MediaPlay

My name is Steve Ersinghaus.  In my main work, I’m Professor of English at Tunxis Community College, where I’ve taught writing, literature, and new media courses since 1995.  I moved to Connecticut from El Paso, Texas that same year.   I am also a poet and fiction writer.  This will be my third year participating in the fun, exciting, and challenging 100 Days projects: year 1 I wrote one hundred poems; year two I wrote one hundred stories; this year I want to move to a new category: fictions.  These fictions will be built from the short films generated by John Timmons or other work generated from his.

What do I mean by fictions?  Mine is a loose definition.  By fictions I mean imagined writing that can range across narrative prose forms and may involve philosophical, analogical, historical, character-driven, or anecdotal subject matter.  A fiction may be an imagined artifact, carrying the architecture of story as a means.  Or it may simply be a conclusion or argument advanced by an imagined character or structured in an imagined world. It may be a way of searching for form from an origin without having to worry about what that origin may be.

Why would I chose this method?  One reason is to play with a variety of potential themes as devices for organization, word-play, association, and exploration, unencumbered by the requirements of story.  Other reasons also come to mind.  Certainly a writer can develop an image in poetry or story.  For my purposes, I’d like to understand where an image might go in a string of language originating from another work.  I’d also like to play with phenomenological dynamics such as color, spatial scales, actions and causes, and sense shapes in prose or hypertext.  Let’s call this the metaphor of a water drop plopped onto a complex surface.  Where will the water drop go?