Elayne Zalis

Vagabond Scribe (Leah's Backstory) Elayne Zalis

In this literary experiment, the young Leah as a woman archives traces of her life. She begins the first stage of her retrospective in the mid-1980s, at the opening of VAGABOND SCRIBE. The paper trails that she follows lead to real and imagined places she has visited as a child, a teenager, and a young woman. Her diaries and journals help, and so do her old letters, as well as her collection of books and memorabilia. Aware of blind spots and exclusions, she creates a collage of textual fragments, traces of where she has been. Readers glimpse a look behind the scenes at a memory bank in the making, a resource for ideas and inspiration as well as for stories to come. VAGABOND SCRIBE can be read as a prequel to ARELLA'S REPERTOIRE. These texts represent the fictional half of a quartet; the other books, VIDEO-GRAPHIC ALCHEMY: TRANSFORMING "DEAR DIARY" and VIRTUALDAYZ: REMEDIATED VISIONS & DIGITAL MEMORIES, are nonfiction.