Collaborative Writing or “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”
A guest column at Angry Gable Press
I love gables, especially if they’re angry, haunted, hungry or deranged. As a historian, I’ve spent a lot of time around them and in them, not all of it pleasant, but the Angry Gables of Angry Gable Press are some of my favorite and always unnerving, deep, shadowed, unsettling, beautiful, and thought-provoking.
I had the privilege this month to do a guest post on their blog about the agony, challenges, methods of madness, and delight of collaborative writing.
Excerpt -
“I’ve had a long history of collaborating on poetry; and, collaboration poems week was exciting for me, because I enjoy working with other writers to see what comes out when different writers’ styles, voices, vocabulary, experiences, ideas, and workflow collide, conspire, collude and mutate into a single piece. Sometimes it’s magnificent. Sometimes it is a disaster. It’s always interesting and a great exercise for writers.
I’ve had long-time writing collaborations that became nightmares and bled out beyond the page; I’ve had collabs that resulted in 3 AM phone calls, and sending an entire email consisting of a screen full of “No!!!” I’ve even written a poem about those collabs called “The Truly Dangerous Liaison” about a decade-plus collab that was amazing, productive, and dysfunctional. I’ve had amazing one-time collabs, too, short-mergers, such as my one with Amy Drees that was in Space & Time Magazine #145 and “Aural Fixation” with Bili O’Hara.
Two brains are not always better than one, and poetry, especially, is a very personal private form of writing until the workshop vivisection occurs. The Exquisite Corpse poem, the ultimate group collaboration poem, is still individualistic with the organizer often working as resurrectionist on the varied and seemingly random body parts provided by each poet to donate to the monster and give it life as a poem.
You can read the rest of it here.
My experimental poem “Tea & Dust” will be included in Katabatic Circus Volume 1, an annual anthology on Angry Gable Press.
