Approaching writing as a form of friendship and connection also made it possible to continue writing poems and see the chapbooks through to publication at all.

Creating art collaboratively is not a new process. Musicians are probably the best example of visible collaborative art as we see the music a band creates be drastically different from a musician’s solo project. Other artists have been collaborating and creating together for decades—even in poetry. An immediate example that comes to mind are Yoko’s Dogs (Jane Munro, Mary di Michele, Susan Gillis, and Jan Conn), as well as the many collaborations of Gary Barwin with writers such as Tom Prime, Stuart Ross, and more. More recent collaborations are Khashayar Mohammadi and Klara du Plessis’ “G” and Rahat Kurd and Sumayya Syed’s poetry-essay-letter hybrid collection, “The City That is Leaving Forever: Kashmiri Letters.” And while it’s not poetry, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s “This Is How You Lose the Time War” is a Sci-Fi novella written in incredibly poetic prose. I give all these examples to show that collaborative writing is not as novel or fringe as it might seem. As collaborative works become more visible, more avenues open up for poets to realize they can enter the world of collaborative poetry too.

My sister Nimra and I describe our collaborative art process as being one that started from childhood, when we played with and created art out of our grandmother’s old saris and wedding invitations. As adults, we created a more formal collaboration called Reth aur Reghistan, a project through which we explore Pakistani folklore through writing, art, and community engagement. The idea of collaborating together was never a formal decision, and there was no question that the heart of the project be that sense of play. We had to balance the play aspect with the administrative work required to accomplish goals like exhibiting our artwork and publishing a book of our creative output. But as for the making of our artwork, it could only be at its best when created with that sense of wonder and joy we approached it with as children.  

When I started collaborating with my writing group, VII, early in pandemic lockdowns in 2020, we jumped into a writing process that similarly felt like play. With the need to physically distance to keep ourselves and our communities safe, we found different avenues to connect and foster a sense of closeness. That subsequently made it possible to create two chapbooks with our seven different voices that represents a fusion between our poetics rather than skewing towards any one person. Approaching writing as a form of friendship and connection also made it possible to continue writing poems and see the chapbooks through to publication at all.

Some of my collaboratively written poems have come into being in a notebook passed back and forth as we sat in the sunshine by a river or lake.

The same has been true for the way I’ve collaborated with poets like Liam Burke, Conyer Clayton, and Sanna Wani, where none of the projects began with a firm idea of the end product. What mattered there was pushing our own style and routine of writing with another person. When something was ready to share with the world, we might compile a chapbook manuscript or a submit to a literary magazine. Until then, collaboration was an activity to do together as friends and writers, not so different from playing a board game. Some of my collaboratively written poems have come into being in a notebook passed back and forth as we sat in the sunshine by a river or lake.

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Those are the fun, easy, and carefree parts of writing collaboratively. Like all writing, collaborative poems also go through an editing process once the draft is completed. This is where the challenges of writing collaboratively come in most, in my experience. Creating the draft of a piece can exist without the pressure of deadlines or expectations. However, once the draft is done, the more serious aspect, editing, becomes necessary if the piece is intended for any sort of publication.  

As much as we might want it to be, poetry is rarely the main focus of someone’s life, and it is rarely possible for a poet to make a living out of poetry alone. This means that poets are caught up in their own schedules, day jobs, life, and more. Editing a solo project is involved and time-consuming. A poet has to make a schedule to work on editing, and for book and chapbook-length projects, editing also requires re-entering writing projects well after the initial writing spark. When working on solo edits, I’ve had to find ways to re-enter a project to be able to edit (and sometimes re-write) it so the poetry can reach its full potential. The same applies to a collaborative project, except there’s more than one person who needs to go through the process of creative re-ignition.

Maintaining the collaborative spirit is important, yet difficult, when editing. What do you do when editorially, someone’s entire contribution to a particular poem is suggested to be cut in order to strengthen the poem? How do you ensure there is still an equal contribution from all participating poets while also keeping the poem’s strength and effectiveness at the forefront? This is a challenge that emerged when editing my collaborative chapbook with VII, “Towers.” With seven voices, there were poems where each of us contributed 1-2 lines each. It’s not entirely uncommon for an editor to suggest removing a whole line, but in this particular case, that line was someone’s entire contribution to the poem.

I learned a great deal about editing my solo work too, and how to bring editorial feedback into conversation with my own work rather than just following an editor’s suggestions uncritically.

The challenges of editing a chapbook with seven people also came with high rewards. When considering questions such as the one posed above, the solution wasn’t simply to remove the line. We had discussions about what the line brought to the poem, what its intention was, and how the poet who wrote that line might communicate the intention in a different, stronger way. If one of us felt strongly about the particular configuration of a line, we couldn’t just make the change and move on to the next edit. We had to articulate our reasoning to the other people in the group and consider whether that was the best choice for an editorial suggestion. This process became more complicated when two or more people felt strongly in different directions with regards to an editorial suggestion. With this process, however, more thought and care went into each word choice, each punctuation mark, each line break. I learned a great deal about editing my solo work too, and how to bring editorial feedback into conversation with my own work rather than just following an editor’s suggestions uncritically.

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This approach to thoughtful editing took a long time, though. Everyone has their own process on handling the administrative side of writing. This includes creating editing schedules, figuring out timelines, and working with the way creativity ebbs and flows on a day-to-day basis. We tried (with a lot of difficulty) to find times that worked for everyone—a bigger struggle than writing enough poems to make a chapbook. Finding a time that aligns logistically and creatively is a challenge even for two-person collaborations.

Long-term, multi-year projects like Nimra’s and my Reth aur Reghistan involve applying to grants and adapting ideas based on funding. We had to define the parameters of our collaborative output clearly when it came to the administrative work surrounding the playful art-making I mentioned earlier. Defining these parameters before we had even begun our work was difficult, but in the long-term it helped us create plans that saw our project through. The structure of our book manuscript changed as we researched folklore and learned for ourselves the stories we wanted to include. The nature of our exhibition shifted when we considered a community arts focus might better highlight the collaborative nature of our art-making practice.

We reached the point of having a manuscript and having work ready to exhibit by setting specific work plans and deadlines, and keeping each other accountable to those. The deadlines required by grants also helped with that accountability. We set aside two hours every day to work on our art, and this could include physically making the artwork or writing pieces to interpret the stories. Either way, determining when we would create helped us create the volume of work required for a full-length collection and a solo exhibition.

Towers was written using the exquisite corpse method, where everything except the last written line is hidden. Each poet added two lines, then hid the first line they had written. This process led to surprising narrative and visual turns when the final poem was revealed.

Even shorter projects benefit from some sense of parameters. Sometimes these parameters are the sense of play, and other times they emerge from the writing project itself. Towers was written using the exquisite corpse method, where everything except the last written line is hidden. Each poet added two lines, then hid the first line they had written. This process led to surprising narrative and visual turns when the final poem was revealed. For Orbital Cultivation, Liam Burke and I had recently discovered the golden shovel poetic form and were eager to explore it in our writing. In this form, you take an existing line, and each word of that line becomes the last word in your poem. The length of your poem is determined by the number of words in your chosen line. I came across Phyllis Webb’s ten-line poem, “And in Our Time,” around the same time as I discovered the golden shovel form, and through happy coincidence Webb’s poem became the perfect option for our golden shovel. The poetic form already determined the length of a poem, and the ten lines meant that we would have ten poems equally divided by the end of our writing.

Other methods of poetic form revealed themselves through the creative process. When creating Border Poem, Sanna Wani and I did not have a specific end product in mind. We started writing letters, thinking we would work with them after the fact to create poems. For Sprawl | the time it took us to forget, Conyer Clayton wrote the starting poem, and I was open to do whatever I wanted. I ended up using the last line of their poem to write mine, and the loose crown sonnet style of our long poem unfolded.

These methods give some ideas of how you can enter the world of collaborative writing. There are infinite ways of approaching this type of writing, and each way will be as different as the collaborators involved. In all cases, when writing collaboratively you have to give up control in the final product of the piece. If you allow yourself to get into the flow of a collaborative creative process, you can be surprised by what you create.

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I’m curious to see where collaborative writing will go next. The process is too long-standing to be considered a fad or a trend. Collaborative writing allows for a level of experimentation and creative play that I’m not always able to achieve in my solo practice, and I know for certain that it is going to continue being a part of my writing process. I look forward to being surprised by what happens next. 

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, poets have been collaborating and publishing for decades. That being said, it can still be difficult to find avenues to publish and share collaborative works. I’m fortunate to be writing collaboratively in a time when it’s becoming more common, and there are more avenues to send collaborative work for consideration. With Sprawl, Towers, and Orbital Cultivation, we wrote those chapbooks with the idea of sending them to the new collaborative chapbook publisher, Collusion Books. Collusion was created for the purpose of publishing works by two or more poets. Collusion’s first and second seasons saw two chapbooks each on the bpNichol Chapbook Award shortlist, which clearly meant there was a strong desire for more published collaborative work. And while collaboration has been going on long before pandemics and lockdowns, distance made the desire to connect through other means more prominent.

In an era of prominent collaborative chapbooks being on award shortlists, VII felt comfortable sending a second chapbook manuscript, Holy Disorder of Being to Gap Riot Press, which also had a collaborative title on its recent publication list at the time. While our first chapbook had more structure, a result of lockdown, the second manuscript came out of the time period of “the new normal,” when policies were attempting to get back to business as usual and the speed of life was picking up again. We suspected that an experimental feminist press would be interested in a manuscript exploring the chaos, uncertainty, and anxiety of this period of time. Around this same time, Nimra and I thought about submitting a portion of our book manuscript from Reth aur Reghistan to a chapbook publisher. We were similarly lucky that collaborative writing and art-making had reached a level of popularity to take a chance on emerging writers without trade collections or industry connections.

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I’m curious to see where collaborative writing will go next. The process is too long-standing to be considered a fad or a trend. Collaborative writing allows for a level of experimentation and creative play that I’m not always able to achieve in my solo practice, and I know for certain that it is going to continue being a part of my writing process. I look forward to being surprised by what happens next. 

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Manahil Bandukwala is a writer, visual artist, and editor. Manahil was born and raised in Karachi and am currently a settler on unceded Algonquin and Anishinaabe territory (Ottawa). She holds a BA in English from Carleton University and an MA in English at the University of Waterloo. In 2023, Manahil was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star by Shani Mootoo. She am currently a columnist with Open Book and Digital Content Editor for Canthius. She was the former Coordinating Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine.

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