August Highland is the Director of Culture Animal. He is the originator of Hyper-Literary Fiction, Microlinear Storytelling, Next-Gen Nanopoetics and Metapoetics Theatre. He is the founder of the Worldwide Literati Mobilization Network, the International Belles Lettres Federation and the Superheroes of Humanities. Highland is also Publisher of the Muse Apprentice Guild, an International Literary Quarterly. Highland's literary work has appeared in numerous print and online publications.
The work of August Highland can be seen at:
Culture Animal
--"following in the footsteps of tradition"
The Literary Quarterly published by Highland is at:
Muse Apprentice Guild
--"expanding the canon into the 21st Century"
In the production of my literary work I use source materials of different thematic content and compose the work with the assistance of small programming tools. Although my work is software-assisted, I do not associated myself theoretically or aesthetically with computer-generated work because I am intimately involved with the writing process from beginning to end. I conceive of the project, I write the small programming tools, I carefully select the source materials, I apply the tools to the source materials, and I apply manual post-production work (editing). My literary work is an interaction between the tools I have designed for a specific function and the manual industry and formal conceptualization that is involved in every stage of the work's production. While my work may not reflect my experience in the way that traditional modern literature is an expression of the author's internal life, my work does intimately reflect my experience in relationship to the terrain (environment) in which I am writing, a terrain that is inextricably embedded in the globalized communications network of the internet. My work is not centrally expressive of my psychic life. It is expressive of both the psychic life within me and the collective psychic life in which I am immersed. The reader is not reading about me. He/she can't because of the structure of the literary form which involves devices that are intended to interrupt narrative passages and repeat narrative passages; this prompts the reader to interact with the narrative by informing it with his/her own psychic life. As a result, the literary work in one sense becomes more about the reader's experience than the author's.
I have assigned the title "Next-Gen Nanopoetics" to this work because of the device of abbreviated textstrings which I am using to replace rhyme and meter while wanting to achieve the same effect. The title also signifies the accelerated momentum of this poetic form which is achieved by truncated textstrings and the reiterative formula.
