Whereas Encyclopedia Brittanica tells us that fiction is “literature created from the imagination, not presented as fact,” the Providence encyclopedists behind the Encyclopedia Project ask, "What occurs under the sign of fiction?" Or, in newly minted encyclopedist Tisa Bryant’s words, “Imagine an empty lot with a sign that says fiction — what would be in the lot?” Encyclopedia: Vol. 1, A-E is a far cry from Brittanica, or Pliny the Elder’s 37-volume Natural History, written in the first century, or the Enlightenment encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert. “The traditional encyclopedia is cocky,” says Kate Schatz, the second encyclopedist, commenting on the form’s perennial goal of containing all knowledge — knowledge decided upon by a few experts. “Who are the experts?” asks the third and final encyclopedist, Miranda Mellis. Knowledge is not static, she argues; fittingly, “Encyclopedias are symptoms of the history they come out of.” Schatz, 27, Mellis, 38, and Bryant, 39, are all writers, educators, and recent graduates of Brown’s Literary Arts MFA program. Rather than tidying up the messy landscape of human knowledge, they have decided to create an encyclopedia in which the mess is celebrated, the intellectual flotsam relished. With the rise of Wikipedia and other online tomes usurping the position of the traditional encyclopedia, Schatz says the three wanted to "resurrect the form, but change what it means historically.” The result is the five-volume Encyclopedia Project, a literary encyclopedia meant to explore and challenge what and how people think about fiction rather than compile and cement that thought. Encyclopedia: Vol. 1, A-E hits bookshelves in mid-April and offers 332 pages of cross-referenced entries by 114 contributors. The entries range from bildungsroman to celebrity to epic, taking the form of essays, blog excerpts, e-mail exchanges, lists, poems, video stills, and drawings. (The self-published book includes a color portfolio of artwork.) The book’s unorthodox form and content follows from a similarly inventive method of solicitation. The compilers composed an expansive list of words, sent customized lists to more than 200 writers and artists, and asked them to provide an entry between one sentence and 4000 words. “Some people didn’t like any of the words,” says Mellis, “so they came back with their own entries.” The resulting disparate group includes Jorge Luis Borges, sci-fi auteur Samuel Delany, Anna Joyce Springer, poets Rosemarie and Keith Waldrop, artists Layla Ali and Zak Smith, and Brown faculty members Carole Maso, Thalia Field, and Brian Evenson. Half the authors are writers of color and minorities, and 15 percent are based in Providence. A typically atypical entry on denouément excerpts a newspaper article on a dead body being found “shortly after dawn in an alley off Rua das Caos, near the new and unauthorized favela of N.” Another addresses “elegy” in the form of an essay on crime fiction. Like traditional encyclopedias, Encyclopedia derives much of its élan from the connections between seemingly incongruous entries. The aim is to “create conversations that wouldn’t necessarily take place otherwise,” Bryant explains. “We hope to open up ideas about what’s readable, what’s accessible, what can be understood.” Or, in Mellis’s words, “It’s not like we need an entry for flowers, so we go find a botanist.” |
