For this Power Q & A, we are delighted to welcome author Jade Wallace! Jade is known not only for their individual work—like their upcoming release, Amonia (Palimpsest Press, 2024) but also, for their incredible collaborations with other artists. Today, we want to know a little bit about what makes these collaborations work.
Welcome Jade!
Q: You do collaborative projects and we are wondering: what’s one piece of advice you’d give people thinking about entering into collaborative writing?
Amonia is forthcoming with Palimpsest Press in June, 2024. Preorder here.
A: Writing collaboratively is a type of relationship, and you should treat it like one, so all the wisdom of maintaining human relationships applies (ensure you're compatible, be clear about expectations, yes it is fun but it also requires work to sustain, etc.) And like any other relationship, collaborative writing can allow you to experience (artistic) realms that you simply would not be able to enter alone. Open yourself up to that unfamiliarity—it's what makes collaboration so thrilling.
Jade Wallace. Photo credit Mark
About Jade Wallace:
Jade Wallace (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, and disabled writer, editor and critic. Their debut poetry collection, Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There, (Guernica Editions) came out in 2023. Wallace is co-founder of MA|DE, a collaborative writing entity, whose debut collection ZZOO came out from Palimpsest Press. Anomia, their novel, is also forthcoming from Palimpsest Press on June 15, 2024. Pre-order here.
About Anomia:
In Euphoria, a small, fictional town that feels displaced in time and space, an affluent but isolated couple have vanished from their suburban home. Their estranged friend, Fir, a local video store employee, is the only person who notices their disappearance. When the police refuse to help, Fir recruits Fain, who moonlights as a security guard, and they set off on a seemingly hopeless search for the lost lovers. Their chance at an answer, if they can ever find it, lies on the wooded edge of Euphoria, where Slip, an elderly trailer park resident, finds a scattering of bones that cannot be identified. Distrusting everyone, Slip undertakes a would-be solitary quest to discover the bones’ identity. Yet secretly, Limn and Mal, two bored, true crime-loving teenagers from the trailer park, are dogging Slip. Determined to bring justice to the dead, Limn and Mal will instead bring the lives of all seven characters into fraught and tangled confrontation.
Beneath the familiar surface of this missing-persons novel lies an unparalleled experiment: the creation of a folkloric alternate reality where sex and gender have been forgotten. Expanding on the work of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx and Jeannette Winterson’s Written on the Body, and joining gender-confronting contemporaries like Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed and Akwaeke Emezi’sThe Death of Vivek Oji, Anomia is an atmospheric exploration of a possible world, and a possible language, existing without reference to sex or gender.
