“Every morning you climb several flights of stairs, enter your study, open the French doors, and slide your desk and chair out into the middle of the air. The desk and chair float thirty feet from the ground, between the crowns of maple trees.” That’s one of Annie Dillard’s fantastical descriptions of a writing process, from The Writing Life. “Your work,” in Dillard’s words, “is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.”
Writing, as Dillard describes it, is incredible work. It demands a force of, a belief in, imagination’s ability to do what seems unbelievable: writing in midair, without a net. It’s a risky practice. It could fail. You could fall.
None of the writers of this forum’s four books do (fail or fall). They push their desks and chairs into the air and — imaginatively, seemingly impossibly — stay there.
These four books are very different, from each other and from most other academic books. I don’t want to efface their differences. Each book shimmers in its singularity. Each “gives form,” in Anne Dufourmantelle’s words from In Praise of Risk, “to a pure singularity, to what will only arise a single time.” Each book in this forum is this book and no other. That’s celebration-worthy.
Part of my task is to find kinships across these books’ differences. One relating thread running through them, like a readerly basting stitch, is imaginative power. It’s a double power: imagining new ways of doing things and imagining ways of doing new things.
It’s a power strong enough to keep these writers hovering above ground, near treetops, where horizons look different. There, midair, through their imaginative powers, these books reshape contours of what can happen, in and through writing.
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These four books are remarkably crafted writing experiments. And experiments are always risks. They materialize amid a pair of questions: what if? and how might? Between these questions, imaginations become realities.
I don’t know what questions these writers asked themselves. So I have to do some imagining, based on my readings.
What if we turned our years of conversations and collaborations into a text? (A Knausgaard Reading and Writing Collective)
How might I create a “multi-genre, multi-form, multi-limbed” text that’s poetic and prophetic, emergent and urgent? (Lata Mani)
What if I wrote a book that is separate, yet inseparable, from a documentary filmmaking process? (Shannon Lee Dawdy)
How might I make a text without fixed form, a web of ways of discovery? (Shahzad Bashir)
I’m sure these writers asked many more, many other questions. Questions drive imaginations. And imaginations — powerful ones, full of creative force — fashioned these writing experiments.
I dwell on these what if? and how might? questions to highlight another cross-textual kinship. These experimental books are necessarily experimental. They’re experimental because they have to be, to be what they are. Each book works, in Kathryn Reklis’s words, “to render in writing what cannot really be written in the rituals of our recognizable scholarly genres.” (I’ll return to these words.)
Maybe these books are necessarily experimental because they’re necessarily honest? I recall Shannon Lee Dawdy’s question: “‘what is the most honest way that I can present what I’ve learned?’” Honest here seems to include personal, dis-closive, risky. (Honesty always involves risk and humility.)
In other words, Dawdy’s question seems to ask: how might I write most honestly about my learning, as a process? That seems a question each book, in its own way, asks and responds to.
To its imagined, imaginative how might? questions, each book implicitly and performatively responds like this. Supplementing these books’ forces of imagination are forces of necessity. Together, these forces -pel these books forward: impelling, compelling, propelling.
And us with them. This “us” seems necessary, in at least two ways.
Each of this forum’s four books is collaborative, internally and externally. Each book is — performs — a collaboration: with a filmmaker, or with other writers, or with digital designers. So they’re multi-noded and multi-mediated. They necessarily exceed bounded genres and genred boundaries. These texts exceed their own borders.
They draw us in, requiring our collaboration. We have to click on networked links to create paths, or scan QR codes for audiovisual experiences, or weave together words and images and word-images, or attune ourselves to polyphonic interactions. This forum’s books are — require — inter-action.
Through our collaborations with the authors, the books are continuously remade. In Bashir’s words, “these stories will change if and when they are taken up or transmitted by others.” In Mani’s words, “knowledge is conceived as situated and necessarily partial. Any synthesis or conclusion is deemed provisional.”
Collaborative also means unfinished. These four books are, meaningfully, porous rather than hermetic. They make ways for, and call for, our inter-actions with them. (With might be, performatively speaking, these books’ activating preposition.) They invite us into their ongoing meaning-making adventures.
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Imaginative, collaborative, unfinished, honest — they’re all risky. And this forum’s four books are, as I’ve suggested, necessarily risky. That offers one response to the question how and why are these books risky? But another question remains open: why take these risks? In other, fewer words: why experiment?
Jeffrey Kosky asks a version of this question and then offers a possibly risky response: love. We experiment, we try, we risk out of love. Love is at least some, and maybe all, of these risky things. It’s imaginative, collaborative, unfinished, honest. Love is, unsurely, an experiment. It can always fail.
“The things we love,” in Kosky’s words, “aren’t always perfect — yet they affect us, and we care about them and for them.” No, they aren’t. And yes, they do — and, so, we do.
Love, here, doesn’t name something adolescent, or rom-commy, or cloyingly happy-ever-aftered. It names a doing. It’s a doing of ongoing care, a giving of dedicated attention, an act of fidelity, a way of enacting with. It’s opening, and personal, and intricate, and unpredictable, and profound. It moves me, or maybe you, or maybe us.
That seems, to me, an apt description (among others) of what these four books are and do. They care about and for their subjects and objects, their processes and products. They care, they attend, they invest, they risk, they surprise, they move. And they captivate.
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Now I return to Reklis’s words, moving in two directions.
In one direction, I underline the word “rituals.” It leads me to recall Jacques Derrida’s “Passions,” which begins by imagining a scholar: “a specialist in ritual analysis.” “There is ritual everywhere,” Derrida writes. “Without it, there would be no society, no institutions, no history.”
We are, Derrida reiterates, all ritual participants. If you’re reading these words, you’re participating in a set of rituals called scholarship.
Reklis reminds us of this point. And Reklis reminds us that genres are rituals, too. They’re protocols, procedures: conventions. They don’t have to be fixed forever. This forum’s four books demonstrate that. Their authors are ritual innovators. They show us different hows. They demonstrate how differences are possible. And they ask us to ask questions about how.
In another direction, Reklis highlights something about the responses featured in this forum. They’re poly-semic, even poly-phonic — especially together.
Each response is to one of its four books. But it might be, maybe somehow even is, addressed to other books in the forum. Here’s an example.
“I can only imagine how many conversations they must have had in cars, coffee shops, and over dinner, conversations that may have flowed in and out of the domain of their research, exploring its connections to everything else — the weather, work, family, memories, music, food.”
These words are Liv Nilsson Stutz’s, written about American Afterlives — more specifically, about interactions between Dawdy and filmmaker Daniel Zox, who collaborated on the film I Like Dirt.. But they might also be about A Knausgaard Collective, whose meetings spanned six years. (I’d guess that Mani and filmmaker Nicolás Grandi had plenty of conversations, too.)
Here are a few more examples (among so many possibilities) of respondents seemingly responding to all four of this forum’s books.
“Or, at least, thinking back to these moments is where I start projecting my own participation into their conversations.” (Scott Korb)
“I was captivated by what I read.” (Fred Appel)
“‘With a twist’ is perhaps the best way to describe this book’s scholarly nature.” (Ruth E. Toulson)
“It is an invitation to plurality — to multiply and let proliferate what we understand.” (Shenila Khoja-Moolji)
“This epistemology and method is attuned to the edges of what we can see, to the experiments, to the way people imagine and work with other beings to produce a future in the gaps, the interstices.” (Miriam Ticktin)
“All of this expresses a personal affinity with the earth as a living being and a duration-soaked abode of beings with whom we are always in connection, despite our conditioned inclination to believe that society consists only of relations among the living.” (Erik Mueggler)
“They provide a taste of how generous collaboration leads to insight, and how thoughtfulness supports risk.” (Kyle Wagner)
These resonant sentences seem almost oracular. I’m not sure what to make of their poly-morphic, multi-textual reverberations.
Maybe it’s that these four books, across their real differences, share experimental effects on readers and reading? That their experiments compel readers’ attentions, in ways they didn’t know to want until these reading experiences? That these books are openings to fresh, refreshing, imaginative possibilities? That they incite imaginations, to contemplate what might be possible in and for and with and through academic writing?
What I’m sure of is that these four books enactingly offer portals to ways of considering what is and what might be. That’s the magic that writing — at its experimental best, risking, working without nets — can perform.