III. Balance
My first sustained attempt to think through what I had learned from my doctoral experience resulted in the writing of my recent electronic novella, These Waves of Girls.

Based on my theoretical understandings of emerging literacies, and my doctoral finding that readers of hypermedia typically still crave readerly texts, I constructed an architecturally and visually complex piece that nevertheless employed many of the traditional appeals of narrative. While some electronic writers predict that many of the current concerns about readability in hypermedia work will fade over time as the notion of reading itself makes the shift, and the scope of what we mean by “text” expands, I nevertheless deliberately set out to write These Waves of Girls, as a text of pleasure built in part as an echo of the dissertation.

The novella was awarded the 2001 International Electronic Literature Prize for Fiction, and I believe in large part These Waves of Girls won because it made concessions to people’s existing literacy skills, allowed for closure and pleasure, and wasn’t devoted to the “unpleasure” of more experimental texts, including my own. Unlike my dissertation, people knew how to read it and people “got” it.

Still, at a theoretical level, the text considered complex questions around how narratives of girlhood are discursively produced and how hypermedia might enable a writer to craft a complex and new kind of text while resisting the impulse to produce a standard univocal account of the subject matter – a linear developmental tale. Although it’s a fairly narrative text, the small stories are to be encountered in no particular order. I wanted the stories and memories to crash like “waves” because I wanted possibly contradictory tales to emerge, for readers to encounter the complex nature of diverse girlhoods themselves – girls at once strong, as victims, as scheming, as vain, as kind, as wanting … all of this within one girl. Or are there many girls here? Hypermedia made it possible for me to suggest all of this at once.