On November 14, the lab led the Memorial event in honor of pioneering electronic literature artist, Marjorie C. Luesebrink, or “Margie,” who wrote under the pen name M. D. Coverley. The event took place at the Tuesday Salon, hosted by Deena Larsen on behalf of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). Sixty-seven people from all over the world came to the event and many participated by sharing their stories and memories about her.
Besides being a practitioner of e-lit art, Margie also served as the ELO’s second president and as a Board Member until her death. She produced two great hypertext novels, Califia (Eastgate Systems, Inc. 2000) and Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day (2006) and 25 other works of hypertext fiction and net art.
This first video sees leading members of the ELO Community and Margie’s family talking about her contributions and reading from her works. Participants include (in order of appearance) Deena Larsen, Dene Grigar, Stephanie Strickland, N. Katherine Hayles, Davin Heckman, Lai-Tze Fan, Eric Luesebrink, Stuart Moulthrop, Jeff Ballowe, and Mark Luesebrink. A second video that sees other artists and scholars talking about Margie will be posted here when it is ready.
I’d like to acknowledge the work that Ben Peterson, the lab’s video editor, did on this video to prepare it for publication. A special thank you to Deena Larsen, the Artist in Residency at the lab, for hosting the ELO Salon. And to my lab mates, Holly Slocum, the lab’s Senior Designer, for her work on the announcement cards and other promotional media, and Greg Philbrook, for helping us with setting up a permanent Zoom account for the ELO Salon.