Dr Lynda Clark received her PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at Nottingham Trent University, her home town. She grew up on a council estate and was the first in her family to attend university. Her thesis That’s Not How It Should End!: The Effect of Reader/Player Response on the Development of Narrative explored the production and reception of serialised narrative from Victorian serial fiction to modern episodic videogames and was inspired by her work as a writer and producer in the videogame industry. The interactive novella submitted as part of the thesis, Writers Are Not Strangers, was published in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 4 (2022). Dreaming in Quantum, a collection of short stories inspired by the themes and concepts in the research was published by Fairlight Books in 2021. Her debut novel, Beyond Kidding (Fairlight Books, 2019) was optioned by Film4 and is in development. Lynda joined University of Edinburgh as a Lecturer in Creative Writing (Interdisciplinary Futures) in 2022, teaching and researching in both the Edinburgh Futures Institute and the department of Literatures, Languages and Cultures. Prior to this, she was Postdoctoral Research and Development Fellow in Narrative and Play at the University of Dundee.
My current project, Traumgraz, is part of a wider exploration of ‘Creativity Amplification’ which involves using emerging technologies to inspire and support creative writing. In collaboration with sound artist Jung In Jung (current Styrian Artist in Residence in Graz, Austria), I aim to foreground AI ‘hallucination’ through the creation of an interactive fantasy travel guide to Graz. I am particularly interested in emerging technologies and the stories we can tell with and about them, such as writing for and with AI, text generation and generative stories, speaking machines and other non-human voices, and interactive narratives and creative writing for reflective purposes.