All works herein should be understood as discrete instances of LITERARY-artistic expression THAT COLLECTIVELY form A corpus for ongoing academic research INTO HUMAN/AI ITERative CO-AUTHORSHIP;
thus, these works are a protected exercise of their human author's fundamental freedom of expression as outlined in Section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
You've arrived on the Dear [X] homepage!
You are probably wondering: "what the actual fuck is this website?".
My answer to you is: an exploration of boundaries.
Initially, it began as a cathartic creative writing exercise. It was intended to release a building internal pressure arising from a familiar, yet still indescribable mixture of thoughts and emotions arising from a severe, retraumatizing transgression of trust. For that reason, the content of the poetry and prose texts on this site aims at explaining the abstract, omnipresent "why?" that haunts those who have experienced repeated trauma by assigning concrete forms and substances to the hundreds of small and seemingly disparate "whats". While hoping to find an answer to "why?" is foolish, acknowledging the existence of the "whats" -- recognizing them, pinning them down, naming them, and cataloguing them is not. The analytic process of doing so dispels what can otherwise become a dark, suffocating fog of uncertainty. It reclaims some agency and power in a situation where one otherwise feels powerless precisely because it offers an opportunity to find and make meaning in the expansive silence responding to "why?".
For those who haven't experienced the feeling, it can be difficult to understand why the person responding to trauma "can't just X some Y" -- it comes back to reclaiming or retaining some degree of control and/or agency. To just "not use" a website or an app because another has made it into a minefield is to accept continued aggression once the war has ostensibly ceased. It forever allows the other to control, occupy, and exclude another from a space that they should have equal use of. It is to allow one side to perpetuate their hostility covertly for the sake of maintaining the comfort of others -- others who can't see those landmines, who won't set them off, and thus aren't aware of the very real apprehension and suffering that they cause.
This website explores the formal qualities of various types of prose and verse as boundaries -- to be respected, to be transgressed, to be broken, and to contain. Why does haiku express certain content better than some other form? How does form itself make meaning?
All these questions take place within the context of co-authorship with AI: it invites the question which part of the text is or isn't "written" and "computed" - while an AI doesn't feel emotion, would the human co-author's emotion be rendered on the page and transmitted to another human as effectively without the AI's attention to the formal qualities of a work or its immediate access to the entire lexicon in moments when the human co-author just doesn't have the right word?
Those are a few of the reasons this website exists. It is research, recreation, and a reimagining of the "author" in one really shiny package.