A cura di @NedCuttle21(Ulm).

In un articolo pubblicato sul New Yorker, Ceridwen Dovey racconta nascita, caratteristiche e metodologie di lavoro di tre collettivi di scrittori: gli australiani Alice Campion, autori di The Painted Sky; i sudafricani Helena S. Paige, autori di A Girl Walks Into a Bar: Your Fantasy, Your Rules; e infine i bolognesi Wu Ming, autori di una serie di romanzi metastorici tra cui il celebre Q – di cui abbiamo già parlato qui.

It all started on a weekend away for the Booksluts, a Sydney book club with the motto “We’ll read anything.” Six of the group’s eight regular members were discussing “Crime and Punishment” and talking about the club’s upcoming tenth anniversary, which they dreamed of celebrating with a Trans-Siberian Railway trip. They jokingly decided that they would fund the trip by writing a novel together. Much vodka had been consumed by this point, and plot discussions degenerated into mass hysterics.

But the next morning the friends went out and bought butcher paper and Sharpies and spent all day brainstorming. They decided that their novel would be a rural romance, set in the Australian outback, and agreed on the backstory of their heroine, a city girl who inherits the farm where her father—now mysteriously disappeared—grew up. Sparks would fly when she meets the handsome (and engaged) cattle farmer next door.

The Booksluts returned home with assigned scenes to write and unspoken doubts that the project would go any further. Everyone was surprised when the completed scenes began arriving, like clockwork, in their in-boxes. A few months, meetings, and reshuffles later, there was a core group of five women—Jenny Crocker, Madeline Oliver, Jane Richards, Jane St Vincent Welch, Denise Tart—a few of whom had writing experience (mostly in journalism or comedy), and some of whom had no writing experience at all. What they did have was practice, thanks to about a decade in the same book club, at picking apart novels and voicing their opinions to the group with confidence and respect.

Immagine da Wikimedia.