Featured in: Judy Malloy: Retrospective, the 2012 Electronic Literature Organization Conference, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, June 20-23, 2012

Readings: "Dorothy Abrona McCrae", Electronic Readings , Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, April 5, 2002

Dorothy Abrona McCrae
difference that a small amount of blue
part 1

Dorothy Abrona McCrae is a lexia-based electronic manuscript in which the details of the narrator's life are intertwined with a past that is disclosed through descriptions of her work. The story is set in her studio/residence in the California Gold Country foothills.

In Dorothy's distinctive voice -- simultaneously archaic (in the classical sense) and iconoclastic -- the epic unfolds in fragmented lexias. At the core of the manuscript, recollective meaning is altered by a series of events that are revealed through letters, art work, and conversations with curators and other artists.

Dorothy Abrona McCrae was begun in 2000. The first person narrative device -- that I first used online in Uncle Roger in 1986 -- was by that time traditional in my work. The interface device of glosses as links was a variation on one of the interfaces I created in 1994 for the seminal web-based hyperfiction L0ve0ne. (Eastgate Web Workshop)

First published online in 2000, Dorothy Abrona McCrae was revised in 2008. The current edition was prepared in 2012 for the author's Retrospective at at the 2012 Electronic Literature Organization Conference. In 2017, it was recoded to bring it up to contemporary HTML5/CSS standards.

The interface displays the pages of her manuscript with her writing in the central frame. On the left hand side are the months in which each segment was written. To move to another month, simply click on its name. On the right hand side are phrases from the pages of the notebook. Clicking on a phrase accesses the page that contains it. This section of the interface changes with each selection, allowing entry into other groups of pages.

The story can be read sequentially by clicking on the text or on the red bar at the bottom of each lexia. Although in most of my work, sequential means the order in which it was written, which is generally not-sequential, this work was an experiment in creating a more traditional narrative within a hypertextual structure. However, it can also be read as a nonsequential hypernarrative in which parts of the narrator's life are experienced in whatever way the reader chooses, either by clicking on the "Month" menu on the left, or by clicking on the phrases on the right.