Montana Book Festival 2018

Writing can be lonely because it’s usually done alone. When the work is finished,
it’s often difficult to find an engaged or interested audience. Creative
collaboration refreshes and inspires the writing process while also establishing
community.

The poets Mackenzie Cole, Henrietta Goodman, Ryan Scariano, Karin Schalm,
Ellen Welcker and Maya Jewell Zeller have all participated in recent writing
collaborations that have changed their writing for the better. They will discuss
how their collaborations developed, what they learned from them, and how the
process influenced their writing styles. They will read from work that emerged
from their respective shared writing projects and engage the audience in the
creation of an impromptu collaborative piece.

Mackenzie Cole’s poems (collaborations with Alicia Mountain and Tony Ruzika)
are anthologized in They Said: A Multigenre Anthology of Contemporary
Writing that was released from Black Lawrence Press in June. Two years ago,
poets Henrietta Goodman and Ryan Scariano began a poem exchange via email
that developed into a collaborative book project consisting of two parallel
alphabets of acrostic poems contemplating the intersection of the human and
non-human animal worlds. Karin Schalm and Ellen Welcker share weekly word
exchanges, creating poems with similar touch points but very different topics and
styles. They are working together on a chapbook called The New
Economy. Maya Jewell Zeller collaborated with the artist Carrie DeBacker on a
book of watercolors and poems, Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts, that muse on
the philosophies of geologic time, climate change, human genomes, and
existential destruction.

All of the panelists have exciting ideas to share about creative collaborations and
the development of dynamic writing communities.