Interview on Collaboration with N. Jones and W. Todd

Sometimes the hardest part of collaborating is getting started. Here are some tips from creators that have collaborated — sometimes with an absolute stranger — and made something wonderful!

Did you know your partner in collaboration beforehand? Explain how you got together. 

N.:  Yes!  I mean, I think our poem and bio says it all ;)  We've been friends for years and have always supported each other's artistic endeavours.  W. took a poetry class recently so I figured he'd be into it, so I hit him up for this call!

W.:  Yes, we knew each other from our days as non-native New Yorkers together. We were both twenty something free spirits who moved to the city in search of adventure. Long story short, we discovered we had a lot in common, including our love for language and the arts.

How did you collaborate? What was your process?

N.:  We Zoomed!  I brought some ideas and fragments, and W. brought some work and we wrote together.  Played off of each other and gave feedback as we worked.

W.:  To collaborate, we hopped on a Zoom call and brainstormed ideas for writing topics. We decided that we were both interested in themes of childhood and friendship and decided to incorporate them into our piece. After refining our topic further, we decided to share our unconventional way of meeting each other. We each wrote individual lines of our poem and edited the piece to make it more cohesive.

What were some challenges you faced during the collaborative process, and what did you learn?

N.:  I think the trickiest part of collaborating is making sure each person is equally heard and felt in the finished work.  It can be hard to make sure there's a balance and that everyone is represented.  Like with some of our work that came out of the session, a piece might have been almost entirely written by one person, but the idea in that way or with that form would have never happened without the other person.  The poem would not exist without the collaboration.

W.:  Some challenges we faced were writing artistically and trying not to sound too obvious. I like poetry that heavily utilizes metaphor, so I wanted to use language that painted a picture, but had a hidden meaning behind it.

Any final words of advice for future collaborators?

N.:  DO IT!  Let loose, have fun!  Seeing what you can make when you put yourself out there and get weird with it?  Always worth it!  And don't stress!  It's about the process.  Even if you don't end up with something all parties feel is publish-ready, you'll have fun and learn!

W.:  I would advise future collaborators to choose a central topic and create a word web to help generate as many words as possible related to that topic. This might give you some ideas to branch out into directions that you hadn’t thought of before.

Read N. Jones & W. Todd’s piece, “Untitled Haiku”

N. Jones (she/they/it) and W. Todd (he/him) are neurodivergent queer artists from the Midwest who met on craigslist. Find them: @ablazeinhim; will-todd.com