Photo by Nancy Perez

Bio
Nancy Rawles is a novelist and playwright who grew up in Los Angeles and began her life as a professional writer in Chicago. Her plays have been produced in Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Seattle. Her first novel, Love Like Gumbo (Fjord Press), is the winner of a 1998 American Book Award and a 1998 Governor's Writers Award. She is currently at work on her second novel in a trilogy about the Broussards of Compton Avenue. Nancy enjoys teaching as an artist in education with Seattle Arts Commission, Seattle Public Schools, Very Special Arts Washington, Washington State Arts Commission, Seattle Arts & Lectures, Seattle Children's Museum, One Reel and Powerful Schools.

No matter what I create as an artist, no matter how privately I work, I am certainly never alone. Whether I am drawing on centuries-old traditions or yesterday's conversation, whether I am listening to the voices of my characters or the advice of my sister, there is always someone in the room with me as I write. The mere act of creating makes it so. The gathering, the planting, the harvesting are not done alone. I am glad for this.

Even so, I feel ambivalent about formal artistic collaboration, as wary as some of my students must feel when I ask them to work in pairs to write the opening scene of a play. Some of them want to work alone. Some want to work in groups of three or four or five. Some have experienced group projects from hell and want to be assured they will be evaluated separately. In my own work, it is the project that determines the approach. Is this a venture I can get behind? Does this project need more than I can give it? Even when the answer is yes, I step gingerly into a collaboration. My reservations come from the word itself.

Though I was born thirteen years after the end of World War II, I can never read or hear the word "collaboration" without thinking of wartime photos, particularly one of a French woman being jeered by her neighbors as she carries her child fathered by a Nazi soldier. "We were resisters, not a collaborator like you," the crowd seems to be saying. "We suffered and you gained from our suffering." I'm sure there were many collaborators in that crowd, but the evidence of their failings was not wrapped in their arms. For me, collaborating has always been evocative of cowardice, ignobility and evil. Sleeping with the devil.

I suppose there are people who view all modern artists as exploiting the suffering of others. We're all sleeping with the devil. Perhaps we would argue that art alleviates suffering, that when we tell the story, forge the sculpture, create the dance, we turn suffering on its ear and give it a good spin.

Even the American Heritage Dictionary is ambivalent about what it means to collaborate. "To work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort." Sounds benign enough. "To cooperate treasonably, as with an enemy occupying one's country." Where did that come from? Specifically, how did we get from the Latin com (together) plus laborare (to work) to fascism, slavery and treason?

The synonyms in Roget's Thesaurus become increasingly sinister as you go down the list: work together (with whom?), cooperate (with whom and what?), team up (against whom?), conspire (with whom against whom?), collude (with whom against whom?), join forces (what kind of forces?). . .until you get to "co-author." As in what? God co-authored the Bible with Man? The problems with co-authorship surely began on that day. Dual-ownership, contracts, percentages. In my book, the Bible definitely qualifies as collaboration. With whom against what, I'm not sure.

Before moving to Seattle in 1989, I spent a year working in Japan. I was teaching at a public high school in Sendai. Every morning at the teachers' meeting, somebody would stand up and ask for our support in the day's endeavors. "Please take care of me," he or she would say. The rest of us would respond with phrases like "You can count on us," or "We won't let you down." As an American, learning these phrases was enough to throw me into a panic. You mean, I can't just struggle along individually? I guess not.

I've come to ask from my writing the same things I ask from my life: insight, integrity, joy and company for my journey. Lately, I've had lots of company. The two projects that have consumed me for the last few years-a novel based on family tales and an historical play-are both necessarily collaborative but in different ways.

The novel, Love Like Gumbo, was born in a fiction writing workshop taught by Ursula K. LeGuin. She had been reading the work of several prominent Native American writers-Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Linda Hogan-and was influenced by these writers' use of ritual. Our first assignment was to write about a "family ritual." Encouraged by the response of the other writers to my story, I picked it up years later to rework as a novel. The rituals, places and people of my childhood were all there to draw on. They filled the room when I was writing. Since the book was published, my real life family has embraced it with the same warmth I drew upon as I wrote. That is, after their initial dismay passed.

Love Like Gumbo concerns itself with the youngest daughter of the Broussard clan, a Louisiana Creole family living in 1978 Watts, Los Angeles. As Grace plans to leave the family and move in with her lover Elena, she is upbraided by her deceased father who tells her, in so many words, that she can't leave the family.

She was like California to them. They made relentless fun of her. They sometimes pretended they wanted her to fall into the ocean-she sometimes jumped in just to shock them-but who can imagine a world without California? Who wouldn't miss her if she actually took the dive? The Broussards of Compton Avenue would be the first ones there, tugging on the rope, yelling from the shore, making waves, clinging by their teeth to what belonged to them. Never letting go if she didn't intend to come back, if she wasn't going to be there forever allowing herself to be tormented by their love.

The play, The Assassination of Edwin T. Pratt, has been a very different sort of collaborative project. Based on the murder of the director of Seattle's Urban League in 1969, the project is dependent upon interviews with people who knew Pratt as well as help from archivists at the University of Washington, writings and inspiration from Pratt and others like him, who "collaborated" in the fight for civil rights.

After working on this project for a few years and not getting very far, I realized that I could not present the story by myself. I needed the input of young people. I needed a director and dramaturg. I needed visual artists to help me conceive the set. I needed a composer to create a score. And I needed help from the funding community if I was going to realize the project before taking it to a theater.

So I worked with students from Washington and Eckstein Middle Schools, Roosevelt, Garfield and Franklin High Schools to find out how the issues of the civil rights movement were playing out in their lives. Pratt Fine Arts Center, King County Arts Commission Hotel/Motel Tax Fund and Langston Hughes Cultural Art Center provided support for my work with students.

Later, when I wanted to test what I had written so far, Judith Roche and One Reel/Bumbershoot gave me the opportunity to present a scene at the Bagley Wright Theatre. I commissioned a score from Joshua Kohl of the Young Composers with the help of an Artist Trust GAP grant, coupled with the Jack Straw Productions' Artist Assistance Program. Visual artists Tina Hoggatt and Daniel Minter consulted with me about the set. A Seattle Artist grant from the Seattle Arts Commission helped me to complete the script.

Through it all, Valerie Curtis-Newton at the University of Washington has collaborated with me as director and dramaturg. The U.W. Ethnic Cultural Theatre hosted the first reading of the completed script, which was very graciously torn apart by an audience of friends, colleagues, and civil rights activists. I'm completing a second draft, made all the better by the process of collaboration.
In the play, a character speaks to the importance of collaborating:

Doors are opening. Doors are opening but they won't stay open long. All you need to do is get your foot in. All you need to do is get your foot in the door. You get in and then you can open the door for somebody else. Eventually. Eventually, we'll be able to keep the doors open. Eventually, if enough people get in, we'll be able to keep all the doors open all the time.

I know that I am never alone in my work. Because of this fact, I am obligated to remain faithful to my characters as well as to my ideals, history and culture. I'd hate to be accused of collaborating with the enemy. I know I will be accused of collaborating with the enemy. And I'd better be able to defend what I've done. All alone if necessary.