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22

During the previous year, the writers presented a public reading, which was the result of a more direct collaboration. They all wrote about one theme: Each woman's experience of loosing her virginity; then they passed their piece on to another woman, whose task it was to discover what the essence of that experience was for her, and to alter only those parts which could not possibly have applied to her. Then the papers went through that process once more. Finally, what remained, was a distillation of the experience which expressed that commonality. Through this process of collaboration women saw their similarities and difference, and what they expressed, at the end, was their fusion of experience. (This process was guided by Deena Netzger in the Journal Workshop, and the description here is based on Deena's account of the workshop at my request.)

Another kind of collaboration was developed by five women in the F.S.W. in a work they created for the opening exhibition of the new building last winter. Inspired by Anne Waldman's poem, "Fast Speaking Woman," each of the five artists (Ann Isolde, Cynthia Ann, Meridee Mandio, Anne Gaulden and Emily Chaison) made about 25 small scale images of women corresponding to some of those that Waldman invokes in her poem. Initially, they were thinking of interspersing their images and weaving them together in a quilt-like manner. But as the body of their images grew, and each woman's style and focus became evident, they rethought their original intent. They decided to preserve more of their individual identities by assembling each artist's image on a seperate panel and hanging the 5 panels (identical in size and format) next to each other. They included small square mirrors (of the same size as each image) interspersed among their images on each panel, in order to extend