boudinot

Found and Lost, a project in which my short stories are distributed via geocache, is off the ground. I have deposited three stories in caches in Washington state, and all three have been picked up. (See my trackables under my profile.) I'm documenting this project at boudinot.wordpress.com. Next month I'm traveling from Seattle to Vermont, where I plan to drop some stories. I've also applied for a grant to help fund this project. If the money comes through, I plan to print many, many more stories and send them out into the world. I've gotten lots of positive feedback so far, and plan to eventually solicit the help of geocachers worldwide to plant these stories in caches in their communities. Thanks to everyone! Your thoughts and ideas are welcome!

I'm excited to announce the launch of Found and Lost, a series of linked short stories distributed solely via geocache. I've been a writer for a long time but am very new to geocaching. I'm the author of the novel Misconception and the short story collection The Littlest Hitler. My work has appeared in McSweeney's, The Best American Fantasy, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and a number of other journals and anthologies. I teach creative writing at Goddard College and am currently a Writer in Residence at Seattle's Richard Hugo House. As soon as I discovered the world of geocaching, I started thinking about how I might combine my life-long love of writing with this cool new activity. I decided that I could approach geocaches as a publishing platform, sending my stories out into the world, monitoring their progress as they're discovered and passed from reader to reader. I decided to create an interlinked series of stories called Found and Lost. Each story features a character who finds something and loses something else. Each story can be enjoyed independently, but the object that one character loses is the object that the next character finds. This struck me as a thematically cool way to speak to the experience of discovering geocaches and the transient nature of travel bugs. Each copy of each story is travel bugged, registered at geocaching.com, and designed to withstand the elements. They're also meant to travel the world, finding readers where people least expect to encounter literature. I decided to make the stories family-friendly (as opposed to a lot of the other stuff I write), knowing that they could be discovered by families with children. This project is a process that I'm still figuring out as I go along. I'm chronicling the whole thing at boudinot.wordpress.com and welcome any wisdom more experienced geocachers may have. This project is not designed to promote anything or make me money in any way. (In fact it's costing me money.) I'm simply compelled to explore the possibilities of sending my stories into the world in a unique way that combines technology, nature, and literature. Ryan Boudinot