“By referencing what is real, or historical, a fictional narrative can speak in a powerful, full-throated way to the problems and issues of our time. And a wholly imagined tale, set amid the intricate and accurate details of a real place and time, can resonate with readers in profound ways. In short, drama is its own argument.”
I pulled the above quote from an article in The Times-Picayune online entitled “HBO’s ‘Treme’ creator David Simon explains it all for you” by David Simon, New Orleans, April 2010.
In this article, Simon discusses the mixture of Fiction and Nonfiction in his new HBO television series Treme, set in New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina. He argues for real settings, events, or times populated with imagined tales and characters, and how these two levels of reality may serve to bring further truths about our everyday, real life to the surface.
The texts I have been writing for this hypertext narrative website project are similarly populated by imagined, hybrid animal characters in the midst real locations of an undeveloped suburb in Winterville, GA and the political space of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and real events such as biographical narratives and disasters such as floods (influenced by my experiences of Hurricane Katrina,) droughts (experienced in Winterville, GA) and other disasters such as the attack on the Pentagon, September 11th, 2001 in which I lost a close family member who worked there.
An Excerpt from my text in progress:
“Jacob Wolfe is the only centaur in the United States. He lives just outside of Winterville, in a neighborhood that no one has bothered to develop, staining his golden fur red in the clay, watching the moon travel across his piece of sky, eating the abundant does, drinking the algae-greened water. Fishing for minnows, licking salt from the dirt.”
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