Hypertext Nonfiction
I’m pulling together some notes about hypertext narrative for creative nonfiction – especially journalism and memoir. Who has taught this subject? What are the suggested readings? Kolb, Greco, Rod Coover, and Landow, of course. Who else?
A simple Google search doesn’t yield much, and a a lot of it points to the usual suspects. More suggestions? Don’t be shy. Email me.
Apropos the above, I read McPhee’s 1972 “The Search For Marvin Gardens,” which hangs a tour of then-decaying Atlantic City on the peg of a bunch of Monopoly games. It’s amazing how well this piece has aged; boom has come, bust has come, casinos came and went, and the 1% make Monopoly even more useful now than it was forty years back. I love the way that Jail becomes a pivot for the whole piece, and the way the writer’s voice asserts itself in both threads – the games (in which he’s a player)‚ and the tour of the crumbling city (in which he’s supposedly asking everyone – the man in the street, the hotel clerk, the cabbie – how to find Marvin Gardens. No one knows.
I came here in the first place to see what I’d written about John McPhee’s 2013 essay on Structure in nonfiction, which is obviously pertinent to Tinderbox and Storyspace. It turns out, as far as I can see, that I forgot to write anything about it. Go read it; it’s terrific.