It’s fascinating to see one’s work in different contexts and this month my interactive, online memoir, Fitting the Pattern: or being a dressmaker’s daughter, is published in issue two of Studies in the Maternal. It appears alongside a PDF download of my parallel lecture about the piece, Being Creatively Autobiographical in New Media.
Here’s how Lisa Baraitser and Sigal Spigel describe the work in their editorial:
Christine Wilks’ wonderfully quirky interactive digital media work: Fitting the Pattern: or being a dressmaker’s daughter… is a memoir about her mother, a skilled dressmaker, whom Christine grew up with in Leeds. Christine makes use of biographical minutiae at their intersection with cultural representations for exploring the emergence of subjectivities within mother-daughter relations. The work invites the reader/viewer to take part in the exploration and mediated construction of perplexed yet intimate mother-daughter relationship.
About Studies in the Maternal
Studies in the Maternal is an international, peer-reviewed, scholarly online journal. It aims to provide a forum for contemporary critical debates on the maternal understood as lived experience, social location, political and scientific practice, economic and ethical challenge, a theoretical question, and a structural dimension in human relations, politics and ethics.
The e-journal publishes “articles, essays and reviews from academics, writers, artists and clinical and cultural practitioners who engage with the maternal from diverse perspectives,” including multimedia work that “falls outside of the textual tradition.”
Here are the contents of the current issue:
Great news: the archive has been recognised as one of the best websites in its field for study and research!
For a good proportion of this year I’ve been working with Kate Pullinger and Sue Thomas on building a new resource, an archive of all the Guest Lectures given during the four years of the online MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University: www.creativewritingandnewmedia.com. And now the archive has been selected for inclusion by Intute, the primary UK web resource for academic researchers. See the entry here.
The archive contains lectures from theorists and practitioners as varied as Christy Dena, Rita Raley, Alan Sondheim, Caitlin Fisher, and John Cayley… oh, and me too. This resource, which is under the aegis of the Transliteracy Research Group, will be of value to practitioners, students and academics with an interest in transliteracy, digital fiction, digital art, e-poetry, and cross-media. Please feel free to use this archive and discuss it at our Transliteracy Notes Ning community.
Earlier this year I gave a lecture for the Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University (DMU) about:
My lecture takes the form of a micro-site that explores the creative process of writing, designing and building my interactive memoir, Fitting the Pattern: or being a dressmaker’s daughter, in Flash.
I offer the lecture here as a kind of sneak preview of the forthcoming Creative Writing and New Media Archive of Online Guest Lectures, which is a project of the new Transliteracy Research Group based at DMU. But more on that later.
This movie requires Flash Player 8
In the meantime, I was thrilled to learn recently that Rita Raley, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of California Santa Barbara, is teaching Fitting the Pattern in her course on Electronic Literature in the section on Cybertext: interactivity & playable texts. It’s quite an honour to be included amongst “some of the most technically and intellectually compelling works on the web”, to quote the Course Overview. I’d love to hear what the students make of it.
Indeed, I’d love to hear any feedback about my creative work so please feel free to email me (crissxross at crissxross dot net) or leave a comment.
