My husband, Michael Barach, and I have been working on a book-length series of love letters since we met in a creative writing workshop at Florida State–long before we got engaged or married. Our manuscript-in-progress, “Deus Absconditus and Love Letters From Outer Space,” includes seventy-seven love letters (shout-out to John Berryman). These epistolary poems experiment with just about every form we learned in graduate school. There’s a villanelle, several sonnet sequences, concrete poems, abecedarians (thanks Barbara Hamby), acrostics, erasures, cut-ups, and butchered Welsh forms (that still ended up being pretty cool). There are a handful of acrylic paintings on 4’x6′ canvases that we also created collaboratively. The paintings are labeled “love letters” because they are two poets’ expressions of raw emotion–basically, what happens when words are no longer good enough and you start throwing paint.

Although the poems are written collaboratively, we still believe they speak as a single voice, alternately male and female. Our process varies, although our most common practice is simply to trade lines and then rearrange all of the lines into a new poem draft. Revision isn’t always easy, but we’re both still alive.

This collaboration has taught me so much about how to create a healthy writing process. There is something about collaboration that helps me to focus on process, not product. It’s joyful and fun to work with someone else, and although I want to make sure my lines are as good as Michael’s (not an easy task), I also feel a sense of freedom. For Jane Miller, collaboration infuses the individual with new life by “[a]nimating one’s privacy with another person’s magic.” This often leads to “the creation of a third participant, the ‘us,’” (Interview with Provincetown Arts, 1993). The space between the collaborators is charged with the exchange of ideas, resulting in the emergence of another character—chance—which in an uncanny and often clandestine way, unites the collaborators.

If you’re interested, a few of the poems may be found online:

Another Chicago Magazine: “Love Letter 16. Ring of Fifths” and “Love Letter 18. Words Are Wind in Shut Spaces”

BAP Blog (scroll down until you find us): “Love Letter 13. The World’s Darkening Never Reaches to the Light of Being,” and “Love Letter 77. Mitosis, There Are No Mysteries Too Big”