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Collective Works
Connecting Community Artists
Collective Works is an ongoing project celebrating art made in community. Paper Trail collaborates with writers, dancers, artists, and musicians to see what we can create together.
What Does It Mean To Be Human?
A Collaboration with the Northfield Mount Hermon Dance Department
In 2024, nine writers gathered with me for 10 weeks to explore the question What Does it Mean to be Human? So much of our time was spent writing through all of the different ways we might approach the question, deciding how and when to commit to the one theme of many we would explore, and learning from the perspectives we each brought to the project. At the end of our ten weeks, we handed over our writing to Nicole Williams, one of the NMH dance teachers and one of the writers, who turned the work into choreography performed by students at NMH's winter 2025 performance.
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The Measure of Enough—Exploring
Wanting, Being, and the Space Between
A Collaboration with Waterway Arts
In 2025, twelve writers gathered with me for 10 weeks to explore what it means have enough, to do enough—to be enough. We spent the first five weeks working from prompts to encourage us to try new genres, to follow our thoughts to see where they’d go. The second half of our time was spent trying to commit to one way of looking at this theme, expanding an idea, and learning from each other’s feedback. What is it like to let a piece of writing be enough when we only have ten weeks, and there are so many ways we want to answer these questions? What is it like to let a piece of writing be enough even when new directions remain?
While the writers were writing, Kiah Tinkham, owner of Waterway Arts, posted an open call seeking visual artists who were up to the challenge of creating a piece inspired by the writing. The works on paper were to be the exact dimensions of eleven by seventeen, and would be displayed unframed. There would be just short of six weeks to complete and deliver the work.
Below you'll find the results of our collected efforts—the thirteen different images and the audio recordings of each writer reading their piece.
The Lines We Cannot See
Myrna's Favorite
A Soul Speaks
Collection.Meegan
Collection.Sayre
Chimera Cells & Tone Tagging
Ullage
The Measure of Enough
Wisdom Fish
Enough.Enough.Enough
Looking in, Looking Out
Pauline
Track Name
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