Interview on Collaboration with Georg Amsel and Lake Angela

Sometimes the hardest part of collaborating is getting started. Here are some tips from creators that have collaborated—sometimes with an absolute stranger—and made something wonderful!

Did you know your partner in collaboration beforehand? Explain how you got together. 

Georg Amsel and I (Lake Angela) knew of each other, yes, but the collaboration process certainly has deepened our knowledge of and respect for each other. I would even say that Georg has resented me for any choices I have made outside of poetic ones, and by transcribing his ideas and complementing them with mine, we have come to a tentative understanding through poetry. At this point, we have a manuscript together of about 70 works. We began our collaboration as an experiment in communication across languages, continents, centuries, and poetic forms, and we both have been pleased and sometimes surprised by the results.

How did you collaborate? What was your process?

Georg began with ideas like strips of images and broken letters torn from a newspaper in his mind, in black and white, ink rubbing off on my brain. These ideas began in German, specifically the Austrian German Georg learned in the late 1800s and early 20th century. Bright spots of color appeared on paper. I transcribed the German with my working knowledge of the language, folded in my own ideas in German as well, then translated everything into English, including smells, tastes, ambiguities. Something Georg and I share is our deep appreciation for ambiguity in the German sense of the word Vieldeutigkeit—many-meaninged.

What were some challenges you faced during the collaborative process, and what did you learn?

It can be difficult to work with a style that is uncomfortable but native to both my mind and Georg’s, a way with words that readers have dismissed as schizophrenic—too associative, too hermetic. Together, however, we dove twice as deep into our purposeful ambiguity and emerged with knowledge that neurotypical readers, too, may both feel and come to understand.

Any final words of advice for future collaborators?

At the least, we recommend working across languages; for example, try including translation if you haven’t, even if only to experiment in writing the world differently. Then, take every written risk.

Read Georg Amsel & Lake Angela’s piece, “The Key Word”

Georg Amsel and Lake Angela are artists who collaborate across spacetime in both poetry and dancetheatre. Amsel comes from Salzburg and conceives poetic ideas in an Austrian German from the late 1800s. Angela holds a PhD in the intersemiotic translation of poetry and dance from the University of Texas at Dallas and has her MFA in poetry. Her books include Organblooms and Words for the Dead (FutureCycle Press). Previous publications by Amsel and Angela appear most recently in Passages North, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Fourth River, Portland Review, and Cordite Poetry Review. Their work also advocates for neurodivergence and schizophrenia spectrum creativity.