In Writing Coastlines: Either and both' J. R. Carpenter articulates the double meaning implied by the term 'writing coastlines'. The act of writing translates aural, physical, mental and digital processes into marks, actions, utterances and speech-acts. The intelligibility of that that is written is intertwined with both the context of its production and its consumption. Coastlines are shifting terrains where land and water meet, always neither land nor water and always both. Writing coastlines are edges, ledges and legible lines caught in the double bind of simultaneously writing and erasing. These in-between places are liminal spaces, both points of departure and sites of exchange. One coastline implies another, implores a far shore. The coastlines of the United Kingdom and Atlantic Canada are separated by 3,400 km of ocean. For centuries, fishers, sailors, explorers, migrants, emigrants, merchants, messengers, messages, packets, ships, submarine cables, aeroplanes, satellite signals and wireless radio waves have attempted to bridge this distance. Generations of transatlantic migrations have engendered networks of communications. As narratives of place and displacement travel across, beyond and through these networks, they become informed by the networks' structures and inflected with the syntax and grammar of the networks' code languages. This paper takes an overtly interdisciplinary approach to interrogating this in-between space with a series of questions: When does leaving end and arriving begin? When does the emigrant become the immigrant? What happens between call and response? What narratives resonate in the spaces between places separated by time, distance and ocean yet inextricably linked by generations of immigration? How may writing coastlines serve as contexts for stories of place and displacement that resonate between sites, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, code and narrative, past and future, land and sea, home and away?
