mutating the signature

Mutating the Signature is a place for two poets — or one poet and one artist of any type — to work and write to, for and with one another as creators and curators of an issue of the journal.

Curators will select a theme to work with for the duration of their issue. Each issue will unfold over the course of one to three months, depending on how long it takes for the curators to fully explore their topic and the issue they are creating.

Curators are encouraged to “talk” to one another not only with poetry but with prose, artwork, music, photography, and other means of communication and expression, and to explore fully the possibilities of the online journal space. Each piece shared will contribute to illustrating, furthering and even complicating their issue’s theme, whatever that may be, wherever that may go.

The goals for the curators of each issue are to:

1. strengthen or form a creative relationship and creative partnership,
2. explore their work in the context of the shared issue and shared theme in whatever manifestation(s) that takes (including individual writing, collaborative writing or some combination of the two), and
3. pull from their creative exploration a finished collection, including presentation and order, whose pieces are selected from the creative work that has been generated.

About the Issues
Curators create their issue in real time (daily, several times a day, weekly — whatever works for them) so everyone sees the issue unfold. Ideally, the issue would become a conversation, argument, exploration or some combination these. Toward the end of their stint as curators, the participants will curate their work.

To accommodate both the generation and curation of the material, each curatorship will contain two distinct parts and each issue will contain two distinct sections: a “process” section and a “curated” section.

For the process section of the issue, Mutating the Signature will be opened up and turned over to the curators. After selecting their theme, the two will use this space as an online workspace in which to work together to generate creative material for the curated section of the issue. The process section will contain drafts, notes, false starts, and all the other messy output that goes into any creative undertaking — along with the amazing pieces that come out of that process as well.

The curated section will start once the generation of creative material is complete, a process that could take the curators anywhere from several weeks to more than two months. When all material has been created and the pieces for the curated section have been selected and polished, the curators will wrap up the issue’s process section, leaving it intact as an archival record of their work. They will then put together their curated section and post it on the site.

About the Curatorial Relationship
No matter what ratio of writing “to and for” and “with” each other you choose when creating and curating your issue, you and your fellow curator will be working very closely. There is a certain level of collaboration intrinsic in engaging with another artist’s work in such an intense way, as well as in writing to your chosen theme throughout the process section of the issue.

You will also be each other’s target audience, which means you will be writing not with nobody in mind, and not with everyone in mind — but with your fellow curator (or their work, or both) in mind. (That’s where the writing “to and for” each other come into play.)

This in no way excludes a larger audience — in fact, we encourage curators to build the largest audience they can for their work. (We also encourage readers to join in and comment on both the process and curated sections of each issue.) But it does mean that your target audience is an audience of one, and that your work is a kind of gift to and for your fellow curator. In this way, we hope to offer an alternative to the notion that work written with a specific person in mind can’t resonate with a larger audience or, conversely, that writers should write with nobody in particular in mind.

How Can Curators Collaborate?
Curators might decide to directly collaborate with each other — beyond responding to the same theme and supporting one another through the process and curated sections of their issue. Ideas for being more directly engaged with each other’s work through collaboration include editing one another’s work, giving each other writing or creative prompts, directly working together to create new work, interpreting one another’s work in different media, and writing individual works in response to or inspired by each other’s work.

Ideas for how to collaborate can be found in the Mutating the Signature issue of Qarrtsiluni, which we guest edited, at The Poetry Collaborative, a collaborative poetry think-tank of sorts that we took part in last year, and in the collaborative poetry anthology Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. (We welcome reader feedback about where to find collaboration ideas as well.)

How Is This Different From Self-Publishing?
Our model is fundamentally different from self-publishing. We see Mutating the Signature as a literary journal — even though we do hope this space will offer an alternative to some of the assumptions and pressures that define and drive typical publishing endeavors and publisher/author relationships. Also, by exchanging the roles of author and publisher, and of author and audience, we hope to explore the way these roles are defined and the way they in turn so often define us and our work.

As publishers, we work with past curators to select future curators based on their work as artists. We certainly take into consideration work that they have produced in the past. But we aren’t a journal you send your work to so that we can publish what you submitted: We are a journal that accepts you as an artist, along with a partnering artist. Then we give you the time and space to generate new creative material in the process section of your issue, as well as presenting the results of that endeavor in the curated section of your issue.

In short, we accept you as an artist because we are excited to see what you will do tomorrow (and the next and day and the next) — and we are excited to showcase that work in something approximating real time to as broad an audience as possible — as opposed to showcasing what you have already written.