Unfortunately, Sam & I are no longer able to attend this conference. We send our best to the brilliant folks on this panel!

In Long Beach, CA. More information about the conference.

“Words With Friends: A Roundtable On Collaborative Writing”
1:00 pm - 2:30pm Pacific in the Melbourne Room
With Carlina Duan, Jasmine An, Chen Chen, Sam Herschel Wein, Jeremy Glover, Surabhi Balachander, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Jane Wong

This roundtable gathers an interdisciplinary group of emerging and established scholars and artists to discuss their experiences with collaborative writing and creative practices. Collaborative writing as an intentional method resists the image of the scholar as an isolated figure writing behind closed doors and the division of knowledge through academic disciplines. Instead, collaborative writing invites a framework of creation that is communal, non-linear, experimental, and enfolded in collective actions beyond the page.

Though many graduate programs in the humanities have developed increasingly comprehensive writing workshops and training for their students, collaborative writing remains on the margins of both critical and creative writing instruction. Yet, for many of us, intellectual friendships and collaborations remain the most robust, sustaining, and inspirational aspects of our practices as scholars and artists. As Jodi Melamed so aptly phrased it in a recent workshop, “Collaborative writing makes me braver.” Our discussion celebrates the generative process of writing and creating together. Collaborative writing offers the “speculative possibility” of crossing boundaries of knowledge production and engaging expansively with multiple publics, audiences, and ways of knowing.

This roundtable features four pairs of writing partners who have each worked collaboratively on scholarly and artistic projects. During the roundtable, participants will respond to a semi-structured set of questions—such as “What do your collaborative practices look like in action?” “What have you learned through the process of collaboration?” “How does collaborative writing change your relationship to engaging with a public audience?” “How does writing collaboratively change the nature of the work both of you create?”—before joining each other in open dialogue. We will end by inviting the audience to join our discussion in the Q & A.