Review by Emma Keamy
Open House: Conversations With Writers About Community
edited by Kristina Marie Darling
Tupelo Press
November 2025, 128 pages, Paperback, ISBN-13: 978-1961209374
Open House offers insightful perspectives on community and collaboration in the literary world, ranging from broad considerations about the nature of collaboration to specific suggestions on how to foster collaborative spaces. This essay collection is of particular use to educators, with many of the essays operating from the perspective of professors in classroom settings, and thus including their strategies for engaging students in community. But there are also prescient reflections outside of the classroom or workshop, such that any reader with a passion for writing and poetry might find new perspectives and useful tools.
Each essay in Open House concludes with related prompts, exercises, or discussion questions (save for Traci Brimhall’s essay “Stop, Collaborate, and Listen,” which itself consists of classroom-oriented prompts). The majority of these exercises are geared toward educators, as their structure makes them most applicable in a classroom setting, where these sorts of prompts and questions are assigned to students. That said, there are also exercises that are geared more toward a general reader, such as those asking them to collaborate with friends and colleagues, or prompting them to create something themselves. But the versatility of readership allows for these prompts to be utilized in whatever way is most fit for the reader—a prompt written for a group of friends to follow could easily be repurposed for students, and a prompt written with students in mind could equally be employed for personal use.
One of my favorite pieces is the collection’s opening essay, “Collaboration Is Community or, ‘From Work to Text’ Revisited” by John James. James’s essay is well-suited for the book’s opening, as it addresses a broad array of concepts related to collaboration, offering in-depth history, definitions, and reflections that serve as important context for the rest of the collection. Open House generally emphasizes different manifestations of collaboration, and James begins the collection by immediately expanding how we define collaboration. I was struck by his reflections on how even a supposedly solitary work becomes collaborative when considering its components—if you write with paper and pencil, who provided those for you? Who cut down the trees, processed them into notebooks, packaged and shipped them, and then sold them to you at the store? If you type on a laptop, who designed it? And who built it? And who created the program on which you write, whether it be Google Docs or a notes app or a specific author-oriented application? James continues to expand this concept of collaboration past the physical and into ideas, noting the many people who have created the forms we work in today, as well as highlighting derivation as a common form of collaboration. And while those ideas are of great importance, the tangible point about our physical writing tools feels particularly eye-opening. We are often privileged to think of ourselves as solo auteurs, but where would we be without something so foundational as a writing utensil? The very idea opens new considerations of collaboration and community, asking us to decenter ourselves and understand the grand web that ties us together. (And, perhaps, think more about our role in that web. When we ask who made our laptops, we realize that it doesn’t spring from the box—another person made it. How was that person treated?)
James’s essay continues to provide further context, history, and formal analyses, all of which combine to help writers and readers in the pursuit of creating and appreciating poetry. The exploration of different poetic forms and their histories is quite illuminating, and shows how certain forms/conventions might lend themselves to certain goals—an important point for both the analysis and creation of poetry. James’s own analysis is particularly helpful, and I appreciate the detail with which he breaks down a poem and its effects, particularly the effect of collaboration on a poem. This is one of the most distinctly practical elements of James’s essay, as it is incredibly useful for both poets and analysts to see a breakdown of how a poem is creating a certain effect. Many of the reflections on collaboration remain more theoretical, though still useful and thought-provoking. While not providing a specific outline for how to collaborate, James does provide new ways to understand collaboration. Like many of the following essays in Open House, James stresses a de-emphasis on the idea of oneself as a solo act, which is important in encouraging more solitary readers to seek out more direct collaboration. This is furthered with the ending prompt, which asks the reader to organize a social gathering of collaborative poetry-writing. This brings together the theoretical and practical in James’s work, as his essay provides the context and concepts needed to open oneself to collaboration, and his prompt provides a tangible way to apply these concepts. It’s a structure used throughout the collection, and one that serves to bridge the gap between theory and craft.
Another point that many of Open House’s authors touch on is the implicit collaboration of writer and reader, and the idea that a work becomes collaborative as soon as it is interpreted by a reader. This is another point that can lean toward the theoretical, but does have practical implications. There is a tendency to focus on an author as a solitary and authoritative figure—the only one who holds the key to the “true” meaning of a work. But the way a reader interprets and interacts with their work can create new and unintentional meanings, with those new meanings being a result of this implicit collaboration being writer and reader—even if that collaboration is from afar. It’s not an idea that immediately guides us in how to create or join communities, but it does offer perspective on how we view texts as readers and writers, which is an important step in opening us up to collaboration. I know that I’m guilty of bristling at misinterpretations of my writing in workshops, but perhaps I should be less inclined to call them misinterpretations. Maybe they add something new that I hadn’t seen in my own work. (Or, at the very least, they show me where my work isn’t communicating my ideas in the way it should be.) This sort of thinking, the kind that untethers oneself from the image of the solitary auteur, can create more willingness to incorporate outside ideas.
There are also essays that include more immediately tangible suggestions about community, and in particular I appreciated Wendy Chen’s “Negotiating the Problem of Community as a Writer of Color.” Chen further complicates more idealistic notions of community by addressing the reality of many writers of color, whose inclusion in creative writing spaces is much more complex—and much less implicit—than it is for many white writers. Her insights provide practical advice on how to create spaces that are welcoming to writers of color (both in what should be done and what should not be done). I especially appreciate Chen’s emphasis on community as a process instead of a static concept, which expands on ideas present throughout the rest of Open House in very practical ways. Long-standing communities can seem somehow innate, as if they sprang from nature, but Chen reminds us the importance of examining these concepts that are deemed normative—these are established communities, but someone had to establish them, and with some purpose. Additionally, Chen notes that many community spaces are born from the dissolution of another one, and in this way communities are always shifting. Chen thus pushes readers away from the discouragement one might feel at seeing a new community seemingly crumble while dominant ones remain, reminding us that all communities are shifting entities. If a writing community is unwelcoming to writers of color, perhaps it can shift to be better. Or perhaps the writers can shift toward creating a different community. Chen puts forth both possibilities while also acknowledging that both come with their own difficulties—but that these difficulties do not mean a better community isn’t worth pursuing.
Open House’s essays maintain a particular focus on poetic communities within the literary world, which makes for a collection that is particularly suited to Tupelo Press’s poetry-passionate audience. The authors speak from much experience in the literary world, and as such offer advice useful both to those already established in communities and those looking for a foothold. Dean Rader’s essay “Open the House! On Collaboration as Community” offers practical guidance for educators and others in the literary world to foster collaboration. Rader recalls assignments given to students that helped them connect more with a poet, as well as his work editing anthologies that center marginalized poets. Both of these examples illustrate the ability of those situated in the academic/literary world to facilitate collaborative activities, and the value that these collaborations bring to poetic spaces. The prospect of entering a new community can be intimidating, and Rader’s essay encourages those already within the community to bring in new and overlooked voices.
I did find myself wishing for more co-authored essays, especially after the beautifully-written “Towards a Third Voice: Collaboration, Artistic Risk, and Conceptual Play” by Chris Campanioni and Kristina Marie Darling. Campanioni and Darling bring poetry to the very core of their essay, weaving an elusive poetic voice that punctuates their main points. Campanioni and Darling explore the concept of “owning” a text, one of their points being that “grasping” a text’s language—understanding it, and thus dominating and owning it—should not always be one’s purpose in reading. The language of the essay itself plays with this, often obfuscating in imagery what a traditional text would explain plainly. The result is an essay with the soul of a poem, one that allows the translation of ideas into words to remain ethereal, rather than taming them into something digestible. The prose is especially intriguing to read after James’s introduction, where he examines the way collaborative poems complicate the subjects of “I” and “we,” their co-authored nature implicitly calling into question the nature of these pronouns. Campanioni and Darling play with this as well, opening the essay with “I” statements that have the reader question who is speaking. Perhaps the essay has fused the authors into one entity, their separate experiences blending into a singular voice. This ambiguous subjectivity makes it more striking when the essay eventually says its first “we,” and when I first read it, I wondered if it was the first time that both authors were speaking. The “we” sits in similar ambiguity as the essay’s “I,” oftentimes seeming a collective “we” that might include the reader and any other poets, and other times separated from the reader by the appearance of a “you” directed at us. This complex dance is achieved through the implicit effect of co-authorship, and I would have liked to see more instances of this collaboration in the collection.
Overall, Open House: Conversations With Writers About Community provides insightful resources for educators and poets with essays that weave together thought-provoking theory with achievable practice. By its nature as an essay collection, Open House displays collaboration between a number of authors, all implicitly in conversation with one another (and with the reader) as each author expands and refines the definitions and applications of both community and collaboration.
About the reviewer: Emma Keamy is a recent graduate of Wheaton College (MA), where she completed an undergraduate honors thesis in Creative Writing, which consists of the first third of a character-focused science fantasy. In the fall she will begin graduate studies at the University of New Hampshire in their MFA Fiction program. She loves writing stories with elements of horror and sci-fi, but doesn’t consider herself limited to one genre. Her main pursuit is in prose fiction, but she is also experienced in poetry, playwriting, screenwriting, journalistic writing, essays, reviews, and editing.