t a l l a h a s s e e     b e a c h

j.   s.   c l a r k

Tallahassee Beach doesn't appear on your maps. It was originally the name I gave to a short-lived, satirical SF series set in Florida’s capital in the 23rd Century, when the rising Gulf of Mexico has brought its surf to the outskirts of town. The series appeared in the long-defunct print periodical, Q Magazine, back in the 20th Century—when people still published using a substance called paper. When I built my first personal website in the 1990s, that beachy name was an obvious choice for my own web-surfing homepage. The name eventually even washed up on the virtual shores of the metaverse, in the OpenSim project described below.

About Me:

Since retiring from academia in 2020, I've had more time for creative endeavors. When I can pry myself away from the damned screens, I like to travel, camp, paddle, snorkel, bodysurf, drink craft beer, visit with friends and family, act, sing, and make feeble guitar noises. Not necessarily in that order. I got into scale modeling for sanity when stuck at home during the Pandemic and have had fun with that--in part a replacement for my erstwhile longtime obsession with antique Volkswagens. Currently geeking out over gardening with native plants.

Interact:

I can be reached by emailing jsclarkfl at gmail. I can also be found running my mouth off on BlueSky and TrustCafe, as well as various subReddits.

Online Creative Outlets/Links:

Writing. I'm an experienced writer/editor of technical and educational materials in a wide variety of contexts. I'm also an author of fiction and essays, generally in the vein of magical realism and weird tales. A highlight: "and certain stars shot madly from their spheres," published in the Apalachee Review. I very occasionally post short blog bits—usually something weird. I've just started experimenting with a Substack presence for all that. From time to time I'll do public readings/performances at local venues.

Amateur photographer. I especially enjoy photographing Florida's natural environment and documenting my travels. My Flickr feed is where most of my work ends up.

Dabbler in virtual worlds. When I went back for a Ph.D. in 2006, I got interested in environmental communication, visual rhetoric, rhetorics of museums and monuments, and gender theory. One thread led to immersive, three-dimensional virtual spaces like Second Life, culminating in a currently-offline OpenSim project intended to evoke "Florida." See a video tour. You can also view a rough draft video tour of an OpenSim virtual FSU campus that I created as a sabbatical project. A "fictional autoethnography" about gender performance in virtual worlds, Virtually Queer, continues to get more attention than just about anything else I've published in academia, which tickles me enormously.

Previous Life:

I retired from the faculty at Florida State University in May 2020 after a long career, primarily on college campuses, teaching Communication and consulting in instructional technology and distance learning. A Curriculum Vitae provides professional details and links.

Terminal degree: Ph.D. in Communication (2014) with an emphasis in environmental rhetoric and new media. A few publications, including a journal article, book chapters, and invited talks, as well as unconventional things like multimedia Prezis and an award-winning machinima. Dissertation was a critical/interpretive project on the way the natural world is represented in virtual ones—and the resulting ambiguities in the meanings of "natural," "virtual," and "real." Yes, I had a fecking ball with it.