If We is a collection of notebook pages that I gathered from writers and artists in the Wild Roof Journal community. When requesting these pages, I intentionally did not make any special requests for content, style, or subject matter. I wanted real pages, unfiltered, unfinished, and messy. A notebook is a place of intimacy, where inner thoughts collide haphazardly with words plucked from one’s daily surroundings, impromptu sketches, partial lists, scribbles, and cross-outs.

Next, I used photos of these notebook pages to layer with my photographs. I kept the decision-making of which photograph to pair with each page somewhat loose, leaving room for intuition to take hold from time to time. It was important to me to honor the words on the page, while also allowing for some areas of the text to recede into the background and other areas to stand out.

The title of the collection was first suggested by Mars Cassidy and encapsulates both possibility and connection. “What if?” is perhaps the central question of my creative experimentation. “What if?” is how the idea of Wild Roof Journal began in late 2019. What if I started my own lit mag? I found some of the collaborative pieces that have been included in WRJ issues to be really appealing. In particular, a poetry and collage series by Clive Knights and Terriann Walling fit so wonderfully with WRJ’s mission to bring together the visual and literary arts. Additionally, many-time contributor Amy Marques put out a collaborative collection of her own last year, titled Duets, in which my poem “Side Road” is paired with one of Amy’s paintings. I thought, “What if I can do something like that!?”

As a collaborative project, the “we” of my creative comrades and I was a source of inspiration and motivation. Without the people who were excited to send me their notebook pages, this project wouldn’t exist. Thank you all for being willing to go along with my offbeat idea for this collection. Special thank you to Lisa Achammer for designing the cover art.

As Editor in Chief of WRJ, I put out each issue to celebrate the work of the amazing contributors and place the focus on them; however, this project allowed me to take on a more active role in the creative process. As I gave myself some room to play around with each image, I felt the need to share them. I considered submitting them for publication as individual pieces but decided that presenting them as a collection would be most fitting. Also, it’s been about one year since the release of my poetry chapbook The Half Turn. While I continue to write poems for another book, I wanted to put something different out there in the meantime and take on a different challenge. I’m grateful to be able to share it with you.