Timothy West’s satirical radio play “This gun in my right hand is loaded” is a wonderful demonstration of what happens when writers who are used to one particular medium (in this case the screen) adapt their idea for another (in this case radio) and fail to account for the affordances and limitations of the form.

At one point early on, the protagonist says (adopt posh 1960s BBC radio voice) “Whiskey eh? That’s a strange drink for an attractive, auburn-haired girl of 29”, hilariously exposing one of the singularities of radio, which might be more subtly manoeuvred by a writer with the right expertise. 

Every medium requires a different approach and set of skills in order to really make it sing and virtual reality is no different. But VR is still evolving its form and even its terminology. What one person means by virtual reality may not correspond to what another does, so let’s start by trying to pin down what we mean by VR. 

For many, VR is any computer-simulated environment that you can access via a VR headset. However, purists say that 360 video, though it conforms to this definition, is not ‘true’ VR. If you try to move forward inside a 360 video, the world’s edges move with you. It’s a bit like having a fishbowl on your head (stay with me).You can look at the fish to the left or the right, up and down, or behind you, but if you try to get a closer look and take a step forward, the whole bowl comes with you – a very disorientating feeling when you first experience it.

 VR that uses a gaming engine like Unity or Unreal, whether that world is created using CGI, photogrammetry, volumetric capture or a combination of all three, does not have this ‘depth’ problem and is generally more interactive. You can choose whether to approach certain things or move away from them just as you can in the real world.

Writing for so-called ‘true’ VR is different from writing for 360 video because the former generally entails branching narratives and interactions and is a more complex process. Writing for 360 video tends to involve a straightforward linear narrative, but whether you are writing for one or the other there is something very important to bear in mind with both – the non-traditional point of view of the user. 

Again, terminology is tricksy here. ‘User’ is a gaming term and for less gamesy experiences, many still use the word ‘audience’ (originally from latin meaning listening or hearing). Others talk about ‘participants’ or ‘viewers’ or even ‘viewsers’ – a useful hybrid coined by media theorist Dan Harries.

When writing for VR, it’s important to realise that the viewser’s POV is self-directed, omnidirectional and present. The viewser is not being told where to look and what to concentrate on by the framing of a shot. There are no shots or cuts and they can (and will) look in any direction around them. This needs to be accounted for by the writer.

It’s wonderful that in VR the viewser has such freedom to choose where to focus her attention. Gone are the slow from-the-legs-up lingering shots on women’s bodies, for example. If you want to, you can turn your back on the leading lady and just take in the sky or the floor. But it’s very likely that some of your viewsers will completely miss something important that is unfolding in ‘front’ of them and check out the skirting boards at precisely the wrong time. If something in the story is crucial and should not be missed, it needs to be signposted with sound design or some other sleight of hand, for example with a “Coooey! Over here!”, just before it happens.

By saying that the viewser’s POV is ‘present’, I’m referring to the immersive nature of VR. Writers who are used to writing for film or TV will need to take into consideration the fact that viewsers are not outside of a frame looking in. They are inhabiting the world – not necessarily acting or participating in it (though they may be), but always taking up space in that world and experiencing themselves as part of it, which entails a completely different mindset from traditional writing for frames. There is no hard and fast rule, but the viewser should probably be acknowledged in some way and it should make sense for her to be there. 

Story Studio, Oculus’ explorative VR studio, pinpointed this need to have the viewser’s presence acknowledged with what they called The ‘Swayze’ Effect (after Patrick Swayze’s character’s feeling of dislocation in the film Ghost). Viewsers are not just observers; they are experiencers, embodied in a world and they should be accounted for and considered as such throughout the writing process.

VR is a rapidly evolving art form that is still finding its feet so it’s pretty hard to predict exactly what kind of writing it might entail in a year or even a few months’ time. Until fairly recently, there were no consumer headsets, let alone hand tracking, haptics or wireless rigs. Things are shifting quickly, but we can hazard a guess that VR will become increasingly social and increasingly interactive with writers needing to be able to come up with complex branching narratives, which means a lot of writing!

With the pandemic leading to increased headset sales and with the market for VR growing, now may be the time to try out some VR for yourself, see what works and what doesn’t and to have a go thinking outside the frame. 

In introducing my new novel, author Ryan O’Neill puts it most succinctly:

This is an introduction to a novel you will never read.

He adds hastily that he is referring not to the book in your hands, the one he hopes you’re about to begin, but the novel that inspired his words, the novel he read.

The novel in question is Ex Libris and regardless of which copy you read it contains twelve chapters that can be shuffled into any order. The number of variations possible with such a structure is a little over 479 million. It has been published in both standard paperback and ebook editions, each copy a newly shuffled order of chapters unique to that copy alone. The manuscript that Ryan read in order to create his introduction is different to the finished copy now in his possession, which is in turn different from every other copy ever made.

I have written about Ex Libris previously where I noted that this kind of storytelling has its precedents, the most significant of which all hail from the 1960s. Nanni Balestrini’s Tristano was conceived and written using early computer programming to randomise its content between copies, though it wasn’t published as intended until print technology had caught up in 2007. Other similar books were housed in a box, either as loose leaves (Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta) or as chapter booklets (The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson). Of these, Johnson’s novel provided the most direct influence on the structure of Ex Libris: the fluid pieces of the story are defined not arbitrarily by the size of the page, but by the narrative itself. The story is broken into discrete, meaningful components that combine to form a larger picture.

What Ryan alludes to in his opening statement is that any work structured in this way presents a challenge to critical reading. How can readers universalise their experience if the texts they read are never consistent? You may disagree with someone else’s reading of a text, but you do so on the fundamental understanding that both of you have at least read the same words in the same order. John Bryant’s scholarship on textual fluidity through editions, translations, and adaptations demonstrates that texts are never as concrete as we might assume. But variation between editions is a long way from a narrative that changes by design between individual copies. Although it is possible to arrange Ex Libris in approximate chronological order (some events in the story clearly happen before others), each of the novel’s fluid chapters is a vignette, dependent on the others for context, but not for prior knowledge. I have used the analogy of a jigsaw puzzle to explain this to readers: smaller narratives link together to form a larger picture. The order in which the pieces are placed changes the individual’s progress but doesn’t change the ultimate picture.

The coding to compile finished print-ready files is done in Automator, the computer equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine.

It can be difficult to get past the structure itself and the mathematics behind it as many contemporary and more recent reviews of recombinant works demonstrate. Umberto Eco in his introduction to Tristano, focuses almost exclusively on the novel’s number of permutations with only a cursory nod to the story. This might be understandable for a novel that, though beautiful, has a deliberately tenuous grip on character, plot, and setting. But the same approach is repeated in reviews of Saporta, Johnson, and other similar works. It is as though the flashy acrobatics of the novel’s physical construction obscure what the writers are doing within. And the critics’ resulting performative bewilderment or pithy dismissal of a wacky experiment seem to me like missed opportunities.

When the assumed shared experience of an audience is modified or removed altogether, how does their engagement with a narrative change? Some clues may be found in my own experience on both sides of the reader/writer divide. How I initially read and thought about a fluid novel like The Unfortunates, for example, is very different to how I have come to think about Ex Libris and that change in point of view has been illuminating.

My experience with The Unfortunates suggests that a first reading looms large in one’s perception of story. While reading, I had to keep reminding myself that the clever positioning of two adjacent scenes was attributable not only to the author’s craft but also to sheer happenstance. We’re trained to read stories as linear and it’s a hard habit to break. When I return to The Unfortunates today, no matter how many times I reshuffle its contents, the story is always coloured by that first reading and how the chapters initially unfolded. That first reading has become my definitive version of the novel from which all others deviate.

Readers of Ex Libris may have a similar experience, perhaps moreso given their copy cannot be physically reconstructed. Information that colours the perception of the characters and their actions may come earlier or later and its impact will undoubtedly shift. Readers who see more of a particular character earlier, for example, may centre the story around them in a way others won’t. Several of the fluid chapters also contain crucial pieces of information that change a character’s image or motivation and cast events elsewhere in the story in a different light. Reviewing the chapter order for each copy, I frequently pay attention to where these chapters fall, wondering how their precise location changes the tenor of the story.

I say I wonder because, primarily, I must rely on guesswork. My perception of the novel is not of a puzzle but of narrative pieces in constant motion, a true fluid state. As I worked on it, Ex Libris formed a kind of web, a set of interlocking shorter narratives that fed into a larger complex. For me there can never be a definitive version of the story, only discrete narrative chunks that cross-reference, echo, or contrast, but never line up precisely.

Unlike The Unfortunates which can be endlessly reshuffled, Ex Libris is presented to the reader as a single, fixed manifestation of the narrative. But it’s also a window, a viewport through which you might catch a glimpse of what I see. Without the capacity to physically manipulate pages, the reader must instead imagine that fluid state and the differences in emphasis that come with changes in how the story unfolds. With Ex Libris, like with all fluid texts, a critical reading should regard not only the text as it’s presented, but also with the text in every conceivable other version. The success or otherwise of any one version of the narrative is merely a subset of nearly half a billion possible narratives in the aggregate. Though difficult to fully conceive, this is something I suspect many readers instinctively know. A common reaction from those who have finished the novel is to seek out other readers to compare notes.

But what readers who squint to catch glimpses of the author’s view may not realise is that they have experienced the story in a way I cannot. I can cast an eye over any number of versions of my story, but I can never see the flow of a linear narrative, only a single path running through that fluid web of chapters. For better or for worse I can never have the experience I had reading The Unfortunates.

I suspect that’s why the story that emerged turned out far more self-reflexive than I had originally intended. Maybe it was inevitable that a narrative featuring a band of literary misfits reconstructing a library from fragments in a dystopian world would eventually turn in on itself, a comment on how fiction can become a vehicle for revealing how we construct our own truths. In the same way the story’s characters can never truly reach the author, so too a reader’s and writer’s experiences always remain tantalisingly out of reach for each other.

Ex Libris is out now.

Reference

Bryant, J., 2005. The Fluid Text. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Like all of us, March 2020 was a slow decline into horror at the news of Covid-19. While the British government dithered about what to do, I cancelled some events I’d been booked to hold in promotion of my novel The Blame Game. Quite frankly, I was afraid to travel (from Glasgow to various parts of England), given the news reports about the virus, but I was disappointed to have to scupper these long-held plans – what a pity, I thought, that I couldn’t organise a virtual event in place of a physical one.

 On 13th March I tweeted something to this effect – it seemed likely that locking down the country was going to be necessary (though the British government would dither for another 10 days about it) and I posted that it would be a good idea to have a literature festival that was entirely online. The tweet had a big response, so big, in fact, that I felt I’d need to put my money, or at least my expertise, where my mouth was. Having convened the Distance Learning MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow since 2015, I have experience in running virtual events, and in using the technology. In short, I knew both the pros and the cons of virtual events pretty intimately, and so I felt relatively confident about doing some online author events for people who were stuck at home to access. Paper Nations, a well-known Creative Writing incubator, got in touch with me and asked to partner on the festival, which I decided to call the Stay-At-Home! Literary Festival. I created a google doc and cascaded it to writers who’d expressed interest, to which they added their proposed event with a date and time. I was astounded at how quickly and enthusiastically people responded to my call. In addition to over 100 writers quickly filling up the google doc (forcing me to extend the length of the festival to 16 days), an organisation called the Professional Writing Academy got in touch, offering a range of fabulous writing workshops for free.

 Within 11 days, the Google doc had exploded with workshops, talks, open-mic nights, panel discussions, and showcase events. Word spread quickly to publicists, who were eager to find new routes by which to publicise new books and replace cancelled events. I had to scramble to find slots for authors; I knew all too well how disappointing it was to have to cancel a tour. I also wanted to ensure that minority voices were heard; I love attending book festivals, but all too often I have felt frustrated by their lack of diversity. I’m also deeply aware of how festivals can exclude people with caring duties, with disabilities, and with work commitments. I’m very aware of people who feel out of place at literary festivals, and who simply can’t afford to attend.

The Stay-At-Home! festival was programmed on zero budget. I made it clear to everyone who expressed interest that, while I believe fervently writers should always be paid for their work, this was a pro bono festival; everyone involved, with the exception of 7 Writers in Residence who were paid a small honorarium by Paper Nations, contributed for free. By programming this festival, I was able to platform a diverse range of authors. I wanted to ensure that minority writers were heard, and that writers at all stages of their careers could be involved. One of my MLitt students at the University of Glasgow offered to host an open-mic session; the available slots filled up within hours. Similarly, writing workshops attracted crowds of 500+ – an outstanding feat, and an impossible one in physical form. I was witnessing the birth of something truly unprecedented – the potential of virtual live literature in all its awkward, brilliant glory.

There were many learning curves. One was the phenomenon of Zoom-bombing. Naively, I thought that sharing the Zoom link to an event on social media was danger-free. As it happens, there are individuals out there who get their kicks from troll-bombing such events with the intent to either shout racist slurs across the microphone, or use the screen-share facility to splash porn across the screen of unsuspecting attendees. This is horrifying to experience, and I learned fast how to stamp it out. But even when I had a handle on muting attendees and preventing screen-sharing, trolls would use the chat box and, on one sickening occasion, their own video screen to share inappropriate content.  

It is saying something, however, that feedback from our attendees – of which there were 14,689 from all over the world – rarely mentioned the events that had been subjected to trolling. Instead, feedback focused on the sense of community that had been created by the festival, and it is this which I’m most proud of. Something was created on 27th March 2020, at the very beginning of lockdown and when we were all staring into the surreality of a global pandemic, that has triggered a host of other virtual events. Whereas Edinburgh Book Festival initially announced that it was cancelling the 2020 festival, it has done a U-turn on this decision, with a highly successful virtual festival in its place. Several of the authors who led events at the Stay-At-Home! Festival went on to run their own festivals – for example, Dr Pragya Agarwal (author of Sway) led a festival on South Asian Writing, Virginia Moffatt ran a New Authors festival, and I was pleased to consult on a number of others. 

The Stay-At-Home! Literary Festival was a wonderful experiment. I had the rare privilege of bringing together a range of authors and audiences from all over the world to talk about literature in a moment when we were all facing the terrifying prospect of quarantine and a deadly virus stalking our streets. Lockdown also permitted me a rare privilege of experimenting without too much fear of failure – as one of the very first digital festivals, I was venturing out on to new territory. We were all confined indoors, and therefore my audiences engaged with authors – and each other – from their interior spaces. And yet, I found a richness in encountering high profile authors in their office, kitchen, or spare bedroom. Stay-At-Home! Festival facilitated a levelled audience experience. During the project I was keen to encourage authors to embrace the intimacy, immediacy and even the informality fostered by an online platform like Zoom, and I believe this worked well to draw down certain barriers. Going forward, I don’t think we should be too quick to eradicate this from virtual events. It’s one of the many strengths of virtual live literature.

I have no doubt that the landscape of live literature has forever been changed by Covid, and possibly for the better. I would bristle slightly when I’d hear people say ‘unfortunately we have to hold this event online’ – bristle, because for many people, online was the only way by which they could be included. During the feedback plenaries that I held after the festival, many of the SAH festival’s attendees commented that they found the accessibility of the festival ‘gold standard’. Some posted pictures of themselves with babies on their laps while they engaged in events. If we continue to put thought and experimentation behind our efforts to make literature more inclusive, virtual live literature can boldly take us places that we never knew possible.

When writers discuss plot and pacing in narrative craft, especially in creative writing classes, we often talk about the curve of stories, the rise and fall in tension that characterises the most common story structures. Now usually, at least in my experience, that curve is not something a writer actively thinks about while composing a work. It’s more instinctive. Manipulating pace is one of the writer’s primary tricks in taking a simple sequence of events and turning them into narrative. But what in retrospect looks deliberate and disciplined, is in the act of writing more like manipulating the feel of the story as you go.

When it came to my current publishing project, all that instinct counted for nothing. An experiment in recombinant narrative structure requires careful consideration and active manipulation of the curve.

Ex Libris is a novel containing twelve chapters that can be shuffled in any order, yet always presents as a cohesive narrative arc. It is being published in a print run that randomises the chapters between each copy. With close to half a billion possible combinations, each copy will contain a unique version of the text, yet all will tell the same story.

The title for ‘Ex Libris’ comes from the nineteenth century fad for bookplates.

The two books that, more than any others, inspired the structure of Ex Libris are The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson and Tristano by Nanni Balestrini. Curiously, both were written in the 1960s, though Tristano wouldn’t find its true form until 2007.

The Unfortunates is a beautiful but restless story about grief and the intrusion of memories that overlay the banality of daily life. The novel was structured with a fixed opening and closing and with freely fluid chapters between. The first edition and its more recent reproduction was published as chapter-length booklets contained in a box, which the reader was free to arrange in whatever order they desired.

Balestrini envisaged Tristano as a standard bound work with content that was randomised between copies. Sound familiar? The author was unable to realise the work as intended until forty years after its initial publication and with the advent of digital-based print technology. As the title suggests, Tristano builds its text using Tristan and Isolde as scaffold, which frees Balestrini to desiccate the narrative into the smallest of fragments, hints of meaning that only ever briefly come into focus.

Both works experiment boldly, not just with structure, but also with the language itself. The result is intoxicating: as a reader you feel like you’re having fun, even as you stumble around the text, constantly trying to find your footing. Tristano is one of the best examples of what I call ‘narrative drift’, the sense that, as a reader, you must let go of any sense of structure or meaning and allow the pages to take you wherever they lead. The Unfortunates is more focused, a narrative that initially drifts, but tightens as more of its pieces fall into place.

When I began writing what would become Ex Libris, I didn’t have a particular structure or publishing method in mind. What I wanted to do was write a work with fluid text without sacrificing a reader’s sense of plot or narrative arc.

I started with much more complicated mechanics and elaborate concoctions of fixed and fluid chapters. I ground my way through three drafts of the story, never completely satisfied, trying to find some magic key that would unlock how the story should work.

Eventually, I abandoned these versions of the story altogether. After a break from the manuscript, I returned and found myself back at first principles. Finally, I contemplated the curve.

I created a storyboard of sorts in Scriviner—movable lists in dot points—obstinately refusing to write anything resembling finished prose until a supporting structure had been mapped in sufficient detail. Slowly, a new structure began to take shape. The story begins in media res, at the beginning of the climax. Then it backtracks. It fills in details and circumstances that led directly to the opening scene. Then it jumps to the rest of the climax and conclusion. This means Ex Libris, like Johnson’s The Unfortunates, opens and closes with fixed chapters that frame the narrative. I had hoped not to invite such direct comparisons with Johnson, since clearly I would come off a distant second best. But the structure he pioneered, with its parallels to classic storytelling technique, is compelling in its simplicity.

Beyond the framing device, the fluid or recombinant chapters in Ex Libris primarily concern themselves with exploring character and world. These chapters exist in a weird state of semi-independence. A fluid chapter is episodic, with its own miniature arc. It cannot rely on prior knowledge. That doesn’t make it a short story. Although it shares traits with the short story form, a fluid chapter’s raison d’etre is to contribute to a greater whole. Detached from their surroundings and the framing of the novel, these little stories might struggle to pass a ‘so what?’ test.

Story and the structure developed in tandem. Part dystopia, part satire, with doses of paranoia and farce, and a self-reflexive bent, the novel is set in a hyper-networked surveillance state that has abandoned and almost forgotten the book. It focuses on a small band of subversives who collect the fragments and scraps of stories left behind. Calling themselves the ‘free readers’, they are attempting to rebuild a grand library they know must have once existed. A fragmented book about fragmented books, Ex Libris both feeds off and contributes to its own structure, a virtuous cycle of knowing winks.

I was very conscious of the reader’s experience.

I was very conscious of the reader’s experience, signposting and orienting the text at every opportunity to counter and minimise the sense of narrative drift. I maintained strict upper and lower word limits for each chapter. Too long indicated waffle that needed to be broken up. Too short pointed to a lack of substance. Often throughout the long planning stage of the project, I would stare at a dot-point breakdown for a chapter and think ‘but where’s the story?’.

I also avoided working on chapters in any particular order. Instead, I jumped around. From its initial use as a storyboard, Scrivener became a kind of reference tool as I wrote, a way to maintain a wide-angle view of the story, while moving the chapters around. The texts themselves were composed in separate documents, organised by character name and working title. Early printouts were separated into chapters, each one held together with a bulldog clip, so that I could shuffle and reshuffle while reading.

When I finally created the first complete manuscript, I used a random number generator and manually combined the chapters into a single file. I’ve never considered putting together a preferred or canonical order. The thought of it seems a bit…wrong to me. The chronology of the story can be reconstructed in part—some events clearly happen before others—but a grand overarching chronology would be impossible to determine. That’s not how this story works.

At the end of an exhaustive process, I wasn’t sure if I’d succeeded. It wasn’t until the first feedback from beta readers (each of them with their own unique random shuffle) that I suspected maybe this was working as intended. A good indication was that some of these early readers did their own reshuffling to see if I had cheated.

The coding to compile finished print-ready files is done in Automator, the computer equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine.

The long process of conceiving, planning, and writing Ex Libris has led me to a different way of thinking about raising tension in a narrative arc. The behaviour of the characters introduced in the opening sequences is gradually becomes clearer as their background is revealed. It doesn’t matter in what order those revelations happen.

The best analogy I’ve found is that it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. The order in which you place the pieces doesn’t change the final picture, but it does change how you experience the journey towards it. Adjacent chapters might flow or they might juxtapose. A character might disappear from the story for a while. A particular piece of key knowledge might be revealed earlier or later. The story has a different rhythm between copies. If the traditional narrative arc is the linear curve, this is more two-dimensional.

So does it work? That remains my burning question as I finalise editing and prepare to publish. It’s impossible to speak for every possible combination. There are 479,001,600 of them so I can’t check. It’s something every individual reader will have to determine on their own based on the version of the text they receive. I’ve always hoped that the story might be good enough to transcend its construction. I imagine a reader happening across a copy of Ex Libris, with no prior knowledge of its creation, who will read from cover to cover and enjoy it.

Is that even possible? I guess we’ll see.

The crowdfunding campaign to publish Ex Libris is live until 25 November 2019.

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

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

Beemgee
An online authoring tool

Beemgee is a web-based tool designed demystify complex narrative, breaking it down into its components, and step its users through the minutiae of storytelling, one concept at a time. Essentially, it is a storyboarding tool, using a card-based interface to provide a broad overview of a project. It guides its users through the often mechanical processes writers undertake—character profiles, switching between chronology and narrative order—cleverly integrating them into an engaging visual design. Beemgee’s bet is that these tasks can be approached step by step, like baking. Maybe they’re right. But storytelling is an idiosyncratic process and the inevitable assumptions all tools such as Beemgee must make are unlikely to suit all writers. Having said that, this tool’s real value may yet lie not so much in the creation of new stories, but in the breakdown and analysis of existing ones.

As a web- based tool, it also comes with built-in caveats. Using an app within a browser window is not for everyone. Even widely adopted apps like Google Docs have always felt to me like swimming fully clothed. It also raises concerns about the long-term storage and accessibility of its data. But Beemgee does bring a fresh and well-thought-out approach to the tricky business of story planning.

Beemgee is available to try for free online with the option of a subscription for additional features.

Last year, I was invited onto local radio to talk about a new category introduced to the Queensland Literary Awards: the QUT Digital Literature Award. I had been invited in my capacity as chair of the judging panel alongside two of the shortlistees: Mez Breeze and Jason Nelson. The first interview question was directed to me and—I must admit—I braced myself, knowing exactly what was coming.

‘So, Simon, what is digital literature?’

Ah yes. There we were in 2017, still futzing around with definitions. This can be a source of frustration, especially when you consider it appears to be a problem peculiar to this category. The chair of the children’s book panel, for example, does not need to clarify what a book is, or for that matter what a child is.

For the record, my response to the question tends to hew closely to the awards’ stated intention: to ‘showcase innovation and creativity in storytelling for digital media and new directions in contemporary literary practice informed by technology’. The Digital Literature Award is the second of its kind in Australia’s premier literary awards space, after the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards established its Digital Narrative category way back in 2010.

So why does this question refuse to go away? Why is it that, for lay audiences who haven’t spent the past ten years or more immersed in digital literature, the term remains opaque?

The first problem of definition is a problem that applies to all definitions: the placement of boundaries. The boundaries for digital literature are wide, much wider than for any other category in these particular awards. There is no uniform approach to digital literature: no form, no medium, no genre, not even a consistent means for navigating through a story. This can be a strength (wow, digital literature can be almost anything) or a weakness (ugh, digital literature can be almost anything), depending on the tone of your voice.

Another related problem points to the continued lack of a single work or body of works that stands a as a singular example of digital literature. Why should such a singular breakthrough be required for digital literature when no such ‘definitive’ work exists for other categories? For one thing, the other award categories under consideration are not solely defined by the technology of their container: indeed, almost all other categories represent variations of the same print technology. But the norms for all those forms—novel, long-form non-fiction, short story collection, picture book, poetry collection—coalesced at some point in their history around seminal, defining works. Though the identity of such works can be argued over ad infinitum, they certainly exist.

In digital literature, we have seen a dazzling array of wildly inventive work (even a brief survey of Breeze’s or Nelson’s oeuvre, for example, confirms this), but the breakthrough, the work that everybody knows about even if it’s not exactly representative, continues to elude even the finest practitioners and, while not absolutely necessary, presents a barrier to establishing an idea of digital literature in the popular imagination. Indeed, this is one of the major goals for the QUT Digital Literature Award and others like it. But, for the foreseeable future at least, we will continue to be asked to explain exactly what this stuff is all about.

Screenshot from Nine Billion Branches by Jason Nelson.

But beyond determining boundaries and promoting the idea of digital literature in the wider reading public comes, for the judging panel, the difficult task of determining its quality. Specifically, how does one weigh up the wildly different works that fall within those boundaries against each other to determine a winning entry?

Personally, I like to keep things simple. The title tells you everything you need to know.

The first consideration for me is examining how text is used as an integral part of the narrative. Video, animation, graphics, and audio can all of course be combined variously to create inventive narratives, but an entry where text does not form a significant part of the storytelling, for me, would fall too far outside the scope of a literary award. But even works that are clearly worthy in this regard bring challenges for judges. How does one judge, for example, non-linear poetry against remix works against linear prose augmented by multimedia elements? Subjectivity does come into this, but the task requires judges to consider the purpose of narrative. For me that means thinking about the quality of the connection between writer and reader and the clarity of the communication between.

The other consideration for the judging panel is around the technology. What does it mean for a literary work to be ‘digital’? For many people, this automatically means ‘screen’, which to some extent is fair enough. The rules of the award at the moment specifically refer to the screen as an essential medium of delivery. But thinking more broadly, ‘digital’ literature uses technology as an essential part of its design. A great digital narrative tells a story that relies on its underlying technology: stories that make use of the fluidity of digital media, either in their construction or their delivery.

All the shortlisted entries from last year exemplified these ideas in various ways. Looking through the list offers some indication of the complexity of the panel’s task.

After much deliberation, though, the panel granted the inaugural award to Jason Nelson. His winning entry, Nine Billion Branches, finds a unique way to represent fragmented and non-linear narrative. It grasps at meaning in a way that is thoroughly contemporary, reminiscent of grappling with social media threads mid-conversation. It requires its readers to actively negotiate their way through a conceptually three-dimensional space (up and down, left and right, in and out). Its structure recalls the manic pace of today’s online rhetoric, but the narrative reveals itself only when the reader, by choice, slows down to reflect on each fragment of text as a piece within a complete picture. In Nine Billion Branches, Nelson makes a pointed critique of Australian culture, the commercialisation of public spaces, and the politicisation of private spaces. It is a piece that could only exist in a digital environment, but maintains a handmade aesthetic, finding beauty in mundane space of everyday life.

In other words, this is a challenging, but beautifully written work with an urgent message, told in a way that could only be constructed and experienced via digital media, published to the web.

But, while I see in Nine Billion Branches a work deeply immersed in digital culture, I am aware some (perhaps many) readers simply see a screen-based work. This is what I think will be a challenge to the future of literary categories built around technology. A myopic focus on the screen as the defining characteristic of digital literature could eventually lead to a cul-de-sac. Our society and technologies might be screen obsessed today, but the fluidity of digital media has been influencing storytelling long before we carried screens everywhere with us and will continue long after the next interface innovation comes along.

Does that mean I just blurred another defining boundary of digital literature? I should really stop doing that.

The 2018 Queensland Literary Awards are open for nominations until 31 May.

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

This is the phrase. Adopted as a pep-talk by silicon valley Imagineers and tech startups, by creative writing students and university lecturers. It doesn’t mean what you think it does. It isn’t a hopeful phrase, isn’t an entreaty to keep going, to try your best and move on from disaster.

It’s a mournful set of words. Melancholic, devoid of joy. A sequence spoken at the end of a life filled with failures. An introspective self-justification to remain sane as you lie on your deathbed. It is the language of disillusion and despair, despondency, and defeat.

We do it a disservice by misquoting it. We malign it as we forget its place amongst the last things Beckett put to paper. We employ it as a lie.

Worse: We have weaponised the concept of failure.

This weaponisation has a real effect. It is not an abstract, not a situation we can ignore. Billions are thrown at mis-advised startups and empty-headed schemes which are fated to collapse before they draw their first real breath. The hot air present in new technology entrepreneurism has been powering the whole world for years.

In its weaponisation, it occludes the value of learning. ‘Fail better’ has become a mantra for moving on and jumping aboard the next, newest, shiniest piece of technologically enabled disruption. It has become a watchword for novelty for the sake of itself. The innovation Ouroboros eating its tail, as Saturn squats in the next room, devouring his children. Each one, he imagines, will taste better than the last. Each time, he is disappointed.

Beckett wrote those words toward the end of his life. The whole novella (Worstward Ho. 1984, Grove Press) is a lament. The phrase, that phrase, specifically laments the desire to succeed at one thing. To strive toward perfection at the expense of all else. Beckett skewers, impaling on a stake, precisely the anodyne future that his words would engender. Fail better has become the phrase to justify a butterfly-like flitting from one disaster to the next. Your document management start-up just went bust? Don’t worry, there’s an umbrella-sharing scheme opening in Shanghai next week. Jump on board. Just remember to fail better next time.

Beckett pursued the word. His try again, fail again; a steady, unending process of whittling and carving. The novels, plays, novellas and poetry each, and together, bear testament to obsession.

Beckett, and the context that phrase, the phrase, arose from is why the weaponisation of failure is toxic. We have allowed failure to be acceptable because, in truth, it is. Failure is part of the creative process. Novels contain chapters replete with failure. Paintings the same. What is different about an artist’s failure, and a tech startup’s failure, is that the former fails in the name of improvement, in pursuit of learning. Failure is a step along a path and the footfall it leaves will be examined, pored over and deconstructed. Poked at and worried over. Realigned and turned inside out. The latter will be packaged as equity debt and sold on, reabsorbed into the guts of the machine. It will appear, in a new suit, in a year or so, whereupon the whole sorry circus will begin once more.

Beckett demanded perfection, insisted he live up to his internal expectation of his work. His lifetime was dedicated to embodying human experience in words; an impossible ambition, but one that Beckett’s diligence, his obsession, brought closer to fruition than, arguably, any other writer in history. Beckett accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. Accepted, and declined to attend the ceremony in Stockholm. He was too busy working¹. Too busy failing better.

Beckett’s fail better is Frank Auerbach painting every single day for sixty years. Remarking of his work that “… I haven’t done enough pictures to justify my existence”. Carving an image out of his paint², willing the subject to manifest on the canvas.

Behind Camden Town Station, summer evening Frank Auerbach

You don’t achieve Beckett’s clarity, his precision, by walking away. You don’t get that good by failing better somewhere else, at some other thing that tantalises you with a swift return on investment. You get some way toward that by reflecting and trying again. Patience, here, is genuinely a virtue. In fetishising failure, celebrating it as a necessary entrepreneurial byproduct, we are forgetting how to actually learn, how to process diligence and commitment. We have valorised the mantra of TED talks. Bite-sized fragments of learning that are rarely examined in detail by their audience. This short essay is being published on The Writing Platform, who’s mission is “arming writers with digital knowledge”. This is the small piece of knowledge I’d like to impart, and have come to mind the next time you’re told that failing better is a virtue:

Failure is a choice, not a consequence of iteration. Failure happens when you walk away from an idea. When you give up. Everything else is narrowing your focus and getting better, becoming more precise.

Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all.

1. Something Bob Dylan’s critics would do well to remember. ︎
2. Here’s a secret. Stand 20 feet or so from an Auerbach painting and look again. His studio is 25 feet square. Stand in the artist’s shoes and see. ︎

What makes a city the kind of place where you can grow older and be an older person?

No Bindings is collaborating with Bristol Ageing Better (BAB) to explore the possible answers to this question! No Bindings is a project, started in Bristol, by Lily Green. Lily is a resident of the Pervasive Media Studio at the Watershed. She makes sound recordings and handmade books. These book-come-audio pieces are called publication-podcasts! Over the autumn months and beginning of winter, Lily will join forces with Pat Gregory, a member of BAB’s steering group. Equipped with a dictaphone, they will get to know the ins and outs of nine projects that work with and for older people in Bristol.

They will collect interviews and stories and hear what project leaders and older people have to say about how age-friendly the city is. No Bindings seeks contributors for its fourth publication-podcast! No Bindings is looking for writing and artwork related to the following themes that make a city age-friendly:

• Navigating this City
• Dignity
• Inside Spaces, Outside Spaces
• My House, My Home
• My Value
• #connected
• My Voice
• Join in the Fun and Games!
• Feeling Well

The publication and the podcasts (sound recordings) will explore the ways in which a city is, and isn’t, a place where you can grow older and be an older person.

No Bindings strongly encourages you to send in work if you are over 50 years of age. No Bindings welcomes collaborative pieces between younger people and older adults. All contributors must live in Bristol.

Writing

• Submissions must be no more than 1000 words (prose) or 50 lines (poetry).

• Fictional work and work translated from other languages into English are encouraged!

Artwork

• Please be aware, artworks will be printed in one colour (grayscale).

Deadline: 5 pm, 10th November 2017

Selected contributors will be invited to take part in a relaxed interview. The recorded content of this interview will be used in the podcasts (sound) material.

Selected contributors will be paid £150.00 for their written piece or artwork and their involvement in this project.

For more information visit the webpage: https://www.nobindings.co.uk/submit, or email: lily@nobindings.co.uk

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.

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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).