Interintellect
UX Writing & Content Design
Content design for attendees, hosts, members, and partners to join, participate in online and in-person events, and stay active in the community.
Event Lifecycle Management
Closing, editing, promoting, designing flows, and aligning across teams for 500+ events as well as festivals such as The Future of Publishing.
Style Guide Creation
Creating growing style guides to apply across hundreds of events and in work with partners and outside contractors for text, video, audio, and marketing.
Training and Documentation
Defining and refining content processes and automations, training new editors, and supervising a cross-functional team for a global brand.
Bloomsday
“Bloomsday” is a literary holiday celebrating the day on which James Joyce’s novel Ulysses is set, which is also the day on which he first went out with Nora Barnacle, who is then featured more centrally in his later novel, Finnegans Wake.
The day is often marked with readings and other activities to commemorate Joyce’s life and work. With closures and restrictions in June of 2020, very little happened. In 2021, as New York City was opening back up, I still could not find information on any public events — so I organized one.
With three weeks to go until Bloomsday, I began recruiting volunteer readers on Twitter, Facebook, and other communities — online and in-person. In the end, I had seventeen volunteer readers, the exact number of chapters in the novel — plus myself running around to fill in gaps or ease up longer sections.
I designed and printed the above brochure. To maximize the reach of the reading, I spread the chapters out in a loop from carousel back to carousel — reflecting the cyclical nature of the story. In scouting locations, I plotted a route which is accessible, reasonably populous, and scenic.
With permission, I recorded a small selection of the event, edited into the video below:
In overlapping readings, we got through one of the most infamously challenging — but made to be heard — novels in any language. The readers I spoke to after all described it as a highly positive experience.
Hosting discussions with authors
Often, if an event with authors has a question-and-answer section, it will be saved for the end, after talks and host questions and other components of some more primary event. In bringing in authors, I have taken a hybrid approach: I distribute a thorough introduction in writing first, then moderate a much more open discussion.
The asynchronous component can be blog posts, Twitter threads, videos, etc. This material markets the event, but it also gets basics out of the way. For experimental material in particular, it can even mean getting more in-depth and giving each reader as much time as is needed to understand the work.
In advance of a live, open discussion with award-winning digital writer and artist J. R. Carpenter, I prepared the three posts here, each introducing one of her works and its mechanics.
Open Discussions and interviews
In addition to J. R. Carpenter, I have hosted writers such as Charlotte Geater, Nick Montfort, Tim Maughan, and Karen An-hwei Lee.
I also did solo interviews with writers experimenting with platforms not typically used for creative writing: Dikaiopolis 2 with Roam Research and Max Razdow with Mastadon.
“The Self-Similar Coast”
An introduction to Carpenter’s The Pleasures of the Coast: A Hydrographic Novel, which combines endless scrolling in its pages, endless cycling of text, and loops between five pages.
“Hearing Islands, Islands That Hear”
An introduction to Carpenter’s Etheric Ocean, which features horizontal scrolling, audio, images, video, and text — both static and generative, cycling through a deep well of writing.
“Navigational Text”
An introduction to Carpenter’s …and by islands I mean paragraphs, which has readers scroll in all directions around a map to various islands, each with a generative sequence of text variables.
Double Vision
This is a podcast I developed which has both a conceptual and methodological interest.
The core concept is that each episode will examine a pairing of one literary work and one film, with the conceit that the two be released close together: sometimes simultaneous or within a few days or weeks; sometimes within a matter of months. Typically in conversation with a guest, we explore this moment of synchronicity and these two distinct visions.
The method applied there is also partly the point. There are many brilliant and interesting people online who read books and watch films, but rarely talk at length about them. Double Vision provides an appealing structure for the task, and, further, holding up two striking artistic visions side-by-side allows both of them to come into clearer view.
From late 2020 to early 2021, I completed a 16-episode first season, with more to come.
Listen on: