About Fex & Coo

by

Paco Mitchell

Occasionally someone will ask me, “What are you working on, Paco?” What they mean to say is, “What are you writing?” That’s easy to ask, but not so easy to answer.

Unless they already have some knowledge of this unusual project that my colleague Russell Lockhart and I call Fex & Coo, I might just say, “Well, I’m working with a co-author on an experimental fiction project. We’re going to serialize it.” That’s a short answer to a long question. For one thing, it’s true: Russ and I are indeed experimenting; we are in the process of a serialization; it is a lot of work; furthermore, it is a fictional work of a collaborative sort; and it’s turning into quite an interesting project.

A cynic might reply, “So, you’re just winging it, huh? Like two pantsers?[1] No plotting at all? It’s just bullshit! Gotcha!”

At that point, I might respond: “Yes, that’s it exactly. Oh, you understand! We’re winging it. Like two birds.” But I could also add, “And writing this is a lot of fun. Besides, if owls and herons could write fiction, don’t you think they would be writing something like this? Well? Don’t underestimate birds!”

My counter-response, being true to the improvisational spirit of Fex & Coo, might leave our imaginary cynic momentarily off-balance. But it’s not as though Russ and I are trying to throw any reader off-balance. Not at all. But if not, what are we trying to do? Lest we sow confusion where we only wish to plant fertile seeds,[2] maybe I can fill in some details regarding Fex & Coo.

1) The root idea or impulse, then, that prompted this project, came about virtually by accident. Out of the blue.

Let me explain.

One day Russ was sitting in Tully’s coffee shop in downtown Seattle, working on his computer. Being a life-long reader, and an accomplished writer as well, he was musing on a book about Goethe’s ideas that he’d been reading. In part, it dealt with Goethe’s unconventional “method” of doing 18^th-century science. As I understand it, Goethe’s scientific method was imaginative in high degree. It had to do with looking deeper into what one was seeing, “to find the story there,” as Russ says. Even more, this idea touched on mythical dimensions residing “within” our profane reality. But the trick is that, as Russ points out in his opening passages, one really does have to look at what one sees.

2) The “germinal accident” in this case, which Russ describes in his prologue, had to do with a convergence of fixed and mobile elements within his visual field—as he sat in that warm and steaming coffee shop, looking out onto the city streets. First, and most crucial, what he saw were two delivery trucks—FedEx and Costco. What could be more mundane? But, following Goethe’s lead, what Russ really saw, thanks to the blocking effects of a pillar on the front sidewalk, were truncated, eclipsed versions of those everyday signs, which he wrote down in his computer as—Fe-x and Co-o—or rather, Fex & Coo. Those turned out to be, not the names of commercial corporations, but rather the names of two fictional characters in the story that quickly developed.

3) Once Russ had harvested a few “nuggets” from this Goethean experiment in the old Tully’s shop (now gone out of business), he tested Goethe’s hypothesis by writing a few brief sentences that might serve as openers to a story. On impulse, he sent an email to me, and enclosed those out-of-the-blue openers.

Talk about psychoactive!

The effect of those sentences on me was explosive. Immediately I wrote a continuation to Russ’s tentative opening, and sent it to him. A day or two later, he wrote back with his own continuation of what I had written. That was all it took. Within a few days, the project had assumed a life of its own.

4) Fiction writers, especially pantsers like us, are familiar with the phenomenon of invented characters taking on a mysterious reality of their own—even to the point that the characters dictate the story to the presumptive authors. However, we have found that, when both co-authors are devoted to and familiar with dreams, synchronicities and depth psychology, their spontaneous exertions tend to increase the element of surprise—as much for the authors as for their readers.

This quality—characters, words and images coming alive and into view from unknown psychic depths—is one main reason, I think, why Russ and I have both been so enthusiastic about this project and why we have found the writing so enjoyable. Both of us sincerely hope that readers will share this attitude, and perhaps even find moments of creative stimulation, just as we have, in this serialization to come.

[1] “Pantsers” are writers who write by the seat of their pants. No plodding—excuse me, no plotting. It’s all discovery. All winging it.

[2] I use the phrase “fertile seeds” because that’s precisely how Russ and I both experience what one of us delivers to the other, in this back-and-forth process of authorial collaboration. And if we are both fertilized by this sort of playful interplay, why can’t a reader likewise be fertilized? Maybe there are readers who harbor their own creative voices within, lacking only an animating stimulus.