In the neoliberal university of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the word collaboration has a legitimacy that it lacked in the 1990s when the research on collaboration first appeared.It has become imperative for academics to participate in at least some forms of collaborative work. In , for example, Jonathan Church speaks of the intensive collaboration required of faculty members who, rather than being the sole providers of knowledge are expected to be part of teams creating pedagogical products (35). Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford’s (1990) was the first to combine theoretical and historical explorations with actual research on collaborative and group writing. And yet, as recently as 2001, Ede and Lunsford continued to argue that no matter how thoroughly the status of the author has been problematized, deconstructed, and challenged ( 354), we in English studies are often more comfortable theorizing about subjectivity, agency, and authorship than we are attempting to enact alternatives (356).

In an effort to encourage collaborative efforts, Ede and Lunsford’s 2001 article points to several examples of humanities scholars’ success at collaborative research and writing, including the University of Alberta’s Orlando Project. As evidence of the crucial role collaboration played in the project, they highlight the number of scholars involved, the breadth of the goal, and the multiple perspectives necessary to illuminate the writing of women across such a broad span of time (361). Clearly, the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory/Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada (CWRC/CSÉC) follows in this mode. See Susan Brown and Mary-Jo Romaniuk’s Afterword in this volume for more on the CWRC/CSÉC.

But my focus is on alternative collaborative modes in innovative women’s writing communities. A bridge from Ede and Lunsford’s argument to my own may be found in their attention to the work of Kathy Acker, whom they describe as a self-styled autoplagiarist (362). In Acker’s work they find a practical example of the theory that language cannot be owned—particularly not by a coherent, autonomous, individual author (363). Also useful is Ede and Lunsford’s discussion of an invitational rhetoric that grows out of collaborative principles, one that offers an alternative to the agonistic individualism characteristic of so much academic writing (360). As much as I admire and have learned from their research, I find it a bit unsettling that despite their call for ways of thinking about writing that are genuinely collaborative, what they really want to see is work that is being written by two coherent, autonomous individuals—two authors, rather than one. Their collaborative writing is still, to paraphrase the title of their book, a singular text, but it is now written by plural authors.

In the work of innovative women’s writing in Canada, there is both a critique of the author and an enactment of an alternative: a collaborative space of friendship, networking, and conviviality that Nicole Brossard calls connivance. In an article on Brossard’s , Jodi Lundgren gestures toward the meaning of connivance when she sets it alongside the word complicity: The respectful connivance (230) and nice complicity ([] 118) that develop between her [Nicole Brossard] and her translator offer hope for an intimate, transnational exchange between women of words (18). This notion of collaboration as an intimate, transnational exchange between women of words is strangely absent from recent scholarship on women’s collaborative writing. Despite the complex vision of collaboration analyzed in Lorraine York’s (2002), for example, when it comes right down to it collaboration means, simply, overt co-authorship or co-signature of a work of art (4).

begins with an epigraph, one that takes us to that fantastic moment in Virginia Woolf’s when, perhaps for the first time in literature (78), a woman liked another woman. She collaborated with her in the sense that they shared a laboratory. Or did she? York cites Woolf’s text as follows:

The text actually looks like this:

In deleting the quotation marks and the ellipses, York has eliminated both the fictional writer and imagined reader of these lines, both of whom were crucial for Woolf’s argument and for grasping Woolf’s vision of collaboration otherwise. In order to write the sentence, Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together, Woolf had to collaborate with herself by creating a heteronym—a novelist by the name of Mary Carmichael—who ostensibly writes these words in a novel that the I (also a convenient term for somebody who has no real being [Woolf 6]) of Woolf’s text is reading. Woolf’s imagined women readers are also collaborators in the telling of this tale. We are addressed directly: Are there no men present?…We are all women you assure me? (78).

According to the , connivance" involves sharing a covert understanding with a person, co-operating with that person. The Latin roots of the word collaborate are col—together—and laborare—to work. To collaborate means to work in conjunction with another or others, to co-operate. Authorship has nothing to do with it. For Woolf, connivance required her to connive, to undertake a covert operation. For Brossard, collaboration is overt and involves a fine adventure of encounters, discussions, sharing, friendship and writing, as she explains in a fragment of conversation with Louise Forsyth entitled :

I work in places where there are affinities, Brossard asserts; Work spaces among women linked by a project are stimulating and productive, and I have always associated pleasure, friendship and festivity with them ( 27).

By way of offering a concrete image of this alternative notion of collaboration, let me turn to one of the stimulating and productive work spaces shared by Caroline Bergvall and Erín Moure. Rather than list them in a traditional table of contents, Oana Avasilichioaei and Kathleen Brown, the co-editors of the 2011 issue of Calgary’s magazine decided to include the names of the contributors in an unconventional way (see Figure 2.1).

As this small section of the map indicates, Erín Moure may be linked to Caroline Bergvall via a collaborative space that includes Donato Mancini, Elena Johnson, Kai Fierle-Hendrick, Traver Pam Dick, Indra Singh, and Rachel Zolf. Several additional chapters could be written tracking the generative collaborative links between this set of names alone. But let me look briefly at just one of them: Rachel Zolf. Previously based in Toronto, while studying at the New School in New York, Zolf designed and mounted possibly the first collaborative MFA in Creative Writing ever. emerged out of an online archive of poetic DNA that she elicited from eighty-six writers, artists, and thinkers from across North America, all of whom are listed as collaborators.In Zolf’s article she lists all of the following as her collaborators: Sandra Alland, Gary Barwin, Emily Beall, Joel Bettridge, Gregory Betts, Christian Bök, Jules Boykoff, Di Brandt, Laynie Browne and Jacob Davidson, Kathy Caldwell, Angela Carr, Abigail Child, George Elliott Clarke, Stephen Collis, Communications and External Affairs, Jen Currin, Moyra Davey, Anonymous Donor, Thom Donovan, Sarah Dowling, Marcella Durand, Kate Eichhorn, Laura Elrick, Jennifer Firestone, Rob Fitterman, Jenna Freedman, Dina Georgis, Barbara Godard, Nada Gordon, Kate Greenstreet, Rob Halpern and Nonsite Collective, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Holbrook, Catherine Hunter, Jeff T. Johnson, Reena Katz, Bill Kennedy, Kevin Killian, Rachel Levitsky, Dana Teen Lomax, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Jill Magi, Nicole Markotic, Dawn Lundy Martin , Steve McCaffery, Erica Meiners, Heather Milne, K. Silem Mohammad, Anna Moschovakis, Erín Moure, The Office of Institutional Research, Akilah Oliver, Jena Osman, Bob Perelman, Tim Peterson, Vanessa Place, Kristin Prevallet, Arlo Quint, Rob Read, Evelyn Reilly, Lisa Robertson, Kit Robinson, Kim Rosenfield, Paul Russell, Trish Salah, Jenny Sampirisi, Heidi Schaefer, Susan Schultz, Jordan Scott, Evie Shockley, Jason Simon, Cheryl Sourkes, Juliana Spahr, Christine Stewart, John Stout, Catriona Strang, Chris Stroffolino, Michelle Taransky, Anne Tardos, Sharon Thesen, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Nicolas Veroli, Fred Wah, Betsy Warland, Darren Wershler, and Rita Wong. (n. pag.) Moure’s name is listed on Zolf’s site, as is that of another of the writers on the special issue map above: Kai Fierle-Hedrick. Moure donated poetic DNA; Fierle-Hedrick produced a poem based on the archived donations. And Bergvall included Zolf in (2012), her co-edited anthology of conceptual writing by women. Bergvall and Moure et al. write in this always-expanding, rhizomatic field of what Brossard calls connivance. As a reader of their work, I feel invited to participate by noting the ways that their alternative collaborative writing practices connect texts across space and time in a way that also expands our understanding of collaboration.

Born in 1962, to a French mother and Norwegian father but based in London since 1989, Bergvall is a multilingual poet and artist who has published four books, several chapbooks, and a compact disc of performance texts entitled.The John Hansard Gallery at the University of Southampton has published a DVD release of Bergvall’s solo work under the title . Bergvall works with collaborators who are architects, composers, musicians, and installation artists. She has mounted sound-space-text installations in Britain and the United States, including one at the Tate Modern in London and another at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2013, I invited her to produce an art piece based on the qualitative data in the Rhodes Project archive, and she ended up collaborating with a graphic designer. The art piece they produced, entitled , is now part of the permanent collection at Rhodes House in Oxford. Bergvall even runs her website (carolinebergvall.com) like a project. The front page, for example, features a series of photographs from three recent projects: a sky banner prepared for Refugee Week ; photographs from an audiotext with vinyl lettering installed in the main lift of the Theatre du Grötli in Geneva from February 2–5, 2012, and a photograph of part of a group show at Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, October 2011 to February 2012.

Bergvall’s texts are not singular either; they exist in always morphing iterations and the installation work appears in different contexts with different content and effect. Only in particular moments of reading and performance, as Jacob Edmond argues, can a singularity be grasped: These repetitions and variations stress the singularity of each embodied instantiation at the intersection of multiple vectors of iteration, what Bergvall (2011: 5) elsewhere calls a series of intersecting lines or tissues of lines (114). Bergvall’s comments in the published version of an interview I did with her about her installation piece offer some insight into the way she thinks about the relation between different iterations of a text:

Bergvall and Moure’s alternative collaborative writing practices take seriously the implications of Barthes’ notion of the death of the author. If writing requires the death of the author, why not collaborate with dead people?With thanks to my partner Frances Bowen who, when I was stuck, read a draft and then asked if I really intended to claim that Moure was collaborating with dead people and fictional versions of herself.The insight is hers. They’ve both done so. In , Moure collaborates with Pessoa. And in , Bergvall collaborates with Chaucer, rewriting the Wife of Bath’s tale from the point of view of a contemporary woman named Al.

The opening of describes the invitational rhetoric she experiences in reading Chaucer: Do we let ourselves go back to the ancients, or do they catch up with us? No matter. An outstretched hand suffices. Lightly they cross over to us, our strange guests who are like ourselves (n. pag.). The English language itself is a strange guest in Bergvall’s mouth. Having grown up speaking French and Norwegian, she describes her move to London in 1989 as precipitating what she calls her “language’s work” in English.

Bergvall collaborates with the English language—“meddles” with it, to use the adjective of her recent collection of texts —in order to, in her words, create textual works where the authorial hold over the text is somehow distanced, perhaps neutralized, yet where the structural impact of experience, of living, of loving, of knowing, of reading, are in fact recognized ( 21).

Edmond sees Bergvall’s practice as one that simultaneously asserts and erases both voice and identity (114). But I prefer to see it as entering into a collaboration with itself and others, with itself as other. Like Moure, Bergvall describes her practice as not solely motivated by linguistic and verbal concerns but also by concerns of context & situation (). Bergvall’s practice inhabits what Joanna Drucker (among others) calls an expanded field of writing that includes recorded sound, the speaking body in performance, and text installations. One of the signifiers that shows up repeatedly in Bergvall’s texts in this expanded field is the graphic sign of collaboration: the ampersand. Bergvall sees the ampersand as, in her words, a sign of interconnections and spaces of inscription. It offers an alternative to the either/or space of the binary opposition that in literary contexts is figured as writer/reader and gestures toward the fundamental importance of collaboration for Bergvall’s practice.

In contrast to Bergvall, who began publishing in the 1990s and whose work with text was performative and innovative from the start, Erín Moure was initially recognized within Canada as a sophisticated and capable but resolutely lyric poet. However, by 1988 when her fifth book, , won the Governor General’s Award for poetry, Moure was already furious about the way people use language (86) and bored by what she called the Erin Mouré poem. As I wrote in 2005, With each book since won the Governor General’s award for poetry in 1988, Erin Mouré has posed increasingly complicated challenges to herself as a writer and to her readers ( 205). Like Woolf, she has created a fictional collaborator, the heteronym Elisa Sampedrín, who first appeared in (2005). Sampedrín is listed as a co-author, along with Moure and Avasilichioaei, of (2009). Consider the following overt invitation to the reader to collaborate on the first page of :

Moure’s practice of signing her texts with multiple names further challenges the notion of a single point of origin for a text. In their collaboratively written epistolary text ,In (2008). Bergvall writes to Moure:

Bergvall might well have addressed Moure herself as Erin Mouré et al. This proliferation of authorial identities began when Moure signed her name “Eirin Moure” on the cover of (2001), what she calls her “transelation” of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s (itself published by Pessoa under the heteronym Alberto Caeiro). By using the Portuguese spelling of her name—Eirin—she exemplifies the ways that, for her, A practice of reading is always embodied ( n. pag.) and it always engages an other.

In the words of Édouard Glissant, rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other (11). Despite the fact that Pessoa died in 1935, Moure’s experience of translating his work sounds a lot like she has collaborated with him. As she writes, in at the beginning of , I translated Pessoa by responding to him as a person. I, a person, and Pessoa, a person. For in Portuguese, pessoa is person. I just read the Pessoan poem line, then wrote my line, or read a few lines, then wrote mine. It was abrupt, direct, total (viii). The elation of translation arises, for Moure, in those moments when the lines between author, translator, and reader can no longer be clearly delineated. When we’re all collaborators, especially with ourselves. As Ann Levanthal writes in a review of Moure’s collected essays, her beloved wager is on the opportunity the collaboratively written/read text gives for us all “to be changed by language and have the world created anew” (n. pag.).

This chapter originated in a collaborative research project with Erín Moure and was extended because of a collaborative project with Caroline Bergvall. My move to London has enabled me to continue to collaborate with Bergvall. As I have demonstrated, Bergvall shares with Moure a commitment to poetry as an intellectual and investigative form of writing-knowledge(Bergvall and Moure 170) that requires the presence of many engaged bodies. Their impulse to collaborate, to take the exquisite risk of working alongside another person, has come about because they are multilingual and because they are translators as well as poets. But they also share a marginalized sexuality (they are both lesbians), and further research could be done on this aspect of their collaborative work.

In Bergvall’s long poem , she speaks directly and autobiographically about her body’s relation to language and to the collaboration with language that she must maintain in order to make sure that what [she calls] her body would remain in the transit from othr [sic] languages (146). In Norwegian, the word kropper means bodies, and this long poem explores what Alison Weir might have called the sacrificial logics of identity formation, the ways that any concept of self-identity necessarily represses the fragmentation or multiplicity of the self (3)—the way the self must be cropped in order to exist. Bergvall writes,

For Bergvall and Moure, as for Brossard, whom they have both translated,Bergvall has translated two pieces by Brossard— and ; they appeared together under the title and were published by London’s Reality Street editions in 1997. With the innovative poet and novelist Robert Majzels, Moure has published three translations of Brossard’s texts: (2007), and, under the “Mouré” spelling of her name, (1999), and (1998). connivance offers the opportunity to celebrate the multiplicity of the self with others, to collaborate with language that, because it takes place outside me as an individual (Avasilichioaei and Moure, 36), ceaselessly challenges the authorial hold on the text. Let it go, their texts say. Take the risk. Consider, instead,