Several articles on collaboration across artistic fields have appeared in New Writing. Shauna Busto Gilligan and Karen Lee Street, in an essay called ‘Critical reflection on creative collaborations: imagining the image and wording the work,’ assert, ‘It is through collaboration and the sharing of information and craft – at events such as community workshops and academic conferences – that as artists we can expand our art (whether it is art of the word or image) and critically reflect on what we are trying to do through further creations’ (Gilligan & Street, 2011). For those of us working in universities, we can connect with other creative disciplines to expand our artistic practices and, even more so, our approaches to teaching these artistic practices. Similarly, Phillip Gross and Wyn Mason, in their essay ‘Surface tensions: framing the flow of a poetry–film collaboration,’ assert: ‘Collaboration, working across art forms and media in particular, offers a window into creative process. [...] Collaborators across forms cannot presume a common language; they have to make their work apparent to each other’ (Gross and Mason). ‘Text(ure), Modeling, Collage’ explores the intersections and differences among creative writing, graphic design and visual art, in terms of artistic practice and pedagogy.

Claudine Jaenichen: We don’t often make time for these conversations across artistic fields. As Karri Holley explains in Understanding Interdisciplinary Challenges and Opportunities in Higher Education, academic institutions often isolate faculty both physically and intellectually (2009: 18). A creative writer may not have occasion to bump into a visual artist across town or across campus to talk about how rigorous our practice is, how our fields share similar kinds of problem solving that build intuition, or how revision works across artistic endeavours. This interdisciplinary conversation essay is designed to circumvent our usual isolation, cultivate pedagogical allies, and develop new perspectives that invigorate teaching in both creative writing and the visual arts.