Joe Essid directs the Writing Center at the University of Richmond, where he teaches courses in writing and literature. He is a Richmond native who attended the University of Virginia and earned a Master's and PhD at Indiana University. His research interests include technology in the classroom and Southern literary humor. His academic writing has appeared in Computers and Humanities, The Writing Lab Newsletter, and anthologies about technology and writing. He is a contributor to Style Weekly and has appeared in Eighty One and RVA. Ignatius Onomatopoeia is the "avatar" who represents Joe in the game-world Second Life. Ignatius will be wandering the virtual terrain of Second Life while his creator writes here about what may be either "the next big thing" for the Internet or the latest darling of the cyber-hip... the reader can decide.
E-mail contact: jessid@mac.com | Web address: writing2.richmond.edu/jessid

Location: Two Virtual Places of Rest

For an assignment in an earlier course, my student “Ariena Weatherwax” had traveled to our city’s famous Hollywood Cemetery to do a photo-essay.  I suggested that she look into the rituals surrounding death and dying in Second Life®.

In part one, she explores a surprisingly realistic graveyard in-world and funeral home.  She finds it oddly disturbing in its banal details, such as the rows of folding chairs for a mourning family to use at a funeral.

In part two, Ariena discovers a cemetery that is less disquieting, a place to honor people who have died in our world and thus left the metaverse forever.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts