This week I'm going to be guest blogging about the theme of collaboration. I was never a collaborator- writers write alone, right? But when I met Kathleen Sweeney, a fellow adjunct professor at the New School University, and a communications expert and social media guru, something about our interests dovetailed and clicked into a fruitful collaboration that took some unexpected turns.

Word City Studio is a name we gave ourselves. It was a platform for a new blog about experiencing a new kind of creativity using an urban backdrop. Weekly, we would meet at an inspiring spot with an interesting literary history or a transient exhibit, and we'd offer each other writing prompts, take video, live blog, and pull together polished entries that seemed (and still seem) poised to become a book, a collection of books using different cities as backdrops, and a series of workshops whereby we use our combined decades of teaching to help others find their creative selves with a little help from their own urban backdrops. We would have workshops in person; we would have webinars online. We would put good stories into the world using social media, thus creating "good viruses", another project coined by Kathleen about the power of change makers in our changing media landscape.

Here's what happened next: Everytime we took two steps forward with our website, either getting it designed, or tweaked, we'd hit a wall. A designer dropped out of contact and left technical problems hanging. A whole umbrella of other mind-numbing challenges persisted in the minutia. Finally, not a Good Virus, but a Very Bad Virus attacked our website, causing it to get an inordinate amount of spam and general wreckage unlike that which we, being fairly tech savvy, had every seen. 

We had been such good collaborators, that we became philosophical about our difficulties. Perhaps Word City Studio, for now, wasn't about the end result of creating a workshop/ book writing enterprise. Perhaps it was meant to be what it was in real time: the process of collaboration unfolding in a sacred timeslot of our week. A commitment to challenge each other and ourselves to reach beyond our creative comfort zones. To go to new places despite the various outside pressures of life that fall upon everyone. 

This week, I'll share some of our collaborations. We haven't ended our mission; we're just sitting back and reevaluating our next steps. I've used my inspiration to feed my own blog NewYorkLostandFound.blogspot.com, and to have a more creative outlook on my freelance writing life, and Kathleen has created the Viral Media Lab, a project that evolved out of "the good virus" concept, an ongoing blog with new content added every week. She's also tapped her newfound inspiration to embark on a series of otherworldly video work (one of the things she figured out throughout our collaboration was that she "doodles" in video). So welcome to Word City Studio!