The Sundering
The Life and Death of a Collaboration Reborn from its Decay
“How do you honour the birth, life, death, and decay of one of the most important working relationships of your life? How do you come to terms with the rise and fall of something that gave you so much joy? They say that grief is the result of love, that where you have loved then eventually you will feel its sting. The thing that I and my collaborators poured so much love into eventually foundered, in part because of the weight of that same love. How to make sense of this, to mourn it, to learn from it, to use those learnings to rejuvenate a sense of potential for future collaborations?”
Me and Paulina Larocca co-wrote an article on honouring the birth, life, death, and decay of a collaboration; on rejoicing in it, grieving its demise, and learning from it. It’s been published in the Creativity Matters journal, a collaboration of The Atlantic Centre for Creativity and The Canadian Network for Imagination and Creativity.
I’ll admit that ‘the collaboration’ I wrote about in the article is actually a composite of aspects of collaborations I have been a part of over the years. I wanted to protect the innocent but also wanted to distill some of the things I had slowly absorbed through my creative-life experience. Paulina and I wanted to explore what happened when a creative collaboration started to wane - how to grieve this in a way that honoured the love you might have felt for that experience of co-creation?
We feel extremely honoured to have the article included in the Creativity Matters journal, which features a lot of beautiful writing and art from other contributors.