What Happens When I Experiment with Locative Writing...

I am determined to create the project I had originally intended: using typography at different locations. Unfortunately, these are some not so pretty surfaces. I'll have to wait for more ideal locations and conditions.

I don't want to take every note from Shirley Jackson's "Snow" and only use snow for words, but it's surprisingly difficult to find mud without rocks on this campus.

I'll return to this project some day soon I hope.

"Sit With Me" Locative Project

As cliche as it can seem, campus has been the most important location to my life. Despite the traveling I've done, this has been a home I've made. So I decided to celebrate the location and the two and a  half years I've been here. I wanted to demonstrate what it means to me that I met my best friend at this location. 

I originally wanted to make a Locative Narrative that resembled "Snow" by Shelley Jackson, but if I wanted to make typography, I could only find a few sights on campus with a soft, flat surface. If only it had rained more. 

I chose to use Google Maps as my tool to demonstrate this narrative. I actually really enjoy how this turned out and have put below the full text, though it is short. While I have listed in a chronological timeline, you can view them in whatever order you feel. The locations of the events are what matter to me more so than the order.

I didn't want to pick out every single location that demonstrated how our relationship grew, just the ones that are the most important to me. Hence why it is in first person primarily. After walking around campus, I realized that my favorite thing to do with my favorite person is to just be still, sit a while. So I tried to capture some locations on campus that meant something to me when I sat there with him.



I was new and unprepared. All I had to do was turn to see the laugh that I knew would belong to someone important. We were sitting, he and I. I was sitting one row ahead with only him in my sights when I turned around. He wore the same shirt I had: light blue, white text. I couldn't hide my smile. 
Down the hall. He was just around the corner from me. Walk with me. Talk with me. 
Sit with me. "Sit with me," he called across the room. English Composition I. I was taken.
Hours and hours. Fog in front of our faces in the cold air. Hours of us on this bench. He took the time to know me. He gave me his coat to sit longer. Hours before he kissed me. He kissed me until morning.
"You're my favorite person." his shoulder being my familiar lounge for almost two years now. Rain dances under the lights and I'm wrapped in him. His hoodie, his arms, his smell. I couldn't be warmer. I sit with him for hours.
Home. This blanket, this wall, and this nook in an otherwise shitty dorm is home. Sit with me. Stay with me. 

"Urban Decays" Generative Project

Taroko Gorge poems are interesting in that they never stop generating content. They are the epitome of Generative Literature for giving a new text at every view, using a logarithm as a set of "rules" for generating the text, and questions the role of an author.

I decided to take Taroko Gorge code and change the subject matter to be about makeup. Specifically, Urban Decay makeup. While most of the verbs consist of makeup techniques and gestures, the nouns and adjectives are terms of the face, makeup textures, and Urban Decay cosmetic names. I chose names that could be ambiguous and taken in one of two ways with the title: those familiar with the brand would know these colors, and those who don't know it could end up with a different, more literal interpretation. "Urban Decays" could be taken as literally city rot and my poem of random smudges, gunmetal, busted, blackouts, etc.

This project took some html that I was fine with until it came to completion. Being generative, I couldn't seem to find a way of hosting it without some lag time. So please excuse my hot mess html before viewing my "Urban Decays" poem.

My Interactive Narrative: The Company of Wolves

I am obsessed with the horror genre of film and books. So I thought it would be perfect to combine the both of them into an interactive novel-like structure.

One of my favorite movies is The Company of Wolves, a British-gothic horror from the 1980's. It is based off of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and they both use cues from werewolf lore and Little Red Riding Hood tales. Something I love the most about the film is the use of physical effects (I will always appreciate them to computer generated).

In the spirit of the Halloween season (aka the greatest time of year), I wanted to develop a project that really told all the stories within the story of The Company of Wolves. I took quotes from both the film and The Bloody Chamber and then created my own story by filling in the rest and tweaking some endings here and there. I wanted to be able to move through the stories without any definite direction. Overall, I think it turned out pretty well using a flipbook maker. It was hard to find a free maker that gave me exactly what I wanted but FlipSnack definitely gave me the most. To link stories together, I put them in both the flipbook and a blog on WordPress.

To navigate this interactive story, you can either go to the DigitalWolvesProject page and read from there or follow the story through the flip book.

I'd like to add, most images are from the film but several images including the one shown above and the cover were edited by me.



I suggest reading it in fullscreen, but to open a link you must either have your pop-up blocker off or escape fullscreen and click on the widget.

Mambo No. 5 Disney Mashup

This project was based off of the idea of "remixing" and appropriative narratives. That can consist of taking pre-existing ideas or products and shaping them in a different way (through editing chronology or audio, overlaying different artifacts, or in some cases just changing authorship).

With three other classmates (Rachel Addoms, Kayla Stockdale, and Kylie Truscello), I was able to do not only a collaborative project, but an appropriative one. Two of these classmates, Kayla and Kylie, worked with me on my recent Pinterest project, so don't forget to check that out!

Our main goal in mind was to create something light-hearted that appealed to nostalgia and humor. We are all "90's babies" and that meant having some iconic entertainment in our childhoods. With that in mind, we chose to appropriate different dancing clips from both new and old animated Disney movies. The result in mind being a dance sequence, we needed a song that almost every person our age has heard a million times and still hasn't tired of it. We chose Lou Bega's "Mambo No. 5" (I know, basically the best dance song ever made).

Overlaying this song lined up perfectly with our video montage and it was actually a fun experience to polish our project up to make certain clips match the beat. We mostly used various YouTube videos and cut them to our liking on iMovie. A lot of our footage was from Tarzan's "Trashing the Camp" scene because of just how much their movements went with the song.

All in all, I could not be more pleased with the result and how easy it was working with my group. The video turned out cute, clean, and fulfilled our goal of nostalgic entertainment from our childhoods.

Upcoming Writing Project! Birdman Analysis

Last year I had turned in a final paper on the topic of Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) for my American Literary course. The movie is riddled with references to Raymond Carver works and even a little Macbeth. It was a paper that I struggled with but enjoyed writing because I am a diehard movie lover. I adored this movie and everything about it and jumped on the chance to write about not just the literary importance, but the cinematic value and themes of "reality versus perception" that the film explores.

With the advice of one of UPJ's Literature professors, Dr, Jeremy Justus, I'm returning to this paper and focusing more on those themes of reality. I'm hoping to really dig into this project and get a bearing for film analysis. I'm hoping, too, that the material I develop has enough weight that I can present again at UPJ's undergraduate research conference, SPACE. Even without that honor in mind, I want to polish this for my own growth in writing and humanities research ability.

To give a preview on what this will be about, I'm focusing mainly on the three realities of Birdman. There is the objective reality of the film's world, the subjective reality of Riggan Thomson's (Michael Keaton) mind, and the objective reality of the audience's world. I'll be looking at the diegetic elements of the film as evidence of which reality is present at which time and explain where they parallel.

I actually made three completely different drafts for the original paper and am pulling from all four versions along with additional research for this updated project. There is still a lot to decide if I want to keep the literary allusions as a topic (because they are important still) or if I want to keep this purely cinematic. For now, I'm just excited to be working on this topic I love so much again.

Let's Talk About It

Collaborative writing is a great way to expand on ideas or create really interactive dialogue. What's even better about it is that you really don't have a set template for what makes collaborative writing or projects. Twitter threads, image storytelling, google docs, the possibilities are limitless.

I collaborated with two classmates of mine, Kayla Stockdale and Kylie Truscello, by using a Pinterest account. We came together with a common academic interest in communications. Both Kayla and Kylie have communication majors and I have a communication minor (though I'm always tempted to dual major). We decided Pinterest was a great medium for collaborative writing in that we can use shared pins and talk about them individually through captions, but organize them into a bigger idea through boards.

With this Pinterest account, the three of us all pinned different topics, tips, and infographics of why communication is important in our daily lives. Our topics include communication in the workplace, in relationships (both plutonic and romantic), when resolving conflict, and other methods like intercultural or non-verbal communication. Our goal was to demonstrate the importance of different communication strategies using Pinterest to organize our information. The project itself was actually very fun and I was impressed with just how many informative pins were available on this topic. Check out our Pinterest board and see if you learn something new!

Visit Let's Talk About's profile on Pinterest.