Margo Solod was born queer in a small town in East Tennessee, although she didn’t realize it until she fell in love with Susan Dey on The Partridge Family. After college she spent 10 years traveling around the country playing electrician for small theater companies before settling down to cook for 15 years on a tiny New England island. Six years ago she escaped and settled in the middle of 72 acres in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. She lives with her partner and 2 huge dogs. Her new book "Some Very Soft Days" is out from Mayapple Press.

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Carolyn Ogburn grew up making forts out of pine needles and sticks, out of piano music and back porches, out of whiskey and poetry. She lives with her girlfriend, dogs, cats and chickens in Wise Acres, deep in the mountains of Madison County, NC, where she finds jobs for other people and is writing a book about it called Hell and Scissors.

i can't speak for carolyn, but my version is that we met briefly at a writers' conference and then once again for a few hrs. we began to correspond by email and i found some of her emails so beautifully written that one day i pulled out several of her sentences, turned them into lines of poetry, and added several lines of my own. i sent this back to her with no word of explanation and wated to see what would happen. the next day the poem came back, with another stanza added, and the collaborative process was born.

over time we have evoleved a few rules. we don't edit or alter a poem until we decide it is both finished. then we let it sit for a while. eventually i edit it and send my version to her, and she edits and sends it back, usually this happens twice before we are both satisfied.

at present we have around 25 finished poems and another 10 or so in the works. we have had poems picked up by unlikely stories, the mag, the potomac review, big tex[t] and indiana review.

i have tried a number of collaborations in the past but this is the only one that has ever worked.

margo solod