Erasing Frankenstein
Remaking the Monster, A Public Humanities Prison Arts Project
Description
Erasing Frankenstein showcases a creative exchange between federally incarcerated women and members of the prison-education think tank Walls to Bridges Collective at the Grand Valley Institution for Women (GVI) in Kitchener, Ontario, and graduate and undergraduate students from the University of New Brunswick (UNB) in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Working collaboratively by long-distance mail, the artists and contributors made the first-ever poetic adaptation of Frankenstein, turning it into a book-length erasure poem. An erasure poem is an example of found art, a poem created by piggybacking on an existing text; the words that are not part of the poem are erased or blacked out, and what is left is the poem. This book presents the original erasure poem alongside reflections from participants on the experience.
Reviews
This creation, birthed by the Erasing Frankenstein Collective, rips open a passionate new relationship, both to Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel, and to the carceral ‘conditions of unfreedom’ with which the project contended. Again and again, I was struck by the crushing and the emergence of love and humanity it explores. Wonderfully provocative commentary encircles the work—on prison, erasure poetry, and the experiential ethics of this project itself. Erasing Frankenstein has much to teach us about the ‘mess’ and the value of public humanities. Unforgettable contribution!
- Simone Weil Davis, co-founder of the Walls to Bridges Program
Erasing Frankenstein serves as an exemplary model of how theory meets praxis. This book will be an invaluable resource for any faculty member (nationally and internationally) working in prison education programs or any public-facing, humanities project, or programming. That this project includes for-credit university education, public outreach, artistic practice and product, and scholarly discussion makes it a model for twenty-first century public humanities programs that will determine the fate of the humanities, not only within the university, but also in the world.
- —Lissette Lopez Szwydky, author of Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (2020)