Authors Brenda Miller and Julie Marie Wade have published a book of collaborative essays rich in imagery and music. Published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Telephone: essays in two voices is, according to award-winning poet and essayist, Hanif Abdurraqib, “a stellar example of what can be achieved in collaborative work where two voices figure out how to link connective threads that bring out the best in each of their words, images, and narrative flourishes. This a real gift of a book, one I hope to keep learning from.”

The book authors’ note to readers states, “This book collects a series of essays written collaboratively by the two authors over a span of four years. In this shared process, the inciting word (usually the title) spurs associative images from our personal and cultural histories. We build our pieces by responding to each other’s writing until a natural endpoint occurs. Our interactions build a relationship, too, with each gesture requiring trust and vulnerability—not only to each other, but to the writing itself.  We have chosen not to label the speaker in each section so that our individual voices surrender into a more collective, and communal, authorship.”

To experience this, the authors have generously allowed Writing It Real to reprint the title essay, “Telephone,” which originally appeared in 2016 in the literary magazine Riverteeth. At the essay’s end, please read the interview Julie and Brenda did with me to learn more about their collaborative process. You might be inspired to think about who in your writing life you would like to write with. The possibilities are numerous: a child, an elderly relative, a writing buddy, a teacher from the past, a dear friend. What matters is what Brenda and Julie state: “interactions build a relationship…with each gesture requiring trust and vulnerability…” As you read, notice and think about the gestures they create in the collaborative essay by using words introduced by the other, placing those words in the context of their individual experience. Listen to the music they weave.

Before you begin the essay below here are bios from  the two authors:

 

Brenda Miller is the author of six essay collections, most recently A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form. Her book An Earlier Life (Ovenbird Books, 2016), received the Washington State Book Award for memoir. She also co-authored Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. Her work has received six Pushcart Prizes. She is a Professor of English at Western Washington University and associate faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop. Her website is www.brendamillerwriter.com

 

 

Julie Marie Wade is the author of thirteen collections of poetry and prose, including Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing (The Ohio State University Press, 2020) and Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2018). A recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and reviews regularly for Lambda Literary Review and The Rumpus. Her website is www.juliemariewade.com.

 

Miller’s and Wade’s collaborative work has previously appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, The Normal School,  Phoebe, River Teeth, Tupelo Quarterly, among other places. Their work has also been reprinted in the anthologies The Spirit of Disruption: Landmark Essays from The Normal School (Outpost 19, 2018) and They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Their co-authored collection, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, won the 2019 Cleveland State University Press Nonfiction Book Award, judged by Hanif Abdurraqib, and was published by the CSU Poetry Center in October 2021.

****

Telephone

by Brenda Miller and Julie Marie Wade

In the beginning was the gray, and it was called Elisha. In the beginning was the bell, and it was called Alexander. In the beginning was an office in Highland Park, a classroom in Boston, competing laboratories. One future hinged on the “harmonic telegraph”—better than a letter, better than a message in a bottle. Think of it: your own words in real time, your own voice coming through the line like music, and there on the end, your beloved rapt and eager, listening, waiting to hear! In this beginning, as with all: a diagram, a caveat, a rival creation story.

Imagine the bell chiming in the gray. Imagine the loud moon of sound rising through the clouds. Now Alexander whispers to Elisha on the courthouse stairs, “We can’t all be famous, man.” In this version, he has a pipe and pretty hair, soft like taffeta on a woman’s dressing gown. “Give it a century or so. History might turn this all around.”

“Since when?” Elisha spits. He tugs his beard to a narrow point, then tucks his hands inside his trouser pockets. “Since when has history ever been kind to the underdog?”

When the red curtains sweep closed, the gold tassels swish this way and that, almost an echo. Over the clatter of applause, everyone hears it—that loud moon of sound, so unmistakable now: a bright silver telephone ringing.

****

Can you hear it? The song of a loon—voice echoing across a bright sliver of lake, disembodied. Like the voice on the other end of the telephone. In the beginning, that voice mingled with static, especially long-distance, and long-distance was expensive. My mother hissed the words to us as she spoke with her mother in Brooklyn— long distance—when we made a racket in the kitchen. She stood at the tall counter as she talked, the long coil of the telephone looped around her fingers. Her fingers twirled the loops tighter until her knuckles bulged, and then she let the strand uncoil, bouncing ringlets, like the hair on the girls I admired in novels.

I tried to imagine it: long distance, and how a voice could traverse that territory to reach us there in the suburbs of Los Angeles. My mother’s voice, as she talked, became increasingly inflected with New York-ese, an actual dialect recorded by linguists; she seemed to take on the persona of a different person, the girl I never knew.

When my cousins came to visit they spoke a foreign language, tough and hardy, a rollick through the streets. They said I had an accent too—a California twang—but I couldn’t catch it. Can we ever hear ourselves clearly? How others hear us? Say hello to your grandmother, my mother said, and handed the earpiece to me. Hello? I said into the static, my greeting always a question, each word that followed echoing across the distance between us. The telephone warm with my mother’s ear, her fervent listening.

****

My father’s palm warms the receiver with sweat. His dime slides down the phone’s cool throat. As he waits for a dial tone, he peers through the grate on the hospital window. It’s late evening, September in Seattle, plump pigeons mingling on the ledge. It’s his wife’s mother he’s calling, a woman they haven’t seen or spoken to in years. His voice wavers when she answers, but then he says it, clear as a bell, “You’re a grandmother!” Silence: looping back on itself like a snake’s tail. “Did you hear what I said, Tena?” She sighs, begins to uncoil. When she speaks at last, her tone is merely curious: “Boy or girl?” This is the first time my father has ever mentioned me aloud, and she can hear the hope and love and fear passing through his teeth like water over rocks. Love is an actual dialect recorded by linguists, as is disappointment, as is grief. “We have a daughter,” he tells her proudly. Now the pigeons have moved on to other perches. A lone taxi glides through the street like a pat of butter. My grandmother lays the phone back in its cradle.

****

We listened for it, knew by heart this dialect: a phone ringing in the middle of the night. A phone ringing at 9:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., 6:00 p.m., even 9:00 p.m.: these calls had an aura of polite questioning (who’s calling please?). These calls were interrogatives. But a phone ringing at 4:00 a.m.: these calls used the syntax of the imperative (who’s calling!). Jerked from the warm confines of sleep, my mother fumbled for her glasses (I can’t hear without my glasses on). In our bedrooms, we heard the phone jangling, water over rocks gaining in volume, the roar of the rapids approaching. And then murmured words, oh no–water easing out into ripples against the shore. We huddled in our parents’ doorway, the light from the bedside lamp wan in the wee hours. The phone cradled, stubborn and silent, while my mother wept in my father’s arms. They sat upright against the headboard, in their pajamas, covers still demure against their legs. Go back to bed. This moment: not meant for us to witness.

So we went back to our beds, in rooms that held no phones, not yet. Our rooms contained only the present, could not be intruded upon via long distance. Our rooms connected to no other place or time—sported no cables or wires, inlets or outlets. The air: undisturbed, but for our own errant interrogatives, imperatives. We wondered what words murmured through the telephone line at that hour: who called and what language could they possibly speak?

****

My little pink room that held no phone yet: pink as a pencil’s head, pink as an esophagus. The wicker chair where my mother rocked me, undisturbed, by the wan lamplight of the early years. There were roses on those walls—almost an imperative, instructing me how to be a daughter. Girls like frilly, delicate things (don’t they?). The doll with the velvet dress and tatted shawl who kept watch from a corner shelf—whose tiny porcelain nail beds we painted. Girls always do as they’re told (don’t they?). The bed made every morning, the still-warm pajamas slipped down the chute, the hairbrush and powder puff on the vanity table, stubborn and silent, in the room where no phones rang, not yet.

My mother had a French telephone on her nightstand, ivory and gold. She conducted important business on the bed with her shoes off, her steno pad poised. (Can I put you down for a casserole?) (Flower arranging is set for the morning program.) (Just a small donation would be much appreciated.) Her voice was never demure, always an imperative. I crouched in the hall, listening to the rotary spin, picturing the seven numbers flying like a carnival ride at the fair. She worked late into the night sometimes, for Delta Kappa Gamma and the Garden Club, for Bingo and Bunco and A.A.U.W. I thought if I listened long enough, I might learn the secrets of ladyhood: how to speak only like you mean it, polite and precise, never wavering. Even a question is never a question. A request only cloaks a demand.

Sometimes I fell asleep, and my father would find me, crumpled against the grandfather clock he had come to wind. His back was not so bad yet that he couldn’t lift me, cradle me in his arms as he carried me back to bed. “You’re going to be a little wilted flower tomorrow,” he’d say, not quite scolding, pulling the mauve sheets up to my nose, then the quilt like a patchwork blush, a wave of cotton. In the room without inlets or outlets, I slept like the pink pearl I was, soon to erase everything.

****

Erasure: the sound of a telephone ringing in an empty house. A request becoming a demand becoming disappointment. The phone rings 5 (polite) 7, (precise), 9, 11 (peeved) times, almost giving up, then 12 (resigned), the quiet afterward like a sigh. It’s a mystery now, words unspoken but held suspended, pearls in the groove of a tongue.

Sometimes you could hear the phone ringing as you pulled up in the station wagon, your mother hurrying out of the car, fumbling with the bags and keys, rushing inside to pick up . . . and nothing, just the echo of a click. She stood there a few moments, the earpiece in hand, warbling hello? into the silence, as if the question, the repetition, could be an incantation, recalling the caller from oblivion. The house vibrated in the aftermath of a missed call; the rooms, after all, had heard the insistent ring, and they’d inclined toward the phone, wondering. They would have picked up, if they could, would have taken a message.

Messages written on the chalkboard in the kitchen. Coming home from a night out, you automatically swiveled your head to the chalkboard to see if anyone had called, if anyone wanted you. But those messages were imprecise: Kevin called. You imagined your mother talking to the boy, saying May I take a message?, like the career secretary she’d been. She was an expert at answering the phone, had just the right inflections, the accent of professional courtesy. And even those simple words made you blush: the thought of your boyfriend’s voice in her ear, and then her careful transcription in chalk on the board. She couldn’t say what he wanted, couldn’t have really known.

You often declined to go out, instead sitting by the telephone—no, not by it, but as close as possible, the phone in your lap—willing it to ring. You didn’t dare move, didn’t even go to the bathroom, because what if you missed it? That jangly bell summoning you, and you lunged to get it (I’ve got it!), your voice cracking with panic and hope. If it wasn’t the person you expected, you yelled I have to keep this line open! and hung up still waiting. Once you got the call you wanted, if it finally arrived, you stayed on the line for hours, speaking in various positions: sitting up, lying down, rolled onto your back, your hand caressing the cord.

Your house had one line, two phones, so sometimes you heard the surreptitious click of someone picking up—intentionally or by accident—eavesdropping on your intimate pauses. Your mother or your brother might butt in to say they needed the line (get off the phone!), and you hissed okay! Just a minute! And you occupied the line, the only line, a few moments longer to say your awkward goodbyes.

You remember the sound of a busy signal: that loud, brash, staccato buzz—almost angry, indignant, saying: you can’t get through. If you were desperate, if the line had been busy for hours, you could ask the operator to break in, an emergency, and those conversing—your boyfriend and another girl?—heard the distant, officious voice of the operator telling them to get off the line. And there you’d be, embarrassed, with your non-emergency. What was worse? The busy signal—signifying life, someone home, but unconcerned about you? Or the phone ringing in an empty house, the echo of your insistence (pick up, pick up) to be there, to answer?

****

It’s a mystery now, how the world your parents love is lost, how the world you think you love is empty, shallow as water slipping through the lips of Puget Sound. They keep eavesdropping on your heart (how they do this, you’ll never know), then breaking in with their loud, concerned voices: So many false prophets, they warn. So many paths to perdition!

Your father has two telephones in his basement office: an old brown rotary for home, a slick new push-button for work. Two lines. Plugged into their respective wall ports, the phones sit side by side like rivals, or worse—married people who no longer touch each other. You envy the way your father has another life where he is important, the glimpses you have of it: graph paper, a swivel chair, a desk light that bends to various positions, a black-handled, magnifying lens.

Sometimes you play a game where he calls you on the home line from his work phone in the office. You stand at the top of the stairs in the kitchen by the big, yellow phone, the one you call the mothership. Mostly, it belongs to your mother. This phone is big like a blimp, yellow like a submarine. You love answering this phone, stretching the cord long as a jump rope, straddling it, then trying on inflections the way some girls try on shoes: the interrogative, the imperative, softening your voice to a whisper or making it whistle-sharp, precise.

Your parents say one day boys are going to call asking for you, wanting to take you out on dates, to restaurants and dances—but you don’t believe them. Your parents also say you must never call boys, regardless of your generation’s lax morals, its empty, desperate search for quick fixes and instant gratification. None of this means anything to you yet. You like to play with Shawn across the street, so you call him sometimes in secret. Mostly, his mother answers. Her name is Adele, which reminds you of addled. She has sadness you can hear in the pauses between her words. She is all line breaks, like a very sad poem.

Your own mother intercepts you at the threshold. “Who was that you were talking to?” You tell her you and Shawn are going to play tennis, you and Shawn are going to climb trees. You tell her yes, he called you. What you don’t tell is that you and Shawn are going to double back to his family room and prank call all the neighbors for hours—until the officious operator cuts in to report, “We’ve had some complaints associated with this number.” You will roll on your backs, howling with laughter. You will close the White Pages, toss them back on the shelf. Everything is still funny then, and for no good reason. Even when you grow up, you will never touch each other.

****

The Yellow Pages arrived every year, predictable as migration: that heavy thump on the threshold as if something had crawled to your porch to die. Whether you wanted it or not—if there had been big changes or none at all—you had to drag the directory inside and find somewhere to put it. For some reason, your mother kept the old books for a while, stacking them under the counter like building blocks (you never know) . . . Maybe it seemed a shame to toss out something so big, so substantial—something that wanted only to be of use.

Whenever you needed anything—from an auto mechanic to a zoo—you pulled out the Yellow Pages and thumbed through the slick listings, trying to discern from the language and format of the entries which company might serve you best. You always wondered about the one-line listings in pale, non-bolded font: they announced themselves hardly at all, gave you no reason to call. These companies nestled like secrets between the display ads—loud promotions that held pictures of smiling tradesmen kneeling with their children, proclaiming Family Business! Serving you since 1959—and for that reason alone you wanted to call the quiet ones and see who might answer, what they’d have to say for themselves.

Public phone booths used to have the Yellow Pages dangling by a chain, protected by thick, black plastic covers. When you tried to use these directories, they thwarted your efforts; you had to twist and turn to get them to open and lie flat. You had to find a nickel, a dime, a quarter, rummaging in your pocket or purse, your elbows banging against the glass. You had to hold the phone wedged between ear and shoulder while you deposited change and kept your finger pointed to the number you wanted to call. You often dropped your coins. You had to disregard those people standing outside the booth, peering in, waiting impatiently for their turn. Watching you there, boxed in—private but public, your need for help on display.

Once, in a phone booth at a beach park, you kept a long line of people waiting for a half-hour while you cried to a friend. I don’t know what to do, you repeated, clutching the receiver, keeping your gaze narrowed to the metal shelf dusty with grit, studded with chewed gum. Someone had stolen the Yellow Pages; the chain dangled empty. People grumbled, and one boy banged on the glass. They thought you were addled, or simply rude. But you had to hold onto the voice at the other end of the line. The voice talked you down, told you to take deep breaths, move one foot at a time to a café where you would eat a bowl of brown rice and vegetables with peanut sauce. The store next to the café sold crystals and amulets. You might find something there to see you through into your next life.

Whenever you drove long-distance—another broken relationship funneling out behind you—you noticed every phone booth you passed, or every opportunity for a phone booth, exits blinking by like pauses in your sadness. Every phone booth setting off a ping in your chest, igniting that desire to call, to hear a voice one more time, to get some closure. But you could never have enough change to bridge these particular distances, these breaks in the line. You’d need to call collect, and what if no one accepted after charges?

****

And then there were calling cards, cheap and pre-paid from Costco. Times were changing. Even change was changing. Coins no longer jangled in your purse or pocket. You had the card, see. It was sleek and white with a silver stripe you scratched off like a lottery ticket. You called your parents with it—from the beige standard-issue dorm phone, from the greasy payphone after work at the mall, from your first apartment on the push-button receiver with numbers that glowed in the dark.

Flash to an episode of Matlock where Conrad, the chief PI, breaks into a suspicious efficiency. There he finds an empty room, a gritty floor, three Yellow Pages stacked askew. “What do people do on a stakeout?” he muses aloud, following the phone cord to a rotary on the window sill. You can still hear the echo of his boots in that barren space, still remember the trick that delighted you: how he paused to lift the phone book on top, then dropped it so the pages splayed wide. “You order a lot of pizza,” he answers himself. And sure enough, the book yields its secrets like a primed confessor, falling open to the food section—Italian eateries, the bold-stroke slogan WE DELIVER!

You were lucky no one could do that with your mind: rifle through your repeated wishes, peer inside the little jukebox of longing where you spent the most time. You had become so good at being quiet by your college days, tamping down and tucking in, collecting sadness like pennies in a well. Everyone remarked how your voicemail greeting didn’t even sound like you, so you replaced it with music, then learned how to screen your calls.

You could make them wait, but you couldn’t escape them—their questions bridging the distance you had built: book by book and mile by mile. What are you eating? What are you learning? (And under those questions nestled the real ones: What is your weight? What are your grades? ) It wasn’t until the night you didn’t call back at all that they decided to drive north. All night the little green numbers glowed on your phone alone. You were glowing, too, until the urgent ring, your father’s voice cutting in like too-bright light through morning curtains. “Why are you not sleeping in your own bed?” he demanded to know. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

****

“How did you find me?” I asked, voice still croaked with sleep, or not sleep but the aftermath of sex. I squiggled into my pants, couldn’t talk to my father while naked from the waist down. We’d known the minute the bedside phone jangled in that white apartment that it was my father calling, the ring as insistent and angry as his voice. Never mind that, he said, just get home.

And, of course, that had never been the right question.

There were years, I know, when my parents couldn’t find me. I moved away to college, lived in an old Victorian house with ten other people. I called from a payphone on a Berkeley street—surrounded by the scent of falafel and patchouli—and said I wanted to come home. Hang in there, my mother said, but I know she must have cried when she hung up. After college, I drifted from state to state, and I remember no phone calls then, though there must have been: truncated calls, where I hid all my secrets, said everything was fine. I lived in a campground, lived in a trailer, lived on strangers’ couches. I never had a phone. I must have called from various booths, must have slipped once and said, all I want is to go home, and my mother asked, where is home?

That has always been the right question to ask.

When I rented my first apartment, with my own phone, I bought a little cassette answering machine. It took quite a while to record the outgoing message, to time all the clicks, to figure out what I wanted to say and to say it just right. I erased and erased, ended up finally with the officious You’ve reached . . . and Please leave a message after the beep.

It became a reflex to look for the light of messages as soon as I walked in the door, the way I had swiveled my head to the chalkboard in my mother’s kitchen. And a reflex too: the glad lift when the machine blinked its green light, the heavy drop at nothing. I still pushed the button to hear you have no new messages, just to make sure. I rewound the tiny cassette and played old messages, just to have other voices in the room. My mother. A friend. An official from school.

Once, an obscene phone call, a message under the cheerful green light: I want to fuck your brains out. The man’s voice gravelly in the throat, gritty in the room. Even then, I thought it strange that the man would leave a message, would wait so politely for the beep. I played it twice, to make sure I’d heard right, then erased it. You could do that then: erase what you didn’t want. Could watch the tape go back to its own beginnings and start again, start again, until it broke.

****

In the beginning was the gray, and it was called weather. In the beginning was the bell, and it was called school and church and dinner. Always a summons to one thing, away from another, and just as we were settling in, time to change again.

We had seven phones in our home by the time I was grown, and one would always ring first, sounding an alarm. The others followed, like rivals or worse—a family that yammered constantly with nothing substantial to say.

One year we got an answering machine. My mother said they were all the rage. After that, when a call came during mealtime, we sat stiff as mannequins: one ring, two rings, three rings, four. We waited for my father’s canned voice to rise up through the vents, sweep across the kitchen floor: “We are unable to answer the phone at this time. Please leave your name, number, and the reason for your call, and we’ll return it just as soon as we can.”

Before long, my mother never wanted to answer the phone, its ring suddenly presumptuous, an imposition on her time. Instead, she ran to the landing, crouched on the stairs—static, her body silent, as though the caller could hear her if she moved.

“I know you’re there!” her friends sighed, echoing each other. “Pick up!” my father insisted. “I need to talk to you.”

Soon, she forbade us to answer the phone, even if we were expecting a call. “If it’s so important, they will leave a message,” she hissed. “And if it’s not important, why are we wasting our time?”

Eventually, my mother proposed a code: let the phone ring twice, hang up, wait ten seconds, redial. Then, and only then, would the person at home lift the receiver, clutch it in his sticky palm, press it to her addled ear.

I didn’t use this code the last time I called my mother. Were her knees too sore to crouch? Did she lean against the wall instead, steady herself on the railing? It was still my father’s voice that followed the beep, but did I detect a waver, the deep moon of sound slowly waning?

What I might have said: You aren’t home to me anymore. (Too harsh.) We’re history. (Too curt.)

What I did say, clear as a bell: “I love her.” Were they listening as I dangled on the line?

****

Are you listening? Words dangle midair as they pass from child to child: a mouth to an ear, the head inclined, a smile of attention. Then the head swivels to the next in line, words already morphing into new meaning or nonsense. How many children? As many as you want there to be. They line up and shuffle in place, already giggling. The last one delivers the message in its mutant form, and laughter somersaults through them.

The man in the Verizon commercial struts from place to place, phone pressed to his ear. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Yes, we can hear each other everywhere. Words whiz through the air, from ear to ear—imperative, interrogative—disembodied as the moon. We overhear: where are you? We catch: love you. Thousands of love you’s before the phones click off. Love without the I.

Before Alexander invented the telephone, he worked with deaf children; Helen Keller was one of his pupils. His own mother was deaf, and his future wife, Mabel, came to him first as a student. She wrote: Have no recollection of hearing except of a soft low sound I always called the singing of the frogs. Bell invented the telephone for her, that they might speak. She could already see his love in his lips, but not feel it in her ears. His rival, Elisha, and his “harmonic telegraphs” couldn’t reach far enough, could convey only music. Music, in this case, was not enough.

But the first words over the telephone line are not directed to Bell’s wife. His assistant becomes the recipient of this oft-repeated, often misquoted line: Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you. Or perhaps it was just I want you. Or maybe the only intelligible word: want.

Imagine: all language is code, and we spend our lives on the line, waiting for the right voice to reach us. A voice we can understand. And every message, decoded, means: I love.

***

 

Sheila
How did this collaborative effort begin and what led up to that commitment to keep this back and forth going?

Julie
Back in the summer of 2015, I returned to my home state of Washington as a visiting writer at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program where Brenda serves as a permanent faculty member. I had written to Brenda in advance, hoping we could set aside a little time for coffee and catch-up while I was in town, and happily–auspiciously!–we did.

Years before at Western Washington University, Brenda was the professor who first introduced me to the lyric essay in her graduate seminar. She inspired me to keep exploring this genre, blurbed my first collection of lyric essays when it was published in 2010, wrote letters on my behalf when I went on the academic job market in 2011, and has given me the kind of mentorship that any emerging writer would be lucky to have from a more established one. That August afternoon at the coffee shop on Garfield Street, Brenda and I were reminiscing about some of the things we missed from the past, aspects of our own childhood that now seemed entirely foreign to our students. For instance, the telephone! As in a ringing landline tethered to the wall by a long, crinkly cord!

I recall the air of giddiness mixed with nostalgia as we celebrated that “old-school” invention that had played such a memorable part of our youths. I think it was Brenda who declared, “We should write about this!” and I whole-heartedly agreed. Before this time, Brenda and I had both collaborated with other writers, but somehow we had never collaborated with each other before. Once I flew back to Florida, we began writing and exchanging by email what would become the title essay of our future collection–though we didn’t know that then. After “Telephone” was complete, a certain momentum had been established, and it almost felt like, even if we had wanted to, we couldn’t stop. (Nota bene: We didn’t want to!)

Sheila
What was the writing process like for each of you? Had you done any writing in this way before?

Julie
I began collaborating with Denise Duhamel, my friend and colleague in the creative writing program here at Florida International University in 2013. Like Brenda, Denise is a “known collaborator” who has written and published widely with others, including the incomparable Maureen Seaton. I was a big fan of Denise and Maureen’s collaborations but had never really considered writing with anyone before until Denise suggested we write together in response to a prompt from Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. Writing with Denise opened a door that I never imagined I would walk through. I’m not sure why, but I had just never thought of myself as a collaborator. I admired other writers’ collaborative works, but somehow I saw myself as outside the process. Flashback to unpleasant experiences with group work throughout school!

But of course, what makes collaboration different from mandatory group projects is that the collaborators, most ideally, are choosing to collaborate, not being forced to, and presumably, they have some shared interests, questions, and longings that makes writing together a joint effort toward some kind of illumination as well as an exciting, aesthetic challenge. That’s certainly how I have experienced my collaborations with Denise to be, and when Brenda invited me to write with her, it just felt…well…right.

Since I have also been a fan of Brenda’s work for as long as I’ve known her, I can see that I was anxious about writing together at first. I didn’t want to let her down in some way by sending something subpar or simply uninspiring. I don’t remember how we decided who would write the first section of “Telephone,” but I do remember it was me. I got up very early in the morning East Coast time–still the middle of the night West Coast time–and wrote the first entry in a burst of nervous energy. Then, I paced behind my desk for a good 20 minutes before I actually hit the “send” key. But after Brenda’s entry came back to me later that day, I felt the best feeling a collaborator can feel–synergy! Brenda and I weren’t just literally on the same page; emotionally, aesthetically, thematically, we were on the same page, too.

In retrospect, it makes sense to me that writing with Brenda has felt so natural. Reading her first lyric essay collection, Season of the Body, shaped my own first forays into the genre. I’ve continued to read all her books–and teach them as well!–so my study of how Brenda makes a lyric essay is ongoing and cumulative. Her influence permeates my writing and my pedagogical life. And right from the start, I had recognized a shared appreciation between us for a certain kind of language, a certain rhythm and cadence in sentence-making, a deep love of fragmentation and recursion. Brenda was a writer who modeled for me the kind of essays I wanted to write and was already predisposed to writing. Writing Telephone: Essays in Two Voices became, for me, a confirmation and a celebration of that early stylistic and thematic resonance.

Brenda
As you can tell from Julie’s responses here, she is a prolific and fast writer! Her energy ignited my own, and when we were in the midst of an essay, my focus each day became laser-sharp. I woke each day eager to respond, and I usually did so before anything else (well, not before coffee!) The voice that emerged in response to Julie felt different than in my individual writing; it seemed to come from deeper in my subconscious. After writing “with” Julie in the room with me, I felt satisfied all day long.

I have done a few other collaborations—with Suzanne Paola for our textbook Tell it Slant, through three different editions, and with Holly J. Hughes for our book of writing instruction called The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. With Tell it Slant, the writing was more straightforward, and we divvied up chapters according to topic; we weren’t really writing in response to one another, though we did have the support and structure of creating this book together. With The Pen and the Bell, we drafted the chapters as letters to one another, so although the finished book abandoned the epistolary format, the writing itself still has that sense of a deep conversation.

I’ve also been collaborating with my friend and colleague Lee Gulyas for several years; we send each other photographs, and then write what we see in the photograph. Sometimes we each respond separately, then put our two perspectives together; sometimes one of us will write first, then send the writing, and the other will respond to both the photo and the writing. As with Telephone, we usually don’t label the speaker, and sometimes we even scramble our lines together! It’s great fun, and the photos give as an external prompt to get us going.

Sheila
When pieces didn’t work, why didn’t they seem to and how did you deal with that?

 Brenda
In all the pieces, it’s usually pretty clear that two different sensibilities are at work—two women writing from different places, life histories, and sexualities—but the essays that gelled still found a common voice, or the two narrators echoed one another in a way that felt cohesive. In the essays that didn’t seem to work, the stories seemed more tied to the individual rather than the communal, too separate from one another. When that happened, we often “took back” the sections that were ours and made our own essays out of them. Nothing is ever wasted!

Sheila
What were your hesitations about doing this kind of back and forth? Besides ultimate publication, what were the rewards you felt during the process?

Julie
Aside from my first collaboration day jitters, leftover from my fear of ever disappointing a teacher, I didn’t feel any hesitation! Writing with Brenda is joyful and suspenseful. What would she write next? What would I write next in response? Where would our next essay lead us? How would we surprise even ourselves? On the most personal level, I love a new writing challenge, and collaborating is always challenging, regardless of how natural it feels and how rewarding it is. The challenge is in keeping pace but not overshadowing, matching the other writer’s energy, or pivoting the work in a direction that honors what you’ve both contributed so far. Each essay is like a musical number–two people moving together in a dance or harmonizing together in a song, responding to each other’s movements with as much grace and humility as possible. When I complete an essay on my own that I’m proud of, that’s a happy occasion. But when Brenda and I completed an essay together that we were both proud of, that felt like double happiness-happiness squared! And while we did begin publishing our individual essays pretty early on in the process of writing together, I don’t know that either of us was thinking about the possibility of a book during the first months, or even the first year, of our collaborations. Sharing the work with others, while hugely rewarding, always felt secondary to me. The first reward, from my vantage, was the fun of it, the pure thrill and innovation of it, the fact that my heart was in the work.

Brenda
I never had any hesitations writing with Julie, or with any of my collaborators. It’s such a blessing having a reason to write!

Sheila
Did you have an agreement about how this would go and for how long?

Julie
For each essay in the collection, Brenda and I did discuss the general concept or question we wanted to explore in advance of beginning our collaboration. We’d decide, for instance, who would write the first entry, but we always let an ending point arise naturally on its own. When collaborating on these essays, there were really two simultaneous conversations going on–the more formalized conversation on the page and then any necessary side-bars. We’d attach the evolving lyric essay to the email exchange as a Word document, but in the body of the email, we might say something like, “I think this feels close to an ending–perhaps the penultimate or even the final entry is next?” or even simply “I loved your last entry so much! I can’t wait to see what you’re going to write next!”

As with single-author lyric essays, each of our collaborative lyric essays took on its own shape/conceit. “Heat Index” and “Bridges: A Catalogue” required a kind of pre-collaboration to choose the entries that would be indexed/cataloged first. Then, we wrote into those invitations at will, sharing our entries periodically until one of us completed the final one. At that point, we went back to rearrange (I think, ultimately, to alphabetic) the entries and discover the ultimate gestalt. Those essays felt more like a swift epiphany at the end, while others, like “Telephone” and “Cars” and “Camera” moved like slow, steady revelations as we exchanged our entries and wrote in direct response time after time.

Sheila
How did you know that you had reached the end of writing for the collection?

 Brenda
I don’t know that we have! We put together the collection when we realized we had so many pieces that we loved and that had been published; we wanted to see what would happen when we put them together in the same room. After going through our own editing process, and editing with CSU Press, there are still some “leftovers” that will be the beginning to our next endeavor!

Julie
Agreed! I certainly expect to be collaborating with Brenda for years to come. That’s the paradox of collaborations, though: even when expected, they are full of surprises.

Sheila
What would you suggest to readers who get inspired to try collaborative writing like this?

 Brenda
Have fun! Write with someone you know and trust. At first, set up some technical challenges or rules that will give the collaboration some focus.

Julie
I talk to my students a lot about seeking out new invitations, permissions, and prompts every time they read in the genres that they write—and, well, every time they read in any genre. Collaborating is just a more intimate and immediate way of getting to these invitations, permissions, and prompts—while co-making a text with someone else. I love being invited into Brenda’s ideas for a new essay or granted permission to explore a topic with her that I might not have come to on my own.

I think collaboration is for anyone who loves to receive a long, chewy letter in the mail, or to sit for a long time in a coffee shop absorbed in conversation with a friend. If you were ever a teenager who spent hours on the telephone with a confidant (I know I was!), then collaboration is a chance to extend your most meaningful exchanges with another person. By shaping these exchanges into a crafted literary form, you also end up welcoming many others to listen in.

Sheila
As I read the essays in your book, I keep in mind the words of James Allen Hall: “Each subject is subjected to lyrical rendering and astonishing interpretation.” I see exactly why Abdurraqib wrote he hoped to keep learning from the work. Julie and Brenda, thank you for sharing the title essay from the book and for your thoughts in answer to my questions.