Notebook of Sand

• Recent Publications
• Recent Projects
• Conferences & Speaking
"Comparing Spatial Hypertext Collections"
  ACM Hypertext '09
"Archiving and Sharing Your Tinderbox"
  Tinderbox Weekend London '09
"The Electronic Nature of Future Literatures"
  Literary Studies Now, Apr '09
"The World University Project"
  St. John's Col. Cambridge, Feb '09
"Ethical Explanations,"
  The New Knowledge Forge, Jun '08
Lecture, Cambridge University
  Tragedy in E-Lit, Nov '07
Hypertext '07: Tragedy in E-Lit
Host for Tinderbox Cambridge '07
Keynote: Dickinson State Uni Conf
Upper Midwest NCHC'07: Speaker
eNarrative 6: Creative Nonfiction
HT'05: "Philadelphia Fullerine"
  Nelson award winning paper
NCHC '05:
 Nurturing Independent Scholarship
Riddick Practicum:
  Building Meeting Good Will
NCHC '04:
  Philadelphia Fullerine
  Lecture on American Studies
WWW@10: Nonfiction on the Web
NCHC '03: Parliamentary Procedure
ELL '03 -- Gawain Superstar
• (a)Musing (ad)Dictions:

Ideas. Tools. Art. Build --not buy. What works, what doesn't. Enjoy new media and software aesthetics at Tekka.

Theodore Gray (The Magic Black Box)

Faith, Life, Art, Academics. Sermons from my family away from home: Eden Chapel!

My other home: The Cambridge Union Society (in 2007, I designed our [Fresher's Guide])

The Economist daily news analysis

Global Higher Ed blog

• Hypertext/Writing

Writing the Living Web

Chief Scientist of Eastgate Systems, hypertext expert Mark Bernstein. (Electronic) Literature, cooking, art, etc.

Fabulous game reviews at playthisthing.

• Stats

Chapter I: Born. Lived. Died.

There is a Chapter II.

Locale: Lancaster County Pa, USA

Lineage: Guatemala

Religion: My faith is the primary focus of my life, influencing each part of me. I have been forgiven, cleansed, and empowered by Jesus Christ. Without him, I am a very thoughtful, competent idiot. With him, I am all I need to be, all I could ever hope for. I oppose institutional religious stagnation, but getting together with others is a good idea. God is real. Jesus Christ is his Son, and the Bible is true. Faith is not human effort. It's human choice. I try to be the most listening, understanding, and generous person I can.

Interests: Anything I can learn. Training and experience in new media, computer science, anglophone literature, education, parliamentary debate, democratic procedure, sculpture, and trumpet performance. Next: applied & computational linguistics, probably.

Education: Private school K-3. Home educated 4-12. Graduated Summa Cum Laude from Elizabethtown College in Jan 2006. As the 2006 Davies-Jackson Scholar, I studied English at St. John's College, Cambridge University from 2006 - 2008.

Memberships: Eden Baptist, Cambridge Union Society, ACM, AIP, GPA.

Alum of the Elizabethtown College Honors Program, sponsored by the Hershey Company.

Chlorophyll
Saturday, 22 Apr 2006 :-:

I steel myself. Shrunken peels wobble in the breeze. A gust, a fall, and all is clean.

"You are a strong one," he said.

Am I a stone in the forest, my rough crags filled with lichen, slumping, immovable? Does the sedentary rock of the soul, with its layers and layers of dirt and bone, lay compressed: impermeable, alone?

** * **

In the forest, a tree leans in the arms of its companion and moans deeply. They sway in the wind together. Is this sorrow? Or desire?

Sometimes, I want to be a tree: first a sapling, shooting down playful roots which dance their deep, entangled song. Then, branches bud, and leaves spread. I embrace the sun and wind, the rain, the moon, and evening stars. On cool, silver nights, the toads sing baritone to the gentle rustle of my drowsy limbs and leaves.

** * **

Near my home, across a stream and up a hill, well beyond the footworn path, a flat boulder sits beneath an aging tree. I could lay there all day long. And yet the counsel of the forest is not toward immobility. The tree does not embrace the Sun just out of love. The warmth, the breeze, the spring melodies of birds and waterways, the scurried footfalls of tiny friends: these are the sounds of progress and the causes of life. The sun is needed for life. The streams are needed for life. The storms are needed for life. The tree is needed for life. Even the stone is needed for life.

And the poet? He too is needed for life. So standing up at last, he strides back from the forest to the human world, where he will try to cling to solid ground, stand tall, reach out, make shade, and embrace the sky.