Hi everyone!

I’m Vide! My name means “void” in French, “see” in Latin, and “willow” in Swedish. I usually go with the French pronunciation (like “veed”), because I think it sounds best with my last name. There’s no one “correct” pronunciation, though, and I also answer to just V. I’m good with pretty much any pronouns, but I tend to default to he/they.

I’m in the second year of my MFA in fiction writing. Last semester, I took Digital Humanities with Dr. Pressman, and started creating electronic literature. I started a work of interactive fiction in Twine, called “Bread and Circuits,” and submitted a demo version to the annual SDSU E-Lit Competition, where it received an honorable mention!

After a whole semester immersed in the electronic world, I’m excited to spend more time living on the analog side! That’s not to say that there wasn’t plenty of analog book exploration last semester. We even got to visit Special Collections a few different times. The most memorable book I got to see (and touch! and take pictures of!) was a copy of The Malleus Maleficarum (the “hammer of witches”). It was written by an inquisitor of the Catholic Church during the Inquisition, who suggested brutal ways of prosecuting witches. It was controversial even in its own time for its brutality, but it was still used during and even after its time to inflict horrors on people.

And there are doodles in the margins…

It’s just something about those calligraphic figure-eight doodles (do those have a name?) covering that first page. This book is 500ish years old. Who drew the, and when? Was it a bored student? A priest testing a quill nib? An inquisitor, just doodling figure-eights in his spare time between torturing people?

When we get to Special Collections, make sure you look in the margins. There’s a lot to unravel.

Also, if you need help with WordPress, feel free to reach out to me!

Vide