Professor Nat Mesnard Reimagines Memoir Through Interactive Media
Inside a classroom at Columbia’s Kraft Center, students aren't only reconstructing their memories through writing—they're also building remembered worlds so that readers can explore them. Adjunct Assistant Professor Nat Mesnard guides their students through a particular kind of struggle—one with technological tools, which are not always cooperative. The source of both the excitement and the frustration is Bitsy, a design tool that calls itself “a little engine for little games, worlds, and stories.”
"I tried to insert a different room, which deleted everything I had done and I could not get it back," laments one student. Bitsy allows students to create a character and a blueprint of different rooms populated by small objects they can interact with. The resulting experiences look a bit like an old-school video game from the 8-bit era of the original Super Mario Bros. Despite the technical challenges laid out by the students, the atmosphere remains electric as they guide classmates through digital representations of their personal experiences during what professor Mesnard calls a “playtesting session.”
In Mesnard's undergraduate "Interactive Memoir" course, traditional creative nonfiction meets interactive storytelling, exploring what happens when personal narratives become digital spaces that can be mapped out, charted, navigated by readers. As I sit down to playtest some of the students' draft projects, Mesnard gives guidance to the class on how to approach feedback in a way that’s helpful for creators of interactive media.
“When you're playing the other person's game, give your reactions out loud," they instruct. "That's useful even when you're having a fun time, because to them it may feel like it's failing, while in fact you’re thinking ‘this is awesome.’"
The first project I experience explores childhood memories of staging photo shoots with guinea pigs for Instagram. I guide an avatar of the writer through a series of screens with colorful art. I collect the guinea pigs and read about their aspirations and desires. The tone is whimsical and sweet. The next project recreates the experience of being stranded on a military ship during COVID. I walk around endless hallways collecting different items as the creator explains that not everything is working as intended yet. But I think the feeling of claustrophobia, of having to move through a huge, confusing ship at a confusing time, is already there.
With this course Mesnard, whose expansive career includes video game design alongside fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writing, is attempting to broaden the frontiers of creative nonfiction instruction. "This is the first time I've done this syllabus," they explain, "so it's exciting because the students know that, and we've discussed how this is a pilot. Everyone gets to experience it for the first time, and now we're all at the cutting edge of interactive nonfiction."
At their office, I sit down with Mesnard to discuss the theoretical underpinnings of this unconventional course—one I wish had been offered in my own undergraduate program. Interactive storytelling usually takes advantage of the power of fiction to offer the reader branching paths, much like a choose-your-own-adventure book. But what can interactive storytelling offer writers of memoir, where the story presumably took place in a single, specific way?
"What we know from neuroscience is that memory is a process of reconstruction," Mesnard explains. "Every time you tell a memory, you're reconstructing it at that moment—not retrieving a tape from a mental library and replaying it. This is why people remember major events differently. In families, you might say something happened one way, while your sister remembers it completely differently. What's the truth-status of that? It's unclear.”
In this sense, memory can be understood as “a form of storytelling” that allows for play with counterfactuals or differing accounts. A student may, for example, explore “things they imagined doing instead of what they actually did. What you imagined doing in an intense, memorable situation is part of the memory of what you did. Including that isn’t lying—it's expanding the memory space to include internal experiences alongside what you believe to be the actual truth of events.” Mesnard says.
I get to experience this first hand in class when asked to create my own interactive storytelling piece with a simple tool called Downpour while students work on giving each other feedback. Downpour enables the use of images, texts, and links in conjunction to create short narrative pieces. Looking at the photo reel on my phone, I am overwhelmed by images of home in Chile and pictures of my cat, Lupita, whom I haven’t seen in months. I create a short story trying to imagine her perspective of my old house, stitching images with memories in a few taps.
Mesnard's teaching philosophy tries to make space for the deeply personal nature of these stories. "I am not the arbiter of aesthetic value for what's being discussed," they note. "In games, the professor and students are all players who might experience different versions of the game by making different choices. It's impossible for me to have the final say on a game's meaning or value.
Before Bitsy, the students had worked with Twine, a hypertext tool focused on linking passages of text. The final product is a sort of narrative web page, in which different sentences and passages can be clicked on, unfolding more text or changing what was previously there. The creator manages the branching options through a visual interface where snippets of text are connected together in a virtual board, not unlike a mind map. The shift between platforms is felt by the creator in the way they are allowed to visualize their work in progress. "With the UI, Twine felt like you're looking at the game from up high, but in Bitsy you're so close to it. It's hard to see the whole thing in perspective," one student observes.
But these tools also leave an impact on the resulting piece, and its effect on the reader. In a way, just as memories are reconstructed differently each time we recall them, different interactive platforms help render those memories with a distinct texture. A Twine memoir might excel at capturing internal subjective processes, with the reader inhabiting the perspective of the narrator. During one showcase, Mesnard recalled, a student reconstructed a tense scene in which a bomb going off outside their school was followed by the Mexican national anthem: a sign that the danger had finally passed. The student figured out how to incorporate sound into a Twine game, a technical challenge, and had the national anthem play in that moment through the computer’s speakers.
“His initial intention was to include a bang sound,” Nat said. “We suggested using the ‘safe sound’ of the anthem instead of the ‘scary sound’ of the bang, letting players imagine the frightening noise while hearing the reassuring one. When we had our final showcase where everyone played each other's projects, he had successfully included the anthem. Every time someone played it, we would hear the anthem because his computer's sound was on, and everyone loved it. He crystallized a moment of significant meaning in his memory through self-directed learning.”
Bitsy, meanwhile, puts some distance between player and avatar: the reader embodies the memoirist through the mediation of an on-screen character. Yet they also gain something valuable in return: the ability to spatialize someone else’s memory. The memoirist can recreate a room and let readers discover important objects in the order of their choosing, piecing together the story from context clues. The memory becomes tangible in a different way.
Yet there is also something connecting a student’s output across the different platforms. When discussing other students' projects, someone notes how the style of an individual creator transcends Twine and Bitsy. One student, for example, always seems to enjoy breaking the expected format, attempting to create experiences the tools weren't designed for, testing their limits.
As the class winds down, students continue troubleshooting their projects, now with a clearer understanding of both the tools' limitations and the broader implications of what they're creating. In these digital spaces—whether built in Twine, Bitsy, or other platforms—memoir becomes not just a record of the past but an interactive exploration of how we remember, reconstruct, and make meaning from our experiences.