But I'm interested in stories where everything slows down, when narratives decelerate, and where there are many possibilities. Like multiplicity, wrong turns, or digression, or denial, hesitation, uncertainty. All those things that are more like real life. I'm interested in stories that don't go to a neat resolution, and allow for that sort of playing around and struggle before you make progress.

Interviewer: Fragmentary identity seems appropriate for our times. The idea of progress, the metanarrative that informs the classic Western plot structure, suggests we know more, we're enlightened, we've been transformed. This is the logic of science, industry, modernism, psychology. Perhaps we've stopped looking for "the well made play" that solves everything for us, because we've seen these stories play out again and again in the real world. The real authors of progress tend to leave us with solutions that are worse than the problems they fix. So here we are stuck at the end of the 20th century.

As you look toward your next work, are you going to be experimenting with other tools or techniques?

Megan Heyward: Yes. It would be very tempting for me to just go in and do the pulsing text and similar devices as in the first piece. But I'd like to also look at exploring other ways of structuring and conveying the work. Still with fragmentation, and still a composition of fragments. But maybe not expressed in quite the same way.

The next work is essentially about a successful person that's come to an impasse. Their impasse is that they realize that they're unable to dream anymore. So this is going to be their treatment in a sense, or a depiction of their journey as they attempt to be able to regain the ability to dream.

I'm still working it all out- it's a in the conceptual stages at the moment. Who is the audience going to be for the book that you're making?

Interviewer: The money that's paying us to do this first draft of it is an audience that is made up of some corporate people who are looking at our work in the context of improving business communications. And we are twisting that into a discussion personal brand versus the company brand; the emotions and values and resources and skills that one brings into a situation as a story. Those stories then can be linked to a person's understanding about what they're bringing into a work or a professional situation.

And so we're basically arguing that people should take our class or do our kind of process for therapeutic reasons, as professional development, or centering oneself for working in a professional context. And then finally we are suggesting that it's not a bad way to learn multimedia or to begin a creative process. But we're not naïve enough to think that that's the path that most of the people that we would try to get involved in this will take. That they'll wake up and go "god, I could be an artist." We would love to be deconstructing corporate America into a bunch of artists, but since that probably isn't going to happen, our approach is allowing us to write the book as if it's completely about personal storytelling. That's the line.

The interviews are as much to service the digital storytelling movement. So we want to deliver them as a little packet at the digital storytelling festival. We are hoping somehow the amalgam of stories will be a useful setting for our movement building, our identity building, trying to describe something that we are doing. I feel it's important to have the voice of artists because our dialogue with a larger entertainment, corporate communications and education industries is more about integrity than the mechanics of storytelling. It's the struggle for integrity in working in a new art form where money is really weird right now, both in terms of temptation and lack of it.

That's where this book is coming from.

Megan Heyward: It's a funny one because I try to really foster a sense of experimentation in my students. And I'm always amazed by the quality of work that they come up with. It's just insanely good. And they just seem to approach this medium with an incredible amount of creativity and they just go for it. It's like they've suddenly been unleashed and they just explode.

And I do occasionally get the students, god bless them, I can't blame them, they say, "am I going to get a job out of this. I'm paying all this money to be at university and I really want to get a job," and so of course I deal with all that as well. But I have to say that in my heart of hearts I keep trying to push them into becoming artists. And they come up with great work, so who knows. Interviewer:

And the more integrity they take into wherever they're going, the more they'll shape that place in a positive way. So if you start saying just figure out how to make a fast buck, then it ain't going to be interesting, even if it's commercialized, it will be boring commercialized, of which we have plenty.

Megan Hayward: Exactly.

Interviewer: We were trying to get to your piece about dreams. That losing your ability to dream is different than losing your memory, but similar.

Megan Heyward: I'm interested in those stories that-this is totally wrong from a classical narrative point of view- start in the middle of the crisis, where you have someone who is essentially paralyzed, and you have to help them out of there. Which is not really the classical way of telling a story. Interviewer: Well, if you never have a crisis again. But I Am a Singer, the initiating event is a loss of memory, it is a crisis. Every murder mystery is somebody getting killed, that's a pretty bad crisis. And the detective work to figure out whodunit is good story telling, it just doesn't happen and they arrest the guy and it's over.

In I Am a Singer, while the story begins with the crisis of her losing her memory, there is the slow move toward a very delicate crisis of her deciding if she really wants to admit that she really hadn't forgot all of it, she has somehow chosen amnesia as a survival strategy. Is our reaction to trauma about choice? How does our unconscious self defends us in ways we can't articulate? Megan Heyward: I great that you've picked up on those themes in the work, and I guess those psychological aspects are also intrinsic to most of the things I do. From an artistic point of view I'm interested in meaning, and development from a very personal point of view.

Interviewer: I made a statement about the feminist informed quality to your work, but also to a lot of work that seems to have a little more integrity within this field. Do you have thoughts about either the impact of your gender or the impact of the consciousness-the self-consciousness of the gender through r feminist philosophies?

Megan Heyward: That's a really big question. I've been thinking why there are so many really good new media works by women. Not to say that men don't do them, because they do, but it just seems that women are coming up with some really interesting works. I think that working in new media, particularly if you're someone that does everything on your own, like me, you don't need to deal with all of the power relations and embedded discrepancies. You don't want to have to adjust to the embedded relations that exist in things like the film industry and every industry or area of society that we know about. You have to deal with it once you're out there showing the work. But it's really nice to be the boss and to have no one saying you're a bit bossy or "aren't you a bit overbearing." You can be as overbearing and pedantic and fussy as you like because you're doing everything.

I worked in advertising for several years before I left Australia and went to live in England. It was a classic study in gender politics and power relations. All the men were doing the creative work and all the women were organizing them. I could just see that everywhere. My nausea at what I was actually doing and where I was heading led me to leave.

But I think that those gender relation inequities are also embedded in computers. You've just got to see how many men get up there and wax on about the technology. But I think if you're doing everything yourself as a solo female artist, it is an opportunity to soar, you can fly and do whatever you want, and no one's going to tell you you're too bossy or you're too difficult or whatever it might be. Interviewer:

So these issues come up mainly in the context of your relationship to the creative work and the production work. I think your commitment to singular voice is an essential part of a good artist's statement. Singular meaning coming from a particular creative individual is at the heart of our desire in entering into the work of an artist. We want to be a little bit more intimate with the author's head. So art is often a replacement for levels of intimacy that are quite difficult to achieve in our love, friendship, professional and family partnerships. The more the singular artist voice gets mediated, like in popular television or film, the more it fails to move us.

Are you a speculator? Do you speculate about where all this is headed and where you might fit into it?

Megan Heyward: I don't know how much of a speculator I am. I keep coming back to distribution. I think it's really crucial. And I know that we're in a fortunate position here in Australia because we've got government funding in the area of multimedia and new media. And funding to actually experiment and I just feel like wow, I've won the lottery, this is fantastic. And plus I teach in an institution, I really am incredibly fortunate. But I'm concerned that perhaps it isn't going to be the case in five years time. We've got to get the works out there, otherwise the funding might dry up. It's got to be seen as making a difference and getting out to people.

But also we need it to somehow subvert and make some sort of meaningful foray into the commercial genres that are out there totally dominating and drowning everybody. So where it's heading, I don't know. Part of me is concerned that if the computer people don't make enough money quickly they're going to leave and they're going to go and try and find the next new thing. Although I think they've sunk enough money into it that it's not going to go away in a hurry.

Interviewer: Let's take two areas, the internet and immersive media. Are those areas that interest you at all?

Megan Heyward: I have thoughts about both areas. At the moment I don't want to deal with the logistics and the sheer work of an immersive environment. I'm impressed by the works that a few people are doing like Char Davies- you've probably heard of with her immersive environments. But just the sheer amount of time and technology, that's something that I don't want to deal with now.

The internet, once the bandwidth is bigger, yes, I'd look at putting stuff on there. I must confess that I'm a little bit fond of the old ubiquitous CD-ROM. I feel that computers are quite a hypnotic medium. They're ten inches away from your face, and the first couple of times people use the internet they spend hours doing it, I think they're quite potentially mesmerizing little machines. And the fact that they've all got CD-ROMs at the moment makes me think that they'll be around for a little while. But yes, certainly, the internet is more realizable for me now, but it doesn't have the bandwidth for the degree of video that I want, because I want fluidity in the work.

I do think the distribution is crucial. Of course going to things like the Digital Storytelling Festival and meeting people in the States, it was just so wonderful to meet like-minded people from around the world, and get the work out to people in that way. Of course it's a little bit expensive if you live in Australia. But we must find other ways of getting work out to people. I do believe there's a market out there for really nice boxed sets of art CD-ROMs. A small market, but I think it's there. And I'm going to try to convince some people into going for it.

Interviewer: We will also begin to see good curatorial minds, through the web-finding work that we would each respond to in different ways. I think there has to be new publishing models. But I think whether it's the digital story telling festival or whatever, we need to also be involved in assisting distribution.

And it's not really rocket science. The Yahoos and the Amazon.coms are looking for partnerships where people play gatekeeper roles of suggesting quality. If we are consistent in our style and temperament, I think those relationships could be built, and work like yours and like a lot of the work we try to gather at the festival would be seen.

A lot of what the festival is about in some ways is imagining itself having the role that independent film festivals have of initiating dialogue with distribution. And we're way far from that. And since most of those models are totally dominated by people that buy and sell films, it has all the contradictions of buying and selling through those kinds of companies. And I think we need some other kinds of channels. We need our internet independent bookstores. If Amazon is going to kill the little bookstores, then we need to create ours on the net, and a lot of them will be people like you and me saying here's my top ten for 1998. Here's where you buy them, so go buy them, by god. And I haven't done it yet, but I think it's something we have to do.


It's been great talking to you