Sally Ashton | February 2020

NOTES

Quick: which poet wrote the following sonnet?

Scorn not the sonnet; Critic, you have frowned
at its music, damned it as a descent
into a rhyming trance, nothing more than
the dance of awkward animals, but

Critic, my mouth will go to you fourteen
different times in this poem alone.
You can peel back my commas, spread my lines,
enter any place you like. And know this:

In this language of drift and erotics, you can’t
redline the poem’s animus without a shift
in its voltage from splintered psalm to ferric rot.

So the psalm may rot, the brain burn, the music
drift. We are still here, Critic, you, me, and
this sonnet. It’s the last line. What’s it mean?

The first line sounds familiar. If you didn’t read the sonnet closely and quickly guessed William Wordsworth, you’d be right, but just for the first line. Then something seems to go seriously awry, “awkward animals?” If you read the title of this essay, you’d already be thinking, okay, this must be a collaboration, but whose? If you’ve had the opportunity to read Suture,¹ a collection of sonnets written collaboratively by Simone Muench and Dean Rader, you might correctly guess that this is one of their jointly-written sonnets, poems that take their first lines from an assortment of sonnets written by others.

So the authors involved are William Wordsworth (1770–1850), Simone, and Dean, but besides Wordsworth, which poet wrote which of the other lines? Even if you know that the poets’ method was to take turns composing the subsequent quatrains and tercets formally required by the sonnet, can you feel the “sutures” that bind these two distinct voices? Or have the poets achieved what can be one hallmark of a collaborative piece, a single poem with a single voice?

To be clear, though Wordsworth’s line from his sonnet, “Scorn not the Sonnet,” serves not only as a compositional prompt but an essential part of the ensuing collaboration, Wordsworth himself could not be considered a cocollaborator. He was not an active contributor. Such generative usage of a previously written work, acknowledged throughout Suture with italics, steals a line much as a cento does, a poem composed entirely of such “found” lines. But Suture’s sonnets also fall under the form known as ekphrasis, one artwork created in response to another, traditionally practiced as poetry. (If you’re interested in learning more about that also-popular form of writing, there are lots of online sources, many of which will recommend John Hollander’s text, The Gazer’s Spirit², a collection of ekphrastic works with commentary). In any case, this particular sonnet collaboration has just two authors, and one, William Wordsworth, unwitting contributor.

The distinction of two… or more!... living authors writing in collusion with each other proves to be the one consistent hallmark of today’s literary collaborations, an ever-morphing practice in which the number of writers involved, their relationship, whether between emerging writers or accomplished, the genre chosen—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, or cross-genre—whether written in given or invented forms, brief or lengthy, the proximity of the writers, the time frame encompassed, the strategies followed, written just for fun or with publication in mind, and who edits the work of any given composition are components as varied as the writers’ personalities, situations, and whimsy.

The amazing variety of approaches to the burgeoning practice of literary collaboration became startlingly clear to me as I worked as part of the editorial team on the recently released collection, They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing.³ After their own successful collaborative effort, poets Muench and Rader went on to participate in a 2016 AWP convention panel in Los Angeles, “I Got You Babe: the (Dis)harmonies of Collaboration,” along with Brittany Cavallaro, Matthew Rohrer, and Carol Guess in absentia. Given the presentation’s packed attendance and positive audience response, the duo decided a new anthology was in order. It had been a decade since the influential collaborative poetry anthology Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry⁴ had appeared, edited by Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, and David Trinidad, and clearly something even bigger was afoot. Already collaborators, Muench and Rader became editors. Jackie White and I soon joined on as assistant editors.

Writers contributed collaborations of correspondence, call and response, and linguistic pas de deux. What struck our editorial team were the amazing ways in which differing minds converged and negotiated terrains to create a seamless point of view which is neither one person or the other, but a new entity—a third voice that goes beyond the melding of individual voices to create something original and unique. While some works feature an alternating perspective, others are coauthored or group authored so that it is impossible to tell which of the named authors actually “wrote” or “created” any particular portion of the final text.

Something vital in American literature is going on.

Evidence of the practice’s rise in popularity can be found in a growing number of publication venues, from small presses to major houses such as Scribner, which support such work. In fact, The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Kevin Young, recently introduced a recurring web-only poetry feature that “will present innovative and exciting new work, from longer-form pieces to sequences and collaborations.”⁵ The first installment, May 23, 2018, features an epistolary sequence between two long-distance poets, Ada Limón and Natalie Diaz. While in this instance each “poem-letter” is clearly penned by one poet or the other, it is the collaborative effect of their correspondence to “chart a world in the throes of change,” as Young notes, that substantiates their work’s literary and cultural value. The sum is greater than the parts as the two dialogic perspectives shape a somehow singular view.

Of their collaborative series, reprinted in They Said, the poets write that their epistolary process allowed them individually

to connect to a more intimate voice with a specific reader, a real person to write to. To be able to compose to each other—not a wider audience, but only woman to woman, friend to friend, poet to poet, brown girl to brown girl—allowed us to be as honest, as complex, or as dreamlike as we desired. These “poem letters” were a small, intricate house we built out of breath and distance. And at times, that house was the safest place for our minds to live.⁶

For these two poets, collaboration is not simply a creative or generative process nor playful exchange, but a method of self-discovery, social commentary, and community building. And remarkably, the process gives each a greater sense of her individual “intimate voice.”

The inclusion of such collaborations as a regular web feature of The New Yorker, with a print circulation of over 1.2 million, arguably the nation’s most widely distributed publisher of poetry, reflects just the tip of the iceberg for the practice. It only hints at the large and growing body of collaborative work beyond poetry that has until recently remained largely unnoticed.

Not that there’s anything particularly new to communal narrative from an historical perspective. What’s new is the attention it’s getting from contemporary writers of all genres.

Because from what we know, the origins of storytelling began in the collaborative milieu of oral tradition when the collective narratives and songs that formed a culture’s identity were memorized and performed. Within orality—the term applied to a pre-literate culture’s method of storytelling—many voices shaped a common story, a mythos passed from generation to generation. Story making was participatory, enacted through song and dance, the members embodying and partaking in the narrative together, individual identities submerged in a communal experience.

With the advent of writing, orality gradually faded, over time relinquishing the narrative of public song and performance to the silences of solitary scribe and to paper. Written works could be signed, sealed with wax, their authority established, even assigned some value. Words became permanent things to be owned that could be transferred across space and time versus words as notes in a shared aural experience, inseparable from communal exchange and the transient moment.

In this shift, it’s the Western tradition, enthralled with the Romantic and democratic notions of the individual, that has missed out. In its embrace of singular authorship and the primacy of an “original,” distinct artist, Western literature abandons the shared voice thereby losing the generative community-building capacities of collaborative practice.

While contemporary stage and cinema continue to offer a type of communal experience of story, as do public readings and slams, it is perhaps our suddenly interconnected digital world with limitless communal forums for sharing news and narrative of all sorts that has taken intentional collaborative writing viral. This new world of participatory media via online platforms and social networking demolishes former barriers of time and distance and even shared language, given the development of voice recognition and translation apps. These technologies open the door to innumerable possibilities.

As reading and sharing becomes once more communal and interactive, so too does creation. And while the rise of social media initially led to concerns of social isolation, and more so for writers who already work to large degree isolated, instead these virtual platforms have multiplied new modes for connection, collaboration, and online writing communities. Writers have found new writing relationships online, and are reveling in the experience.

*

Evolving writing technologies have always shaped our writing practices and our ideas about what literature is. The printing press enabled a writer’s words to be reproduced and quickly disseminated to the public, encouraging wider literacy. In time, printing led to a need for the copyright, the right to make copies of a printed work for distribution and profit, further locating story-making as the work of an individual, if not a gifted, writer, one who not only creates but who necessarily protects their authorship—the creative process—and subsequent rights to their work from plagiarism. And while it might surprise a Western reader to realize that our concept of plagiarism, of “stealing” words from another owner, isn’t universally held across cultures, the idea decisively shapes our Western, capitalist literary tradition. It’s what the publishing industry depends on, making current-day literary collaboration a somewhat transgressive act.

In this sense, intentional contemporary collaborations disrupt the very core of Western literary practice: the belief, protected by courts and contracts and sustained by publishers and pedagogies, in the primacy of the artist’s unique voice and vision. So why are writers in greater numbers choosing to abandon their own individual “voice?”

Some insight can be gained in research done in the field of rhetorical studies. In their 2012 text, Writing Together: Collaboration in Theory and Practice,⁷ renowned scholars and co-collaborators, Angela A. Lansford and Lisa Ede discuss what they term coauthoring, a practice common in academic writing from research to textbooks. According to the authors’ findings, a full 87% of respondents to a questionnaire offered across major academic professions indicated that they at least “sometimes wrote as part of a team or group.” In academe, the collaborative enterprise remains very much alive. While not all creative writers work in academe, many do, and many others are exposed to academic strategies through the influence of graduate writing degrees and programs.

But another intriguing aspect of Lansford and Ede’s text is that their research not only focuses on collaborative writing policies and practices within the academic community, the authors themselves co-author their own text, analyzing their findings through collaborative scholarly writing.

In discussing their coauthoring process in Writing Together, the authors express a remarkably similar response to their writing experience to those expressed over and over by literary practitioners’ process pieces included in They Said. Lansford and Ede note:

These scholars’ experience underscores the dynamic possibilities of cowriting. Though Lansford and Ede take a more analytical approach, they reveal that they too experienced the sense of community that Ada Limón and Natalie Diaz discovered through their poetic collaboration. Something satisfying. Something “together.”

It is as if some primal chord is being struck.

While collaborative approaches in academic writing managed to thrive, albeit in codified and proscribed forms, literary collaborations have remained relatively uncommon. Like Lansford and Ede, a creative writer may readily acknowledge her own literary debt to “all those voices and words of others in her head,” but intentional collaboration—inviting another writer as an equal coauthor from inspiration through execution—is something quite different. And rare. At least in Western literatures.

*

Other cultures have notably retained collaborative storytelling traditions dating back thousands of years. While we tend to look for examples outside of American literature, many Native American literary practices have survived. According to scholar Kenneth Lincoln, the animist orality that informs such literature, what he calls “dialogic oratory,” is never really the words of one individual human writer but a fusion of the language of the land and a “reciprocal tribalism among plant, animal, spirit, and human.”⁹ Miwok-Pomo Greg Sarris further includes listeners as collaborators such that with each retelling, the story itself is remade.¹⁰

Contemporary Anishinaabe poet Kimberly Blaeser and tribal colleague, Meg Noodin, incorporate aspects of these traditions in the following collaborative poem, “Transformations: Ziigwan,” in which, as with the title, words “circle around movement: between languages, between generations, between thinking and writing,” according to the writers, in a process that has “cracked open new spaces” between the pair.¹¹

TRANSFORMATIONS: ZIIGWAN

Crane calls vibrate across March skies
ajijaak’s elongate body stretching from winter to spring.
I am clan struck—longing.

Aandeg answers the pouring chorus
of melt, then rain, baashkwanakwad from sky to earth.
I am a draining constellation.

Beneath star stories omagakii inflates his pouch—
the trill of marshland songs rise in the night.
I am a holy bellows.

Within the poem we do feel the back and forth movement between elements, the earth and sky, the reciprocity between the English and Ojibwe languages, between the observed and the unseen worlds, and, ultimately, across time. But while we know that there is similar movement between the poets’ two minds, the seams are smooth, the voice singular. One “I” intimately speaks to the reader. Yet hidden within this crafted “I” remains the powerful presence of the “thou” of the collaboration.

Had the US chosen to recognize rather than attempt to exterminate indigenous peoples and cultures, or had it resisted the establishment of slavery, choosing to celebrate rather than violently suppress the language and oral traditions of African peoples, the development of our national literature might better reflect such historical collaborative expression.

*

While 18–19^th-century European collaborative practices have gained greater renown, most notably in the multi-genre writing of the Surrealists, ancient Eastern forms began to find their way into American writing at least by the turn of the 20^th century as well, due in part to the significant rise in immigration to the US from Asian countries such as China and Japan. For example, Japanese poet Yone Noguchi immigrated to California in 1893, worked for a Japanese newspaper while studying American poetry,¹² and published his collection, Japanese Hokkus, in the English language in 1901.¹³ Noguchi’s hokkus eventually appeared nationally in Poetry Magazine, Vol. 15, in 1919.

Though hokkus, precursor to the modern haikus, have a single author, this three-line poem forms the first stanza of the renga, a series of linked poems that are written between two or more poets following a codified pattern of syllabic verse. These Japanese forms may have contributed to 19^th- and early 20^th-century European collaborative writing as well. Following Noguchi’s return to Japan some years later, he “corresponded with Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats about Japanese literary aesthetics,” influencing their ideas on imagism.¹⁴

The renga appeared in Japan around the 14^th century and was used to encourage the collaborative composition of poems, according to Edward Hirsch. Though American experimentation with the renga wasn’t widespread until later in the 20^th century, the form has gained popular usage. Perhaps due to its traditional suitability in collaborative training, the renga does prove to be one easy way for a novice to jump into the practice, especially given our general familiarity with the haiku’s counted syllable pattern.

Various scholars cite an even earlier form of collaborative Chinese linked verse, lián jù, developed in the Qin Dynasty, 221 to 206 BC, as a possible precursor to the Japanese renga. Though lián jù may be obscure to western readers, another ancient Chinese practice of dialogic composition may be more familiar. In “The Wang River Sequence,” renowned Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei wrote poems back and forth with his friend, poet Pei Di, using classical codified forms.

Chang-he, literally “chanting and echoing in response,” is still practiced among Chinese contemporaries using less formal, vernacular structure often accompanied by drinking wine. According to Professor Balance Chow of San José State University who confesses to having recently participated in one such prolonged poetic exchange at a party in Hong Kong using text messaging, such chang-he—oral and written—becomes part of the social experience, composed between participants “on the spot” to commemorate aspects of the event. As such, the practice continues the community-enriching functions of early orality while embracing contemporary writing technologies and language structures. Toasting and texting, too, makes for an appealing—and doable—collaborative pursuit.

Our better-acknowledged European predecessors experimented with a collaborative sonnet form, the bouts-rimés, purportedly as early as 1648, according to editor and sonneteer Simone Muench. The form was made popular in 1864 when Alexandre Dumas issued an invitation to numerous French poets to create sonnets by using a provided set of rhymes. When this collaborative sonnet call was sent out, hundreds of writers responded, and Dumas published the poems in 1865. The subsequent Surrealist movement that included collaborative strategies in their writings gained greater notoriety and did influence some modernist and mid-century American writers, particularly poets in the New York School such as the influential John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch.

However, surrealism’s engagement with an alternative form of reality, an “absolute reality,” of both the unconscious realms of dream and fantastic imagination and the everyday conscious world, didn’t help to integrate experimental collaborative practice as mainstream. This more avant-garde approach served to isolate collaboration more as an outlier in American writing. Besides challenging the primacy of a single author, it was perhaps just too weird. Today, surrealistic collaborative method such as exquisite corpse in which a story is composed line by line by a group of writers, is more likely used as an ice-breaker or perhaps a generative or pedagogical tool in the creative writing classroom. Outside of academic writing, such collaborative approaches have remained largely a curiosity.

And yet it can be argued that the collaborative enterprise never really left us. In 2015, Salon ran an article on Gavin Kovite and Christopher Robinson’s collaborative novel, War of the Encyclopaedists, in which the authors suggest that collaboration is a natural form of writing—we already edit each other’s work, we make suggestions, we write in the margins, we alter wording—we are all already collaborating as in academic writing. We just haven’t formally copped to it or as readily embraced it in literary practice even though our writing is to some extent in conversation with all of the storytellers who have come before us, a conversation begun before pen and paper.

*

Across genres, theater retains the clearest connection to an oral tradition of communal storytelling. A play is intrinsically collaborative, perhaps the most collaborative literary form, in its performance, production, and direction. Depending on whether an opera, musical, or traditional script, a play can involve not only a writer, but a composer, a librettist, a choreographer, set designer, light artist, and of course the actors and dancers. And while it wasn’t historically common for playwrights to compose together—they simply stole from each other, according to Scott Sublett, Professor of Film and Theater at San José State University—this too changed with changing technologies and notions in the 20^th century. In the related field of film, it’s quite acceptable for screenplays to be written collaboratively, or for scripts to be adapted to the screen by more than one author, for that matter, but such practice relied on the development of film and of the film industry, also in the 20^th century.

Poets have clearly benefitted from received collaborative traditions, but contemporary collaborations range far beyond the traditional renga and received forms such as the sonnet or sestina. Martha Silano and Molly Tenenbaum, poets who have collaborated with the sonnet, also composed a poem in twelve tercets over Facetime called, “Like a Small Wooden Doll, Three Wooden Balls Stacked Up” for which they created their own constraints. Here are the first two stanzas.      

To begin the poem, according to the poets, Martha “read a line of of Wislawa Szymborska’s ‘Prologue to a Comedy,’ then paused for two minutes while we both free wrote off the line.” This process continued throughout the Symborska poem, then each poet worked separately, ultimately combining and “smooshing” their lines together, sending revised drafts back and forth until they were both satisfied.

However, today’s writers from all genres are wildly and widely collaborating. Perhaps a perceived lack of tradition allows greater freedom to experiment with inventive approaches. Certainly ever-expanding digital modes, platforms, and fluencies simplify the collaborative practice as well as give it greater relevancy. It was only a matter of time that these new media would engender new literatures. In this case, they draw us back to participatory storytelling. What was once old is, quite unexpectedly, again made new.

The recent anthology, They Said, is a convenient place to catch up on diverse digital modes such as Facetime in action in a variety of literatures. Among the cross-genre offerings, recent MFA graduates Andrea Blancas Beltran and Melissa Matthewson took on a collaborative project using Tumblr to write a series of haibun, (another traditional Japanese form, one that juxtaposes a brief prose narrative with haiku), hoping that their “shared project would ease our mutual anxiety over experiencing the rumored post-MFA writing slump.”¹⁶ Amy Sayre Baptista proposed writing a “series of persona poems based on the tragic love affair of Prince Pedro and his doomed beloved, Inês de Castro” to Carlo Matos. He accepted, and they wrote historical fiction-based poems back and forth via Google doc, creating not only an “ecstatic experience… neither one of us could have written alone,” but eventually an unplanned book-length manuscript entitled, The Book of Tongues.¹⁷ On the other hand, Pace University colleagues Tom Henthorne and Jonathan Silverman, who wrote a self-reflexive collaborative piece on collaboration called “The Noise of Collaboration,” wrote from offices just across the hall from each other, discussing their work in-progress in person.¹⁸

Nonfiction collaborations often accrue a thematic unity through single-voice sections or fragments, much as a single-author braided essay might. For instance, southerners Anne-Marie Akin and Laura Jones carry out a tongue-in-cheek feud over what constitutes the true south in their essay, “Southlandia.”¹⁹ While their separate vignettes retain individual voice and parallel narratives rather than direct argument, the associative interplay of their voices creates a whole collage-like picture through contrasts, edges, and juxtaposition. 

But creating a singular voice in nonfiction? Though Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade take turns debunking popular superstitions in their braided essay, “13 Superstitions,” each writer addressing specific topics such as “Black cats,” or “Broken mirror,” the authors don’t identify who addresses which topic. Instead the pair casually hands off the “I” speaker, creating a single-narrator effect.²⁰ Husband and wife writers Jacqueline Doyle and Stephen D. Gutierrez, however, manage to blur the voice at times in their piece, “Imaginary Friends.” While the essay retains the identifiable points of view of Jacqueline and Stephen, the writers added to and revised each other’s contributions so that while the narrative remains “true,” the two points of view at times are neither purely one nor the other. Here is how they describe their process, alternating between Jacqueline and Stephen’s view, in self-assigned italics, and compare their finished essay to Frankenstein’s monster.

Creating Frankenstein’s monster aptly connotes collaboration’s necessary transplants, the contributions and redactions, the final suturing, even the implied mad genius of the co-conspirators, in bringing life to something jointly conceived.

This stitch-witchery seems especially complicated when considering a collaborative fiction project, especially one that presents traditionally on a page with no apparent sections or multiple points of view. How do pairs of writers such as Gavin Kovite and Christopher Robinson, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, or Mary Higgins Clark and Alafair Burke negotiate the authorial territories, the narrative development, the inevitable “but the character had their own ideas” occurrences that writers so often report in the course of writing a novel? And how do they deal with writer’s block? As a short-form writer, I confess that these added complications to the already daunting aspects of composing a novel leave me in awe.

However, fiction writers too find collaborative writing to be “the most enjoyable kind of work. It’s CRAZY fun,” as Dana Diehl and Melissa Goodrich write about the process involved in composing their short story, “The Classroom Beneath Our Classroom.” They go on to say, “It’s working with someone whose instincts you are in total admiration of, whose jokes you appreciate—who twists and untwists the story you started to write. And it’s about letting go of control in the best possible way. It is all the rollercoasters.”²²

Not everyone loves a rollercoaster, but it is such playfulness, a willingness to climb into the little car, strap yourself in, and go! that frequently appears in writers’ approaches to coauthoring. But isn’t that really what any writer does at the outset of any writing project? Don’t we each put our hand to the writing that does not yet exist with both anticipation and a willingness to follow the pen where it leads? Writing with a collaborator perhaps increases the thrill, adding to the degree of the unknown, increasing the twists and turns of the skinny little track that will twist and turn anyway. Ron Horning and David Lehman’s comments on their novel-in-progress, Land of Opportunity, demonstrate just such high-spiritedness. They write:         

What happens next, after all, is the question that impels any story and is the burning question that fuels a literary collaboration’s willing co-conspirators. Whether swapping text line by line exquisite corpse style, or stanza by stanza as with a parted-out sonnet or formal renga, or character by character; or writing call and response pieces, or combining individual thematically linked sections, writing epistolary works in letter form, or creating mash-ups of combined texts discovering through-lines in the process, or fusing their writing by any other invention—the process that any team of collaborators chooses to employ becomes the constraint through which disparate voices merge and re-emerge. Remarkably, in retrospect many authors cannot remember exactly who wrote what.

*

No, the singular voice isn’t in any danger. People love a good story. How that voice is formed, as a reader, who cares? Part of the fun of reading collaborative work is to wonder at the sutures, the behind-the-scenes creative give-and-take necessary to so seamlessly meld differing voices and sensibilities into one work.

As American writers continue to look beyond our own froggy pond at the rich global heritage of diverse literary traditions, and as we increasingly are exposed to such writers and literatures through translations, immigration, and most notably digital interconnectivity, collaborations will thrive. It’s a collusion we should embrace.

And in our current enflamed political climate with the rise of nationalistic fervor and retrograde protectionism, a parallel interest in collaborative writing might even be viewed as revolutionary discourse, a further act of resistance to such forces in its open-hearted embrace of the “other,” whether that simply be another writer or another tradition. In such divisive, often frightening times, coming together in creative exchange, shedding autonomy, finding community, “something together,” reaffirms our bonds and our faith in art’s transformational possibilities.

To collaborate is to abandon, if only for a while, the guise of the solitary writer. To experience, if for a brief time, creative partnership and for that time to be freed from the pressure of working alone within our hyper-competitive industry is to be renewed at the core of who we are. We draw back to the primal, to the community of griots and poets, of minstrels and tricksters. We tell a story together.

So scorn not, critic. Leave charges of collusion to the Special Counsel. Grab a pen, or a keyboard, or better yet, go Facetime somebody. Collaborate!                                   

Sally Ashton is the author of three poetry collections and has been Editor-in-Chief of DMQ Review since 2003. Her most recent book is The Behaviour of Clocks. Ashton teaches creative writing at San José State University.

Notes

1. Simone Muench and Dean Rader, Suture (United States: Black Lawrence Press, 2017), p. 54.
2. John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
3. They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, eds. Simone Muench and Dean Rader (United States: Black Lawrence Press, 2018).
4. Saints of Hysteria, ed. Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, and David Trinidad (Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2007).
5. “Envelopes of Air,” ed. Kevin Young, the New Yorker Online, September 23, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/poems/envelopes-of-air-ada-limon-and-natalie-diaz-forge-a-bond-amid-the-shifting-landscape-of-contemporary-america.
6. Natalie Diaz and Ada Limón, in They Said : A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, p. 186.
7. Writing Together: Collaboration in Theory and Practice, eds. Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa Ede (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012), p. 73.
8. Ibid., p. 4.
9. Kenneth Lincoln, Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry, 1890-1999 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
10. Greg Sarris, “The Woman Who Loved a Snake: Orality in Mabel McKay’s Stories,” in Nothing but the Truth: An Anthology of Native American Literature, eds. John L. Purdy and James Ruppert (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 2011).
11. Kimberly Blaeser and Meg Noodin, in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, pp. 56–58.
12. California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present, eds. Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost, and Jack Hicks (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2004), p. 46.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Martha Silano and Molly Tennenbaum, in They Said : A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, pp. 317–319.
16. Ibid., p. 448.
17. Ibid., p. 445.
18. Ibid., p. 487.
19. Ibid., p. 375.
20. Ibid., p. 415.
21. Ibid., p. 414.
22. Ibid., p. 347.
23. Ibid., p. 372.