The Cohort Writing Initiative will continue to expand as we move into the new year.  Red Lemonade seeks interns and volunteers to assist with editorial tasks, content creation with writers, social media promotion and reading and engagement with independent literature.

 

COHORT seeks alternative literary fiction inspired by the idea and associations of the word cohort as well as the dynamic of group interactions. We are seeking stories which explore the text, speech, and language that explores the dynamic of the allegiances, commitments and alliances between a group of of people. These folks can be associated by the accident of time, the catchings of memory or the pyschological underpinnings of culture and society which make us do the things we do. Cracking open the codes and speech of a cohort of folks as they move through history while confronting time and each other.

Red Lemonade community members, readers and writers open up the process of story creation, creative inspiration, writing tasks and other elements of the publishing process and share and engage everyone with post on the Red Lemonade blog which are promoted via the Red Lemonade platform.  Take a look on the Red Thread: Cohort: Processes:  http://redlemona.de/red-lemonade/cohort-processes

 

Take a look at the early submissions here :   http://redlemona.de/red-lemonade/cohort-writings

 

To join the COHORT as an intern or volunteer, please email : cohort AT redlemona.de

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

X + 1 Ways of Discerning at a Cohort

 

(A Garland for Audience, Writer, Reader, and the Gathering Shadow Between.)

 

How could mad particles be produced by anything but a gigantic cyclotron?

            Deleuze & Guattari, “1914: One or Several Wolves?”

 

To the Reader:

 

The COHORT writing initiative puts an open prompt in front of the RedLemona.de community: here’s this extremely context-dependant concept, equal parts group formation, organizing principle, and heuristic tool—now: go to work.  Let’s explore how.

I’d like to use heterogenous fragments to examine how a cohort functions as anassemblage.  In “Two Regimes of Madness,” Gilles Deleuze (discussing his work with Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus) offers us a working definition of the latter concept:

 

But what we are saying is that the idea of assemblages can replace the idea of behavior, and thus with respect to the idea of assemblage, the nature-culture distinction no longer matters. In a certain way, behavior is still a countour. But an assemblage is first and foremost what keeps very heterogeneous elements together: e.g. a sound, a gesture, a position, etc., both natural and artificial elements. The problem is one of “consistency” or “coherence,” and it prior to the problem of behavior. How do things take on consistency? How do they cohere?Even among very different things, an intensive continuity can be found. We have borrowed the word “plateau” from Bateson precisely to designate these zones of intensive continuity.*

 

An abstract machine tied together by the affect of its numerous parts in a moment.  A book is an assemblage, its dialects are an assemblage, it characters, their relation to the author, his to the reader: it all depends which stratum we want to look at.  Here we are concerned with how any number of these assemblages act when they are rendered as cohorts. 

Taking from Deleuze & Guattari, I have been asking of this construct, “what is it?  What is it for?”  And then seeing how useful it is without being picky about subject matter.  This part of the autumn in New York is sort of a Caulfieldian time to walk around and not be too picky, I’ll say.  And so below are some applications of the notion of cohort-structure and behavior that start right where they seem to get interesting and stop right before they seem to sound phoney.

 

            [NOTE: Because RedLemona.de has collaborative potential, I am releasing my thoughts as a “garland”: it can be added-to, worn on the wrist, around the head, slung over the mantle.  Feel free to add your bits to the strand, but don’t try to tie it off.  Just indulge the exercise and know—please!—that it gets better if the reader turns the screw and becomes a contributor.

            If you’d like to add (to) a section, make a comment and then mark with brackets the text you’d like to see added. That way everyone can see what everyone would like to say no matter what and if, the weeks to come, the editors choose to curate various versions, everyone can be credited where due.

            The editor requests that whatever the content of your submission, that an effort be made to offer writing that has a continuity of voice or tone with the following selections.  It’s an exercise in style.]

 

            * My thankes to Levi Bryant for this find, and his interesting notes, found onLarvalSubjects. http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/deleuze-on-assemblages/

 

X

A Cohort as Negative Theology

 

COHORT: far easier to define what it is NOT, a cohort coincidentally has negativity in its make up.  In a word, a cohort is a grouping with an agnostic relationship between its parts that exists FOR something other than itself.  The moment you try to form a for-itself cohort, what you end up with is a collaborative (one extreme) or a cabal (the other).

 

X

 

The Greatest TV Star of All Time

 

John Henry’d say all sorts of stuff and then just say something about TV or something else like it.  Always it’d be a show everyone’d seen or at least since we all had cable at this point in our lives we’d’ve known what it was.  Of course by cable I mean basic anyold television, what with all sorts antennae not working for anything except disaster reports anyhow even if Margie’d say different and she always did.  Anyhow John Henry’d, say:

 

“The best example of a cohort I can think of is the team of doctors on HOUSE, M.D.”

 

Oh.

 

“Yeah they really don’t care for one another even if they work well together which almost they don’t and the patients are always dying or having their lives wrecked.  The doctor’s skills are specialized, but aren’t complimentary really.  But they are a perfect cohort because they’re always there in the service of this madcap doctor who only ever cares if things get more complicated and interesting.  And so they complicate things and make things interesting.  That’s their skill, really.  You could say they’re the best team in a crisis, but really only if the crisis is of their own making.  They’re like full-cycle recruiters.  Not really I guess that hardly’s anything to say.

“But you might say they are terrible at what they do, unless if what they are supposed to do is be the most manipulated team in medical history.  You might say, you know, their boss (their leader) does really want everyone to live and get better, and he wants the problems to get solved or even for their not to be any problems, so he can play piano and watch TV.  But the thing of it is that Gregory House isn’t their boss or even the defining principle behind the cohort.  He just wants to chill and get dark, preferably alone. 

“The Boss is House’s addiction to Vicodin, it’s what organizes and prompts everything the team does from cure to argument to occasional sport-fuck.  And an addiction always wants drama and chaos.  That’s why it’s the greatest TV star of all time. 

 

 

X

 

Atom leaned back and finished his qualification by saying:

 

The darkest cohorts, if you ask me, are the ones that leave their members by the wayside in search of something other-than, outside-of and more sinister.  Or at least that’s a part of all cohorts.  The conditions of their ultimate fracture or dissolution are there from the start, like the noises of a slackening grandfather clock in the living room of a who of a man of a whom is having a heart attack because he forgot to wind his ticker.

 

X

 

It seems accurate to say that a cohort cannot have a collective unconscious.  A cohort is more of a mosaic built of chipped memories, depicting a group of friends with a shared trauma vacationing at a rented house on the shore.

 

X

 

A rainment of appointments fettering a crown.  (Sincerity in images, poetic function in the kinematics of qualisigns.)  The crown is there to situate disparate precious stones and imply a natural relation by their juxtaposition.  At the moment of coronation, the cohort becomes the indexical icon of the king’s relation to his court-cohort, who situate him at the head of state by serving as its proxy. 

Why is this image so compelling?

 

 

X

 

A cohort gels in much the same way as an addressee depends upon knowledge of its relationship to the speaker to understand itself.  Except that for a cohort the speaker is generally a principle or idea represented by a proxy (real or ideal) whose own motivations are by no means the same as the principle or the group.  Considered as a cohort, the chapters of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler are addressed to the livre as a whole, torn between hunting the reader and stalking the book itself, whichever will allow them to dissolve their provisional alliance and ground their volatile charge sooner, faster, most fully.

 

 

X

The Genre Lesson

 

Someone who looked at this asked that it should please be more about writing.  It’s very understandable. 

One could write very well on the difference between literary movements and writerly cohorts.  Even more interesting, one could write an essay on how the composition of the latter influences content.

 

§

 

ClaireFontaine’s first book, the one that made her such an attractive member of the circle, was about how Frankenstein was conceived by an ad hoc, provisional cohort.  She went on to talk about how this was linked to the monster’s being a sort of Body without Organs, strung together from people’s contributions, as it were.  But her piece was really hot in that she went on to discuss how this process really created the conditions for something like FRANKENSTEIN; AGENT OF S.H.A.D.E, the comic where in people had to collaborate by literally drawing the monster to together in real time.  it was one of those lectures where the speaker is practically beatific, which I guess means Saint-like.  One of those where people go in their free time, half expecting to be bored, and end up giving an ovation with little tears they haven’t shown their family or their god for years forming in their pineal eyes.

 

§

 

I would like to claim that when writers choose to group units of their work, that these groups inevitably seem to take one the characteristics of real social formations, micropolitics, attitudes, behaviours.  Further, I think it’s a tacit acceptance on the part of a reader to permit these anthropomorphic likenesses traction at the back of the mind.  For a moment, I want to regard a collection of stories or poems as a provisional ritual driven toward the regimenting or dismantling of the cohort (the poems, stories) assembled under a single title.

 

 

§

 

Most books of poems are collections.  Some are little machines.  The really dangerous ones are cohorts in search of a reader.  Like LUNCH POEMS or CAN YOU HEAR, BIRD?, or EDIFICIO SAYONARA or ARIEL or all of Dickenson.

 

§

 

 

Some stories get put together and they break the membrane between accretion and affection.  DUBLINERS, EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE do that.  With that approach you get to keep and craft voice.  A cohort without a powerful  assemblage has voice without timbre.

 

 

§

 

 

Those that have it- the dangerous ones- have collective enunciation.  WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE teases at this, but RAISE HIGH THE ROOFBEAMS, CARPENTERS, SLOW LEARNER (very much so), LABRYNTHS, MY SYMPTOMS, STORIES OUT OF OMARIE (a perfect livre, if you ask me), t-Zero have it. 

 

§

 

Short fiction volumes are like the information-scientists answer to Bakhtinian novelistic polyphony. 

 

 

 

X

 

Hey, Meg, do you remember when we could shatter ourselves in Chicago?  When the nitrous oxide at the window and my head in Lake Michigan, when the blacksmithy of the granite dormitory back on their body?, when the flower of your hair?  Like leaving breadcrubs of ineliuctable experience to return to (even if they were imagined then, they are just as pure as any other memories now)?  You had such awful friends. 

 

X

 

A cohort is a microculture that is confined to its own stratum of experience in terms of ritual, linguistic and temporal efficacy.  The magic that works for the hunting party dissolves with the kill.  The Bear. 

 

 

X

 

(Cohort-in-Constellation: For Fans Only)

 

Even as DC comics attempted to tell a single story in the events leading up toFinal Crisis and Flashpoint, (and yes the whole affair is dripping with marketing prowess), by fragmenting and (post?) proto-ret-conning the entire franchise with the NEW 52, as many story arcs come in global, centripetal alignment as a slow moving invasion of uneasy for relationships.  At the level of the global graphic novel, the EARTH X trilogy has this in spades.  At the level of the graphic novel, the world of PREACHER comes to mind.  At the level of the series, all of the characters in the story-in-search-of-a-storytelling genre of SWAMP THING are a cohort to the titular character.  At the level of the team, a cohort is much more JLA and AVENGERS than it is X-MEN, even if the latter is a pure cohort at the level of story.

 

X

 

A band of plots of land.  (Of prose articulations, author-gardener, story-sun)  BLOCKS OF BECOMING.

 

 

X

 

Speaking of cohorts we speaking not only of human groupness, but of groupings of molar identities, of knowledge, of objects, design, orders of signs, and literary items of numerous logical types, we can talk about perception, memory and becoming.  Or, for the purposes of this discussion,writing.

 

§

 

Addressees of a shared moment in time.  (Iconic indexical symbol, Groupness a posteriori, photophilia in plants) RHIZOME

 

§

 

 

Nora-tuk picked up the card, it depicted a fuzzy black cloud falling off the edge of a cliff or a margin (it was hard to tell), and racing for the spot where her thumb rested on the rounded corner.  At the top it read:

 

swarmSWARMswarm

 

And on the reverse,

 

or, the uncanny valley between we, they, us, here, and there—.

 

Her doppelganger’s boyfriend went on.

 

“…from the perspective of the swarm it is always there, what is next.  there is no backchanneling, and feedback holds the group together, but as a mechanism is only immanent in the next exteriority.  the next thing.  the next there, that, than. . .”

 

Faster and faster now.

 

“. . . a swarm writes itself, it is written in the second person, enduringly at the edge of speaking, but more often just moving.  the swarm is a singularity and in it the individual is not subsumed or erased, nor does the individual confuse the power of its utterance with that of the whole that utters it.  rather, the utterance the individual articulates is always the same- contingently- with that of the whole.  THE ADDRESSEE OF ALL SWARMS OPPOSED TO THAT OF COHORTS IS THE REMAINDER OF THE SWARM’S RAID, ITS FEEDING, ITS MIGRATION, HOME-INVASION OR FORTIFICATION.  IT IS A CORPSE, THE LAMENTATION OF WOMEN, THE EARTH AFTER THE FIRST AND MOST RECENT MARATHON, IT IS NOT THE QUEEN, BUT THE BEEHIVE.  It’s Kerouac’s roll of paper, not as it was but as it is in his telling and as it can only be behind glass at an exhibit at the New York library when I saw it when I was in high school, when I was dating not Sainte-Claire, but her white eyes, the ones that were the last two-way mirror separating the one standing in my shoes from the one brave enough to get naked, or even—close enough—to greenlight that handjob at the back of the empty planetarium in the dead of winter. 

 

“. . .On the other hand for the cohort there is a we but only in relation to the he.  the we is always provisional and nominal, like an empty chair left at the table to remember us now to us then that we were in love and had something really, really special.”

 

X

 

Adele was turning over tables when she thought of how she wanted to reply to Atom’s letter.

 

In this last sense, the surrealists cannot be considered a cohort, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets may (?).  For all of Pounds little words the Imagists cannot, but I feel like the Objectivists can.  Along with a certain selection of1970s minimalist sculpture (not sculptors).  Poets and fiction writers who are sort of baptized by National Public Radio are.  Perhaps one of the greatest pitfalls of MFA programs is de facto/indeterminate nature of the cohorts that come out and about because of them.

 

As a writer, audience, and reader, I believe that the most interesting literary cohorts tend to consist of writers, visual artists, and conceptual artists.  These don’t so much have a name for them, but the New York School is one of those more-than-a-style, less-than-a-movement, more-than-a-state-of-mind/less-than-a-taxonomy affective assemblages.

 

 

 

The Body, Stand By Me, River’s Edge, The Narcotics Anonymous Step Working Guide, Brightest Day, The Dangerous Summer, 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, 13 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, the Song of Songs, Barthes par Barthes, and the melancholy world of A.A. Milne.

 

X

 

“Always-emergent and rigidifying language ideologies are the basis of membership in a human cohort.  A cohort is singular insofar as the feedback loops that include and exclude new meanings are themselves proxies for agency at the group level.  When learning occurs in a cohort, it is generally a sign that the existing force alignments are unsuitable for an inevitable circumstance.” 

 

 

 

X

 

The more I think about it, the Stephen King of the 1980s is horror’s contribution to cohort-storytelling.  It might explain why his endings seem more like dissolutions.

 

 

X

 

A rosary is a cohort.  Farmer’s daughters are a cohort.  Jokes about farmer’s daughters are a cohort.  Heliophiliac stalks on the giant clover plant that survived the cat.

 

 

----------------------------------------------

 

Marco Maisto is a writer and creative director of Threshold Text Ecology NYC, a nonprofit environment for writer’s working in radical collaboration.  Fragments from a novel in partial public development can be found at http://thedaywelostcontact.com andposthumandesign.wordpress.com, and short fiction here on redlemona.de.  In collaboration with Caroline DeVane, his new poetry can be found in the forthcoming issue of Drunken Boat (#16) at http://drunkenboat.com, folio edited by Kristin Prevallet.

 

Sometimes I like to be able to step back from the words on the page and doodle the characters drunkenly on cocktail napkins. This is not necessarily to lay down the specifics of say, their clothes, but to hash out an overall energy to them, like a caricature. Though it may seem to simplify them at first, it serves as a jumping off point for me to dig deeper into who they are, once a basic personality is interesting enough to make me want to actually save the cocktail napkin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Short story ideas tend to come to me as titles first. A phrase may pop into my head. It bobs and hovers, trying to find itself, and I feel inspired to figure out what that story would be. It serves as a jumping off point, and helps my brain organize the exploration of the story experience, by assigning an encompassing nomenclature to house the mesh of other ideas that whir and tap.

For American Dyno Kibbles the title first bumped in 2006. I had just received my first laptop as a college graduation present. In its original form it was more of a monster piece, kind of a fucked up Clifford the Dog, where his dog food makes him grow out of control, and sickly, with scaly skin and a heart condition. Soon after the first draft my apartment got burgled and my laptop was a goner. I hadn’t backed up the file. Years later, the title American Dyno Kibbles still rattled in the recesses of my mind and I wanted to do something with it.

Over this past 4^th of July weekend I was in Lexington, MI watching the small town fireworks. Every 4^th of July, I get partially sentimental and think about what the original onset of Independence must have felt like, to see a celebration that truly rang with a glee for future freedom and freshness. My cousin was holding her newborn baby. The baby was asleep. My whole family was amazed that he could sleep through the fireworks! They were damn loud. He awoke during the grand finale. And I started to think about that feeling of being part of the revolution that must have brought about such joy for new liberty, and what if someone had slept through the final fight, missed out on the culmination of this comraderie, and had to enjoy its fruits while groggy and disheartened.

The central character in this is me, it is also you. We’ve all had those moments we’ve worked hard, but perhaps not efficiently, and we’ve dropped the ball in a bigger context to our duties and job descriptions. We may work long hours, but we may work ourselves into oblivion, a sort of waking coma. Years ago, I worked as an Operations Manager for an event photography company, and experienced such a trend. I thought myself the poster boy for work ethic and dedication. I aimed to rise upon the rungs of the corporate ladder, and I did! And like the central character, Chucker, I pushed myself a little too far, lost my balance so to speak, I started to “screw the pooch” on some projects, but there still existed in me the desire to be better, to serve the whole, to dust myself off and take more on my plate because I felt the company needed me to contribute. Chucker is the American worker, driven, with a propensity to feel guilt when not displaying that drive, so they dive into the workflow, however reckless, without always considering how to make that work flow. As much as my story has taken a different course than its very first draft years ago, the theme still lingers. A big dog grows bigger and deteriorates, so does a hard hitting man who drills himself to the point of sitting on the sidelines.

I know when I awake from a deep slumber, I need a good breakfast to get me going again and shake off the murky nerve receptors. American Dyno Kibbles re-emerged as a sort of super food, perhaps used by said sleepy soldier to come to terms with the guilt of his malaise and perk him up to summon at least some sort of productive gusto. My cat eats his dry food first thing in the morning and proceeds to run around the apartment, a burst of energy, from this little bite of a veterinary cereal, compact with all the nutrients to power a healthy animal.

There was a period of my life, high school, when I was engaged in competitive running and Nordic skiing, where I was obsessed with protein. I wanted my efforts to pay off in the form of sharp snapping sinews, so I’d pay attention to the protein count, and load up. And this extended to carbohydrates of course, for every runner revels in the act of carbo-loading. We’d get together the night before Meets and throw spaghetti dinners. Like dogs on an even social plane when shoving faces into food bowls beside one another, mealtime is a beautiful time for anyone wishing to get to know another person. Like Chucker, I’d get injuries, and the protein I thought important for me to consume to feed the healing process. But equally important for the healing of the wound was being part of the team. And ho! How similar this is to the writing process for me, loading up on life experience, ideas, and throwing down tales to share with others. Any inner scabs that get scraped in applying them to world creation can be soothed by the community reading it and saying, yeah, I’ve done that before too.

The idea of a cohort can seep from sociological connotations, to psychological cohesions of different aspects of one personality, a personal cohort within a bigger community cohort. We can look at the first step in creating a story as throwing down fragments of the writer’s own psyche. And as I eat my morning cereal and load up protein rich eggs, I seek to move this story forward so that each of these characters may see the growth of their own inner cohort of talents and flaws.

 

You can read Jeff's story here :

 http://redlemona.de/jeff-phillips/cohort-american-dyno-kibbles-short-fiction

 

A group of Red Lemonaders and myself, via email, chat and telephone conversations, had a lengthy discussion about a new theme for the writers, readers and members of our online publishing community.  The Hybrid Beasts manuscripts generated many comments and resulted in great interaction, editing and commenting between the readers and writers themselves. It was fantastic to have our guest editor, Molly Gaudry, review the works at the end of process, select a favorite and provide feedback on the stories. All of us wanted to have the editorial process more transparent and clear from the very beginning to provide more direct interaction and engagment.  Certainly, for COHORT, all reader and writers are highly encouraged to  interact and comment on the stories. Their suggestions, review and editorial suggestions will work in conjunction with several Red Lemonade community members who will dedicate time to reviewing and commenting on the uploaded stories.

Hybrid Beasts certainly revealed that a way to make the whole process clearer and more focused is to have a theme to provide a starting off point for a large number and wide variety of people, to work as a writing prompt, and inspire creativity and engagement moving towards a final publication. Several suggestions were discussed and the group made a final decision on COHORT.  See the previous Cohort Post which explores the etymology of the word, outlines how we plan to engage the community and our request for submissions here : http://redlemona.de/red-lemonade/cohort-processes

As a member of the Cohort Team, I wanted to explore my personal take on the cohort theme. This explanation serves to convey the theme from my personal biases and expectations for submissions. The hope is to elucidate one aspect of the theme,since I am dedicated to commenting on the uploaded manuscripts, This essay will make my understanding and editorial  perspective more transparent from the beginning. Other team members will also share their thoughts as well in the future.

I was reading an article about venture capitalists in Ireland and Europe who were confronted with business difficulties that were different than American entrepeneurs. While the exaact situations were very different, much of the same ideas and behaviors expressed and words used were very familar. I am fascinated in the ways that language seeps across borders and allies people to gather. The ways words work to bind people and how allegiances form and transmute over time. In particular, how a newcomer comes to learn and adapt to the mores of a group of people via their particular language use and the stories they tell amongst themselves. In Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, the phrase ' you are either on the bus or off the bus' starts as an offhand comment, becomes a guideline for behavior, morphs into a slightly authoritarian dictate and colors and defines the whole unique journey. In Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop travels across the Zone and confronts individuals who are agents of particular military, rocket fetishist  and intelligence organizations. Each of which promote their worldview and causes with unique and varied agendas with unique words, songs, scientific jargon and mythic stories as they seek comprehension and control. In Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the newborn child is immediately engaged with language (moocow) in ways unique to his environment and historical place. Simple symbols like the color of roses are starting expressions of entrenched, volatile historical conflicts mired in theology and history. They are part of the very first words he experiences and learns!  The ways in which words are used to bend and meld our awareness and reveal the intentions of allegiances of groups of people is my personal fascination with COHORT.

In the future, other Cohort Team members will share their take on the theme. Together we will work on commenting, editing and selection. An important part of the selection process will be the feedback from readers and writers from the whole community. I would like to see stories that explore the cohort theme more deeply while exposing the underpinning that lie within the interactions of several people. The Roman military unit provides a starting off point, but the word traverses enclosed garden spaces, scientific studies, allies moving through history and into criminal activity. While I seek to experience stories which touch on my understanding of the theme, turning it around in surprising ways is always a delight. At its core, for me, COHORT is about groups using language to define themselves and capture newcomers to their purposes. There are stories there.

 

Brian McFarland

Cohort Team Member

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RED LEMONADE is seeking submissions for its first community curated anthology COHORT.   The anthology will be based on a more transparent editorial model, where the unique features of Red Lemonade’s manuscript submission and on page community feedback system will be used to open up the process of selection from slush to publication.

 We are looking for short fiction submissions, with a word count around 5,000 or less, that relate to the etymology of the word COHORTin some way.  The only other requirement is that the work fits under our umbrella term Alternative Literature.  Please refer to the five Red Lemonade published books out in the word, including a PEN/Robert Bingham Prize winner, and the HYBRID BEAST ePub, as the starting point for our definition of Alternative Literature but by no means limit yourself to just these examples.  

Manuscripts can be uploaded to Red Lemonade via the home page by creating a user account and then clicking the Write Now tab and requesting author access for submission rights.   All submissions for the anthology will be publicly available for review, commenting and editing by the community members immediately upon upload, please include (COHORT) in your submission title.  The drop dead date for submissions is early 2013.  Then the real work begins.

The goal of the COHORT anthology is to create, destroy and recreate a process for editorial feedback that empowers community members to champion the voices they admire—while providing the opportunity to discuss why one piece makes the cut and another doesn’t.  Once the deadline for submissions passes, the selection process for the anthology begins as directed by the comments, enthusiasm and author response for the submitted manuscripts.   Manuscripts that seem to drive the conversation regarding alternative literature and that work on a instinctual level will be put forward to the community for possible inclusion in the anthology.  The final editorial critiques and suggestions will be presented to the author via the open comments feature of the site and the community as a whole will take stock of submissions on the “short list”.  All community members will be encouraged to openly support or question the choices for the anthology, and make the case for the inclusion of one author’s submission over another.  We ask that all comments be mindful of the goal of Red Lemonade to foster a home for adventurous, earnest, spiteful, offensive, enlightening, uncanny, and profoundly brilliant alternative literature.

Simultaneous submissions are accepted and encouraged, please cast a wide net for all your submissions, but do keep track and let us know the good news if your piece is accepted somewhere else.

For more insight into what we’re looking for please examine, parse and re-interpret our postings here, here, hereand thereconcerning COHORT. 

 

Everyone is welcomed and encouraged to join the Red Lemonade community and join the COHORT.  Writers are encouraged to draw inspiration from the word itself as shown in the second post. Readers are encouraged to comment and make suggestions on manuscripts. Interns and volunteers are welcome to participate in the process by assisting the Cohort team members with social media. This is an invitation to participate and be part of the process : a request for submissions being an integral part as we explore crowd-sourced publishing with a focused theme. The idea is to 'collape the waveform' and encourage writer-readers and reader-writers to engage each other in discussion and conversation within the entire publishing process. 

 

 A distinctive component of this request is to explore the interaction of a specific group of people who are associated intimately with each other via some common event, circumstance or common cause. A particular focus of such a creative exploration would be the assimilation of a single individual into a wider group, conveyed by the POV of the individual, numerous points of view by the group members themselves in reference to the individual, or a more universal narration encompassing both sides of the engagement. Of key interest would be the social mores, internal culture and relational organization and monitoring of the group members via the use of language of the group.

 

 Alternative literary fiction has a keen ear for dialog and word choice combined with an astute awareness of culture that does not forego a sense of emotional ambiguity, a lack of clear epistemological certainty and an ambivalence driven by overstimulation of choices. This request for submissions is more of invitation to participate in any part of the process, but especially submitting your writing. A rough estimate on word count would be around 4,000. Manuscripts can be uploaded on the Red Lemonade online community by clicking the Write Now tab and requesting author access. Submissions will be publicly available for review, commenting and editing to the community members. The plan is to have the community work together on selections during the Fall of 2012 based on group response and comments. Manuscripts can be uploaded within your Red Lemonade account and then shared in the COHORT Red Thread. 

 

Several Red Lemonade community members have agreed to participate more consistently within the ongoing process. They will be lead participators, assisting in the editorial process and organization among the multiple readers and writers associated with COHORT.  They will act as editors and community organizers : orgitors?, edinizers? As such, these members will monitor interaction and comments on uploaded stories as well as provide feedback themselves.The intention is to provide clearer guidance in order to promote the overall conversation of all members of the community. They will certainly act in the capacity of selection of manuscripts for showcasing on the website and final selections.

 

The goal is to bring the assumptions of the "editorial staff" into alignment as closely as possible with the community at large. It is believed that by opening the publication process from the very beginning, making it evident the personal creative biases of key influences and allowing via comments direct communication and opinions of readers can create a more open group-based communication. As the process continues, the 'selection process' will be apparent via the features of the Red Lemonade community website. As this will occur before any final selection or publication process, further submissions, commentary, and inquiry can be discussed. We look forward to your manuscript submissions and participation : JOIN THE COHORT.  

 

COHORT is a community-based publishing process anchored by a theme that will use the Red Lemonade interactive website towards the final goal of a collection of stories. This is a brief suggestive description and guidelines for how the process will take place.

The online community will take advantage of the features of the website and engage a wider community of writers and readers with their online presence and social media. Cohort team members will work in a more editorial capacity while polling or monitoring community feedback. The hope is to create an informed, manageable creative chaos which incorporates many viewpoints, tastes and creative goals, reading appreciation and writing approaches.

 

Writers can upload manuscripts to www.redlemona.de to share their manuscripts and make them immediately available for review. Community members and organizers, fellow writers and readers can comment, provide feedback and offer suggestions using the comment application available via the Red Lemonade community website.  To facilitate this process COHORT team 'leads' will proactively engage works to help organize the group-based process, commit to making comments on uploaded works and assists in selection making process. 

 

A Cohort Red Thread, or discussion forum, will track uploaded manuscripts as well as comments from the community. Further,Interaction and communication among the writers and readers will be fostered with online collaboration events as well as geographical meet-ups.

 

Based on reaction and engagement from the community, manuscripts which better reflect the encouraged theme of COHORT, will be selection to be featured on the Featured Books portion of the front page of the website. The author will be featured on the bottom portion of the front page. This might occur several times over the course of COHORT and it is hoped that selected works will create a clearer understanding of the overall reaction, comprehension and interest of the Red Lemonade community.

Writers who submit their work will be requested to and can choose to submit explanatory or supplemental articles to the Red Lemonade Blog, also available on the front page. These essays can explore such topics the writing process, the thematic approach, the related research or literary influences of the writer, all within the context and associated with the theme of cohort. Special attention will be placed on placing the writing within the current development of literary and independent fiction as well as classical or contemporary fiction.

 

A desired goal of the process is to engage the current independent press and literary fiction, scene, contributors. The community will be encouraged to seek out recent and relevant works by new authors and publishers. Writers who create essays that supplement their work or creative process will be encouraged to include not only classical and contemporary influences, but also recent works that inspire them.

 

Readers are encouraged to submit responses to the works in essay form, either citing individual works or several works together. Not particularly a review, but an attempt to provide insight and clarification to the reader's response to the writer's work. 

 

Essays and selected works will be shared via Red Lemonade social media platforms. Writers are encouraged to explore and incorporate various media or other websites to expand and enhance the virtual context of their stories and essays.

 

A " last call" for uploading works related to the COHORT theme will take place near the end of the year 2012 and final or additional uploads will be based on the reaction of the organizers and the community.

 

The COHORT selections will be made available via www.PressBooks.com in a webbook, ePub, and PDF. In addition, Red Lemonade will distribute the works within channels such as Kindle using the PressBooks distribution service.  This COHORT collection of stories will be made avaialble to a wider audience in early 2013.

 

The word cohort has a rich and distinct history. In an effort to further guide the Red Lemonade community this post will explore its varying connotations and usage. In order to provide a more clear explanation of how the term will form the fulcrum within this process. Certainly, there is a dovetailing between the choice of the word and the group-based, community writing focus. The historical uses of the word provide rich territory for context and characters. Its diverse usage provides distinct settings or environments that could be used as writing prompts as well as being suggestive of stylistic approaches. In addition, the word sheds some light on Red Lemonade’s publishing mission of ‘alternative literature’.

To begin with Caesar, there are 100 men to a cohort and ten cohorts to a legion.  March your bands of soldiers around Gaul and get out of debt quickly gain supreme executive power.  A Latin term derived from Old French meaning of enclosure, yards and garden with associations of fertility and growth. It is a measurement of a multitude with early associations of war and peace, life and death. A cohort is enclosed group with similar objectives and a common cause. More recently it refers to an aggregation of individuals who experience similar events at the same time This post provides possibilities for understanding the theme of the Red Lemonade COHORT process, much as the word itself derives from enclosing and formation.

The term cohort originally referred to a Roman military unit, but it is now used to identify any group of people with a time-specific common experience. The word has medical and social science associations, particularly in research and analysis of longitudinal studies. Research with an education or psychological focus is common, In addition, cohorts are used demographic and statistical research. Commonly associated with a specific age group or generation, it could also relate to an event like exposure to a disease or common malady. It is a taxonomic term in biology. In short, while it is evocative from an etymological point of view for it lush history of wars and roses and relationship to individuals bonding together. Cohort has equal richness from relationships with a more fact-based or grounded investigative even mathematical understanding. An old word with a deep, interconnected web of related ideas, that depends greatly on its context, and provides fertile ground for creative exploration.

Cohort is also unique in that recent years its dominant usage has undergone a complete reversal. While still understand, from its original usage, to mean a group of people the use of cohort to refer to an individual, rather than a group of people. And despite its ‘ band of brothers’ feel, it usually has a somewhat negative connation, used by people critical of a group, perhaps due to its military associations.

Taking all of this into consideration, it is an exemplary word as a starting point for the Red Lemonade community.  The associated network of meanings, the way its usage has turned back on itself, as well as its connection to critical cultural forces makes it an excellent leaping off point for alternative fiction.  There is an element of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty created not by a lack of information but an excess of it, deeply embedded within vast and varied social context. Red Lemonade understanding of alternative literature (a fluid and ever-changing thing to be sure) is a keen focus on language and a pre-emptive, on the ground awareness. Think Zazen or the uncanny relationship to technology in Matthew Battle’s work, or Kio Stark’s noir femme fatale sleuth, the hijinx and dialog play of Richard Melo’s upcoming Happy Talk. In particular, read Lynne Tillman’s Chartreuse, an emotional investigation into a relationship, that much like our exploration of the word cohort makes full use of the oddness of language and explores human connectedness with it. http://redlemona.de/lynne-tillman/someday-this-will-be-funny/chartreuse

 

This is an exploration of the word cohort in an effort to “prepare the garden” or “organize the troops” with the final aim to inspire stories. Soon, there will be a more focused and specific explanation of the type writing that Red Lemonade is seeking during this group-based endeavor.

 

Up next, some details in how the Red Lemonade online website and community will help reader-writers with engagement and interaction.