Introductory section of
"Notes for Izme Pass Expose"
by Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry
A collaborative experiment of some sort, especially one over distance, the participants geographically far-flung. A few of us had been thinking about this for some time. Then, on request from the editors, Michael Joyce wrote his short story, WOE, in order to create something in which a number of writers would do a sort of Storyspace "take" on this work, all of which would then be assembled and meshed by an editor. The difficulties with this notion were both apparent and not. It was obviously going to be quite a feat for the person who was designated editor in this collaborative effort; and it was surely not the kind of collaboration the two of us, Martha and Carolyn had been thinking about.
In the meantime, we began talking about the way we each had found connections in WOE to our own respective hyperfictions currently in process, and how we felt the connections went both ways. That is, not only did we find these connections in WOE, but we felt that, had he read our own works, its author would have found connections to WOE in them. Deconstruction of priority is what we had in mind. We perceived the nature of connection as exactly the context of human relations, an impossible thing to say except through art, images, examples, stories from the continuum of stories.
What became most important to us was how things are connected, not connection as conceptual negative space, but connection being itself a figure against the ground of writing. We weren't thinking of this as the instantiation of something simple and singular, as a link arrow in Storyspace, for instance. The multiple dimension of connection is for us still an unfathomable mystery. Influence, conversation, disposition, drift. Some paradoxical concurrence by which individual voice becomes. We wanted to unmurk it a little, to form connection in time and space, but without respect to those constraints.
The purely arbitrary construction we decided to work within is a triad of existing texts (WOE, Quibbling, and Rosary) among which we began to weave a fourth, new work (Izme Pass) made not of the parts but the connections among the other three. We placed fragments from the three "outside" texts within our own Izme Pass as representative anchors for those works. Almost immediately we began to see how this process of tinkering with existing texts by intentionally sculpting their inchoate connections had the ironic effect of making everything more fluid. Izme Pass began to affect Rosary which poured its new character back into Quibbling which flowed over into WOE and back through Izme. We see Izme Pass as being a thing unto itself in the same sense WOE or any other work of fiction is. But the conceptual underpinnings of its creation catalyzed unexpected changes and alterations which we will be exploring for awhile yet.
(In the original article, printed in Writing On the Edge, what followed the above was an assemblage of some of the conversation that was the real collaboration and work, that is, Martha's voice and mine, over distance, by email and phone, winding around in the fiction and our friendship.)
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