I need to back up a little.

I wish I could remember when I first encountered BFP’s blog. I know it was before we launched make/shift, because I remember having her on my list of “dream” contributors to reach out to from way before the first issue was a reality. So that puts it at late 2006, maybe, that I first encountered what was then called Women of Color Blog? Anyway, whenever it was, I stumbled upon brownfemipower.com early in my exploration of the feminist blogosphere (which I came to a little late, having had my head mostly in print indie media), and it was immediately obvious that hers was a major voice—and by “major” I mean illuminating, wide-ranging, attentive and responsive, critical (in the various senses of that word), responsible, vigilant, moving, and clearly required reading for any blog reader concerned with social justice. I became a regular reader, daily learning from, being inspired by, and reflecting on the many, many things BFP wrote.

Later, BFP started writing for make/shift, and eventually I edited some of her contributions.

As BFP has noted, I am really into plans. As a freelancer and organizer/activist who wears lots of different hats, I just know I’m not going to get things done if I don’t figure out a time-management scenario in advance. Also, I think of things like deadlines as commitments between people, and used to have a bad habit of feeling personally disrespected by every deadline (commitment) that went unmet. BUT: Collaboration is far too satisfying—and necessary, if your aim is social justice—for rigidity and taking-it-personally around different work styles. Over years of organizing and independent-media work, I’ve discovered it works just fine to bend and shift and adjust in ways that make collaboration possible with the plans-be-damneders of the world, and have even grown to find that little dance pretty fun. The only thing I really need to make it work? Clear communication.

From the minute we started working together, BFP let me know which way of showing edits works for her and which doesn’t (editors, note: no Track Changes for BFP!), that I shouldn’t take it personally if I don’t hear back on an e-mail right away, and etc. I needed to hear that from her to know where to bend and shift, and where to ask her to bend and shift around my needs, to allow us to collaborate. So, rather than feeling annoyed if she sometimes misremembers a deadline, I feel grateful and excited to be in communication with BFP as she develops essays on topics that mean a lot to me, and to the world—I get to be in immediate conversation with someone whose intelligence is fierce and whose heart is wholly alive as she creates texts that shift long-stuck conversations, that are ever engaged with others, rooted in community and vision. Is there better work than that? So what if I have to give her a nudge on deadlines here and there? That’s part of the give and take of collaboration.

When BFP took her blog down last spring, in response to a churning blogosphere swamp of greed, exploitation, and dishonesty that just seemed to get worse and worse at every turn; that presented itself as having something to do with “feminism”; that was like a gross case study of the ways white supremacy, class hierarchy, and individualism, with all their soul-warping and truth-muddling power, are embedded in spaces and people who mean to be (or at least say they are) working for fairness, for change—when all that happened, and then BFP took her blog down, leaving the screaming silence of a blank page in its place, the whole situation was just wrong. Upside-down, preposterous, stupid, last-thing-so-called-feminism-should-have-produced, this damaging morass that reinforced social hierarchies and said fuck you to the voices (not just BFP’s; many others walked away at this time) honestly and connectedly struggling for justice. Just so wrong.

And in the midst of that draining and defeating time, to receive an e-mail from BFP asking if I wanted to collaborate on a writing project? I felt ridiculous, sitting there crying at my laptop and feeling all defeated, and here comes one of the people most personally attacked in the debacle, and she’s reaching out to ask if I want to make something new, together.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.    

We talked on the phone for a couple hours that week, full of pain and frustration about what had been happening, also full of ideas and inspiration. Would we make a zine? A blog? A project of correspondence? At first we thought we’d do something about the weird roles we were each being asked by others to play in the mess of that moment. But we knew pretty quickly that we wanted to move way beyond that situation, however revealing and otherwise significant we both found and still find it.

We started a private blog, and we wrote there about all kinds of things—our days, our families, gender, health, music and dancing, my behind-the-times-ness with blog technology, kitties, and, yes, feminism. A few springtime months of this.

It was a great conversation, long and winding. It was unedited and spontaneous and felt like it could go in any direction and forever.

Were we going to make a “project” of this? What? How?

We met face-to-face at the Allied Media Conference last summer. We realized maybe we didn’t want this collaboration to be “a white woman” and “a woman of color” taking about “feminism and race” after all. We talked for a long time, about lots of things. We were both tired, and there was pain of several sorts in that conversation. We came up with an idea for a zine that would enact and call into vision some meanings of “radical media” — we’d make a media project that would actively work toward de-centered media. We outlined some first steps, including collaboratively writing an introduction.

 “How?” I wondered. “Because the way I write,” I explained, “is so much about experiment and discovery—making a big, way-too-long mess of a draft, and figuring out in the process of spitting a whole bunch of stuff out and then editing and editing it down what it is I want to say. I don’t know how to write an introduction first. That comes near the end, after I’ve made my big mess and then figured out how to winnow and make something of it.”

“Well,” BFP said from across the table (I’m paraphrasing from memory, many months later), “if we’re going to do this together, this introduction might be a different kind of introduction.” It might not be the kind, I understood her to say, that’s made post-experiment to introduce readers to what ultimately came out of that experiment. This introduction would be more about us coming together and setting intentions for our collaboration. “It’s like,” she said, “if we’re going to walk together, first we have to agree that we’re walking in the same direction.”