From Ireland with Letters

Intertwining Irish history and generations of Irish American family memories in a work of polyphonic literature based on the rhythms of ancient Irish Poetry, the imagined lost Irish Sonata, the madrigal, streams and fountains, and Irish song, From Ireland with Lettersis an electronic manuscript of displacement, survival, and the role of art in the abolition of slavery.

The central place of Irish music, displacement, disrupted tradition in the work of contemporary Irish authors is paralleled in this polyphonic Irish American electronic manuscript. Each part is separate and written in a different structure and tempo, but the whole is integrated by themes introduced in the opening Prologue. Although the workings of each section are different, as a general rule, the work can be read either by waiting for the text to change on its own (as if watching a film or listening to a piece of music) or by clicking on any lexia, in which case the reader takes control of how the story is explored in the manner of hypertext fiction.

From Ireland with Lettersinterweaves the stories of Walter Power -- who came to America as an Irish slave on The Goodfellow in 1654, stolen from his family by Cromwell's soldiers and sold in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when he was 14 years old -- and his descendant, 19th century Irish American sculptor Hiram Powers, who grew up on a Vermont farm and moved to Florence, Italy, where his work played a symbolic role in the fight to abolish African American slavery in America.

Currently, there are four files of the work available: Prologue, Begin with the Arrival, passage, and fiddlers passage. The Prologue, Begin with the Arrival and passage, premiered in June 2012 at the author's distance reading and retrospective at the 2012 Conference of the Electronic Literature Organization. And mid-summer 2012, From Ireland with Letters was on display on the plasma screen at FILE 2012: Electronic Language International Festival, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

(Source: Judy Malloy)