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This chapter is the third of three interviews that explore how the concepts and precepts of ambient literature are exemplified through the creation of a work of digitally mediated fiction. In this chapter, Kate Pullinger discusses how 'Breathe' utilises the affordances of the reader’s smartphone by leveraging data, including weather, time and location, in order to personalise the story to every reader. Pullinger describes the collaboration behind the project, developing the narrative through the use of variable or conditional text, as well as discussing decisions about the grammar and mode of storytelling used in creating the work.

Readers learn to forget themselves. We are taught that good reading is inward and affective, and that good readers are silent, still and solitary. The physicality of the printed book facilitates this: we are so habituated to its forms that it all but disappears in our hands. Paradoxically, such ‘disembodiment’ requires a submission to the text’s material form: we have been ‘readied’ as readers not to pay attention to the book as an object. This, though, is relatively modern: for most of literate history, reading has been experienced as situational and embodied, as an ambient practice. This chapter offers an ambient history of reading, from St Augustine’s famous textual revelation in an Italian garden to Kate Pullinger’s Breathe, arguing that ambient literature allows us to rediscover ‘the pleasures of reflexivity’ (to use Christina Lupton’s phrase) by re-engaging with a kind of reading practice that has been for the most part marginalised and deprecated.