The Collectivoli Gardens

Founded in 2009 by Tom La Farge and Wendy Walker, the Writhing Society is a salon dedicated to writing with constraints: arbitrary, invented rules that displace writing out of the habitual discourse of the marketplace or academy. Many constraints were invented or codified by the French group Oulipo, many others invented by the writhers themselves.

The Society meets weekly around a table at Proteus Gowanus in Brooklyn. The salon is open to anyone with an interest in constrained writing; the ambience is kept informal and friendly with wine and conversation. No vetting, election, or experience is required. One of the five leaders will propose a constraint; then an email lets writhers know what to expect and what to bring (postcards, unorthodox musical scoring are recent examples). One part of the two-hour session is normally devoted to collaborative work, and writing is passed around for successive writhers to add to. “Collectivoli Gardens” was assembled from bits by individuals, using portmanteau words conflated from two words that share a syllable. Rarely, an email pass-around occurs; one such exercise built a collective nine-line sestina.

The Writhing Society reveres Oulipo but also the surrealists and situationists. It draws inspiration from William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, J.G. Ballard, Bernadette Mayer, and Paul Metcalf, to name but a few. Meeting often with a shifting group, it practices a variety of experiments. At each session, every writer reads work aloud, and listeners help supply the “sense” that the writer may not know the writing has made. Writhers are encouraged to view the meetings as chances to try out constraints they may want to extend on their own.

The Collectivoli Gardens

The écritourbus pulled up in the divinesparkinglot, and the group of nine awryters got down and put on their offbaseballcaps, for it was sunny and hot. “Welcome to the Collectivoli Gardens,” said a man with deformal charm. “I’m Raymond, and I’ll be your weirdocent. Please take out your queneautebooks and follow me.”

They filed past an open area: “The Wordplay-ground,” announced Raymond. It was not at all what they had expected. There was not a slide or a swing set in sight. Instead there were a number of bizarre looking contraptions. Curious, they went in. There were word ladders, rat centos, critical fictions, erasures and excisions, perverbs and perverses, and not a few exquisite corpses. Sam took notes about two young nouns, a lemon and a monster, that he met there, flushed and sweaty, behind some bushes, interlocked in an act of lemonster. “Better not tell your parents about this,” Sam told them. “They’re Proper Nouns.”

Take out your queneautebooks and follow me.

Shortly thereafter Raymond pointed out a large formless mass of architectoplasm and in it somewhere a door with a golden arm above it. A barker stood there; Carrie got his words down in her queneautebook:

“No matter that you’re unemployed, S&P has lowered your country’s credit rating, and even a stay-cation is looking impossible because you don’t have a home to stay in—there are still unlimited inventures to be had for the making: interior adventures invented in the far reaches of one’s imagination and traveled in style, baby, anywhere you wanna go—yeah, you heard me right. Go for a ride? The Hall of Inventure is open for business. You’re welcome.”

Behind another door, a large and well-preserved example of New World archaeologorrhea was on display in a climate-controlled vitrine of polarized glass. At first glance the sample seemed a pyramid of decomposed refuse, but upon closer examination revealed itself as a minutely brilliant amalgam of uncontrolled but precisely ordered speech, and Wendy began taking feverish notes: “The tiny glinting pieces one can just see without a lens are fractured utterances from heretical dialects of the pre-eminent literary languages. Here and there a crystal in one refracts the color of an unrelated utterance, casting doubt upon the current belief in the lack of a common stemma. Blasphemies in one extinct language show themselves to be, in biological evolution, homophonically identical to computer-generated prophecies...