let us now praise regular folks

reflecting on creative collaboration (and some really good updates!)

“If you kids like trading baseball cards, you’re gonna love trading securities.”

—Reid Hopkins, “fuq”

Hello, writers! This is a post of many colors, as I’m scribbling away to get this to ya tonight! Gonna move pretty fast here 😂 This turn of the year has been very packed, but only with good stuff—here are some updates relevant to you from the last couple weeks:

1. I’ve started an intensive year-long training program in narrative therapy as part of a masters I hope to complete three years hence! This newsletter will get deeper into narrative this year, and I could not be more excited to share these ideas with you. Narrative has been transformative for me and my clients, and I hope to expand that impact as I deepen my engagement with the philosophical foundation for this practice and worldview. This training and masters program also bring me into collaborative work with addiction counselors, family therapists, social workers, and many more dedicated, inspiring people. Creative writing meets narrative therapy? Let’s go!

2. I’m very happy to share my new website, freshly launched! The last few months, I’ve been working with Hawaii-based graphic designer and typographer and adorable cutie Taylor Penton. Taylor could not have made this experience better—he built from my taste and intention, and explained everything about his technique and approach to me along the way. He took my ideas seriously, trying out whatever I proposed and staying true to the colors and vibe I wanted, even though it’s so different and didn’t always work! His expertise brought things I could never have imagined. And he enabled me to make my own changes after we had laid the foundation of the site. Taylor’s currently open to more big projects like this one, so if you have any “strategic identity and visual strategy” needs, check out his work! And, check out the logo we created:

I guess creative collaboration really is the theme this week! It’s been on my mind lately, and I’m so grateful for getting the chance to work with a visual artist—to bring him an idea in words (“would it be stupid to try a traditional flash heart with a pen instead of an arrow for the logo?”) that he can transform into a piece of art that says way more than words could possibly.

It’s a very cool experience!

I mean, is there anything cooler than creating something with someone else?

If you read this newsletter or have worked with me, you know that a foundational belief here is that writing doesn’t have to be this lonely place—that, even when writing alone, you are in relationship. With past works, other writers, your readers, one reader, yourself. Any and all of these. This in the face of a very persistent myth! That idea of writing as a solitary thing for freaks who are “introverted” (as if people can only be one thing in all contexts), in some way anti-social, even violent either with others or themselves, this is just a story of writing. But I did begin to wonder at some point recently, why do I feel so differently? Why do I believe relating and collaboration are at the heart of writing and why we write?

One part of this answer is obvious to me—I’ve written here about how growing up I knew who my dad’s editor was and seeing ‘behind the scenes’ of the creative process, and so I never believed that writing was something that a writer does in a cabin alone drinking Wild Turkey and then the public reads it and nothing else happens and no one else is involved. But, that’s not the whole story of my interest in creative collaboration, or what drives me in this today.

I got a chance to think about it last week in narrative therapy training. Narrative therapy is basically a kind of interviewing, and in my work I am rarely the one asked questions about my personal life! It wouldn’t really work if my clients asked me the same questions I ask them 😂 So I was pretty nervous to have to answer questions about my own life, when we were set an interviewing exercise and I was in the seat of the source—to be interviewed about a ‘chapter of my life’ that I don’t find very interesting, the exercise being ‘what meaning might be attributed to this chapter?’

The chapter I chose was my eight years of a cappella.

I bet you didn’t know I did that! I don’t think a single one of my clients or even adulthood friends knows this about me. When would it possibly come up?

But, this was not just a regular extracurricular, this was something I did multiple times a week and nearly every weekend from my fall semester freshman year of high school to college graduation day. I was the president of the nation’s oldest women’s a cappella group. I arranged 7-part harmonies. WTF? I never think or talk about this!

The interview was fascinating.The questions I was asked helped me—as narrative therapy is meant to do—explore potential meanings of these experiences, and over the course of the interview I learned that my eight years of a cappella—despite the story I had that this wasn’t a big deal and was kind of lame—played a huge part in why I embraced, with deep love, creative collaboration. All the way up to these weird ideas I have about writing today.

The narrative interview let me reflect on this significance. A cappella was where I got to have, consistently, one of the most incredible experiences of being human: singing in harmony with a group of people. And, it was where I cut my teeth on working together for art. Working on arrangements, voicings, solos, travel, set lists, concerts, trust—when I thought I knew more than everyone else, when I took it too seriously to enjoy just being in rehearsal with these people, nothing ever happened. I didn’t always do a good job, but thinking back, I wonder if that eight years of making art with others as a teenager and young adult meant I got to make a lot of mistakes at the right time.

A cappella led me to sing in bands and make music after college, first with some people I had sang with at school, then with people I met just being around. When I started answering questions about this, I realized that my two oldest friends are people I made music with. Making music together is what’s bonded me the strongest to people I love.

Later (I am skipping over a lot), I met people at an open mic in the town I was living who I will know the rest of my life—one of whom I want to celebrate right now. Because the other reason I’ve been thinking about collaboration—and wanted to send this off for this week—is my incredible friend Reid Hopkins.

Reid has an accent. He wears a uniform to work in an office where he helps people and stays tidy. Loves his wife so much. Loves cats.

When I think about collaboration, friendship, and writing, how could I not think of my amazing friend Reid? During Covid lockdowns, Reid put together a record with friends playing from all over the country. From an attic room in my house in the midwest, I recorded harmonies on several of the songs, listening to Reid’s and another singer’s voice in my headphones while my sister—the most talented musician I’ve ever known—produced my harmonies and shared the tracks in the right way. We even roped in an old friend of mine in California to play harp. We weren’t together, but we were working together and having so much fun.

That collaborative record isn’t the one I’m drawing attention to now. Reid isn’t just a songwriter who loves bringing people together to make things, he’s also an incredible lyricist, and he just released an EP that contains many wonderful lessons for writers. It’s not just his accent—the way rhymes can only work the way he sings them—that makes up his voice. It’s also two things about his lyricism: surprise and specificity. And something about his approach: it’s influenced.

First of all, Reid is funny, and his sense of humor as a lyricist is based in the principle of surprise—he twists familiar phrases to make them new, alarming, and profound.

Look at some lines from the last song on his EP:

“Unreliable narrators and more redundancies,

Weird definitions of pessimism and hopes of necessity,

Amateur hours and baby showers and other modesties.

Raison d’être, right back atcha,

What’s mine ain’t just for me.”

There’s just freaking no way around how good these lyrics are. I’m sorry, even if you don’t like Americana folk, you can hear when you listen that this is special. “Raison d’être, right back atcha.”

This is not just a great lyric. It’s a fucking brilliant lyric. It’s the kind of lyric people remember you for. To make it work, you have to hear it in Reid’s voice, with what he had in mind to offer you. It’s the twang, the accent, the specific voicing that makes this line really kill, but it works on other levels too. It’s the combination of a fancy foreign phrase with a down-home, low-brow expression. Surprising, specific, and completely real. That kind of voice is successful because you enter into the person’s intended sound. And that’s where you wanna be.

It’s funny, when people praise great songs they say, “It’s not just music, it’s the writing.”

When they praise writing, they say, “It’s not just writing, it’s music.”

Maybe there’s something there.

Now, what about specificity? Specificity is a huge deal in writing—I often refer to generalities as opportunities to become yourself. That cliche, do you mean it? How would you say it differently? That ‘jacket,’ how can you refer to it that gives us a sense of time, place, and attitude?

We can learn a lot from Reid.

Listen to the opening line of the first song, “fuq,” which I quoted at the top here. The lyrics immediately reference a person none of us have ever met — some kid named JT, and then something we all know about, the classic arcade game Asteroids. The way Reid places himself in time with specificity, while simultaneously placing himself outside of time by invoking traditional folk sound and storytelling, all of these other folk artists—and that is really sophisticated. People think of creativity as ‘making something from nothing,’ and that’s not it! You are making something from all of the somethings you’ve taken in, and that includes other people’s work, the kid you played in the arcade with twenty years ago, his dad, maybe the archives of Todd Snider, and the friendships that make you want to get out there and make noise. Creativity isn’t an act, it’s an amalgamation.

That’s why we need other people to create. We need people to create for, we need people to inspire us to create, and we need people to create with.

So, go listen to The Meaning of Life (And Other Modesties)!

Love you buddy.

The most exciting stuff I’m doing in my client work is unexpected collaboration—after a year working with a client on writing around his founder coaching business, I got to help with lyrics for an album he’s producing now. After three years working with an amazing writer on his philosophy of change and transition, we’re now working on a course together, something totally new.

This is also why I’m drawn to the narrative therapy worldview, in which the therapist is not the expert by any means, just a co-collaborator in constructing the preferred identity and the life that is desired. This is just as I don’t perceive myself as the expert in your book or your voice or intention, how absurd would that be! And the idea of a coach or therapist as a mirror doesn’t speak to me—a mirror is silent anyway, and famously prone to warp. In a reading or listening, collaborative dynamic, both people are affected, not one attempting to effect change in the other.

This is not a normal take for writers! The common advice is ‘write for yourself,’ and ya know, that’s sometimes really good! I consider it a tool in the toolbox or ‘an arrow in the quiver’ as I like to say. When you’re self-conscious in the moment of drafting, or if you’re writing, I don’t know, fiction. But I don’t think it works to unblock and inspire you so consistently in the way I think a relationship can—with yourself, with others. So even if it is just writing for yourself, why not see that as a relationship? Describe that relationship and make it rich. Why does this relationship matter to you? Why do you want to seek creative collaboration with yourself and the Supreme Channel of Mystery?

And then, who else would you want to share creative work with? Not the product, but the work? I meet every single Friday with three writers I met when I was their editor—now we have an unbelievable gift of group friendship and conversation about what we’re working on, what the work means, where it’s going, our contexts, discourses, all kinds of things! What would I do without them? I don’t need to know.

Listening to Zach Woods on the Office Ladies pod a couple months or so ago (a hilarious comedian I admire), he and the hosts spoke about how they will never remember an episode of a show they make—they’ll only remember making it. That’s what people remember. Not the thing they did but the doing. And they remember it a lot more if they did it with others. Because those memories are shared, they live longer, and they live alive in your life a lot stronger.

This example reminds me of something else, something my friends would tell you about me—if I’m enjoying something, I want to know that the people making it had a good time. A movie, a tv show, a record—if I know that creative crew got along and loved each other, I am so much more interested in that thing they made. I enjoy it so, so much more.

Why is it so valuable to form relationships around creativity, to collaborate either hands-on with others or in dialogue around the thing? One thing that keeps beating its drum with my life is, creating together is one way to remove the pressure of norms and standards, the things that so often keep us from enjoying creative work or even starting. In collaboration, you are working for the people right there in front of you, and no one else. You like them a lot. So their excitement, their interest, these are what we care about. In collaboration, it’s easier to remove the pressure of outside standards because you’re at play with others, and play is how we challenge norms—and art is how we resist them.

I also think, like anyone can experience watching opera or basketball, it’s powerful to be part of a group of people all focusing on the same thing at the same time. The cast and the team feel it too, no matter how small a group they may be. It’s the feeling that fuels all good things in the world.

I am not saying that ‘regular people creating art for each other is all that we need!’ Rather, that anyone who has ever created anything you love is just a regular person, like you, who worked with other regular folks you may or may not know about, to make something awesome and full of life. How neat is that? I mean, whether it’s a family, a band, a writing group, a support community, a classroom, a friendship… I think life is kind of about what a bunch of regular folks can do together.

That’s it! Thanks for reading this scattered but delighted post. I love my friends. I love people who make things because it’s fun to do and they care about it and that’s all, and if it’s great it’s great because they made it out of love and with love. If it wasn’t fun to make, I feel like whoever consumes it might be exploiting the creator. So, if we want people to enjoy our work, let’s enjoy making it. Let’s make that a priority. Let us. Find your weird friends and put something together, or to just talk about what you’re putting together on your own. Then, none of you will really be on your own anymore. I really guarantee doing this will not be among the things you regret.