COLLABORATION & TELEPHONE: An Interview with Brenda Miller and Julie Marie Wade
Joee: We tend to think of the essay, and the genre of nonfiction, as an act of the “I” and of one writer’s sole authority over the text. What’s so unique about Telephone’s collaborative narration—and which I believe offers a valuable lesson in the genre (if genre really matters much)—is how the book plays with and complicates the “I.” The book is a conversation between two voices, and there are many occasions where the voices blur and become one because they are not distinguished from one another—they become a single sort of “I.” And it works really, really well. It flows—but it also does more than that. Some works of nonfiction, like Annie Ernaux’s The Years, use the collective “we” in place of the “I” to render the personal and the collective. While the voices of “Telephone” use the “I,” their multiplicity and ambiguity create a collective “we” as well, in a way. But also as the speakers meld together despite their separate experiences, there enters this universality in the blending of multiple voices and experiences into a single speaker: a Janus. Was this blending of voices always the effect you two sought to achieve? Or were there point(s) during the draft stages of “Telephone,” or before the project even, where this was not the case, and the voices were to be wholly separate? What concerns (if any) might you have had in this chosen ambiguity? And what are the biggest boons of collaboration and collaborative narrative?
Julie: Brenda and I both came to the act of collaboration in Telephone having written with other writers, though admittedly Brenda had been collaborating much longer than I had at the time (2015). I wouldn’t say for myself that collaboration is ever about “mastery,” or that “essaying” is, or even that “writing” is. If I felt mastery were possible, I doubt I would be drawn to the more experimental spaces of artistic creation, where exploration is inspired by the many radical uncertainties and lingering questions of my life. The lyric essay allows for exploration that doesn’t have to result in clear or definitive answers—and rarely does!—so lyric essay in collaboration, for me, provides that same experience doubled. I suppose it’s really more than doubled; it’s exponentially amplified!
I don’t think I ever worried about blending voices or ambiguity in collaborating with Brenda—or with anyone else—given that the writing is as much about the process of creating the work as it is about a notion of a “final product.” If we as writers are lucky enough to have a reading audience, then it seems to me we’ve already invited in “collaborators after the fact,” people who will interact with the text in unpredictable, complex, and likely ambiguous ways. We won’t know much about their experience with the work or how far it extends into other facets of their lives. But I like to imagine those possibilities!
Being a collaborator with Brenda before and during the fact has meant showing up with a perpetual invitation to a literary “come as you are” party. I get to look through her lenses at the world—memories, reflections, questions—and see where our experiences overlap, diverge, and run parallel. It’s one of the deepest ways of getting to know what’s going on inside another person, and so I can say that writing the essays in this book has always felt to me like plunging in with gusto—to see what Brenda will say and also to see, in that discovery way, what I will say in response.
While I don’t think either of us had any concerns about ambiguity, there are some essays that we began together that ultimately diverged so far that they became separate projects. For instance, at one point we were writing in response to playing cards, and the individual voices seemed not to be blending enough. Brenda suggested we separate the essay, each reclaiming the separate sections we had written. I took my four sections and broke them up into individual micro-essays, ultimately publishing three as a series in The Texas Review “All Essay” issue and one as a stand-alone short in Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. I don’t know that I would have written those pieces at all had the project not begun as a collaboration, so I feel grateful to Brenda for the content and form she elicited from me and also for her insight that the pieces could, and should, be reclaimed.
More recently, we were writing a lyric essay together called “Pain Song,” and Brenda saw (I think she is better at seeing these disjunctures!) that rather than a braided structure, two simultaneous “pain songs” were emerging. We ended up placing the songs together in an issue of River Teeth, but instead of an integrated collaboration, the two songs appear paratactic—a new kind of collaboration for us, sequential rather than braided.
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Joee: I feel like the essay itself is still thought of in more conventional forms than other genres. I love that this book of essays ventures across the boundaries of what we traditionally think of as an essay and settles beneath the widening umbrella of “essay,” rather than “cross-genre” or “hybrid.” I know, Julie, you are also a poet. Brenda, you are a writer of nonfiction, so it seems only natural that the book blends and expands each form. Can you speak to the form(s) of the book and how they came to be? What challenges, if any, might either of you have faced in constructing it? Where did the prompts that structure the essays come from?
Brenda: There’s a certain kind of playfulness that imbues our collaborations, and it is this playfulness that allowed us to both have fun and to think beyond the boundaries of conventional narratives. We were like kids on a playground, making up the rules as we went along! In our first essay, the eponymous piece “Telephone,” we literally played the game of telephone with our words. In that game, a message gets translated and mixed up through many voices as it travels down the line; for our essay, we would take the last line of the section we received from the other and use those words in a different formation to begin the next section. In this way, the essay spirals along on the energy of one another’s words, until they all come back at the end.
Once we experienced that playfulness, we wanted to just keep playing! We came up with other one-word topics, such as “Camera,” or “Exercise,” and would just start riffing, creating the form as we went along. Sometimes the prompt would come from a call for submissions we’d see, such as “Toys” for Creative Nonfiction, and sometimes the prompt just came out of thin air. Sometimes we’d write in a volley back and forth; other times, as with “Bridges: A Catalogue” and “Heat Index,” we’d be brainstorming entries, and then putting them in alphabetical order to create a list/collage.
Since we’re both poets (I’ve been writing and publishing poetry in the last couple of years, and I started writing as a poet), we both love word play, rhythm, echoes, and metaphor. Having our two voices dance with one another was always a pure pleasure. I never felt any real challenges in creating the essays with Julie, mainly because of the trust we had in one another and the sheer momentum of our process. We’d often be writing every day and have a completed essay done in a week.
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Joee: Going back to form: In “Third Draft,” the speaker talks about their love of words, of deconstructing them and charting all the ways in which a word can be used: “It goes on like this: each word or symbol—which can also be spelled out as a word— opening into another and spiraling down, like the secret staircase behind bookshelves in old and haunted houses.” It seems that the very nature of correspondence and conversation lends itself to association, a “spiraling down, like the secret staircase”—taking unexpected openings and paths which create new meaning or cast new light through association. The form, more or less, in my opinion, seems to be the organic progression of your two voices corresponding—leaping off one another in much the same way as the speaker describes in “Third Draft.” Might this be the case? Were there other forms which you thought the book would take?
Julie: It’s funny because Brenda and I often don’t recall which one of us wrote which section or passage in our essays, but I do happen to recall that I wrote “Third Draft” as part of the alternating pattern of “drafts” in “Works-in-Progress.” I love that you’ve taken an image from my own history of obsessions with haunted houses and secret rooms and made me see just how “meta” it is for the writing, Joee!
As a kid, I remember fondly the occasions when my parents got tickets to the “Street of Dreams.” (I have no idea if this is still “a thing” or if any reader is familiar with it.) We drove somewhere outside the city, in this case Seattle, and climbed aboard a tour bus with other ticket holders. All of the folx on that bus would then be transported to a new “development,” full of mansions that had recently been built but were not yet inhabited. Instead, they were “staged” to look as though someone lived there, and if so inclined, anyone on the “Street of Dreams” tour could make an offer on the houses.
We weren’t there to buy a house but simply to see what was possible in fancy houses like those. In one of the houses—it only happened once, but that was enough—the tour guide showed us a bookcase in the study, ran his hand down the wall beside it, and clicked a button that made the bookcase spring open, revealing a hidden staircase and a secret room below. This was something I had read about in books (e.g. Nancy Drew!) but never something I had seen with my own eyes. I was riveted! I asked if I could descend the stairs and see the secret room for myself. To my disappointment, though, the secret room had no furnishings. It was just an empty space, waiting for someone to give it purpose.
Revisiting that memory through this question, I see just how apt the metaphor is. Writing in general is a lot like feeling around for a “switch” that will help to open up the possibilities for what to place on the page. Collaboration accelerates the process, having someone else to search for the switch with you—often someone who finds it first. And as it turns out, writing with Brenda has been a lot like furnishing that secret, empty room many times over. When we started writing, we didn’t even know we were writing a book. Later, we might have imagined our essays as rooms, and some kind of blueprint for a book—a “house”—began to take shape. The secret rooms, though, are the moments in collaboration when you suddenly realize that you never would have found that “switch,” moved toward that particular content in that particular way, without a companion on the tour, on the search. Writing Telephone gave me a feeling that is not unlike that Street-of-Dreams feeling at all. Thank goodness Brenda offered me a ticket. I love where we went, and I love imagining where else we’ll go!