Increasingly those romantic images of writers like James Baldwin smoking in a corner while he bashed out words on a typewriter, or Joan Didion staring out into space in the vast emptiness of her house while she composed a story, don’t speak to the collaborative processes many writers do engage with or would like to engage with if they had the chance.
As a writer, researcher and teacher, I’m interested in how we both teach and provide opportunities for writers to work with artists outside of their disciplines, which led me to help develop a partnership between the Parramatta Artists’ Studios and the Writing and Society Research Centre called Testing Grounds, in which writers and artists came together to expand their collaborative practices and to help develop a model for arts institutions and universities that want to foster such work. Testing Grounds was held over two intensive days with a couple of short follow-up sessions, which all included time for participants to learn about each other’s practice, make work together and look at some existing models and ideas in the field of cross-disciplinary arts.
