Laurie Greene and Edward Clark On The 5 Things You Need To Be A Successful Author or Writer

Punting can be done in collaborative or solo writing. It is an excuse for intellectual risk taking. It stakes new territory. It allows for the writer to entertain ideas they might not otherwise and imagine unforeseen possibilities in their work.

As part of my interview series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Laurie Greene. Laurie is an emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Embodiment and, as the founder of Yoga Nine Studios, is also a longtime practitioner, researcher, and teacher of yoga. Her diverse research interests include world perspectives on health, language and culture, gender expression, and ritual movement which all intersect in the effort to understand how bodies carry important social meaning. Professor Greene has taught and published works in both academic and nonacademic arenas and is a poet, memoirist, and ethnographer.

Edward Clark is a figure acknowledged throughout the world for his work integrating the fields of theatre and yoga. His performing company, Tripsichore, tours regularly throughout Europe, North America, and Asia. Mr. Clark is also internationally recognised as a teacher of advanced yoga technique and philosophy. He is a regular presenter and workshop leader at Yoga Conferences as well as a sought after teacher on various Teacher Training Programmes in the USA, the UK, Europe, Mexico, and Asia.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

Edward: What I do with my performance company, while quite choreographic and lyrical, is based upon narrative structures. We always tried to conceive and execute our shows to resemble silent moves…with a lot more “arty” physicality. We devised elaborate tales — often actually scripting the material to explain “character” to ourselves and the other performers and nearly always jettisoning this written material sometime before the actual performances. We thought the physical movement expressed more effectively than the written. In the early 90s, the company transitioned into only using yoga movement onstage (we had been incorporating it into our training since the late 70s) because we found the movement and philosophical ideas very potent — and yet, saw that it was largely unexplored as a choreographic language. The scene was exciting; here was new and expressive language to convey profound ideas. Since then, we’ve watched with exasperation as the scene grows more trivial. Both Laurie and I wanted to write a critical evaluation of this and to point to possible directions for the evolution of yoga.

I prefer to write longhand. In particular, I like to write in a small notebook and at times when I would otherwise be looking for ways to distract myself — riding on the subway or on a train, or waiting at the airport, for example. Something about the speed with which I write by hand feels about right with the speed in which I compose thoughts I wish to record. It may be that the writing then has a more corporeal aspect which I don’t get when I am using a computer keyboard.

Laurie: My uncle Judah was a hippie and a yogi. He ran the Sivananda ashram in Philadelphia in the 1960s and 70s and, though we didn’t get on that well, I grew up practicing and volunteering at the ashram after school when my parents were both working. I was a curious and rambunctious child and, ironically, my countercultural uncle saw this as a failing. When I was 14, he decided to teach me self-restraint and sent me to study with the infamous Iyengar teacher Joan White, known for her strict teaching style and exacting discipline. I didn’t get on well there either. I was stubborn and questioned her techniques, but I did appreciate what she taught me, and I saw the value in exploring the breadth of yoga techniques and styles. After high school, I attended a two-year program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. This was purely a studio curriculum (life drawing, painting, sculpture) and I loved the respite from academic study it provided. When I later attended college, I started out as an art history major, then switched to literature, and then biology — all in my freshman year. I had my parents worried, but I was happy exploring. I took my first anthropology course with a wonderful teacher at Columbia University named Morton Klass — Human Evolution — an elective for biology majors. I was immediately hooked. Anthropology — the study of humankind — allowed me to explore all of my interests. Anything that had to do with human beings was fair game. I graduated with a degree in Physical Anthropology from Penn. I then toyed with studying dance therapy in graduate school before applying to Tulane’s PhD anthropology program. When all was said and done, I collected a studio arts degree, a BA is in physical anthropology, a Masters in cultural anthropology, and a PhD in linguistic anthropology. The broad range of my published work reflects these myriad interests, and my belief that academic disciplines tend to create narrow, artificial boundaries for understanding the human condition.

Writing, visual arts, and movement have always been easier ways for me to express myself, but, ironically, I have made a career requiring speaking. As a college professor and yoga teacher, I have found that relaying my feelings and beliefs verbally — earnestly and sincerely — is better accomplished after careful deliberation, and so I often write out my lectures in preparation, even though I don’t look at my notes in class. For me, the ability to convey nuance (to engage in a discussion rather than deliver a lecture), is more easily curated through metaphor and imagery than in personal interactions. Like Edward, I too, like to do my initial drafts on paper. The tactile feels more visceral and direct. It allows me to better connect with my subject matter, or perhaps it’s just that I learned to write on paper, and the screen seems like an unnecessary mediator. The transfer of ideas from paper onto a computer acts as the first editing process and is altogether different than the initial writing — on paper, it’s unfiltered (I’m creating); on the screen it becomes self-conscious (I’m analysing). Both perspectives are necessary for good writing and good thinking.

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?

Laurie: I am currently exploring some new genres of writing outside of academia. I have been writing and publishing poetry, and I am currently working on a memoir for the late Reed Apaghian, a Philadelphia restauranteur, actor, astrologer, and gay icon. Reed and I spent the two years before his death meeting everyday and recording his memories. Memoir isn’t biography. It is focused and thematic, and it aims to highlight a notable or relatable aspect of the subject’s life. So, I am doing what I have always done: Research — by reading a number of notable memoirs to understand what good structure and technique looks like. Having said this, I am situating Reed’s life in the context of queer Philadelphia history — so everything I do is still informed by the anthropological eye.

Edward: I’m working on producing a double album (a vinyl record) with the musicians from Tripsichore’s most recent show (4 songs from the album were in the show). It’s really a vanity project — we might break even if we’re lucky — but we are not trying to become famous. What we did want to do was a musical/yoga project that captured the excitement we used to feel when we bought a double album — you know, the cover artwork, the lyrics to study on the inner sleeve, the credits for every little musical contribution, and sly in-jokes.

For the show, we created some USB sticks to hand out with the music and credits on them. These were cunningly disguised as credit cards (the USB stick flips out from the card). We can see a lot of possibilities for this format — it is a new way to produce and sell an album. Obviously, the songs are all going to be there, but there is scope for a lot of accompanying video, artwork, and ephemera associated with the various artists.

Can you share the most interesting story that occurred to you in the course of your career?

Laurie: As an anthropologist, I have many stories about navigating foreign cultures. One of the most interesting happened to me when I was a new graduate student studying the use of medicinal plants in traditional Mayan communities in the Yucatan. I was about to end my three months of working with a particular healer and her family and took my normal bus, packed with people and chickens, to their small village about an hour away to have one last meeting and say goodbye. I couldn’t pay my informants (they were subsistence farmers who lived, by and large, outside of the cash economy), but I would arrive each day and buy everyone sodas and snacks at the tiny bodega at the head of the village as a measure of my gratitude and acknowledgement of the use of their time and knowledge. This day, when I arrived, a table was set, and a chicken was being cooked. They had made me a farewell lunch which was extravagant by their standards. But the piece de resistance was the pitcher in the center of the table filled with bright red liquid; leaning up against it, an empty cherry Kool-Aid packet. They had somehow gathered the funds to purchase this luxury item and mixed it with the well water from their property. I took my seat on the dirt floor and as the guest of honor was served first. The feet of the chicken I’d seen running around the day before in sewage didn’t frighten me (much), but drinking the well water did. I weighed the options — I could drink the Kool-Aid they went to great expense for in my honor and hope to get back to Merida before the inevitable intestinal barrage or I could insult my hosts and irreparably ruin our relationship. Well, ironically, sometimes you have to drink the Kool-Aid. You take risks and go to great lengths to do the right thing to accomplish what you need to.

Edward: Tripsichore has a variety of satellite performing groups based in different countries. This past June, we assembled a company of various Tripsichoreans from around the world to do 4 shows in Spain. This felt very rock n roll largely because we were using live electric and bass guitars and had a strong collection of songs, many featuring singing (in Spanish — the musicians and lyricist were Mexican). We only had a week to rehearse the show en masse and so we decided to arrange a story based on old familiar pieces. Though most of the participants had never met before, they were familiar with each other’s work via social media. And they pulled together brilliantly. It always sounds dodgy to evaluate one’s own work, but this really felt like a very new and vital kind of entertainment. It had the power of rock n roll but it was being fronted by yoga choreography.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Laurie: We all hope to learn from our struggles, and I attribute my greatest lesson in writing to my high school history teacher, Al Tanner. Mr. Tanner was not much older than us, and straight out of Vietnam. He was a bit brusque, but genuine and straight talking with a laugh that would rock a room. We talked about difficult subjects and historical realities in a way that challenged all of us to question our beliefs. He would assign weekly essays on controversial current events that could only be 5 pages in length. I was a diligent student and could write lengthy tracts on command. The first paper I handed in to Mr. Tanner was 5 pages and a few sentences which sat conspicuously on the sixth page looking sheepish. He returned the paper the following day with an F, noting that he would not read the final page. I was devastated. My favorite teacher had given me my only failing grade. When I asked him why, he answered simply, “if you can’t say it in 5 pages, you don’t know it. You are rambling”. He was right. Mr. Tanner’s voice is still always with me when I write — only write about what you know and get to the point. Be concise. Writing isn’t about saying everything you know. It is about saying one thing as clearly and descriptively as you can. Don’t make your readers wander around and look for your points. It isn’t that this story is funny, but it does make me smile to know my greatest lesson was as a junior in high school.

Edward: In writing our second book, Laurie and I thought it would be amusing to write a chapter about stereotypical characters in the yoga world as though they were anthropological specimens, in an effort to bring to light the “culture” of yoga and the unconscious influence it has on its members, their beliefs, and social interactions. The result was, at best, mildly amusing but we included it in material that we sent the publisher to be vetted by reviewers. The scathing disdain of one reviewer clarified for us that maybe the world was still not ready for yoga humour in the guise of academic literature. Probably, it just wasn’t clever enough to be clear that it was satirical, or perhaps satire has little place in refined analysis. The point of this for the writer is that you have to be prepared to throw stuff away. The chapter wasn’t saying anything crucial and it didn’t warrant the chopping down of trees to print a book. At the same time, a writer should be prepared to give an idea the chance to flourish — to write enough to see whether it is worth putting forward in a public way (as we say “to punt”). There are two lessons here. Be prepared to waste time taking a fling at writing something. And, be prepared to throw it away — don’t fall in love with anything you write.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in your journey to becoming a writer? How did you overcome it? Can you share a story about that that other aspiring writers can learn from?

Laurie and Edward: The biggest challenge for any writer is getting the right publisher for your work. This requires first and foremost that you know why your work is valuable and unique, and that you believe in it. Second, you must find a publisher which is a good fit for your desired audience. We encountered this challenge with our first coauthored book, Teaching Contemporary Yoga: Physical Philosophy and Critical Issues. The text straddled trade and academic audiences, as does our most recent book of essays, Yoga and the Body: The Future of Modern Yoga in the Studio and Beyond. We sent the completed draft to a variety of publishing houses (both trade and academic) but had our hearts set on Routledge, which has a history of publishing crossover books on yoga philosophy and its applied practices. After 3 months, and a series of rejections from other trade and independent publishers, we shot an email to the publisher at Routledge to see if she had considered the book. She answered back right away but it was clear that she had not read the manuscript. After we sent a one paragraph description (requested), she suggested that the book was too difficult for a yoga audience and there probably wasn’t a market for it; but we thought differently. We wrote back a lengthy email with a new proposal detailing precisely why we thought she was mistaken. We included facts about emerging graduate programs in yoga, the impact of the COVID pandemic, other popular books published by competing presses, our experience and connections for over 40 years in the yoga community, and our experience as writers. We explained why this material was “both timely and much needed, as it fill[ed] a void in the serious consideration of yoga as a viable enterprise”. We also acknowledged that “the marketing of books is of great concern today”, and how sensitive we were to the “need for authors to take a greater role in the dissemination and marketing of their materials” and that we were “aware of the kinds of risks that publishers today take”. The very next morning she offered us a contract without peer review of the material or more than a peek at our draft manuscript. All we needed to do was sign the contract and commit to Routledge. Wow. We were shocked and thrilled — this process is unheard of. But it points to the importance of believing in your work and educating yourself about the literature in your field and the business of publishing. Rejection is part of most creative endeavour and you must be ready to vigorously defend the value of your work.

In your opinion, were you a “natural born writer” or did you develop that aptitude later on? Can you explain what you mean?

Laurie: I do not believe that I am a natural born writer and I’m not certain that anyone is. Everything done well requires dedication to craft and it is often when the product is really good that we fail to see all the work that went into it. A great writer might make writing look easy, but it isn’t. I love what I do, and that passion makes the work enjoyable (certainly essential to writing well) but not a walk in the park. I really learned to write as an anthropologist. Anthropological writing — ethnography — has been described as crafting “creative nonfiction”. It is the kind of writing that has its roots in the experience of fieldwork, and its principal research technique — participant observation — is immersive and sensorial. Ethnographic writing is scientific, but different from other academic writing. The ethnographer lives in and becomes a part of the culture they study, and this allows them the opportunity for a depth of understanding unavailable to researchers who maintain boundaries between themselves and the observed. It aims to tell other people’s stories from their native perspective in their own voice. The writing challenge is always to translate my personal experience as an ethnographer, and the experiences of others I have observed and interviewed, to my audience so that they might “feel” as though they are there (it evokes an empathic reaction). Good ethnographic writing is passionate and evocative. It is rich with sensorial description and elucidated through metaphor. These skills — to observe through all the senses, record these experiences, and translate them into evocative descriptions — take time and practice.

Edward: It should be a source of amazement to most writers (and those who aspire) that there are rare souls who can write a polished first draft and who disdain others’ input. Reporters of current events must often churn out material quickly and to do so whilst maintaining the standards of good literature is a considerable accomplishment. If you are one of these rare souls, we bow down before you and tug our forelocks repeatedly. However, for the rest of the writing world, it is quite important to recognise how much revision usually goes into making a good piece of writing. Most writers we know are pretty good at offering advice or criticism when they read another’s work. Yet not that many are so good at correcting their own creations. If you can rewrite your own material, this is a very good thing, but sometimes it requires the jumpstart of learning what another thinks of what you’ve written. Though our writing is cultivated, we felt at pains to make it readable to people who were interested in ideas rather than just the yoga afficionado. When we showed it to acquaintances, we learned, to our surprise, how some things we felt were well expressed, were perceived as jargon-ridden. But we were also writing for a particular niche as well, for whom the lingo of yoga was not so obscure. We had to make a decision: were we going to “write down” to our audience or challenge them to “read up”? A natural born writer would just write, without these considerations. But that doesn’t mean anyone would read it.

Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience, what are the “5 Things You Need To Be A Successful Author or Writer”? Please share a story or example for each.

1. “Punting”:

When we were writing together, we found it vital to preface some of our efforts with the phrase “I’m only punting”. A “punt” is a wager that is not taken too seriously — a flutter. Sometimes you have to try out an idea without feeling the need to seriously defend it. It is an exploratory gambit. The message sent to your writing partner is, “I am giving this a try-out and I haven’t really thought it through yet.” This invites critical input or collaboration rather than devil’s advocacy. “Let’s build this into something before we start to knock holes in it,” is the message conveyed. Punting can be done in collaborative or solo writing. It is an excuse for intellectual risk taking. It stakes new territory. It allows for the writer to entertain ideas they might not otherwise and imagine unforeseen possibilities in their work.

2. Write about what you know

We are both longtime teachers and practitioners (participants) as well as researchers (observers) and this proved invaluable to our writing. The fact that we were participants provided a deep understanding that the observer’s eye alone could not decipher. In any written work, be it fact or fiction, creative or academic, one can only write about what one truly knows. “Surface writing” like that found in social media, and often in journalism, is meant to be an introduction to a topic but not a deep analysis. To those who are more informed on a subject, or who “live it”, such cursory writing seems superficial. The anthropological lens, the depth required in the ethnographic perspective, and experience in the creative arts have greatly influenced our writing, as has our lived experience in the world we are trying to elucidate. Writing any book requires deep inquiry, whether it be research, the immersion of oneself into the world they are describing, or simply the experience gained through the passage of time.

3. Be disciplined (Routine)

The ultimate fruition of any creative act like writing requires discipline. One thing that we both do when we are involved in a project is make time to write every day. We both designate three hours to work (either together or apart), although it may go longer if things are clicking. This may mean you sit and think and jot down ideas, research, edit a previously written piece, read relevant material, discuss what you have written with a trusted reader, or even write! In the Tripsichore company we have a saying, “the hardest thing is to put on your tights.” By this we mean, the most difficult part of creative process is getting started. One cannot begin rehearsing until you are in your gear. The writer, like the performer, must prepare themselves every day to write. Despite the fascination of the television, your Instagram feed pinging, or the refrigerator calling, one needs to put everything else on hold and make the writing process take precedence.

4. Read a lot.

An author needs to know how their work fits into the breadth of the literature in their field. Publishers want to know what makes your work stand out from the body of work already published. Technique and style are also revealed through reading other’s work, and an author may develop their style through exposure to works they find effective. Extensive reading outside of one’s specialty also leads to a cross-fertilization of ideas — you can better see the connections between your work and the work of others. This expands the particular concerns of your work into the broader scope of related literature. This can make an author’s work relevant to a wider audience.

When writing Yoga and the Body, we reviewed a range of writing outside of the discipline of yoga, which served to expand the relevance of the analysis we were proposing. Iain McGilchrist’s work, for example, which is about brain lateralization, was used to discuss the nature of consciousness, and Susan Palmer’s work on “cults” published in The Guardian was used to elucidate the powerful effects which empathy can produce. David Byrne’s Broadway production, American Utopia, was the central device used to discuss the potential for yoga to transform individuals and the cultures they live within. The ecstatic writings of St. Teresa of Avila and Luther were used to illustrate the physical nature of spiritual experience. The broader the connections one can make in their work, either through association or analogy, the more universal an author’s work becomes and the greater their potential audience.

5. Don’t write down but make your work accessible

There are a number of concepts in yoga philosophy that are complicated — their logic can be difficult to follow and the premises, at least on the surface, can be difficult to swallow. Some might say that it is not unlike a religion in this respect. It is easier to ask adherents to accept on faith that the tenets of these beliefs are the way they are and are beyond questioning. Probing them shows “bad faith” and is not encouraged, whereas acceptance (and espousal) is rewarded and deemed to be rewarding. One of our self-assigned tasks was to unpick some of these yoga premises in a way that plausibly explained them, but which didn’t oversimplify. While the book deliberately aims to speak to yoga practitioners of a certain elite understanding, we also wanted to be clear that such an understanding was available to all.

A pertinent question for authors with such ambitious aims is how to make difficult material accessible to all without talking down to their audience. This is perhaps the most difficult challenge an author faces. One can avoid jargon or ensure that jargon is adequately explained. One has to know the material well and clearly express it. Even after revision, when you think it’s finished, take a pause and get someone who doesn’t already know the material to read it. In the writing itself, admission of the difficulty of the material may also help. Encouragement like, “You’ve made it this far — bear with me” may give the reader some measure of accomplishment. And humour — never overused in the Academe — may help the reader through the grind. Though this can be a daunting process, some writers are superb at it. Oliver Sacks’ work on perception (i.e. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) is an example of complex concepts presented in a way that is informative, entertaining, and accessible.

Which literature do you draw inspiration from? Why?

Edward: The most influential, but not recently read, would include the usual culprits for teenagers with artistic aspirations: Kafka (due for a renaissance), Dostoyevsky (dark, funny, and desperate), a lot of other Germans, Russians, and Czechs (Lermontov, Thomas Mann, Gunter Grass, etc.) Later, with a subscription to the New Yorker, there were people like John Updike, Rose Tremain, Cormac McCarthy, William Trevor, and Don DeLillo.

In the academic vein, there are some predictable equivalents to the above: Hawking, Dawkins, Hofstadter, as well as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Heidegger. But Julian Jayne’s book The Origin of Consciousness in The Breakdown of The Bi-cameral Mind was particularly influential…and later, Iain McGilcrhist (who gently, but largely, refutes Jayne without disagreeing with the originality of his findings). Joseph Alter would also have a place on my pantheon.

Laurie: I value academic literature and fiction differently but have been influenced by both. Generally, good academic writing brings forth ideas. It helps one to create a narrative and analytical structure in which to organize and present your observations and analysis. I love the work of anthropologist Joseph Alter, who writes cogently, analytically, and dispassionately about the esoteric practice of yoga in India. I also love the work of Ruth Behar who captures the emotional landscape of the cultures she studies in a more personal and vulnerable style. Fiction on the other hand is, for me, about inspiration, both stylistically and as creative motivation. I have a thing for wordsmiths. My god, I have loved Nabokov (maybe it was Vladamir, maybe it was Vera his wife — who knows?) since I was a teenager. His descriptive techniques are unparalleled and there are phrases from Ada, The Gift, Speak Memory, and Invitation to a Beheading that will always live in my head. But I also love the grit of more modern writers who take chances, like Miranda July in her incorrigibly honest book On All Fours. I love poetry that speaks to the quotidian — Gallway Kinnel, Andrea Gibson, Pablo Neruda. So, I am influenced by the removed and the intimate; the academic and the personal. They all have their role in inspiring my thinking and my writing.

You are both people of enormous influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Laurie: Having taught at university for many years and watched the increasingly rapid decline of reading as an activity, and writing as a skillset, if I could start a movement, it would be to severely limit the use of AI writing tools like ChatGPT. To be fair, technology isn’t the boogieman, but it isn’t our saviour either. As Marshall McLuhan observed, at some level, the medium is the message; but my concerns about the reliance on AI writing tools runs deeper. It began with the technology of the internet. The ability to look up gads of information quickly is both a blessing and a curse. The overload of information and the lack of vetting of sites has led to what we now know is a dangerous amount of misinformation and the tendency to create information overload. People have increasingly, and often unintentionally, begun to plagiarize others. Instead of working to take in, synthesize, and understand information to form their own concepts through critical thinking, they instead find it much easier and quicker to copy and paste. Recent studies from MIT and others suggest that the regular use of AI writing technology affects our ability to critically think, imagine, and create on our own. The data shows that many who compose these documents, don’t remember or understand what they have written. They have essentially let the bot do the thinking. It’s so very relevant here, because many “writers” are using AI, and any knowing eye can tell. Technology is best used to expand our abilities to experiment, not mute our creative and intellectual capacities. It also positions writing as an onerous task instead of a powerful vehicle for expression and the “play of ideas”. So, write on your own. The struggle is well worth it.

Edward: The ethos of non-judgement, vigorously extolled by many in the yoga scene, may be informed by kindness, but it is wholly unreasonable and unfeasible. As soon as one enters into perception, judgement has been made. Certain things are noticed and others are excluded. In our first book, with disguised exasperation, we discussed the difference between Radical Acceptance (no judgement; only acceptance) and Critical Acceptance. Not wishing to rehearse this argument again, suffice to say we found the fatalism of “accepting” everything to be fatuous unless it was done so as you would with any scientific hypothesis — temporarily accept that it is worth testing and critically evaluate what the test turns up.

Critical Acceptance is the provisional acceptance a notion or theory and, through circumspection, leads to revision and improvement. People do get into ruts. It’s a neurobiological feature — certain neural pathways are established and these speed cognitive process. It helps us to maintain the façade of our personalities both to others and to ourselves, but makes us see the world through a predictive selection of what we (both consciously and unconsciously) choose to perceive. Practising Critical Acceptance demands that one entertain other possibilities, yet without investment in the outcome beyond the flexible use of discernment.

What is the one habit you believe contributed the most to you becoming a great writer? (i.e. perseverance, discipline, play, craft study). Can you share a story or example?

Edward: I suppose habit and routine cover similar territory. Routine is important because it ensures that the ongoing importance of something is maintained. So, rules like “write for 3 hours before breakfast” works for some (though I would find it impossible if not sustained by a coffee habit). It is also important to have the latitude to break your routine.

Laurie and I were working together in time zones that were 5 hours apart and both had complicated and irregular schedules — often involving us moving much further apart in time; as much as 12 or 13 hours. While we did much of the writing together, we just as often wrote up a passage to be vetted later. To be able to do this entailed a fair amount of discussion time and the habit of occasional cocktails at the end of sessions helped with this. It was a time for more casual and yet far-reaching discussion. It is probably where our best ideas percolated. Our heads were filled with the ideas we were working on and the cocktails helped fuel our sense of grandeur.

o COCKTAIL RECIPE

o 1 Measure of Mezcal

o 1 Measure of Tequila

o ½ Measure of Aperol

o ½ Measure Cinzano (Red)

o Slice of orange

Served preferably with a large ice cube (slow melting and effective chilling)

This may have been easier for me because it might have been 7:00 or 8:00 at night and I could stagger off to dinner and thence to bed. Goodness knows how Laurie coped with the remainder of her afternoon though I am certain she did it with aplomb. DRINK AND WRITE RESPONSIBLY.

Laurie: I certainly agree that an excellent cocktail accompanied by riveting conversation is bound to produce what is believed (at the time) to be excellent work :), especially when the participants are particularly entertaining. However, it is really the unstated ground rules of these meetings which lead to success. Collaboration in writing is very different from writing alone. It requires that you have the utmost respect for your writing partner for there are bound to be disagreements, both in terms of the content of ideas and the way that they should be expressed. Edward and I are very different people, and despite what people who read our work think, there is plenty that we disagree about. The habit that I think is crucial in writing, whether it be in collaboration or in the editorial process, is respect, even when sometimes passionate disagreements might suggest otherwise. Because of this, Edward and I often, after much sole scuffing and snarling, come around to each other’s point of view. And where we can’t agree, we compromise or leave the discussion behind for another day. I really can’t think of anything less interesting than having someone always agree with me. Disagreements force one to examine the reasons behind their beliefs, and this reflection (both about your own and your collaborator’s point of view), allows you to critically examine your arguments and ultimately the preconceptions that lie at their foundation. In the end, that’s probably what the cocktail is for, a toast to our beloved differences.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Laurie: https://laurieagreene.com/ (webpage)

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/proflaurieagreene/

Instagram @lauriegreene9999

Edward: www.tripsichore.com (webpage)

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Tripsichore/

Instagram: @tripsichore

Thank you for these wonderful insights!