting with “Is The Grass Always Greener?”

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SCo2PqoaMX7KDYfU92wejVg3_OhA7muEZlhUgiBCbvo/edit?usp=sharing

I was excited about creating my own electronic literature piece; now I’m a stressed mess about it.  The end of my Masters has been so much more taxing then I even could have anticipated. My nerves are shot and I have several (4) larger projects to finish up. I have already taken my comprehensive exam and I have my defense on Friday.

I originally thought it would be fun to do a parody of on-line dating, where you could pick your own destiny (pull downs or easy to answer questions) but even that has become terribly difficult.  I cannot figure-out the html piece of this project.

I have a couple of ‘prewritten’ pieces I thought about utilizing, but no matter what I pick I’m having a very difficult time executing.  I’m not trying to learn code, and even the simplest navigation is difficult for me. I’ve read other peoples experiences and blogs and I have to say that I’m impressed with the over all great attitude and self esteem this class has as a whole.

I’ve been working on this for days and I’m no closer to having anything to share with the class, but I’m going to continue to try.  I need to focus better, just follow my instincts and stick to a single subject.  I’m going to try and storyboard this for easier execution. 

Visiting my family in Spain was important to me, I had not planned to take a Monday night class when I made the arrangements, and missing two classes is very much not like me.  I’m bummed that I missed workshopping this, it would have been helpful.  I’m going to read the notes and everything else I can get my hands on and do the best job I can with what I have and what I know. 

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200 Pieces and Blackout Poetry

200 Pieces, Felt a bit like rummaging through a junk drawer. The work is scattered, fragmented, a little messy, I was a bit disappointed and frustrated because I really believed that I was getting the hang of this “electronic literature “. 200 pieces did not feel like literature.

One moment that really stuck with me happened about halfway through my wandering. I clicked into a small block of text that looked almost like a glitch It turned out to be just a few lines shoved off to the corner. It read like an unfinished memory: someone describing a bus ride, the way the window fogged up, and the blur of lights outside. It was only a few sentences, but I got the idea that we all have the small memories that may not tie into something else. It reminded me of those flashes of life you remember for no reason at all, scenes that don’t belong to any larger story, but stay with you anyway.

That’s what the whole experience felt like: bumping into moments that didn’t need to justify themselves. No plot arcs. No explanations. Just a collage of hints, confessions, images, and oddities. And the more I clicked, the more I realized the joy was in the wandering, not the understanding.

Tried out the Blackout Poetry Tool the other day, and wow, it turns out to be quite a trip. I grabbed a random piece of text and just started circling words that jumped out at me. There’s something so satisfying about turning a whole page into a little pocket of meaning.

I wasn’t able to get the ‘definition’ of what black out poetry is, but I was able to figure this one out quickly.  

At one point, I pulled this line: “Everything fades but the spark remains.” I didn’t even plan it, it just poppedup. I guess that’s the beauty of blackout poetry: the words are already there, you just have to notice them. At first nothing made any sense, but as I worked with the bot version, I started to see how you could create small patterns.  It’s kind of like finding your own secret message in someone else’s story.

You start seeing patterns, connections, little nuggets that you’d never notice just skimming a page. It felt more like a game.

There used to be these magnets for your fridge that were words and you could move them around and leave messages for your family or little poems or haiku’s, this reminded me of those magnets.  

It’s creative, a little meditative, and honestly not a bad and playful way to spend some time. But I’m not sure how it is literature, other than the poetry that might arise from the words.

Retratos vivos de mama by Carolina López Jiménez

Retratos vivos de mama by Carolina López Jiménez this weeks electronic literature journey, I immediately was aware of how personal this experience felt. I loved that you could actually turn the pages of a book, it gave this piece the feeling of a real book (which I kind of have missed since this classes start), even though this experience was digital. The physical scrapbook filled with memories made me feel like I was a part of the story. The mix of handwritten notes, drawings, and photos made it feel alive, it made me think that I might even do something like this one day – something creative and expressive.

Even though the videos were in Spanish and I couldn’t fully understand what was being said, I still tried to listen closely to the tone and emotion behind the voices.

Mother Daughter relationships are complex. My mother is still alive, and our lives are closely intertwined, I stay at her house on weekdays to help her out, then go to my own home on weekends. Reading and watching Retratos vivos de mamá made me think about how every moment with my Mom is creating a new memory.  While it is impossible to imagine, my Moms age and health dictates that I should be aware that one day my life will exist without her.  I begin to say what a loss this would be for me personally and all who know her.

I was just watching a show and the person on it said “How we keep people alive is by saying their names” (I imagine he’d include memories on this). It inspired me to think about my own mother’s story and how much of it maybe I don’t know. Maybe I could convince the ever stubborn Reni to write her story down, so that someday, I can remember her not only through photos or memories, but through her own words.

Retratos vivos de mama is  a living archive of love, loss, and memory, just like a scrapbook.  It reminded me that storytelling, whether digital or handwritten, is one of the most beautiful ways to keep someone alive in our hearts. 

Writers Are Not Strangers by Lynda Clark

Writers Are Not Strangers by Lynda Clark, and it’s one of those e’lit pieces that makes you realize how alive words can feel on a screen. I noticed that this isn’t a story you read passively but you interact with it. You click, hover, and sometimes just sit there, letting the text reveal itself in fragments. One moment you’re reading a line about memory or a fleeting thought, and the next, a new phrase pops up in an unexpected place, like the words themselves are alive and watching you.

overlapping text and sudden shifts in tone, between perceived humor, melancholy, and even a bit of playfulness, make it feel almost like wandering through someone else’s mind. As I followed Alix navigating her world, I could sense the weight of her mother dying, the pressures of family expectations, and the tug of her own creative ambitions. I found myself returning to a section where the text reflected on connection and distance between people, and it felt surprisingly intimate, almost like a conversation I wasn’t supposed to overhear but couldn’t stop listening to.  I really got that writer reader connection.

By the end, what stayed with me was Alix’s constant need for feedback, how every choice, every story she shares, seems to hinge on someone else’s judgment. It was uncomfortable at times, watching her balance the pull of her own ambitions against her mother’s needs and the weight of family expectations. I found myself relating to her tension, that push and pull between what you want for yourself and what others need from you. Writers Are Not Strangers is a great reminder that writing, like life, is a negotiation, and that intimacy and discomfort often go hand in hand.

“All Your Time Tossed Selves” by Porpentine

Porpentine’s All Your Time Tossed Selves feels part interactive survey and also some kind of inward experience. The story opens with what looks like a questionnaire,  you’re prompted to make choices and respond to strange, poetic questions that seem to measure emotions, time, or maybe even parts of yourself.   All of this done on pull downs like you are answering a survey.  But it’s very unlike a real survey, you can’t just skip around or check boxes without reading carefully. Each question leads somewhere else, and the meaning only starts to unfold if you slow down and take in all the words. It’s like the piece demands your attention and your careful reading, it wants you to feel the rhythm of its sentences and the subtle unease of its tone.

Even  though it feels disjointed at first, everything begins to weave together the more you read. The repetition, the structure, the instructions, the sentances that you have to read even to pick the middle of the thought, these all  build a sense of being analyzed or maybe being lost in your own data, I liked that tension. And then, at the end, the graphs appear, I’m a marketing person by nature and I love a graph – its  colorful, almost like a reward (slightly competitive) or a summary of your emotional journey. They make you wonder if the piece has been keeping track of you all along.

This story is a mirror, reflecting how scattered and multifaceted our “selves” can be, especially in digital spaces. That we’re along for the ride and it may not even reflect our true selves. 

Experiencing “Hannah Feels” by Gavin Inglis

Exploring Hannah Feels by Gavin Inglis was an interesting but somewhat confusing experience. While the timing to this particular story was on point – my prior week was BAD. A reminder of mental health in our lives and how we make choices was a perfect place to land after this bad week.

The piece presents itself like an interactive story where your choices shape what happens to Hannah, the main character. It’s meant to pull you into her world and make you think carefully about how small decisions can affect someone’s emotions and wellbeing. However, I found it a little tricky to follow at times. Some of the prompts weren’t entirely clear, and it was hard to tell which choices would move the story forward or change the outcome in a meaningful way.

Exploring Avenue S by Jody Zellen was an experience that felt both visual and emotional.  I should start by saying that I chose this piece purposefully because I originally was a fine art major and I felt like it had a good amount of art attached to it. 

I then looked-up Jody Zellen, the author/artist, and discovered that she was an artist (graduated RISD) and was a Los Angeles resident.  I was surprised by her residency, because I really believed when she spoke about the ‘city’ she was talking about Manhattan (I guess since I consider that my city).  What I liked about her approach is that sues movement, layering and interactivity to create experiences, rather than just images or a story.  Avenue S truly explored city life during the time of COVID-19.

From the moment I entered the piece, it had a quiet, almost eerie energy: Urban streets without people, fragments of text, and shifting images that seemed to appear and disappear on their own. It didn’t feel like something to “read” in the traditional sense, but more like something to move through, at my own pace, noticing what caught my attention.  Also, I felt like I needed to take my time, that it brought me right back to COVID.

My experience with COVID was different then others, much like this piece.  We were asked to work-from-home, but only for about 5 or 6 weeks.  I had worked at home in a previous career and found it to actually be more work then in you went to your office, so I was somewhat enjoying my house.  I was able to take walks around my neighborhood and do my own art.  It seems that Jody Zellen and I do not share a similar feeling about such things.  For one thing, her experiences is very much city oriented (lots of people – then none, etc.) My experience was very suburban – no people down the shore in March anyway, so this was a kind-of welcomed solitude. 

The stark, black-and-white imagery gave the work a haunting kind of beauty. It reminded me of walking through a city on a summer weekend night when the city (my city) would empty out and go to the Hamptons. The emptiness and repetition of certain visuals felt intentional, as if Zellen was trying to capture the rhythm of the city when no one’s around, places in the city you would find that are small forgotten corners.  It also paced the passing of time. 

Zellen captured a real sense of monotony in parts of the navigation, where certain images or patterns repeated, and the clicks didn’t always lead somewhere new or not new. At first, it felt a little repetitive, but then I realized that was probably the point. It seemed to mirror the routines and rhythms of everyday life, he way days can blur together, especially in the city. I started to see it as Zellen showing us her own day-to-day experience, with its cycles, small shifts, and familiar scenes that might feel the same on the surface but carry quiet differences if you really look.

Because the piece didn’t follow a straightforward story, I wanted to understand how it worked beneath the surface. Again, I’m new to this way of reading and my curiosity and the need for some kind of story seemed to allude me.  I looked up things I may have missed in Zellen’s narration, such as secret hyperlinks or hidden paths that others had found while navigating the project. I found it difficult to get these “secrets” to work, even the ones that I thought I had figured out from the calendared page I stumbled upon eventually. Still, that process of searching added another layer to the experience. It made me think about how we try to make sense of these digital pieces of literature, always expecting some kind of clear direction or payoff that doesn’t always come.  Plus there’s the personal experience of it directing you down your very own story.

As I continued, I realized Avenue S was more about mood, perception, and even a sense of redundancy than about any kind of clear narrative.  he random clicks, the shifting pages, and the unpredictable visuals became their own kind of language. The work made me think about memory and how my memory seems to come in pieces, not in order, and while the memories may not be repeated sometimes they are repeated endlessly.

By the end, I saw Zellen’s Avenue S as less of a story and more of a meditation on solitude, movement, and urban life. It challenges what we consider “literature,” blending photography, design, and poetic fragments into a single experience. Even though I couldn’t access every hidden detail, I still felt like I had wandered through something meaningful. The act of exploring became the story itself.

Exploring High Muck a Muck was unlike any I’ve ever read before. It was like entering a museum on my computer where when I clicked through the blue and white lottery card map, I was able to uncover what I would discover eventually, a story about Chinese immigration to Canada.   The overlapping stories of Chinese immigration to Canada were playing with my idea of order, there was no possible way of clicking in a specific order which would unfold a story so that I could understand it quickly or easily.  Each choice felt like opening a small window into a much larger narrative.

Voices reading poetry, layered with accents and emotion, added depth to the text on the screen. This was very different than the other stories we were asked to read.  I liked the idea of ‘being read to’.  The sounds (whether in the music or in the voices) gave me context, history, and tone and were able to ground the words with human voices that tied abstract ideas more together. At times, the audio felt like a guide, reminding me that these were real stories of struggle, resilience, and belonging.

From the beginning you are asked to take a chance on the Lottery Card, I later felt as if this was a metaphor for the risk of immigration (something that I think is topical) and the kinds of chances you must take to change your nation. I recall that there was one piece that speaks of a mans gold teeth as he take his lottery book our of an overcoat…pages worn.  This made me feel this man’s ‘risk’.

In the section Canada, There was an image of a man suspended upside down struggling to write Chinese character.  I think this was representative of what it may be like when someone emigrates and is stuck between two identities (Canadian and Chinese).  It gives the feeling of caught between two countries.  I can’t imagine the strength of the people who came before us having to immigrate or change countries in order to make a better life for themselves or their families.

By the end, I realized High Muck a Muck wasn’t something I could move through in order, and honestly, that was a bit of a struggle for me since I usually like things to have a clear beginning, middle, and end. But once I stopped trying to “finish” it and just let the flow take me, it felt different. The mix of sounds, images, and words pulled me in, and instead of reading a story, I found myself collecting moments and impressions. I really felt like High Muck A Muck stayed with me long after I closed my computer. It made me think about how literature can shift into something you don’t just read, but actually experience, I think I’m starting to get it.