Desmond Barry is a novelist, creative nonfiction writer and senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Glamorgan. He has published three novels with Jonathan Cape; and directed a multi-platform novel with Serpent’s Tail under the heteronym David Enrique Spellman. His shorter prose has been published in The New Yorker, Granta, The Big Issue, and in anthologies including Sea Stories and London Noir. The chivalry of crime won Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America. Far south was funded by a Creative Wales Award. His multi-platform travel project www.falkland-diaries.org.uk is available on the web. The web components of Far south are at www.far-south.org. He is currently developing a new multi-platform project for a South American river expedition.

 

Far South—cooperative creativity, the use of chance, and the escape of the imaginary author

The Making of a Multi-platform Novel

The present work is an early exploration of the role of chance in creativity, the serendipities and synergies that emerge in a collective project, and questions of authorship in an interdisciplinary practice-led research project. Far south by David Enrique Spellman is a multi-platform narrative with a published novel at its heart but incorporating film, graphic novel, photographic images, sound files and supplementary text on a series of websites. Desmond Barry is the writer of the core novel and directed some 24 people who participated in the multi-platform production. Participants’ interaction, however, took the fictional narrative in different directions in the creative process. Found objects, postcards and photographs from Tristan Navaja flea market in Montevideo, Uruguay, influenced the narrative in ‘surprising conjunctions within carefully delimited frameworks and processes’ as Joanne Retallack described composer John Cage’s lifelong project (Retallack 1996). In an academic environment where chance and risk are often considered suspect, the present work, a self-reflective narrative examination of practice-led research and creative process, is an initial interrogation and illumination of the potentialities of using cooperation and chance in prose fiction and interdisciplinary multi-platform stories.