I’ve personally been feeling this new medium of literature that you describe forming inside me for some time … and it’s very exciting to see it emerge in the world around me.

I too carry my camera with me everywhere (except when I consciously don’t, as you say) and think in beautifully complex (or beautifully simple) combinations of image and word – seen, imagined, spoken, written.

When I read posts like yours, and hear of creative media projects/courses like Kate Pullinger’s in the UK, it feels as if we are collectively birthing a new (multi-sensory, multi-modal) awareness & its dynamic expression is already growing healthily.

I can’t help but feel invigorated by the collectivity of this experience – like there is something much bigger we are tuned in to, and it’s exciting for me to find one of my “tribe” in this sphere… I’m inspired by what you’re doing, and even more by what you’re saying & thinking, so I’ll be sure to keep tuned to you for more and share what comes up in me as response.

Amy

Memory, it’s wonderful to have you find your way back to bgblogging years after leaving Middlebury, going o two grad schools and now entering the creative-writing classroom as teacher! Terrific! I still refer to your innovative use of a digital story as the framing event of your thesis defense. You are a natural working in this medium, and I hope you will take your own students on adventures blogging and creating multimedia writing.

Your blog is gorgeous.

Mem.

In my blog, which features intentionally my photography and writing combined, creates in the process a whole new medium that I find myself “dumped into” whether I like it or not! Sometimes the story comes and then I start thinking about the image that should be included. The image search may take me afield so that I go out and capture, as near as possible, “just the right image that can speak with it’s own voice. Other times, something more subconscious is going on, in that I go to my photo files and find exactly the image for my story.

Other times I can sit staring at an image I created and then see and feel a story rising up from the photo, When this happens, I usually print out the pic, prop it up nearby and start writing about it.

Thank you, your post was inspiring!

Thanks for Barbra Streisand clip. I hadn’t seen it.

As for text being reduced, that’s really a good thing for me. I tend to over-write and need to pull back the number of words. The 100-word exercises over on bgexperiments have helped me a good deal with that as have using images.

Your response gets me thinking about another aspect of the process of creating these more personal posts in public spaces. Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody writes about how people on cellphones in public places feel that the little bubble they are in is private space, and anyone listening in is invading their space in a sense. I think some people who blog their thoughts and feelings (the open diarists) must feel that way too.

But when I post decidedly I-narratives, it’s really to enter a contact zone with myself as well as to see if anyone out there finds it interesting enough to respond to and make me stretch my thinking. Blogging itself–knowing that whatever I write here, in posts I will publish (I have over 50 drafts right now sitting in the unpublished back drawers of this blog), could be read be others–makes me read my own posts/thoughts/ideas from a bit more distance than I might if they’re in draft form only. I’m tryng to get a bit more daring with that, allowing myself to be more of an open laboratory as I move into a new space. To hear that it was useful to you is wonderful! Thanks!

I’ve got almost no experience with this sort of thinking myself, but in the bit I’ve tried the amount of text gets reduced dramatically, so I’d guess it to be quite challenging to have an abundance of both.

I’m inspired by your example to continue and expand my own next steps. As part of an online course, that I’m not taking for credit, I find myself pulled into trying to meet the expectations of others. Your post draws me back to defining for myself what I want to get out of my interactions with others and with the topic. I need to focus on and write out again what is in this course for me.