Memoir on DVD, too.

Thank you very much for your thoughtful insights in your book review of The Dawn At My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing (EYE, July-August 2003). The entire project happened by chance. Based on your review, I do want to provide you with its fascinating history. A book/DVD-ROM/Web site, Dawn merges print and electronic publishing formats to create a mother-daughter memoir for the 21st century. The Dawn Project is an umbrella concept that expands the boundaries of the memoir genre, the book, the author and the audience. It happened through a series of academically inspired opportunities. The University of Texas Press's innovative Constructs Series was the book's catalyst. The DVD-ROM was developed at the University of Southern California/Annenberg Center for Communication's Labyrinth Project.

Dawn's Web site and the project's distribution plans are going through a similar process. Dawn has been introduced in stages under the umbrella name, The Dawn Project. The book was available in January 2003. The DVD-ROM was completed in March and the Web site will be available this December. In each of the three formats, I have worked with creative teams who have been focused on employing their specialized expertise and technologies to their particular format.

As I moved through the process, I recognized the independent and interdependent nature of the project's three products. Each contained similar narrative elements. To create unity between the three formats, the narrative elements function as conceptual threads weaving the formats together.

And so Dawn has evolved through discovery. My goal is to replicate the transformative potential available through what seems to be shaping up as new ways to make literature. In each format, I would tell myself a different version of my story. In the doing, I gained new insight that generated growth and expansion. In addition, I sought to replicate the shifts in consciousness generated by successful interfaces between analog and digital technologies. Using my own perceptual and emotional changes as a model, I'm now exploring how to duplicate the fluidity that occurs in those junctures between history and memory, narrative structure and story tradition, author and audience, print and electronic publishing, text and sound, still and moving image, and linear and nonlinear narrative design.

In addition, I believe the rich complexity inherent in the African American experience is especially fertile ground for this innovative playing field. None of us really know what shape books, moving images and sound will take 100 years from now. But for now, it really has been a delight to play in a sandbox made up of mature 20th and emerging 21st-century tools while creating The Dawn At My Back.

Thank you for taking the time and thought to do an wonderful review of Dawn. With much appreciation

--Carroll Parrot Blue author of The Dawn at My Back.