This month, our editors-at-large takes us to Mexico, where competing views of children’s literature vie for attention, and to Canada, where writers and experts came together for a conference on literature in multimedia contexts. Read on to find out more!
René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico
Just a couple of months ago, I shared with you the homage that Librerías Gandhi, one of the biggest bookstores in Mexico, paid to Norma Muñoz Ledo, a Mexican novelist specializing in children’s literature. Last week, the results of the “Juan de la Cabada” Prize for Children’s Story were announced, and they were baffling. The jury, which included writers Elizabeth Hernández, Gabriela Peyrón, and Gabriela Bustos, determined that there was not a single participant with work of sufficient quality to claim the prize of $250,000 MXN (around $13,800 USD).
Worried about the state of children’s literature in Mexico, the jury suggested to the Culture Office and the National Institute of Fine Arts that the money be used instead to create workshops for writers interested in creating children’s stories. “We hope that this decision can be made to favor the quality of works presented in future editions of the prize,” the official statement declared. In fact, the National Coordination of Literature, which is part of the Culture Office, took the suggestion into account and is set to organize activities focused on children’s literature, to stimulate the production of books, and to improve the circulation of quality works for children.
Ironically, the announcement was made while the National Book Fair of Children and Young Literature was still ongoing in Xalapa, Veracruz. Some publishing houses reported an increase in sales at the festival compared to previous years. Furthermore, some children wrote poems and got on stage to read them in front of visitors; a young boy named Leonardo even presented a book he wrote with his dad, titled Abron Leo. As Iris García Cuevas, coordinator of the Book Fair, stated: “There are kids who bring their poems, read them, and it’s beautiful. In this Fair, we have realized that kids are not only consumers of art and culture but also producers of art and culture.”
As a final note, let me share a conversation I had some time ago with the aforementioned Norma Muñoz Ledo, regarding a renowned prize for poetry for children, where she served as a judge. The winner, whom I shall not name, presented a collection of poems written in a rather classical style, with precise and strict meter. “It is a book that old men would enjoy,” she said, “but kids…”. So, with the “Juan de la Cabada” Prize, is it a matter of quality? Or are we failing to support the art that kids want and can create?
MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Canada
The ending of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2024—DHSI, one of the world’s top DH events—at University of Victoria (UVic) in Canada a couple of weeks ago was marked by a number of remarkable literature-in-digital-and-intermedia-contexts lectures (chaired by Michael Sinatra and Ray Siemens). I was really fortunate to attend and to have the opportunity to reflect on the ways literature is translated between forms and languages (be they ‘natural’ or computing/mediating ones).
In his talk “Sound, Storytelling, and Digital Humanities,” seasoned sound artist and author John Barber presented a wide range of creative work using digital approaches to soundscape recording/creation inviting the audience to multiple interactive paradigms, from focused mediation to social activism to post-radio cross-artform storytelling, performance, and/or production. As part of the latter, a multilayered multi-voiced digitally inflected remake of The War of the Worlds—the H.G. Wells sci-fi novel famously adapted for radio and broadcast in 1938 by Orson Welles much to the panic of a certain portion of the audience that mistook it for live coverage of a Martian invasion—was presented as illustrative of a new poetics of “reimagined radio,” enthusiastically welcomed by those in attendance. A digital-humanities scholar, Barber also framed his creative work in academic terms that spoke to the audience in quite a compelling way. Literature was therefore well-represented, another example of Barber’s work (and an exciting tie-in to the subsequent talk) being the first ever radio adaptation of the electronic literature (e-lit) classic Figurski at Findhorn on Acid by Richard Holeton.
The talk given by Dene Grigar and John Durno built on the internationally successful exhibit they co-curated Hypertext & Art: A Retrospective of Forms, covered by a previous Asymptote report. The talk represented a great opportunity for those who had as well as those who had not seen the exhibit to better grasp the scope of the relevant research and curation, as well as the synergy between the two curators. In his capacity as director of UVic’s Historic Computing Lab, Durno has collected and worked since 2016 on computers mainly from the 1980s and 90s but also dating as far back as the 60s, thus constituting a panorama of what he termed “the most formative era in our lifetimes.” Tracing back the evolution of hardware and software as part of such endeavor provided the grounds for a strong and memorable statement like the one cited above, as did the retrieval of archives on those ancient and prehistoric computers, archives relevant to researchers and audiences in the fine arts as well as wider communities beyond academia. Among these archives, as Dene Gregar added, is the e-lit one involving bodies of literature, that is, databases, and again, equipment, collected, researched, and published on by herself and her team at the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University, Vancouver.
Picking up on this note, the shorter concluding talk given by the representatives of a globally networked collective of writers, coders, artists, and translators, expanded on the potential radicalism of mathematical modeling of/for poetry and announced two intriguing releases: one on literature and computation, and the other, a computationally assembled anthology of Belgian poetry in algorithmic/English translation.
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