Johanna Blakley
Media | Entertainment | FashionArchive for transmedia
Re-Imagining Memoir: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
Even though it had been highly recommended to me repeatedly, I didn’t get around to reading Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home until after I saw the musical at the Circle in the Square on Broadway. It’s rare that I retain enough interest in something to read the book after having seen the movie or the play, but I knew I would this time. The musical, which grabbed five Tonys, was such a fresh, original take on memoir, with subject matter so foreign to the Broadway stage, that I knew I would enjoy, at the very least, mulling over the differences between book and play.
I was especially eager to dig into the book after I read a fantastic interview with Lisa Kron by Laurie Winer in the LA Review of Books. Kron was the playwright for Fun Home and I was really intrigued when she claimed that about 75% of the play doesn’t appear in the memoir (what?!) and that the book didn’t contain any scenes:
“There are no scenes in the book. There are no scenes! There is no dramatic action, there are no sustained scenes. There aren’t even really characters. There’s Alison at this age, at this age, and at this age. There are fragment[s] of scenes in different locations.”
I just couldn’t fathom what that meant, and I must, say, after having read the memoir, I’m still not sure what she’s talking about. Either her notion of what qualifies as a “scene” or a “character” completely diverges from mine, or (and this possibility entrances me) her play so deeply informed my reading of the memoir, that I was unable to recognize the lack of scenes or character. Had Kron baked into my mind the material I needed to bridge the gaps between plot fragments and character revelations? It seems like I would need a time machine to know (or a device like the one in the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.)
But then I remembered Scott McCloud’s brilliant graphic book, Understanding Comics.
My Transmedia Summer
A video that captures the creative possibilities of multi-platform storytelling
It’s been an incredibly busy summer, what with the launch of the Media Impact Project, and a particularly rewarding one, as well. A good chunk of my time this summer was devoted to teaching my class on transmedia storytelling in the Master in Professional Writing Program at USC. I’d taught a mini version of this course once before but this time I scaled it up to a full three-credit course, and I couldn’t be happier with the results.
My goal was to create a course that would help prepare professional writers for the challenges and opportunities that new media offers. We reviewed a wide variety of experiments in transmedia narrative and examined some of the more popular tools that writers can use to extend their work across platforms, including blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Spotify and Instagram. By the end of the course, students forged a “story bible,” a detailed plan to turn one of their existing writing projects into an interactive transmedia narrative.
Johanna Blakley 