Molly McCully Brown, Susannah Nevison, and Janet Frishberg Talk About Faith, Friendship, Bodies, and Ghosts

In conversation with Janet Frishberg at The Rumpus, Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison talk about their book-length collaboration, In the Field Between Us (Persea), and the angles of their long-distance creative process. Their collaboration began when Nevison and Brown attended the Sewanee Writers' Conference. "Our friendship has always occurred at a geographic distance because we lived in different states, but it immediately had this level of intimacy to it. Sus and I probably had known each other for about six hours before we started joking about how we should write a book together," Brown remembers. From there: 

Nevison: Only a couple months after we got back from Sewanee, we wrote essays in conversation together for the New York Times’s disability series. They didn’t get published for another year and a half, but we’d started having written conversations about these issues almost since we met.

Later on, essentially we both arrived at this point in our writing where we didn’t really want to be doing what we were supposed to be doing. We decided that we’d do a collaborative project, just as something for us to look forward to, along with our other work.

Rumpus: What was the editing process like for a collaborative book?

Brown: It’s interesting—because of the way the poems were conceived, if we cut a letter from one of us, then we had to cut the corresponding letter, or we had to figure out something to put in its place. Sometimes we had a negotiation where one of us had written a poem that we really hated; we’d like the other person’s corresponding poem but not our own. I love Susannah’s work and don’t have the same ego-filled relationship to it, so I was sometimes more allowing with my own work to save something that I really admired of Susannah’s. It allowed me to feel affectionate about the revision process in a way I’d never feel about revising my own work alone.

We did cut some poems from when we were writing our way in. The poems in the book appear roughly chronologically as they were written.

Nevison: The first poem in the book is the first one that we wrote. We each edited the whole manuscript, so I got to provide line edits for poems that I admired; revision became this act of joy.

Continue reading at The Rumpus.