As the pressure of collapsing cosmology affected me [as Zea Mexican was dying], so my writing hand began to seize up. Instead of being the curlew which writes, it becomes a fist, becomes like stone.… That is why I was fortunate eventually to discover the computer. Instead of being able to have a fist and create the sculpture of the word, I could use a little finger and tap those keys, and miracles would happen on the screen electronically.

By the time I came to Dreamstories, I had developed another technique within my writing, which I call the Sycorax Video Style, in which I try to visualize hearing. In other words, instead of simply an auditory experience of the poems, I tried to put on the page what sound looked like. And using the computer, I make all sorts of things happen on the page. To do this, you really require a mural—you require a larger space than the publishers of the twentieth century, apparently, are prepared to provide. This is the poem out of the twentieth century utility.… [Video style is a mural of the imagination. The publishers said “a larger book not sit appropriately on the shelf.” And so I had to spend the whole summer collapsing these Dreamstories into this rather crowded space.