Writers and Collaboration: Part 1—Working with Illustrators

I’ve been involved in many different collaborations in my career as a writer. These projects have been among the most exciting, rewarding, and well received that I’ve ever worked on. This series of blogs will discuss collaborations and writers—how collaborations function, and the pros and cons of working together with others.

The first type of collaboration I’d like to discuss is working with visual artists who illustrate a book or poem. There is a collective product at the end of this sort of collaboration, but the author does not necessarily engage in much collaborative work. The writer could, if the artist is open to suggestions or ideas from the author. In some cases, though, the two artists work separately. Often the visual artist is interpreting or reacting to the work of the writer.

I’ve worked with visual artists who have illustrated some of my books of poetry. I collaborated with the fantastic artist Linda Touby, for instance, on my very first book, Glimmerings. I met Linda before she became a well-known painter whose work is displayed in U.S. embassies and many private collections. 

Linda Touby

I got to know Linda in a figure drawing classes at the venerable Art Students League in New York City in the mid-1970s. Linda was the star of that class, turning out gorgeous sketches of the nude models, and breaking all the rules that the instructors were setting for us.

For one thing, Linda never used shading or modeling to define shapes. She had such a command of line that she could suggest volumes just by the way she waltzed the tip of a pen around the page. I admired Linda’s work enormously, and I was thrilled when this skilled artist agreed to illustrate my poems.

There’s a lesson for writers here—you may think that your work is not up to the level of a potential collaborator, but you still might find that there is common ground for a joint project. Don’t be afraid to ask another artist or writer you admire to work together.

I was extremely lucky to work with longtime friend Ilse Gordon on my book Make It Last. Ilse’s lovely ink drawings created a unified look to the collection that in many ways defines the aesthetic of the book. 

Ilse is multitalented. Her work includes luscious oil paintings, as well as furnishings such as painted screens and tables that she tiles herself. 

The incredibly gifted artist Rachael Romero did the cover for my book A Preview of the Dream. I admired Rachael’s work from her woodblock postcards of artists and writers that were popular in bookstores in New York City in the 1980s. I got in touch with Rachael though the contact information on the back one of the cards.

Postcard of James Joyce © by Rachael Romero

At the time that Rachael did the woodblock print for the cover of my collection of poetry, she was making her living partly by sketching portraits of tourists on 6^th Avenue in Greenwich Village in New York City, usually on warm summer nights. When I wanted to discuss the project with her, I stood next to Rachael on the sidewalk as she created quick and insightful pastels of passerby who would stop to have their likenesses done.

Portraits © by Rachael Romero

This brings up another point about collaborations—you inevitably have to go outside your comfort zone in working with another artist. You might find yourself discussing your project standing on a corner under a streetlamp at ten o'clock at night. 

I once remarked to Rachael Romero that her work greatly resembled some of the political posters that I liked from the 1960s and 70s, artwork produced by a group that signed itself the San Francisco Poster Brigade. “I was the San Francisco Poster Brigade,” Rachael confided, not without a touch of pride.

Poster © by Rachael Romero as the San Francisco Poster Brigade

The style of Rachael’s that evokes the period of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s—I love it!

Another artist I admired enormously whose work is on the cover of one of my books of poetry is Mona Caron. Mona is an amazing and accomplished mural painter whose artwork graces many buildings internationally, including the bikeway mural on the Safeway supermarket at the busy intersection of Market Street and Duboce Street in San Francisco.

Duboce Bikeway Mural © Mona Caron

I met Mona Caron at the dedication ceremony for one of her murals. Whenever I wanted to discuss our collaborative project, I had to find her at the site of the mural she was painting at the time and shout up to her while she was high on a scaffold above the street. 

Mona Caron painting

Mona did a fabulous cover for my book of love poems, The Number Before Infinity. We had multiple discussions about the artwork. Mona was concerned that in portraying a sensual woman, she might be objectifying the person in the image. I think she found a way to evoke the eroticism of the love poems in the book while still depicting the female figure as powerful.

Interestingly, Mona elected to handwrite the type on the cover in black letters, in order to have it match the wind-swept hair of the woman in the illustration.

I’ve found these collaborations with visual artists so fascinating. I’ve gotten to work with painters and graphic artists whose work I was a huge fan of, and felt a deep affinity for. To see their work displayed in tandem with my own is humbling and gratifying. Their artwork and interpretations of the poems add greatly to the reader’s experience.

Writers and Collaboration, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 8: When Is a Work of Literature Finished?

Some say never. James Joyce was notorious for correcting his books till the very last second before he had to turn them over to the publisher—and after. When Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake was republished in 1945, four years after Joyce’s death, it appeared with a sixteen-page booklet of errata that Joyce had compiled after the first edition.

James Joyce

At the other end of the spectrum, there is automatic writing, where the author makes no edits. André Breton, creator of automatic writing, used this title for his guide to spontaneous composition in The Manifesto of Surrealism (1924):

SECRETS OF THE MAGICAL

SURREALIST ART

Written Surrealist composition

or

first and last draft

This approach to writings holds that the most spontaneous, least edited utterances are the most finished. Why? Because, according to this aesthetic, the closer we get to the bubbling spring of our imagination, the more perfect the results.

André Breton

That may be true for some writers—Jack Kerouac’s continuous roll of paper used to write On the Road comes to mind. (Someone should write a thesis on the connections between the Surrealists and the Beats!) But I think the law of averages is against spontaneity in literature. It’s like playing roulette and always betting on 22 black. You’ll win big every once in a while, but what about all the other times? How can you sustain that? In literature, as opposed to jazz, for example, spontaneity is hit or miss. More often, it’s miss. This may be because literature requires a critical and self-critical appraisal of the world and of one’s own writings.

In my own writing, I do countless drafts. I print out my work after each series of revisions because the human eye simply reads paper differently than it reads a computer screen.

At a certain point in the revision process, I realize that I’ve reached a spot where the changes I’m making are no longer improving the text. They are merely changing it. At this stage, I’m also switching things back and forth, inserting the same phrases I deleted earlier. When I get to this crossroads, I feel a work is done.

But I’ve also had the experience of thinking that one of my poems was finished, and then reading it in print several years later and feeling it really needed editing. I tweaked many of the poems in my book The Number Before Infinity when the second edition was released in 2014. Why? Years are like prescription lenses. They sharpen our vision.

I did notice when I reread my book before the new edition appeared that most of the poems I wanted to edit were not the poems I liked best. The poems that were my favorites, the ones I choose for readings, had assumed their final form more easily and earlier. Those I mostly left in peace.

I think each writer has to develop a personal sense of when a work is done, just as each writer has to develop a writing process. The answers will be different for different writers, just as James Joyce and André Breton, who were contemporaries, developed diametrically opposite writing methods around the same time, and both in Paris. These two writers were both fascinated by the subconscious and how it could reshape literature, but in Breton’s case, it was the spontaneity of the subconscious that mattered, while in Joyce’s case, showing the workings of the subconscious or superconscious involved a meticulous collage of words and fragments from a kaleidoscope of sources.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer