Some years ago I learned, by accident, that postcards offered a way to shatter
the mirror of the everyday and to enter into whatever I was writing. I would
look through a goodly sized pile and, by the time I was done, my brain had chased
its tail and I was ready to say what I needed. -- Lawrence Sutin Thinking Beyond the Page
Combining Text and Other Media
Hypertext
Exploring a Nonfiction Hypertext
Try It My mother's given me her mother's stuffed cabbage recipe, and I've
spent the last several days staring at it, trying to write an essay about my
memories of this particular dish. The work's not going very well; I'm bored
and restless and ready to give up. But after a while, I realize it's not really
the recipe that intrigues me, but the yellowed and stained paper itself: a sheet
torn from a notepad, personalized with "From the desk of Sandra Miller" in flowing
calligraphy over the top. The recipe is neatly typed, with handwritten amendments
written in the margins, notes to herself with more precise measurements and
corrections. I look at a few other recipes she gave me, some of them on scraps of paper
in my grandmother's handwriting: a mysterious dish that combines Pistachio Instant
Pudding with cool whip, another with chopped meat and cranberry sauce. The handwriting
is a more hurried version of my mother's, scrabbling in light ink over the page.
And I realize that the essay I want to write is not so much about the food,
but about the connections between women over the years: the instructions we
give to one another, the immortality we achieve through the food that arises
and disappears in our kitchens. At the same time, I understand that the written word, alone, will never fully
convey this sense of connection and history. I must use the paper itself, the
artifact combined with the text, the words in my grandmother's handwriting,
the typewritten words of my mother. I get some textured paper to act as a backdrop,
and before I know it I'm creating a series of "recipe cards," each one layered
with color photocopies of the recipes, copies of old sepia-toned photographs,
my own typewritten text, a copy of a wedding certificate written in Hebrew,
and strands of a letter my mother wrote me when she sent the recipes. I've got
all these things spread out on my kitchen table, along with glue sticks and
scissors and big index cards, and I'm happily gluing away for hours, the time
flying by. -- Brenda Thinking Beyond the Page Sometimes, words alone just won't cut it. You find yourself with a topic, or
a memory, whose complexity demands a form that is more three-dimensional. In
"The Lyric Essay" chapter, we touched on how form, itself, can sometimes determine
the content of an essay, rather than vice-versa. In mixed-media works and hypertext,
the relationship between form and content becomes even more symbiotic, with
the form becoming both a highly visible architectural component of the piece
and an artistic statement in itself. It can be a little daunting to think beyond the page in creative nonfiction.
Writing can be hard enough; why add any other medium to complicate it? But what
our students have found, over and over, is that the opportunity to expand the
means of creative expression becomes quite exhilarating. With mixed media projects,
the text becomes tactile, and the work takes on layers that lend new meaning
to the prose. Rarely do we feel our work in such a concrete way, with
bits of it sticking to our fingers, or wavering under layers of gauze, or branching
out into cyberspace. Suddenly we're allowed entry into the realm of the artist,
who appears at the end of her workday splattered with paint, a visual testament
to the work she's accomplished. As we work in mixed media, the essay becomes more mutable, and therefore takes
on that vivacious tenor of the unexpected. In hypertext, the prose no longer
remains confined to one dimension, but takes off on many branches that encourage
a reader/writer collaboration. In both cases, the forms allow for the writer
to create the distance necessary for the piece to flourish outside the confines
of the writer's, and the reader's, preconceptions. Combining Text and Other Media In his book A Postcard Memoir (see Anthology for excerpt), Lawrence
Sutin juxtaposes images from his extensive postcard collection with the brief,
vivid reminiscences and ruminations these images inspire in him. The postcards
both inspire and illuminate the prose, and Sutin uses fragmentation and interplay
between image and text to powerful effect. For example, in his piece "Boy and
Man," Sutin uses an old black-and-white portrait of a father and son to ruminate
on the nature of his relationship to his own father. He sees in this photograph
not just the figures of a man and a boy, but the emotional underpinnings and
connection implied by the placement of a hand on a leg, in the identical smiles,
in the way man and boy imperceptibly lean toward one another.
Sutin does not spend time describing the photograph; in fact the prose itself
hardly refers to it. Rather, his own story arises from the image, and the details
he chooses enable us to look at this photograph through his eyes. In this way,
the reader becomes a participant in the creative process. As Sutin remarked
in an interview with the Bellingham Review:
The interplay of text and images was very important, and I think it allows the
reader to jump off to consider their own lives because the images are sort of
shared islands between us. The reader can float along with the image in [his]
own way, too, because it's clear that these aren't real photographs of my life,
so there is a shared quality to them.
By using the form of postcards to tell his own story, Sutin automatically gives
himself limits that both contain and liberate his personal history. The "public"
images lead him into private memories he may not have expected. The form of
the postcard also necessitated brief vignettes, rather than drawn-out narratives.
"Obviously many, if not all, of my pieces are longer than you could fit on the
back of a postcard," he explains, "even if you had very spidery, tiny handwriting.
But the idea of the postcard being a brief recollection, and in my mind, an
intense recollection was something that I used."
The postcard medium also carries within itself, intrinsically, the intent of
communication -- an intimate yet public communication between writer and reader.
After all, a postcard is meant only for the recipient, but in the course of
its journey can be read by many eyes. By working in the genre of the postcard,
Sutin automatically brings these philosophical issues to bear on his writing,
and so he is able to craft a voice that is intimate and public at the same time.
We read these messages to ourselves, but then tape them to the fridge for anyone
to see.
This mix of image and text is a relatively simple example of how a writer can
use other media in her work. But such projects can be as simple or complex as
the material demands and in accord with the artistic skills the writer has accrued
along the way. The field of Book Arts abounds with work that combines several
different types of media together to create new work that pushes through the
concept of a traditional book. For example, book artist Susan King created a
piece entitled Treading the Maze: an artist's book of daze. King had
spent several months traveling in Europe and was then diagnosed with breast
cancer on her return. The book that came out of these two experiences charts
her travels through these different types of terrain. "The artwork that resulted
from these two journeys," King writes, "uses the maze at Chartres Cathedral
in France as the structure of the book. It places the reader/viewer in the role
of a pilgrim, confronted with unexpected images, stories that look back and
forth in time, and a sense of what it means to walk into the maze of illness
and back again. "
Our students, though not training as artists, have created a plethora of artifacts
incorporating written texts, visual arts, photographs, and whatever other medium
the student finds appropriate. We've had students incorporate their own music
into computer-generated slide presentations, or create a narrative printed on
strips of paper baked into fortune cookies. We've read essays pinned in fragments
on a screen door or "planted" as specimens from an arboretum, each with its
own fragment of a nature essay attached. In this last case, the student, Anna,
asked her classmates to choose the pieces at random and read the fragments aloud.
We all got our fingers covered in dirt, and in so doing collaborated with Anna
in creating the shape of the final essay. Another student, Jennifer, created
an address book that held pictures of her family and accompanying narratives
about each of the places she had lived or visited. As we flipped through the
address book -- with its familiar alphabetical tabs and lined paper -- her personal
story became our own as we held in our hands this everyday object transformed
into art.
Mixed-media works are, perhaps, the perfect vessel for creative nonfiction because
you connect with your reader in such a concrete way. The use of different media
in your creative nonfiction work also allows you to discover new sources of
creativity within yourself. Too often, we get bogged down in habitual ways of
writing; the requirement to use other media forces us to approach writing from
a fresh perspective, and adds a wonderfully tactile quality to our personal
expressions. Hypertext
The largest and most evolving literary marketplace right now is without a doubt
the World Wide Web. We've all witnessed the cyberspace revolution of the last
few decades -- the emergence of a giant repository of word, image, sound and
video that can (assuming you have a computer) be accessed free or for the relatively
low fee charged by a service provider like America Online. Almost every library
in the country has Web-accessed computers patrons can use for free. Much of
the "room" in cyberspace is still largely devoted to print, taking the form
of millions of websites -- clusters of images and documents you access by typing
in their addresses, or URLs.
The existence of cyberspace means that anyone learning a fairly simple coding
program can post on the World Wide Web his or her own essays, diaries, and artwork,
or create a sophisticated literary journal, without the cost of paper and printing.
The accessibility and low cost of web access, compared to other forms of publishing,
has led to an explosion of literary experimentation, as writers begin to discover
the possibilities of this medium. What Is Hypertext?
Technically speaking, anything written on the Web is hypertext. But for literary
purposes the term is used to mean writing that uses a "link-node" organization,
or an organization somehow similar to link-node movements. This means that embedded
in the literary work -- which much of the time will incorporate visual elements,
such as photos and artwork, in addition to text -- will be links that, once
activated by the click of the mouse or some other action by the reader, will
move the reader to another screen. Each screen is a new chunk, or "node," of
the work. Note that in hypertext we refer to screens or some other term
rather than pages of text. One of the goals of hypertext is to get away
from page-bound thinking.
In a traditional hypertext site designed to be navigated easily (navigation
is the term for moving through a work in hypertext), linking words are highlighted
-- blued -- so the viewer can immediately move to the word or phrase of interest,
such as This week's events, click on it, and be done. Early literary
hypertexts generally worked through the same kind of highlighting links, and
many still do, to great effect -- you may read an essay and use links to follow
a particular story line or learn more about a character that appeals to you.
As hypertext has grown in sophistication, however, authors use many alternatives
to traditional blued linking: different colors or highlights can be used to
link, but links can also be embedded in artwork (as we'll see later on in this
chapter), made invisible until the cursor hits them and changes shape, or taken
out of the viewer's control -- he may find himself swept off the page at the
end of a sentence.
To write hypertext, you must gain some mastery of an HTML (hypertext mark-up
language) program. These have evolved from cumbersome hand-inserted codes to
programs that function much like straight word processing programs. Called WYSIWYG
(What You See Is What You Get) programs, these simpler programs produce before
you the screen as you want it to appear, hiding the code. You may already have
some HTML under your belt; many people do. If not, and you're interested in
working in hypertext, the programs are not difficult to learn. Many users teach
themselves; many have skilled friends happy to do some tutoring. We like the
Dreamweaver and StorySpace hypertext programs, but there are many other programs
out there. If you have your own computer and it came with a software package,
you may already have a basic HTML program, such as Microsoft Explorer's or Netscape
Communicator's. Hypertext and Nonfiction
At first, as writers explored the implications of the World Wide Web and web
publishing, they tended to reproduce the page on the screen. But it soon became
clear that reading in cyberspace is a new experience. Gradually writers began
to awaken to the differences of writing on-line, and to use those differences.
Think about this: even in the most leaping lyric essay, the printed page has
by its spatial presence a top-to-bottom organization. In other words, there
are few forms so successfully experimental that you don't read from the top
down. Hypertext is spatial in every direction, truly nonsequential -- nothing
follows by necessity anything else in the essay. You can read screen by screen,
or read only the first few words of the first screen, and so on. You may come
to the screen that describes a wedding and only navigate the links that lead
to the engagement much later, determining chronology as a reader. Link-node
hypertext branches out, and allows choice to the reader, who creates the text
through interaction. It offers different reading/viewing paths, and so it isn't
a closed, fixed work but one in a constant process of shifting and revision.
(There are hypertexts offering branching organizations that take the choice
away from the viewer; these variations are beyond the scope of this discussion).
Though links in hypertext were originally compared to footnotes -- words that
could be followed out of the text to another place, at the end of the chapter
or bottom of the page -- it's a false comparison. With footnotes, a clear primary
text exists. With hypertext, it often does not: the reader interacts with the
work and can make her own primary text, possibly following only the sports links
in an essay, or only ones having to do with horticulture, or surfing a little
of everything all the way through.
Authors and critics of hypertext use the term decentered -- it can (though
doesn't necessarily) become impossible to say where the core of a hypertext
work lies. French critics Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari compare this writing
strategy more poetically to the branching systems of rhizomatic plants such
as mints and buttercups, plants spreading via a loose root system that establishes
nodes for new plants but has no base: "any point on a rhizome can be connected
with any other, and must be. This is very different from a tree or root, which
fixes a point and thus an order." Vannevar Bush, a mid-century thinker who anticipated
the development of the World Wide Web, pointed out that such a writing system
comes much closer to the way we think and learn: nonsequentially, interactively,
working off association and exploration.
The branching, associational, and inherently lyric quality of hypertext writing
forms a natural fit with much nonfiction, particularly the type of nonfiction
we describe in Chapter Eleven, "The Lyric Essay." If you tend to braid your
work, with different strands of writing moving between each other, or jump via
association, as Albert Goldbarth does in "After Yitzl," (he moves from love
to Mormon marriage to a cult called the Unarians in one paragraph) or juxtapose
mirroring experiences (as Brenda Miller in "Basha Leah" mirrors her mother's
hysterectomy with her own travel), hypertext might be an apt form for you. Hypertext
also offers a natural way to use visual images, with text or on screens of its
own, and other media as well -- music, chanting, nature sounds, all have been
used effectively in hypertexts.
In hypertext you can make your leaps optional, creating a main text readers
can stay with, choosing not to follow the links for Mormon marriage; or you
can actually link your piece to a Mormon website, possibly creating a stronger
visual union between your love and Mormonism than words could. The point is,
if you work with similar strategies, it helps to know hypertext writing offers
new ways of negotiating them. As teachers, we've had students use outside links
to CIA sites, POW/MIA sites, army training sites--links that were devastating
in their surprise and visual power when we viewed them.
If you mirror your essays, you can create the mirroring more visually, layering
or splitting the screen or creating meaning through the placement of links.
A mirroring of home events with traveling events such as Brenda Miller's, for
example, could find the links actually embedded in letters from home, recreated
on the screen.
Likewise, if you find yourself also drawn to the use of visual elements in your
writing, and consider the use of interactivity and decentering exciting aesthetic
possibilities, you may want to investigate hypertext. There are a myriad of
ezines now, discussed further on in this chapter, eagerly looking for well-crafted
hypertext works. One side benefit of this mode of composition is that visual
elements become much easier to publish; if you can present your work to an interested
editor in the proper format (with images saved in a format such as "jpg"), the
editor, barring copyright problems, can use them. With print publications the
limits of the page can be daunting for visual imagery. Exploring A Nonfiction Hypertext
To help you see what can be done with hypertext we are going to show you samples
from one of our favorite hypertext essays, Shelly Jackson's "My Body: A Wunderkammer"
(URL: http://www.altx.com/thebody/body.html).
Of course, viewing this work on the Web, as hypertext, is an irreproducible
experience, but this sample screen will give you an idea of the form. The screen
we've reproduced here is the main one of the essay, though not the first screen
you come to: first you find a title page done in the same visual style; there
are no blued links, but clicking anywhere on the title page takes you to this
screen, unless you choose the "Notes" option.
Though most of "My Body" consists of words, we enter the essay with an overwhelming
visual statement: a woman's body, boxed and fragmented, except for the head.
The architecture of this image, as we stated in Mixed Media, has already shaped
our responses to the words. Next to the boxed drawing of the author are words
for the various boxed parts -- "arms," "stomach," etc. The hand-drawn, crosshatched
script ties the words directly to the crosshatched drawing, making it clear
there's no distinction here between word and image (indeed, she draws on herself
a tattoo of an ampersand, a typographical mark). Image is text: text, image.
The words and body are further drawn together by the fact that the boxed arm
and word "arms" are both links to the same screen -- a screen in which viewers
see a close-up of the illustration beside text in which the author explores,
in memoir form, that part of her body.
At twelve I did more chin-ups than anyone else in my class, and the boys came
running jubilantly across the playground and caught me up like a sports hero.
The girls were exhorted to manage one chin-up. That was considered sufficient.
I looked at the other girls' arms and knew I was a different animal. It did
not seem possible that I could ever have wound up with arms like theirs, no
matter how religiously I abstained from climbing, swinging, sawing wood. The
scant flesh lying so mild over the bone, the slender arms, as uniformly tubular
as sleeves. The thin wrists, the soft knuckleless hands. I couldn't admire them,
nor could I despise them with any passion. Does the moose despise the antelope?
My arms are an anatomist's fantasy, muscle and bone in a thin sheath of skin.
Within these nodes of text/illustration are more links, indicated by bluing.
These may lead to screens of writing that further elaborate on themes from the
lead-in screens, often with a more philosophical and conceptual approach. Or,
just as often, they jump the reader to other body parts. The link on "I looked
at the other girls' arms" leads to the "hand" screen. The reader is invited
to share the intricate connections Jackson makes within her body, to make her
own connections, to see the body as inextricably interlinked. The navigation
of this long work is a work in itself. Try It Combining Text and Other Media
Go to a place, such as antique store or a used bookstore, which sells old postcards.
Buy at least three and bring them home to your writing desk. Using Lawrence
Sutin's A Postcard Memoir as a model, write brief vignettes that rise
from the images. Try to focus on what lies beneath the surface of these pictures.
Use your imagination. Pair the images with the texts for your final presentation. Variation for a group: Each person brings in several postcards, either
from their own collection or bought recently at a store. Mix these postcards
up on a central table. Each person chooses one or two at random, then writes
for several minutes. Exchange postcards and repeat the process for as long as
you like. Then share at least one of the pieces with the group.
Create a mixed media piece that uses other kinds of documents and images along
with your own prose. Make several photocopies of these documents so that you
can cut them up and experiment. Create collages, paying attention to the kinds
of textures you create with these elements. One way to get started: write between
the lines of a document you're using. Write your story, by hand or with a typewritten,
between the lines of a birth certificate, divorce decree, etc., so that the
language of that document -- Asian male, 6 pounds, and so forth -- suggests
the direction of your piece.
Create a mixed media piece using at least one natural object as your focus.
Collaborate with a photographer, a musician, a painter, or a sculptor to create
a mixed-media work for presentation to an audience. Hypertext
Edward Falco, in response to a question about how authors start a piece in hypertext
(with all its many components) said, "There are probably as many different ways
of writing hypertext as there are hypertext writers." Some authors start with
a print piece and gradually accrete other nodes of material; some write directly
to a hypertext program like StorySpace. One method we've found useful is to
have everyone assemble index cards and actually map out the architecture of
a site- -- including visual elements like photos and art, if you plan to use
them. Lay the potential screens out in front of you, and see where links would
occur, and practice different navigational options. Hypertext exists spatially
in a way print does not, so seeing it spatially can ignite ways of using the
form.
2. You can also begin by starting a simple piece directly in a hypertext program,
if you know one, or can find an easy one to learn (look around for friends who
can tutor you). Challenge yourself to use just three text links (text linked
to other screens of text), for instance, and only use outside links for visual
images. Remember, most museums and artists have websites you can link to --
Back buttons will take viewers back to your site, or you can plan to end at
an outside link. Starting out in hypertext by trying to scan in artwork or conquer
PhotoShop may give you the false impression that this form is too difficult
to master. It isn't; it's a series of small steps. Start with a few little steps,
and you will most likely be excited by the possibilities you see before you. Suggestions for Further Reading In Our Anthology Sutin, Lawrence, from A Postcard Memoir
Elsewhere Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence, Nick Bantock Treading the Maze: An Artist's Book of Daze, Susan King Beehive (http://beehive.temporalimage.com Blue Moon Review (http://www.thebluemoon.com) Brevity (http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/brevity.html) Eastgate (right now, Eastgate is the largest publisher of hypertext literature
-- on CD-ROM -- and their web site has a great deal of information as well
as "reading rooms" of hypertext works: http://www.eastgate.com) Electronic Literature Organization (http://www.eliterature.org) Jackson, Shelly, "My Body: A Wunderkammer" (http://www.altx.com/thebody)
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2004 McGraw-Hill Higher Education