View source for Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls

When I began writing ''Mythologies'' in 1995 I was thinking about gender in language and, informed by a poststructuralist feminist critique of the representation of the female body as landscape, I set out to explode these stereotypes by using over-the-top geological metaphors. I wanted to convey a moment of realization, when a number of ideas come together at once. It mattered little to me what order the ideas came in, only that they came together in the end. The narrative structure of this non-linear HTML version was influenced by the Choose Your Own Adventure books. The interface was based on the placemats you get at many restaurants in Nova Scotia, which depict a map of Nova Scotia surrounded by icons of purported interest to tourists: lobsters, whales, lighthouses, beaches and the Bluenose. The found images and texts came from a geology course I took in university, a civil engineering manual from the 1920s and a random assortment of textbooks found in used bookstores. The deadpan technical descriptions of dikes, groins and mattress work add perverse sexual overtones to the otherwise quite chaste first-person narrative. Between the diagrammatic images and the enigmatic texts, a meta-narrative emerges - an entre space - where the absurd and the inarticulate, desire and loss may finally co-exist.