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Shelley Jackson

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Template:Short description Template:For Template:Infobox writer Shelley Jackson (born 1963) is an American writer and artist known for her cross-genre experimental works. These include her hyperfiction Patchwork Girl (1995) and her first novel, Half Life (2006).

BiographyEdit

In her own words: "Shelley Jackson was extracted from the bum leg of a water buffalo in 1963 in the Philippines and grew up complaining in Berkeley, California."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Here, her family ran a small women's bookstore for several years; Jackson later recalled, "I was already in love with books by then [...] and the family store just confirmed what I already suspected, that books were the most interesting and important things in the world. Of course I wanted to write them!"<ref name= "bold">Lynch, Megan. "A Conversation with Shelley Jackson", Bold Type 5.12, May 2002. Retrieved 2007-08-01.</ref> She graduated from Berkeley High School,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and received a B.A. in art from Stanford University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brown University. She is self-described as a "student in the art of digression".<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

While at Brown, Jackson was taught by electronic literature advocates Robert Coover and George Landow. During one of Landow's lectures in 1993, Jackson began drawing "a naked woman with dotted-line scars" in her notebook, an image she eventually expanded into her first hypertext novel, Patchwork Girl.<ref name= "amerika">"Stitch Bitch: The Hypertext Author As Cyborg-Femme Narrator", Mark Amerika. March 15, 1998. Retrieved 2007-08-01.</ref> Jackson later said that she never considered publishing Patchwork Girl as a print novel, explaining, Template:Cquote

A nonchronological reworking of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Patchwork Girl was published by Eastgate Systems in 1995 to acclaim;<ref name= "eras">D'Erasmo, Stacey. "My Sister and Me", The New York Times, August 13, 2006. Retrieved 2007-08-01.</ref> it became Eastgate's best-selling CD-ROM title and is now considered a groundbreaking work of hypertext fiction.<ref name= "amerika"/><ref>Patchwork Girl, Electronic Literature Organization, 2001. Retrieved 2007-08-01.</ref> "Patchwork Girl" uses tissue and scars as well as the body and the skeleton as metaphors for the juxtaposition of lexia and link. While working in a San Francisco, California bookstore,<ref name= "amerika"/> Jackson published two more hypertexts, the autobiographical My Body<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> (1997), and The Doll Games<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> (2001), which she wrote with her sister Pamela.

In the late nineties, Jackson alternated hypertext work with writing short stories (in publications such as The Paris Review and Conjunctions) and children's books. Jackson has explained that she "completely ignored" one college professor who told her the key to success was focus, and added that "[s]ometimes this means shuttling manically between art and writing and other, more unmentionable obsessions. More and more, though, and partly because of the ease of mixing media in electronic work, I've come to see all these projects as interrelated."<ref name="bold"/> During this period, Jackson also did cover and interior illustrations for two short story collections by Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen (2001) and Magic for Beginners (2005). She also illustrated her own children's books, The Old Woman and the Wave (1998) and Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog (2002).

File:Human arm tattooed with the word FUR.jpg
Skin Project "Word"

She published her first short story collection, The Melancholy of Anatomy, in 2002. In 2003 she launched the Skin Project,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> which she described as a "mortal work of art": a novella published exclusively in the form of tattoos on the skin of volunteers, one word at a time. Only those participating in the project were permitted to read the entire narrative. Jackson's first novel, Half Life,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> was published by HarperCollins in 2006. The story of a disenchanted conjoined twin named Nora Olney who plots to have her other twin murdered, Half Life suggests an alternate history in which the atomic bomb resulted in a genetic preponderance of conjoined twins, who eventually become a minority subculture. The novel received mixed-to-positive reviews; Newsweek called it "brilliant and funny,"<ref>Braiker, Brian. "Two Times a Lady", Newsweek, August 16, 2006. Retrieved 2007-08-01.</ref> and The New York Times, while praising Jackson's ambition as "truly glorious," added that "All this razzle-dazzle, all the allusions, [and] the narrative loop-de-loops [get] a bit busy."<ref name= "eras"/> Half Life went on to win the 2006 James Tiptree, Jr. Award for science fiction and fantasy.<ref name=sfadb>"Shelley Jackson". Science Fiction Awards Database (sfadb.com). Mark R. Kelly and the Locus Science Fiction Foundation. Retrieved 2013-11-22.</ref>

In 1987, Jackson married the writer Jonathan Lethem; they divorced in 1998.<ref name= "guard">Edemariam, Aida. "The borrower", The Guardian, June 2, 2007. Retrieved 2007-08-01.</ref> She currently teaches part time in the graduate writing program at The New School in New York City and at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

WorksEdit

HypertextsEdit

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  • My Body (1997)<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }}</ref> N. Katherine Hayles writes that both this work and Patchwork Girl map parts of a female body through links until "body and text become metaphors for each other."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

  • The Doll Games (with Pamela Jackson, 2001)<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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BooksEdit

Other projectsEdit

  • Skin: a story published on the skin of 2095 volunteers (begun 2003).<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }}</ref> This work involves tattooing a single word on each of the 2,095 volunteers. John Cayley reviews Skin in Grammalepsy, "given that the entire story cannot be read as published, this is a text that is maximally integrated with a very particular and unusual but very powerful, ethical, moral and mortal culture of human reading."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

  • Musée Mécanique, a Web Exclusive<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • The Putti<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • Wrestlemania<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • Hagfish, Worm, Kakapo<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • A Field Guide to Shelley Jacksons (An Aid to Identification)<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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See alsoEdit

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ReferencesEdit

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External linksEdit

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