A Conversation with Danny Collier,
creator of An Abbreviated Family Dictionary
Interview by Laura Ellen Scott

For Prick of the Spindle, Vol. 4.2, June 2010

Danny Collier’s An Abbreviated Family Dictionary is a Web-based literary compendium of words, sounds, and unexpected definitions that are often more intimate than sensible. The Dictionary is under construction but open for readers, and it is the type of project that could be complete tomorrow or never. Now that literary innovation has come to mean publishing innovation, it is a thrill to encounter AAFD as a textual experience that is not merely enhanced by technology, but is essentially Web art. At least for now.

A Tennessee native, Collier attended a private Baptist high school before going to UT to earn a BA in English with a minor in Religious Studies, after which he dallied in the Iowa Workshops before fleeing to the MFA program at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, a suburb of D.C. Like many of his peers at Mason, he enjoyed early, important success (his poetry appeared in New American Writing) before going into a much slower writing phase (12 years) during which he did not publish at all. After extensive traveling, which included a teaching stint in Russia, Danny is back in D.C. with his partner, poet Lucy Jilka (also featured in this issue of Prick of the Spindle), and their two-year-old daughter, Rexine. Like many poets, Collier is self-trained in technology. He is currently the IT Director for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at George Mason, a position once held by another D.C. poet, Mel Nichols. Having re-entered the literary scene, Collier’s poetry appears in recent issues of >killauthor and Everyday Genius. He has also contributed a song to the “Inside Joke, Explained” feature of The Northville Review.

Laura Ellen Scott: Everyone who looks at An Abbreviated Family Dictionary says the same thing—that it’s very cool. But what is it?

Danny Collier: The best term I've heard is... "Web literary art object thingie." I'm not sure that's what you're asking, though. And "idioglossia" is not a term that's going to be useful for others making their own Web literary art object thingies. Another person described the individual definitions with "amuse-bouche." That's a great phrase (and a nice compliment, I thought). Little melt-in-the-mouth fascinations, not all of which will please every palate. The third paragraph in the usage section of the Wikipedia entry for amuse-bouche seems to me to be hilariously on-the-nose.

It's possible to make a Web literary art object that can't be rendered in print, but this isn't it. It would be different in print, but I wouldn't say it would be limited (except in that it would not change over time). It would be different in print the way Michael Ondaatje's "Elimination Dance" is different as a book, as a single (unsatisfactory) piece in a collection of his poems, and as a video.

If I had the opportunity to publish a version of the Dictionary in book form, I would want the design to reflect an actual dictionary: compressed text with intermittent line drawing images, phonetics, etc. That would be a fun playground.

Because the Dictionary is a Web site, I can link to external reference materials for each word. I started with OneLook and WordNet, then added clichés and anagrams. As I come across other resources I will add them. If a reader moves into those reference works from one of the Dictionary's words and gets lost, they've ended up where I started.

Fundamentally, the Dictionary is a thing I'm enjoying. I really do hope other people will read it and enjoy it. I hope it keeps evolving. I hope I keep enjoying it. And I hope WordNet and OneLook start to include my words in their search results. I'll build an API if they will come.

I tend to think of myself as a poet. I have an MFA in poetry. If you ask for influences on the Dictionary I'll name books of poetry. But in the context of the great writing I see folks doing these days, fiction and poetry feel like gender identities. There's a joke: what's the difference between straight & bi-curious? A six-pack. Rewrite the joke substituting fiction and poetry for the proclaimed gender identities and then go read very short fiction.

LES: Each entry for AAFD includes an audio file of you pronouncing the word being defined. Are you still thinking about how sound works with the Dictionary?

DC: I thought about getting my two-year-old daughter to record the audio but decided it could get creepy. I may do it anyway at some point. Creepiness aside, it might actually resonate. If I keep writing this you could hear her grow up, one word at a time. Attentive listeners can identify which words I recorded while I had bronchitis and which were recorded before and after I moved my writing and recording into the basement.

LES: How has AAFD evolved?

DC: When we   lived   in   Moscow (1997-98) I   had   a   good   bit   of   time   on   my   hands and access to all the bootleg software I could rationalize. I   bought   CDs   of   reference   works   like   Encarta, played with them, and wrote. There's a whole glorious vocabulary about the life cycle of glaciers, words like nèvè, drumlin and firn. So I wrote about glaciers or whatever else came up.

The dictionary started around that time, as a poem. The first definitions were lines in that poem. I don't remember when I paired each line with a word, but I remember I wanted one word for each letter and I wanted the alphabetic order to matter—c building on b building on a. I thought of it as an abecedarian, but wasn't happy with the term, and I included "family" in the title but it wasn't all that focused. If I'd stuck with that form—closed, one word per letter, accretive—the title would've used a word I didn't learn until recently: Idioglossia. That's what the Family Dictionary is, taken as a whole.

Instead, I accumulated definitions. I settled on the title and threw out definitions that didn't fit. I left it alone for long periods of time, returned to it, tinkered, left it alone again.

The notion of turning this into a Web site came on suddenly. Since 1998 I've made my living making Web sites. I'm not the guy who makes them pretty and I'm not the guy who makes the servers work. I'm paid to think about how people read Web sites, come up with ways to present specific kinds of content/data/information to people on the Web, and write code to flexibly store that content and, later, display it in ways I didn't necessarily anticipate.

I took the 70+ definitions I'd written, wrote a content management system around them, and designed a site that was, to the best of my limited design skills, dictionary-like. An Abbreviated Family Dictionary combines my writing with my day job.

[Listen to an outtake.]

LES: So how did you build AAFD?

DC: I intended to define one word for each letter in the alphabet. But some letters are easier than others, so the words kept coming. I worked at it as a single piece and I still read it that way.

You can see it that way by clicking on "Idioglossia." A friend has told me I'm the only person who views the Dictionary that way and judging from the analytics, he's right. Once I built the Web site, it became harder to view it as a single, continuous poem on one page. Most visitors to the site viewed the main page, Lexicographer, or the individual words.

In the short time since the site first launched, I've changed the interface a few times. I initially had a list of all of the words in the right-hand column. Clicking on a word took the reader to a page containing only that word. Once I had a word for each letter I replaced that list with the alphabet. Each letter links to an anchor so the reader goes directly to that letter on a page containing all of the words. I also added a way to browse through the words in the order that they were added.

The alphabetical navigation was my attempt to reinforce the one-page, one piece view of the Dictionary. And, yes, in a sense I'm writing by analytics. Google has a hand in how the Dictionary looks. And it worked. Before the navigational change, most people read the landing page, my bio, and individual words. Few read the Idioglossia. Now the landing page still gets the most hits, but the Idioglossia is second. That won't last. At some point I'll have too many words for a one-page Idioglossia view and I'll give each letter its own page.

LES: The most popular word so far?

DC: Judgment and understanding are nearly tied. That statement, standing on its own, cracks me up. It almost merits a place on the list of definitions needing words. But I'm not joking; they have twice as many hits as the next word, kaffle.

LES: The word you wish more people would visit?

DC: Youth is a recent word, and I'm fond of that one. Kaffle is also recent. But I'm surprised the only defined word from the title doesn't get more traffic.

LES: Am I correct that many of the definitions are ‘gathered’ before they’re crafted? 

DC: Yes, many of the definitions come first. That was especially the case early on but has changed as I've figured out the form. Right now I have a pile of words waiting for definitions, a few definitions waiting for words, and two bracketed notes to remind me that I thought of something for which I do not yet have a word or definition. One of the notes is: [knee-jerk fury]. I won't tell you the other one. I think I came up with the word and definition for it today.

Family is an evocative abstract. The Dictionary is grounded, but I can range wildly while feeling firmly on-topic. The Dictionary is personal; there are bits in there that my siblings should recognize. The definition for "Home" is an actual place. I could take you there, provided the current residents would let us in. I can show you the specific couch for "Couch" because I inherited it when my grandmother died.

LES: What’s next? You seem to like creating sets and series pieces. Are there any other projects in the works, or will AAFD keep you busy for a while?

DC: I'm enjoying AAFD. I also wrote half of a chicken poem to add to "A Series of Romances Involving Chickens and/or Chicken Parts."

To read more of Danny Collier’s poetry, visit >killauthor and Everyday Genius. He has also contributed a song to the “Inside Joke, Explained” feature of The Northville Review.

Laura Ellen Scott teaches fiction writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Her short fiction has been selected for Wigleaf’s Top Fifty, Short Story Month, Eclectica Best Fiction, Gravity Dancers: More Fiction by Washington Area Women, and Barellhouse’s “Futures.” She was nominated twice for Dzanc’s Best of the Web and has made the StorySouth Million Writers notable stories list three times. Most of her published work is linked at her blog, Probably just a story. Laura is also the curator of VIPs on vsf, where editors and writers of very short fiction express very brief thoughts on form and craft.

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