I play a game called Magic the Gathering—I like nothing more than transforming the field of play into vampires and taking control of creatures through Olivia Voldaren’s ability. In the format of the game I play, Commander, each player fights towards victory with their general, and whether victory means eliminating a player by reducing their life total to zero, milling them out so they can’t draw anymore cards, achieving an infinite combo of some variety or simply doing twenty-one points of damage with your commander to KO a player, we are all working collaboratively towards the end of the game. It’s a social game as much as it is a game of strategy and opportunity. We chat about the characters in the game, our lives, and dinner while we play. We make suggestions for each other’s decks. While each player has their own deck of one-hundred cards, the field of play is public. We weigh tactics, resources, and assess threats. We play politics, make deals, and must be adaptable. We take risks. Magic the Gathering isn’t so unlike writing in this respect. Though we think of writing as an individual, private act, it’s actually collaborative.
In a poetry class last spring, while we didn’t play Magic, we did play Once Upon a Time, another cooperative storytelling game. Using story elements typical of fairy tales—a fairy godmother, a magic wand, a dragon, dancing teapots—each player tries to move the story towards their secret ending. Surprise is a part of the collaborative experience here. This is a long way of saying collaboration is fun. Listening, problem solving, and imagination are all collaborative acts. Students used the story we crafted together as generative material for their individual work. I love this game because it demonstrates quite literally that as writer, you’re first a reader. It also demonstrates that writing is not a competition—it’s a collaborative event.
Sometimes this means collaboration with art or performance through ekphrastic writing. Not only did we close read Christina’s World, for example, but we work together with a particular voice in a specific historical moment. Reimagining the present through ekphrasis brings the source into the contemporary. Again, an act of collaboration: the archive is a live, malleable thing—it can be influenced, and it influences the writer. I love lyric because it forces you to be engaged in the world. Persona poems too are a kind of collaboration—immersing yourself in research, voice, and radical listening.
Collaboration is a practice of inquiry and care.
When working collaboratively, you recognize difference in a more active way. Collaboration promotes multi-voiced, multi-gendered, multicultural, multi-modal, and other non-archetypal relationships to writing. Labor is foregrounded and you become aware of the way your voice sounds and what it adds. This was perhaps the most surprising thing students learned from last spring. From persona to cento or other found forms and a variety of erasure strategies, students exercised their voices by exploring how context can impact content. Form is then not an imitation (and it’s okay to imitate! everything is an imitation!) rather a way to put pressure on the writing to reflect experience. It makes non-poetic texts—newspaper articles, court documents, passports, resumes, instruction manuals, dictionaries—into art through excision and collage. Yet another way collaboration takes the act of writing out of isolation and makes it an act of participation. It draws people into the making of artifact. Whether this artifact is a poem, story, or other art, we are drawn towards each other and together. It allows an opportunity to untidy a single narrative. It gives the writer power to undermine or subvert fallacious narratives. Process is cooperative. We must think critically about our ideas and be open to play. The work is then about uniting disparate points of view, working towards a similar end that can’t be achieved alone. I love the many forms and genres collaboration takes in Issue O. 13.
All writing is a collaboration.
If I teach my students anything this semester, I want to be that workshop is collaborative. Learning is collaborative. The classroom is always a collaborative space—we all must show up and participate in the ways we are able. In my workshops, students turn in letters of intent with their pieces each week. I recognize intent in limited but it’s a good practice to check in with yourself and articulate what you, as writer, need. Then as readers, we are able to shape our responses to the writer’s needs. We’re able to reflect on how the writing is teaching us to read it, as opposed to us placing a strict rubric over the writing. I love the degree to which a classroom can work collaboratively.
Reading is a collaboration.
The Fourth River, like many literary journals, is only possible through the dedication of a small but devoted group of collaborators. The literary journal as form wouldn’t be possible without everyone behind the scenes putting issues together digitally and in print—from the alumni to the graduate student readers and assistant editors to the faculty who serve as genre editors, to visual artists, to every printer and designer. Thank you to the poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction editors for their vision: Sheila Squillante, Heather McNaugher, and Marc Nieson. Thank you to managing editor Lauren Hunter. The Fourth River wouldn’t be possible without the collective work of my colleagues, the MFA students, Chatham University, and of course: you, reader.
Stay alive,
Leia Penina Wilson
Editor-In-Chief