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About the Project: Endnotes
For all its infuriating qualities, I think writing is rather magical and elusive process.  Our thoughts – floating around in our minds, awash in vibrant color, stories, and possibilities – explode through our neurons, push through our synapses, and travel as both figurative and literal electricity through our bodies.  Somehow these microscopic pulses become words on a piece of paper, boxy typewritten letters, or the movement of a word processor’s cursor. 

 

Perhaps even more magical is the process in which electric thoughts become words on a paper and then are somehow digitized into electricity again – this time as functional icons and images on a screen.  This page attempts to describe the somehow process in creating Beyond the Margins: War Stories.  

This multimedia website was inspired by media scholar Henry Jenkins’ notion of “convergence culture” – where “old and new media collide” and where there is a “flow of content across multiple media platforms.”  Accordingly, this site was created using a variety of platforms and technologies:  WordPress, the parallax scrolling software ScrollKit, Adobe Photoshop, social media microsites like Tumblr and LinkedIn, the online training and technology site Lynda.com, GarageBand, and an assorted mix of recording and editing equipment.  I also used pens and pieces of paper: Ballpoint pens, gel pens, fine tipped pens, notebooks, pieces of loose printer paper, etc.  Both sets of tools were equally important to the conception of this site – a convergence of old tools, new tools, and emerging tools.
Theoretical Framework 

Before I started a WordPress site, before I recorded sound, and before I selected and animated images, there was writing.  The three pieces of writing featured here were written across multiple classes and, in my view, genres:  Craft Studies/Creative Non-Fiction, Approaches to Teaching Writing, Intro to Fiction Writing, Hybrid Forms, and Experimental Fiction.  I consider my writing to be, as writer Dinaw Mengestu describes, a “Hybrid Form.”  Mengestu defines the Hybrid Form as “text that [is] the product of multiple literary styles, techniques, and traditions” attributed to “writers [who] have always strayed across the boundaries, borrowing from other forms and genres.”  The three pieces on this site – “A Re-Education,” “When Prompted,” and “How to Write a Moral War Story” – are a mixture of “true” stories and fictional narratives. 

 

My writing and this project have been greatly informed by post-colonial studies – most notably the work of scholar Edward Said and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-Ha.  In her article “Other than Myself/My Other Self,” Minh-Ha writes that for “a number of writers in exile, the true home is to be found not in houses, but in writing…and exile, despite its profound sadness, can be worked through as an experience of crossing boundaries and charting new ground in defiance of newly authorized or old-canonical enclosures.”  Similarly, as the daughter of Vietnamese refugees seeking to piece together a personal, fragmented history, I often cross genres in my creative writing to better understand historical events that I may never know to be true.

 

Like the converging form of this website, my writing seeks to evade categorization and is thus rooted in queer theory.  As a graduate student, queer theory has been deeply influential in the way I see the world and view my writing and projects.  Although often defined in terms of LGBTQ sexuality, scholar Steven Shapiro writes in The Cinematic Body that “queer” is the “liberation from social significations that are all too firmly in place.”  Consequently, labels like “gay” and “lesbian” actually reinforce the “firm” “social significations.”   Furthermore, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Queer and Now argues that queer is “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning.”  Although both Shapiro and Sedgwick refer to the unraveling of sexual binaries, Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird’s “Queering the Non/Human” brings queerness into the non/human world by defining the term as a “fluidity, uber-inclusivity, indeterminacy, indefinability, unknowability, the preposterous, impossibility…” which “[undoes] normative entanglements.”  Queer deconstructs and moves beyond categorization – a notion that I hope applies to the convergence of this website and the hybrid nature of my writing.

 

I find that the embodiment of convergence, hybridity, and queerness is the poet/novelist Eileen Myles.  Her autobiographical novel Cool For You is a blend of what we consider to be poetry, prose, fiction, and non-fiction.  An astute, witty critic, Myles' work is a commentary on an economic system that turns creativity into “what astronauts suck from tubes, each substance clearly labeled for the journey: poetry, music, art.”

 

Repeat that Myles quote over and over in your mind and let’s begin – piece by piece.

"A Re-Education"
"When Prompted"
"How to Write a Moral War Story"
Living the Questions: 
An Audio Story

“A Re-Education” is a story that began in my Hybrid Forms class as part of a longer piece about memory, genocide, and the absence of Vietnamese re-education camps in my history classes.  Yes, it attempted to do all that and was actually quite bad at it, so I rehabbed the story in my Intro to Fiction class.  "A Re-Education" is a mixture of "true" events - my grandfather was murdered in a re-education camp and my father was a dishwasher in New Orleans.     These two kernels of story opened up an imaginitative world  - a world of fiction in which I tried to put together my personal history.  According to Trinh T. Minh Ha, this cross-generational, cross-cultural method of storytelling “[expands] in time and space,” becoming “dizzyingly complex in its repercussive effects.”  Like exile itself, writing has “the potential to widen the horizon of one’s imagination and to shift the frontiers of reality and fantasy, or of Here and There.”

 

From a technical standpoint, the version on this website is mocked up on the parallax scrolling site, ScrollKit.  Parallax scrolling is a computer technique that has recently come of age in the mainstream media.  The technique employs a background image that moves at a slower rate than the foreground images, thereby “creating the illusion of depth…and adding to immersion” – a fantastic metaphor for what I aspire my writing to be.  Moreover, parallax scrolling allows animation to appear at specifically timed “scroll points.”  Accordingly, the story begins with a video clip of the last chopper flying out of Saigon during the city’s fall in 1975.  The video intends to mark the time of the story and is purposely programmed to loop continuously – a signification of post-Fall Vietnamese American life.  The photos in this story are a compilation of images that tell a broader story of Vietnamese American life “out of story.”  Accordingly, captions have not been added to the story, however their placement in the text is intentional. 

The notion of queer temporality is something that has always intrigued me.  As a queer Vietnamese American woman, I often perceive time as grasping for bits and pieces of my identity and history.  Writing about the film The Aggressives, Kara Keeling in “Looking for M—“ notes that the film rearranges time queerly by providing a “highly subjective and culturally dependent sense of the subjects’ time by relying on their own references as markers of their location in space and the passage of time.”  Similarly, in critically analyzing the works of Vietnamese visual artist Khanh Vo, Susette Min in “Remains To Be Seen” describes time as “non-linear, fragmented” with “overlapping narratives” creating an “interruption, a gap that [complicates] the narrative of melancholia.”  Accordingly, I played with the notion of reconstructing my family history in “When Prompted.”  I consider my history to be fractured and interrupted by the Vietnam War.  “When Prompted” arranges time through pieces of writing, ordered by “genre” to create, as a whole, a hybrid text.  The photos that accompany the text are from my own personal collection, framed as a captioned Polaroid, which I crafted in Adobe Photoshop.  Although the each of the photos has a traditional time marker, the associated captions elaborate a more complex history – often describing an event, emotion, or moment that bleeds past the photo’s designated year.  I employed this method because of my intrigue with what captions do, say, and construct in our visual and personal histories.  
“How to Write a True Moral War Story” is directly inspired by three different texts.  The title plays off of Tim O’Brien’s famed “How to Tell a True War Story.”  O’Brien’s prolific writing about the Vietnam War was my first, explicit exposure to the war, which is striking considering that, as a Vietnamese American, my family also directly experienced war.  Until graduate school, I did not have the language to describe my uneasiness with western-centered stories about the Vietnam War.  Thus, Edward Said’s Orientalism has been a formative text.  Said defines Orientalism as “a collective notion identifying ‘us’ Europeans as against all ‘those’ non-Europeans” creating a cultural hegemony that establishes “European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures.”  The implication of Orientalism is western constructions of the Orient through “making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, teaching it, ruling over it.”

 

Whether O’Brien intended to or not, I now read his work as a western construction of Vietnam.  Whether I intend to or not, I often write pieces that offer the “other” perspective.  However, I garnered the idea to write from the O’Brien-esque male soldier’s perspective after reading John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction.  Gardner argues that writing fiction is “a mode of thought” and that to do so morally, the writer must “makes discoveries which, in the act of discovering them in his fiction, he communicates to the reader.”  I wanted to discover the “other side” in this process.  Instead, as the professor (my real life professor!) in the final portion of the story reveals, I wrote, whether I intended to or not, a rather mean story.

 

Thus, “How to Write a Moral War Story” was drafted in two parts.  The right side of the narrative, which appears through scroll-point timed animated boxes that change in size as the user scrolls, is the original “moral story” written with Gardner in mind.  The left part of the screen is the meta-narrative I constructed thereafter.  All of the images that appear are directly referenced in the piece – purely western depictions of the Vietnam War, timed to also appear at specific scroll points.  

The audio story is the final creative component of this website and serves as a reflective piece.  Produced in GarageBand and featuring interviews with my sister, my friends Alex Tran, Phuong Vuong, Hai Vo, and Vietnamese American poet Bao Phi, the audio story plays with the notion of “authorial voice.”  I entered this project having read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You” in my Experimental Fiction class.  For much of my young adult life, I have approached my father and my family history in what Sedgwick calls a “paranoid manner” – constantly searching and critically analyzing my past in an attempt to evade “bad surprises.”  In the process, I developed an “intimacy between paranoia and knowledge.”  Thus, I wanted the audio story to be a reparative process – to explore while surrendering “the knowing, anxious, paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new.”  In the audio story I, like Sedgwick, question what knowledge does – "the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows.”  Although Sedgwick does not explicitly describe what reparative reading looks like, I hope my audio project embodies it.  
 A huge, huge thank you to Jennifer Natayla Fink for expanding my writing beyond the margins” (pun intended) and for being incredibly supportive throughout the process.  It was a fun, great journey – and I think it is quite fitting that both of our computers died at precisely the same time.  Appropriate, even.

 

Thank you to my colleagues in the Capstone class for consistently providing thoughtful feedback and to Maggie Debelius for leading the show.  A shout out to all my creative writing and writing pedagogy, and critical theory professors, past and present (Norma, David, Dinaw, Maggie, Dana, Angie and Jennifer again!).  You’ve all deeply shaped my writing and my revision process – and made both an extended metaphor for my life.


This website would not be possible without the technical expertise and support of Aryana Mehrabi, who assisted in getting my header to stick on the pages, and Emmett Zackheim, who sat with me for hours as we tried to figure out how to get the menu to function.  Hours for a few lines of code!  Thank you both for helping me bring my website to life.

 

Thank you to my roommates and my family for putting up with me.  And to my partner, Tracy – I wouldn’t have made it on the other side without you.  See you soon.