Reinventing Creative Writing in the Digital World
As we progress technologically, we are inspired to use the developed advancements to reinvent the arts. One way this is currently happening is with creative writing in digital spaces. It’s a way to manipulate the digital world that has come to mold our society to create something new and innovative. I had the opportunity to interview Dr. DaMaris B. Hill, a professor at the University of Kentucky currently teaching creative writing in digital spaces, and find out about how she is using the digital world to enahce her creative writing.
What does creative writing in digital spaces mean to you?
My creative writing and digital practice is one that is heavily influenced by my Black girlhood experience. I invested three degrees in studying Anglophone literature, specifically the intellectual/creative legacies of American and surrealist literature. As a result of my lived experiences, I am also heavily influenced by the arts of deejaying and the arts of remix. By remix I mean the arts of copying, combining and transforming using digital material. A comparative analysis between the arts of remix and the literary composition style that I engage illustrates how I use 21st century stuff — such as digital archives, audio samples, film and photography — in my writing. I use this 21st century stuff in my writing to expand conventional notions of narrative. As a result, my writing stands in the crossroads of literary (in the form of linguistic text), visual (archival photos and genre manipulation), cultural (abstracting/recontextualizing the historical narratives) and other artistic disciplines. And while standing in these crossroads — I hope that my work is in conversation with popular culture and interrogates classical art forms — using new forms.
What lead you to focus on the intersection between technology and creative writing?
My creative writing cannot be discussed outside of the context of my social environment. I spent the formative years of my life in the New York Metropolitan Area, most notably Elizabeth, NJ and later Baltimore, MD. In my black girlhood experience, I attended a lot of Methodist church services and a lot of parties. And if you have ever lived in the armpit, the funk, of an artistic mecca like New York City, you are privy to many musical art forms that include gospel, house music, reggae, dance hall and hip-hop. The electronic and emergent art forms of house-music and hip hop are most evident in my writing.
What challenges do you believe the art of creative writing faces in the digital era?
Some of the challenges that the art of creative writing faces include corrosion and erosion. Corrosion includes viruses or poor quality digital materials, images and audio that don’t have high resolutions. For me, erosion has more to do with apps and digital software that are no longer being hosted on the web or that are not available.
In what ways have you incorporated digital spaces in your own writing?
My novel is a story about two parents’ struggle to control their daughter’s sexuality during the 1930s. The novel embraces remix philosophy. In this work I sample photo archives in order to create these fictional ethnographies and a polyphonic narrative. I am in the process of revising this novel. It is represented by Sheedy Literary Agency.
My style of literary remix is also evidenced in my forthcoming memoir in verse, A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing. It is forthcoming with Bloomsbury (world) Publishing. A poem entitled, “Shut Up In My Bones”, opens the book. “Shut Up In My Bones” was remixed into a digital poem. A recent review of my work in Musiqology finds that “Black art-making is also embracing a multimodal turn, specifically in the musical realm….. Poetry is another arena where multi-media can enhance the experience, and we wanted to introduce our readers to the work of DaMaris B. Hill. Hill has recently published what she is calling a digital remix poem, “Shut Up In My Bones,” that combines sound, word, and image.”
The re-appropriation of digital archives in my work expresses a type of remix in literary form. My work also relies on the theories of scholars Eduardo Navas and Adam Banks that view remix as a global activity. One that utilizes the creative and efficient exchange of information made possible by digital technologies.
I would be remiss not to mention that my placement of portraits and archival photos in literary works demonstrates the influence of poet and writer Lucille Clifton on my writing. Her memoir Generations (1976) is composed of family photos and short prose writings. The work of scholar Deborah Willis and writings like Langston Hughes’ Sweet Flypaper of Life (epic poem) and Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’a Ophelia have also served as inspiration for this type of writing.
What challenges have you faced in incorporating digital spaces in your creative writing?
Traditional writing venues and more seasoned readers are not sure what to make of the writing.
