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I’d like to point you in the direction of Flying House—a new organization devoted to collaboration between writing and the visual arts. Check out their page to see details about the annual operations, but also look at the blog, where they will be providing new content throughout the year. I had the good fortune to be asked to contribute an essay to their new series, “House Talk,” which is focused on exploring the places where writing and art come together. My essay, “Frank Lloyd Wright, the Interstate, and the House: A Romance,” attempts to approach several ideas about collaboration and the divisions between the arts by looking to America’s greatest architect. There’s also a healthy dose of loosely related personal anecdote. I hope you enjoy it.
(I have a feeling this will not be my last meditation on Mr. Wright. Consider yourselves warned.)
In March of 2009, my good friend and colleague, Brian Oliu, came to visit me in Brasov, Romania, where I was spending a year teaching via the US Fulbright Program. Early into Brian’s visit, we knew that this would be the kind of shared experience that we needed to do something with, something more than the snapping of some photos, the writing of some facebook status updates, and the reminiscences we were bound to share whenever we met again for the indefinite future.
After just a few days, we decided that we needed to turn the events transpiring into an occasion for collaborative writing. What better way to remember than to create something lasting of this trip? If I remember correctly, the first ideas were hatched on a shoddy train running through the north of the country. It took us months, long after Brian had returned to Alabama, and even after I had left Romania, to finish the project, but the process felt as much a journey as the train ride where I recall us laying down the groundwork for it. And the result found a way for us to work through our understandings of the mountains, beer, ubiquitous techno, bowling, karaoke, trains & more trains, superstition, ethnic television programing, expat French folk, pork, pollution, women, and, of course, vampires we met along the way.
We have named the collaboration, “Have Fun in Romania.” I’m happy to announce that a selection from these lyric essays have now been published and can be read online in Super Arrow #3. My thanks to the editor of Super Arrow, Amanda Goldblatt, for taking the pieces, and thanks to Brian for being a great friend and excellent collaborator.
I also recommend you take the time to check out the rest of Super Arrow #3, which features fresh & lively poetry, prose, & art, but also a sizable section devoted to collaborations! (Among the collaborators is another friend & favorite of mine, MC Hyland of Double Cross Press. She wins on both talent and kindness.) Super Arrow is an interesting new(ish) journal that we can expect to continue to do exciting things in the future. I, for one, look forward to following it; I hope you will too.
[I took the image above in Brasov and it remains one of my favorite illustrations of the kinds of surprising juxtapositions I became accustomed to in Romania.]
