Freedom: A Novel (I Stole That Title)

When we imagine collaborative fiction, our romantically trained minds drift towards visions of “A”uthor merging with “A”uthor. Perhaps these scribes pass the page back and forth; perhaps they take a chapter here and trade for a chapter there; perhaps they email passages, scroll back over text already written, or slice and dice with word processors and X-ACTO knives at one another’s completed, collected texts. When this romanticized Author is forced to compromise and work in a mutual partnership, they do so with the great responsibility that comes with being a keeper of meaning. We do not (or, at least, most do not) imagine collaborative writing as existing in the realm of fan fiction, pop culture detritus, and extended appropriations of characters swiped from eighties cartoons and David Lynch. Yet, Re:Telling fire walks us that way, down a green pipe to a bonus level of short stories and poems that work collaboratively not with a single “other” mind, but with long-deceased personalities, the characters they created, the worlds they imagined, our conception of these places and things, our immediate understanding and knowledge of their existence, and, essentially, culture as a whole.

The idea is an intriguing one, and the anthology plays out like a greatest hits album for those booze-soaked evening readings brought to you by literary hipsters crammed into whatever urban bar was willing to cut a deal and offer cheap beer. Chances are, if you’ve been to enough of these events, you’ll find a piece mimicking that referential bit of post-ironic crowd pleasing here. That is to say, the collaborative efforts of these pieces extend beyond a one-sided partnership with an invented persona and into the performative arena. The pieces in Re:Telling are written, if not to be read aloud, to at least engage with their intended audiences in a wink wink, nudge nudge manner. You want to be in on the joke (even if it’s not a particularly amusing one); you want to be able to rattle off the deeper meaning behind its playful approach to pre-existing pop/literary norms; you want to be able to smile to yourself and judge just how aware of its own artifice the piece in question is.

Of course, that enjoyable artifice can, in large doses, become ever so slightly trying and too-sweetly smug. Re:Telling is a product with a hook, a rather gimmicky sell that lures you in with promises of rewritten fairy tales and easily digestible doses of literacy. It asks you to geek out; sometimes it demands it. Where we begin with a tale of gamer icon Mario in existential crisis (“He dies until he runs out of lives and then he waits for God to say Continue. He waits for a long time and so he knows that God is frustrated with him), we progress swiftly into a who’s who of familiar names, faces, and places. This is an anthology that leaps deftly between the high and low, from I Love Lucy to Jorge Luis Borges to Henry Miller to Madonna to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Herman Melville to Sydney Bristow to Law & Order—the only show watched in marathon runs by college freshman and elderly women who read their TV Guide subscriptions with a magnifying glass alike.

The anthology plays out like a greatest hits album for those booze-soaked evening readings brought to you by literary hipsters.

At times, the stories engage directly with the source material, perverting it out of context, making it explicitly that which it was/is not. Early on, Alicia Gifford gives us a Desilu backstage trip more in line with Showgirls (1995) than wholesome Americana. We like a story like this because it gives us a satisfying taste of the unseen, the illicit, the wish fulfillment we didn’t know we needed. Gifford collaborates with an idea, a time...