DO MAKE (•⌓•) by tomorrow afters

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writer_cjvallis — 2022-05-09 00:13:43 UTC

A blue satin bowerbird in a hoop pine forest near the Bunya Mountains, Queensland. Cattle paddocks encroach; trees stand tall. For now, the bowerbird finds twigs and leaves and forms a domed tunnel, wide enough for a lover to pass through.

Inside, the bird chews grass and berries, then paints the bower with vegetable spit. Outside, the bird scatters plastic bottle tops that reflect ultraviolet light. Flower petals too.

Creative writing is just as complex, a messy tangle and tussle with ideas and text. Each word, each piece chosen is personal. Singular. These bowers must lure readers.

Writers hand build stories. They adapt materials that mismatch, that seem random. These incongruous elements form part of the creative process and product (Rogers, 2015).

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writer_cjvallis — 2022-05-11 05:06:23 UTC

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who craft illusions

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          make-do

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do-make

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           visual

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 new forms

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          to digest

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entice

writer_cjvallis — 2022-05-11 10:30:35 UTC

Bowerbirds place blue pieces in a complex mosaic that narrows towards the bower entrance. They present themselves at a flattering angle to appear larger and stronger and more attractive.

Each bower is a lyric essay (Robertson & Hetherington, 2017). This is no fluke.

The most skilful, experienced birds create an Ebbinghaus Illusion.

Scientists who disturb these artful entrances, who scatter their objects, observe that the bowerbirds soon restore the pattern (Kelley and Endler, 2017).

Female bowerbirds choose their mates on the craft of their illusions.

writer_cjvallis — 2022-05-11 10:34:37 UTC

Bowerbirding resembles bricolage (Rogers, 2015), and the craft of tinkering to “make do with whatever is at hand” (Lévi-Strauss, p. 11). Bricolage describes a creative way of adapting multiple perspectives and research methods (Dwyer et al., 2016).

Bricoleurs improvise from local terrain. To make do, they collect and create, borrowing tools and materials from other trades and professions to handcraft their eclectic work. Their tools and materials are finite.

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Writers observe (Garner, 2002).

And perve (Greet, 2017).

Their poetry scrounges eclectic scraps.

They borrow and steal arresting elements—

recycling characters and stories for

their assemblages

(Williams, 2015).

The infinite web changes bricolage and bowerbirding.

Writers forage and feast on ideas,

layering thoughts into nests.

Make-do, do-make,

back and forward,

across the web, they fly,

reciprocal and cyclic,

with no sharp start or end.

Words branch in natural directions,
asynchronous
synchronicities.
"Knowing where to look,
where to find the blue pieces"
(Brady, 2000),
no longer applies.

We are gluttons for internet.

Knowing what to select, sort, and "move beyond"
(Kroll, 2021),
feeds digital bowerbirding.

writer_cjvallis — 2022-05-11 10:53:04 UTC

Digital tools help design, manipulate, and view messy bowers from different perspectives. Externalising ideas with images and metaphors makes sense of creative meaning (Freiman, 2015).

Visual structures make thoughts tangible.

writer_cjvallis — 2022-05-11 10:56:26 UTC

Text finds its natural habitat on the web. Text is colour. Even images are arrayed as RGB (Red, Green, Blue) or CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, black). Maps, diagrams, blogs, posts, links, and moving pictures; all are texts to weave into the mesh of creative work. Algorithms pose as people.

Infinite digital forests of text, unseen vistas. Digital canopies are dense, the light dim. Hold your hand before your face and you barely see its outline. Only fragments. Jumps and gaps.

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            digital

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We see differently. Text is an abstract visual medium. Digital tools amplify creative insights by stimulating new ways of reading text (Candy, 2019). Reflecting on lived experience helps creative research (Van Manen, 2016), but it is not enough. Look into the web mirror.

The web feeds visual tools to fiction writers. Data visualisations make connections clearer and save time. Doing and making, real digital, lights a path to new research and creative practice. Digital tools and practices shape how we create the bower.

A birds-eye view of text helps to do differently. Patterns emerge through visual data and content analysis tools. Browse repetitive words and weed them out. Unearth other phrases through statistical analyses, the document's density, and connections. In deep forests of creative data, these tools identify landmarks and map areas to explore.

writer_cjvallis — 2022-05-11 11:35:31 UTC

Printed novels are ephemeral. Flat (Hayles, 2004). Like the nest, paper is tasty to mites and gradually disintegrates to dust.

The novel’s embodied life is shorter than ours; it survives longer as digits. Stories live on paper and in bytes. Like our lives, stories are organic and digital, entangled and hybridic (Jordan, 2019).

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We digest lived experience in bits. Writers regurgitate phenomena in journals, draft, and document the progress of creative projects with word processors.

In digital journals writers can do-make in a “personal and voiced” way (Bacon, 2014, p. 387). Search and replace, section work into headings and hierarchies, highlight themes, and upload voice memos to convert speech to text.

File pipe-cleaners, sticks, feathers, and stone. Convert idiosyncratic memory and historical detritus to digital traces.

writer_cjvallis — 2022-05-11 11:41:19 UTC

Stand behind bowers. Strut in the court, feathers bristling with questions.

Will it do?

Churr and whistle, call to others. Let them come, then fly back to their own nests. Blood and bone, ones and zeroes.

We return to courts that quiver.

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REFERENCES BOWERBIRDED

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Bacon, E. (2014). Journaling – a path to exegesis in creative research. TEXT Journal, 18(2). http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct14/bacon.htm

Bell, A., & Alber, J. (2012). Ontological Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology. Journal of Narrative Theory, 42(2), 166–192. https://doi.org/10.1353/jnt.2012.0005

Brady, T. (2000). A Question of Genre: de-mystifying the exegesis. TEXT Journal, 4(1). http://www.textjournal.com.au/april00/brady.htm

Brow Books. [@Brow_Books]. (2019, October 29). Check out this remarkable new work of digital literature from Jamie Marina Lau [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/Brow_Books/status/1189091572714835968

Candy, L. (2019). The Creative Reflective Practitioner: Research Through Making and Practice (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315208060

Dwyer, S., Franks, R., Galassi, M., & Thorpe, K. (2016). Editorial: the betwixt and between. TEXT Journal, Special Issue 34: Writing and illustrating interdisciplinary research, 1–12. http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue34/Dwyer_et_al.pdf

Freiman, M. (2015). The Art of Drafting and Revision: Extended Mind in Creative Writing. New Writing, 12(1), 48–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2014.977797

Garner. (2002). I: Helen Garner explores the new and different persona a writer must adopt in each successive work. Meanjin, 61(1), 40–43.

Greet, P. (2017). Writer as perv: bricolage, bowerbirding, observation. New Writing, 14(2), 184–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2016.1223142

Hayles, N. K. (2004). Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis. Poetics Today, 25(1), 67–90. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-25-1-67

Hayles, N. K. (2013). Combining Close and Distant Reading: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and the Aesthetic of Bookishness. PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 128(1), 226–231. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2013.128.1.226

Jordan, S. (2019). Postdigital Storytelling: Poetics, Praxis, Research (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315112251

Kelley, L. A., & Endler, J. A. (2017). How do great bowerbirds construct perspective illusions? Royal Society Open Science, 4(1), 160661. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.160661

Kroll, J. (2021). The writer as interlocutor: The benefits and drawbacks of bricolage in creative writing research. TEXT Journal, 25(2). https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.29557

Lévi-Strauss. (1972). The savage mind ([New ed.]). Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Mycroft, L. (2019). A World in Miniature: the storytelling potential of research offcuts. Research in Post-Compulsory Education, 24(2–3), 251–267. https://doi.org/10.1080/13596748.2019.1596422

Robertson, R., & Hetherington, P. (2017). A mosaic patterning: space, time and the lyric essay. New Writing, 14(1), 36–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2016.1235204

Rogers, M. (2015). Contextualizing Theories and Practices of Bricolage Research. The Qualitative Report. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2012.1704

Samareh Moosavi, S. H., & Khatibi Bardsiri, V. (2017). Satin bowerbird optimizer: A new optimization algorithm to optimize ANFIS for software development effort estimation. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 60, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engappai.2017.01.006

Van Manen, M. (2016). Researching lived experience: human science for an action sensitive pedagogy (Second Edition). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Williams, P. (2015). Plagiarism, Palimpsest and Intertextuality. New Writing, 12(2), 169–180. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2015.1036887

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writer_cjvallis — 2022-05-16 23:10:37 UTC

Bowerbird methods inspire all sorts of scientists. An artificial intelligence algorithm, the Satin Bowerbird Optimizer (SBO), mimics the steps of bowerbird courting. To improve project quality, SBO estimates software development effort. The best possible bower (prediction) has variables of flowers, fruits, sparkling objects, branches, and dramatic gestures. (Samareh Moosavi et al., 2017). It adapts.

Community health researchers naturalise bowerbirding as a fitting method for the Anthropocene (Mycroft, 2018). Bowerbirds recycle human waste; research also produces data detritus, leftover data rich with stories.

writer_cjvallis — 2022-05-17 08:14:25 UTC

Writers are bowerbirds 
who craft illusions 
make-do 
do-make
visual 
digital
new forms
to digest 
entice  
save forest.

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           Writers are bowerbirds

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          save forest