These are the opening words on Shelley Jacksons website, http://www.ineradicablestain.com/ . She is majorly weird and fascinating. She studied art at Standford and did an M.A. in Creative Writing at Brown (which makes me hopeful that M.A.'s do encourage experimental development in form and content). She's published a novel with Harper Collins, Half Life, and a successfull hypertext novel Patchwork Girl which, as far as I can figure out from the internet, is a re-working of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but the work that really blows my mind is Skin. It's a story published on the skin of 2095 volunteers. Basically, you write to her telling her why you want to be a part of Skin and she sends you a word that you then get tattoed on the place of your choice. The only rules are that you only get one word and if its a bodypart you can't get it published on said part. So it becomes a mortal story that dies out slowly but is incredibly permanent for the time it is alive. She definitely has a fascination with what it means to be alive.
'From this time on, participants will be known as "words" . As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died. The author will make every effort to attend the funerals of her words.'
I know its insane, but its oddly beautiful too.
I'm kind of considering getting a word of my own...
p.s. I cant take credit for finding ms. Jackson myself, she was introduced to me by my much missed amigo Anto over the weird and wonderful communication device of Skype last night. He is writing a hypertext novel himself, which I won't pretend to understand at all but is pretty cool anyway.
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