One of my (many) reasons for applying to the Narrative Futures programme was my ever-growing frustration with the stagnation of the publishing industry. While all around us, art explores new avenues, new mediums, new technologies, constantly creeping from the too-narrow or too-vague definitions that we try to contain it with, writing is just… writing. It’s words on a page, solely dependent on the writer’s ability to transform their ideas into words, and the reader’s ability to re-transform said words into ideas of their own.
I love books. I do. A good third of my possessions, currently in storage in another country, is books. I don’t want to abolish books, or claim that nobody even reads anymore, or decry the concept as outdated and stuffy. But I do think the traditionalist approach that writing consists of words on paper is stifling us as a community, and continually widening the gap of what we do and what we could be doing, if we only dared.
