Writing Together on Life

The following co-authored post refers to an ongoing writing project I am undertaking with Katina Rogers in which we mail a journal back and forth to each other over an extended period of time. In those pages, we engage in an extended dialogue about writing, reading, and life. Posts here are a space to share excerpts as well as to reflect on the process.

Brandon:

This week we had one of those check-ins that’s useful for any collaborative project, but especially so for a long-form project like the one Katina and I are embarking upon. Katina and I had a quick pulse check where we asked the other person how they’re feeling, made sure that any anxieties were addressed, and made sure that the enthusiasm for the project was still there. Happily, we agreed that we were both still interested and excited about the project. I apologized profusely as a part of that discussion for being slow to respond to the journal. We had initially set a deadline for how long we would hold the journal before sending it out again, but I had some childcare difficulties and obligations this last month that took priority. And Katina, in the same conversation, described her own anxiety: she feels as though her contributions need to be more serious or deeper in some way.

First off, I don’t think that’s true. I think everything Katina has to say about work and writing is very interesting and useful. But I think the concern also points to something that I found profound and moving about this project: it’s impossible to separate the life outside the page from what goes on inside of it. In part, the format we chose demands this: the writing is quite literally moving through physical space, handled by hands that are not our own, bodies that are not our own. But we’re also very honest about the temporality of writing, the scene of composition. One of the earliest moments in the journal that I found interesting was when Katina talked about how her hand was starting to hurt from physically writing, so she sat on the floor to get a different kind of perspective on the work. It’s not often that when we’re writing that we physically talk about the body at the laptop or at the page. The moment reminded me of the scene from the beginning of Pale Fire when the fictional editor Kinbote speaks about how he can hear a noisy amusement park outside his window interrupting his thinking as he writes. You get a real sense of the person at the desk, fictional or not. One of the great tricks that Pale Fire plays is that this person at the desk is both fictional and likely spinning a massive web of lies about his own life embedded in the notes to the text.

So much of what Katina and I have been writing about-so much of what has been bleeding into the page-is deeply personal and very real. We talk about our kids, we talk about our families, and we talk about our hobbies. These can’t help but inform the work that we do, even as we’re talking about topics entirely different. And I think Katina’s anxiety about whether or not this work feels serious enough has a lot to do with institutions of power that determine what professionalism means, with the ways in which professionalism forces us to feel like parts of our life are not relevant to the work that we do. In fact, so many of the most important contributions are inseparable from our lives. I wrote recently about how our toddler is just on the cusp of beginning to learn what literacy is. He only knows three letters, and it’s so fascinating to watch someone slowly discover the code on the page and how it can convey the stories he’s loved his whole life. He’s just starting to become an insider in a new way.

These emotions watching an emergent literacy are inseparable from the writing that Katina and I have been exchanging back and forth in these pages. This is not just a work about writing; it’s a work about two lives writing, two people writing, two bodies writing. The journal shows the way in which life gets into the text, if you will just let it. It’s left me wondering how all of our lives would feel different if we had more writing in them, but also how much the writing that we have in the world might feel differently if more people let their lives into it.

Katina:

One of the things that I have noticed as I become a more seasoned and confident writer is that I’m much more likely to let all the different elements of who I am and how I think come together on the page. As a grad student, I absolutely did not do that—it was terrifying to think about letting the scholarly mask slip, even a little bit. As a reader, I am drawn to writers who weave together different ways of knowing: writers who talk about the way caregiving influences their thinking, or how much they love birds, or whatever the thing is that is on their mind but not necessarily on topic. I think part of why I love it so much is connected to what Brandon and I wrote about recently on surprise. It is profoundly human to have these messy lives, these untidy patterns of thought that mash together to-do lists and anxieties with theory and analysis. Letting all that onto the page is, to me, a sign of a confident writer. Writers who find ways to craft all of that complexity so that the chaos is there but legible and even beautiful is, at its best, astonishing.

Stepping outside of academic institutions made it so much more possible for me to explore some of that unruly writing. It feels scary, risky. I feel much more vulnerable sharing things about my life, my tastes, my emotions than I do with a scholarly argument, where I have some distance between my identity and what’s on the page. I wonder—maybe pushing into that terrain is also part of a more complex citation practice? I’m always interested in seeing ways that people make citations more than a mere formality (the way Katherine McKittrick is able to not only reference Sylvia Wynter’s work, but show through her citations the extent to which Wynter has influenced her thinking—I love it so much). But how do I find ways to acknowledge the things in my own life that influence my thinking? How can I possibly show how much my thinking is shaped by my kids, by where I live, by the things I love and the things I hate?

In the other collaborative writing project I’m working on right now about narrative justice and the complexities of storywork, Ashley Cheyemi McNeil and I have been been sitting with the idea of an epistemology of care, as Vrinda Dalmiya theorizes in her book Caring to Know. I’m so drawn to this concept—that care and relationship are not (just) an ethic, not (just) a practice, but also a way of knowing. That orientation completely changes the significance of letting life into our writing. Parenting changes my thinking because care is a way of knowing. Same with community work, with friendships, with the way I move through my neighborhood.

I think that’s part of what feels quite profound about this project—we are undertaking a writing project that has these elements of care at its core, which changes how we know. Add to that the layers of embodiment and physicality that Brandon mentioned—writing by hand, our kids adding stickers, the package being carried and sorted by postal workers from New York to Virginia—and no wonder we find ourselves grappling with questions of meaning that extend far beyond the stakes of the writing itself.