"Darkly comic, highly entertaining, and with a healthy dose of the absurd" Wayne Marshall, author of Shirl
"weirdly exquisite" Eugen Bacon, award-winning author of Serengotti
"hard-hitting and hilarious" Lara Cain Gray (review)
"weirdly exquisite" Eugen Bacon, award-winning author of Serengotti
"hard-hitting and hilarious" Lara Cain Gray (review)
"leaves one breathless" Alejandro Escude, author of The Book of the Unclaimed Dead
"astonishing" Lisa Chavez, author of In an Angry Season
"heartbreaking and heartwarming" John Sibley Williams, author of Scale Model of a Country at Dawn
"I believe in this book" Katie Manning, author of Hereverent
"astonishing" Lisa Chavez, author of In an Angry Season
"heartbreaking and heartwarming" John Sibley Williams, author of Scale Model of a Country at Dawn
"I believe in this book" Katie Manning, author of Hereverent
"searing yet hypnotic... unforgettable" Wiley Cash, NYT bestselling author of When Ghosts Come Home
"reaches back to the imagery of the great classics" Stuart Dybek, winner of the MacArthur Genius Grant
"reaches back to the imagery of the great classics" Stuart Dybek, winner of the MacArthur Genius Grant
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Award-winning California writer Allen C. Jones serves as associate professor of Literature at the University of Stavanger, Norway. His research focuses on literary gaming pedagogy and his creative work includes a novel (Her Death Was Also Water), a poetry collection (Son of a Cult), a short story collection (Big Weird Lonely Hearts). His hybrid work includes the digital game Dylan Thomas Dominoes, a rap, spoken word, a metaphor-tracking interface, a web-based story, and a game-based translation piece.
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The Author at Work
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
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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