Shelley Jackson
| Shelley Jackson | |
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Jackson in 2005
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| Born | 1963 (age 53–54) Philippines |
| Occupation | Writer, artist |
| Nationality | American |
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Shelley Jackson (born 1963) is a writer and artist known for her cross-genre experiments, including her groundbreaking work of hyperfiction, Patchwork Girl (1995). Her first novel was published in 2006, Half Life.
Born in the Philippines, Jackson grew up in Berkeley, California, where her family ran a small women's bookstore for several years; Jackson later recalled, "I was already in love with books by then....and the family store just confirmed what I already suspected, that books were the most interesting and important things in the world. Of course I wanted to write them!" She graduated from Berkeley High School, and received a B.A. in art from Stanford University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brown University. She is self-described as a "student in the art of digression".
While at Brown, Jackson was taught by electronic literature advocates Robert Coover and George Landow. During one of Landow's lectures in 1993, Jackson began drawing "a naked woman with dotted-line scars" in her notebook, an image she eventually expanded into her first hypertext novel, Patchwork Girl. Jackson later said that she never considered publishing Patchwork Girl as a print novel, explaining,
A nonchronological reworking of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Patchwork Girl was published by Eastgate Systems in 1995 to acclaim; it became Eastgate's best-selling CD-ROM title and is now considered a groundbreaking work of hyperfiction. "Patchwork Girl" uses tissue and scars as well as the body and the skeleton as metaphors for the juxtaposition of lexia and link. While working in a San Francisco, California bookstore, Jackson published two more hypertexts, the autobiographical My Body (1997), and The Doll Games (2001), which she wrote with her sister Pamela.
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