'Into an alien ocean:' The Lore of Kathy Mac’s Unnatural Habitats

In her poetic hypertext pastiche, Unnatural Habitats, Canadian writer and scholar Kathleen McConnell, alias Kathy Mac, explores the spatial affordances of Storyspace hypertext both formally and thematically. It engages with the ways in which modernity’s phallogocentric strife for teleological technological progress and masculine dominance has created numerous subjugating, alienating, and potentially fatal spaces for humans and other animals. In my ethnographic research into the lore of early, pre-web hypertext (Ensslin 2020; 2021), I had the opportunity to interview Kathy about some of the processes and ideas underlying her work, as well as to access some of the written correspondence she had at the time with Eastgate’s Chief Scientist, Mark Bernstein, who published her work in The Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext (issue 1:3) in 1994.