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January 26, 2008
Collaboration
When Robbi and I first proposed to teach our Winter Study class at Williams, we were mostly curious to know if others would be interested in trying their hands at producing the kind of books that we have been working on. We were pleased that enough students were interested to meet the minimum enrollment numbers. But we arrived on campus in early January with decidedly low expectations. A number of factors were working against us.
First off, Winter Study is really only three weeks long. Not enough time, we worried, to generate collaborative creative content with a partner one had never worked with before. Surely not enough time to piece together an attractive, interesting, coherent narrative.
Also, the general idea of winter study is to provide a low-key, low-stress outlet for students between two intense academic semesters. Many of the courses are neither rigorous nor time-consuming. To work according to plan, ours would have to be both.
Finally, collaboration between writers and artists is a pretty novel concept. Typically, especially in college, writers workshop with other writers and artists critique with other artists. We had no idea how quickly our students would be able to adjust to the mixed media aspect of the course.
We had 12 students, evenly divided between guys and gals. We had a fairly even mix of class years. We had six writers and six artists.
Given the short time frame, we had sent our students homework to complete over the break. We emailed them three paragraphs and three images. The writers were instructed to "respond" to the images and the artists to the paragraphs. On the first day of class we looked at the responses together as a group. It was interesting to see how stunningly various were the responses to the same prompts. Our hope was that it would give our students, and us, a good sense of aesthetics and interest to the end of helping us come up with compelling collaborative pairs. We gave our students the opportunity to write us an email that night letting us know who they might like to partner with, not along the lines of who they liked personally, but along the lines of creative compatibility. We took this info, added our own judgment, and assigned pairs. The next day we spent most of the class period looking through an anthology that was the course text, looking at and discussing the work of established indie comics makers. At the end of the class, we announced the partner pairings and sent them off to spend the weekend starting the conversation about a collaborative project.
The rest of the course was essentially a workshop to discuss and develop their works. We met three times a week for two hours as a group, and each pair met independently with Robbi and me for an hour long tutorial session.
Our biggest worry was that the groups would have difficulty getting off the ground with the initial idea from which to depart. Not a single group struggled in this respect. Their ideas were interesting and surprising. The creative direction seemed drawn from a place of genuine collaboration, not from one person's aesthetic or agenda overriding the other.
I'll cut to the quick:
Our students were amazing. They worked their butts off. They took risks. They articulated their ideas with passion and eloquence.
We were so pleased that we took them bowling. Writers versus artists. In a match to the death.
Here is Robbi's crew.
And here are some of mine.
It was a well-contested match, but I am happy to report that the writers prevailed by a slim margin. Our victory can be attributed to a general lack of will among the artists. I cite this example: at one point one of our more audacious writers, name of K-Town, stole the 8-pound pink ball that many of the artists had been using. The act was overt and witnessed by various members of the artist camp, but beyond minor protest, the theft went uncontested, the result of crumpled spirits. From that point, my people cruised to easy victory. We aren't above a little necessary sabotage.
Perhaps the highlight of the evening was the purchase and consumption of the "cod roll", a curious item from the snack bar that fascinated one member of my team.
The month continued and the work continued to exceed our wildest dreams. We had hoped for not much more than good thinking on the topic of cross-media collaboration. But complete narratives were emerging, complete with strong, thoughtful syntheses of writing and images.
The six projects were, in a nutshell:
1) a mock-academic piece on Emily Dickinson that gradually but unflinchingly pilloried the life and work of the misunderstood Belle
2) the tragicomic tale of the dawning of consciousness of Moshe the "just add water" Tyrannosaurus Rex, complete with questions of ontology and the premature onset of epistemological gloom
3) a process piece on the inner narrative of a superhero/assassin, who, in the end, is revealed to be just like you and me, an honest average Joe who goes to bed in his suburban house each night
4) the quiet, yet powerful story of a disabled woman trapped in her upstairs apartment, taking the voyeur's long look at the world passing by outside her window
5) the story of two college lovers poignantly reunited on the occasion of a wedding told in an alternating narrative of photograph and prose
6) a quirky, knowing voicing of male insecurity that unfolds across a 96-inch accordion-fold dreamscape of self-aggrandizement and surreal fantasy
Further, our students seemed motivated to actually produce finished books, formatted in InDesign, the professional page layout program we use for our books. Robbi did a two-hour seminar on the software and expected that the students would be overmatched by the new technology. Instead, each group created sophisticated layouts, which would enable them to print and assemble multiple finished copies of their book.
We set up a bookmaking lab in our classroom and spent a full day printing, trimming, folding, scoring, gluing, and stapling.
They were tireless and amazing.
In spite of the usual fare of errors and delays on the part of the printer.
It was incredibly gratifying to see the care they took in assembling their finished books.
And the pride they obviously felt in beholding them.
On the last day of class, this past Wednesday, we had an open house for the public. I would have been happy with a dozen or so visitors. Instead, over the course of two hours, 50-60 people came through to see the finished books, students and professors alike.
Perhaps it was the spread of delicious cheeses that drew the crowds, but our students' work spoke for itself. They were absolute stars.
Inspired by the spirit of collaboration, one of our artists penned the following illustration, which I may have made into a poster for the benefit of generations of collaborators to come. It speaks volumes, I think.
I am reluctant to ever teach another course for fear that no other group of students could match up to the ones we had this month. For those of you who care about the place, it seems that Williams is in very good hands.
Posted by bogenamp at January 26, 2008 10:05 AM