Bøger af Elayne Zalis

In *Video-Graphic Alchemy: Transforming "Dear Diary,"* Elayne Zalis explores personal and cultural memories of life in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. Blending fact and fiction, the retrospective brings together artistic, multimedia, and literary texts from her repertoire. A childhood diary that Zalis kept in the mid-1960s inspired these transmedia experiments. The book includes reproductions of more than twenty color and black-and-white images. For additional background, see www.TheMemoryChannel.com.

A visit to South Florida in 1995 prompts Leah to reflect on her early years in Miami, beginning with her childhood in the mid-1960s. To help with her memory work, she conjures up a troupe of spectral dancers who stand in for her at different phases of her life. Known by the colors of their costumes, Dancer in Rose, Dancer in Blue, Dancer in Plum, and Dancer in Gold recreate scenes from an ongoing drama. Diaries and archival treasures inspire the performances. Blending the real and imagined and combining genres, the story Leah tells unfolds chronologically, yet each "act" can stand on its own. A travelogue, a memoir, and a screenplay all in one, When We Believed in Magic can also be read as a preliminary script for interactive digital platforms or as a sketch for an actual dance performance. This retrospective highlights the performative strands of Arella's Repertoire, a novel by Elayne Zalis.

In this literary experiment, the young Leah as a woman archives traces of her life. She begins the first stage of her retrospective in the mid-1980s, at the opening of Vagabond Scribe. The paper trails that she follows lead to real and imagined places she has visited as a child, a teenager, and a young woman. Her diaries and journals help, and so do her old letters, as well as her collection of books and memorabilia. Aware of blind spots and exclusions, she creates a collage of textual fragments, traces of where she has been. Readers glimpse a look behind the scenes at a memory bank in the making, a resource for ideas and inspiration as well as for stories to come. Vagabond Scribe can be read as a prequel to Arella's Repertoire.

The novel begins as Arella prepares for 2000 and the fresh start it represents. More at home in cyberspace than anywhere she has actually lived, she reinvents herself and her life story for readers of a multimedia web diary she calls Arella's Repertoire, a blend of memoir, travelogue, and blog. Characters who star in this virtual drama recapture worlds Arella has known and weave together the memories, dreams, and imaginings that have contributed to her development as a woman and a writer in postmodern America. Framed as an online text that she posts incrementally throughout the month of December 1999, the narrative explores personal and cultural memory. Arella's Repertoire resonates with two other books that Elayne Zalis wrote, Curated Memories: A Boomer's Personal Retrospective (2023) and Reimagining The Twilight Zone: A Young Fan's Stories (2021).

This "blook" preserves the musings on media and memory that Elayne Zalis posted on her blog, VirtualDayz, from June 27, 2005, to July 15, 2006 (see http: //www.virtualdayz. blogspot.com/). Both private and public archives inspire her reflections, which explore media in transition, a range that encompasses film, video, print, digital arts, and the Web. She is interested in what artists and writers are doing and in what critics and scholars are saying.

In Beyond the Spotlight: A Multimedia Preview, Elayne Zalis highlights selected strands of Curated Memories: A Boomer's Personal Retrospective, an autobiography she published on her seventieth birthday in 2023. Designed to stand on its own, Beyond the Spotlight recounts a journey of discovery and invention that begins in South Florida in the early 1950s and concludes in Southern California in the early 2020s. Fusing twentieth- and twenty-first-century sensibilities, Zalis documents her early experiments with video and multimedia and suggests how writing becomes not only a through line in her autobiography but also a lifeline in her real life. The voices and visions of her younger selves echo through her own. While curating her memories for future generations, she chronicles her evolution as a late-blooming writer who finds comfort beyond the spotlight. Guided as much by a child's longing for fantasy as by a woman's desire for truth, Zalis explores personal storytelling in the digital age. Beyond the Spotlight sets in motion a creative interplay of her writing and multimedia work within a broad social, cultural, and historical context. Like her eastern European ancestors, who immigrated to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, she imagines belonging somewhere. The book includes full-color images. Elayne Zalis, PhD, MA, draws on an interdisciplinary background in writing, communications, and the media arts. Her work explores personal and cultural memory across a range of media, including film, video, print, digital platforms, and the web. Beyond the Spotlight: A Multimedia Preview and Curated Memories: A Boomer's Personal Retrospective serve as companions to Reimagining The Twilight Zone: A Young Fan's Stories, a collection of autobiographical essays Zalis published in 2021. For additional background, see TheMemoryChannel.com.