This is for you, my experimental reader
About MonkeyLit
Please don’t correct me if I’m wrong, but this is how I imagine it all happened: we were bored as the habitants of the earth, so as soon as we discovered something to gather around, we started to tell each other stories.
Eventually the oral tradition, with all its imperfection, lacked the excitement and some genius came up with the disruptive idea of picturing the stories on walls. Imagine what an experimental move that was! I’d like to pin this person as the first avant-garde.
Then, I suppose, considering the time spent painting stories frame by frame, and the likely complaints by the elderly about the youth not being able to take their eyes off of the walls anymore, people began to feel an itch: This thing, they thought, this form is cool and all but what if, what if. . . And to scratch the itch, they invented writing as nails on their fingers. Mere shapes were now enough to represent all the pictures you could imagine, pictures that belonged solely to you and your own imagination.
Everything moved so, so fast after that: there came new forms, genres, movements, new ways to investigate and express thoughts and feelings – not only stories but also the human condition. And at each step, the motivation was the same as it had always been: getting rid of that itch, satisfying the curiosity of the question, What if, what if. . .
I’m Berkan, and I am doomed with this itch on a critical level. So much that if we’ve met, you’d avoid shaking my hand on the suspicion of a flea infestation, feel obliged to recommend me a good dermatologist, and might briefly remember our encounter in the following years and wonder, “What the hell was wrong with that guy?”
I write, and predominantly read, fiction, and I thoroughly enjoy it. I am especially mesmerized by that momentary shock at first encounter with such works of fiction — when you learn that there’s no letter “e” in Perec’s A Void, when you figure out what the deal is with Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, when you take a quick look at Danielewski’s House of Leaves and ask yourself how the hell you’re supposed to read it. If nothing else, they break the routine reading experience, as if someone switched to sign language mid-conversation. I love it. I long for it.
As an author with the joy of a monkey given a typewriter, and with the curiosity of the scientists who gave the typewriter to the monkey, I designed MonkeyLit as a playground where I can conceptualize ideas for experimental fiction, even write and publish them when I feel shamelessly bold. Needless to say, there will also be the occasional rumination about literature in general: book reviews, creative process, publishing gossip. . .
All for the exactly same purpose: gathering around a bright screen, an imitation of a primitive fire, telling stories, entertaining each other, killing time.