Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

17776
by Jon Bois

“What football will look like in the future.” It looks at first like just another opinion piece by just another American writer for sports-focused site SB Nation. But, very quickly into the story, it becomes clear that something is terribly wrong. The text itself warns you of this shortly before the page disintegrates. The opinion piece falls away from the page before it can really begin, nothing more than a ruse that deposits you into the world of 17776.

Distant satellites pointing back at Earth bring you the story of a generation of people who have not died or even aged, a generation that must find ever more elaborate ways to occupy its time. What football looks like in 17776 is a game with neither time nor physical boundaries. It’s a fascinating premise that leads to an extended mediation on immortality, boredom, and the deeper meaning of games: a strange brew that Bois handles with deft assurance.

The tech behind it uses simple html and embedded YouTube videos, with only a little javascript trickery, which has already given it a reasonable shelf life. Originally published serially in 2017, it’s a story worth revisiting or discovering.

https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

Writing with Machine Learning
By Robin Sloan

Robin Sloan, author of the novels Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough, has recently turned his attention to using artificial intelligence and machine learning as a creative tool. In discussion with Ars Technica, he elaborates on the experience of building and writing with a bot, powered by machine learning. In particular, Sloan sets his project apart from other bots that are fed texts and set to automatically generate bizarre texts as humorous social media fodder.

Using as source material thousands of issues of sci fi magazines from the 50s and 60s, Sloan’s bot acts as a kind of creative autocomplete with a sci-fi bent, a genuine tool for building literary images. Sloan himself offers an interesting analogy:

it’s like writing with a deranged but very well-read parrot on your shoulder. Anytime you feel brave enough to ask for a suggestion, you press tab, and…

The bot is open source and available to download and play with in any way you see fit. Sloan’s discussion is also available via the Ars Technica web site and well worth your time.

https://video.arstechnica.com/watch/ars-live-25-how-to-write-a-novel-with-machine-learning

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/writing-with-the-machine

It was early in 2013 and really I’d had enough.

A novel of mine had come out in 2011, and another in 2012, and now I was supposed to sit down and start another? I bridled. The solitude of novel writing, the grating solipsism of the form – strapping yourself alone to the industrial word loom – felt oppressive. Writing a novel at that point seemed like wallpapering a dungeon. In short, I was lonely.

Reacting, I sought to make my writing life more collaborative, to spread my wings in other fields. I co-wrote a screenplay, which got made into a film. Inspired by some amazing work, I ventured into digital literature with an app, Reptile Resistance, written collaboratively and crowd-funded via Unbound. I started teaching writing more, and lecturing on the Publishing degree at Oxford Brookes University. I was mitigating the loneliness of writing long form prose by collaborating in a broader suite of texts and activity.

Still, although the prospect of writing a novel was oppressive, I really did have a story to tell and I knew that sooner or later I’d have to overcome my resistance to the loneliness of writing in order to tell it.

My friend Mark solved the problem. I told him about the tribulations of the word loom. Also, because of working at Brookes, I’d been thinking more about scholarship, specifically about how early drafts of contemporary books – once upon a time hand-written or typed – were now just being written over, dissolved into the rolling palimpsest of computerised text.

Mark solved both issues in a stroke. ‘Stick a bit of malware on it.’

‘What?’

‘Stick some spyware on your computer.’

He meant that if I put some malware, or spyware, on my computer to note everything I did, it would record all changes made to an evolving manuscript, plus it might offer a weird kind of company for me in my wallpapered dungeon.

Good old Mark.

So, in April 2013 I approached the digital curation team at the British Library, offering myself as a guinea pig, offering to have a piece of spyware put onto my computer to track the writing of a novel – every wrong-turn, reappraisal, edit, mistake, not just recorded, but time and date stamped. Immediately, the British Library saw the scholarship possibilities in what I proposed and we negotiated a contract where (to put it crudely) the data was theirs but the resultant book was mine.

It became quickly obvious that to save us from running into privacy issues, I would need a separate machine on which I only wrote the novel. That was no problem. I’m not the world’s richest guy so I bought a pretty basic reconditioned laptop and used only that.

The curation team chose a piece of keylogging software called, Spector Pro about which Jonathan Pledge, a curator of contemporary archives at the British Library has recently written:

After installation on a host computer, Spector Pro works by running undetected as a background application and cannot be accessed via the normal Windows user interface (it is not visible in the Applications folder). Access to the programme is by a default keyboard combination Control-Alt-Shift which brings up a password dialog box. The password is set by whoever installs the programme.

As keylogging software Spector Pro is not terribly sophisticated and seems to have been specifically designed for low-level company surveillance of employees, potentially without their knowledge. It is possible to run Spector Pro as a visible programme but this would seem to negate its original stated purpose.

Spector Pro can track and record chat conversations (as transcripts), emails (sent and received), websites visited and, most importantly for this project, keystrokes made, not only what has been typed within an application; but mouse and keystroke usage across the whole computer system.

I visited the library and had the software installed on my empty computer and I set to work. Over the next 42 months, while I laboured through what turned out to be a very difficult novel, I visited the British Library on eight separate occasions, to allow them to download the data. My last visit was March 2018.

So, what do we have?

We have information on keystrokes typed:

This shot shows the raw data usage as a list. By far the largest number of keystrokes concerns writing/typing as well as work on editing (Find & Replace) with the remainder comprising system activity including backups.

And we have thousands of screenshots, one captured every few seconds each time activity on the host computer is detected.

From the moment the computer is logged into until the moment it is shutdown. Screenshots allows an output as either still images (.jpg or .BMP) or as black and white video (.avi).

And we have text outputs:

Text output from ‘Keystrokes Typed’ for a single tracked session. As seen from the detail below the header provides information on the Application used, the start of activity and the title of the file being worked on. The greyed text represents the tracked movements with typed words rendered in bold. Time stamps are given, with the green text signalling the start of activity and red the end.

In total we have generated 222GB of data, captured across 108,318 Files.

What are we going to do with it?

Well, I’m not going to do anything with it, I don’t have the skills or the motive. But the data is out in the public domain now, under a Creative Commons BY licence, running free here.

But if you are a scholar of digital humanities, or a digital artist or creative visualizer, be my guest, see what you can find to do with it. The data is there to be played with.

During the writing I never asked about the data, about what was going on ‘under the hood’. I had no access to the software on my computer and I had no sense at that time exactly what it was recording. And while I never knew what it was doing, it helped with my problem. I managed to start again, by making the practice of longform fiction into something that felt collaborative, not only because the software was sat there recording, but also because of the digital curation team who were taking the data.

Sure, it was a mind trick – I was still essentially alone at the desk – but even though I knew it was a mind trick, that didn’t matter, I was able to begin to write fiction again. As Paul Simon wrote, ‘Once I was crazy but my ace in the hole was that I knew I was crazy.’

I have been asked if knowing that the work was being recorded made me self-conscious, and, sure at first, I was minding my Ps and Qs a bit, trying to seem like a more competent writer than I was. I remember at one point I even looked up the spelling of a word on another computer so that I could type it correctly into the spyware computer.

But that didn’t last. I relaxed and soon I actually quite wanted my mistakes to show. It seemed like an act of solidarity with the writers I was teaching, to show them what I had often told them, that writing is born from repetition, that every writer has blind spots – shonky spelling, flimsy characters, poor plotting – and that only re-writing cures. It seemed generous to show the tottering beginnings of what most people would only consume as the finished article.

But not only that. I forget about the keystroke software recording my every move because of the story itself. I wrote earlier in this piece that it was a difficult novel to write, and that was because I aimed to write as simply and truthfully and compassionately as I was able. Aims I found to be not as readily available to me as I would have flattered myself to hope – compassion and truth not really having been the modus operandi of my younger self.

As I wrote, I forgot about the keylogging because the difficult writing became immersive – as I hope the reading of it will be – because my story and my characters – Tony and Laney, Jo and Nick – absorbed me, and in the end it was their story that cured me of my loneliness, the keylogging project was just the booster to get the journey started.

I don’t feel a need to perform this experiment again. If someone wants to wire me up or whatever I will dutifully agree if it will help them with what they have to do, but personally the need and the moment have passed. Collaborative work is embedded now across my broader practices and actually, every now and again, in a busy house in a busy world, strapping myself alone into the world loom seems like a respite.

Staying On is published by Duckworth 18^th October

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

Frankenbook
By Mary Shelley, et. al.

That this year marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is remarkable considering the novel’s continued relevance to contemporary questions around technology, creativity, and the social and moral responsibility associated with them. Arizona State University, as part of its series of bicentennial celebrations, is the primary force behind Frankenbook, an online compendium that reproduces Shelley’s original 1818 text with annotations from a range of experts, alongside complementary essays, and associated video and interactive media.

Interesting that the project has been published to the open web, given that even a few years ago this is exactly the kind of project that would almost certainly have been distributed as an app (for example, the similar treatments for On the Road or A Clockwork Orange). Of course, publishing to the web for this kind of project comes with both advantages and disadvantages. True to its title, Frankenbook is a living text that welcomes annotations from all readers and encourages social interactions within the site and via other platforms. However, although the reading interface is clean and the annotations and navigation are well handled, the inherent limitations of the web (a chapter per page, an inability to bookmark) make Frankenbook better suited for devotees to discuss and delve deeper into the text, rather than as an introduction to new readers.

Frankenbook is freely available online.

‘Breakdancing Jesus’ mural by artist Cosmo Sarson, Hamilton House, Bristol, UK.

The great Festival is in two days. The weary pilgrim, teasing her larchwood beads through her fingers and fearing that she will never see the Temple hung lousy with banners, or smell the grilling of sacred cat-meat, wonders whether to take the lonely and ill-kept track through the deep-cut hills, or instead continue along the ceremonial avenue that runs, sanctioned and leisurely, across the floodplain.

The waiter, not remembering precisely what the racist senator had ordered, stands with the bottle of bleach in his hand, hovering above both the abalone pâté and the asparagus soup.

The motorist sees the crippled, squeaking gull semaphoring from the roadside in her brake lights; in her boot is a heavy carjack that she has never used, and perhaps still won’t.

As he mutely waits for the kettle to boil, his knuckles held hard as calcium against his sides,  James knows that forgiving her would be the easier choice.

There persists a tendency amongst many people, particularly those who are not authors themselves (though authors are not immune) to see stories as impregnable and rather forbidding objects. They can feel like something revealed, rather than something constructed: a conclusive piece of excavation that an author has performed, discovering a pure, foregone seam of one thing after another. However, it is in moments such as those above – the fleeting, pregnant pauses of a character’s indecision before things plunge on in the customary steeplechase – that a fundamental fact about fiction comes clear. Storytelling is not the mining of a strip of monolithic truth. In those spaces where a choice has to be made we can see that, instead, a story hides an intricate machinery behind it: a fictive, thrumming world of pressures, influences, places, peoples, coincidences, syzygies, causes and effects that have their own logic, and their own obscured authoring.

This machinery, the construction of which is probably the vast majority of any author’s work, is like a Rubin’s Vase only perceptible in the negative: as readers, we have to look for it in those places where it is most obvious. When the dusty pilgrim decides to turn left, the corresponding possibilities of turning right spark into life; and even if, as readers, we only get to study one particular readout of the machine – one particular passage of events and decisions – it doesn’t mean that the machinery stops its rustling operations. The world it represents, no matter how small, goes on turning, and could certainly turn differently next time. That’s the thing about machines, and worlds: you don’t always know what is going to happen when you turn them on.

At different times in history, but particularly in recent decades, this sort of truth – that the work of an author is less a feat of writing and more a feat of engineering, or even programming, of a fictive space – has made some literary scholars very queasy. A specific, and historically blind, the definition of technology still holds sway over the popular imagination, despite the fact that a book has more moving parts than most smartwatches, and the Latin alphabet, like any writing system, is as digital as the Python programming language, and much, much harder to compile. If the Guardian videogames editor Keith Stuart is a technology journalist, then the Telegraph’s literary critic Tom Payne has to join him at that particular, overcrowded desk: their beat is essentially the same. Both are interested in the diagnostics of fictional worlds, and the calibration of their workings. Even words like ‘diagnostic’ and ‘calibrate’ set a gunmetal panic in most writer’s guts; barren, rod-backed words that have no place in the eely shamanism of their work.

The still-uncomfortable confluence of these ideas can be plumbed back to 1945, when the American engineer Vannevar Bush wrote a piece for the Atlantic Monthly, entitled As We May Think; which served as a peephole into a world, and its attendant machineries, where a union between modern science and art might become possible, and even desirable. In particular, he invited his readers to consider a machine that, as yet, he could not build. He called his machine the Memex and described how he thought it might operate: storing and linking all human information and allowing its operators to move between works, individual texts, without any authorial prescription. This core concept – what came to be called the hypertext in the 1960s – was not a revolutionary one. The marginalia of medieval psalmbooks leading you to other works in the monastic library, are as effective as any link on a webpage. However, it was the medium that became, wholly, the computer – consistently shrinking, cheapening, civilising and naturalising throughout the twentieth century into something approaching the printed word in terms of cultural invisibility – which superseded Bush’s original fancy and provided us with a bedrock on which not only to display our existing written culture, but upon which to create new artforms which exploited the machinery of the computer to mirror the machinery of the worlds that lie beneath the surfaces of every story.

In 1976 Will Crowther, an engineer for a US military contractor, built such a functional fictional world, which he called Colossal Cave Adventure, while time-sharing on his employer’s mainframe computer. Based on his weekend spelunking in the Mammoth Cave National Park of nearby Kentucky, it is considered the first example of interactive fiction and has come, unavoidably, to triangulate the very contours of the form. While undoubtedly a written text, Adventure was also, quite literally, a functioning contraption: a set of instructions for the computer to calculate its bounded world as happily as it calculated the physics of nuclear brinkmanship. Performing from the 700-line script which Crowther had written, the mainframe presented the reader with a text whose machinery was, at least partly, accessible. Readers could type instructions and the computer would, in return, narrate the opening of locked doors, the avoidance (or not) of bottomless pits, and the acquiring of unruly MacGuffins. Their choices of what to type, thanks to the procedural attention of the computer itself, reverberated through the corridors of Crowther’s imaginary grotto, reforming it as they went.  In exploring Crowther’s world, and in fiddling with its mechanisms, those pregnant pauses became longer and wider: vulnerable to cave-ins, collapses, redirections and opened shafts.

Interactive fiction has since accreted a rich literary culture of its own, along with all the accompanying furniture. It has its own polemics, schisms, discourses and honours. It has its own well-trod norms and weird, deep-cut deviations. At its best, it is a culture, and most importantly a technology, which has allowed me, as a reader, to experience many striking, complex and thoughtful worlds, and the stories implicit within them. In Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden, I rifled through the cabinets of one family’s discordant, hoarded memories of the first Gulf War. In Emily Short’s Galatea, I attended a gallery opening for Pygmalion’s famous living statue, questioning the work on its own artistic merit as I became drunker and more unpleasantly flirtatious: boorishly and unwittingly activating the trauma that Short had encoded into Galatea’s every gesture and word. In howling dogs, I cycled between the same three, featureless cells for simulated day after day like dank air; each night contenting myself with falling asleep in the visored chair of the Activity Room and tinkering with the settings of my dreams.

howling dogs, created by the writer and digital artist Porpentine, is both distant and near to Crowther’s efforts over forty years ago. Though it shares some of its heritage, it has little of the infamous inaccessibility of even later interactive fiction works. For Porpentine to build it did not require a proprietary level of programming knowledge prohibitive to writers who, like myself, had never received any formal schooling in the subject beyond Excel macros and unlocking the secret pinball game in Microsoft Word. It was not the project of a senior software engineer,  working close to the tinplate of some of the most complex machinery on the planet. Instead, it was the product of a single artist working, like all artists, with a technology. In Porpentine’s case, this technology was called Twine: a tool which has done a huge amount to narrow the gap between the work of worldbuilders, in whichever department they might sit. Based entirely online,

Twine lubricates the interactions between the machine and the author almost to invisibility. The creation of a passage-bound world like Crowther’s, full of glimpsed opportunities, is as simple as writing Passages of text and linking them together, like web pages, by [[putting double brackets around a word or a phrase]]. Clicking on these links represent a conscious choice: do I take the [[left fork]], or the [[right]]? Twine even generates a map of the author’s growing mental topology, represented as a blueprint cartography of boxes of text and the routes between them. It is a map equally suited to physical space, such as that of Adventure, or more allegorical landscapes, as in Zoe Quinn’s seminal Depression Quest. Publishing one’s work is as simple as uploading a single file, a few kilobytes in size, to Dropbox or any of the several free Twine hosting services.

Every interactive fiction writer has their own gateway into the form, usually outside of any institution. Twine happened to be my own and constituted its own curriculum: a curriculum I both wish that I had encountered at school and am glad that I did not. It remapped my own conception of storytelling, not by any great thunderclap, but instead with a furtive, creeping realisation. As I pottered about with the tool, I uncovered more and more advanced techniques, orbiting the most fundamental concepts of computer science. Soon enough, I was not just building networks of static paragraphs for my readers to explore, but using the tenets of formal logic, the bread-and-butter grammar of the digital computer, to observe whether my reader chose to take the hill road or the busy highway; whether they had poisoned the soup or the pâté; whether

they unclenched James’ knuckles or tried to compress them tighter; whether they had had the fleeting, momentary courage, or cruelty, to put the gull out of its misery. After many years of writing, and both supervised and self-led schooling, I had discovered an actual vocation: the jalopying of engines of consequence, a grease monkey in my own imagination. Though my mum would never have wanted me to be a gearhead, I couldn’t have been prouder of myself.

I have seen similar, ratcheting ascents of realisation in many others attending the Twine workshops I teach; in the faces of both 7-year-old schoolchildren and 70-year-old academics. From initial scepticism, they pass to clumsy experimentation and then a burst of pure, combinatorial joy as they start to extend the horizons of what these techniques might accomplish.

For those who have not played at building worlds since they were very small, this process can be more tentative, and freighted with all sorts of prejudices about the fripperies of play, about the disappearances of the author, and about the fragilities of one’s own creation. Happily, this most often gives way to a positive impatience: a busy urge to begin eroding out passages, and sounding depths.

Twine won’t single-handedly combat the queasiness and snobberies that artificially segregate the work of computer programmers and writers. I still regularly hear the protestations. What happens to the author when a reader has the agency to change the path of their narrative? If all choices are equally valid, are any of them truly significant? How can a machine that performs brittle, unyielding logic have a place in the creation of art? What if – like Victorian idealists in the age of steam – comparing fictive worlds to computer simulations is just a case of historical relativism? How can I talk about a Tolkienesque gewgaw, written by a bored computer programmer to distract his daughters when they visited him every other weekend, in the same breath as works of ‘true’ literature? Writing a single, static perspective on this issue here does luckily afford me the luxury of not answering these questions. I can pretend, as we all do, that the narrative is already written, and the conclusion is foregone. If I stood by my own evangelism I should have written this essay as a Twine story, made its workings vulnerable, and let you make up your own minds. In lieu of this, I can only counsel some direction; some passages to follow. Go and read the work of Keith Oatley, and Marie-Laure Ryan. Read Merritt Kopas and Anna Anthropy and Emily Short. Come to the Interactive Fiction Summer School that I am curating at the British Library this July. More than anything, go to http://twinery.org and furtively, creepingly, tinkeringly, convince yourself.

Digital Writers Festival 2017 is finally here, and it’s bringing a host of live-streamed events, panels, and workshops to everyone with an internet connection. Creative Producer, and Queenslander, Samantha Glennie has rounded up her ten must-see events taking place throughout the festival.

1. Digital Zine Fair (Festival-long project)

Zine Fair’s are special places where you get to really dig into the creative practice of a maker you might never have run into otherwise, and DWF is proud to host the very first digital iteration of such an experience! The Digital Zine Fair showcases zine excerpts from a wide and eclectic range of makers, paired with an interview, so you can scroll through, find your next favourite zinester and get inspired.

2. Songs and Stories At Home (Thursday 26 October, 7pm AEDT)

This event was so popular at the Emerging Writers’ Festival, earlier this year, that we had to bring it back for DWF17. An intimate and special performance, six writers invite us into their homes to hear their origin stories, and the path they took to get to where they are now. It promises to be a moving experience, sharing stories of home through music and poetry. The event has some incredible artists involved – Soreti Kadir, Panya Banjoko, Yeo Choong, Simona Castricum, Pola Fanous and Ziggy Ramo will be sharing performances. It really promises to be one of the most moving events of the festival.

3. QUT Literary Salon (Wednesday 1 November, 6pm AEST)

Excitingly, DWF17 marks the first year that the festival has organised a handful of physical events that audiences can attend in the flesh, as well as stream online! We’ve got events running in Perth, Brisbane and Melbourne and Sydney, but one that I am particularly looking forward to is QUT Literary Salon. The salon will showcase student readers in a variety of different forms: poetry, fiction, and memoir. It’s a free event and will be coming to you live from The Menagerie in Brisbane! It is sure to be a fantastic event whether you show up in person, or join us on the live-stream.

4. Writing Web Series: Serial Showcase (Thursday 2 November, 7pm AEDT)

The Digital Writers’ Festival isn’t just a festival that is online, it’s also a festival that is really interested in how digital technologies are shaping the future of storytelling. Web series’ are one of the spaces where this innovation is happening, and they have become a space where independent artists can explore their ideas and push boundaries. This event presents a discussion with three award-winning web series creators, Hayley Adams, Mat Blackwell and Julie Kalceff, as they discuss the challenges and rewards of writing web series.

5. Get YA Words Out (Saturday 28 Oct, 12:30pm AEDT)

 The internet can also be a tool through which we can carve out space for communities, and our panel discussion Get YA Words Out spotlights Queer writing in YA fiction. The panel will explore how online platforms develop and support Queer writers in the young adult literary community; as well as discussing how best to cultivate authentic and well rounded Queer characters within YA.

6. Decolonising Online Spaces (Sunday 29 October, 12:30pm AEDT)

A different event that also tackles with carving out space online, Decolonising Online Spaces treats online spaces as a place of community. This is an exploration of how the internet can be a site of decolonisation, resistance and activism through the perspective of First Nations writers. Nayuka Gorrie, Evelyn Araluen, and the indigenous art collective Fresh and Fruity discuss what it’s like to carve out your own space in the digital realm, and how the internet can foster creativity, collaboration and connection for Indigenous artists in this eye-opening panel.

7. No Chill (Wednesday 1 November, 12:30pm AEDT)

Is social media a sentimental exercise or a social experiment? Is it possible to portray an unfiltered version of ourselves? This chat between digital natives Madison Griffiths and Lucinda Price promises to deconstruct the place social media has in our lives. It is a personal must-see for anyone who owns a social media account. Truly a #nofilter discussion on cultivating an online identity for women and sufferers of a myriad of mental illnesses.

8. A Platform of One’s Own – Liminal Magazine (Tuesday 3 October, 12:30pm AEDT)

Ever dreamed about creating your own online space? Linh Nyugen and Leah Jing McIntosh, the creators of Liminal Magazine, discuss how to build your own digital platform, find your niche and maintain an audience! This is truly a must-see for any creative looking to branch out into the digital realm.

9. Representation in Fanfiction (Friday 3 November, 3pm AEDT)

Fanfiction is becoming more and more prevalent in the mainstream, with authors like Marissa Meyer and Cassandra Clare getting their start on the platform. Check out this panel to see Nalini Haynes, C.B. Mako and Ella Donald discuss how interactive narratives in spaces like fanfiction are becoming a space for minorities to represent themselves in their favourite works of fiction, and how it is beginning to influence the canon as well.

10. Manifest (Friday 3 November, 7pm AEDT)

 Manifest will be the festival’s send-off, and an important keynote on how to grapple with the endless opportunities that the internet presents. This event aims to leave you wondering, ‘what if?’, charing six writers with the exploration of six alternate futures where the possible has become actual. There are some fantastic writers involved – Winnie Dunn, Jesse Oliver, Piriye Altraide, Rebecca Jessen, Ben Walter and Zhi Yi Cham, and they will send off the festival on the hopeful note that the future isn’t written, and we have the power to change it.

This is truly the only festival that you can attend entirely in your pajamas so join us at these events and more! DWF17 broadcasts to everyone, everywhere! You can find our full program on the website.

Can we shape a digital literary form using the world around us?

What happens to literature when a reader is mobile and engaged in a narrative both spatially and temporally?

How can a writer use ubiquitous computing, available using a smartphone, to situate readers in a literary work?

Such questions brought together researchers from three universities in the UK (the University of the West of England, Bath Spa University and the University of Birmingham) to think about the intersections between place, technology and literature.

The resulting Ambient Literature project is a two-year AHRC-funded research collaboration investigating the potential of situated literary experiences delivered by pervasive computing platforms, which respond to the presence of a reader to tell stories. Such stories take place both in time and space; the reader is brought into contact with a physical location as part of a narrative.

Works of ambient literature can be shared with the reader in different ways, including through text and audio, and the reader is asked to also read situation and context. They may read text on the screen of a smartphone and listen to audio through headphones but also read the physical environment around them, walk along city streets or experience the sights and sounds of a single location. For example, in work resulting from the StoryPlaces project at the University of Southampton. This has both the potential to offer both an immersive literary experience as well as a reframing of the everyday world.

The technology used by the Ambient Literature project is often not new. For many years, artists, writers and performers have experimented with locative storytelling and used GPS tracking to tell stories through tagging locations. There is a long history of this type of media and creative production; in arts and performance by artists such as Janet Cardiff, who creates audio walks, the writer Eli Horowitz, who in The Silent History^⁠ tagged stories to locations using GPS so the reader had to move between spaces to access story with the use of a smartphone and, working at the intersection between performance and games, Blast Theory , an artist group that uses interactive media to engage audiences.

Countless others have explored this terrain and experimented with the idea of the situated participant who engages with a physical location through their movements in time and space. To add to the work of these artists, writers and performers, the Ambient Literature project wants to experiment with how ubiquitous technologies found within smartphones, such as sensors, can be an opportunity to access the data that is all around us to produce literary works.

To help us understand what ambient literature might become we have commissioned writing projects from writers Duncan Speakman, James Attlee and Kate Pullinger . The first of our commissioned works, It Must Have Been Dark by Then by Duncan Speakman, launched in May. It is a book and audio experience that uses music, narration and field recordings from three places in the world experiencing rapid human and environmental changes; the swamplands of Louisiana, Latvian villages and the Tunisian Sahara.

During this work, the reader is asked to physically seek out, by walking, types of locations in their own environment, such as elements of the natural world and human-made feature, and, in response, are given sounds and stories from remote but related situations.

At each location, the reader is invited to make connections between places and, in the process, create a map of both where they are standing and places that may not exist in the future. As the reader is encouraged to walk along city streets, there is space around the narrative for interruption, unpredictability and serendipity and this is a potentially exciting feature of ambient literature. A writer is unable to know exactly what a reader will encounter and so must think about their experience. For example, there may be an interruption from a passerby, an unexpected encounter or a strange sight in the physical environment.

This experience of being part of a narrative but staying open to these uncontrollable parts of a real-world space can resemble the visual art and performance art practices of participation and improvisation. The reader may be reading a text and listening to audio but, at the same time, they are part of an immersive experience that includes everything around them. It Must Have Been Dark by Then encapsulates this idea. In the experience, a reader is asked to navigate city streets through walking but there are physical boundaries and borders in place. The city controls their movements and they cannot pass entirely freely from one place to the next. There are rivers, commercial and business areas, fenced off areas and unsafe places. You can’t get to certain places and this becomes an interesting metaphor in the work. You experience a work about physical global borders while experiencing the borders in front of you.

In ambient literature, as an emerging form with its roots across media and literary production, there are opportunities for writers to play with the physical material of the city to shape a story. Technologies that have become a part of our everyday lives can be used to build narratives that are immersed in places. Through a carefully orchestrated experience, a writer can draw a reader’s attention to different aspects of the environment, highlight what is usually unseen or distract them from the familiar. This involves a re-thinking of what we understand as literary, what we mean by reading and how we can use the technologies all around us to tell stories.

You can follow the progress of the Ambient Literature project on our website [www.ambientlit.com] or on twitter @ambientlit.

Our second work of ambient literature, The Cartographer’s Confession by James Attlee, will be launched in September followed by our third, Liquid Continent by Kate Pullinger.

All images by Mark Lawrence capturing It Must Have Been Dark by Then. 

The first ever UK competition to find the best new examples of popular digital fiction has been launched by Sheffield Hallam University and Bangor University.

The Opening Up Digital Fiction Writing Competition, run by Sheffield Hallam University and Bangor University, and part of the AHRC-funded Reading Digital Fiction project, is inviting entries from people across the UK and in two languages – English and Welsh.

Digital fictions are different to e-books and are known as ‘born digital’, as they would lose some of their form and meaning if they were removed from the digital medium.

Digital fictions require the reader to interact with the narrative throughout the reading experience. This may include hyperlinks, moving images, mini-games or sound effects. In many digital fictions, the reader has a role in constructing the narrative by controlling a character’s journey through the story.

Hypertexts, text-adventure games, multimedia stories, interactive video, literary games, and some mobile apps are all examples of types of digital fiction.

There are five prizes up for grabs in the competition – Judges’ Prize, People’s Choice, Welsh Language Prize*, Student Prize and Children’s Story Prize.

Winners will receive a cash prize, publication on the Reading Digital Fiction website, and a series of mentoring meetings with select judges on a future digital fiction project.

Dr Alice Bell, a reader in the Humanities department at Sheffield Hallam University, is running the Reading Digital Fiction project with Dr Lyle Skains from Bangor University, a practitioner-researcher in digital fiction in the School of Creative Studies and Media.

Dr Bell said: “There is a new generation of readers and writers who see digital media as a dynamic and genuinely immersive means of experiencing fiction. We’re trying to capture that within the Reading Digital Fiction project by engaging with established audiences as well as introducing more readers to this form of storytelling.

“The competition is designed to expand digital fiction readership to include a broader segment of the public and is open all writers – from rookies to veterans – and all types of digital fiction. We’re keen to see entries that will be accessible to different audiences compatible across different devices.”

Dr Skains said: “As a writer of digital fiction, I’m excited to see the public engage more with it, and to see more popular forms emerging from this engagement. Our judges, too, have expressed a keen interest in seeing what digital fiction can do once it hits the mainstream. We’re really pleased to have such high profile judges join the panel, from very popular digital fiction writers to Welsh-language researchers in digital media and creativity.”

Click here for more information on the competition or to submit an entry.

*(Welsh language entries are eligible for all prize categories).

The interior northwestern United States is remote: impenetrable mountains, untamed rivers, and disorienting prairies paired with unpredictable and extreme weather. Once an intricate patchwork of territories occupied by Nez Perce, Salish, Blackfeet, Pend O’Reille, and Sioux, the region has undergone a post-colonial identity shift to that of ranching and hydropower, agriculture and wilderness playground. In the one-hundred-and-fifty years of Euroamerican occupation, it has become birthplace and life landscape for generations of non-indigenous people who, in the footsteps of novelist Wallace Stegner, claim nativeness. I am one of these natives, born in Montana near the Custer Battlefield. The West is a part of my identity, much as it was for the indigenous people before me. We have experienced in common the warm, wet wind of a chinook ushering in spring after the brutal cold of winter. We’ve tasted brook trout and suffered under the punishing sun on sagebrush prairies. We have contextualized our lives and humanity against the backdrop of rugged peaks so grand that rivers are divided. To grow up in the rural west is to experience its hardships and sweetness first-hand, directly, with your sleeves rolled up and grit under your nails.

For early non-indigenous natives like Stegner, the Massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota[i] in 1890 ended the Indian Wars and opened the west to white settlement. Euroamerican writers, looking back on a hard fought victory, entered an era of romanticizing and mythologizing the West and the fortitude of settlers. They mythologized Euroamerican hardship in the face of a wild land in which Indians were summarily dismissed as “the vanished people.”

The name Nez Perce, to me, was first perceived as a region within the United States Forest Service. Only later I understood it as the tribe of indigenous people whose tools we collected in the tilled soil of our garden and landmarks we witnessed. When the television drama I Will Fight No More Forever (I Will Fight No More Forever, 1975) aired, my childhood friends and I hailed Chief Joseph for his bravery in attempting to out-pace the US Army with his entire tribe—children and elderly among them—in tow. With heart-felt allegiance, we mourned Joseph’s defeat just miles from the Canadian border, and we repeated his now-famous words, “From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.” (Beal, 1963) Like ghosts, Indians were present in our lives in ways that we imagined were meaningful, but they were seldom present among us.

Wallace Stegner’s literary contemporaries included so-called “vanished” Indian authors such as D’Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, and James Welch; some writing about the very landscape to which Stegner claimed himself not just native, but indigenous. McNickle, a member of the Salish & Kootenai Confederated Tribes, wrote about the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. My family’s ranch was a part of McNickle’s 1936 landscape, and because it was white-owned by 1917 it represents the reality of Euroamerican settlement on treaty land as he described in his work. I had Indian contemporaries of my own growing up. Sherman Alexie was stretching his literary wings on the Spokane Indian Reservation not far away while I was immersing myself in Wild West movies starring Clint Eastwood and other iconic actors. These movies represented Hollywood’s golden years, and they taught a revisionist history to generations of Americans—perhaps the world—about the West and what it represented. Genre Westerns—books or film—have iconized the West in ways that undoubtedly damaged Native Americans, but also the viability of literary artists from the region. Our work is often pigeon-holed in preconceived tropes that readers and scholars alike skip over it with little regard for its merit. But as a child and a member of the colonizing race, I was anesthetized at best and completely ignorant at worst, to problems this mythology created, as well as the cultural conflict that remains.

Alexie, in his twenties, began boldly writing about privilege through its absence. But it took me years longer to find my voice. My experience growing up in the remotest parts of the West, my connectedness to the landscape and its power to shape or kill people, made me a regional writer by default. I had no choice but to tell the story of life here. And while my burgeoning understanding of the cultural conflict was an impetus for my writing, recognizing my unwitting participation in the Indian Wars gave my voice a tentative timbre. As Elizabeth Cook-Lynn suggested in her essay “Why I can’t read Wallace Stegner” I, too, was aware that we might “discover the unwelcome news that we have been enemies and perhaps still are.” (Cook-Lynn, 1996, p. 33) For a child in love with Chief Joseph, this was a staggering recognition—a chrysalis releasing an identity crisis. Like many regional authors, my work has omitted Indians and their influence on my life in the West entirely.

As an outspoken member of the community of Native American Scholars, Cook-Lynn’s assessment of Stegner includes the following criticism of all Euroamerican writers:

The principal perpetrators of a wrongful history, as far as Stegner was concerned, are allowed to melt into the heroic and hopefull future of America with no more than an expression of regret. Such terrible regret is expressed so beautifully that readers are helpless to resist a sympathetic emotional response. This is the power of Stegner and those who preceded him, and those American writers of the West who follow. They all become part of the American literary movement which claims possession of the American West. … Un-self-consciously, they write about the plains and the American Indian and their own experiences in an attempt to clarify their own identities. (Cook-Lynn, 1996, pp. 31-32)

Given the historical depiction of Indians by Euroamerican writers throughout history, it seems reasonable for Indians to draw hard boundaries around the reclamation of Indian identity. I don’t want to contribute to a history of inaccuracy and cultural appropriation, though clarifying my identity, as Cook-Lynn states it, requires that I write about my experiences in the West. But as a writer sitting down to her craft, it would deny the larger truth of my own experience to suggest that I omit Indians and Indian influence when writing about characters who reside here, and specifically Euroamerican characters who live on treaty land, which is an undeniable truth today. In the context of creative writing, and especially the art of fiction, it is the work of authors like myself to produce a complex, multi-layered story that deals with a universal condition. Within that discipline, omitting other races is not simply too restrictive, it contributes to the revisionist history we seek to avoid. It cannot answer the questions: What of the interracial experience? And beyond that, the bi-racial experience that is frequently the outcome of such unions? Astute authors have significant contributions to make to the literary tradition of the West as it applies to these cross-cultural matters, regardless of their race. I often seek to understand these things: How do Euroamerican authors native to the West write about the racially charged tension of our generation without appropriating indigenous identity or making the same romantic or racist missteps of our predecessors?

To help answer these questions I researched twentieth and twenty-first century Native American literature, tracing their depiction of Euroamericans and other ethnic characters. The depiction of interracial relationship, in particular, stood out for me, as characters attempted to bridge the cultural divide through intimate relationships. These love interests and sexual encounters illustrated a more personal effort to overcome racial biases by understanding a member of another race intimately. They seemed, in many cases, to transcend racial biases, but not without significant struggle. Perhaps this approach was also personal to me because I have been married to a man from another culture, religion, and country for most of my adult life. The depiction of these characters’ struggles and hardships was identifiable and consistent with my own experience.

I found that Native American authors like Cook-Lynn, Alexie, D’Arcy McNickle, and Janet Campbell-Hale did not shy away from inside first- and third-person perspectives of Euroamerican characters. And Alexie writes from the perspective of a variety of races (white, black, Indian, and bi-racial), as well as gender. And within those characters he creates a variety of racist, non-racist, and interracial perspectives.

D’Arcy McNickle’s novel The Surrounded (McNickle, 1936) is among the first Indian works in the tradition of American novelists. In it, he explores the issue of non-Indian settlers on reservation land through the perspective of the mixed-race character, Archilde Leon. Born to a Salish mother (Catherine) and Spanish father (Max), Archilde straddles both white and Indian worlds. Max operates a ranch and embodies the Euroamerican Individualist archetype so thoroughly that he lives alone in a large, modern ranch house while his Indian wife and mother of his twelve children remains in a rustic cabin nearby. When her tribal community arrives to celebrate Archilde’s return from Indian boarding school, they pitch their teepees in the forest and share a feast. But Max remains in his house, listening to their tribal stories. Though he is fluent in Salish, he cannot comprehend his wife’s people for cultural reasons. Max is likewise perplexed by his own children, who have disappointed him. He doesn’t understand why his sons go fishing instead of working the ranch. To him they are lazy and wild, they do not possess good work ethics, and they are unworthy to inherit his land. But the fish they catch, which Max’s wife prepares without him, is his son’s contribution to family existence.

As a member of the dominant culture, even on the reservation, Max assumes that his wife and children will conform to his way, discounting the cultural differences between them. Catherine was the daughter of the old chief, and though she has been schooled by Jesuit nuns in Euroamerican homemaking, that has remained nothing but a curiosity to her. She lets the stove Max bought rust from disuse while she cooks over an open fire. The butter churn dries and falls apart, and the wash tubs are battered out of shape by her children while she soaks the clothing in the creek. Catherine also feels the brunt of the differences between them:

Even without those complications it was difficult to be a white man’s wife. In the old way of living one never stayed in one place for very long. One camped wherever there was game and grass and water for the horses. . . . When the old way came to an end and the Indians had to live on the Reservation, the habit of moving persisted; people went visiting. They would live on their allotment until they got restless; then they would take their tepee poles and travel to some relative’s place . . . A white man does not care to have his relatives or his wife’s relatives come live with him. He will slam his door in their faces. (McNickle, 1936, p. 172)

Though Max and Catherine are estranged, they remain married, if separate. On his death bed, Max admits that Catherine was not the cause of his troubles and offers reconciliation. It’s important to him that he not die without mending the relationship. Yet he behaves as a European patriarch, telling Catherine he doesn’t blame her, rather than asking her to forgive him.

McNickle uses assumptions of common understanding between two cultures with vastly different mythologies and world views to show how unpredictable and illogical they seem to each other. The Indians in The Surrounded show both confusion about the white world and its laws, and distrust of whites themselves because of it. With the interracial relationship, McNickle offers both perspectives in order to illustrate the origins of that distrust, such as the hunting regulation that prohibits killing female deer to protect next year’s fawns. Only after the animal is killed are the Indians aware of the regulation. They have been accustomed to abundant game and have historically taken young, tender animals regardless of sex. Failure to understand and adopt the dominant culture’s world view, thought, does not protect them from the law, regardless of their logic, giving the novel a powerful point.

In Sherman Alexie’s 2012 short story “Assimilation” (Alexie, 2012), he takes on the issue of interracial marriage with frank openness and scrutiny and with a same-race infidelity twist. Mary Lynn is a Coeur d’Alene Indian married to a white engineer, and the story opens with her determined search for any random Indian man to have “indigenous” sex with. She is filled with angst about her identity, not because she feels bad about being Indian, but because she wishes that being Coeur d’Alene was a description rather than “an excuse, reason, prescription, placebo, prediction, or diminutive.” (Alexie, 2012, p. 332) She is fully aware that she is cheating on her white husband because he’s white. Alexie brings the historic animosity of the two races down to the relationship level.

After a clumsy and unromantic sexual act in a cheap motel with a Lummi Indian who Mary Lynn meets in a diner, she meets her white husband for dinner at a trendy Seattle restaurant. Mary Lynn is a woman with children and broad sexual experiences, but she has never experienced sex with another Indian. She uses this fact to justify her infidelity to herself, calling it a political act.

If forced to admit the truth, or some version of the truth, she’d testify she was about to go to bed with an Indian stranger because she wanted to know how it would feel. Why not practice a carnal form of affirmative action? By God, her infidelity was a political act. Rebellion, resistance, revolution! (Alexie, 2012, p. 333)

Alexie illuminates the prejudice against Indians by embodying those prejudices within his Indian characters. This technique brings their prejudices into the spotlight in a way that gives those prejudices more credence. He also uses extreme comparisons, such as when a reservation Indian compares his people with the Jews who survived the death camps as those who lied, cheated, murdered, stole, and subverted. Alexie shows us how Mary Lynn ended up with a white husband from her own place of prejudice, and why that prejudice undermines her happiness.

White men had never disappointed her, but they’d never surprised her either. White men were neutral, she thought, just like Belgium! And when has Belgium ever been sexy? When has Belgium caused a grown woman to shake with fear and guilt? She didn’t want to feel Belgium; she wanted to feel dangerous. (Alexie, 2012, p. 335)

By Mary Lynn’s admission that she desires dangerous men, Alexie then restores the dignity of those he has just excoriated, which brings the reader back to the understanding that these are prejudices not realities. Alexie repeats this pattern throughout the story. Mary Lynn imagines that her husband, Jeremiah, as “out there” with eighty-seven other white men on business trips, wearing suits, but not their best suits, staying in similar business-class hotels, each separately watching pay-per-view porno. That it is a predictable white-man existence creates a prejudice, but her belief that they deserve better, reversing the ugly stereotype with her idea that they are smarter and more tender and generous than the white men who came before them neutralizes the prejudice, restoring them as human beings once again.

Alexie turns up the volume on the racial tension while the couple waits outside for a table, bringing the exchange to a near fight. When Jeremiah claims to know the difference between individual Asian ethnicities, Mary Lynn accuses him of being an Indian, and his response is harsh for a man speaking to his wife of twenty years.

Fucking an Indian doesn’t make me an Indian. (Alexie, 2012, p. 340)

It’s followed by a short exchange about whether they should stay or go, on the surface meaning the restaurant, but the subtext implies the marriage. They’ve come to the brink—the deciding point. They are now openly hostile and using language reserved for enemies, as the two races have historically been.

Once again, as soon as racial tensions are at their peak, Alexie reverses course, retreating from overt stereotypes into family life, softening the conflict through thoughts about their four children. Their two boys take after Mary Lynn—obviously Indian to the casual observer. Their two girls resemble their father—blond and fair. When they mutually acknowledge that the boys get preferential treatment from both sets of grandparents, Jeremiah vows to love his girls more to make up for the inequity, but he also wonders if he’s doing it simply because they look like him. Mary Lynn wonders if they should have another child to determine once and for all whether they are an Indian family or a white family.

What Alexie achieves in “Assimilation” is not simply a story about an interracial couple struggling with common cultural misunderstanding, but a stark juxtaposition of the ugliest and most prevalent stereotypes from both racial perspectives. The point is clear when the couple, after infidelity, fighting, and the parsing of children by ethnic similarities, finally get to the root of the issue, and it is the insidiousness of it that bubbles out.

[They] had often discussed race as a concept, as a foreign country they occasionally visited, or as an enemy that existed outside their house, a destructive force they could fight against as a couple, as a family. But race was also a constant presence, a houseguest and permanent tenant who crept around all the rooms in their shared lives, opening drawers, stealing utensils and small articles of clothing, changing the temperature. (Alexie, 2012, p. 344)

In this perpetual cycle of glaring racial tension followed by a retreat into compassion, Alexie uses bold language to punctuate the emotion. Mary Lynn, when angry about men, invokes a mantra in her head wherein she chants hate hate hate and then lets it go. Three times in the story, she goes through her mantra and releases it. The story appropriately unites the couple at the close. The premise and execution leading up to the reconciliation are an analogy for assimilation because assimilation is ultimately a process of recognizing one’s prejudice, acknowledging the hatred it invokes, and then releasing it and stepping forward on the same path. The story glimpses into the real work of overcoming racial prejudice and maintaining an interracial marriage. It is also an outstanding model for authors seeking a balanced technique for depicting those racial prejudices within the context of overcoming them.

Understanding the techniques used to engender fictional characters within a work with varying viewpoints, including extreme racism, without making the overall nature of the work racist was the goal of my research. In close examination of Alexie’s narrative structure and narrative voice, I found that he demonstrates a strong empathy for each of his characters, and he does so with a clear purpose to illuminate the hardships of race relations from each of their perspectives. This was highly useful for my own writing—racism exists, and many people are not looking the other way, but attempting to understand their own relationship with it. As a writer, I cannot shy away from criticism over assuming other racial identities if I am going to achieve a clear depiction of interracial relationships and cultural tension in my work. When I began my research, I didn’t expect to instill extreme views in my characters, but it was important to understand the extremes in order to determine where my characters fell on the racist continuum. Now I recognize that my characters can be anywhere on the continuum without automatically making the work itself racist or being guilty of appropriation.

There are four specific techniques that I identified for use in my own work:

• Alignment with historic context. Alignment with historic context combats racial stereotypes and allows the reader to experience a character’s full situation in the story. To ignore actual events that are significant to the development of racial perspectives, such as systematic removal of Indian children from their homes, sets characters adrift and robs the reader of information that puts behavior into context.
• Outsider perspective. One of the most effective ways, I found, of depicting cultural differences and nuances is through an “outsider” characters, or someone who is from neither race involved in the conflict. Outsider characters are allowed to make mistakes, offend, learn, and earn forgiveness, and their journeys can illuminate truths about other cultures that the reader might never experience first-hand.
• Racism from within. One of the most powerful techniques for illustrating racism is through the inclusion of racist ideas about a group from a character within that group. For example, Mary Lynn’s thoughts about Indian men making her afraid, and her husband’s thoughts about how white people created racism in order to enslave blacks and kill Indians. When the character is of the same race as the racist concept it is easier to show these biases as simply that and not truths.
• Rotating (or circular) racism. Particularly with the inclusion of interracial couples, there is a privilege that comes from familiarity. This allows characters to make highly racist statements, either out of affection or during battle. But the characters must then consider their commitment to the other-race spouse/lover and see past those racist feelings into the humanity of their partner. Through this technique the author can bring the racism to the surface, then transcend it.

In my own work, and specifically a novel titled A Delicate Divide, I use the concepts of interracial relationships to transcend racism within my characters. Set in Montana, the story unfolds in the same location as D’Arcy McNickle’s 1936 novel The Surrounded. Written roughly eighty years apart, the two novels, when read in succession, will render an epic story of integrated life on the Flathead. McNickle’s novel takes place at the peak of institutionalized dismantling and iradication of Indian culture. His characters are subject to laws they do not understand as they watch their treaty land infiltrated by outsiders. The Catholic church, a looming Gothic structure built in 1890, is central to his narrative. His characters straddle Christianity and the forbidden religious practices of their forebearers. In my work, the church remains a central landmark in the town, and the characters straddle Christianity and the rejection of all religion in the face of modern life. In McNickle’s novel, the Indians are forbidden from speaking their native language, and the children are systematically sent away to boarding schools where they are “assimilated” into white culture. In my novel, the highway project touts signs in Salish, translated into English for the benefit of those passing through, and the cultural center undertakes an aggressive project to glean traditional stories from elders before they are lost forever. In McNickle’s novel the white law prevails, and in my novel, the confederated tribes have discovered the power of the legal system and are aggressively reclaiming treaty land and lost rights.

As I studied McNickle’s work it became apparent that telling the contemporary story of water rights in A Delicate Divide was not quite enough to give the reader a full comprehnsion of the events that took place in the interviening eighty years between McNickle’s work and my own. Some of these events included the decline of the tribes into poverty, the rise of addiction, the removal of children to white foster homes, the rise of the American Indian Movement, Wounded Knee II[ii], the subsequent rise of the cultural preservation movement, and the eventual adoption of the Euroamerican legal system to preserve tribal sovereignty. To illustrate these important events between the works I added a historic storyline based on an early white settler to the region, and then follow his descendants. My work opens with the purchase of land in 1911, which has been deemed surplus by the government after the allocation of parcels to Indians under the General Allotment Act of 1905.[iii] I also borrowed two of McNickle’s characters from The Surrounded: George Moser, the merchant and land speculator, and his wife. Moser’s wife is the primary racist representative in McNickle’s work, and in many respects she sets the tone for the next forty years of overt racism that my characters witness. By including her in my work, I am giving body and voice to what McNickle only alluded to in 1936 (she does not actually appear on the page). I can only guess that his treatment of her character might have been more direct had he been writing at a later time in history.

The Rocky Mountain setting, rugged and beautiful, represents more than the location of the Flathead Reservation. The West is central to what it means to be American. The folklore of the West, as illustrated by the movies of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and the plethera of Euroamerican authors like A.B. Guthrie and Wallace Stegner, is entrenched in the modern American psyche. Generations of Euroamericans like myself have grown up believing that this landscape and narrative is wholly our own. It is important to me, as an author and native Westerner, to bring a broader perspective to our existence here—that of a single chapter in an ongoing narrative. A very small slice in the history of all that has come before, and all that will come after.

[i] In 1890 Cavalry Soldiers killed hundreds of unarmed Minneconjous men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. It is considered the last episode of the Indian Wars, and is commonly described as “The Massacre at Wounded Knee.”

[ii] Wounded Knee II is defined as the 71-day siege of the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota by Oglala Sioux protesting corruption among tribal officials and the US government’s failure to fulfill innumerable treaties throughout history. More than 60 deaths are attributed to the protest.

[iii] The Dawes Act was passed by congress in 1887. It is also known as the General Allotment Act and the Land Allotment Act, and was adopted by individual states at different times subsequently. Montana enacted the law in 1905. The Flathead Reservation was divided into parcels and each Indian head of household was granted 160 acres under the law. The remaining land was deemed “surplus” and sold for settlement. This is how treaty land first came into Euroamerican ownership.

Alexie, S., 1995. Reservation Blues. Paperback ed. New York: Warner Books.

Alexie, S., 2012. Blasphemy. New York: Grove Press.

Balch, R., 2006. THE RISE AND FALL OF ARYAN NATIONS:. Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 34(1), pp. 81-113.

Beal, M., 1963. I Will Fight No More Forever. 2nd ed. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Bremer, K., 2014. My Accidental Jihad. First ed. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books.

Brown, D., 1970. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. New York: Bantam.

Chopin, K., 2015. The Kate Chopin International Society. [Online]
Available at: http://www.katechopin.org/desirees-baby-text/
[Accessed 2 April 2016].

Cook-Lynn, E., 1991. From the River’s Edge. First ed. New York: Arcade Publishing.

Cook-Lynn, E., 1996. Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice.. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press..

Doris, M., 1987. A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. 1988 Trade Paperback ed. New York: Warner Books, Inc..

Erdrich, L., 1984. Love Medicine. First ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Erdrich, L., 2013. The Round House. First ed. New York: Harper Perennial.

Frazier, I., 2001. On The Rez. 1st ed. New York: Picador.

Hale, J., 1984. The Jailing of Cecelia Capture. New York: Random House.

I Will Fight No More Forever. 1975. [Film] Directed by R. Heffron. U.S.: Wolper Productions.

I Will Fight No More Forever. 1975. [Film] Directed by R. Heffron. USA: Wolper Productions.

Kidd, S. M., 2001. The Secret Life of Bees. 1st ed. New York: Penguin Books.

King, T., 1989. Medicine River. First ed. Toronto: Viking Canada.

Krupat, A., 2002. Red Matters. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Leslie, C., 1984. Winterkill. First ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.

Lundquist, S., 2004. Native American Literatures: An Introduction. London: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd / Books.

Magpie Earling, D., 2002. Perma Red. First ed. New York: Blue Hen Books.

Marmon Silko, L., 2013. Yellow Woman. In: M. Puncher, ed. Norton Anthology of World Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 1683-1690.

McNickle, D., 1936. The Surrounded. Albuquerque: New Mexico Press.

McNiff, K., 2013. Art As Research: Opportunities and Challenges. 1st ed. Bristol: Intellect.

Norman, H., 2001. Norther Lights. First ed. New York: Picador.

Oregonian, 2014. Teen threatens American Airlines with Al Qaida action, tweets go viral. [Online]
Available at: www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2014/04/teen_twitter_american_airlines.html
[Accessed 15 April 2014].

Owens, L., 1985. Other Destinies. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Parini, J., 1995. John Steinbeck. First ed. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc..

Steinbeck, J., 1936. Of Mice and Men. sixth ed. New York: Penguin.

Steinbeck, J., 1938. Tortilla Flat. 2nd ed. New York: Viking Penguin Inc..

Stevenson, A. & Waite, M., 2011. Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Twelfth ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Vizenor, G., 1990. Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. 1st ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Welch, J., 1974. Winter In The Blood. New York: Harper & Row.

Womack, C., 1999. Red on Red, Native American Literary Separatism. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Heather Sharfeddin is a Pacific Northwest novelist whose work has earned starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal, has been honored with an Erick Hoffer award and at the New York and San Francisco Book Festivals, as well as the Pacific Northwest Book Sellers Association. She has taught creative writing at Randolph College, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and Linfield College (presently). She is also a book reviewer for Colorado Review. Her fifth novel What Keeps You is due out in late 2016. Sharfeddin holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University (Bath, England).

The first time someone mentioned the term transmedia to me I was already collaborating with four project teams. We were working to produce a comic anthology centered on my urban fantasy novel Fallen Heroes. I was also co-writing the first episode of an audio drama spin off. The name I gave to this transmedia project was Unseen Shadows, which referred to the trilogy I was working on, of which Fallen Heroes was the first.

My goal in using transmedia was to create stories in other mediums that could be enjoyed as stand alone adventures. However, when those stories were combined with the novel they would expand the world established within its pages. This meant that a single line of prose within the novel could be transformed into a 22 page comic or a supporting character could take the lead in a five part audio drama.

An Unseen Shadows project begins when someone, usually a writer, reads the novel and wants to become involved. I start by asking them what character they want to work on rather than choose one for them. This has led to some interesting choices, including both main and very minor characters being given the transmedia treatment.

The next stage is for the writer to give me a brief overview of their idea. Once I’m on board they will work up a full pitch, including any suggestions I may have made, before moving onto the scripting stage. At the same time the artist begins work on the main character sketches.

In my goal to create stand-alone routes into the novel I am involved in every stage of the process. I approve each story pitch, comic or audio script, character design and every line of dialogue spoken by a voice actor.

There are currently around forty writers, artists, letterers, colourists, graphic designers and voice actors working within the Unseen Shadows team. Their talent and experience are as diverse as their backgrounds and locale. Members can be found in the UK, Ireland, Portugal, Scotland, South Africa and the US.

Overseeing a team spread across the world is definitely a challenge. I quickly found that email, cloud storage and social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and Skype were the greatest weapons in my communication arsenal.

All the past and future Unseen Shadows projects are stored using cloud storage. The projects are divided into folders with each one containing scripts, artwork, sound files and more, with access provided for relevant team members. This helps avoid any time zone issues as folders can be accessed 24/7.

I created an Unseen Shadows Facebook group where team members could share developments, discuss ideas, welcome new members and anything else they wanted to use it for. I also use the group to feedback on the progress of future novels or anything else of importance.

One of the main issues a writer working in collaborative fiction must face is the time demands. Projects have to be managed, timescales set and monitored. In some cases I have been the main reason that progress on a project has stalled. This can be because a team is waiting for me to read a script, approve a character or respond to an urgent email before they can continue.

A significant amount of my own writing time is spent overseeing the transmedia and collaborative elements of Unseen Shadows and that can be hard. However knowing the amount of work the team members are putting into their projects and seeing the end results spurs me on to manage my time better, which can only be a good thing for my writing in the long run.

Working within these different mediums has meant that to effectively manage the teams I had to develop, at least, a basic understanding of the terminology within each medium be it comics, audio or more recently film. It also pays to know some of the advantages and disadvantages of working within in each one. I have been lucky to find a lot of people along the way willing to offer me help and advice on that front.

The positives with working on collaborative fiction are many but overall it is the feeling of never being alone. In the dark days when the fear of a blank screen comes calling, a piece of art, a new script or question is not far behind. The light never goes off in the world of Unseen Shadows and knowing there is always someone at work is a great motivator.

These extremely talented people work on these projects not for the money, as all profits go back into the development of new projects, but because they love the source material. They constantly challenge me with their ideas, questions and suggestions for new ways to expand this world they have had a hand in developing.

I have found over the years that these new stories and characters have influenced me in unexpected ways. I have already referenced several of the events and characters created in the comics and audio drama in the second novel.

Working with the teams has taught me how to express to a writer why a particular line of dialogue does not work or to an artist why a character sketch does not feel right. This has helped me with my own self editing when I write.

The last two years has been a great training ground for learning when to step in and when to step back and trust these talented people with my world. The collaboration aspects of the various projects have given me a deeper understanding of my own characters as I watch them written, drawn and spoken by others.

10 tips for collaborative fiction

• Your story may be at the heart of everything but in the realm of collaborative fiction you need the creative lifeblood of your team to keep that heart beating. Respect them and their opinions.
• Ensure your team has a clear idea of what you expect of them before they join the project. I have a statement of intent document, which every member of the team receives, which must be read and its terms agreed to before they can join the project.
• Never dismiss ideas out of hand.
• Used wisely, social media can be a great aid to team communication. Used poorly it can a massive time drain.
• No one knows your world better than you but always be prepared to back up your decisions with reasons that don’t start with ‘It’s my book so…’
• Never be scared to get your hands dirty in another medium yourself. (I had never seen an audio script before Unseen Shadows much less co-written one.)
• Try to gain an understanding of the terminology used within the mediums you will be working in.
• Collaborative fiction can be a huge time commitment. Keep that in mind when deciding which projects to undertake.
• Keep yourself included in every stage of the project.
• Communication is the key. Keep your teams up to date and ensure they do the same. So many problems can be avoided with regular communication.