Individual Work
CityFish

CityFish by J.R. Carpenter is the story of a young girl named Lynne going to New York City to visit her aunt, uncle, and cousins. She does not get along well with them at all and speaks of her dislike often in the story. During this story she finds herself in China town and sees the dead fish laying out in the summer heat. Her family eventually buys one and it speaks to Lynne with great wisdom.

Carpenter does a wonderful job of blending collage, storytelling, poetry, and hypermedia. The story reads like a scroll from left to right. There are interbed links of cityscapes scattered throughout the story immersing the reader into Lynne's city landscape. The collage elements help make it feel like you are reading someone's personal journal of their trip to visit family. The real photos make the story come to life and real like it had truth in it. It makes it so the reader is able to connect with Lynne just from first glance. This short story has many labels it can be placed under. It has elements of poetry by including certain poems throughout the story. It is mainly a short fiction story of a girl on a trip to a place she hates.

CityFish means to speak about the fish out of water feeling when around family you dislike or and especially when you are a middle school girl. Lynne relates to the fish and she is the only one who can hear him. They are direct parallels of each other. Both stuck in a life that they have no control over. The fish was free back home like Lynne is more free in Nova Scotia. New York City is a place they hate. The fish becomes a voice for Lynne's own thoughts and feelings since she is the only one who can hear him. CityFish is a touching story of two fishes out of water.

This analysis was written by Mia Lynch for Dr. Melinda White's Spring 2026 Electronic Literature course, at The University of New Hampshire.

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Author statement: 
CityFish is a hybrid word, title of a hybrid work, tale of a hybrid creature. Part classical parable, part children’s picture book, CityFish is a web-based intertextual hypermedia transmutation of Aesop’s Town Mouse Country Mouse fable. Winters, a Canadian girl named Lynne freezes in Celsius in the fishing village of Brooklyn, Nova Scotia (Canada), a few minutes walk from a white sandy beach. Summers, she suffers her city cousins sweltering in Fahrenheit in Queens, New York (USA). By now Lynne knows everyone knows it’s supposed to be the other way around. Lynne is a fish out of water. In the country, her knowledge of the city separates her from her school of friends. In the city, her foreignness marks her as exotic. Meanwhile, the real city fish lie in scaly heaps on long ice-packed tables in hot and narrow Chinatown streets. CityFish represents asynchronous relationships between people, places, perspectives and times through a horizontally scrolling browser window, suggestive of a panorama, a diorama, a horizon line, a skyline, a timeline, a Torah scroll. The panorama and the diorama have traditionally been used in museums and landscape photography to establish hierarchies of value and meaning. CityFish interrupts a seemingly linear narrative with poetic texts, quotations, Quicktime videos, DHTML animations, Google Maps and a myriad of visual images. Combining contemporary short fiction and hypermedia storytelling forms creates a new hybrid, a lo-fi web collage cabinet of curiosities. The story of Lynne and the city fish unfolds in this strange horizontally scrolling world of absences and empty spaces – furious, intimate, and surreal. https://luckysoap.com/statements/cityfish.html
Read the original work online here.