We neglected to tell you about our trip to New England, but we’ll use it as the excuse for not posting for a few days. We were invited to present in a daylong Creativity Seminar in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. We drove up on Friday morning and back again on Saturday night, the highlight of our actual travels being our meal in a diner on the Garden State Parkway in which we were each given two glasses of water in addition to the other beverages we ordered.

Robbi and I both love New England. Our spirits lifted as we drove north and the temperature dropped and the gentle wooded Berkshires sprang up around us.

We were there to be part of a seminar on creative collaboration hosted by the Erikson Institute at the Austen Riggs Center, a renowned mental health facility. The participants were health care professionals of various types: primarily psychiatrists, but also some nurses, social workers, teachers, and at least one librarian. Our fellow panelists were all creative folks. Robbi was very excited to learn that Sam Waterston of Law and Order fame was in the lineup, but every time Robbi tried to sidle up to him for an autograph, Sam ran in the opposite direction. Ultimately, this was the best photo we could get.

I did hear one psychiatrist bragging to another that he had, “just used the same urinal as Sam Waterston.”

Other presenters included Margaret Ladd (an actress best known for her role on Falcon Crest) and Lyle Kessler (award-winning playwright), who, together, founded The Imagination Workshop, a world-renowned dramatic arts program in which mentally ill and at-risk individuals write, direct, and act in plays under the guidance of actors and other theater artists, to the result of experiencing positive, lasting behavioral changes. It sounds like this approach has sometimes succeeded in awakening catatonic patients where traditional therapeutic methods have failed. It’s admirable, fascinating work.

Also in the lineup was our good friend Joshua Wolf Shenk, essayist and award-winning author of Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled his Greatness. Josh is in the process of writing a book on collaborative pairs and is “studying” how Robbi and I work together to get a better sense of the subtle inner workings of the collaborative process. We have enjoyed the scrutiny.

After lunch, we were treated to a performance and discussion from two young women who are Fellows this summer at the Tanglewood Institute. For those of you who have not had the pleasure of sitting on the lawns at Tanglewood as the sun sets over the Berkshires, it is one of the world’s premiere summer orchestra venues, and surely the most beautiful. Emma Sutton and Ellen Cockerham spoke beautifully about how the various members of an orchestra or quartet communicate, anticipate, and collectively pursue a fleeting metaphor in producing successful collaborative sound.

And then Robbi and I took the stage. In some ways, we did our usual presentation, reading aloud from a few books while showing the illustrations, telling the story of how Idiots’Books began, and the road that’s led from there to here. But, given the context, we also spoke more pointedly on the nature of our collaboration itself: how Robbi’s drawings do more than just “illustrate” my words, but in a way, how they take my incoherent, broken narrative and elevate them, or “complete” them if you will. In his research, Josh has discovered that most successful creative pairings are rife with a conflict and tension that both fuels them to greatness and, ultimately, precipitates their disintegration.

Josh’s interest in Robbi and me come, in part, from our seeming ability to sustain creative production while negotiating the tensions. So far, at least.

The day ended with a joint session in which all of the presenters formed a single panel to reflect on the issues and ideas of the day. I’m including this picture, in spite of its blurriness, because it seems to be the only photo we took of the actual proceedings.

We walked into the late afternoon sunshine feeling awfully good.

So we walked across the street to the Red Lion Inn for a bit of repast.

Quite a bit, it turns out.

After dinner, Robbi insisted on showing the Red Lion exactly who was boss.

And then we drove home to Maryland.

When we got back to the barn, Alden and Kato were sitting politely on the couch, exactly where we’d left them.

Alden insisted that they had passed the weekend playing with colored blocks and discussing the pros and cons animal crackers, but Robbi and I both sensed that there might have been greater collaborative mischief afoot.