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124 Back to Back: An Epistolary Essay on Collaboration Alice George and Cecilia Pinto monday Alice and I are writers. Sometimes we write to each other. We write for each other. This is an interesting process that involves spontaneity and serendipity. Put another way, Alice is like lightning. I am like mud. We are essential. We are unknown to each other. We are making this up. Alice and I are friends. We have had many meals together, and her lovely blue eyes keep me honest. I am writing this and will send it to her. She will do the same. Although I don’t know what she’s writing until I read it. We’ll exchange work for a few days, reacting to and stealing from each other and braiding (that’s Alice’s word) until we have something that holds together and is both strong and pretty. Eventually, we’ll sit side by side and create a final version. The braiding is fun. Sometimes I throw something in just to see if Alice picks it up, like anodyne, which is a word I just learned this morning and the title of a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa whose meaning I don’t understand. And because I work in mud, meaning slowly, and not always with much glee, it’s nice to steal some fantastic idea from Alice and run with it, or at least lift myself a little closer to her crackling sky. Having written in this way for a while, there are some things I can now predict. Alice is better with the rules, and she’s faster. I never know what she’ll send me, even when we’ve discussed a project in advance. This can be exciting and a little troubling. Sometimes what she does causes me to want to be like her, sometimes the opposite. I’ve written my part; now I’ll hunker here in the muck and the reeds and wait to see what happens next. —Cecilia * )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 back to back 125 C. beat me this morning, writing her first bit toward this essay, so her words go first. Banter abides between us, tonic and sister-like. Her e-mail subject line: Beat ya. One metaphor that comes to mind when thinking about our process is parenting—and how collaborative work feels like raising a child with two parents—while most of our solitary work is unitary, mythic. Athena springing from Zeus’s forehead. Ferns asexually emitting spores. But, when we make something together, C. and I, we can err and exceed, posit untenable ideas, speak in extreme or odd terms. Leave our sentences unfinished. Because we’ll be countered, doubled, added to and subtracted from. Someone has our back. Someone will stop us from threatening to ground our teenagers until they start smiling. That sounds too comfortable, though, because sometimes what happens to my original words is scary. She sees something I didn’t see. Which is what readers do. But then she responds to what she sees in a way that makes me see it strange. Often that strangeness is amplified by our way of writing blind, writing back to back, each e-mailing the other, not knowing what the other has just written. The process can feel transgressive, because when you’re used to making something alone, making something with someone else feels uneasy. Lopsided yet complete. Askew. —Alice (P.S. I’ve set my iTunes to party shuffle while I write this, mixing my daughter’s music with mine. Another kind of influence. Not knowing what comes next.) tuesday Reading what Alice wrote on Monday, I’m struck by the friction between our lines. I know what Alice wants. She knows what I want. We can appease , we can tease. Usually, Alice is the grown-up. She organizes, keeps us on track, prods me to write. And occasionally, she reminds me of what’s true: her eyes are green, she says. (I’m pretty sure they’re not.) However, I’ve taken responsibility here for being the one who explains things, so she can waft and be ethereal, write unfinished sentences, posit, shuffle, be lopsided. Alice said that writing with someone else causes unease. I guess, since she continues with me, that she likes that uneasy shifting, someone getting in and out of her boat. That’s me, my muddy feet scraping against her hull. )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 [3.138.105.41...

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