imagination || craft: Muses & Collaboration
Poets at play; plus self-guided Lyric Essay now available!
NOW AVAILABLE: I’m excited to offer a self-guided version of Writing the Lyric Essay, a course I originally designed for Creative Nonfiction. Students will go through the self-guided class together, offering each other feedback, and it opens on October 22nd. $45 early bird price through October 1st!
Plus, I’m offering a new one-day (Halloween-inflected!) Zoom-based workshop on prose poems on Saturday October 28th, Through the Veil: A Prose Poem Workshop. We’ll read poems that move “between worlds” (in various ways), and I will provide timed writing exercises. Limited to 14 participants. $50 through October 1st!
This week I’ve been thinking about the artistic community that I’ve been lucky enough to find along the way. It’s always shifting with time, but friendship and collaboration have been central to my development as a writer. And to my joy and sense of aristic play! I spoke about this in an interview my friend and longtime collaborator Todd Colby did with me for Boog City a couple years ago:
I sometimes joke that I feel compelled to make all my friendships into a “brand.” Ethel, Melancholy Moms, the Todd and Joanna Show (that’s our new name). I don’t know why. I think that when you and I started writing collaborative poems when I lived in New York, it helped push me toward a new understanding of my own voice in poetry (ironically) and what was possible. I found it very cheering.
And creative play has always been part of my friendship with Sara (Ethel). When she visited me in New York, I would make up “fake rituals that really work” to call her soul back into her body. And we would walk around museums pointing at pictures and saying, “That’s you.” Finding those spaces of shared humor and sensibility really does keep me going.
On Women’s Artistic Community and Muses: A Bit of Personal History
The name of my teaching and editing business, Muse Writing & Creative Support, emerged from a teaching and writing collective with two of my friends, Jessica Mesman and Rebecca Bratten Weiss. In the late 2010s, Jessica, Rebecca, and I met via a community for the spiritually weary started by Jess, Sick Pilgrim. We quickly realized that, despite our very different histories, our artistic sensibilities were a wonderful complement to each other. So, spurred on by each other’s strengths, talents, and explicit encouragement, we found a sense of female artistic community that we needed in just that moment in each of our lives
At first we called our small collective “The George Sandinistas,” using a great name Rebecca had previously come up with. Rebecca and I even had a newsletter of that name in which we exchanged weekly poems and shared them with others. (Looking over those poems now, I’m astounded at what I produced and then forgot again, like this poem and this one, almost as if I were in a creative trance— which is a topic for another newsletter.) When we decided to join together to promote our online writing courses, we chose the name “Muse,” partly to counter the idea that the muse and the artist were necessarily separate (the model of the female muse and the male artist). We wanted to provide a counter-narrative to a history of women such as Camille Claudel and Elizabeth Siddal, women artists who were cast as muses by their male lovers, much to their detriment.
Claudel’s history always feels particularly devastating to me. Anne Carson captures the tragedy of the end of her life well in the prose poem “Short Talk on Sleep Stones” (from the collection Short Talks).
In contrast to this ultimately limiting (and often completely destructive) idea of the female muse, Jess, Rebecca, and I realized that in many ways we had become each other’s muses, in a rich and mutually beneficial way. We sought to both honor suppressed women artists and offer a new idea of what “muse” could mean in the context of women’s friendship.
I’m pleased that Muse has continued as a space where I can make my own (hopefully) inspiring offerings and where I can also host the offerings of three of my great former colleagues from Creative Nonfiction (Nancy McCabe, Megan Baxter, and Joelle Fraser). At the same time, the word “muse” still gestures toward a complicated and reductive history in some people’s minds, and someday I may choose a new name.
Collaboration and Play
But to return to the joy of it all—
Todd Colby says this about artistic community, especially in New York, where we met:
Yes, there is a deep tradition among poets and artists in New York all hanging out, collaborating, arguing, enhancing, and protecting one another. I like that idea of a community among creative people. Particularly in New York City where everyone has to hustle so much to pay the bills, so when you get an opportunity to really be with other like-minded, non-job related friendships, they really take a feeling of being saved by friends, like a life-raft or something.
And since leaving New York soon after becoming a mother, continuing to find community among creative people near and far— and ways to collaborate, encourage, and protect each other— it really has saved me.
In the interview I relate it to that idea of the “third area” from D.W. Winnicott, which I love. Here’s Winnicott:
I have tried to draw attention to the importance both in theory and in practice of a third area, that of play, which expands into creative living and into the whole cultural life of man… [this] intermediate area of experiencing is an area that exists as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated… it can be looked upon as sacred to the individual in that it is here that the individual experiences creative living.
This “third area” of creative play and communion does indeed feel like a sacred place of rest from the outside demands for me. And it is finally, as I note above, just very cheering.
If you’re in New York, you can see a talk and reading with me and Todd Colby on Friday September 29th! It’s a Bookend event of the Brooklyn Book Festival, and you can find more information here.
Community is the thing. My dream as a younger person, really fantasy, was creative community. A business job in the suburbs was not good for that, but post 50 I keep trying (and periodically succeeding).
Thanks for this. Writing friends with similar yet complimentary sensibilities can be hard to find, but enormously "cheering," as you said.
I'm interested in your self-guided Lyric Essay course, but wonder when any online meetups are (if there are any).