‘my body — a Wunderkammer’
— Reneé Bibby
Fellow writer (and previously featured Wilds writer), Melissa Goodrich, asked the online community about contemporary fictions that explore form, and the cavalcade of responses yielded many gems, including the strange and sparkly ‘my body — a Wunderkammer,’ by Shelley Jackson.
To access the story, a reader navigates across a folk-art-like scratch-board drawing of a woman, clicking on body parts to open a page of the story. Within that story, the reader can drill down even deeper, following more body parts, more stark black art of disembodied limbs and close-ups of the physical form. The focus of the story is dedicated to description of the narrator’s body moving through the world, at different times of life, with precise, sometimes gruesome, detail.
We begin to understand the narrator and her body gradually through accretion. There’s no one way to follow the plot, no one way to experience the art. You can frame out the timeline in your own head and fill it in bit by bit, or you can let go of a linear life and revel in the sheer sensual experience of a body that has been well-lived in, reviled, and loved.
At the time of writing this, I’d barely started down the arteries of the story and have yet to uncover the end, haven’t even surfaced back to the original drawing to start a new body part. The interactive dimension of this story is as much a marvel as the writing and is a superb example of modern storytelling.