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Late last year, whilst in the final throes of my doctorate in Creative Writing, I was invited by my supervisor at the University of Southampton to join an interdisciplinary Leverhulme Trust-funded research project entitled: ‘StoryPlaces: Exploring the Poetics of Location-Based Narratives’. Working alongside the university’s creative writing undergraduates, professional writers such as Philip Hoare, and colleagues from English (Verity Hunt) and History (James Jordan), my role on this project was to write a short story about nineteenth-century Southampton for two techies investigating how the latest location based apps (for example, GPS mapping) could grow mobile, location-aware digital storytelling into something that “[escapes] the confines of the desktop and [intertwines] in new and interesting ways with the physical world” (Millard, Hargood, Jewell, Weal, 2013: 1). ‘But I know nothing about computers,’ I responded, before agreeing to join the project.

A few months later I was invited to the university’s school of Electronics and Computer Science – a contemporary glass-fronted, air-conditioned, high-security, sparsely-populated and altogether alien establishment when compared with my nonagenarian campus inside which droves of students can be ‘seen’ and ‘heard’, tatty brown mock-leather sofas abound, the comforting smells of coffee and pizza pervade and cast-iron radiators produce year-round balmy/barmy temperatures that warm already roasted cockles ─ to attend my first meeting with the techies, Dave Millard, Senior Lecturer of Computer Science, and Charlie Hargood, Research Fellow in Web And Internet Science (WAIS). At this point in my digital-fiction-writing journey, the task, or ‘commission’ as it now appears on my curriculum vitae, was still not entirely clear to me: as far as I knew, I was simply going to write a story about Southampton that would be used by my colleagues to make some sort of digital advance in this mysterious realm they called location-based hypertext fiction. Armed with my Moleskine and pen – not even a laptop or tablet device ─ I prepared to note down the following innocuous particulars: word count, submission deadline, required genre, theme and setting. Meanwhile, the whiteboard was peppered with what looked to be, to a sufferer of mathematical anxiety at least, algebraic equations. These algebraic equations were in fact a diagrammatic representation of my colleagues’ conceptual sculptural hypertext model, a model which sought to “create interactive, location aware narratives […] where the [reader of the story] is the principle locus of activity, and interaction is accomplished by moving through a physical space (typically carrying a smart device […] as the interaction mechanism for the virtual space)” (2013: 1, 2). Clearly, I wore my mathematical anxiety upon my face as plainly as some wear their heart upon their sleeve because what followed was a patient explanation of the above in language I could understand. Crucially, ‘Nodes’ became pages; ‘pinned’ nodes became the pages of my story that would only be made available to the reader of my story once they were situated in a predetermined location specified by me; ‘unpinned’ nodes became the pages that could be read by my reader in any location i.e. of their choosing; while sequences of unpinned nodes known as ‘stacks’ became the pages that might or might not be pinned to a specific location, but that I had determined must be consumed in a specific order. (Even as I write this, I’m still not confident that my interpretation of the ‘node’ ─ and I take full responsibility for it ─ is accurate, but it is with this particular understanding of the node that I forged ahead and wrote my digital location-based story.)

As I have already stated, the story was to be located in nineteenth-century Southampton but was to feature the city’s Emigrants’ Home – a home built to accommodate the influx of emigrants who were entering the city to await transportation by ship to the New World. Furthermore, in order to provide a walking and reading experience that would last between thirty and sixty minutes, the story had to total 5,000 words in length, be connected to between three and six additional locations, and provide a narrative capable of being traversed in more than one way. In response to this brief, I duly wrote ‘The Destitute and The Alien’, the synopsis of which follows:

“It is 1895 and Jack the Ripper now lives in the City of Southampton. Newly promoted to caretaker of John Doling’s Emigrants’ Home in Albert Road, he spends his days fumigating the new arrivals and his nights visiting prostitutes in nearby Simnel Street. For seven years he’s kept his knife sheathed and his predilection for murder and dissection supressed. But with the arrival of Golda – a beautiful Jewish girl fleeing from persecution in the Russian Pale – comes the reawakening of Jack’s psychotic compulsions. Will Golda survive her stay at the Emigrants’ Home to board the ship to take her to the New World? Or will her final destination be the cold mortuary slab? To find out, charge your smartphone, don your walking shoes and head for the City of Southampton. In ‘The Destitute and The Alien’, streets you never knew existed, and likewise histories, await your exploration…”

I chose to locate ‘The Destitute and The Alien’ in the following places: The Emigrants’ Home; Simnel Street; Queens Park; the French Garden in Town Quay Park; the White Star Line’s Head Office, Canute Chambers; The Old City Walls; The Frog and Frigate Pub; The Genting Club, and Dock Gate 4.

Six of my locations: The Emigrants’ Home, Queens Park, The French Garden in Town Quay Park, Simnel Street, Canute Chambers, The Old City Walls. Photographs by Tory L. Dawson, 2016

In order to create more complex digital interactions and experiences for the reader, I was also encouraged by my colleagues to attach temporal as well as locational conditions to the story. This I was able to achieve when relaying the historical fact that before the Emigrants’ Home was constructed, many emigrants were forced to spend nights sleeping rough in Queens Park. To help the reader visualize this scene, I decided that the relevant page/node should only be made available to the reader in Queens Park after dark. (In the interests of keeping the reader safe, I also attached the condition that this node/page would only be made available when there was more than one reader present in this location i.e. a group of three or more.) In terms of genre, the choice was mine alone. However, since my story had to be located in nineteenth-century Southampton, a Neo-Victorian sensation thriller seemed the natural choice since, like location-based fiction, “Proximity is, indeed, one great element of sensation” (Mansel, 1863: 484). I also wanted this story to be a ‘page-turner’ not some thinly veiled didactic tour-guide that bored my reader and failed to breathe life into my chosen locations. I imagined the digital location-based fiction equivalent of a ‘page-turner’ to be one that compels the reader to hurry, not amble, to the next location in order to access the next page/node of the story. To achieve this, I knew I would have to ensure my reader was totally immersed in the Victorian setting. However, in order to reach the story’s Victorian places, the reader would have to pass, and therefore experience, Southampton’s twenty-first century places such as its high-rise tower blocks, car parks and shopping malls. It was then that I became interested in anthropologist Marc’s Augé’s theory of the ‘non-place’ which he describes as “a place that cannot be defined as relational, historical, or concerned with identity” (Augé, 1995: 77, 78).

Southampton’s ‘non-places’. Photographs by Tory L. Dawson, 2016

As far as I could see, my story was located in a geographical area that was littered with Augé’s ‘non-places’. What was I to do about them? Was I to acknowledge these ‘non-places’ by means, perhaps, of a dual narrative, or simply ignore them in a bid to preserve/maintain the nineteenth-century setting? I began to view these ‘non-places’ as potential saboteurs capable of causing my story to fail and by extension, my reader to amble between locations. In response, I spent many hours at the locations, travelling between them, attempting to view them as my reader might. Ultimately, I decided that Southampton’s ‘non-places’ would not be ignored and that it was better to acknowledge them directly. Thus, the narrator of ‘The Destitute and The Alien’ invites the reader to take some time away from the narrative to consider their own first impressions of Southampton. The reader is made to ask the narrator: “Victorian Southampton or twenty-first century Southampton?” Before the narrator replies:

“You can see how hard it’s been to keep you in Victorian Southampton when contemporary structures such as the one before you on the corner of Albert Road, intrude. (Betwixt you and I, dear reader, these ugly modern architectural excretions have caused me more than one attack of the vapours.) I have often had to consider how best to proceed. Have you ever been present when an upright elderly relative has loudly let one fly in company? Consider what might be one’s reaction? The unpleasant eructation is generally ignored”.

This narrative exchange is designed to enable the reader to acknowledge Southampton’s ‘non-places’ before swiftly returning them to the story’s Victorian setting where, hopefully, they’ll feel compelled to hurry on to the next location to discover what becomes of Golda and Jack.

I began the StoryPlaces project claiming to know ‘nothing about computers’ but it would have been more accurate to say that I knew nothing about digital locative fiction. Now that my participation in the StoryPlaces project is at an end, I don’t claim to be an expert in the field, but what I will say is that I enjoyed writing digital locative fiction and would jump at the chance to do so again.

In 2014, we decided to set up digital platform for the young people of Bristol. As part of a talent development programme and as a magazine to amplify young exciting voices in the city, we wanted to see if we could affect positive change among young people. It would be called Rife Magazine. Rife meaning widespread, everywhere, full of life. Rife, subverting the common usage of the word (‘nepotism is rife’, ‘disease is rife’) in the same way Vice and Crack did.

The biggest question facing us when we were setting up the platform that would become Rife Magazine wasn’t: how should a bunch of people in their 30s chat to young people? It was, why are we, a bunch of people in our 30s, chatting to young people?

If we were going to run a site that presented issue-based articles about things important to young people, spanning politics (local, national and international), social issues, arts and culture and frivolous fun shit, and use those articles to push positive activities for 13-19 year olds in Bristol, well, who better to write it than its target audience?

Let me back up.

Rife Magazine, and her twin sister, Rife Guide, are both aimed at 13-19 year olds in Bristol. On the magazine, we cover everything from the aforementioned politics, social issues, arts and culture, to more fun listicles, like ‘Dessert Island Discs’, an investigation into the best music to listen to when you eat your favourite puddings.

Watershed took over Bristol City Council’s virtual youth service in order to create something young people actually use and engage with. Watershed is known for its creative, collaborative and risk-embracing co-producing attitude to projects. I had recently moved to Bristol and was looking for a creative project to get in to. Interestingly, I’d been hired once, to go into a Young Offender’s Institute and do an inspirational talk as a writer. The day was…terrible. I was awful. The kids were difficult. I didn’t know how to handle them. But I walked away from that experience realising the value of youth work and what the potential for my role could be. So I was really into the idea of creative youth work as a way of putting back into my community.

The first thing we did, before we even had a name for the platform, was to invite a bunch of young people in-house to consult with us on how they used the internet, and what they wanted from a new platform.

Without giving our secrets away, I’ll tell you the three best things I’ve ever learned about working with young people. These are really important, and will help you to not be ‘patronising out-of-touch 1950s stoic dad’ around them should you ever need to do a school visit, run a workshop or make a thing. Ready?

Tips for working with young people:

• They know more than you. Ask questions. Listen. Without judgment or feeling like ‘it was better in my day’.
• Pay them. Feed them. Respect them. Snacks go a long way. Money goes further. If you feel uncomfortable paying young people for consultancy, maybe ask a large advertising/brand consultancy firm what its day-rate is.
• Jeez, look, there isn’t a number three. Okay? If you struggle to talk to teenagers, you probably don’t remember being one.

The way we work on Rife is simple: I don’t decide the content. We have an in-house editorial team who does that for me. We offer 6-month paid jobs, where 18-24 year olds come and work with us. I mentor them, help them to create digital content, make videos, tell stories and promote those stories on social media. Because obviously, in a world saturated with content, the worst thing we can do is create something and publish it online and then take the rest of the day off to watch Netflix. We have to push the content out, seed it with key influencers, manipulate the metadata and source the right imagery.

The ideas generated by our in-house team is very much based around what’s important to them. I try to balance the content between the personal and the external, the things they are knowledgeable about and the things they are curious about. Often, we run lists and guides to help other young people create things, like set up businesses, go freelance, ask to be paid when someone tries to commission them by telling them it’s ‘good for their profile’.

Every Wednesday, we have an hour meeting to go through the next two weeks’ content schedule. We go through what’s happening in Bristol at the moment (constant travel chaos, a new mayor, Massive Attack’s first gig in near decades,), what issues are irking/delighting our content creators and what other youth projects are up to that might be of interest and spark off a piece of content. We build the schedule, based on ideas pitched. I work with the guys to shape the ideas into pieces of content. Often this involves turning a piece from a vague abstract idea into a story, sourcing interviewees, igniting hot takes and working on production plans for videos.

The genius of this set-up: a broadcast standard set of video equipment provided by Rife, a platform built on a simple wordpress, all the social media accounts we can muster, and a board of post-it notes filled with ideas. We’re only as good as our ideas. The way to keep this momentum fresh, and keep our journalists excited on projects, is to keep the ideas visible, the potential for a new exciting project prominently displayed, and work on a selection of long and short term projects. This means that our journalists can try new things, get better at things they can already do and always feel like the next new thing is around the corner. This set-up allows us to be flexible, adaptative, reactive and also keep the focus on the content. Because we’re only as good as our content.

The learning points for me as a writer, and as an editor, and as a youth worker, have been largely around thinking young people think this and that. It’s been challenging and inspiring to see how brave, adaptive and opinionated they are. How, if you give them the freedom to develop their own voices, where their opinions are valued above all else, then you have a happy, enthusiastic and hard-working workforce who hold a mirror up to Bristol. Getting the team to sit in alongside Watershed’s larger creative department, gives them soft skills like understanding larger more long-term creative strategies, as well as how to conduct yourself in a professional manner. It also means that their opinions, their thoughts and their feedback directly effects all of Watershed’s planning.

This chaotic and collaborative method of working means that we can cast a large net over Bristol, dealing with localised stories and projects as well as covering the larger cultural implications of Beyoncé’s new album. The trick for me is to have a flexible approach and to not be afraid of having no content – because, if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s this: in the right environment, one that is creative, supportive and collaborative, we are never short of ideas.

Nikesh Shukla is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Meatspace, the Costa shortlisted novel Coconut Unlimited and the award-winning novella The Time Machine. He is also the editor of a forthcoming collection of essays by 20 BAME writers, called The Good Immigrant. He wrote the short film Two Dosas and the Channel 4 sitcom Kabadasses. He is the editor of Rife Magazine, a digital platform created for and by 13-19 year olds in Bristol.

I began my PhD in Creative Writing in the autumn of 2012 in the afterglow of the hugely successful London Olympics and Paralympics and on a wave of hope of empowerment and equality for disabled people. However, in reality, the situation for disabled people in Britain was becoming increasingly difficult and has continued to worsen throughout my three years of study.

With my PhD novel, The Summer of Love, I wanted to address this, to find a way to reach out and connect with readers. My novel needed to hypothesise, to examine difficult and disturbing issues arising in the England I was living in and to consider the ‘what if’s’; i.e. what if disabled and vulnerable people became society’s scapegoats and what if this led the way to social cleansing and euthanasia? I needed to find a way, through craft and imagination, as well as applied research, to convince a reader that the power of my novel would carry them through the difficult terrain of politics, of socio-economics and of my own personal, furious, interpretation of the intricacies of contemporary England. To address my research inquiry, my novel had to resonate on many different levels with many different readers, not just be a single aggrieved political tract.

I decided, therefore, to create a novel that hypothetically asks what could happen if the UK government sanctioned state-sponsored euthanasia as a social cost-cutting exercise? It is a fiction about the welfare system, about disability and vulnerability; more than that it is a novel about power and powerlessness, about love, courage and freedom.

For many years it has become a mark of commonplace courtesy and intellectual rigor to note occasions when racism, sexism, or class bias creep into discourse…Yet there is a strange and really unaccountable silence when the issue of disability is raised: the silence is stranger, too, since so much of the left’s criticism has devoted itself to the issue of the body, of the social construction of sexuality and gender. Alternative bodies people this discourse; gay lesbian, hermaphrodite, criminal, medical and so on. But lurking behind these images of transgression and deviance is a much more transgressive and deviant figure; the disabled body. (Davis, 2006: 5)

I needed a disabled protagonist who was not defined by their disability. With regard to this, there were some essential concepts I had to explore in order to deepen my understanding of the current state of play with respect to disability within, and without, literature. It was also important to familiarise myself with work of academics such as Rosemarie Garland Thompson , Rod Michalko, Paul K. Longmore, Georgina Kleege and David Bolt, amongst others who have analysed representations of disability in art, literature and film. I had to become more informed about both the definitions of ‘disability’ and the various models of disability, historical and contemporary. These are cogently analysed in the article ‘Disability, Definitions, Models, Experience’ by Wassermann et al. which states:

The medical model understands a disability as a physical or mental impairment of the individual and its personal and social consequences. It regards the limitations faced by people with disabilities as resulting primarily, or solely, from their impairments. In contrast, the social model understands disability as a relation between an individual and her social environment: the exclusion of people with certain physical and mental characteristics from major domains of social life. Their exclusion is manifested not only in deliberate segregation, but in a built environment and organized social activity that preclude or restrict the participation of people seen or labelled as having disabilities.

In their extreme forms, the medical and social models serve to chart the space of possible relationships between impairment and limitation more than to reflect the actual views of individuals or institutions. (Wasserman et al., 2011: section 2)

I concluded from much of the literature I read and from academic commentary on the texts (Bolt; Garland Thompson,), that female disabled characters were vastly under-represented in literature. This helped me decide on the sex of my own protagonist. She must be female. Her disability? I decided to bestow on her the gift of blindness. Not complete blindness. She would see as I did, therefore she would have tunnel vision, and use a guide dog. This would ensure that I could get the essential detail of her disability right. Being visually impaired (VI) myself, I would be able to draw on my own physical and mental experiences and processes swiftly and accurately.

In this role of writer-practitioner and by using my own understanding of living day-to-day with a degenerating sight condition, I was not just thinking of gritty realism or authenticity per se. My protagonist would be authentically visually impaired, yes. But for a writer ‘authenticity’ is more nebulous as a concept.

As I grappled with this concept, I began to realise that the real impact on the novel from utilising my own direct experience is perhaps more to do with empowerment than authenticity. It can be seen as a reaction to my disability being ‘written about’ by others in the past who may, consciously or not, have exploited it in order to add significance to their own fiction. As the author and winner of the Pen/Bellweather Prize for socially engaged fiction, Susan Nussbaum, notes about her own beautifully crafted debut novel Good Kings, Bad Kings (2013), set in an institution for disabled teenagers in the USA:

None of those people writing books and movies that exploited their disabled characters as “symbols” were disabled themselves…They knew little if anything about the experiences of real disabled people. I knew the world, the jokes, the words, the underground details. I knew all three dimensions, not the tired one dimension they put out there for the public to eat I knew the struggles, the brutality of oppression, the love that held us together. I was the real thing, the authentic article. A genuine crip writer, writing about crips. (Nussbaum, 2013: 303)

I would emphasise that, although I have a visual impairment, I am not a ‘blind’ writer. Imagination has no physical impairment. I am a writer, full stop. The visual impairment gives me access to a different experience and different view-points that I can utilise to further my profession. In The Summer of Love I did want to work with a visually impaired character, partly to test my ability to channel my experiences and partly because visual impairment is a fact of life, like having green eyes or dark hair. It is not so exceptional and should not be treated as such.

However, in an ocular-centric world, blindness still evokes a certain ancient response, even in societies that purport to have an enhanced understanding of the human body and a more inclusive attitude.

It is relevant that my visual impairment, known as Retinitis Pigmentosa, was first diagnosed when I was 21 years old. At the time, I knew no one who was either similarly visually impaired or blind, apart from the occasional Zambian beggars of my childhood, who used to be led from door to door by young children asking for hand-outs, the objects of terrible pity. My response to the possibility of my own total sight loss (as can occur with this condition) was abject, unmitigated, fear. What had I learnt about blindness from literature? Visions of hell from The Day of the Triffids (Wyndham, 1979) and Blindness, (Saramago, 1997) cavorted with the gnarly one-eyed Fates of Greek mythology and filthy eye-patched pirates in Treasure Island (Stevenson, 1883). The blind were to be pitied or avoided, exploited or even hunted like animals. Many authors refused to even contemplate a normal life without sight. It’s better to be dead than blind, intimates Kipling in The Light That Failed (1891) and Conrad in The End of the Tether (1902), where, faced with the onset of blindness, their heroes commit suicide. My future as a globetrotting free spirit suddenly became untenable, unimaginable. When I thought of the blind community I would be joining, I imagined a line of groping, lurching, repulsive beggars, one behind the next, stumbling across my future landscape, and eventually I would have to grasp a shoulder and follow. No one would ever love me. I would end up in a dark corner weaving baskets, head shorn, a thing of pity and horror.

My ignorance of the reality of living with sight loss was hardly my fault given the circumstances. There were no obvious role models for someone with my condition and not even the opthalmologists could offer any encouragement. They often saw me as ‘a condition of the eye’ not as ‘a person’. Beyond the anatomy, physiology and diseases of the eye, they seemed uninterested in the daily life of their patients.

By 2012, however, I was over twenty years on from my original diagnosis and had enough experience of living with chronic sight loss to know a new literary model had to be written, a new paradigm sought. People are not defined by their condition. My VI protagonist would not be either.

I investigated further with help from Bolt’s book on The Metanarrative of Blindness: a Re-reading of Twentieth Century Anglophone Writing, in which he examines representations of blindness in more than forty literary works, including works by Kipling, Joyce, John Millington Synge, Orwell, H G Wells, Sontag and King, describing his work as shedding light on the deficiencies of these representations and sometimes revealing an uncomfortable resonance between these texts and the Anglo-American science of eugenics. (Bolt, 2013). This seemed appropriate given the issues of stigma, separation and potential euthanasia that I would be exploring in the novel manuscript.

His analysis led me to discover a remarkable absence of partially sighted characters in literature and on film. People are either ‘blind’ or ‘sighted’. They may ‘go blind’ and therefore experience vision impairment on their journey, but there are very few people represented with a chronic condition, stable or not. According to the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) website, of the two million people with severe sight impairment in UK, only about 4% are totally blind, and given that one in every nine people over 60 is living with sight loss, it occurred to me that this left a vast swathe of people unrepresented in fiction and film, myself included. This was a gap I determined to fill with my novel.

I did find some interesting representation of visual impairment when it came to memoir, both in films like Blue (Jarman, 1993) and Black Sun (Tan, 2005), and in autobiographical writing. There are many examples of excellent disability memoir, Christy Brown’s My Left Foot (1954) and Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997), to name but two. However, with regard to the experience specific to sight loss, and perhaps because I am searching for a deeper connection when reading these, I have found less well-rounded, less active and more passive writing. John Hull’s Touching The Rock (1990) was given to me by a friend when she heard that I might lose my sight. She said that the book had moved her greatly but personally I found it rather dull and depressing and quickly lost interest. I suspect that my friend had only glanced at it but presumed that I would find something more powerful within it due to my own circumstance. The book is about Hull’s journey to blindness and mixes memoir and flashback, dreams and contemplation, all weighted heavily towards the Christian ideals of ‘bearing up’ and ‘being one with Christ’.

If blindness is a gift, then death is a gift. What shall we give in return for our death? Whatever we are able to give it must be in anticipation for when we receive that final gift, we will have nothing left to give.

But if blindness is a gift and death is a gift, what have we to fear? If darkness is light, then light is darkness….The world, life or death, or the present or the future, all are ours, and we are Christ’s… (Hull, 1990: 108)

Need I go on? I strongly suspect that Touching The Rock is the kind of book given to people ‘like me’ i.e. people with a degenerating sight condition, by well-meaning ‘normal’ friends. This raises the question of who these memoirs are written for. Are they written to give non-disabled people an empathic experience of disability, or to give people becoming disabled a supporting shoulder squeeze? Are they written to shock or shake up the reader, or purely to reaffirm a status quo with a novel-length outpouring of depressing but possibly reassuring ‘coming to terms’ with being a ‘crip’? This confusion can be a problem for a reader, especially within memoir, when someone else’s experience, viewed through the lens of their personality, may irritate more than inform. Candia McWilliams, for instance, wrote her memoir What to Look for in Winter (2010) when she was blinded with blepharospasm, a condition which causes the eyelid to remain permanently shut. Her writing is sumptuous, lucid and poetic, but her all-consuming, self-pity renders her a lugubrious Eeyore:

That we each invent a world I do not deny…Mine feels unwhole to me at present, without sight and without a presence to give love to, through with many beloved absences, but I know that when I write fiction, I can make something external to myself that is whole. If one cannot daily build love, one must make something. I am digging a hole through the dark.

…and one of the reasons, I am sure, that I have been so imprisoned by my blindness is that I was my eyes, my eyes were how I got to being me. My eyes saw the edges of things and the insides of things and permitted me to write novels about these matters. My eyes gave me jokes that led me to friends who enjoyed my company. Without my eyes did I still believe? (McWilliams, 2010: 275-6)

There is a tendency for the ‘blind’ memoir to be either fraught with self-pity or, which in my opinion, is often as bad, plagued by the need to be seen as triumphing over tragedy, with the ‘kill or cure’ tropes of the disability literary canon casting oblique shadows. Helen Keller, Jacques Lusseyran, Jason Roberts and Ray Charles have all written memoirs about overcoming their ‘tragedy’ of sight loss to do extraordinary things against all the odds. They may still be disabled, blind ‘crips’, but they have almost purged themselves of their ‘otherness’ by their courage and spirit. How, in my own novel, and again referring to the original research enquiry, could I address the issues around living as a disabled person without falling into these traps?

I am grateful to Georgina Kleege who punched a hole in this concept of disabled hero as ‘symbol of human fortitude’ in her ingenious examination of Helen Keller’s life and work, Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (2006). In the book, Kleege opens an intimate and lengthy imagined conversation with Keller through a series of letters asking, in fact demanding, that Keller come clean about how she had really felt and what she had really experienced. Kleege notes ‘It was as if her need to be an inspirational icon made it impossible for her ever to express any rage, fear or sorrow, even when her experiences would have prompted these emotions in anyone else. By turns, this baffled and infuriated me’ (Kleege, 2006: ix).

Reading Kleege, I get the sense that what starts in anger, in accusation, gradually mellows through the interrogation and the evocative and moving imagined re-enactments of events in Helen’s life, to a greater understanding:

The subject now is sex. Another aspect of the Helen Keller Myth is that you had no sex life. It’s a myth a lot of people work hard to preserve… They are such pains to promote the idea that you were innocent, pure, sexless. Why, Helen? Why is the idea of your sexuality so threatening? There are several answers. One comes from the impulse to make you a saint. Since blindness, deafness, and other impairments have traditionally been associated with sin, to make yourself admirable, you had to promote the notion of absolute purity. (Kleege, 2006: 45)

There’s more than one way to be a human being – that’s what you told the world. On the surface, it seems a pretty innocuous statement, but in fact it’s quite revolutionary. It forces people to question everything they take for granted as normal. It’s a message that needs to be spoken still. (Kleege, 2006:182)

This need for proof of self-worth has morphed into another cultural stereotype occasionally affixed to disabled people and often associated with the Paralympics, the ‘super crip’ or ‘super human’. And from ‘super crip’ it is not too big a step to ‘inspiration porn’, as nattily coined by the actor and journalist Stella Young. An example of this is the quote by Scott Hamilton, the figure skater and cancer survivor, ‘The only disability is a bad attitude’, which is often plastered over pictures of physically disabled people, usually children, doing ordinary things. As Young remarks:

Let me be clear about the intent of this inspiration porn; it’s there so that non-disabled people can put their worries into perspective. So they can go, “Oh well if that kid who doesn’t have any legs can smile while he’s having an awesome time, I should never, EVER feel bad about my life…”

In this way, these modified images exceptionalise and objectify those of us they claim to represent…it doesn’t matter what their names are, they’re just there as objects of inspiration. (Young, 2012)

Is it any wonder that so many of us who have a perceived disability struggle with understanding what is expected of us – should we hide or be heroes, be stoic or sob? Self-awareness and self-representation are surely integral issues for all of us, but how can disabled people approach our own stories when feeling constantly under scrutiny and held up to judgement? Kleege’s memoir, Sight Unseen, contains one answer as she takes ownership of her difference in a captivating, thought provoking song of self.

Others, I hope, will revive their image of blindness. And it’s about time. That image is older than Oedipus and could use a new coat of paint. This new image of blindness is blander and more mundane, a mere matter of seeking practical solutions to everyday inconveniences. It will force us to abandon the old clichés that equate blindness with ignorant despair and sight with virtuous wisdom. Surely it’s time for some new metaphors. . (Kleege, 1998: 227- 228)

I wanted my protagonist to be, like Kleege, fearless in her approach to this perceived vulnerability. I needed her to somehow stand for, and yet stand up for, all of us VI and blind women. I wanted my heroine, in the parlance of the American cinema, to ‘kick all kinds of ass’, but without having to don a mask and cape. To give her authenticity, she would have to have lived a life that toughened her up, that gave her insight and a certain body confidence. My heroine had to have more than attitude, she had to have experience of actual physical tangling, be it wrestling in bed or fighting out of it. She had to know what it felt like to hit someone hard as well as kiss someone hard.

By the second draft my protagonist had a name, Alexandra Lyon, no specified background, but named for lions and conquerors!

‘…I grow, I prosper:’ shouts Edmund in King Lear. ‘Now, gods stand up for bastards!’(Shakespeare, 1:3)

I knew this woman, Alex, would need a similar shout. ‘Now gods stand up for the disabled!’

References:

Bauby, J. (1997) The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. London: Fourth Estate.

Black Sun. (2006) {DVD} Director: Tam, G. Passion Pictures.

Blue. (1993) Director: Jarman, D. Channel 4 Films.

Bolt, D. (2005) ‘Castrating depictions of visual impairment: the literary backdrop to eugenics [penultimate draft of article]’Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness, 99: 141-50 [Online] Available from: http://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/files/library/bolt-Castrating-Depictions.pdf [Accessed 8 December 2015].

Bolt, D. (2007) ‘Saramago’s blindness: humans or animals?’ The Explicator, 66 (1): 44-47.

Bolt, D. (2014) The Metanarrative of Blindness: a re-reading of twentieth-century anglophone writing. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

Bolt, D., Rodas, J.M. and Donaldson, E.J. (2012) The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, discourse, disability. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

Brown, C. (1954) My Left Foot. London: Secker & Warburg.

Charles, R. (1979) Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ own story. London: Macdonald and Jane’s

Conrad, J. (1995) Youth; Heart of Darkness: The End of the Tether. London: Penguin Books

Davis, L.J. (1995) Enforcing Normalcy : disability, deafness, and the body. London: Verso.

Davis, L.J. (1999) ‘Crips strike back: the rise of disability studies’. American Literary History, 11 (3): 500-512.

Davis, L.J. (2006) The Disability Studies Reader. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge

Garland-Thomson, R. (2002) ‘Integrating disability: transforming feminist theory’. NWSA Journal, 14 (3): 1-32.

Garland-Thomson, R. (2011) ‘Misfits: a feminist materialist disability concept’. Hypatia, 26 (3): 591-609.

Hull, J.M. (1990) Touching the rock: an experience of blindness. London: SPCK

Keller, H. (1996) The Story of My Life. London: Dover Publications; Constable and Co.

Keller, H. (2009) The World I Live In and Optimism: a collection of essays. Mineola: Dover.

Kipling, R. (1891) The Light That Failed. London: Macmillan & Co.

Kleege, G. (1998) Sight Unseen. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Kleege, G. (2006) Blind Rage: letters to Helen Keller. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press.

Longmore, P.K. (2003) Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability. Philadelphia: Temple University Press

Lusseyran, J. (1964) And There Was Light: Translated by Elizabeth R. Cameron. London: Heinemann

McWilliam, C. (2010) What To Look For In Winter: a memoir in blindness. London: Jonathan Cape

Michalko, R. (2002) The Difference That Disability Makes. Philadelphia: Temple University Press

Nussbaum, S. (2013) Good Kings Bad Kings. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Saramago, J. (1997) Blindness: a novel. London: Harvill.

Shakespeare, W.(1994) King Lear. London: Wordsworth Classic Editions.

Slade RNIB – Supporting people with sight loss [Online] RNIB. Available from: http://www.rnib.org.uk/Pages/Home.aspx [Accessed 13 November 2012].

Stevenson, R.L. (2011) Treasure Island. London: Sovereign.

Wasserman, D., Asch, A., Blustein, J. and Putnam, D. (2011) ‘Disability: definitions, models, experience’. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Wells, H.G. (2006) The Country of the Blind and other stories. Iowa: First World Library

Wyndham, J. (1979) The Day of the Triffids. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Young, S. (2012) We’re not here for your inspiration [Online] The Drum. Available from: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-03/young-inspiration-porn/4107006 [Accessed 12 August 2015].

What new kinds of stories can we tell as our media become pervasive? What kinds of new experiences do location based technologies offer readers?

Ambient Literature is a two-year research project, a collaboration between UWE Bristol, Bath Spa, and Birmingham Universities, involving a combination of historical and theoretical research and tangible practice-led inquiry. The post will be based at the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol.

They are commissioning three authors to make original works and working with readers to understand the beauty and the power of situated literary experiences. The post will run over the length of the project, the post holder assisting with research and delivery in the process of production for each of the three original Ambient Literature works.

As such the post is aimed at a suitably qualified creative producer, who is committed to both delivering excellent projects as well as furthering their research by practice or publication. This research may be in the field of – for example – digital cultural forms, creative practice or new markets in publishing.

Deadline: 27 May 2016

Location: Bristol

Find out more…

Whether you’re typing into Novlr, downloading via Kindle, self-publishing through Reedsy or reading on Wattpad tech is everywhere. But bar the odd writing app, the process of getting words down remains tech-free. For most writers engaged in writing, tech is at best peripheral and at worst a distraction. But can tech be more than something you type into, read on or publish through? Can it be integral to the writing process itself?

Over the past few years we’ve been obsessed by habits. How you develop good ones, how you ditch bad ones, why some people have better habits than others. This obsession started when my co-founder Bec Evans worked as a centre director for Arvon, one of the UK’s most established and well-known residential writing schools.

She saw that the main difference between the writers who finished their work and went on to get published and those who didn’t wasn’t just talent. Published authors have talent in spades, but they also have something else – perseverance. Writing doesn’t come easy, but these people were able to develop a writing practice – a habit – when other people could not. They kept writing and in so doing, became better writers.

There are many theories of behavior change and habit formation but one of the leading centres of excellence is at Stanford University where its Persuasive Technology Lab has been influential in the design of many leading tech products. Whenever a new Tweet or update gets you going back for more by giving you a tiny hit of dopamine – that’s persuasive tech at work. And that insatiable urge you get to flick through the out of focus holiday snaps of a Facebook pal? Yep – that’s persuasive technology too. All these products keep you using them by making you increasingly invested. The more engaged you are, the more likely you’ll check in again.

But persuasive tech isn’t all about pokes, RTs and ad revenue. It can help people adopt new and potentially life changing patterns of behaviour. Both myself and Bec are big fans of fitness products like Fitbit and RunKeeper and through my work in healthcare tech I know how beneficial diet, mood and wellbeing trackers can be.

All these products mix-up technology and behavioural science to help people adopt new positive habits and they all work in a similar way. You set a goal, track your progress against that goal and gain data back on your performance – information which helps you calibrate your behavior. They also involve a system of rewards to keep you moving towards your target and an element of community accountability to encourage you to commit to your goal. These habit-forming tech products help people develop healthy behaviours in the same way that doctors or coaches do but they do so at scale.

We want to test whether technology can help people develop new creative habits – like writing regularly – in the same way it can help them develop new healthy ones. Our question is: can technology be used to give people writing habits who would normally struggle and can we do that at scale?

The answer so far is… probably. But we have a long way to go. To test our hypothesis our first experiment mimicked diet and fitness goal setting products by creating an online community of novice writers who all set writing goals and tracked their productivity over time. Writers joined, completed stories they wouldn’t have otherwise completed, wrote novels they wouldn’t have otherwise written. We even had one writer bag a publishing deal.

Next we’re taking our learning further by mixing together the principles of gamification and behavior change to create a writing challenge which helps writers progress a piece of their own writing over 5 days. Our new writing ‘game’ might be different, but our objective to make technology integral to the writing process remains the same.

How to get the motivation to write – 5 science-backed tips that work:

1. Scale down your goal: Setting a tiny first step to start off a project means that you’re less likely to be intimidated (and therefore put off) by your longer term goal.

2. Slowly crank up the time: Once you have your small writing goal, increase the time you commit to writing – the trick is to do it so slowly you don’t notice.

3. Stretch yourself: Make your goals achievable but don’t make them easy-peasy, the moment they become easy-peasy make them harder to attain – it’s only that way you’ll improve.

4. Track, monitor and adjust: If you’re struggling to achieve your goal, don’t get despondent – change your goal. It’s only by tracking and changing your bahaviour that you’ll know what works for you.

5. Use other people: Science tells us that peer-pressure and accountability is important in helping us stick to our goals – tell other people about your goal and regularly give them updates.

***

To find out more about Write Track’s new 5 day writing challenge, check out the blog and sign up to the fortnightly newsletter.

http://blog.write-track.co.uk/

Simon Appleby, director of digital agency Bookswarm, highlights ten more websites that do their authors justice on the web.

Back in 2013, I blogged for The Writing Platform about ten author websites I really liked. They were my personal picks – I was interested in sites for how they looked, how they worked or what they said, and I tried to choose a range to illustrate that there is no single right way to do an author website well.

Web design conventions have moved on and we thought it was time to come back for another round.

Let me know what you think of my choices in the comments.

Roald Dahl 

Why we like it

Straight away this site asks you if you’re a teacher, a kid or a grown-up – and then takes you to content that’s likely to be appropriate for your needs and interests. There’s a great wealth of content available, but the site avoids any unnecessary visual whizbanggery (or as the BFG might possibly have said, bangwhizzery), eschewing animation and sound and not going too overboard on using Quentin Blake’s characteristic illustrations. It also does a great job of allowing visitors to explore Dahl’s comparatively neglected writing for adults.

Black marks

There’s no doubt that the Roald Dah’s Marvellous Children’s Charity is indeed marvellous but we did wonder if it would be better for the main site and the Charity to have two separate, mutually supportive websites rather than having the charity as a subsection of the main site.

http://www.roalddahl.com/

Laline Paull

Why we like it

Simple and elegant, this site feels very much on brand to promote Laline’s debut novel, The Bees. Everything from the content to the colour scheme supports the need to talk about and engage with readers of the novel, and it collects a good range of content (video and text) to give the visitor more than they could get from a retailer’s website.

Black marks

Literary Awards information and links to social media are only available from the home page and we almost missed them the first time around. And not a black mark as such, but unless Laline’s next book is a bee-themed sequel, the site may need redesigning sooner rather than later.

http://www.lalinepaull.com/

Shannon Selin 

Why we like it

I should say that Shannon is a Bookswarm client and this is a site we designed and built – but that’s not the reason for choosing it. Shannon’s single-minded content marketing approach has seen her write well over 100 blog posts on Napoleon and all things Napoleonic since we launched her site in November 2013. She publishes them once per week, and faithfully e-mails her growing list of subscribers every Friday with details of her latest post. Not only are her well-researched writings of genuine interest to her readership, but they’re great for search engines too, giving her opportunities to connect with new readers.

Black marks

This is a toughie – the only thing that occurs to me is that with a long interval between publication of her first novel and its sequel, the website could do more to give interested readers a sense of when their craving for more Napoleon in America might be satisfied.

http://www.shannonselin.com

Haruki Muarakami 

Why we like it

This is the US site for Haruki Murakami and the design embraces the aesthetic of his book cover designs. The Community section is a good way to involve users around a specific call to action (for example, “tell us your favourite scene”), which works well for a popular and established author. We like the chance to see Haruki’s desk, and there’s great depth of content in the Resources section.

Black marks

The slightly experimental home page doesn’t really do justice to the depth of content in the site, and some users could find it slightly discouraging.

http://www.harukimurakami.com/

Gillian Flynn 

Why we like it

Where an author is still overwhelmingly known for one particular book, their website can have a role to play in broadening their appeal and making sure their readers know about their other writing. This website was in our last round-up but has been updated as the focus has moved on from Gone Girl, with the ‘takeover’ of the masthead by her latest book, The Grownup (we really like the clever masthead scroll effect), and there’s a wealth of content for all of her books.

Black marks

Literally a black mark – I’m not a fan of white body copy with a very dark background, as it makes my eyes go funny!

http://gillian-flynn.com/

Anthony Horowitz 

Why we like it

Anthony’s site was in our last round-up as well, but it’s been completely redesigned since then. It’s much lighter and more welcoming, with nice big book jackets (US and UK covers and shown prominently side by side) – definitely much more fresh and engaging.

Black marks

The new site retains its forum, a feature which only the most intrepid author commits themselves to – it’s possibly because it’s early days, but at this stage the forum feels like it’s mostly being used as a way of contacting the author, rather than facilitating discussion between fans.

http://www.anthonyhorowitz.com/

Conn Iggulden 

Why we like it

As the author of multiple series, set in different periods of history (and some children’s books on the side), Conn Iggulden’s site has work to do in making sure his readers are clear on all his output. It does this effectively, with a section for each series, including a whizzy ‘World of…’ section for The Wars of the Roses, which includes book trailers, character profiles and maps.

Black marks

Blog posts are sporadic and the most recent one is over a year old. Any author who doubts their ability to regularly update a blog should search their soul about having one, even if they have sold millions of books!

http://www.conniggulden.com/

Chris Cleave 

Why we like it

One of the comments on our previous post three years ago was about how many of the chosen sites the authors had made with their own fair hands, without outside help. It’s a fair question – so here’s a site that demonstrates how, with WordPress and an off-the-shelf theme, you can make a site that had good content and a high level of engagement with its audience. Chris has experimented across the years with various themes for his site, but one thing that hasn’t changed is the friendly approach to comments and the frequency with which he replies; another is the wealth of information about the research that goes in to each of Chris’s very different novels.

Black marks

Chris’s current choice of theme doesn’t actually feature his name at all in the masthead area – which could be a little confusing for some visitors.

http://chriscleave.com/

Nick Harkaway 

Why we like it

Just like one of Nick’s books, this is a website that draws the visitor in – the slightly anarchic, off-kilter red ‘pathways’ that run through the site are really eye-catching, and Nick’s blog entries are funny and perfectly geared to his geek persona. It even features his notoriously bushy eyebrows in a supporting role.

Black marks

Somewhat surprisingly, the site is not responsive (mobile friendly) – more ‘high concept’ designs can be harder to boil down to work well on mobile.

http://www.nickharkaway.com/

Joe Wicks 

Why we like it

I realise this has been a list dominated by novelists. Perhaps because non-fiction writers have more strings to their bow (broadcasting, TV, politics, academia), books can often be relegated to a smaller part of their web presences. Indeed, non-fiction books can often be brand extensions, but even if that’s true, it’s hard to find fault with publishing sensation Joe Wicks’ site. There’s an immediate inducement to sign up for free fat loss advice via e-mail, clear calls-to-action to buy the books, free recipes and a blog, all wrapped up in a very clean, modern and inspirational package. It’s selling all the way, and that’s no bad thing.

Black marks

The main menu is accessed by means of the so-called ‘hamburger’ icon at the top left – even when the site is viewed on a very large screen. While many people understand this visual convention, not all users will.

http://www.thebodycoach.co.uk/

Matt Finch is the 2016 Creative in Residence at the State Library of Queensland, Australia and a project worker at British Library Labs.

In this post, Matt explores how digital literature, facilitated by libraries, can create playful interactive spaces that are truly democratic, responsive to local geography, and open to a wider range of voices.

 See more at www.matthewfinch.me/about

1. Digital Underdogs

Are there still cultural backwaters in the digital age? I’m three months into a year-long stint in Brisbane, capital of Australia’s self-proclaimed Sunshine State. It’s Australia’s third city after Sydney and Melbourne. Years under the deeply conservative premiership of Joh Bjelke-Petersen have given a lingering impression that this place doesn’t have much of a cultural life, despite the fact that Queensland will soon celebrate three decades since he lost power.

Queensland Cultural Precinct

Contemporary Queensland includes many shining examples of people exploring the potential for literature in the digital age. Among them are Emily Craven and her Story City team, Lee McGowan and colleagues at Queensland University of Technology, and Simon Groth who runs if:book Australia out of the Queensland Writers Centre.

In a recent interview, Simon told me:

Brisbane’s culture and how it views itself today is deeply informed by its long hibernation in the 70s and 80s and that’s important in a foundational sense. But today we can be connected to communities anywhere.

Brisbane was the kind of place where artists would have to create something and then tell people about it and cultivate an audience and then set up a venue and get the liquor licenses (or avoid the cops) etc…A great independent scene in music and publishing came out of this, especially once the political fog lifted.

Arts and activism for a long time were intertwined […] An arts infrastructure has built up around us now and that’s a positive thing, but I like to think that the art we create still has a few rough edges, a bit of mongrel about it.

“Today we can be connected to communities anywhere.” As Simon says, the new age of digital opportunity gives us a chance to correct a centralising tendency in Australian cultural life, the lingering sense that culture is made in urban places and broadcast outwards.

This tendency might itself be a reaction to Australia’s still-tense relationship with the postcolonial landscape. Where previous generations romanticised the bush and depicted it through colonial eyes, sometimes it feels as if the Aussie literary scene now consists of Melbournians who wish that they could turn their eyes away from the country and look only instead towards Brooklyn or their fellow UNESCO Cities of Literature overseas.

Recognising this, the Aussie writing community is currently going through one of its periodic bouts of self-questioning, although sometimes the critiques can look a little shrill, as did Luke Carman’s sharply worded piece in the current edition of literary journal Meanjin.

Ben Eltham gives a useful and measured overview of the latest spat at The Guardian, but what’s really telling is Eltham’s opening line: “Sydney and Melbourne are fighting again.” The literary battleground is seen only in terms of the usual suspects, the two warring cities whose rivalry dates back to before Australia’s federation.

Although Carman is Sydney-based and Meanjin is published out of Melbourne, the journal’s name is actually a Brisbane word – derived from an indigenous term for the “spike” or finger of land on which the city sits. This discordant note, a label for Brisbane land, taken from its traditional owners, in the middle of the present-day squabble, returns a sense of place to the lofty debates of the literary mainstream.

Here in the north-east corner of the continent, appearing to be a backwater can be advantageous. Queensland is on the sidelines of the Aussie book world’s urban squabbles. Cultural institutions here have different challenges – like serving a region three times the size of France! – but also different opportunities: Queensland’s regional centres are larger and stronger than those in other states. The city’s international profile is lower and budgets are tighter, too, but the benefit of this is that cultural organisations here can’t ever afford to forget the ground beneath their feet or the wider community they serve.

2. Location, location, location

Mungindi, Queensland / New South Wales border

In his 1957 collection Mythologies, Roland Barthes devotes a chapter to the Guide Bleu series of travel guides. He points out that the Guide “hardly knows the existence of scenery except under the guise of the picturesque. The picturesque is found any time the ground is uneven.”

In short, any time you see the word “picturesque”, what the Guide really means is “hilly”. This identification becomes so strong, Barthes says, that ultimately the Guide is able to state, “The road becomes very picturesque (tunnels)”:

It matters little that one no longer sees anything, since the tunnel here has become the sufficient sign of the mountain.

This is rather like the use of the word “locative” in contemporary literature. For many cultural institutions, it’s really just a buzzword meaning “offsite”. Locative literature could mean slapping Post-It notes on alleyways or writing poems in DYMO tape on bus shelters; it could mean GPS-sensitive apps which share pre-existing content; it could mean a game like Jim Munroe’s compelling Solvitur Ambulando, which spatializes the business of puzzle-solving by counting whether you’ve paced enough steps to merit an additional clue. Fitbit meets the life of the mind.

Connecting with places has to mean more than reading about them. The question is not just whether we add a virtual layer of digital literature to physical spaces, but who gets to create the stories in that virtual layer. People don’t pass through physical places without also passing through social spaces, which are inhabited, mapped, claimed, and disputed by other human beings, whose voices are equally worthy of attention. If writers are having a creative and critical conversation about the world, and in the locative age we are venturing outside of traditional venues, we still need to ask: who are “we” having those conversations with?

Part of my job as Creative in Residence at the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) is simply to notice things. That could mean spotting opportunities for new partnerships and programmes, but it also incorporates a sense of place which I try to share each week via an email newsletter, Marvellous, Electrical.

A road trip to Mungindi on the Queensland-New South Wales border led to encounters with a sunburned, swearing, “typically Strine” butcher, but also the gay, adopted, Aboriginal acrobat who is now ringmaster of our national circus.

A long walk down a historic Brisbane road – “who makes a pilgrimage to the Australian Tax Office at Easter?” – was a chance to look at the anonymity of postcolonial suburbs.

And discovering that TV chef Bernard King was a Queenslander led to an exploration of what his fallen stardom tells us about Australia’s attitude to gay rights.

These kind of ventures are part of the business of listening and noticing which underpins any writing which purports to link to the real world. Spotting the unusual and provocative corners of a locale is part of the work which Alasdair Gray’s characters described in Lanark:

“Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?”

“Because nobody imagines living here…. think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.”

But paying attention to a neglected setting, as Marvellous, Electrical does, isn’t enough, because it still draws a heavy line between “the artist” – individual, special, “using” the city – and the mere inhabitants who live there, supposedly incapable of imagination without that special someone to engage them.

A truly locative literature would embrace the voices of a place, past, present, and future. It would probably dethrone the author in favour of a facilitator’s role, helping locals to speak with one another and outsiders.

In fact, it would look very much like the work of a 21st-century library.

3. Start a riot, make a comic

You know the great strength of libraries?

They don’t have audiences.

Unlike other arts institutions, libraries think of the communities they serve as users, not mere spectators. This is the great and lasting benefit of libraries’ long association with the book: back in the old shelfy days, a library only came to life when someone stepped inside and began to read. Books are always a collaboration between the reader, the writer, and many other intermediaries who play a part in publishing and distribution.

Nowadays, libraries are less concerned with shelves and silent reading – but they are still the place you come when you want to learn and explore on your own terms. Neither teachers nor preachers, librarians’ agenda is simply to facilitate and protect your freedom of access to information. Increasingly that also means taking their programmes off-site, outside of the walls and into every space they can possibly reach.

Is this what it really means to be locative?

One of the digital initiatives which is part of this library-led drive to truly democratise culture emerged from the international Fun Palaces movement.

This invites communities to come together and offer people the chance to try their hands at the arts and sciences on the first weekend of every October. The motto of these community-devised and -delivered events is “Everyone an artist, everyone a scientist”, but the underpinning ethos is even more radical than that. The original manifesto reads:

Choose what you want to do – or watch someone else doing it. Learn how to handle tools, paint, babies, machinery, or just listen to your favourite tune. Dance, talk or be lifted up to where you can see how other people make things work. Sit out over space with a drink and tune in to what’s happening elsewhere in the city. Try starting a riot or beginning a painting – or just lie back and stare at the sky.

What might this look like to the digital writing community?

Last year I worked with SLQ to create the Fun Palaces Comic Maker, a simple browser-based way for people to create drag-and-drop comics which were then published via Tumblr.

Built at short notice and for a minimal budget, the Comic Maker was by necessity basic, but simply offering people the opportunity to tell stories on their own terms released a lot of creativity. People used the tools we gave them in sophisticated, unpredictable ways.

There were non-narrative comics:

and comics in languages other than English:

Users spotted a clever workaround to the limited set of drag ‘n’ drop images available, by typing emoji into the text captions:

And the “just for kids” vibe of the Fun Palaces design was undercut by adult users who offered tongue-in-cheek references to Lovecraft, among others:

Comics as a medium are intimately entwined with the politics of space, consisting as they do of words and images which gain meaning through juxtaposition. Digital projects extend this exploration of space by inviting people located around the world to take part in comics creation and experimentation.

Creating an opportunity for people worldwide to tell their own stories through a simple mechanism was an experiment in this kind of local connection and now that the basic engine has been built, SLQ and its partners are exploring new ways to use the Comic Maker to support people’s creativity.

You can see a full report on the project from the Electricomics conference here (PDF download).

4. Fun Palaces and the Fury Road

So what does all this mean for a “Creative in Residence” in an Australian library?

SLQ’s mission is to “inspire Queensland’s creativity forever”. It’s amazing that such cosmic language was secured within the bureaucratic bounds of a state government. It raises interesting long-term questions too… In some post-apocalyptic Mad Max: Fury Road future, where, God forbid, the state of Queensland had ceased to exist or even been forgotten – would the library’s duty to inspire locals forever still be in force?

That might sound fanciful, but the 21st century is full of great examples of libraries going above and beyond their remit in the name of doing the right thing, whether that’s Ferguson Library during the recent civil unrest or Christchurch Libraries during the earthquakes in New Zealand.

At precisely those moments of crisis or natural disaster which we normally experience through apocalyptic fantasy, libraries have proven themselves to be resilient, inventive, and utterly committed to the public. This relationship to place and sense of duty to a broadly understood community is also part of being “locative” and something which makes libraries stand out from many other arts institutions.

So my duty as Creative in Residence is to respect this library ethos and ask: How do we take this dream, of truly democratic access to culture, its production as well as its enjoyment, into a digital space that is truly interactive and available to the general public – understood as users, not just audiences?

We’re sure to stumble along the way – we’re the underdog, after all – but that doesn’t mean we won’t give it an amazing go.

You can follow what we get up to during my residency at @drmattfinch and tinyletter.com/marvellouselectrical.

Book Kernel are seeking an entrepreneurial, flexible, senior editor with a desire to do something different.

Person Specification

This person must have editing and publishing experience but needn’t necessarily define themselves as working in the publishing industry – you could be working in technology, theatre, event management, education, or anywhere so long as you can prove you’re suited for the job.

Tender issuers will have:

• edited online and off for at least 4 years;
• knowledge of digital print formats and physical print;
• thorough experience of managing a networked team;
• some experience of teaching;
• some experience of working with schoolchildren;
• a desire to steer a start-up publisher;
• business to business contacts;
• desirably, some experience of video production for online environments;
• desirably, some understanding of creative commons and creative knowledge licences.

Job Description

The role has: heavy editorial duties; logistics for delivery of output; and overall financial planning.

In this role, you will assess publishing proposals, commission, and oversee books for varied clientèle. We publish fiction and non-fiction, specialising in event-based books.

Our team is a flexible, global group of freelancers and you will manage them. We operate our publishing services on a sliding scale of cost and you will need to get the most out of limited budgets.

Going forward, you’ll forge the strategic direction, the advertising, and the implementation [i.e. the creation and editing of books] of the Book Kernel project. You will liaise with event managers, conference organizers, academics, and literary producers to create events and contacts.

Value of Tender: [£10,000] + [contracts earned]
Contract term: 2 years minimum
Contract hours: flexible – contract expected to be taken on as a part of a freelance portfolio

Deadline: 11.59 p.m. March 19^th, 2016

Interviews: March 21^st, 2016 at: PM Studio, Watershed, Harbourside, Bristol. BS1 5TX

Please apply with a two page CV and covering letter to: Ben Gwalchmai

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About Book Kernel

Book Kernel makes a book of an event and gets it there before the event is over.

As well as making physical and digital books for events, our online system can be used for many applications including the documentation of creative projects, learning, and research.

Book Kernel is entering a transitional phase and will be expanding its portfolio over the next two years. The hired person will aid in this transition with a view to becoming Managing Editor in 1-2 years’ time.

This work will require the Senior Editor to report to the Managing Editor, teach Junior Editors, and deliver documentation workshops with freelancers and students from South West England.

As part of our new portfolio of work, we will be working with Bath Spa University on their Paper Cities project. Paper Cities is a Creative Writing Hub that will work with young people to increase creative writing engagement and ability. Paper Cities is funded by Arts Council England’s Strategic Fund for Creative Writing in Schools.