Chapbook Club Update 2: Elizabeth S. Wolf
Last time I wrote about how I got involved in a chapbook project with Prisoner Express while hunkered down at home during the pandemic. But that’s not the only place my words traveled this year. I was selected to be part of a digital archive project that is literally out of this world: Writers On The Moon.
WOTM is a group of independent authors, headed by speculative fiction writer Susan Kaye Quinn, who created a Lunar Time Capsule of stores and art to capture a view of humanity as it stood in 2020. The memory card is part of a payload to be delivered by Astrobotic on the lunar lander Peregrine One. The mission hopes to land on the moon at the Lacus Mortis in the fall of 2021.
I am not a sci-fi writer. I was very excited to score this opportunity- and then wondered how I would fill my allotted digital space. I decided my offering would be showing the connections between the individual, local, and international communities. With that in mind I included e-versions of several books: the chapbook I donated to PE, my full length poetry collection, an anthology with a local poetry group, and an international bilingual anthology with poems in English and Farsi.
I also included the chapbook assignment created for PE. We don’t know who will be reading these works, or when it will be, or where they came from. But the prompts we created for PE were meant to be open-ended, provocative, and inviting. So our readers would be inspired to become writers. That’s how I chose to send the same assignment into both small, confined cells and to the frontiers of space. We all have stories to tell.