Writing Together

Brandon

What does it mean to write? Who do I write for? Who do you write for? How do we write together? How has the impact of generative AI changed all of these answers? Perhaps most importantly, what can it be? What can it be for you, for me? What can we write together? How can writing push back against these questions and create new worlds, new shapes for ourselves and our community, both public and in private?

I’m really excited to share a new project that I’m working on with Katina Rogers, my longtime friend, mentor, collaborator, and colleague, who’s taught me so much about writing. The way this project came about is Katina and I have often shared writing and discussed the subject informally. To take just one example, we were on a panel at MLA together about writing for the margins that Katina put together about how writing has changed for us since we’ve entered into interstitial in the academy. Recently, Katina came to me with a new writing project she was working on and asked if I wanted to hear about it. We started discussing her new project on writing. It was incredible, as is everything that Katina works on. At a certain point, I sheepishly threw into the room that, I would love to talk about collaborating on the subject if she ever thought it could be a possibility. We went back and forth about this for days, offering each other an out if we didn’t want to continue with on. Eventually, I posted about it on social media and forced the issue. We both decided to commit.

What we settled on was a project that we would together, about writing, in a way that mixed public and private. The format that we settled on was to physically send a journal back and forth to each other in which we would carry on a regular conversation. Each time we get the journal, we have three days to write an entry to the other person in response to their previous one. And we’ll end each of our entries with a prompt or question to the other person that they will then respond with. We’ll go where it goes, but as we initially framed things we will reflect on writing, what it means for us and for each other, how writing intersects with for our jobs, how it enriches our lives for our lives, and more. We’ll then send the thing back in the mail to the other person again. So this document will unfold over time, growing with each new handwritten note to the other person. Our plan is to follow up by regularly transcribing the entries and sharing portions of them publicly with a few contextual reflections. The result should be a blending of public and private, outcome and process.

Interestingly, what I saw in our first entries together is we each share different kinds of anxieties related to the project. For me, I have a lot of concerns about taking Katina’s time and attention away from the projects that she was already interested in. I always feel very happy and fortunate to be included in conversation with her at all. Katina’s work is endlessly inspirational, and I am excited to collaborate with her. We also both express similar instincts about where we wanted the project to start, if not similar anxieties and questions about where we wanted to go. Both of us immediately drew in our environments. Katina talks about writing on the floor, while I talked about writing outside. We both talked about our children, their lives, and ways that I think neatly blend the personal and the private. We also both discussed how the physical act of writing and how it felt a certain way that would not have come across online. I will end here and give Katina space to share her own thoughts in the process. I’m excited to see where this goes. I think you’ll find reflected in the documents that we’re going to share the sense that the destination will be good no matter where we might wind up. We’re excited to be stepping out into this unknown journey together.

Katina

Brandon and I have been crossing professional paths since 2012, and in that time I’ve admired the ways he weaves so many strands of work and life—scholarly writing, music, pedagogy, video games, administration, parenting. I’ve edited his writing, and he’s given feedback on mine, so we know one another’s work quite well. While chatting on slack, we both found that we wanted to write about writing—or maybe, to think about writing and what it means at this particular moment in time, and for both of us, one of the best ways we think is through writing. So here we are: writing to each other (and to the internet) to understand what makes writing important and human and worth doing.

I often dislike collaborative writing, if I’m being honest. Writing is a little bit like running for me—something I need to do, crave doing, but cannot stand doing with someone else. A lot of it, in both cases, is fear of judgment. I’ll be too slow as a running partner; my writing will be vapid and pointless. But part of it is also control and agency. Both running and writing are spaces that are profoundly mine, where I don’t have to worry about anyone’s feelings but my own. But when Brandon proposed this exploratory project, it felt right. Maybe it’s because it’s an indeterminate project. We don’t have a clear sightline on what we’re aiming for; we’re writing this way to see what happens. Everything about the approach is experimental and relational, which—in a moment when we’re all getting bombarded with flat, AI-generated writing—feels worth trying.

We’ve been taking a yes-and approach, letting each other’s ideas take hold and building on them as we go. We decided to write back and forth, by hand, in a physical journal—so that we have to wait to receive the other’s thoughts before jumping in with our own. It makes each entry both time-bound and ephemeral, connected to the moments that pen touched paper. What was the weather that day, what were our kids doing, how were we feeling? Writing by hand is embodied in a way that makes the process feel much more vulnerable than that rapid-fire chatting we tend to do over slack or bluesky.

Maybe because of those distinctions, Brandon and I keep nervous-laughing about how much anxiety we both feel about this. Will my handwriting be legible? Will I have anything worthwhile to say? What if I forget all my ideas when I have the journal in hand? Right now these worries are front-of-mind, but as we spend time in the project I’m imagining that they will soften into something interesting. Why do we both have such a strong affective response to this approach? How will it change the way we write?

Our plan for the time being is to share parts of our writing as we go, with a slight lag to allow us to read the other’s response and transcribe our preceding entry. We’ll likely play around with constraints (Brandon pulled an Oblique Strategies card to launch our first entries, for instance). We’ll definitely think about time and friction and audience. And if we’re lucky, something will take shape that could only happen in conversation.