AUSTRALIAN BOOK TOUR! CLICK BELOW FOR FREE TIX!
9 November
Brisbane Books@Stones
15 November
Canberra King O'Malleys
16 November
Melbourne Buck Mulligan's
17 November
Melbourne Eltham Bookshop (paid tickets: includes book, wine, and cheese)
Note: many of these events are free, however, we would appreciate an RSVP either at Eventbrite (order a free ticket) or by messaging us on social media.
Brisbane Books@Stones
15 November
Canberra King O'Malleys
16 November
Melbourne Buck Mulligan's
17 November
Melbourne Eltham Bookshop (paid tickets: includes book, wine, and cheese)
Note: many of these events are free, however, we would appreciate an RSVP either at Eventbrite (order a free ticket) or by messaging us on social media.
Reviews of Her Death Was Also Water
I finished the book in 2 days; I genuinely thought it was fantastic...So much going on; the relationships, intertwining stories, personal flashbacks, a planet-defining cataclysmic event, the vivid descriptions of scenes from the flood....all just greatly attention-keeping. will definitely be buying a copy for my library. Highly recommended.
NoahJon Marshall (Ubud Readers and Writers festival)
NoahJon Marshall (Ubud Readers and Writers festival)
Her Death Was Also Water is a searing yet hypnotic debut by a novelist in full control of his powers. With an unforgettable cast of characters, Allen Jones distills so many of our collective fears about climate change and the uncertain global future into prose that is buoyed by beauty and hope. This is an unforgettable reading experience.
Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of When Ghosts Come Home
Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of When Ghosts Come Home
In his brilliantly imagined debut novel Her Death Was Also Water, Allen C. Jones has given us a polyphonic fever dream in which our current cultural moment is seen both through the prismatic depths of a flood that has washed the world clean and on the vast reflective surface upon which the characters throw their pasts like nets, hoping to retrieve the meaning that will nourish them through the apocalypse.
Daniel Mueller, author of How Animals Mate and Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey
Daniel Mueller, author of How Animals Mate and Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey
In his ambitious, debut novel, Her Death Was Water, Allen C. Jones reaches back to the imagery of the great classics, such as the Bible’s punishing flood and Odysseus’ perilous journey, and projects the notion of a water world into the punishing, perilous future of a post-climate change planet.
Stuart Dybek, winner of the MacArthur Genius Grant
Stuart Dybek, winner of the MacArthur Genius Grant
Her Death Was Also Water puts seven strikingly different characters on a boat in anapocalyptic flood and shows us the best and worst of humanity. An imaginative blend of family drama, allegory, magic realism, satire and eco-fiction, the novel is also a psychologically astute, at times deftly humorous, take on masculine bravado and vulnerability; an incisive critique of class and racial inequality; and a haunting evocation of grief. Above all, this unsettling, compassionate story affirms the value of community and the necessity for hope in our deeply damaged world.
Award-winning writer Susan Midalia
Award-winning writer Susan Midalia
Allen C. Jone: Bio and Etc. FB, Twitter, Instagram
Her Death Was Also Water, MidnightSun Publishing, November 2022: LEARN MORE HERE
Son of a Cult, full-length poetry book, forthcoming, 2023 from Kelsay Books.
Award-winning California poet and writer Allen C. Jones is associate professor of English Literature and Culture at University of Stavanger, Norway. As a writer, game developer, and scholar, he takes an interdisciplinary approach to literature. His digital work explores the usefulness of creative writing games (DT Game) that encourage users to experience (play and create) alternative and "non-linear" textual experiences, a goal that includes designing usefully creative user interfaces (metaphor mapping). Find his paper-based creative work here: Cobalt Review, Fiction Southeast ("Seven Signatures"), Great Weather for Media, Whale Road Review, Razor Lit Mag, b(OINK), Five:2:One, Maudlin House, Fiction Southeast ("Unisex Soliloquy"), The American Journal of Nursing, Bird's Thumb, Korea Lit, Pilgrimage, Moss Trill ("Deadicated Puzzler" and "The modern bony fish": control-f to find these), Blackbox Manifold, and Pa'lante. His novel Her Death Was Also Water will be published in November 2022 by MidnightSun Publishing, and his experimental memoir-in-verse Son of a Cult, is forthcoming in 2023 from Kelsay Books. With his students, he has built a modernist research website as well as experiments in online network fiction. You can also find an online museum of his students' digital work here, and their brick-and-mortar designs here. For an ongoing project, visit Intoutuotni. Finally, visit his doppelgänger's blog here (where you can learn how to bump your head, live in exile, and lose at swordplay).
(No answers Here Sarp)
(No answers Here Sarp)
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
--Wittgenstein
I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.
--Thoreau
...he spent whole days and nights over his books; and thus with little sleeping and much reading, his brains
dried up to such a degree that he lost the use of his reason.
--Cervantes
A philosopher who has evolved his entire thinking from the fundamental themes of the philosophy of
science...if he wants to study the problems posed by the poetic imagination.
--Bachelard
Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues
--Nick Carraway
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music
--Walter Pater
in the slow attentive reading demanded by unpunctuated texts
the faculty of hearing has its chance
is enhanced
until the text speaks itself
--Richardson
music is perceived in and through time alone, with absolute exclusion of space
--Schopenhauer
--Wittgenstein
I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.
--Thoreau
...he spent whole days and nights over his books; and thus with little sleeping and much reading, his brains
dried up to such a degree that he lost the use of his reason.
--Cervantes
A philosopher who has evolved his entire thinking from the fundamental themes of the philosophy of
science...if he wants to study the problems posed by the poetic imagination.
--Bachelard
Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues
--Nick Carraway
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music
--Walter Pater
in the slow attentive reading demanded by unpunctuated texts
the faculty of hearing has its chance
is enhanced
until the text speaks itself
--Richardson
music is perceived in and through time alone, with absolute exclusion of space
--Schopenhauer
Recent Events (after the time machine of Covid): Game Workshop at ASSF
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As part of the Australian Short Story Festival in Fremantle Australia, I was invited to do a game workshop as part of a session on genre. I presented an argument that one way to conceive of the short story/novel relationship is to de-privilege the novel as a lens and move from the short story toward the novel, conceiving of the long form as a composite of the short. I call this approach "collage" calling upon the tradition of collage ushered into the art world in the early 20th century by artists like Hannah Höch and Braque and Picasso which mixed genres (sculpture/media/painting) much as I argue a novel can be seen as a Bakhtinian cannibalization of the short story (in the novel's ability to use multiple discourses, one of these is the language/discourse/approach of the genre called the short story). This "collage" approach stems from my experimental work with games at the University of Stavanger, a research project that looks at developing and analyzing "creative mind", a pragmatically useful skill set developed out of the Surrealist tradition of games and experimental writers that focuses on open exploration, free association, and the potential of creative prompts/algorithms/obstructions (see OULIPO). The session at ASSF was wonderful, and as it turns out, while Exquisite Corpse did not work as well as I would have liked, Definitions (Conditionals) was amazing. I did have to modify the games a little for the group, but this just makes the results more interesting and complex. Let the experiment continue!
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Recent Events: Research Trip to Hemingway Museum, San Francisco de Paula, 2019
Those are the keys, right there: "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish..." I paid with ten days of intemperate gut to get there.
Recent Events: Summer Hemingway Conference in Paris, 2018
Too cheap to plunk down the change for a drink at Hem's cafe, but I stood outside and wore my fancy name tag.
RECENT EVENTS: Feb 2017: Virtual Reality in Rome
At the X Annual International Jame Joyce Foundation Conference where I presented my paper: The Parenthetical Screen: A Formal Training of the Codic Eye in Joyce’s “Circe.” Here I am trying to smash a virtual glass in the Martello Tower in Boston University's installation "Joycestick," a virtual Joycian world. Special thanks to Joseph Nugent and his team. I also might be trying to throw Ulysses around the room (no respect). After spending ten minutes in this world, I was sweating profusely and had heart palpitations. Good thing? Maybe. Definitely powerful. No technological doomsday talk now, but I do wonder where we are going with all this. I have my own ideas of our destination, but they haven't put me in charge of the world yet. Soon.
RECENT EVENTS: June 2016: Literary Metaphor Mapping
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Recently completed metaphor-mapping program as part of the University of Puget Sound Capstone Project. Programmers: Alexia Ingerson and Tori Vaz.
TRY IT NOW!: Metaphor Mapping Program |
RECENT EVENTS: March 2016: Juan Morales visits University of Puget Sound
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Poet Juan Morales came to do a workshop and reading from his new book The Siren World. Students were asked to study his book and to write their own replacement poem using one of his poems.
About Juan: Poet Juan Morales is a CantoMundo Fellow, the Editor of Pilgrimage Magazine, and an Associate Professor of English at Colorado State University-Pueblo, where he directs the Creative Writing Program and curates the SoCo Reading Series. Morales’ first book of poems, Friday and the Year that Followed won the Seymore and Gorsline Poetry Prize. He will be reading from his second poetry collection, The Siren World, which was selected as one of NBC News' 2015 Latino Books: 8 Must-Reads from Indispensable Small Presses. More info on Juan |
RECENT EVENTS: Oct. 2015: DT Game is up! PLAY NOW!
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The Dylan Thomas Game 2D Version is finally up and running. Click either to play (different formats):
1. Play online: Dylan Thomas Game Warning: This version does not score or give you directions. It is simply a game board. You must actually read the directions below! Directions: 1. Press okay for the Dylan Thomas puzzle/game (or enter your own once you have become an expert). 2. On the right will be the line list for the game. On the left the game board. 3. Drag lines from the list to the board. Grab ends to size or middle to rotate. 4. Goal: each line must touch another line that shares a content word (content word = not "and," "the," etc.). First line can go anywhere. 5. 1-Player Puzzle: fit all the lines to the board and you win. This will take rearranging as you go. 6. 2-person Game: Each player takes a turn placing a line. Winner is the last to place a line. Lines may not be moved once played. Note: 2-Person Variant: A player may move a line one time as a move. This line cannot be moved again for two turns. |
RECENT EVENTS: August 2015: Modernist Timeline is Up!
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Check out the research website we are building on the Modernist movement: ModernistTimeline
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RECENT EVENTS: November 2014
I conducted a writing workshop with the full-immersion fourth graders at Rosa Parks Elementary in Berkeley, California. Students learned about guided free writing and surrealist techniques including the Exquisite Corpse. Notice that one of these excellent students shows her investment in surrealist practice by putting on her best Desnos trance look.
RECENT EVENTS: Open Mic Takes Off, 2013
The Coffee House Series at University of Puget Sound kicks off the event season with an open mic featuring Laura Krughoff. Read the article. Recent events also include a literary trivia night.
RECENT EVENTS: Summer 2013: The Dylan Thomas Machine
Presenting the demo video of the DT Machine at the University of Arkansas on their six screen integrated presentation monitor at the Digital Humanities Summer Research Institute. I am presently working with programmer Billy Rathje on developing a prototype for this interactive poetry analysis game.
Links to My Creative and Scholarly Work
An Old Scholarly Essay--must update this link
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Links to Lit and Digital Sites
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"Ultimately, the fact that the head was missing ceased to be relevant as enough was found
to allow him to be identified, and thus to be returned to his family and buried"
--Robertshaw and Kenyon, Digging the Trenches: The Archaeology of the Western Front
to allow him to be identified, and thus to be returned to his family and buried"
--Robertshaw and Kenyon, Digging the Trenches: The Archaeology of the Western Front