“A story with many rooms”: Twine as a tool to expand life writing practice about place and space

Abstract

This article will explore how hypertext technology in Twine might be used by writers to expand and augment creative nonfiction life writing about place and space. Twine is a digital storytelling platform for creating interactive, nonlinear choose-your-own-adventure type narratives. Using a case study of a personal essay on homesickness written by the author of this article using Twine, this paper argues that Twine’s functionalities can be employed to represent and explore associative networks of memories and multi-directional thought pathways. Drawing on place theory by Gaston Bachelard and Edward Casey, it responds to the questions: how might writers represent living and moving through the multi-directional and multi-temporal nature of place? And what new mediums could be employed to reflect the exploratory creative research process of life writing about place?