Hypertext Magazine asked Jackson Bliss, author of Dream Pop Origami, “How did you come up with the idea for Dream Pop Origami? Did it come all at once or did it slowly reveal itself to you a little at a time?”
By Jackson Bliss
I have a ridiculously precise answer. I’d been thinking about writing a memoir for a long time, years before I started my MFA. Pretty much ever since my stint in West Africa teaching English for the Peace Corps, I felt like I should write a memoir about my time there and everything I’ve done since. The only thing I knew for sure back in the early 2000s was that I didn’t want to write a typical narrative nonfiction memoir with all of its cherished linearity, food porn, and personal revelation. At the very least, I didn’t want to commodify my own epiphanies.
I took this nonfiction writing class in Portland, Oregon, that was basically nothing but writing prompts for a whole quarter. Exactly what I needed! As I started writing the first chapters, I wondered if there might be a way to connect all of the short essays I’d written so far and put them together into a coherent and cohesive manuscript. Two years later and a couple weeks before I went out for tea with my friend, MFA classmate, and fellow AAPI fiction writer, Lily Hoang (who has gone on to have a brilliant literary career, definitely check her out if you haven’t already), I came up with a dope idea for a memoir that fit my own artistic ethos perfectly: an experimental work of creative nonfiction where readers got to choose the essays and/or chapters of the memoir! I’d been ruminating on similar ideas for much of the semester and then suddenly it was a literal Eureka in the bathtub.
Two weeks later when Lily and I met up for tea at this New Orleans themed café (beignets and all) in Catholic Country, I mean South Bend, I told her my idea that I was embarrassingly proud of it and then asked her why neither of us had ever read experimental creative nonfiction before where readers got to choose how the memoir was told. Now, it would take me, oh, ten years to write a definitive first draft and another four to five years to revise that little fucker until the memoir sparkled and hummed in the way I wanted it to, in the way I needed it to. Along the way, I’d play an obscene amount of hybrid action-RPG games like Fable 2, Deux Ex, Fallout 3, Mass Effect 2, Fallout New Vegas, and the sheer conceit of the variable narrative as an artform and plot mechanism would return again and again in my life in ways that just thrilled me. I began to see as I wrote and revised Dream Pop Origami, that giving readers (players) the power to decide which stories are told, how they’re told, who they’re told to, and what the consequences of those stories are, can be such a powerful, consequential, and organic way to give readers (players)agency, direction. It’s textual curation that readers are directly shaping. Even if the words aren’t their own, it’s still a book they are helping to decide on one level, which is kinda revolutionary. I find that idea—as a project and reading experience and interpretative paradigm—to be hella exciting. The friends I’ve send this memoir to seem to agree, which I’m really grateful for. More than anything, I’m just glad I waited until I was really done to show this book to the world. I would have been insanely self-conscious and insecure if its flaws were everywhere for the world to see.
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Related Feature: Excerpt: Jackson Bliss’ DREAM POP ORIGAMI
Jackson Bliss is the winner of the 2020 Noemi Press Award in Prose and the mixed-race/hapa author of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press, 2021), Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), and the speculative fiction hypertext, Dukkha, My Love (2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Guernica, Antioch Review, ZYZZYVA, Longreads, TriQuarterly, Columbia Journal, Kenyon Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Witness, Fiction, Santa Monica Review, Boston Review, Juked, Quarterly West, Arts & Letters, Joyland, Huffington Post UK, The Daily Dot, and Multiethnic Literature in the US, among others. He is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University and lives in LA with his wife and their two fashionably dressed dogs.
Follow him on Twitter and IG: @jacksonbliss. Website: http://www.jacksonbliss.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jacksonbliss Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jacksonbliss
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