Explain

The online piece is called “English Textbook Wiki.” It explores how knowledge is constructed and created, both on the internet and in middle school classrooms. It’s central character, Rebecca, is struggling with issues of authority, language, and expression in trying to do her job as an English teacher. The piece is also a vehicle for several other pieces I have combined.

Wikipedia’s model offers a radical departure from the approach to learning most of us experience both before and during college. At the same time, it has its own problems and, beneath its high tech framework, some familiar (and problematic) assumptions. However, using Wikipedia as a platform for literature does open up interesting questions about narrative authority and the author/reader relationship. Really it asks just how comfortable people are when they try to tell someone else’s story.

The other two stories are “Cassandra” and one that is untitled. The former is an exploration of voice, powerlessness, and in what ways women are defined (and define each other). It is also about how myths operate in culture. The second was not so much a mediation as an attempt to embody what an extreme transformation might look like on an open format, as it is happening; it also tries to foreground the process, or part of it, behind the creation of fiction.