Brief essay on Kate Pullinger and some of her digital work.

1. Joel Navarrete Ayala
Ingl 3300 Sec 050
Prof. Leonardo Flores
May 11, 2012
Paper on Kate Pullinger & her Digital Works
Kate Pullinger was born in Cranbrook, British Columbia and went to high school on
Vancouver. She dropped out of McGill University, Montreal, after a year and a half she went to
work on some mines in the Yukon. When she earned sufficient money she started travelling the
world, and then after a while settled in London, England, where she has been ever since. Kate
Pullinger is an extraordinary writer, she writes for both print and digital platforms where she has
excelled. Some of her printed works are “A little stranger”, “Weird sister”, “The last time I saw
Jane”, “Where does kissing end?” and “When the monster dies”. In 2009 her novel “The
Mistress of Nothing” won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, one of Canada’s
most prestigious literary prizes. Her digital works are composed of “Inanimate Alice”, “Flight
Paths”, “Ebb & Flow”, amongst many others (Pullinger).
Kate Pullinger views E-lit as a new media that allows students to develop multiple
literacy’s like for example literary, cinematic, artistic, etc. all this is achieved in combination
with the highly collaborative and participatory nature of the online environment. She utilizes in
her works a variety of multimedia components such as images, sounds, texts and interaction.
Her digital work “Inanimate Alice” is a story that is considered a bildungsroman. Which
simply put is a story about someone’s growth from childhood to maturity. A bildungsroman is
when we as readers see an individual’s growth and development throughout a story and can see
that change in them.

2. Kate Pullinger’s latest work “Inanimate Alice” has proven to be a success amongst
educators and students alike. What makes this digital work so appealing amongst everyone is its
level of interactivity and its increasing grade of difficulty and challenge.
“Inanimate Alice” is a work of Digital Fiction by writers Kate Pullinger and Chris
Joseph. Over the past few years, “Inanimate Alice” has gained a powerful reputation as a vital
transmedia title in education. Also the Episode 1: “China” of the series won the first ever prize
for Digital Art awarded by MAXXI (Pullinger).
Kate Pullinger’s “Inanimate Alice” was written first for and specifically to be read and
viewed from the screen, this will require the viewer to interact by driving the action of the story
forward. As stated before it utilizes different multimedia effects like; text, images, music, sound
effects, puzzles and games to illustrate and enhance the narrative.
“Inanimate Alice” is a new kind of novel, a reading-from-the-screen experience for the
“always on” generation, because nowadays everything is moved by the internet. Each episode of
the series is a self-contained story; the chapters become more complex as the narrative unfolds
reflecting Alice’s age and competency as she develops towards her calling as a game animator
and designer, and here we can see the bildungsroman concept in the series.
The series “Inanimate Alice” is about a girl named Alice who moves around the world
frequently due to her father “John” work in an oil company. Alice spends most of her time inside
her home because she doesn’t seem to have many friends and she is home-schooled by her
mother “Ming”. Alice and her mother spend a lot of time together, her mother painting an canvas
and she in her PDA.

3. Throughout the series we get to see Alice mature and develop into a future programmer
or digital artist. When we are first introduced to Alice she is 8 years old and seem like a lonely
and scared little girl and in the last available episode she is about 15 years old teenager and seem
to be more bold and more sociable than before. We notice that the events that have and are
unfolding around her, has made her grow and is shaping her future. You get to realize that we are
the sum of our experiences and they determine our path through life.
Another of Kate Pullinger’s digital works is title “Flight Paths”. This work seeks to
explore what happens when two lives collide with each other. It also has an opened to
interpretation ending in which the reader can later post its reaction or contribution to the text and
its home page. Many people post in their flight Paths inspired stories with different characters
and different plot, while others tend to use the plot and characters in Flight Paths and make some
alterations and add things that could have happened, it is all subjective and relative too each
personal interpretation of the story.
We have only too characters in this story and they have never met nor spoken with each
other and at the end their lives will collide in a really unusual way. The images and sounds in
these stories really pull you in, it makes you visualize yourself in the shoes of both characters,
seeing, feeling, and sensing what they are doing. The ending of this story leaves you thinking;
did she faint from the impact it caused her and dreamed they left together, did he fall on her and
killed her and all sort of crazy things you can imagine.
Reading these awesome stories from this excellent writer was a really motivating
experience. Now I know that there is a lot more to a story then just words, you need to see the
whole picture, pay attention to those small detail that might go unperceived but those are the
things that makes these stories so good and interesting

4. Works Cited
Kate Pullinger. Flight Paths. Web. 5 May 2012.
http://www.flightpaths.net/
Kate Pullinger. Inanimate Alice. Web. 5 May 2012.
http://www.inanimatealice.com/
Kate Pullinger. Kate Pullinger-writer. Web. 5 May 2012.
http://www.katepullinger.com/