A Collaborative Writing Project

THIS 2020-2022 POP-UP WRITING PROJECT HAS BEEN ARCHIVED HERE.

Boccaccio’s Decameron set the stage for our virtual pop-up project “DECAMERONline,” begun in March 2020 just after the unexpected closing of campus life — and indeed in-person, bare-faced social life in general.  In the time since we moved to almost exclusively online interactions, members of our working group have shared our research and writing, our thoughts and our stories regularly, just as the Decameron’s protagonists did during their sojourn away from plague-ridden Florence.  After ten days and 100 stories, Boccaccio’s ten young Florentines returned to their city, refreshed and recharged by their communal time away.  Now we are returning to campus, to full classrooms and open libraries and in-person exhibitions.  Now we seek to bring the best of what we have been doing for the past year and a half together with the excitement of meeting again.  Here are some of our reflections on our tenth day, our return to life together: 

It is hard to believe that one of the very first meetings of our group occurred in February 2020: a Friday afternoon “Writing Time” in a classroom in Taper Hall. Part of the impetus for founding our group was to discuss ways of building and sustaining community in a world of rapidly evolving digital technologies. Back then, we were thinking of physical books and physical libraries, talking about the experience of being in Special Collections, and I was eagerly planning a visit with my undergraduate seminar to go to Doheny later in the spring to see rare books. Back then we knew we lived in a hybrid world—at once physical and virtual—but little did we know the resonance that the term “hybrid” would take on in the coming months. These were themes we were discussing in what now seems like the rarified world of scholarship, and while at this point it almost seems superfluous to admit it—little did we know that, from March 2020 onwards, they would soon become the themes that would dominate both the biggest moments and most quotidian realities of our lives. If there was one silver lining in the dark and difficult days that followed, it was watching our very definition of community expand when it was no longer bounded by time or space (or the strange combination of both in that modern construct of the time-zone!). I’ve woken up at ungodly hours to be “in” Europe for conferences, attended friends’ PhD defenses heartened to see 70 people in the Zoom room from all over the world, and reconnected with people whom I knew at various phases of my life but who live far from Los Angeles. Through it all I’ve been working on the theme of time (a book on the concept of historical periodization as it developed in early modern Europe), and it’s been at once disorienting and enlightening to pursue the topic as our own definitions of space and time have changed so drastically. Presenting my work to our group last April was a moment for which I’m most grateful, as was hearing everyone else present and share their own research throughout the year, and I hope that—in whatever form of future-time we will enter—we keep expanding community exponentially, beyond the walls of universities, cities, and time-zones alike.

• Frederic Nolan Clark

“Books, Texts, and Images” has been my home over the past year. In a time when I could not go home and be with the people who are home to me, meeting bi-weekly with the members of this working group has been a panacea for the heart and for the mind. Sharing my thoughts and work with other scholars in the Humanities when we could not meet in person has given me the consistency and the human warmth one needs to get through these hard times. We met at the beginning and at the end of the week, and this would help me start the week with motivation and continue my research with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a keyword to define this group. Everybody has always been enthusiastic about each other’s successes and endeavors, has enthusiastically helped one another to write, to do research, and to pursue their wonderful ideas. Thanks to this energy, I could complete my dissertation, write and submit three articles for publication (one of which has already been published!), and start a new research project.

For our “return to campus,” I can’t wait to meet my fellow writers in person when we go to LACMA this year, to discuss our research topics together during our Working Progress, and to read books together, as we are planning to do… And I hope for the family to expand!

• Erica Camisa Morale

As the months pass by and Covid-restrictions come and go (and come), the passion and enthusiasm for „Books, Text, Images“, and writing remains. For me personally, writing has become different over the past year. It was so beneficial to experience our consistent and productive „Writing Times“ as something individual and yet communal.  The support of the group and to be able to share progresses as well as challenges we all face during writing, was extremely rewarding. I am looking forward to a more social time and to immediate exchanges with colleagues. However, I am equally grateful to know that I can count on the precious moments during „Writing Time“ and other events mapped out for the year, such as discussion rounds, working progress presentations, and museum visits. So much has become impossible due to the pandemic, but how wonderful to see that good things can also arise – and stay. I am excited for all the activities that may lay ahead and to continue to be part of a communal and inspiring group, meeting old and new colleagues and friends, and to follow the individual paths- virtually or in person.

• Veronica Peselmann

Questions concerning materials/materiality have been a persistent theme throughout my time participating in DecamerOnline and it is an interest shared in different but related ways with other participants. Because we are a disparate group–we are all in the Humanities, broadly conceived, but in different disciplines, fields of study, and even professions–storytelling has also been a red thread. We share our work with each other, but must think about how to share it with different audiences and with each other. Working outside of our disciplinary bunkers has helped me, especially, think more broadly about my work and its applications. But more than anything over time it has helped us forge a community around our writing with individuals who are broadly curious, interested, and invested in each others’ work and it has been a welcome appointment weekly to write with all of them.

• Erin Maynes

2020-21  DecamerONline 2.0

We love books.  We read them, we write them, we revel in discourses — current and past, public and scholarly — about them.  We  study writing, drawing  and record-keeping more generally; material, aural and virtual forms of communication and publication; historical and past interpretive communities; and books without words, such as artists’ books and musical scores. These interests inform our own practices of writing, which we will also explore together.  Please join us at our 2020-21 Working Progress talks, BIG PAPER in small pieces events, or Writing Times.

                          “Books, Writing and Community” Working Group, USC Levan Institute for the Humanities

Post Scriptum, Fall 2020:  Exquisite Corpse

Our DecamerONline pop-up project has popped — yet now in September 2020 we are still in exile from plague-ridden Trecento Florence and at the start of an all-new, all-online semester.  So here below are some of our reflections on what books, writing and community have meant to us since March 2020 when we began this project, and what they mean now in a time of continuing pandemic precautions.

• As a newcomer to “Books, Writing and Community,” I can offer few reflections on the group’s past. So, I’ll confine myself to its present and future. This group affords us with a unique opportunity to revel in one of the few good things to come from COVID–the further movement of academic communities onto digital platforms. As a budding scholar of the late medieval and early modern world, I am torn between dismay and relief. I need not dwell on the dismay: those who devote their academic lives to studying, among other things, the materiality and circulation of texts and the networks of communication and sociability that sustained early modern intellectual life, might cringe as the world recedes to the impersonal, dematerialized spaces of the internet. Yet that which violates the long-established practices of academic collaboration also offers to liberate us. Hem and haw as we must, Zoom, google docs, and blogs connect far-flung scholars (like myself!) in ways somewhat unimaginable just six months ago. This I welcome, with open arms. Community can replace the often alienating experience of archival research.

                                                                                                                                                                             –Harrison Diskin

• Being alone, together. This could describe how most everyday activities, personal and professional, have been altered by the forced isolation of COVID. Zoom rooms replace meeting rooms, classrooms, therapy rooms, friend’s homes. But “alone, together” isn’t just an insufficient metaphor for our culture’s current existential crisis: community in isolation is basically how one experiences much of one’s professional life as an academic or writer. And it can be what keeps us together, tethered to the wider world both past and present. Right now, my community in isolation is the “Books, Writing, and Community” group that has emerged around the DecamerOnline project. Twice a week, I know I have an appointment to gather together with colleagues to…write in silence for an hour. Yes, writing is an isolated and often isolating activity best done by one. But writing typically imagines a reader, an exchange with some future unknown and unseen person. Writing together is a different kind of experience–a way of sharing the small joys and big pains of writing projects and feeling less alone in the experience of writing. For those apt to procrastinate, or who have difficulty finding time for the difficult work of writing, or who are just a little bit motivated by a guilty conscience (all me), there is a friendly accountability to one’s colleagues in this community, and someone to share it with when the hour is up.

                                                                                                                 –Erin Maynes

• Only once did we meet in person for a “Writing Time.” It was an experiment that I experienced as extremely inspiring and helpful, and one that has not lost its effectiveness or communal aspects in its online version. Rather the opposite is true: the bi-weekly meetings of “Books, Writing and Community” turned out to be a particularly fruitful platform to work on individual projects, learn about the research from colleagues and exchange thoughts about the current COVID situation. In a unique way “Writing Time” combines Writing and Community, two things that cannot be taken for granted in such sidetracking times.  Besides benefiting from the online meetings and the communal network, my participation in “Books, Writing and Community” impacts my own ongoing research and how I approach the question of books and interaction with books. With a remote community and audience listening to readings and concerts or books simply being inaccessible, the material means of books and art in general change. Respectively, our interaction with the arts alter in a way we still cannot fully oversee nor anticipate. Individual works and interdisciplinary discussions in “Books, Writing and Community” continue a dialogue on these aspects that possibly will join us for a little longer.

                                                                                                                 -–Veronica Peselmann

• Over the past six months, “Books, Writing and Community” became my writing-life backbone. Scheduling consistent, guarded time to focus on bite-sized tasks within larger projects, especially during the months between (Zoom) classroom teaching, yielded a sense of structure and regularity vital to navigating this moment’s otherwise nebulous reality. And despite our meetings’ necessarily remote format (and the inevitable strangeness of feeling close to people we have never met in person), this group has successfully connected us—across programs, departments, and USC-adjacent activities—with other thinkers we might not have encountered otherwise. Thus, perhaps because we are remote, it has become a sacred-feeling academic experience, in my opinion, to forge such connections over the practice of writing, an all-too-often lonely pursuit. Apropos of that, I think that it says something interesting about this “community” aspect that, for several of us (you know who you are…), it was ad-hoc viola da gamba (music) group lessons, more than explicit research/scholarly or departmental overlap, that initially brought us into this communal, interdisciplinary writing environment.

  As artists, thinkers, musicians, and researchers, we ultimately all find ourselves in the discipline of responding to our environments, present or past. In this spirit, 2020’s artistic intensity springs from our current, clashing environment of simultaneous “Apocalypse” and “Living Room” (if we’re lucky), with only our sanity to mediate. Every day, as I scramble to organize tabs of digital research materials on one screen, struggle to jam grotesque sections of existing conference papers into sections of dissertation chapters, fight off snippets of inconceivably disturbing news, painstakingly re-outline (and invariably re-re-outline), I find a larger portion of my brain than I can spare daydreaming about the LiteraTea courtyard next to the USC Music Library, at the back entrance of Doheny. I knew that communal working among other thinkers in a dedicated space helped my writing process, but I could not fully realize how much my process truly depended on it until it all disappeared. After spending nearly every moment of my studying and writing over the last five years either in that courtyard, the library stacks, the Early Music enclave in UGW, I, like so many others across the country, have had to suddenly figure out how to research and write any other way. Considering the life-and-death discord that now consumes this country, the raging wildfires, and prevailing political disdain for truth that has only grown more deadly as our population intellectually implodes and cannibalizes itself, it feels darkly flippant to say that I experience “library grief”. But I do, all day and every day.

  So, friends, now six months in, I still see DecamerOnline as that idyllic courtyard-sanctuary outside of every library in the digital ether. It is a place to look up from our work and tell each other about intriguing things we encounter in our private research mines, our heads, or to simply share snippets of projects that have not found a home elsewhere. As the many physical, public spaces in which we used to write, share, and just be able to move through more freely continue to vanish from our pages, it is more crucial than ever to cultivate new space for storytelling of the sort that reminds us why we continue to research, reflect, share ideas—and turn primarily to art—in times of strife.

                                                                                                                  –Malachai Komanoff Bandy