(Note: this is a joint post)
The Exquisite Conversation: An Adventure in Creating Books
We’ll try to avoid unmitigated gushing, but it’s hard not to be starstruck when you’re in the same auditorium as beloved literary heroes Katherine Paterson, M.T. Anderson, Natalie Babbitt, Susan Cooper, Timothy Basil Ering, Steven Kellogg, Patricia MacLachlan, and James Ransome. We saw their faces. We heard their voices. Patricia MacLachlan even sang!
L-R: Mary Brigid Barret (president of NCBLA), Steven Kellogg, Susan Cooper, Katherine Paterson, James Ransome (standing up), Natalie Babbitt, M.T. Anderson, Patricia MacLachlan, and Timothy Basil Ering.
They were there to talk about The Exquisite Corpse Adventure, a progressive story-telling activity that began as a literacy project on read.gov. It’s something like a cross between the game Telephone and campfire stories: one author writes chapter 1, and it’s passed on to the next writer who pens chapter 2, and down the chain it goes until the story reaches its end (or rather, the designated number of chapters). Cliffhangers and plot-twists are encouraged! And unlike a normal novel, there’s no master plan or outline. Characters and plot threads sprout up like mushrooms and some get left behind. Indeed, M.T. Anderson aka Tobin (like the bridge!) compares the experience to hot potato: “Sure, everyone wants the potato to stay in the air….[but] the fumble and save is part of the thrill of the game.”
A close-up.
Although the idea is vintage (see the Surrealists), the Exquisite Corpse offers a new kind of experience for readers, but also for the authors and illustrators who participated in the adventure. Plot-threads weave quickly from writer to writer; Patricia MacLachlan joked, “It struck me at first as a very unliterary exercise” because there was no time or room for edits and revisions. And the multi-writer dynamic meant that the authors’ characters, nursed from their imaginations into fully fleshed personalities, can and did get hijacked by other authors farther down in the plot! According to Anderson, there are two types of Corpse writers: the generative folks, who write haphazardly and breed plot bunnies without any thought of consequences, and the rationizers, who feel obligated to tidy up loose ends so events come to a satisfying conclusion. Timothy Basil Ering reveled in the freedom it, whereas Anderson himself became a fixer-upper, because, as a self-described contrarian, he did the opposite of what he’d naturally do.
Aother close-up.
As a treat, the authors recreated the writing experience by reading aloud chapter one, which features, among other things, a train, some elephant clowns, a Star Wars lunch box (yes!), two circus orphans, something about another dimension and mortal peril. As they took turns reading the text, Steven Kellogg, James Ransome, and Timothy Basil Ering drew quick sketches of several characters on giant sheets of paper. In real time! Ering’s sketch—a monstrous clown that looked like a potbellied mouse—was particularly creepy.
The Corpse Conversation ended far too soon, but on a very meaningful note. It’s so clear the authors and illustrators in attendance passionately and fiercely believe in what they do. They advocate not only for quality books, but for the kids who read them. Natalie Babbitt said she wrote for children to counteract the tendency to view kids as “a lump of something” who “don’t matter until they turn 18.” Children aren’t simple or stupid, and as Patricia MacLachlan so aptly put it, they deserve truth, hope, and beauty: truly the magical ingredients that make these authors’ work so exquisite.
