About Us...

Portrait of a Trailer is a work in progress. Or more accurately, the progress of our work.

We are Alden and Trip. We have no idea where we're going, but we do know what will carry us there: a trailer. There's no trailer yet, though it seems to be as real in our thoughts as if we did have one. Soon enough.

At some point there will be a very real trailer. A camper trailer is what we envision. We shall see.

This trailer will be the book for the portraits we're now writing. We mean that literally, in the way of a physical object that binds words. Perhaps there will be cushions that unfurl, their exposed interior marked up with a chapter. Perhaps the spatulas in a withdrawn drawer will each have a scene written upon them. Perhaps a long scroll of fabric carrying the dialog of lovers can be pulled from a light fixture by unscrewing the bulb, like a scarf drawn from a magician's sleeve.

This trailer, this book, will be half kitsch, half overwrought sentimentality, half self-conscious affectations, and a tenth poor grammar.

Our math will be astounding.

This trailer, this book, will be non-linear: one scene will be written on the back of a painting in this corner, another scene will be written in the vase on the table. Perhaps some scenes might be stolen by one of our future guests. Moving about the trailer, the reader will necessarily move from point A to point H back to C then to Z, ignoring any sequential essence there might be. So it is that we will create with minimal sequential essence in mind:

We live across the country from one another, so this blog is our means of communicating. One of us will draft a scene of so many words and post it here. Perhaps it will have audio or some visual attached, perhaps the author will identify how the piece could be physically published within the trailer. The other then will reply with a piece that builds on some element of the scene just received. Perhaps the narrator's voice will be the thread, perhaps a mood, perhaps a set piece. In these replies, perspectives might shift, characters might undergo cataclysmic change, new characters might be introduced. We don't know yet. And that is part of it. Like life itself, this act of creation will be....fairly unpredictable. As time moves on and a sense of the trailer takes hold of us, we will select and edit the pieces we are writing. We will populate the trailer with them, binding them to the trailer sculpturally, theatrically. Then, after so many months, perhaps years, as the trailer's interior is restor(i)ed, we will get to a point where the trailer will not contain another word. And then we will stop and hitch this beast to a truck and look for weary travelers across this country who merely want to stop for an hour and drink a beer and read a story...in and of a trailer.