An Interview by Mehulkumar Desai on April 01, 2026

Few writers have shaped the early terrain of electronic literature as profoundly as Deena Larsen. A pioneering voice in hypertext writing, Larsen belongs to the first generation of authors who worked with digital narrative before the internet. In this conversation, she reflects on her long journey through electronic literature, the conceptual and ethical architecture of Stone Moons, the politics embedded in its making, and the persistent challenges of preserving complex digital forms for future readers. The interview also reveals Larsen’s remarkable candor about process: for her, ambiguity is not confusion but method; ethics is not an afterthought but structure; and hypertext is not merely a medium, but a way of thinking.

Interview

Mehul: Deena, thank you for joining me. You are widely recognized as one of the foundational figures in electronic literature. To begin, could you reflect on how you first entered this field? What drew you toward hypertext and digital narrative at a time when the form itself was barely understood?

Deena: Thank you. My entry into electronic literature came through both intellectual curiosity and necessity. My master’s work was already concerned with hypertextual thinking, and even then, I was interviewing writers working at the edge of what was possible. At that time, however, the field was not institutionalized. We did not yet possess the vocabulary, the infrastructure, or even the broad cultural recognition that electronic literature has today. In many cases, I was trying to explain not only my work, but the very idea of linking, nonlinearity, and digital textuality to people who had never encountered such things before.

One of the great difficulties was technical. Hardware was expensive, software was limited, and even the most basic operations had to be invented in practice. I had to teach my thesis advisors how to use a mouse; I had to explain that a literary work might not proceed in a straight line. Those constraints were not incidental; they shaped the aesthetics of the work itself. Hypertext emerged for me not as ornament, but as an answer to literary forms that could not be adequately expressed through linear print.

Mehul: That sense of invention seems crucial. When you were first working in hypertext, what did the medium allow you to do that print could not?

Deena: Hypertext allowed structure itself to become meaningful. In print, sequence tends to dominate interpretation. In hypertext, however, juxtaposition, recursion, interruption, and return all become expressive acts. The reader does not simply move forward; the reader inhabits a system of relations.

That mattered deeply to me. The lives I wanted to portray, especially in works like Marble Springs and later Stone Moons, were not reducible to a single narrative line. They were social, layered, unstable, and often contradictory. Hypertext offered a way to write complexity without flattening it. It allowed me to build literary space, not just literary sequence.

Mehul: Let us turn to Stone Moons. One of the most compelling aspects of the work is its navigation structure, the distinct paths associated with Sarah, Laurel, and the Moon. Could you explain how that architecture functions artistically?

Deena: The navigation is central to the work’s meaning. Sarah’s (the mother) path is grounded in the pressures of ordinary life, the mother’s everyday existence, its routines, anxieties, bureaucratic burdens, and moments of exhausted humor. The Moon path, by contrast, moves into ambiguity, myth, and projection. It gathers together the notes associated with the moon figure, but it is never entirely clear whether that figure is external, symbolic, delusional, or emotionally real. Laurel’s (the autistic child) path introduces another register altogether: language, mediated expression, facilitated typing, vulnerability, and uncertainty.

What matters is that these paths are not merely parallel. They refract one another. The reader is never placed in a stable interpretive position. Is the Moon an autonomous force? Is it Sarah’s fear? Is it social violence translated into myth? Is it a way of perceiving the child’s difference? The work is designed so that these questions remain open. That openness is not a flaw to be solved; it is the aesthetic core of the piece.

Mehul: That ambiguity is one of the most striking features of Stone Moons. Was that indeterminacy always deliberate?

Deena: Entirely deliberate. We designed the work so that the reader could never settle the matter once and for all. You do not know whether Sarah is losing her mind, whether the Moon is “real” within the logic of the narrative, or whether Laurel’s words can even be attributed to Laurel at all. The uncertainty is constitutive.

I think this is one of the strengths of electronic literature. Hypertext allows you to sustain ambiguity structurally. A print narrative can certainly be ambiguous, but hypertext distributes uncertainty across pathways, nodes, returns, and omissions. It lets the reader experience undecidability as form.

Mehul: Your remarks on Laurel lead directly to the ethical dimension of the work. In our earlier discussion, you emphasized that the ethical implications of Stone Moons were profound. Could you speak more fully about that?

Deena: Yes. The ethical stakes were enormous. Had the work been published in the late 1990s under real names and circumstances, the mother involved could have faced devastating consequences, including the loss of custody and even legal jeopardy. That is why pseudonymity was essential. “Clarissa” is not the mother’s real name. The child’s name was changed as well, and even the child’s gender was changed. These were not cosmetic revisions; they were protections. They were necessary acts of care.

At the time, the project was also politically charged. We were writing against a legal and institutional structure that made it extraordinarily difficult for parents of disabled children to receive humane support without surrendering control. In that sense, Stone Moons was not only literary; it was, potentially, an intervention. There were portions of the material that could have been mobilized publicly to challenge those systems. So, the ethics of the work were inseparable from its politics.

Mehul: That raises another difficult issue: the status of Laurel’s voice. You noted that the work includes facilitated typing, and that this is a controversial area. How should readers approach that?

Deena: With caution and honesty. The work itself acknowledges that facilitated communication is controversial. We do not know with certainty that these are Laurel’s words. That uncertainty is part of the ethical frame of the piece. It would be irresponsible to erase that problem. Instead, the work allows the problem to remain visible. The disclaimer matters. It reminds readers that access to another person’s interiority, especially under such conditions, is never simple, never innocent, and never guaranteed.

Mehul: And yet the work is not unrelentingly solemn. It contains humor, irony, and moments of startling wit. Why was humor important to the project?

Deena: Because humor is part of survival. It breaks tension, but it also preserves humanity. In situations of extreme stress, people joke not because suffering is trivial, but because humor becomes one of the only ways to endure what otherwise cannot be borne.

In Stone Moons, humor belongs to the texture of lived experience. It keeps the work from becoming purely monumental or pathologizing. It reminds us that care, exhaustion, absurdity, and tenderness coexist. Humor is not an escape from seriousness; it is one of seriousness’s most complex forms.

Mehul: You also suggested that some of Laurel’s perceptions overlap with your own way of experiencing the world. Would you say that Stone Moons carries an autobiographical undertone?

Deena: In certain respects, yes. Not autobiographical in a straightforward documentary sense, but in the deeper sense that one’s own modes of attention shape the imaginative field of the work. I have spoken openly about my own neurological and bodily experience, and there are aspects of Laurel’s perception that resonate with how I have felt or thought. So, while Stone Moons emerges from collaboration, observation, and transformation, it also bears my own investments in how difference is felt, narrated, and misunderstood.

Mehul: How do you see Stone Moons within the broader history of electronic literature? Does it occupy a particular place for you?

Deena: It does. For me, Stone Moons belongs to a moment when electronic literature was trying to do many things at once: innovate formally, survive technologically, and still speak to urgent political and human realities. That is difficult terrain. Works from that period were often fragile in every sense: they were technologically vulnerable, institutionally marginal, and aesthetically ahead of the frameworks available to read them.

What I value in Stone Moons is that it attempts to hold complexity without resolving it prematurely. It deals with disability, motherhood, institutional violence, and mediated voice while also remaining literary, open, layered, and formally alive. That balance matters to me.

Mehul: Many young scholars now approach your writing through preservation platforms rather than original hardware. What kind of reading do you hope they bring to the work: historical, formalist, archival, computational, or some combination? And do you feel criticism still has not fully arrived for your work? Also, does changing platforms change your voice as a writer?

Deena: There are really several questions there. Let me begin with the last one. Yes, my voice has changed. A great deal. If you look at works like Consider the Sea, or at Entanglements, which Bill Bly and I worked on, you can see that my voice changes through collaboration. I am now doing another collaboration, let me plug Stained Word Windows, in which we are trying to get a hundred people to rewrite and translate one of my 1999 pieces.

But with Stone Moons, in that month when I had to reconstruct the navigation, I really tried to stay true to the 1999 voice. My students kept saying, “Deena, don’t change anything.” Our plan, and it still is, was to present readers with a stillborn child that has been resurrected, not a newly rewritten contemporary version.

As for students coming into the work now: first, we always need to say thank you to Dene Grigar. Thank you for the resurrection efforts. Without the Electronic Literature Lab, without the museum work, we would be nowhere. Stone Moons would not exist now if Dene had not had that 1997 computer. Her students, too, are brilliant. She is creating a remarkable generation of electronic literature readers, writers, gamers, and thinkers.

But obsolescence is real. I can pick up a book. Electronic literature does not have that luxury. HyperCard died practically the week I published Marble Springs. Flash later disappeared too. If you have only a week, or a few years, to get a complex work out into the world before the platform collapses, how are you supposed to build an audience? And in the 1990s we were still dealing with people saying, “I can’t read on a screen,” or “What even is this?” We had the “click here” problem forever.

So, yes, one major reason electronic literature did not enter the canon as quickly as it deserved is obsolescence. The works are complex and ephemeral, and they often disappear before they can develop readership. Another major reason is genre. Disappearing Rain was almost under contract, but the publisher did not know what it was. Is it poetry? Is it a mystery? They could not categorize it. Genre uncertainty mattered enormously.

Then there is the problem of money. All of my works are free at DeenaLarsen.net. I often discover that people are reading them because a teacher writes to me in panic: “Your site is down and we have a test on your work next week.” Then, I have to figure out who stole my domain, what payment failed, what server problem occurred, because websites go down. We had to get Leonardo Flores’s I Love You poetry back up only recently after it had vanished for a long time. Digital access is unstable. It is not like a book on a shelf.

Mehul: That is exactly one of the issues I wanted to raise. In a recent study I conducted with Dr. Shanmugapriya, we found that electronic literature often could not become popular not only because audiences were not ready, but because creators could not generate financial stability from it. Unless someone already has another source of income, why would they devote so much labor to creating these works? We were trying to propose a model for bringing electronic literature into creative industries. What do you think? Should there be a model that allows creators at least some modest financial return?

Deena: Yes, we need something like that. We need an itch.io for electronic literature. Mark Bernstein has done important work with Eastgate. Others have worked in similar directions. But it is difficult.

Still, it is not only an electronic literature problem. It is a creative-labor problem more generally. In the United States, the average or median income of a writer is tiny, something like two to five thousand dollars, depending on how the numbers are calculated and whether poetry is included. And the average is distorted because Stephen King, Danielle Steel, Mercedes Lackey, those people make money and drag the average upward. Most writers do not make money. Poets certainly do not. So, electronic literature inherits a much broader structural problem.

That is one reason I tell younger people to do it because they love the field, but also because they love thinking. I recently wrote Talking Through the Markets, a simple work meant to teach people how to write electronic literature. If we can get young people thinking electronic-literature-wise, making connections, building relational thought, that is one of the few things that might save us.

We are living with climate change. Physics does not care who is in charge. Sea level rise, methane in the permafrost, greenhouse gases, those are going to happen, and they are happening. The same with the geopolitical horrors around us. The only way we are going to save the world is if young people can think. Electronic literature can teach connection-making. It can teach people to think and to enjoy thinking.

Mehul: Young people are also losing interest in print books and spending most of their time on digital screens. That is one reason I, along with Simran Bhimjyani and Dr. Shanmugapriya, worked on how eco-electronic literature can foster environmental awareness differently from print (Bhimjyani et al. 2025). Electronic literature seems to offer multimodality, kinetic text, image, voice, video, sound, in ways that can capture younger audiences.

Deena: Exactly. We need to grab their attention. We are already doing that in many ways. Twine is wonderful. Many people are working on these forms. The next electronic literature conference will be online and basically free, which means we can bring more people in.

And I also want to put in a word for Wikipedia. We need volunteer editors. That is one way to think and to research without surrendering everything to AI. AI is going to be here. Human beings need to think. And electronic literature is one of the ways to help us do that.

Mehul: Yes. AI may produce text, but it cannot replace the kind of interpretive and imaginative human language that electronic literature develops. I remain optimistic about those possibilities.

Deena: And we are working on them.

Mehul: For this interview, the last question would be: what are the projects you are looking forward to now? Do you still have imagined worlds you want to create and give to young readers? What new forms do you want to explore?

Deena: What I really want is to introduce works for young kids, for students, and for anyone else who wants to come in. One of the things I am working on now comes out of 1999, the same period as Stone Moons. I had written a piece in JavaScript. It has connections, and now what we can do is translate it. When we translate it, we are also printing a “rose” version so you can see the connections across languages. That is one project.

The other one, but we decided the first one was still a bit complex, though I still want a hundred people involved, is Stained Word Windows. So, if people want to get into that, they can go to DeenaLarsen.net/SWW and talk to me. I want their input. I really do.

The other project is called Talking Through the Markets. It uses a spreadsheet structure. You talk through different points, and we can do it in different languages, so we are exploring a multilingual, multiperson work. You can put your own story there. I use one little story of my own, about being in Pojoaque with Bill Bly when I was working on Stone Moons, but the larger point is participation. These are projects designed to get people involved. So, yes, please, come on in. The water’s fine.

Mehul: These are wonderful ideas.

Deena: And Disappearing Rain is there too, of course, but really, “come on in, the water’s fine” is the invitation I want to leave people with.

Mehul: You have witnessed the field’s evolution over more than three decades. Why has electronic literature, in your view, so often struggled to reach a broader readership despite its enormous artistic potential?

Deena: There are several reasons. One is ephemerality: digital works become obsolete quickly, sometimes before they have had time to find their audience. Another is genre. Publishers, readers, and institutions often do not know how to categorize these works. Is it poetry? Fiction? game? archive? essay? interactive art? Electronic literature has always troubled those distinctions, and that has made it harder to circulate in conventional ways.

There is also the economic question. How do you sustain work that is often technologically demanding, difficult to preserve, and frequently made available for free? These are structural challenges, not failures of imagination. In many cases, the works were ahead of the systems that might have supported them.

Mehul: Despite these challenges, your work continues to evolve. What excites you now about the future of digital writing?

Deena: What excites me is participation, finding forms that invite readers, students, and emerging writers into electronic literature without reducing its complexity. I remain interested in multilingual, collaborative, and formally exploratory works. I want younger audiences to encounter digital literature not as an obsolete experiment from the past, but as a living field with enormous creative potential.

For me, the future of electronic literature lies not only in preservation, though that is vital, but in renewal: new readers, new interfaces, new communities, and new ways of thinking with language. The field is still full of possibilities.

Mehul: I must thank you for doing this interview.

Deena: Thank you.

Closing Note

This conversation reveals Deena Larsen not only as a pioneer of electronic literature, but as one of its most rigorous thinkers: a writer for whom formal innovation, ethical responsibility, and political awareness remain inseparable. In Stone Moons, ambiguity becomes an instrument of truth rather than obscurity, and hypertext becomes a medium uniquely capable of holding contradiction, vulnerability, and care. The result is not simply a work of digital literature, but a sustained meditation on how lives under pressure may be represented without being reduced.

References:

Bhimjyani, Simran, Desai, Mehulkumar, & Shanmugapriya, T. Narrating Nature in the Digital Age: Exploring Indian Eco-electronic Literature. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 2025, pp. 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/13614568.2025.2557808

Larsen, Deena. Stone Moons (Twine Edition). 1 June 2025. http://www.deenalarsen.net/stone/.

—. Marble Springs. Watertown, Massachusetts, Eastgate Systems, 1993.

—. Disappearing Rain. 2000. The NEXT, Vancouver, WA. https://the-next.org/works/932/0/0/

—. Fundamentals: Rhetorical Devices for Electronic Literature. Eastgate Systems, https://www.eastgate.com/DeenaLarsen/guide/index.htm

—. Samplers: Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts. Eastgate Systems, 1997. The NEXT, https://the-next.org/works/928/0/0/