AJ: I love that thought of Glissant’s, of a poetics that is “in contact with everything possible”, and your idea of a book as a place to rest. A horizon I want to keep approaching. I’d love to come back to these questions – and experiences – of time, and poetry. But for now, I’d love to hear more about your sense of collaboration. I sense this is fundamental, not only for particular projects (yours, mine and so many others), but for life itself. I’ve just finished reading Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, where she attends to what she calls “disturbance-based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without either harmony or conquest”. Which reminds me, too, of my own experience of the collaborative writing project I facilitated, which resulted in the book Raging Grace: Australian Writers Speak Out on Disability. Here, speaking and listening, then writing together, we were enabled and affirmed, but also challenged and transformed. This seems to me to chime with what you said about Petra Kuppers and Neil Marcus’s work in exploring the possibilities of joy and movement, not transcending our bodies but more spaciously inhabiting them, especially together in community.

Can you expand a little on what your experience of collaboration has been, in relation to Dreaming in the Fault Zone, but perhaps also more broadly? In this current era, are we in particular need of attuned collaborative work?

ES: A significant part of the material for Dreaming in the Fault Zone came from collaboration – dialogue with people in different fields, performance with other poets and artists, co-teaching. Much of the book is densely woven with discussions of others’ work, quotation, different voices, including various lyric ‘I’s that are and aren’t me, or I don’t necessarily know who they are/where they come from. I sought to write in a way that was documentary but also transfigurative, or maybe better, transducive. I wanted a criticism that was thinking-with, feeling-with, listening-with, moving-with. ‘Dreaming-for’, the anthropologist Megan Gette calls it in her review.

It was important to me to include scenes of direct collaboration. The poem a psychotherapist improvises in real time from the client’s words. Translating Greek poetry with my mother after my father’s death. Participating in performance installations with Petra, Neil, and others in The Olimpias collective: dancing, touching, sounding, contact improvisation. Making infinite shapes and relating to each other in physical space. I would say Petra and Neil facilitated poetics in a profoundly visceral way: poetics that is both form-making and organising, inseparably aesthetic and political. I experienced this embodied, real-time poetics, this visceral poetics, as a form of communication and community but also as mutual expression without intention or goal. It felt like writing. I mean that it itself was a form of writing, or I experienced it as such. It was as meaningful, thrilling, mysterious, opaque, beautiful, sensuous, as writing. The kind of writing that comes to you from the outside, or in trance or a hypnagogic state, or from somewhere between you and another person, so it’s a surprise. And yet you have never felt more yourself.

This form of collective attention and solidarity felt utterly different from other forms I’d known, for example in academia, music, theater, protest. But I also happily recalled some of these other collaborations, particularly during the lockdowns in 2020: playing in a symphony, chanting in the street, striking a set. Thinking particularly of the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s notion that rhythmic activity, being in tune or synchrony with others, keeping time together, creates pleasure and safety that can help to heal the brain, I can recognise these activities now as forms of healing through the social but not necessarily verbal. A lot of my pandemic dreams were populated by these earlier examples of collaboration in my life, incubating my desire for a collective future not glued to a screen.

To speak to your observation that collaboration is fundamental for life itself, writing the book made me rethink what collaboration is, or can be – that it’s not just social or artistic but existential, constitutive. It can be an ethos but it’s also not a choice. This is obvious in ecology; it’s absolutely required for public health. It’s apparent and instructive, without ever being reducible to a template, in cultures that have a different sense of personhood that’s not individual, or that includes the extra-human, the more-than-human.

Disability, too – it’s not only that it compels us to understand interdependence as fundamental to living, but that disablement comes from a lack of, or refusal of, collaboration – or, one could also say, disablement is produced by the wrong kind of collaboration, of being complicit with the forces and structures that block access.

We can’t have ‘wellness’ when disabled and ill people are regarded as undesirables or aberrations who should be out of sight and silent. We can’t have a well society when we have mass poverty, homelessness, people who go bankrupt or die from lack of health care or who have to fight absurd battles for it that make them sicker. It reminds me of Toni Morrison’s recognition that freedom, that Enlightenment concept, hinged on mass enslavement. Wellness in the US is predicated on not-being among those perceived as diseased, weak, fat, clumsy, defective, etc.

All of this makes me think about the current regime who openly seek to destroy any sense of interdependence and collaboration, of care for your neighbors or people elsewhere in the world, of altruism, of any concern at all for those who speak a different language or practice a different religion (stigmatising them as ‘foreigners’ and/or ‘aliens’). (Here I think of philosopher Alphonso Lingis’s wonderful counter: “the community of those who have nothing in common”.) A regime that declares war on empathy as a symptom of weakness, calling it ‘toxic’ and ‘suicidal’. This is a caricature of self-interest, self-reliance and white supremacy, yet quite real, in the way that fascism is its own caricature or obviates parody.

So, I think about collaboration now in terms of organising, the possibilities of that amid the fear and bewilderment and uncertainty as people are abducted off the street, speech is punished, and the military is sent into cities. I think about what we do as writers and artists (besides continue to write and make art). How do you get people to take risks, to be steadfast in refusing to self-censor, to strike, to fight but also not forfeit being spontaneous, ludic, aimless, weird, soft?

In some small way I hope that Dreaming in the Fault Zone might invite collaboration in turn. As writing and as book-object it’s designed with what I hope readers might perceive as open space, within it or emerging from it, the way there are blank pages at the end. How do we find the kairos, opportunity, to invent forms that fit this time? After I gave a reading at a college last January, a student wrote to tell me that they and some other students had created their own cave in which to grieve and just be together in person. San Francisco Bay Area artist Selby Sohn created a wearable ‘roaming oculus’ as a healing device, inspired by writing in my book on the image in EMDR and Jung’s active imagination.

AJ: Indeed. Whatever we write, and the communities we live in and build, are never isolated or solitary. They ripple outwards. But it’s especially the case when there’s an attentiveness to solidarity, when the writing (as you say) creates space for breath and rest, which is inevitably also co-presence and a kind of therapy. On that, in Dreaming in the Fault Zone there’s a really nuanced and potent perspective on modern Western medicine. You write, ‘The existence of many arts instantly estranges me from the truths that modern medicine claims and from its epistemic monopoly on the author¬ity to cure. I say estrangement – not rejection. And I am also a stranger to these arts; I have not experienced most of them firsthand. … Sacred or secular, secret or shared, many medicines exist and people are healed by them’ (p.159). Can you talk a little about how your experience of ‘healing’, its failures and possibilities, is threaded into the fabric of the book?

ES: There were many trails I was following, and it took time to see how they met. How did therapeutic landscapes connect to toxicity, how did iatrogenic harm connect to fascism, how did the subtle and the radical connect to poetry connect to rhetoric connect to magic? How could I write my arguments – for example, my opposition to for-profit ‘healthcare’ – and still keep a sense of hope that change is possible, how to make it as vibrant and surprising as poetry? How could I write against language wielded as weapon but also about poetry’s treatments? The paradox of my desires, as I say in the book.

I held the difficulty and the ease of ‘healing’, its promise of a future, in tension, because in the reality of the chronic they’re always there together: the rough suture and the subtle scar. The word itself always sounds to me like simultaneous cautery and light. I also wanted to reclaim the potential for healing in darkness, rather than its demonization (as in what so many say of the present: ‘dark times’. Whereas we see crimes and atrocities committed out in the open, in full daylight).

What you say about seeking “to radically reimagine poetry, health and community, their interrelationship” is exactly right. Which is why it was very important to me, in reexamining the therapeutic dimension, to decolonise ‘poetry’, and write about how words and sounds and song are known as medicine throughout the world, how they’re essential for survival. There were things I needed to say, not only about my own trajectory in how I came to study literature and ethnographies of verbal arts and of medicine, but about language itself as medicine. There were things I wanted to say about reclaiming the resonant and subtle and asymmetrical and dysfluent, reclaiming them from aberration and pathology. I think about d wolach once writing to me about becoming ill: “Poetry was the form that could fit this new organization and time.”