Interviewer: So your video experience and your writing experience combine to create a visualization that worked for you, and the new stuff about interaction design and trying to imagine the audience going through the piece and drawing out the meaning, that that was all new to you.

Megan Heyward: When I started working in this area, there was very little theoretical stuff concerning non-linear narrative. There's been stuff about hypertext, but hypertext doesn't have the same amount of sound and visual information. Hypertext is a literary tradition, albeit a fascinating sort of tangent to that tradition. I just worked intuitively and experimentally, and wasn't bound by any great theoretical paradigms that I was trying to follow or convert.

Interviewer: What have you learned?

Megan Heyward: Probably the main thing the entire process taught me is the importance of developing channels of distribution. Distribution is absolutely critical, because there are pockets of people all over the world experimenting with this form, but it's so hard to get access to them. I don't mean this to sound like I'm blowing my own trumpet, but people really seem enjoy " I Am A Singer". They say, "god, where can I get hold of these, why can't we see more of this stuff." And while I have to accept that yes, it is an experiment and I'm incredibly fortunate that I've gained funding to help realize that experiment, it just would be so wonderful to be able to get that work out to people. I think it's important to subvert the competitive game genre that is just being plugged consistently. And I think that adults really deserve a little bit more than that. And children as well.

As for the development of my work, there are some specific things I am looking to address. The next work is going to look at incorporating the feedback I have received from people. It is possible in I Am a Singer to actually help the protagonist gain her memory back rather quickly. Which I felt was valid in that that can actually happen in real life anyway.

But I've decided to build in a level of programming where you need to have traversed the new work for a certain amount of time before you come to cerian experiences or revelations.

Interviewer: There's no question that there's a literary market for intelligent, well-conceived work. The paradox is that the gaming culture that most appreciates the computer interface as a tool for entertainment is not mature enough to support mature content, and the older culture is still a bit ambivalent about the computer as a medium for the exploration of story and meaning.

I Am A Singer is about memory. A lot of my work is about the relationship between these boxes and our own memories. My sense in I Am a Singer is that the idea of identity is central to the work. Particularly the fractured identity of women in the current historical period, an identity that must be figured out in order to be whole, to be effective, to continue living.. Increasingly the canon of literature in the US shares this particular concern about the problems of memory and identity for women, how they were forced to forget something and they're trying desperately to re-grab it, to make sense of it, to make memory of it. Most of these stories are autobiographical.

Your fictional story seems to be so dead solid center into this impulse that I that it made me curious about what possessed you to write that story.

Megan Heyward: You've picked up on a lot of the underlying themes that are embedded in I Am a Singer. It's about a woman whose face is known, she is famous, but it could be anybody and everybody, really. It is about the various roles and personas that we may take on or be forced to take on which are perhaps not that meaningful or relevant anymore. I took someone who is from a worldly point of view successful, but totally fucked up and without a center, and can't find themselves within all of those public faces. I felt that putting the story on to someone who is famous was a good way of encapsulating those issues without making it autobiographical.

I started writing the short story was when I was living in England. I'd been living in England for two years, and I have to say that my time living in England was a time of incredible personal upheaval. If we can just say that the foundations of my life fell from under my feet, and every single bit of clothing was stripped away then I wouldn't be exaggerating.

I don't tend to talk about the details publicly, but clearly, the work is personal to some extent. It's about a person who has everything stripped away and is very lost, but somehow manages to find their way back home.

Which may be my story and may be lots of people's stories one way or another. So yes, that's where it's coming from psychologically. Another thing that's interesting about all this stuff is it gives me an opportunity to fight against the classical idea of narrative, where the character always does things that are meaningful. All of the boring little bits of everyday life, or hesitation or wrong turns, are neatly edited out of works. We are given this wonderfully linear trajectory as to how someone's life goes. Which is obviously good for reading and good for viewing and good for keeping people into something, it's the classic Western literary tradition.