The Big Idea: Jackson Bliss

Posted on July 26, 2022    Posted by Athena Scalzi

Life is full of decisions, and sometimes those decisions can be tough. For author Jackson Bliss, making decisions was the driving force behind his newest novel, Dream Pop Origami. Read on to see how one’s decisions will impact the story.

JACKSON BLISS:

Dream Pop Origami is based on a single big idea I had in grad school with lots of interesting and unexpected consequences: what if a memoir about mixed-race/AAPI/BIPOC identity was structured like a choose-your-own-adventure novel? How different would the reading experience be if readers got to choose what the next “chapter” of a memoir? How differently, if at all, would the idea of memoir change if readers had agency in their own act of reading someone else’s life? How differently, if at all, would the construction of text and mixed-race identity change if the reader, not the author, decided its structure, narrative speed, major themes, and level of emotional interiority? 

I came up with the idea of Dream Pop Origami during my MFA. I wrote the first—and horrendously disjointed—draft between 2012 and 2014 when I was working on my dissertation and from 2014 to 2019 when I was commuting from LA to Orange County to teach writing/rhetoric at UC Irvine. I revised the manuscript from 2019 to 2021 in Ann Arbor and LA. Never in a million years did I think I would publish this memoir because it’s so heterodox, multimodal, experimental, and stylistically eccentric (both literally and figuratively). What excited me was the idea of creating an interactive work of nonfiction, something I’d never seen before in any form except hypertext (I’m thinking of Shelley Jackson’s My Body, which I’ve read and taught many times, finding new layers in every new reading). Though I didn’t realize it at the time, much of the excitement I had for this book was based on two important things from my childhood.

The first was choose-your-own-adventure novels. Until these novels became available, I thought I hated reading since the shit we had to read for history, social studies, and English classes in elementary school were fucking horrendous. The reading assignments were unbelievably boring and the book reports they made us write were so formulaic. They were also low in content and historical accuracy too, written in a dry style, stripped of any and all imagination, and totally lacking in literary merit or creativity whatsoever. But when I started reading first choose-your-own-adventure books, they changed my fucking world! I saw for the first time what a strong narrative arc could do for storytelling. I learned that giving your characters (and readers) agency was a natural way of giving them their humanity by forcing them to make their own decisions and then live by the consequences of those decisions.

In other words, there’s a necessary relationship in literature, I think, between causality, ontology, and humanity. When characters get to make their own choices and live by those choses, they get to exist in the text and we get to study their existence. And as a consequence, their humanity is both tested and developed on the page. I guess it took a niche fiction market for me to see how exciting this could be!

The second thing was my reconnection to video games. Being a mixed-race kid and the son of Japanese immigrants on my mom’s side, I was an Atari 3600, IBM PC, and arcade gamer as a boy. Sometimes, video games kept my company when I came home to an empty house. Years before I became a dedicated book lover, an emerging writer, or literature scholar, I first found joy, companionship, and interactive storytelling in video games. Whether it was in Oregon Trail (where everyone got dysentery), Treasure Island (which required you to type in the exact command or die by bluebeard), and King’s Quest, there was never a time when I didn’t have access to a (narrative) video game in my childhood. Years later when I was getting my PhD, I bought an Xbox 360, which was a terrible idea for my sleep schedule, but great for my creativity.

Once I began teaching at UCI, I bought myself a PS4 as a reward. I became kinda obsessed with Detroit: Become Human, and the Fallout, Deus Ex, Dishonored, Life is Strange, Mass Effect, and Final Fantasy series. I found exhilaration in the organic multimodal storytelling of those video games, the way that music, dialogue, gameplay, backstory, side missions, character arcs, and graphics could work together to create a multidimensional text that could be so rich, so powerful, so of-the-moment, and so emotionally impactful. I also found exhilaration in the power of my own decision making as a player. Most of these video games give you agency to make your own decisions and those decisions not only affected the ending, but the plot lines and the character arcs as well.

For all these reasons, Dream Pop Origami is as much the product of a literary fiction/creative nonfiction writer, electronic musician, and literary scholar as it is the product of an avid traveler, lifetime gamer, hypertext creator, and conceptual artist. This memoir is the product of choose-your-own-adventure novels and to RPG/action video games but it is consciously and unconsciously responding to those media too in many different ways. Just to give you one example. At the end of each chapter in Dream Pop Origami, readers get to pick the next chapter like this:

次に/Next:

1. To see Jackson going through culture shock, go to page 62.
2. The Tower Records in the East Village was church and the coffee table books were the hymn books of pop culture, all on page 239.
3. To read about the first time an Argentine boy stole Jackson’s cell phone, go to page 34. 
4. Or just turn the page gently and with understanding.

It’s not necessary to have read a choose-your-own-adventure novel, played a video game, or stayed up to date with the most critically acclaimed/experimental works of creative nonfiction in the past thirty years to appreciate this memoir. But if you have, this book will have so many more layers available to you. Ultimately, there’s no wrong way to read Dream Pop Origami and there’s no previous knowledge needed to enjoy it, but there are definitely rewards for readers who can see the other discourses that this book is part of and also responding to.

Dream Pop Origami: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s 

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s website. Follow him on Twitter.