ELO’s Ignition: Rob, Scott, Joe and (somewhere behind the curtain) me

Hello. I’m Kurt Heintz. And this is my love letter to e-lit’, featuring Joe Tabbi.

In 1996 – sometime before ELO existed – I was one of only two Chicagoans called to a literary exchange between Chicago and Hamburg. The other Chicagoan? Rob Wittig. I was a techie, but I also came from a street poet tribe. That made me a bit wary of Rob, who had studied under Jacques Derrida. His academic pedigree spoke to another life I almost never saw.

But that challenge would disappear in just a couple years. Hop forward to 1998. Scott Rettberg needed someone to help him build eliterature.org. Rob was part of Scott’s tribe, so was Joe Tabbi. Rob ushered me into the troop, and that’s how I became one of the four caballeros, so to speak.

Like Rob, Joe was a member of Chicago’s intelligentsia. Neither man was snobby about it, and that put me at ease. I was simply not used to the high level of discourse that they apparently shared. I could talk about audio compression. Joe spoke about the significance of “ludic activity”. Almost needless to say, he and I faced a bit of a gap.

It’s never good to wear exceptionalism on your sleeve, but all four of us did have some keen understanding of an e-lit’ ingredient, whether that was philosophical, practical, or something in between. And what did I care if I asked silly lit’ crit’ questions? I was among friends.

Moti Mahal on Chicago’s Belmont Avenue was our favorite café. When we weren’t conniving e-lit’ ideas over Indian food, Joe served piping stroganoff at his home. That’s when his hospitality really kicked in. His dinners convened a hub of discourse that included even more friends, more idea people, and more buzz. For example, Joe drew Mark Amerika to our table when his writing was quite new. Another dinner saw researchers back from South America who sought to reckon the differences between how Americans and Brazilians creatively texted each other. Yet another dinner had a “model photo shoot” for the new ELO tee-shirts. Convivial as things were, there was almost always a working aspect to our meetings. Joe absolutely catalyzed this activity.

Scott lacked Joe’s academic chair, so he may have counted on Joe and his connections for ELO at first. And yet where Joe was a man of ideas, Scott was a man of society and wonderfully laid back. He made me feel like I was part of the scene at a time when I needed that sense of place. That was golden. I built web sites for Scott and got to travel when I engineered the media for him at symposia, such as at the New School or at UCLA. As new works percolated to ELO, I learned to open my imagination wider.

Those early ELO days introduced me to great minds, such as the Wardrip-Fruin brothers, Noah in particular. There’s an LA Times photo of me with their UCLA installation. Their computer paginated my silhouette by setting the type on screen as it watched me in digital video. The words in the Fruins’ story changed and flowed into my shape in real time as I moved. Magical!

Then there was the incredible spirit of Marjorie Luesebrink, whom I miss. Meeting her was like finding a favorite cousin at a party, except she and I could talk shop about creativity in the digital sphere. And there was Shelley Jackson, whose Patchwork Girl stories were not just hypertext, but also something I could record with her, one-on-one at the Hammer Museum.^⏴Marginnote gloss1⏴The ebr editorial team is hoping to provide this recording here! Check back soon! — Tegan Pyke (January 2026) ↩

With Scott Rettberg came people like William Gillespie, Dirk Stratton and Nick Montfort: writers who were old hands at weaving twisted stories between each other. There was never a dull moment in this tribe. If you know, you know.

Talan Memmott set the bar so incredibly high with his animated and interactive dynamic HTML. I owe Talan particular thanks for his connection between e-lit’ and performance, something that I longed to see. He demonstrated it at the Boston Cyberarts Festival in 2001.

I mention these inspiring minds because we had a growing core of people. Every one of them left an influence in me that still resonates today. Joe Tabbi was fundamental to their convergence, because he was fundamental to e-literature’s core, making good on that by working directly through ebr and by supporting ELO.

In 2012 I was part of a panel at AWP called “Present at the Creation”, because way back in 1986 I witnessed my friends jump-start slam poetry. But ten years before that AWP – in 2002 – there was a night after the ELO conference at UCLA where about fifteen people (likely more) packed into a high-floor hotel room off Wilshire Boulevard. Wine flowed very freely and, as an honored guest at that conference, Robert Coover held court. As I took in that electric room, I recognized that something remarkable had happened in the week leading up to that night.

Today, I have words for that. I was present at another creation entirely: the full bloom of the Electronic Literature Organization and the rise of a broader creative and scholarly dialogue on electronic literature. There was no pretense among us that Wilshire Boulevard hotel. About a quarter of us casually sat on or near the bed as Coover and others spoke. We were just us: journeymen tech artists, some authors who also code, a few academics, and a couple media hackers with an outsider’s sense of what’s next. But to see that room? What a group of “us” we’d become. And to remember how it took shape at a Belmont Avenue café with saag paneer and lamb vindaloo, with Scott, Rob and Joe. I got to be present right there, at that creation.

I am a lucky man to be such a witness.