Patchwork People

Shelly Jackson’s ideas seem to be a bit before there time. She wrote, Patchwork Girl, a hypertext electronic fiction work in 1995. This is long before the e-reader’s moment in the spotlight. Patchwork Girl is available as a cd you load on to your computer. It’s a work of non-linear fiction including elements from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and L. Frank Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz.

I think Stitch Bitch: The Patchwork Girl was a great reading choice for this week, paired with our self-portrait assignment. Themes like collage, plagiarism, mutts, non-linear storytelling, and choice are throughout Stitch Bitch. These same themes are also relevant to composing a self-portrait.  Being a patchwork person is inescapable. Jackson is telling us we should embrace it.  We borrow things in life, try them on, and that’s how we learn about who we are. She also writes about being a mutt and plagiarism as a positive.  Much in the same way we were encouraged to look at many different artists to inspire the assignment.

With only a few requirements, we were left to our own devices to create two self-portraits. Both of my pieces aren’t exactly collages, but they have many layers physically. They also don’t really follow all the directions, but I am pleading to Jackson’s statement, “boundaries between genres and disciplines keep people dumb and inflexible and make them careerists of the imagination” (241).