Creative Partnerships: When Your Writing Partner Is Also Your Romantic Partner
by Melinda Palacio -- June 25, 2005
Writers Chela Courington and Ted Chiles discuss love, marriage and successful writing collaborations with your lover. The two have been married for 13 years. When Chiles met Courington, he had little interest in writing or communicating with words, said the 51-year-old economist whose main communication device was arithmetic equations. Meeting Courington altered his mode of communication and his career. Chiles is now a writer who sometimes collaborates on writing projects with his wife. Their writing collaboration has led to numerous projects, including a successful one-act play “Tummy Tamers” staged in Santa Barbara.
Courington attributes their success as writing partners to their mutual aptitude at showing compassion and flexibility. The story of how they met is important to their ability show compassion and flexibility. Both were previously divorced and had left “training-marriages” that taught them about compassion and flexibility says Courington who admits they’ve both learned from past mistakes.
It was Courington’s best friend and Chiles’s father, both in Albertville, Alabama who conspired to introduce the two scholars. Chiles started wooing the Appalachian poet with his stories and his quirky guitar playing. He incited her to co-author 8 songs including their much beloved “Emily Plays on Harmony” and “Gaby, the snake-handling-stripper-preacher.”
Two years later, they had co-written their wedding vows. However, during the next decade they tucked away their creative juices and immersed themselves in academia. Courington helped Chiles edit his economic treatises and Chiles listened to every paper Courington had presented to the English department. But it was his wife’s interest in writing that reminded him that’s he’s always had an idea or two for a novel or short story.
Something happened on their journey from Alabama to California that
turned them
both into professional writers at age 50. The couple’s move
California allowed them to reinvent themselves. “There’s
something about the attitude of people in California,” said
Chiles. “Nobody thinks it’s weird that I’m trying
to write.”
The professor of Economics also attributes the
success of his newfound writing career to the advent of the personal
computer and spell checker--essential tools for a writer like Chiles
who is dyslexic. Chiles’s creativity in writing advanced from
academic papers such as “The Impact of Union Status of Firm
Performance” to “The Golf Seasons” for Gulf Life
Magazine to “Alice Doesn’t Eat Here Anymore,” the
short story which evolved into the couples’ 2004 one-act-play
“Tummy Tamers.”
In 2003, Courington participated in the national writing project where she rediscovered journaling and creative writing. “Journaling put me back into poetry,” she said. A year later, she published her first collection of poems “Southern Girl Gone Wrong.” She is currently at work on a second book of poems on animals and sacred spaces
It was Courington’s idea to collaborate on the one-act-play with her husband. “Writing is play to me,” she said. “The idea of working together really charmed me.” Although they had had a very successful collaboration of their song “Emily Plays on Harmony,” written on a trip to New Orleans, Chiles admits he was somewhat scared about the idea. “I’ve done a lot of collaboration on academic pieces and I saw a potential for conflict,” he said. “I also knew nothing about writing plays.”
Courington and Chiles are both glad they were able to overcome the initial hesitation of writing “Tummy Tamers.” The play is a spoof of a couple, Alice and Calvin Trilling, who attend Weight Watchers and how the experience of rethinking their body images brings them closer together. Chiles and Courington enjoyed seeing their play staged by Dramatic Women and were surprised to see which lines got the bigger laughs. Their only regret is not being able to revise their script during rehearsals.
Their writing process was both communal and solitary. The two spent a solid hour steadily writing in a coffee shop. They took turns with scenes and dialogue, bouncing ideas off each other. Then they’d spend the rest of the week editing and rewriting. They found that their writing styles meshed well. “We’re both minimalist,” said Courington, “we say more with fewer words.”
The couple discovered that the collaborative process was fun and easy. “It’s such a joy that we can collaborate, share and negotiate--it brings us closer.” For Chiles, working outside of their respective genres was important. He’s more of a fiction writer and she’s more of a poet and they are not in competition with each other.
The happy writing partners are ready to take on each others genre and collaborate on poems and short stories. They are tickled that they will both be published in the same issue of Nature and Legend and Story (NILAS). Keep your eye out for this rising literary power couple.