A collaboration of amateurs is a collaboratively-authored cento composed of language lifted from texts encountered in our spring, 2019 writing workshop and then gifted to the group in a gesture of shelter, protection, and love. Inspired by Barbara Browning's
The Gift, we approached this collaboration in the spirit of amateurism: we selected language that inspired us and transmuted it into a new medium, one in which we are dabblers, newcomers, and passionate neophytes. We embraced the idea of inappropriate intimacy in gathering these materials and in stitching them together into an intimate artifact. This is a gift we give one another as a record of the places we have gone as individuals and as a class in BCWRIT 501,
Between Fact and Imagination, Spring 2019.
It reflects our immersion in the following texts:
- Jordan Abel, Injun (Talonbooks, 2016)
- Barbara Browning, The Gift (Coffee House Press, 2017)
- Julie Carr, Real Life: An Installation (Omnidawn, 2018)
- Diana Khoi Nguyen, Ghost Of (Omnidawn, 2018)
- Jena Osman, Public Figures (Wesleyan UP, 2014)
- Khadijah Queen, I’m so Fine (YesYes Books, 2017)
- Cecilia Vicuña, Spit Temple (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012)
