I was fortunate enough to interview Jodi Cleghorn yesterday for the Adventures of Bookonaut Podcast Episode 2. I’ll be talking more about Jodi and her work in some upcoming posts but for now I wanted to point you in the direction of a collaborative project that she has worked on with Adam Byatt.
It’s contemporary fiction in a unique form:
Post Marked: Piper’s Reach is an ambitious collaborative project between Jodi Cleghorn and Adam Byatt traversing an odd path between old and new forms of communication, differing modalities of storytelling and mixed media, all played out in real and suspended time. The project has at its heart a love of letter writing and music.
The letters are posted in “real time.”
Essentially Adam and Jodi wrote letters to each other, each writing the character of one correspondent. The were written in real time ie Jodi would send a letter and Adam would receive and send another back. The project was then subject to the vagaries of the postal service.
Post Marked: Piper’s Reach aims are to:
- rediscover the love of letters (writing and receiving), and by extension, reintroduce readers to the form.
- write a serial narrative in a non-traditional form.
- write a serial which brings together the best of new and old technology to create a cross-platform merging of digital and paper, instant and delayed gratification, music and prose.
- work collaboratively.
- utilise an organic narrative development process to as closely model a real exchange of letters and reveal between characters.
- explore the different impacts real time and delayed gratification have on the process of writing, character and narrative development.
- participate in a writing project which is fun and does not require massive investments of time in editing and redrafting, which slots between, and complement, exisiting writing projects and professional relationships.
They have managed to write two seasons worth and a Christmas special. The post are available on the website in order and you can download scans of the actual letters as well.
I am kicking myself that I hadn’t stumbled upon it earlier as I can now consume everything as fast as I want.
Sometimes its better to delay the gratification.
I encourage readers to check it out. Writers too, because I think its an interesting exercise in discovering an older form of narrative presentation.
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