All posts by nasvidapoet

student blogs

E Lit Progress Update: Learning More Than I Expected

As I moved from planning my e lit project into actually creating it, I quickly realized I had taken on more than I fully understood. I began searching for platforms and tools, only to discover that I had no idea how to use RenPy, Twine, or anything remotely connected to coding. I had never written a line of code in my life, yet here I was trying to build an interactive digital love story.

This is where the perks of teaching tech-savvy students came in. One of my students teased me for not knowing how to use Twine and insisted that there was no way I could use RenPy without learning to code first. Instead of feeling discouraged, it motivated me. She spent an entire week showing me how things worked, and I slowly learned the basics of CSS, JavaScript, and variables.

I am still figuring out how to embed images and occasionally break something by accident, but the progress I’ve made feels huge. More than anything, I’m proud that I didn’t back down from the challenge. This project is pushing me to grow in ways I didn’t expect, and even with its frustrations, it’s becoming something I’m genuinely excited about.

Onward to the final step.

student blogs

E-lit Final Project: When Love Becomes a Click

I want my e-lit project to explore what happens to love when it exists mostly through screens. Not just the social media version, but the kind filled with missed calls, delayed responses, and the quiet anxiety of time zones that never quite line up. My idea centers around building an interactive fiction about a long-distance couple trying to survive the distance while still learning how to love each other in a digital world.

At the beginning of the experience, the reader would choose the characters’ love languages: words of affirmation, acts of service, quality time, physical touch, or gift-giving. These choices don’t just act as personality traits, they shape how the story unfolds. A character who values quality time might struggle more with distance than one who values words of affirmation. The story would unfold through text messages, voice memos, short poems, and shared music links. The reader wouldn’t just read the relationship; they’d participate in maintaining it.

Each chapter would present the reader with choices: Do you send a poem or a playlist? Do you wait to respond or call immediately? Do you confront immigration issues directly, or avoid them out of fear? These decisions lead the couple down different paths. Some endings might show diaspora love surviving systems designed to break it. Others might show how distance, lack of intimacy, or family pressure slowly tears them apart.

Visually and structurally, I imagine the project looking like a chat interface or message thread, where timestamps, loading dots, and unsent messages become part of the narrative something like “Hana Feels” or “Writers are not Strangers.” There would be moments of silence built into the story, blank spaces where users have to sit with the absence, simulating what long-distance actually feels like. Music and poetry would function as emotional artifacts, love letters in digital form, showing how intimacy adapts when touch isn’t possible.

This project matters to me as a person that had had to navigate a failed long-distance love, it isn’t just about romance. It’s also about borders, migration, cultural expectation, and emotional survival. By making it interactive, I want readers to feel the weight of choice,  to understand that love online is not passive consumption, but active, fragile construction. Every decision becomes political. Every message becomes evidence of care or neglect. In the end, some relationships will survive. Others won’t. But either way, the reader walks away understanding that love, like electronic literature, is shaped by systems, interfaces, and the emotional code we choose to write within them.

student blogs

Understanding through Stories

“Writers are not Strangers”

Writers Are Not Strangers succeeds in dramatizing that writers are real people with real feelings. It tells the story of Alix, a writer, along with her dying mother, her aunt, and a meteorite threatening Earth. The piece gives a similar emotional resonance to Hana Feels, although the setting and tone are very different. You can tell this story takes place in a future shaped by technology, artificial intelligence, and influencer culture, most likely somewhere in Iceland due to the volcano mentioned. There is an impending doom that we are aware of, alongside the passing of Alix’s mother, who was once a hero of sorts.

I disliked how technology and the era of AI seemed to desensitize everyone from the real world and the things happening around them. I wanted to see Alix grieve her mother, or even her pet fish that I named Darla (it’s giving Finding Nemo). Instead, everyone just continues on as if the city has not been affected, as if making content is more important than acknowledging that the world is slowly crumbling at their feet. Still, I loved the creativity of the piece, especially seeing Alix’s reactions to my choices and ratings. At one point, after she visited her mother and wrote a post, she didn’t seem to care at all about the rating I gave her work, which felt both powerful and sad.

The plot, however, feels less important than the overall theme: how readers can affect the lives of writers. At one point, I used a combination of the scores I gave her writing as a passcode to access the hospital wing where she could see her mother one last time. As the player, you rate stories that Alix has written, and she reacts emotionally to those ratings. At other times, you make decisions for Alix herself, switching back and forth between being her reader and being Alix.

Alix responds to the ratings you give her when you are playing as a reader. For example, the first story of hers that I read was difficult to follow, so I gave it a low rating. Later, I watched her go through an exhausting visit to the hospital to see her dying mother. When she checked her ratings afterward, she was deeply upset by the low score. I felt as if I had punched her in the gut after she had already been through something emotionally draining. Yet at the same time, I was Alix, because I had been the one guiding her through those same moments. In a strange way, I had hurt myself.

This pattern continues throughout the piece, as you keep rating Alix’s stories and watching how she responds. Her later stories are even influenced by your previous ratings. I found myself trying to be honest and give her work the scores I thought it deserved, but I also felt tempted to give higher ratings just to protect her feelings. This creates a tension many players will probably experience.

By the end, Alix no longer feels like a stranger. You come to know her both through her writing and through the small glimpses of her life. The title becomes true, at least within the world of the story. It also made me think about how in real life we never get to “play” as our favorite writers. We are only the readers, not Alix, and it raises the question of how much we can truly know someone through their writing. Sometimes we can, but often the familiarity we feel is just an illusion. Still, Writers Are Not Strangers reminds us that writers are real people with real emotions behind every piece they create.

Retratos Vivos de Mamá
The second piece, Retratos Vivos de Mamá, pairs surprisingly well with Writers Are Not Strangers. Both explore memory, grief, and the act of preserving connection, though one does it through technology and the other through storytelling and remembrance.

Retratos Vivos de Mamá deeply moved me. It’s a meditation on discovering and honoring a mother’s life after her death. I resonated with it personally because I care deeply about preserving the memories of the women in my family, their strength, struggles, and sacrifices. I’ve been blessed to know both my great-grandmother and grandmother before their passings in 2019 and 2022, and understanding their experiences as matriarchs and eldest daughters helps me see my own mother with more compassion and grace.

One quote that struck me translates to:

“She will peer into the past. She will listen silently. She will take careful note of everything she hears and sees. She will retrieve the photos from all the albums. And she will return to the present with her suitcase full of voices. She will return to give a second life to the woman who was her mother before she had children. She will invent another life for her mother.”

The women in my family have always loved photographs, and we have albums spanning four generations. Each picture holds a story, a voice, a moment frozen in time. This piece reminded me that revisiting those memories is an act of both grief and rebirth.

The mother-daughter relationship can be complicated, especially when trauma stretches across generations. I’ve felt resentment toward my own mother at times, but learning her story has helped me understand her humanity and pain. The line, “Two things remain with me today: the certainty of never having truly understood my mother, and the solace of having tried to understand her at the end of her life,” made me pause. It’s a reminder that understanding our mothers while they’re still alive is both a privilege and a necessity. My mother lost her own mother just a few years ago after more than fifteen years apart. I often wonder what conversations they didn’t get to have or what memories they missed. Even as I grieve parts of my own relationship with her, I know some things are best left resting. Healing is slow, one day at a time.

Both Writers Are Not Strangers and Retratos Vivos de Mamá explore what it means to connect through writing, memory, and loss. One asks whether readers can truly know the writer, and the other asks how we can keep our mothers alive through stories and remembrance. Together, they show that words, whether written or remembered, are one of the few ways we can make sense of love, grief, and being human.

student blogs

Choosing Paths

This week’s dive into E-Lit left me thinking a lot about control; how we use it, lose it, and sometimes share it with the text itself. Both “All Your Time-Tossed Selves” and “Hana Feels” play with this idea of user participation, but in completely different emotional registers. One feels like wandering through the ashes of a burning world, and the other like sitting beside someone in pain, trying not to say the wrong thing.

All Your Time-Tossed Selves

This piece felt like stepping into a digital poem that wanted me to choose its heartbeat. I loved the freedom of clicking through and seeing where my decisions would take me. It reminded me of a dream you can steer, but only slightly. The way it’s structured through a Google Form was surprisingly effective. Each choice opened a new fragment of poetry, but it also made me wish I could see the culmination of my responses to see the poem as a whole, Luckily, I screen-recorded my version.

The city is burning
The knights of the city have wings
How could they help but fly into the black wind?
The tips of their wings caught fire
“I feel you here in the orchard. In these trees of ash, bearing only embers.
Stop talking.
But you don’t eat anymore do you?
The apples tasted so good this year
As if they sensed the end was near
Did you taste them?
I did. In a sense. They were described in her letter.
My mouth watered, smearing the ink.
Did you write back?
I wrote back, but she never responded.
I see.
Let’s not get distracted.
I lost control in the last month of the year
And when I lost control…
…I couldn’t remember why I ever tried in the first place.
It’s fine.
Don’t blame yourself.
You couldn’t have changed the outcome,
even if you drowned me at birth, in the little stream running under the house.
So gather up your things as the city crumbles around you.
Try to stuff them into a much too small bag, only intended for the ten-minute walk of carrying your books to the tower…and now press-ganged into a walk of unknown and perhaps limitless duration…
What did you bring?
Useless knick-knacks.
The amber bird…I just need more time to make it sing again.
A hair-dagger.
Reams of notepaper, in hopes that one of them contains the seed of the formula.
I hope you realize the end of the city
is only a symptom of the end of everything.
It can’t be compartmentalized.
Running only makes it worse.
Did you notice yet?
How it keeps repeating?
Life isn’t done with you.
The flash tells you… no matter what decisions you make,
The time comes when everyone must.

“All Your Time-Tossed Selves”

It’s poetic and apocalyptic at the same time. Like the speaker is trying to hold onto something beautiful while everything collapses. What really struck me was the looping quality of it: “Did you notice yet? How it keeps repeating?” That moment made me realize that the poem isn’t just about a destroyed city, it’s about memory, futility, and maybe even the endless process of trying to rebuild ourselves. Each “choice” doesn’t change the outcome as much as it reveals how small we really are inside the system of the poem.

“Hana Feels”

If “All Your Time-Tossed Selves” felt abstract and poetic, “Hana Feels” felt painfully human. I was immediately drawn into Hana’s emotional world, and I found myself being so careful about every response I picked. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing or make her feel worse. I eventually got to the ending where Hana is about to open up to her mom, a moment that felt like real progress, like a quiet breath of relief.

The conversations with Jen, though, were another story. They stressed me out. Nothing I chose ever seemed to calm the situation or make Jen more understanding. Jen just came across as an awful friend, defensive, dismissive, and almost cruel at times. But maybe that’s the point: Hana Feels forces you to experience that frustration, to feel what it’s like to be trapped in a toxic friendship and still hope for something better.

As a teacher, I couldn’t help but think about this through my Social Emotional Learning (SEL) lens. The entire experience reminded me of the delicate nature of real-life conversations around mental health, how tone, timing, and empathy matter just as much as words. I found myself trying to be as kind and peaceful as possible, because I genuinely wanted Hana to feel seen and supported.

That’s what makes Hana Feels so powerful, it’s interactive empathy. Every click is a moral decision. The piece mirrors who we are and what we believe about care, responsibility, and communication. I realized I was trying to create a “perfect” conversation, a utopia where kindness fixes everything, but that’s not how real emotions work. Sometimes, even when we choose all the right words, people still hurt.

student blogs

Exploring Digital Resistance 

Ask Me for the Moon

While moving through Ask Me for the Moon, I couldn’t help but think of Bad Bunny’s song “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii”, a critique of colonialism, overtourism, displacement, and the loss of cultural heritage due to foreign interests—issues that also affect his home country of Puerto Rico. The piece itself moves quickly, the words phasing into one another, demanding close attention. I actually found myself screen-recording my navigation through it just to revisit and unpack the experience.

Certain phrases stayed with me: “all work is night work” and “guest approaches host, nature divided by work.” These lines expose the tension between pleasure and labor in spaces like Hawaii, where tourists seek rest and escape while forgetting they stand on Native land—served by the very people whose culture has been commodified.

As the poem concludes, Waikiki’s skyline fades into view. Instead of the bright, colorful image one might expect, it appears in muted shades of black and gray, metaphorically representing exhaustion and the invisible labor sustaining Hawaii’s tourism industry. Beneath the skyline, a collage of images emerges: photos spelling out “Waikiki,” a palm tree, waves, and a figure standing before the ocean. The sound accompanying these visuals—whether heavy breathing or crashing waves—evokes both the persistence of life and the suffocating labor rhythms described throughout the piece. The repetition of the word breath reinforces this duality between survival and exhaustion.

As readers, we become participants when clicking through the images, choosing our own paths and uncovering layers of text and turquoise words. These fragmented poems expand into longer reflections on Hawaiian culture, revealing the state’s control over Native rights and traditions. We learn how beaches celebrated by tourists are often inaccessible to locals, and how the hospitality industry depends on unseen nighttime labor. Through this structure, Zuern forces us to confront the hidden costs of leisure—the people who work tirelessly to maintain the image of paradise.

The Vine and the Fish

Scrolling through The Vine and the Fish felt like moving through a living archive—stories of men and women intertwined with species like kudzu, mosquitoes, lionfish, and Asian (Silverfin) carp. Each was brought to America for a purpose, only to be labeled “invasive” once their presence grew inconvenient. This dynamic made me think of indentureship and slavery—the way Asians and Africans were brought to the Americas to build railroads, cultivate fields, and provide labor, only to later face exclusion and segregation.

The piece’s language stood out: “good = native and bad = invasive,” and “real is the human desire to create order by imposing clean categories in an untidy world.” These phrases reveal how fear and hierarchy shape both ecological and social systems. The line “Fear of the body being invaded by contagion, fear of the nation being invaded by outsiders” draws a striking parallel between environmental discourse and xenophobia.

The poem critiques how society uses foreign species—and by extension, foreign people—until they no longer serve its purpose, at which point they’re rebranded, excluded, or erased. The discussion around renaming Asian carp to Silverfin mirrors this impulse to reframe what’s uncomfortable to suit a more palatable audience.

One line made me laugh in recognition: “There’s some resistance in the U.S. because we don’t like the bones in our fish.” I’ve been eating fish with bones since I was five and never thought twice about it. That simple line underscores cultural difference—and the privilege embedded in what gets accepted, rejected, or renamed.

Both Ask Me for the Moon and The Vine and the Fish use digital form to challenge readers to think about power, belonging, and the unseen consequences of consumption. Through interactive movement and layered text, they remind us that art—and resistance—can live in the space between click and breath.

student blogs

Two Doors, Two Worlds

In exploring digital literature, few experiences have contrasted as strikingly as Welcome Home and Façade. Both works invite us into intimate spaces, a home, an apartment, a world that feels alive, and yet what unfolds inside those spaces couldn’t be more different. One pulls us into the comforting embrace of nostalgia and imagination, while the other confronts us with the messy, unpredictable emotions of adulthood.

My experience with Façade was mostly through YouTube videos, yet it still managed to pull me in. It’s strange how something so minimal in design can feel so human. Watching Grace and Trip argue, confess, and crumble felt invasive but also deeply real. Every interaction carried emotional weight. You could say one wrong thing and the whole night would fall apart. Even as a viewer, I felt tense, caught between wanting to help and knowing I couldn’t really fix them. It was comical at times, but underneath the humor was something uncomfortable; the quiet truth that sometimes, love doesn’t feel like home anymore.

Then came Welcome Home, and the shift was immediate. Suddenly, I was surrounded by color, warmth, and friendship. Wally Darling’s cheery voice and the gentle community around him felt like a return to childhood, a simpler time where kindness mattered and everyone had a place. It reminded me of Sesame Street, where every character, no matter how quirky, was loved and accepted. There was something comforting about that, especially after the chaos of Façade.

While Façade showed me the cracks that can form in relationships and communication, Welcome Home reminded me why those connections matter in the first place. It’s about understanding, patience, and finding joy in togetherness. Even knowing that Welcome Home exists now only through restoration efforts, there’s something beautiful in the way people are coming together to preserve it. The anonymous team behind The Welcome Home Restoration Project isn’t just saving a piece of media—they’re saving a feeling. That’s what art does when it’s loved enough: it lives on through the people who care about it.

Experiencing both works side by side made me think about how important it is to preserve not just art, but the emotions it carries. Façade captures the complexity of adulthood; the frustration, miscommunication, and longing, while Welcome Home keeps the child inside us alive. In a world that often feels heavy and divided, we need both kinds of art. One helps us face our reality; the other helps us dream beyond it.

For me, Welcome Home isn’t just about restoring a show, it’s about restoring a part of ourselves. It’s proof that love, joy, and imagination never really disappear. They just wait quietly, like Wally Darling, ready to welcome us back home.

student blogs

My Journey Through ‘High Muck a Muck’

In the quiet hours of the morning, I entered High Muck a Muck and immediately felt a sense of grounding, as though the work itself was waiting to pull me inward. Almost instantly, the first poem appeared before me:

He, his eyes sparkle, brown finger with long

slim nail points to the green spot eight-spot

and he smiles gold teeth as he takes his

Lottery book out of an overcoat pocket

and slaps the worn pages on the cafe counter.

He laughs and his eyes glitter.

That moment hooked me. It was playful and gritty at the same time, gold teeth, a lottery book, the slap of worn pages on a counter. Chance and survival side by side. It made me think of the ways laughter and sparkle still surface in lives that are marked by hardship or uncertainty.

The project presented the body as a map, and I stopped to consider where to begin. The choice felt symbolic. I decided on the center, just above the clavicles, close to the throat, the place where voice emerges. The video that played there carried a meditative energy, with violin, chimes, and gongs weaving together into a humming sound. To me it felt like the vibration of vocal cords, the low hum that begins in the diaphragm and resonates out like the soul itself. The image sequence added another layer: an old man’s eye zooming in until it transformed into the eye of a baby. I lingered on that transition. The eyes, I’ve always believed, are the gateway to the soul. Watching that movement from age to innocence felt like a reminder that sometimes to truly see, we need to return to a child’s way of looking at the world, simple, unclouded, curious.

From the center of the body, I wandered downward and eventually drifted to the left, toward the water. Water always pulls me in, and here was no different. Along the coastline of the map, I found myself transported into a village scene. The first image that caught my attention was an airplane, fitting, maybe, since I’ve been longing for travel myself. A billboard stood out too, bluntly declaring: “H1B problems, Pivot to Canada.”Standing nearby was a man gripping a shovel, staring at the sign, and I couldn’t help but imagine what his story was. The poem accompanying him spoke of taxes, nails, and history: “That head taxes, just a rusty nail not the apple of John A’s greedy eye, but that brown nails been here forever. The real last spike is yet to be driven.”

That poem made me pause. The immigrant body described as a “nail,” used for labor, taxation, and building, but also a nail that has always been here, that endures. The “real last spike” waiting to be driven suggested an unfinished story, a history still in progress.

Nearby, another figure with binoculars drew me into a video, this one layered with unsettling sound. A heart thudded loudly in the background as radio stations flickered in and out, never landing on a stable frequency. The confusion was palpable: the longing for home clashing with the pull of a new land, the frustration of not finding belonging anywhere. The heartbeat seemed to echo regret, emptiness, and dislocation. I half-expected it to quicken into a panic as the video progressed, to capture the anxiety of being caught between worlds, but it never did. Instead, the sound stayed steady, which made me wonder if the numbness of displacement sometimes outweighs even the panic.

As the video shifted, a clock began ticking and crows, or maybe ravens, cried overhead. The sound carried a sense of impending doom, like time was running out and scavenger birds were circling. On the screen, a driver headed to the airport, watching planes take off. The action looped again and again: driving, parking, watching planes. The monotony of it made me think of how migration routines can become numbing, even when they hold such high stakes. By this point the soundtrack had become distorted and fragmented, a deconstructed version of traditional music, unsettling and disorienting. I couldn’t help but wonder why the heartbeat never returned, or why no one on the other end of the phone ever picked up. The absence felt loud.

Clicking on the airplane itself revealed another line: “a saffron room somewhere is easily understood but far away we imagine things are not so fixed.” That line sent me searching. Saffron robes, I discovered, represent spiritual commitment, a detachment from worldly desires, a pursuit of enlightenment. Connecting that to the airplane, especially one branded with China Airlines, was fascinating. The plane appeared to be leaving rather than arriving, which shifted the meaning for me. It suggested people choosing to return home rather than staying in the West, rejecting the pull of modernization and Western customs. To me it symbolized a refusal, a deliberate movement back to roots, a search for stability where things are fixed and familiar.

Back at False Creek, I noticed again the figures of the man with the shovel and the man in the suit, this time drained of color in contrast to the surrounding images. The lack of color made them seem ghostlike, as if their humanity had been stripped away. Another figure nearby, a parent with children, was accompanied by a striking line: “don’t mention yourself, especially when you show a family portrait.” That line cut deep. It reflected how often immigrants push themselves to the background, working relentlessly not for their own desires but for the survival of their families. Their individual identities fade as sacrifice takes over.

I eventually traveled to the Pacific Rim section, where the screen filled with words: “Made in Japan,” “Made in Hong Kong,” “Made in Thailand,” “Made in China.” These phrases crossed the screen like cargo moving across oceans, one after another, until they felt endless. I saw a leather bag stamped Made in Hong Kong, a globe faintly visible in the background, and then Made in China appeared as a watermark repeating across the screen. To me, these were footsteps, symbols of movement, trade, and labor. They reminded me of how so much of the Western world relies on goods and labor produced elsewhere, often cheaply, often invisibly. It spoke to the history of exploitation, indentured servitude, and near-slavery that many Asian migrants endured, tricked into working hard to build up industrialized economies in places like the U.S., the Caribbean, and Canada. The video carried that layered message: migration as both contribution and exploitation.

From there, I journeyed north into Canada, the map shaped like an arm, mountains and valleys forming veins. Starting from the fingertip, I read: “trust, ugly words to show how heavy beauty.” It felt like a reminder that even trust can be painful, weighed down by history, yet still necessary to move forward. Closer to the thumb, another poem urged: “pretend you are the yellow earth limitless perform your mother’s official function.”That line made me think about the Earth as a mother: nurturing, providing, teaching, and endlessly giving, even when unacknowledged.

The center of the hand revealed: “a lot of small pieces broken from a long stick promises.” Placed where pressure points lie, it made me think about the pressure of broken promises, promises fractured across generations of migrants. But the poem that struck me the most read: “to write your gravesite details here because your name is it.”

That line lingered with me. Many immigrants carry two names, a traditional one and a Western one, but what happens when neither is remembered, when assimilation erases both? To write one’s own gravesite details is to confront mortality and the possibility of being forgotten. Another poem layered onto this ache: “the family is not empty full of ancestors who won’t remember you.” It was heartbreaking to think of how traditions and memories slip further away with each generation, survival prioritized over remembrance.

Yet, despite all of this, the final poem I encountered shifted the tone. It read: “like a family are these trees abundant dense. It shows that immigrants are plentiful. Their roots were deep in a lot of places they nourish the Earth, they cultivate the land and they stand in the firm.”

That line closed the journey on a note of resilience. Yes, migration is marked by loss, sacrifice, and forgetting, but it is also marked by abundance and endurance. Immigrants root themselves deeply, nourish new lands, and stand firm against the weight of history.

When I finally left High Muck a Muck, I carried more questions than answers, but that felt right. The work doesn’t want to resolve, it wants you to travel, to reflect, to see the layers of migration as unfinished. For me, it was a reminder that migration is never one clean story. It is departures, arrivals, losses, sacrifices, roots, and resilience, all layered together. The body is a map, yes, but more than that, it is a vessel carrying memory, longing, and soul.

student blogs

Moving Through Time

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.

student blogs

Hello E-Lit Crew!

My name is Nastassja Anderson but everyone calls me Nas. A little about me: I was Jersey-born, but island-raised, my roots are planted in both Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica. I’ve always carried a love of nature and the ocean with me. I find peace at the beach and in quiet outdoor spaces, but I’m also a creative through and through. Whether it’s writing, building Legos to unwind, or co-creating projects like my podcast Pencil to Podcast, which explores pedagogy and the student-teacher experience.

When it comes to technology, I’d call myself “chronically online,” always keeping up with trends, current topics, and digital conversations. For me, it’s more than just scrolling; it’s about staying connected and relatable to my students. While I’ve never been the biggest video gamer, I’ve always been fascinated by how things work. As a kid, one of my favorite shows was How It’s Made, and that curiosity has stayed with me as a life-long learner.

I’m especially excited about this class because I love interactive media, and electronic literature falls right under that umbrella. I see it as a powerful way to make literature more engaging and appealing to a generation that loves everything digitized. I’m here to learn, explore, and (hopefully) bring some of those lessons into my own classrooms.I’m excited to learn from all of you, diving into the world of electronic literature, and to share this creative journey together.