Internet writing projects have a satisfying immediacy. In so many blogs, the writing is raw, honest, passionate, direct. I think that the most successful blogs spark conversations like comfortable dinner parties, where after good food and a few glasses of prosecco, someone explains what they have been thinking/writing/dreaming about. They ask, “Does that make any sense?” Everyone else unpacks it, dissects the thoughts, agrees, disagrees, explores, and feels nourished by the conversation.
A few months ago Trickhouse featured Origin, A Novel in Installments by Elizabeth Rollins (Madame Frankie Karamazov), a brilliant vehicle for publishing her novel that offers writing prompts and invites collaboration. The eight internet writing projects featured below are different in their content— dreams, the notes of teenage girls, political analysis, bibliomancy, an individual’s daily experience, virtual postcards. But like Frankie’s Origin, they reach an audience by carving their own niche in cyberspace and offer up their words without the filters of editors or presses. I suppose I should be careful and say that I love books and support publishers (many of the projects below are hosted by writers who publish and/or have published books). I appreciate the alternative that blogs offer. They are accessible to everyone with an Internet connection, an interest, and a desire to communicate. These projects will link you to others, which will link you to others, which will link you to others— a series of interconnected tubes, a circuitous journey into writing and art. There is beauty in this, don’t you think?
- Kristen E. Nelson, Trickhouse Curator
Featured Tubes
Women As Objects
WOMEN AS OBJECTS is Kate Durbin's tumblr-based project for and about teenage girls, where she re-blogs notes and images from real girls in real time in order to create an archive gallery. WOMEN AS OBJECTS has already culminated in one live performance, Pardonmywhoremoans, at BELLYFLOP swimming pool gallery in Los Angeles. The project will culminate in more live performances, gallery shows, and a book.
- Kate Durbin
www.womenasobjects.tumblr.com
Montevidayo
Montevidayo is a multi-authored blog that seeks to host a conversation about the arts, writing, politics, culture, media, genre, hygiene, genre-hygiene, food, war, chronometry, dissipation, propaganda, funerals, bicycles, haircuts and cutters, B-movies and Rimbaud, stunt-doubles and stutterers, in something like real time from many parts of something like the world. Many authors post to this blog, and the hope is that many commentators will comment, moving the conversation off in new vectors and into contact with new regions of the mushy body of the contemporary. Meanwhile it will be forming its own body. Adumbrating, elaborating upon, decorating its mushiness.
- Johannes Gorensson and Joyelle McSweeney
http://www.montevidayo.com/
The Annandale Dream Gazette
Poets' Blog of Dreams
The Annandale Dream Gazette is a chronicle of poets' dreams. Some believe the dream comes from the gods. Some believe that the dream comes from the ancestors. Some believe that dreams come from a part of the dreamer’s self usually remote or removed from consciousness. Some believe that dreams are scraps of memory and fantasy, remnants of the day. All of these beliefs are probably true enough in their ways, and certainly all have been productive of creative and analytic results. Scriptures and assassinations, benzene rings and orphic odes arise from dreams.
- Robert Kelly and Lynn Behrendt
http://annandaledreamgazetteonline.blogspot.com/
The Skein
skein
[skeyn]
-noun
1. a length of yarn or thread wound on a reel.
2. anything wound in or resembling such a coil.
3. a flock of geese, ducks, or the like, in flight.
4. a succession or series of similar or interrelated things.
The Skein was created in early 2011 as a way to give a written form to my neverending commentary on the political and social constructs inherent in American culture. The Skein has recently been re-imagined as a place to more fully explore the world as "a succession or series of similar or interrelated things," not just through the complementary lenses of political and sociological study, but from a more humanistic and holistic perspective. The primary "goal"— if something like this project has a goal, and is actually anything more than a wind-lofted seed driven by the order of chaos— is to incorporate more personal and emotional content, steadily moving closer to an accurate reflection of who I am and what I think as a woman, a liberal, a feminist, and a writer, without filters of assumed and arbitrary propriety. It's a work in progress, and aims to stay that way.
- Julia R. Gordon
http://theskeinblog.com
Christian Peet Would Prefer to Discuss Something Else
"Unpopular narratives" is probably the best description of what I write, whether on my website or in magazines and books. I doubt that will change much in the future, should someone visit my site via Trickhouse years from now.
- Christian Peet
http://www.christianpeet.com/
Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?
A Day in the Life of a Naropa University Writing Professor
I teach writing in The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. In other words, I did not imagine for one moment that this would happen. I planned for other things. Dentistry. Film. Prague. This is not a problem. In other news, my blog is "not right" and I would advise against reading it as some kind of promotional material. Read it only when in need of cheering up. At the end of a long day. For a quick, neutral yet not unpleasant "boost."
- Bhanu Kapil
http://jackkerouacispunjabi.blogspot.com/
The Dictionary Project
For The Dictionary Project, I close my eyes and run my fingers through a dictionary and then across the page I fall upon; whatever word my index finger lands on is, without exception, the next Dictionary Project word. I'm interested in what happens when chance intersects with language, what happens when we revisit words that are outdated or have changed meanings, what happens when our day-to-day lives, experiences, and thoughts intersect and complicate the words and definitions we encounter. Every word in every dictionary is expansive beyond measure, with endless room for meaning to be rooted out and sorted through and divvied up, and I see The Dictionary Project as also expansive in this way.
- Lisa O’Neill
http://dictionaryproject.wordpress.com
You Were Here
without the wishing
Last year, I started this collaborative blog project, because I was thinking about the postcards I had been swapping with friends living in Germany and South Africa. When their postcards would arrive in the mail, I was excited and nourished by these fragments of their lives and thoughts. I set up You Were Here to explore the kinds of collaborations and communication that could happen with 20 artists from 20 cities posting virtual postcards (words, photos, audio recordings, video projects, rants, and calls for help) for 20 days.
- Kristen Nelson
http://you-were-here.blogspot.com/
