Note on Process
Identify common concerns. Spend time together about it. Show yourselves off to each other. Collaboration is the boots down diggity. Conjoining > editing. When we failed we won. Our individual limits were exposed by being expanded. Because there were two, we were responding to response, so in other words improvising. We found the less we talked about it the more we flowed, the more we felt. Finding a form for a feeling, for the relation, is always the challenge. Lost all our poetry, learned how to tie new knots.
We started writing together because we wanted the other’s words inside of ourselves. On the one hand, we believed that there isn’t a single utterance that isn’t born from collective entanglement, so we didn’t have much of a choice.Writing together doesn’t dissolve the singular authorial mode, it is already dissolving all the time. On the other hand, we wanted to hang out and have someone to talk our shit to. We used each other to get lost from our own voice, to be released from our own syntax. We wrote in consideration of pleasure, seeking sound and beauty and earnestness. Why were we so protective of our voice? What did we really fear to lose in letting it be swallowed up in a chorus?
We sent each other poems, asked each other to rephrase and reshape. Take this and consume it, twist it until it is yours so that it is ours. At times we would account for specifics. “i sort of just riffed off your form, the vibe, the feeling. then some other slant rhymes you can clock.” Other times we were just vibing like motherfuckers “quick thing - no idea - let’s see where that gets us.” We became obsessed with writing about a love with no biographical veracity. We used desire as a material. Other times we asked for help: “i want to write about eros bc i’ve never had the courage to. If i could displace it though, somewhere that is between us, and at times, explicitly stated of us.” We had stuff to say we couldn’t say without each other. Some things we said better because we could say them to each other. That felt good. Then we wondered if it started to get corny. Isn’t that always the price we pay for love?
When it comes to publishing, collaborative writing is the exception, and as we have found, for good reason. Writing with one another is as limiting as it is generative. Without specialization or practice, attempting to merge our isolated processes has led to the practical limits of space, time, etc. Banal constraints like trying and failing to schedule time to work together and more existential ones like finding out there isn’t much you can do to make someone your mirror combine to make writing together at times slow, boring, and challenging. Like any relationship, things that were once pleasurable become swamped with logistics, moods, time zones. Each creative risk requires that much more vulnerability, and that much more blame to go around. Decision making processes require unanimous consent and so can get stunted by conservative, appeasing choices or compromise becomes a ramp to new promising terrain. As we have thought through the stakes of collaboration, we continually feel routed to a field of ambivalences. Evacuating yourself to be with another is supposed to create a vacuum to be filled with love. That is the promise of relation. But that emptiness is also full of our debts to each other. We are attempting to become singular and learn more about our difference. We bump up against judgment and become more empathetic. Staying with a person is to expand to include all of them. If language is at its source a social endeavor, then in a way we are just talking.
We started writing together because we wanted the other’s words inside of ourselves. On the one hand, we believed that there isn’t a single utterance that isn’t born from collective entanglement, so we didn’t have much of a choice.Writing together doesn’t dissolve the singular authorial mode, it is already dissolving all the time. On the other hand, we wanted to hang out and have someone to talk our shit to. We used each other to get lost from our own voice, to be released from our own syntax. We wrote in consideration of pleasure, seeking sound and beauty and earnestness. Why were we so protective of our voice? What did we really fear to lose in letting it be swallowed up in a chorus?
We sent each other poems, asked each other to rephrase and reshape. Take this and consume it, twist it until it is yours so that it is ours. At times we would account for specifics. “i sort of just riffed off your form, the vibe, the feeling. then some other slant rhymes you can clock.” Other times we were just vibing like motherfuckers “quick thing - no idea - let’s see where that gets us.” We became obsessed with writing about a love with no biographical veracity. We used desire as a material. Other times we asked for help: “i want to write about eros bc i’ve never had the courage to. If i could displace it though, somewhere that is between us, and at times, explicitly stated of us.” We had stuff to say we couldn’t say without each other. Some things we said better because we could say them to each other. That felt good. Then we wondered if it started to get corny. Isn’t that always the price we pay for love?
When it comes to publishing, collaborative writing is the exception, and as we have found, for good reason. Writing with one another is as limiting as it is generative. Without specialization or practice, attempting to merge our isolated processes has led to the practical limits of space, time, etc. Banal constraints like trying and failing to schedule time to work together and more existential ones like finding out there isn’t much you can do to make someone your mirror combine to make writing together at times slow, boring, and challenging. Like any relationship, things that were once pleasurable become swamped with logistics, moods, time zones. Each creative risk requires that much more vulnerability, and that much more blame to go around. Decision making processes require unanimous consent and so can get stunted by conservative, appeasing choices or compromise becomes a ramp to new promising terrain. As we have thought through the stakes of collaboration, we continually feel routed to a field of ambivalences. Evacuating yourself to be with another is supposed to create a vacuum to be filled with love. That is the promise of relation. But that emptiness is also full of our debts to each other. We are attempting to become singular and learn more about our difference. We bump up against judgment and become more empathetic. Staying with a person is to expand to include all of them. If language is at its source a social endeavor, then in a way we are just talking.
Rosie Stockton is the author of Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books 2021) and Pumpjack (Other Weapons Distro 2022). They hold an M.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University and are currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA. Rosie lives and works in Los Angeles.
