Bill Bly's We Descend
Bill Bly is the author of the hypertext novel, We Descend (Eastgate, 1997) as well as many poems and stories that have appeared in 5 AM, Amelia, American Poetry Anthology, Antigonish Review, Encore, Explorations ’95, MacGuffin, Runes, Yahoo! Internet Life, and Zone 3. He has published articles and reviews in such publications as Barron’s Book Notes, sigWEB Newsletter, Books & Religion, Didaskalia, TDR, Tekka, and Trinity News. He teaches writing at the university level and has taught at New York University, Fordham University, and Wagner College, where he ran the Writing Program. He has won the Stanley Drama Award, held writing residencies at Shenandoah Valley Playwrights Retreat, Ploughshares International Fiction Seminar, and Vermont Studio Center, and received fellowships from the Shubert Foundation and the Empire State Institute for the Arts.
Bly's We Descend, Volume One was produced with the Storyspace authoring system and published on floppy disk in 1997 by Eastgate Systems. It is subtitled, "Archives Pertaining to Egderus Scriptor, Volume One, Rendered into Hypertext Form and with Forward and Afterword by Bill Bly. Volume Two, which contains material not found in the original version, was published by the author on the web using Eastgate Systems' Tinderbox in 2011.
The work has been indexed at ELMCIP's Knowledge Base and exhibited at the Electronic Literature Organization's first conference and media art show, State of the Arts, in 2002. It has been the subject of critical essays by Astrid Ensslin (2007), Anne Mangen (2006) and Mark Bernstein (2002). Bly has written extensively about his work, most recently for Authoring Software, a blog published by Judy Malloy, reprinted here in this book. Bly's papers, including ephemera from We Descend, Volume One, are archived at "The Bly Collection" at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, located at the University of Maryland College Park.