Abstract
In this article we record, recount, and reflect on a 48-hour period in which we hang out in a rented house beside a lake with the intention of writing collaboratively. The writing emerges out of conversations. Our exchanges move back and forth and sideways between talking, writing, reading, and responding to each other’s writing. These exchanges are held together and created through cooking, eating, going to the pub, walking, making cocktails, singing, and arguing. This is a narrative account, in real/chronological time of a collaborative process of generating this writing. As such these are the raw, unedited texts. Our process includes three instances of talking, writing, and reading. We offer this as a backstage snapshot of collaborative writing.
[The evening of November 5, 2011, Guy Fawkes Night in the United Kingdom. Tami begins with a piece from an earlier collaborative writing gathering that took place two years ago, as a gift to Jane who had been unexpectedly absent on that occasion.]
Tami:
Viv sits in front of me. Hospital stories. She reads the words of Jane’s dad’s story. Jane’s story. Jane’s love song. Viv knows this landscape. Inside. Inside her. Inside the hospital. Inside those doors that opened, opened for Jane’s dad. For Jane.
It’s the shock isn’t it? It’s the shock. The shock of hair. The shock of here. The shock of white hair. It’s a shock. Even though we know it’s coming. It’s a shock.
Their hair. Jane’s dad’s and my dad’s. Their beautiful thick white jazz infused hair lying on the pillow, having been blown back with waves of wails from millions of horns, of millions of men blowing. Blow. That cat can blow. He can blow.
Blow. Breathe. Blow. Breathe dad. Once more And once more again. Do it for me Just one more time. I know you don’t want to. I’m sorry to ask. No. I’m sorry. Stop Listen to the horns Feel it in your hair. Blow. Out. This is my love song. Millions of wails from millions of daughters This is my love song.
[November 5, 2011, reading this evening’s writing aloud]
Tami:
We are at the writing retreat! And we are scattered here and there not knowing what to write, where to go. The politics of the world, the body politic is fractured, fragmented. Or is that overused? What are we now? What post-post -postness are we in now? What are the words now? Is the talk of colonization passé’? For who? How? And who and what am I to say here and now at 51 years old? What do I know now about the world? Are the things that I know old? Out of date? Passé’? Is only “new” knowledge actually knowledge?
Scattered, wandering, wondering what to say, what to do? What?
Feeling the heft of my hair, I feel the weight of my own history. Days and weeks and months and years tied up on knots of meaning. Knots that are me and not me, not-not me as Schechner might way.
Ken:
“Remember, remember, the 5th of November, with gunpowder, treason and plot . . .”
Surprising words drifting down corridors . . . mind’s fuzziness . . . fuzziness of mind.
Is it too late to write?
Is the talk of politics too diffuse?
Is the intent too serious?
Can I connect?
Can I think of ways of linking this with that?
I feel lost, deep in sensual pleasure, warmth of company, so many glasses of wine . . . How are my senses going to deal with this?
Dealing with the sensible?
I lift myself off the page, only momentarily, and become fascinated by the something that is me that digs away at the need to be sensible, to pull the plug on pleasure and to seek organisation and a sensation of order in the haziness of glow and rapture.
Where did that come from?
Where does that come from?
Where will that come from?
(“How long are we writing for?”)
What are we writing? I am so aware of the desperation that I feel in writing this now. I am drawn to the mess of indeterminacy and here I am trying to write myself into a world that makes sense.
More wine? A small sip? . . . mmm . . . a cool breeze blowing in from the balcony.
Shall I talk of politics?
Shall I try to bring all those hazy ideas and ideals into focus here?
Again as I pull my head back from the page I find myself absorbed, in fascination: I find it hard to separate these powers, this politics, from this culture, these feelings, this dancing animation, this love of the moment . . . this need to write, not to explain, not to describe and simply (simply?) to act.
Writing as politics,
Writing in this sense of space
Wondering if this space is enabling me or disabling me
What is the politics of this space?
Jane:
“Remember, remember the 5th of November with gunpowder treason and plot”
Remember, remember to be born in November, you’re a Scorpion like it or not.
Here’s the thing: Scorpios, by anybody’s testimony, are supposed to be mysterious, fiery, oversexed passionate people.
Where did I go wrong?
I can just about do fiery and passionate but frankly oversexed has me baffled. To be honest I can’t be bothered with oversexed. I’m not even sure I can be bothered with undersexed . . . and when I listen to Tami’s story of harassment in the castle grounds I feel mostly in touch with a part of me that’s old and scared.
I am getting older, that’s my sense, older and less sexy and less feisty. I feel frailer in relation to Tami’s story and frailer in relation to the city I live in. Beneath the fiery red-dyed top-haired bravado I am a white haired crone eking out an audacious time-limited living in an age of austerity and possible resentment.
Oddly the less sexy I feel the queerer I get. I’ve spent a lot of the last twenty years, as opposed to the first 37, wanting to fit in—campaigning to be like “them,” to fit in, to have rights to get married, to be normal, not to have my kids taken away, not to get spat at in the street, all that sort of thing.
But along with ageing and crone-ing and bearding up and pube-ing down (there’s a whole rearrangement of bodily hair going on right now you guys wouldn’t believe . . . but I digress most inappropriately)
The thing is (and this relates to Ken’s shorts and Tami’s dreads and Viv’s orange bob and Artemi’s Greekiness . . .) there’s part of me that has always been there, that doesn’t give a fuck . . . do you know what I’m saying here? There’s a major part of me that’s as queer as a three pound note and that’s just a whole way of seeing that spits on “normal” and safe and all those tickets you get sold to rides in some other person’s fairground.
Viv:
the connections which activate our stories connections which are more than the self which cross time, and space and continents cross generations reach back way back in time far beyond memory grounded in the earth but also in the cultural mores and power relations reach forward in hope anxiety uncertainty possibility
I think of Tami’s story of the Pitmen Painters and love that it is Tami’s story, and that in her recognition of the position of those pitmen, and in her telling of it, she has brought it home—to me, and given me a gift . . . I wonder what is it in the story which connects with Tami’s own life.
I think of Artemi—that we were both born in Darlington
Serendipitous connections
Across time space continents, generations.
Artemi:
In this weekend of reunion and celebration, I want us to mark and honour every little bit of good news. How many candles this year? Let’s see if we have that many reasons to celebrate:
Here’s to all the middle-aged male white policemen who carefully attend to (which means: who attend to with care) women who choose to appear as “other” but certainly and absolutely do not choose to be harassed.
Here’s to lorry drivers who repeatedly refuse to cross a picket-line to deliver their goods.
Here’s to ethical fishing and new kinds of fish on the table.
Here’s to anonymous pizza buyers who jam the phone lines when brave activists tweet they are hungry.
Here’s to British gentlemen who drink ouzo and bang the backgammon dice with “τσαμπOυκά.”
Here’s to lovely Cornishmen who are surprised to hear that pistachio nuts grow on trees.
[We open more wine and sit down for supper]
[November 6th morning]
Ken:
“When I get older/losing my hair/many years from now”
Many years from now . . .?
I remember hearing those lines for the first time, 1967, the Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper” album, sitting on that old threadbare carpet on the floor of my flat in Holloway Road, incense burning, scarves over lamp shades, body tingling, warm sensuality . . .
When I’m 64? Incredulity . . . 64? When is that? What is that? What does it mean? 64?
I draw that memory forward into my life today with ease and as I do that I also have to draw down such a mixture, a mixture of culture, of affect, and questions about age, not just about its simple relentless Roman chronology but all its attendant signifiers, all its dos and don’ts, all its whys and wherefores, its responsibilities and expectations.
I think of another song line and age is again thrown into sharp relief.
“I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now.”
As I retreat into aging, madness seems to provide the only succor. If it is only about that relentless chronology then, yes, it is time to pack up and go home . . . and being younger than that now means that I will wear my shorts all through the winter, dance til my heart packs up, race down the cliff and dive headlong into the waves and . . . and . . . also in the politics of these deeply present moments I leave behind the Preacher Man, I churn together the works of Marx, the Bhagavad Gita, Kerouac, Deleuze and all the rest into seething, erotic multiplicities. I am happy about what comes out, always tasty, always challenging, always risky, always . . . always . . . why not, why not, why not?
And then, a coda?
The flight from reason is of course very bumpy.
It is also not a simple one way ticket.
It is, as Jane remembers, a ticket to ride.
It is so important to be becoming with that memory.
A ticket to ride.
Becoming in the moment . . . histories in the present On the top deck, bouncing along, Taking in the delights of the journey, Jumping off at stops, just for the hell of it, Always ignoring what is on the headboard Perhaps this is really about only wanting to catch a bus that has no headboard!
Artemi
Ticket to ride in some other person’s fairground.
She walked in long after the fun had started, absentmindedly shoving her ticket in her back pocket. Countless people were already on rides, some having chosen the adrenaline-pumping roller-coasters, others peacefully cruising on beautifully crafted carts. Once or twice she had to blink and look again: it looked as though the same person was on more than one ride. At first this baffled her, as she thought that everyone only had a ticket for one ride, but gradually she came to realize that this was how people used language in this place: most people will speak of only one ride, yet seem to share a tacit acknowledgement that everyone samples other rides from time to time.
Tami:
Old and scared. God damn it. That’s what that little harassing psychopath made me feel like, old and scared.
Ken asks what is the politics of this space, this place? 50 years old the politics of my female body are such that a group of little shithead boys can bring me down like a hyena and its prey.
So look fuckers, look. I will sting you with my tail, my scorpion’s tail, my ass sticking out as you so grossly yell. You want to call it out, call me out, treat me like some soulless exotic dreaded old American woman? Well bring it on because I will eat you up and spit you out and lose not a moment in my stride as I continue down my path.
I used to be very angry as a young woman. I used to rip someone a new asshole regularly and got a reputation for it. But it never felt good or right and I’ve worked very hard over the decades to learn how to deploy that scorpion sting with plan and craft and intention. And I am glad to have engaged that as an attempt at an ethical way of being. But now I often wonder if or how it has muted me. Like Jane said, spending the last 20 years trying to fit in. So have I. Pulling in my tail, tucking it in between my legs trying to subdue the sting, or practice collecting the venom as they do with a rattlesnake to use later as a mix for the antidote. I think I must have bottles of venom stored somewhere to use for later while I hide my tail to fit in.
But fit in? Trying to fit in? Who am I kidding? My scorpion tail Medusa spider leg dreads scream otherwise, or whisper a snake’s rattle, “stay away, keep your distance or I will strike.”
But I don’t. Instead I get pushed around, pushed down, holding myself down so as not to be taken down like prey by the 13-year-old sociopaths of the world who are simply the future CEOs of Goldman Sacs, Leaman Brothers, and Bank of America.
So look, fuckers. Stand back, or step up. My tail is on fire. I’m poised and ready to strike.
Viv:
I am struck by transitions And transformations Writing as a process of becoming Where will this writing lead me? Who will I become? A sense of looking ahead From looking back Moving through loss and grief Death as transformation For the dead person For the living In her death I moved from girl to woman “You’ll be my mother from the womb to the tomb”
1
And moving now from woman to crone Oestrogen decreases Atrophy A body that at times feels alive Certainly looks alive Who is that woman Short, overweight, not sexy I don’t want to see her I don’t want to recognise her For she could be me Her hair is like mine Her body is short and round Not gamine No longer boyish hips, but middle-aged backside No longer flat stomach But round belly Elasticated waists No longer cheekbones But jowls Folds of flesh No longer comfortable in this body Ashes under the apple tree
Jane:
Threads through from now to then, then to now, time passing, time past—the present sense of them that’s brought to us as we weave back and forth from the first writing group 2 years ago in Northumberland when I was/was not there . . . to this group now.
Is this the same group? In which case just as I was/was not there then—are the two other people who came to that group both here and not here now? Should we send them these writings? We could have connected with them as part of this group this weekend on e-mail of course, but its not until now with the second reading of Tami’s writings from Northumberland that we became a continuation of that group. I didn’t know we were still in that conversation until now, which all makes me wonder if this is a particular situation or part of the subterranean power that lurks around people who write together. I am part of another writing group that keeps having involuntary resurrections, which resolutely refuses to be written off, despite our very clearest of other intentions. I wonder when and how often do writing groups have to meet before they have ended or begun and whether anybody ever really knows their group has ended or begun until it is all suddenly apparently “started” or imperceptibly over.
All over, they all went through, all horns playing, and I’m thinking again of all those dads that were here not here in this group last time. I met Ken’s dad in a photograph, I have an image of him, from the very first time I met Ken, I’ve met Tami’s dad, who had swing, through her performances, I’ve met Viv’s dad through her own telling of an oral history—a Durham miner turned police dog handler—a man of great loyalty and on my computer I still have a letter, placed here for safekeeping that Artemi may or may not have sent to her father by now. I don’t know what it says, its all Greek to me, but I know the letter, like the man is complicated.
Old parents, cantankerous parents, dead parents, parents who have all gone through, drawing us all closer now, closer at this time of the year when the veil between the worlds is thinner, closer to our own mortality: closer to each other.
There is talk of aging, of less potency, less sexual power—we are the granddads, the Mesdames, the professors—and there is, perhaps a different power in this as well as a loss of the fecund, fertile power of youth.
I am reminded suddenly of a scene from an American B movie in which an irate Rosanne Barr rams head on into the car of two young women who have swooped, laughing, into a supermarket parking place ahead of her; “lets face it” she shrieks at them, “I’m older, I’m crankier and I’ve got more insurance.”
Well I’m older, I’m much less cranky, I’m wise in different ways and I love life now and the many dead people I walk beside in ways I could never have imagined even ten years ago. The “pulling power” I had even ten years ago with the living has faded, but has been replaced with an extraordinary pulling power with the dead—a different kind of pulling power that slips between worlds that I had never expected or sought. I wouldn’t now be persuaded to swap this new kind of pulling for the old kind. Unless I could pull Johnny Depp of course. I may be a “dyed-in-the-wool-old-dyke,” but I’m flexible when it comes to Johnny Depp.
[We go to the pub for Sunday lunch]
[late afternoon]
Jane:
We were talking, before lunch, about lost bodies—leaky, saggy lost bodies and I find myself regaling them all with stories of my 30-year-old self, strutting her stuff around the streets of Hackney, bra-less in her ‘D.D.G’ (drop dead gorgeous) T shirt .
I do not speak openly at the time of the sense of grief I feel for those breasts—they were truly magnificent, easily my finest feature—large soft, full, alert and perky with dark chocolate brown, almost purple nipples—and they have sunk, without apparent trace of their former glory, almost to my kneecaps. The overstretched nipples have faded to a pale delicate coffee, or at least that’s how it seems and feels.
These are difficult things to write, breast-pride talk and breast-droop regret somehow carries with it an implicit anti-maternal critique of the year or so of breast-feeding that led, in part at least, to their demise—and yet it is possible to have loved that deeply erotic and special closeness with my baby and still mourn the loss of my most succulent feature.
I did not speak of these breasts and my love of them, and love them I did, they were after all the first breasts I came across, the first breasts I truly appreciated. They were my trusted companions in a first foray into a sense of myself as a lesbian. They were accomplices on a subversive trajectory that was to lead me later quite unexpectedly and sensationally and spectacularly astray. I did not speak of this, but this was what I was thinking somewhere, whilst waffling along with everybody.
At which point Ken turned to me and described me as a “sex bomb.” I was enchanted, and my silent breasts found a voice and replied: “Oh I know, we are too, we are still drop dead gorgeous somewhere underneath.” And then, at that moment, my mobile phone rang and it was my partner ringing from home. It was as if she had caught my breasts in mid – conversation with Ken and I came over all flustered and blotchy-necked and retired to the balcony to chat about lost keys and neighbours and other trivia. I was so glad that we were not on Skype.
It is tricky being in these writing groups, when you let your guard down. One minute all is “tickedy boo” . . . and the next minute—things just go “tits up.”
Viv:
I’m running out of steam here—
Ken:
I’m not sure if I can write anymore.
Kristeva says, what is there but to write?
Sometimes that makes me apprehensive.
Sometimes what I write feels so . . . personal, so impersonal, so contrived, so ordinary, so unimportant.
Sometimes, then, writing seems pointless.
That’s rich coming from me, I suppose, as someone who has written and written: journals, diaries, and now all these more recent things, writing that is shared and laid bare.
So I am wondering about writing and time; what is it all about?
I look back on some of those old writings, I feel embarrassed sometimes by its naiveté, sometimes I am excited by its lurid account of an erotic exchange and then perhaps become fascinated by certain insights and details that I had offered and then left to rest, slumbering between hidden pages. There is so much writing but I do wonder what it is for, if it is any good, why did I write it and so on. It is beginning to feel now that much of it will remain there between those dusty cardboard covers, until a lover, a voyeur, an archivist, or a friend will perhaps dig it up and shuffle it around, arrange it into a new order and encourage it to come to life again.
And as I listen and listen, I know, of course, there is so much to write.
My knuckles whiten as I lean into Tami’s lucid and angry vitriol.
My eyes moisten as Viv tells of the ashes that are dusted under the apple tree.
It is when affect takes me out of one self that I know of the politics of writing.
This is a politics of writing that is so much about the caring and the sharing, the telling and the listening, the reading that comes from the writing, the writing that is always of itself something new and its performative energy that is always about my becoming. This writing feels reflective and really reflective writing isn’t necessarily what I want to do. I feel much more at ease and happy with what I have done when my writing spills on to the page like paint from Pollock’s overfilled cans, when, with Richter, I can scrape it back, etch through its crustiness and reveal a bright pigment that has been hidden for far too long. So this is the writing that I enjoy, it is the writing that suspends time, that doesn’t bother to remind me of my mortality and which makes me laugh as my pen fingers grow sore.
Tami:
“Are we writing again?” Jane is nudging us along into this next phase, next segment of our time here together.
We had an incredible conversation this afternoon, the five of us, following the reading of our last bit of writing. We talked about the writing of aging always looked at as something boring. “Oh great, there goes another old git trying to figure out what it means to get old.” The ‘ole “I’m a young woman trapped in an old woman’s body” thing. Boo-hoo-yea, yea, get on with it.
The cultural narratives about aging are insufficient. I can’t see myself in any of them anywhere. I’m not a young woman in and old woman’s body. I am Tami at 51. The inner and the outer, the young and the old have built one another, have formed and reformed one another. There’s no separation between the person inside and her body outside. There never has been. I am who I am based on how I have lived with this body and the language I have used to form and reform what it means.
It’s just that I’m afraid of some of those “aging woman” narratives. Afraid they’ll apprehend me, that they’ll kidnap me like the Body Snatchers. Stories of aging snatching my body from me. The story comes, Craig (Gingrich-Philbrook, (2001) says, after the accident to identify the body. Aging as accident. The accidental tourist in the aging body. “Oops, sorry, took a wrong turn. This isn’t where I’m suppose to be. Sorry. Just misread the map a bit. I’m supposed to be over here—over there in that body romping around with Jonny Depp.
Artemi:
Ticket to ride in some other person’s fairground.
She walked in long after the fun had started, absentmindedly shoving her ticket in her back pocket. Countless people were already on rides, some having chosen the adrenaline-pumping roller-coasters, others peacefully cruising on beautifully crafted carts. Once or twice she had to blink and look again: it looked as though the same person was on more than one ride. At first this baffled her, as she thought that everyone only had a ticket for one ride, but gradually she came to realize that this was how people used language in this place: most people will speak of only one ride, yet seem to share a tacit acknowledgement that everyone samples other rides from time to time.
She pulls her ticket out of her pocket and takes another look. It doesn’t specify the ride, she can choose. But which one should she go for? And how does one choose anyway? A safe ride? A fun ride? A sophisticated one? Quiet and sensitive? Some or all of those things together? She puts her ticket back in her pocket and sets off on a stroll through the fairground, to get a feel of the place. “Walking as inquiry” she thinks to herself and smiles. the solitude and the company of her thoughts, she stands on a sunny spot and looks all around her, intrigued at the range of expressions on the faces of those who whoosh by in their roller-coaster wagons or leisurely cruise past in their carts.
Next thing she knows the sun is blown out and someone’s hand is groping between her thighs. No it can’t be anyone’s hand, it only has one finger. The people, their voices, the whole fairground have all disappeared and Big Man is in her face and inside her clothes. She tries to speak, to yell, to protest, but no voice comes out. “Who invited you here?” her puzzlement asks. “You did love” Big Man says with a confident smile and all eleven fingers. “No! No! I never did!” her anger screams as she tries to shake him off her. Big Man’s Friend now struts up and clutches her bum as he gently pulls his mate away. “I told you not to bother with her” he tells his mate as they move away, “Fucking bitch doesn’t know her own pulling power.” “I speak a different language!” she yells at them both, but still no voice comes out. She stands rooted in the spot for a short while and then slowly, very slowly, picks up the pieces of her that she can see and sets off continuing her stroll through the fairground. Savouring the solitude and the company of her thoughts, she stands on a sunny spot and looks all around her, intrigued at the range of expressions on the faces of those who whoosh by in their roller-coaster wagons or leisurely cruise past in their carts.
Next thing she knows the sun is blown out and someone’s hand is groping inside her blouse. The people, their voices, the whole fairground have all disappeared and Smart Guy is in her face and inside her clothes. She tries to speak, to yell, to protest, but no voice comes out. “Who invited you here?” her puzzlement asks. “You did love” Smart Guy says with a confident smile and all eleven fingers. “No! No! I never did!” her anger screams as she tries to shake him off her. Smart Guy’s Friend now struts up and licks her face as he gently pulls his mate away. “I told you not to bother with her” he tells his mate as they move away, “Fucking bitch doesn’t know her own pulling power.” “I deal in a different currency!” she yells at them both, but still no voice comes out. She stands rooted in the spot for a short while and then slowly, very slowly, picks up the pieces of her that she can see and sets off continuing her stroll through the fairground. Savouring the solitude and the company of her thoughts, she stands on a sunny spot and looks all around her, intrigued at the range of expressions on the faces of those who whoosh by in their roller-coaster wagons or leisurely cruise past in their carts.
Next thing she knows the sun is blown out and someone’s hand is groping inside her clothes. No it can’t be anyone’s hand, it only has one finger. The people, their voices, the whole fairground have all disappeared and Strong Male is in her face and inside her clothes. She tries to speak, to yell, to protest, but no voice comes out. “Who invited you here?” her puzzlement asks. “You did love” Strong Male says with a confident smile and all eleven fingers. “No! No! I never did!” her anger screams as she tries to shake him off her. Strong Male’s Friend now struts up and clutches her bum as he gently pulls his mate away. “I told you not to bother with her” he tells his mate as they move away, “Fucking bitch doesn’t know her own pulling power.” “I live in a different world!” she yells at them both, but still no voice comes out. She stands rooted in the spot for a short while and then slowly, very slowly, picks up the pieces of her that she can see and sets off continuing her stroll through the fairground. Savouring the solitude and the company of her thoughts, she stands on a sunny spot and looks all around her, intrigued at the range of expressions on the faces of those who whoosh by in their roller-coaster wagons or leisurely cruise past in their carts.
[We mix cocktails. We open another bottle of wine. We graze from cheese biscuits, olives, and nibbles. We watch the last episode of Downtown Abbey. We have a bloody great row about collaborative writing. Tears are shed. Hugs are given. We open more wine.]
[November 7th late morning. Collating writing. E-mail work off to editor—Norman Denzin. Open more wine]
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.