Here We Are!!

. And here is our Stage Set.

(screen shows Welcome page, music)

(characters offstage)

M. Luesebrink (In dinner cape):  Welcome to our entertainment for the evening!  We are in the midst of a wonderful conference on electronic writing – and as part of our explorations, we have brought an Entertainment to you directly from the World Wide Web!
In the spirit of all storytelling, this drama will require your active imagination.  Unlike other dramas, however, it also may prompt your active participation. 

 I want to thank Sue Thomas --  and the  Project Organisers:

Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink (M.D. Coverley): Creator and Web Designer

Helen Whitehead: Nottingham Director

Roger Parish: Senior Librarian, Nottingham City Council - Research Advisor

Cathy Grindrod: Literature Development Officer, Nottingham City Council - Local
Writer Liason.

The Name of our drama tonight is M is for Nottingham? 

The title owes its genesis to two the lineage of two great literary precedents.  First, the mystery genre – arguably a form most fully developed in England, but also widely imitated in the US.  In California, one popular writer is Sue Grafton, who has written a series of mysteries – Grafton started with A is for Alibi and B is for Burglar and has gone all the way to P is for Peril.  In her lexicon, N is for Noose.  Aha!

The second literary precedent is the work of Jorges Borges, the famed Argentine who showed us that the most complicated labyrinth of clues could be plotted in a postcard of time/space.

We have adapted his phrase from “Death and the Compass” – “The last of the letters of the Name have been spoken.”

Our assembly here this evening gives evidence to a significant revolution in the practice of reading, writing, and teaching over the past decade or two.  The advent of electronic writing has changed all of us in some way – whether we are casual e-mail users or we are involved with the innovative writing and tutoring classes that trAce conducts worldwide, entirely over the Web. 

The Program Committee, in seeking to address the interests of our conference members, and have some fun, too, it must be admitted, began by thinking of ways that we could foreground the current multiplicity of new writing forms and the kinds of inter-faces, intra-faces and interactions that they suggest.

Not only are we moving the physical classroom into a virtual space, we are crafting fantastic new ways to write and communicate – collaborative writing, hypertext, wikis, listserves, hypermedia literature, chat groups, and so forth.  Purists may argue that none of these “written” records constitute either literature or anything that could be remotely considered admissible as Book. 

In fact, many of these purists have insisted that electronic writing not only isn’t The Book, but that it may be killing the Book.  You yourself may be a suspect in this crime!

But we were not so sure – and so we decided to investigate the nature of inter- relationships among The Book, The Word, The Text, The Story, and The Drama. 

The result was M is for Nottingham?

M is for Nottingham? Was conceived as a collaborative writing experience.  Writers would join together to construct a mystery story on the WWW and then gather, here, at the Incubation 2 Conference to play out, in costume and in real time, the dénouement to the story.