{"id":1702,"date":"2015-01-22T12:19:58","date_gmt":"2015-01-22T02:19:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/?p=1702"},"modified":"2015-01-22T12:19:58","modified_gmt":"2015-01-22T02:19:58","slug":"conversing-about-corpses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/?p=1702","title":{"rendered":"Conversing about Corpses"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Exquisite_Corpse\"<\/a>
Collaborative artwork (exquisite corpse?) by Mica Angela Hendricks<\/a> and her four-year-old daughter, Myla.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This month, I was invited to participate in an online version of the Exquisite Cadaver<\/a> parlour game, being hosted\/published over at The Conversation<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I was #7 in a series of ten writers who participated. We each received an email with the preceding entries, and were given about 24 hours to write our 300 word contribution. At that stage, I had no idea who else was playing, or whose writing belonged to who: this was only revealed to us (and our readers) when the pieces were published.<\/p>\n

As we (Dallas Baker, Jen Webb and I) discuss in our post-mortem<\/a>:<\/p>\n

This is a Surrealist\u2019s game, remember, linearity and realistic storytelling were not of any interest to\u00a0[the inventors of the game].<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Still, it was an odd experience to receive the first few instalments, contribute my own and read the resulting full text. I don’t love it (at all, actually!) and this is partly because I’m a great fan, it turns out, of linearity and realism. Also, I’m personally\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>a big fan of war stories, about men, with references to classical male literature in them. Lovely young men going off to war while quoting\/reading about Troy and Achilles, quoting Yeats. It’s not a story I can imagine myself choosing to write. But that’s part of the game: you get (and respond to\/build on) what you get.<\/p>\n

It’s no surprise to me that my own contribution brings us back to sunny Queensland.<\/p>\n

And those last two instalments? (The ones I would subtitle, perhaps, ‘It was all a writing assignment’) \u2026 I have mixed feelings.<\/p>\n

What do you think?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n