Weird Fiction
I write what is frequently referred to as weird fiction, blending science fiction, fantasy, supernatural horror, and magical realism. I think these kinds of stories are particularly effective for evoking The Sublime—which is always present but often hidden.
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| The Immersible: Dispatches from Tallahassee Beach |
- My personal fave is and certain stars shot madly from their spheres, published in the Apalachee Review. It's probably my best effort so far, and I hope you'll fall in love with Nadia (or whoever she is) like I did.
- Another one that seems to resonate is Wisteria Blue, a performance piece originally published in the 1990s, inspired by yardwork and H.P. Lovecraft. (See the Performance page to experience it properly.)
- Channeling the same voice, The Freon Jones is a chilling tale of chemical addiction originally published in the local newspaper. I found it clipped out and pinned to a bulletin board in the Florida Governor's Energy Office, which made me right proud.
I've written much more—poetry, flash fiction, short stories—and have been developing a Substack site, The Immersible, to host and promote them. I hope you'll pay a visit sometime.
Weird Nonfiction
Not everything I've written is fiction, though plenty of it is still weird. Academic publications include a dissertation, a journal article, book chapters, conference proceedings, and invited talks, all detailed in my curriculum vitae. Two personal faves:
- A fictional autoethnography about gender performance in virtual worlds called Virtually Queer, which delights me by continuing to get more hits than just about anything else I've published in academia.
- Remediating the Stars: Rob Wright’s ‘Watch the World(s)’ Machinima, on hypermediation, MUVEs, and Vincent Van Gogh, which won a Top Paper award at a convention of the National Communication Association.
My old academic/professional blog, Virtually Natural, is an archive of often unintentionally amusing posts made during the heady days of what we grandly called New Media, circa 2006-2013. Much of it consists of breathless cataloguing of new toys and rhapsodizing about technofuturism, but there are enough more thoughtful analyses that make it worthwhile (to me) to keep it online.
Also, occasional bits of mostly non-fictional musings can be found on my old-school weblog What've I Done?