Simone Muench is the author of six books including Orange Crush (Sarabande), Wolf Centos (Sarabande), and Suture (Black Lawrence), a sonnet collection written with Dean Rader. She and Rader, along with Sally Ashton and Jackie K. White, edited They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence). A recipient of an NEA poetry fellowship and a Meier Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award, she is a professor at Lewis University where she teaches creative writing and film studies. She serves as chief faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review, a poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and creator of the HB Sunday Reading Series.
Kristina Marie Darling: You recently co-edited a multi-genre anthology of collaborative writing called They Said, which is newly available from Black Lawrence Press. What are three things you’d like readers to know before they dive into the book?
Simone Muench: a) We tried to publish a range of aesthetics that surveyed the current landscape of contemporary collaboration with the understanding that readers would find pieces to enjoy and admire as well as pieces they were indifferent to; and, in some cases, perhaps even dislike. We were aiming less for a “best of collaborative writing” and more for an inquiry and overview into the collaborative landscape and its rich mosaic of voices.
b) We wanted to be as inclusive as possible in order to honor community and the spirit of collaboration. We were less interested in “perfected” texts and more responsive to the deliberations and deviations of combined minds: privileging risk, vulnerability, and playfulness, over faultlessness.
c) Collaboration can be exhilarating; so, when reading through the anthology, bookmark some of the engagements that most intrigue you and try them out with friends. Also, consider creating some new collaborative ventures. Part of the pleasure is not just the writing, but also the crafting of new methods of collective endeavors. In contradiction to novelist Tom Clancy’s tongue-in-cheek “collaboration on a book is the ultimate unnatural act” (used as an epigraph in Suture), collaboration is often a natural way of composing. As noted in They Said’s preface, “we already edit each other’s work, we make suggestions, we write in the margins, we alter wording—we are all already collaborating. And, of course, most writers recognize and revere the thought that our writing is to some extent in conversation with all of the storytellers who have come before us, one begun before pen and paper.”
KMD: What surprised you the most as you curated the creative work and process notes included in this volume?
SM: The seamlessness and dexterity of some of the voices as well as the sweeping ingenuity of the experiments: A-side and B-side duets, epistolary poems, exquisite corpse styled poems and essays, she said-she said weavings, imaginative horror film scene translations, verbal volleyball matches, computing techniques, antonymic translations, “renga essays,” and other various pas de deux, pas de trois. . .
The ease in which we, as editors, worked together and the effortlessness, and joy, of working with Diane Goettel and Black Lawrence. Diane helped considerably, especially by attending to permissions, which is one of the factors we were most concerned about.
The excitement and inspiration that came from compiling this anthology: instead of growing tired of collaborative work, I grew more invested, turning to one of the other editors, Jackie K. White, to collaborate on another book of poems.
KMD: What advice do you have for writers hoping to pitch and edit anthologies? What was the biggest challenge you faced as an editor of this volume, and how did you overcome it?
SM: Similar to the act of collaborative writing, the composing of anthologies is equally collaborative—mainly a partnership, not only with authors but between editor(s) and the press. During the pitch process, since we understood that our proposal would be an alliance with the press—in our case, Black Lawrence—we noted in our proposal that although we’d serve as the primary curators of the project, we understood that whatever aesthetic decisions we made would publicly reflect the press; therefore, we’d always be open to discussing our selections. And, though we were mainly autonomous, in a few cases, the publisher Diane Goettel weighed in on our choices. However, her assessments were welcomed and, in some cases, even sought.
One of the challenges was figuring out how to embrace a vast array of collaborative work and still be able to consolidate it to one volume; therefore, we established some parameters as to what kind of collaborations we would and wouldn’t accept for this particular volume. Even with these constraints, we still ended up with a 500+ anthology. Another challenge was the rejection of submissions. However, we approached acceptances and rejections democratically; and, in the rare cases where we were split in our decision, we’d discussed thoroughly before making a final call.
KMD: In addition to your work as an editor of this important and necessary anthology, you have co-written some of the most exciting and accomplished collaborative volumes I’ve read in a long time. Tell us about the logistics of your own collaborations. Did you write line by line? Poem by poem? Or something else entirely?
SM: For a book of epistle poems that I wrote with Philip Jenks, we often aggregated the poems line-by-line or couplet by couplet via email as he was living in Portland, Oregon at the time, and I was in Chicago, Illinois. For sonnets written with Dean Rader, we traded quatrains and tercets, also by email, as he resides in San Francisco. For my current project, I’m collaborating with Jackie K. White and though we use email, we also meet in person to discuss and revise. For our project, we are writing in a variety of forms from self-portraits to centos to sonnets to faux blurb poems; therefore, the form often dictates our process as well as the person who initiates the poem. For example, if we’re writing a self-portrait, and I’m sent a couplet, a tercet, or a cinquain, I respond in turn with the same stanzaic chunk until we reach a mutually agreed upon endpoint.
KMD: When working on collaborative poetry, how have you handled revision? How has this varied from collaboration to collaboration?
SM: I tend to revise during the process as well as post-poem. For Disappearing Address, an epistolary collaborative book co-written with Philip Jenks, I attended to the majority of the editing; mainly, because he had a more organic viewpoint of the collaborative process than I did. With Dean Rader, for our book of sonnets, Suture, we revised as we wrote. At the end, two of my friends Hadara Bar-Nadav and Jackie White were generous enough to provide detailed editorial feedback, which we then heeded. For the current project, which is provisionally titled Playing the Field, my collaborator Jackie K. White and I have edit-heavy hands so we revise as we go, and meet in person to discuss our revisions as we finalize our work. We also have a similar sensibility so we’re rarely at odds with one another’s suggestions and overall assessment of a piece. For both of us, revision is part of the art and the enjoyment.
KMD: What are you working on? What else can writers look forward to?
SM: As mentioned above, one of the other editors of They Said, Jackie K. White, and I are colleagues, friends, and fellow graduates of UIC’s Program for Writers, where we were both gratefully mentored by Michael Anania and Anne Winters. We’ve been reading and editing one another’s work since graduate school so we decided this past year, after finalizing the They Said anthology, to collaborate on a poetry book. We applied for and received a Lewis University Faculty Scholar Award, which provides us a course-reassignment so that we can have some time to devote to writing. Our book-length project is one in which we deliberate on a variety of forms from sonnets to centos to self-portraits thus the working title of Playing the Field. One of our self-portraits, “Self-Portrait as a Line from an Emily Dickinson Poem,” was just published at The Los Angeles Review, many thanks to Vandana Khanna and Blas Falconer. Additionally, three of our sonnets just appeared in The Journal with thanks to Emmalee Hagarman as well as Jessica Lieberman. We also have sonnets and centos published or forthcoming in Pleiades, Isthmus, Posit, and Cincinnati Review.
In terms of individual work, Laura Jones, who is an editorial consultant at Mondo, was kind enough to invite me to write a piece, “Wild Roses, Red Feathers,” for her flash-fiction anthology that accompanies the horror film The Field Guide to Evil. The film is comprised of eight segments that draw from horror folklore around the world. I was able to respond to the first segment “Die Trud” by directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, who also directed the fabulous film Goodnight Mommy. I enjoyed the project so much that I may continue to write these “minute fictions”. . .