ThinkingDaughters

Annie Grosshans' ThinkingDaughters is a multi-voiced lyrical essay that builds upon a promised third part of her previous work, The World Is Not Done Yet.

This cyberwork is structured around three main narrative flows, all related and pulling toward the same destination of meaning.  The throughline of this meaning is laid out in the downward scroll of the eight SpineOfTellings screens.  Each vertical screen continues the poet’s oration from the previous.

In conversation with these tellings are horizontal screens scrolling to the left and right.  There is associative content and shared directionality between each horizontal scroll, as well as with its vertical spine screen and with the overall literary narrative of the work.

Leftward are Narratorials, exposition anchored in quotations from women thinkers and writers who have inspired the author, germinations important in the growth of her own thinking and consequently, her sense of self.   Receiving permission, taking encouragement for subjectivity is a core value of print literacy carried over with the author from her print origins into this cyber medium. 

To the right of the SpineOfTellings are Authortorials, two-voiced, personal evocations of direct address to the reader from the author’s experience as a woman living a life chosen both domestic and worldly, a complicated suture. The last of each Authortorial scroll is a Correspondents screen composed of letters about the ideas raised in this work between the author and other thinking daughters, all born into the same era of exponential growth, expression and evolution in our understanding of what it is to be a woman.

Occasionally placed throughout the work are popup audio and visual elements that join the chorus: whispers - intimate confidences;  Remember?- video vignettes of early utterance and language;  coreKeywords-definitions and etymologies of words central to and recurring in the text.

ThinkingDaughters traverses two ongoing urgencies.  What is literacy, a foundational creation and cognitive tool of humans, now that its custodian and carrier medium is migrating from print to cyber? 

And can we acknowledge and act on the imperative of reconstructing the relations between us, intimate and structural, and of humans with earth?