Collaborative effervescence through communitas
Co-authored with Stayci Taylor, Oliver Watts, Francesca Rendle-Short, Peta Murray, Kim Munro, Brigid Magner and Ames Hawkins
Sydney Review of Books
2023
In this essay a posse of graduate students, a gamut of walking writers, and an ensemble of diarologists explore the idea of communitas, ‘togetherness itself’ (Edith Turner), through a daisy chain of gifts: digital voice, live chorus, satellite offerings, testimony, wit(h)nessing, oversharing, listening, and secular ritual.
Drawing on three related sites of durational, hybrid, creative collaborations (presented collectively online at NonfictioNOW 2021), this choral text enacts the joyous embodied knowledge of the communitastic we experienced via the ‘live-but-not-live’ conference medium for which this riff was first devised. The panel tested out the idea of communitas via the creative unfolding of three projects: The Symphony of Awkward (diarologists and oversharers), Writing Walking (crossover writers-in-performance in a walking-not-walking walk/write/shop), and an interactive, unfolding experience with graduate students calling themselves the Columbia College Chicago Elementary School.
To compose this essay, we embraced collaborative or queered co-writing processes and crossover writing. As creative writing method, we ‘fountain up’ (Francesca Rendle-Short). We ask how do we really sense we’re together when we’re together – as in ‘togetherness itself’? How might the many, the lateral, and the collective show up in nonfiction? What sort of radical joy/effervescence can be generated in the liminal space of communitas? What can you do as a group that you can’t do on your own?
Read the full essay here.