Written by Nate

Maybe you’re already a friend, or maybe you’re just passing through. Maybe you’re a writer beating the bushes to find a small press who’ll love you and publish your writing, and if so, solidarity to you. You want to know what Puzzlegrass is, and, yeah, that mission statement on our homepage is a little vague because, honestly, we haven’t fully answered the question ourselves.

I’m Nate i.e. Nathan Grover, sometimes “Nathanimal” in virtual spaces. I’m a writer, fifty-one, who lives in San Francisco. Much of what I’ve written here is born from frustration with the bush-beating mentioned above and with the evermore saturated and extractive publishing landscape.

I won’t complain that publishing is hard. It should be hard if it’s to bring quality writing to the top. But there comes a point when publishing is too hard, requires too much attention, causes too much anxiety. Trying to publish my stories, I’ve often become distracted from what brings me to writing in the first place, which is to have a place of meaning in my life where I can forge imagery that moves me. It can be terribly hard, too, to form community when writers are so pitted against each other for coveted publications and awards and when attempts to find a readership can so easily come under the suspicion of self-promotion.

Sometime around 2018 I became re-interested in Surrealism. Let me be clear, because among writers surrealism is often a style, like magical realism, which isn’t what I mean. When I capitalize it—“Surrealism”—maybe you picture something more period-specific, like Dali’s melting watches, and you wonder Are people still calling themselves Surrealists? Yes they are. I’m not a Surrealist (though I might argue Surrealism is something one does rather than something one is) and while I’ve had the pleasure of corresponding with a number of contemporary Surrealists, I won’t attempt to speak for them. So for now, let’s just put aside the “weirdness” of the Surrealists and whatever Black Dahlia podcast you may have listened to. I want to focus on two aspects: the Surrealist group and the Surrealist game.

Writers talk a lot about community. They host readings. They start literary magazines or writing groups. These are all important, but I think they’re somewhat incidental to making meaning and forming community. They so often become just another drum to beat in the march towards publication.

Surrealism is a revolt against capitalist bourgeois sensibility. It mistrusts the ego and its products. Creating literary commodities to increase the weight of our by-line is such a foundational premise for us writers it can be difficult to imagine a writing life without it. Surrealists solve this problem by working as a group, usually according to the constraints of a game to keep as much of their habitual selves out of it as possible. When the product (text, image, whatever) is touched by many hands no single person can claim credit for it. There’s a sense, too, when people have been listening and reacting to each other and putting ego aside, that the product has emerged all on its own. This emergent process reorients the group towards the product and towards each other. In other words, not only does the group create the product, but the product creates the group.

Here’s why I think the Surrealist group/game is a better method for building community than starting a lit journal: Communities are formed when people build and own something together and when that something owns them in turn. It’s best if this something is an image (it can be a real thing, too, but it should also be understood as an image) because communities form around shared symbols and are strengthened by group interaction with those symbols.

I’ve spent so much of my writing life trying to get out of my own way, to see beyond my own limited idea of what writing should be. Once while playing a Surrealist storytelling game with two Surrealist acquaintances, I was being Nate the Writer, messing up the tempo by fussing over my sentences too much, when one of the other players said to me, “Imagine we’re sitting at a table just passing a notebook back and forth between us.” He couldn’t have understood the impact this image would have on me, how long I’d labored with notebooks, the kind of lonely and even stressful place notebooks had become for me as I filled them with the sentences of Nate the Writer.

Ideally Puzzlegrass would be that notebook sliding back and forth across the table. It would be a place to be read by others, not just for your craft, as in a workshop, but for your substance. We can be the audience we need. In fact we can listen and respond to each other in ways that an audience can’t.

I’m not suggesting writers should only write collaboratively or only write slapdash automatic poetry—there’s obviously immense value in the “flowers of afterthought” and shaping work into something intelligible to oneself and others;  I’m suggesting we writers strike a better balance and open ourselves to the creative process by opening ourselves to each other. There’s joy to be had doing this, a joy found in the “Yes and” of improv and devised theater, the collaborative “flow state” of jazz.

I already have a few leads. Over on our books page you’ll find our first published book, Genesis. I consider this the urtext of Puzzlegrass. Genesis recounts “seven days of Creation,” a period that actually took about 3 years, when my good friend Ben and I made a bunch of screwball investigations into the creative process. Our methods centered around finding images that embodied creation, the Mad Scientist fixated upon lightning, the creation-myth animals Rabbit & Fox, etc. When these images found their metaphorical grounding they became a toy to share and a catalyst for collaborative discovery. Puzzlegrass, I imagine, will be a lot like that, a place where writers can play with the images that join them together.

Besides Ben there’s also my buddy Josh. The second Puzzlegrass book is his novel BBQ Beer Freedom, which we edited together and I designed and published. There’s also Earle, who I’ve recruited as the Puzzlegrass cartographer, a high and glorious office within the Puzzlegrass org chart. And there are other friends I’ve been in talks with. I’m lucky to have quite a few talented and open-minded writer friends.

Josh and I have been planning a regular publication. Each issue will feature a collaboration or game of some kind. We’ll include fiction, too, and maybe a column or something, but the main attraction will be collaborative. And I’d like to foster as much of this playful collaborative spirit as I can in Puzzlegrass Online, too. For now I leave these outlines intentionally vague, as I attempt to get out of my own way and let Puzzlegrass be what it wants to be.

At this moment, there’s no application process. I’m hoping Puzzlegrass, if properly watered and fertilized (ew) will grow organically, bringing together a diverse and cohesive group of writers and perhaps other kinds of artists, as well. If you’ve been nodding along to all this build-it-yourself, community-before-audience, Yes-and stuff, then there’s a good chance Puzzlegrass is for you. Even better if you connect with the image-obsessed aesthetic going on here. A letter, say, from a collaborator addressing the difficulties of collaborating with me, told as an extended scene of them trying to dance with my dead rigid body, would really tickle me and definitely end up on the website. But more importantly it would start a conversation.

In that spirit, I guess the first step for anyone wanting to get involved would be to leave a comment, send us a message, or post a response to anything we’re doing here on their own blog or however they put themselves out there.