Marjorie Luesebrink

Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink (August 4, 1943–October 4, 2023) was an American writer, scholar, and teacher.

Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink (born August 4, 1943) was the daughter of Jack Coverley and Alice Wilcox.

Her father was an engineer at Lockheed Aircraft in Southern California; her mother was active in several educational and charity organizations.

A fourth-generation Californian, Coverley spent much of her youth exploring Southern California history and landscapes.

The family spent summers in Balboa, where she raced sailboats and surfed.

In winter, they went on trips (to buy "worthless land") in the deserts.

She started writing poetry and short stories at age eight.

She received her B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965 and her M.F.A. in fiction from the University of California, Irvine, in 1975.

After graduating from UC Berkeley, Marjorie married Richard Wayne Luesebrink.

They settled in Newport Beach.

He practiced law, and they began a family with the birth of Eric in 1967 and Marc in 1969.

Coverley began writing articles for local magazines such as Los Angeles Magazine and Orange Coast Magazine.

In the early 1970s, she returned to school in the UC Irvine Writing Program.

After graduating from the UC Irvine M.F.A. program, Coverley began teaching, first at Orange Coast College and then at the new IVC in Irvine.

She started her first book-length fiction, Love and the Dragonfly – a multivoiced, mixed-text work - in 1973.

In 1979, Luesebrink began teaching full-time at IVC.

She was one of the original 13 faculty members.

At IVC, she started exploring the intersections between computers and writing – experimenting with computer-generated poetry and initiating a program in CompuEnglish.

Later, she developed the first online courses in literature and writing for the college.

These courses appeared both online and on television.

She taught in the UC Irvine writing program, UC Irvine Extension, and Orange Coast College and was professor emeritus, School of Humanities and Languages, IVC.

Her works incorporate text, image, animation, sound, and structure to create spatial, visual story worlds.

Her career includes novels and short stories, scholarship, curating, editing, teaching, and publishing.

The Marjorie C. Luesebrink Collection in The NEXT Museum has revived and maintained 27 of her works.

She bought her first computer in 1981 and began experimenting with narratives that used the affordances of electronic digital media.

A pioneer born-digital writer, she is part of the first generation of electronic literature authors that arose in the 1987–1997 period.

She was a founding board member and past president of the Electronic Literature Organization and the first winner of the Electronic Literature Organization Career Achievement Award, which was named in her honor.

Lusebrink was professor emeritus, School of Humanities and Languages at Irvine Valley College (IVC).

Writing hypermedia fiction under the pen name M.D. Coverley, she is best known for her epic hypertext novels Califia (2000) and Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day (2006).

Coverley has published two multimedia hypertext novels, Califia (Eastgate Systems, 2000) and Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day (Artist’s Book, Horizon Insight, 2006), a collection of short stories, Fingerprints on Digital Glass (2002), as well as other short fiction, poetry, interviews, and articles on electronic literature and born-digital writing.

Califia is a multimedia, interactive, hypertext fiction for CD-ROM.

Califia allows the reader to wander and play in the landscape of historic/magic California.

It is a computer-only creation of interactive stories, photos, graphics, maps, music, and movement.

It has Three Narrating Characters, Four Directions of the Compass, Star Charts, Map Case, Archives Files, 500 Megabytes, 800 Screens, 2400 Images, 30 Songs, and 500 Words.

One scholar has written of Califia that it is designed to lead the reader "to discover the lost cache of California through her wanderings within the story space".

Another writer calls it "a metaphysical quest rather than a conventional mystery", noting that the central question of the treasure remains unresolved.

It has been termed a classic of hypermedia, and literary critic and hypertext scholar Katherine Hayles has cited it as one of the establishing texts for electronic literature.

Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day is an artist’s book published by Horizon Insight.

The "first edition" consists of 100 individualized copies – each one bearing a named "spell" for the owner.

Thereafter, "reader" versions have been available on flash drives.