Virtual dexterity

CEDAR RAPIDS - Famed not only for his prizewinning short stories, essays and works of fiction, Ian Rosales Casocot also maintains a literary website, authors a well-read blog and just had an e-book publisher snap up his latest creation.

Casocot is the new “typical” in the esteemed University of Iowa International Writing Program.

“Increasingly our writers come with more technology-based resumes,” said Joseph Tiefenthaler, fall residency coordinator for the writing program. “The online presence (of authors) seems to be a growing thing internationally.”

For decades, residents of the UI's nearly 45-year-old International Writing Program were chosen based on the books they had written. Many of today's resident authors also are known - in some cases best known - for their online work.

“That professional dexterity seems to be a recent and growing phenomenon,” Tiefenthaler said, noting that 17 of the 37 residents in the 2011 program have blogs or some type of web presence. “It's a growing number every year.”

Authors chosen for the program - this year's group came from 32 countries - spend 10 weeks writing, reading their work publicly and appearing locally and across the country.

Several of this year's residents - for the first time - had Twitter accounts, and some have started blogging about their Iowa experience.

“When people ask me what I am doing in Iowa, I just tell them that as a writer, I am merely going back to the mother ship,” Casocot wrote in his blog on Oct. 16, 2010, during his residency.

Casocot, a creative writer and journalist from the Philippines, described the shift in literary milieu as “literature without frontiers.”

Casocot said by email that his online work has consisted mostly of blogs, but now he's experimenting with the literary possibilities of Twitter and Facebook.

“My fascination with these things lies in my realization that everything we do is a form of narrative,” Casocot wrote. “We love to tell stories and we love to hear the stories of our friends, be it in tweets or status updates or whatever.”

Casocot's latest work, “Beautiful Accidents,” is an e-book, and the author said he expects more of his writing to follow that virtual path.

“I think our work as writers will ultimately follow and conform to the type of technology that constantly emerges,” he wrote. “Some may protest and refrain from adapting for a long time, but nobody can stop technology's march.”

Oonya Kempadoo, 45, an award-winning fiction and non-fiction writer who lives in Grenada, said via email that she's about to delve into the world of online authorship, too.

“I could not ignore the way in which the Internet, media and the sheer amount of visuals and information exchanged now on a daily basis affects the way a story could be told,” Kempadoo wrote, adding that she doesn't expect her online work to replace her print publications - in part, because much of the world has not made the digital conversion yet.

“The populations that I am concerned with (in developing countries) still very much deal with (print),” she wrote.

The UI's International Writing Program also is expanding its own virtual horizons by broadening its online course offerings and producing its own electronic literary work. The program just published its first e-book, and James O'Brien, distance learning coordinator for the program, said instructors now are using online chat rooms or video conference calls to connect with students at schools like Al-Azhar University in the Gaza Strip.

Eventually, O'Brien said, the writing program hopes to use mobile technology for worldwide instruction. Such web-based learning, he said, encourages amateur and professional writers to use the Internet as a medium for their work.

“There are so many people producing literature (online) as good as anything in print,” he said. “The fading paranoia that caused us to devalue and be wary of that mode, I think, is unwarranted at this point.”