Power/Collaboration

Elizabeth Lopeman & BT Shaw

Question: In terms of collaboration, is one role or other inherently more powerful? How does power, then, affect the creative process (or not)?

The Rules:

1. There are two writers: Writer One and Writer Two, hereafter referred to as WO and WT.

2. WT rolls a 20-sided gaming die to determine the value of n.

3. WO composes a paragraph of no fewer than n+50 words and no greater than n+100 words.

4. With the text generated by WO, WT must write a corresponding text using only
1) words found in WO’s original paragraph and 2) anagrams of no more than three contiguous words from the original text. If used, anagrams must appear whole and complete in WT’s text.

5. WO and WT offer independent reviews of the experience.

***

WO: Elizabeth Lopeman
N=4

Only the smoke of an electrical fire smells like this

So I go up to a West Side rooftop hoping the wind will clear my nose

Crisp autumn wind and sun. Dusk settles first on Montauk.

I anticipate the morning like a fire’s spell

Padding barefooted on the green, where intersecting blades of grass submit to frozen sleep.

Next year this time we’ll have solved this mystery – of fire – crossed wires.

Can conflagration be only on my mind?

I haven’t been to Vermont in years, we were young swimming in those freezing gorges.

From this windy place the Hudson wavers hot under the sunset.

***
WT: BT Shaw

We were the mystery—swimming in the Hudson under electrical fire, intersecting on the green. Barefooted, we crossed Montauk, Vermont, wires. We were shortwave, we were what roves. We were the first morning smoke.

Next, sunset, sunset, sunset, sunset—the dusk cannot not submit. Mind the wind, mind the fire. Autumn. A flat crooning settles in. Next, sleep—the oldest shiv—will clear the spell.

We were on a rooftop like this. No, like this. I haven’t been young in years.

***

Elizabeth Lopeman speaks:

As writer one I had the power to create the foundation for the project, and I had the advantage
of getting to choose the words BT had to use (with the exception of the anagrams, which were
also closely related to my diction). But, as soon as I turned my work over to BT, my control of
the project had expired and BT had the power to subvert my meaning, which made me slightly nervous.

I think we’re hardwired to want the power to control what happens to us, which triggers an impulse to want to control other people’s actions to support our agenda. Forfeiting power feels frightening, and while collaborating with BT meant giving up total control, I had to use reason and convince myself in some way that the advantages of working with a friend and a poet who I admire outweighed, or were equal to, the disadvantage of losing some power in collaboration.

The work is tremendously more interesting (in my opinion) than it would have been without BT’s contribution. When I read the poem BT produced from my words, I was impressed with how she assumed power and I felt that her poem was much better than my poem–more energy–more potency–more horsepower, and then I wanted to defend myself with ideas like: Well, of course her poem is better—she’s a poet, she went to school and studied poetry, I am a prose writer, etc., etc..

Losing my power over the material made me uncomfortable and I felt outshined by BT’s work, but the end product of our collaboration has more power than either poem as it stands alone and the experience of collaborating and sharing compensated for the loss.

BT Shaw speaks:

At the beginning of the project, I was sure the position of Writer Two was dominant. I thought I’d be free to hammer Elizabeth’s into whatever shape I wanted. I could have wielded that power to smash Elizabeth’s piece into individual words or syllables or even letters—

but I didn’t. I couldn’t.

The impulse to honor the tone Elizabeth set became a primary concern, which I wouldn’t have guessed beforehand.

And then there was the problem of words that neither Elizabeth’s piece nor the anagrams could provide. In one case, for example, I messed around pointlessly for longer than I care to admit because I couldn’t find a suitable conjunction. I was up a creek without an “or.” Likewise, I was stumped for want of an “is,” a “but.” To finish the piece at all, I had to start thinking of it as an artifact, not art. In that mindset I could wrap it up and let it go.

So: Why didn’t I simply give myself a break and break “the rules,” add a word or two, to satisfy my aesthetic? Not enough time has passed for me to say anything definitive, but I can guess. A competitive streak that wanted to meet the challenge. A sense of obligation to a friend and colleague. Curiosity. Notions of fair play.

More than anything, though, I suspect the real reason I didn’t fudge the rules is this: The thought didn’t occur to me until late in the process. And when it did rise to consciousness, I dismissed it out of hand.

No big deal. There was absolutely nothing at stake, really. Elizabeth and I had conceived the project as more play than purpose.

And yet the question is playing on loop tape in my head.

“I was instructed by persons in higher rank to ‘stand there, hold this leash and look at the camera,’ ” said disgraced Army reservist Lynndie England after her conviction for “maltreating” detainees at Abu Ghraib.

How many rules do we follow every day, automatically, blindly? How many of those are necessary, how many superlative? How many are injurious to others, however subtly? And if it came down to it, push to shove, hand to leash, who among us would stand there? Look at the camera? Would I? Would you? Are you absolutely certain?

“[W]e were doing our job,” England said, “which meant we were doing what we were told.”

B.T. Shaw holds a journalism degree from University of Oregon and covered politics and the environment for a daily paper in Jacksonville, N.C. In 1999, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Washington. A book reviewer and poetry editor for The Oregonian, she teaches at Portland State University and the Independent Publishing Resource Center (www.iprc.org). Her first collection, This Dirty Little Heart, won the 2007 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry and was published by Eastern Washington University Press. B.T.’s poems and essays have appeared in a variety of print and online publications, including Climbing, Field, and Orion.

Elizabeth Lopeman is the assistant editor for Centurion and Departures magazines. She writes fiction, non-fiction about art, craft and design and lives in Munich, Germany.