“Rearrangement” and the reader in Lynn Jenner’s <i>Lost and Gone Away</i>

Post 2000, many creative writers work across blurred boundaries, stretching form and eluding genre definitions to craft hybrid texts that defy classification and often deal with ideas of unease and uncertainty. This article examines how Lynn Jenner’s Lost and Gone Away (2015) enacts tensions between language and loss through its hybrid form. Drawing on Lyn Hejinian’s (2000) concept of the “open text” which rejects closure and invites reader participation (p. 43), the analysis highlights the mobilising effects of techniques such as fragmentation, juxtaposition, self-reflexive narrative voice and repetition. The discussion shows how these aspects involve the reader in an ongoing process of meaning-making, mirroring the text’s central theme: the search for “knowledge” (Jenner, 2015, p. 26) of what is “lost and gone”. By emphasising process, Lost and Gone Away makes the search for words to speak about loss a continuous and communal activity.