First Email Invitation from Lane

Craig, Trent and Mike,

I have been interested in experimenting with collaborative authorship, and wanted to run this idea by you for feedback. Inspired by Waxweb (multimedia project, kind of hermetic, that came from early muds), House of Leaves (allegedly began on a wiki), alt-history projects, and a lifetime of addiction to collaboration, I propose trying to develop a disjointed "novel" titled The Flowage Rebellion, centered upon the apocryphal histories of The Midwestern Water Wars. Below is the set-piece for the project, and I have no expectations other than 1) it deal with this history, 2) be open in form 3) inhabit an ethos of ecology, pseudo science and ficto-history.

Here are my first concerns:

1) do you perceive this as interesting?
2) would you have time to devote a bit of development to it as an ongoing piece (not too demanding, but needs to develop over duration)
3) how would authorship "product" be constructed? (a collective? a ghost-author?)

My concern is that I wouldn't want this to distract anyone from their primary work, but on the other hand, it might be an exciting exercises in creative authorship and form that could be useful in both pedagogical and formal arenas, and who knows, it might lead to an exciting piece!

If a core group of you signs on, I'd propose a viral structure (what's a little virus among friends!) where we then each invite participants based upon a collective invitational narrative that The Core develops. Off hand, I would certainly invite others from our Obstructions class, as well as various grads in the CW program. Because this is (would be) a ficto history, I see that form could easily be adapted, as different people would be interested in developing different modes, narratives, reviews, exerpts, tangeants. I would also expect a lot of genre cross-over.

I have been busy developing my website, (check out little embedded videos in recent posts - ) and would be interested in using some content for that, and using all content as "found text" for further sausage-grinding. Others could do whatever they wanted with the text: that would be another "rule".

Thoughts?

(be honest: if this is merely a distraction, or not an esthetic interest, please feel free to express!)

Lane