Beyond the Spotlight

In Beyond the Spotlight: A Multimedia Preview, Elayne Zalis highlights selected strands of Curated Memories: A Boomer's Personal Retrospective, an autobiography she published on her seventieth birthday in 2023. Designed to stand on its own, Beyond the Spotlight recounts a journey of discovery and invention that begins in South Florida in the early 1950s and concludes in Southern California in the early 2020s.

Fusing twentieth- and twenty-first-century sensibilities, Zalis documents her early experiments with video and multimedia and suggests how writing becomes not only a through line in her autobiography but also a lifeline in her real life. The voices and visions of her younger selves echo through her own. While curating her memories for future generations, she chronicles her evolution as a late-blooming writer who finds comfort beyond the spotlight.

Guided as much by a child's longing for fantasy as by a woman's desire for truth, Zalis explores personal storytelling in the digital age. Beyond the Spotlight sets in motion a creative interplay of her writing and multimedia work within a broad social, cultural, and historical context. Like her eastern European ancestors, who immigrated to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, she imagines belonging somewhere. The book includes full-color images.

Elayne Zalis, PhD, MA, draws on an interdisciplinary background in writing, communications, and the media arts. Her work explores personal and cultural memory across a range of media, including film, video, print, digital platforms, and the web. Beyond the Spotlight: A Multimedia Preview and Curated Memories: A Boomer's Personal Retrospective serve as companions to Reimagining The Twilight Zone: A Young Fan's Stories, a collection of autobiographical essays Zalis published in 2021. For additional background, see TheMemoryChannel.com.