Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch are writers and collaborators whose work turns walking, conversation, transcription, urban observation, and improvised dialogue into literary form. Their book Ten Walks/Two Talks, published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2010, maps New York City through a sequence of sixty-minute walks and two extended roving conversations.
Their collaboration treats attention as a compositional practice. Street scenes, overheard speech, weather, architecture, bodies, transit, art, memory, and friendship enter the work as they are encountered, giving the city the texture of a continuously unfolding poem.
Ten Walks/Two Talks
The walking sections transform ordinary movement through Manhattan into tightly observed sequences. Construction sites, storefronts, workers, dogs, food, traffic, parks, strangers, architecture, and fragments of public speech gather sentence by sentence. The form makes duration and attention visible.
Walking supplies both route and rhythm. The writers move at bodily speed, so the city appears through what can be noticed while crossing blocks, waiting at corners, changing direction, and responding to whatever enters the field of perception.
This gives the work a natural affinity with Chuck Stebelton’s place-based poetry, where repeated observation of local environments allows landscape, species, season, and human activity to accumulate into literary form.
Walking as composition
Walking creates a sequence before language begins. One street follows another; a building appears, recedes, and is replaced; sound changes by block; weather becomes more or less noticeable according to the surrounding architecture. Cotner and Fitch use this temporal structure as a literary engine.
The walker also occupies an intermediate position between destination and dwelling. Attention can remain open because movement gives every detail a limited duration. This encourages a form of composition built from encounter.
Such writing makes the city legible through fragments. A storefront sign, construction noise, a dog, a scrap of conversation, or changing light can briefly become central and then yield to the next event.
Two talks and roving dialogue
The dialogue sections record Cotner and Fitch moving through shared space while thinking aloud. Their conversation ranges across urban light, Japanese art, seasons, music, architecture, memory, bodies, and the immediate circumstances of the walk.
Conversation produces a different kind of form because no single speaker controls the whole path. One remark changes the other person’s thought. Digression becomes structural. Silence, interruption, correction, and shared noticing all participate in the composition.
The result resembles improvisation: each speaker responds to what has just happened while the city continues providing new material.
Conversation as literary form
Cotner and Fitch continued their collaborative practice in Conversations over Stolen Food, a project built from thirty recorded conversations around New York City. PennSound preserves joint readings, conversations, and performances that document the spoken dimension of their work.
Conversation as literary form preserves contingency. A thought can remain unfinished, a joke can redirect the subject, and ordinary speech can carry intellectual weight without being polished into a conventional essay voice.
Nick Piombino’s writing on interaction, conversation, and literary exchange offers a neighboring perspective on meaning created between people through speech, reading, correspondence, and shared attention.
Transcription as method
Transcription changes spoken time into visible language. Breath, hesitation, pacing, repetition, overlap, and informal syntax have to be represented through writing. That process makes the relation between speech and page newly visible.
Cotner and Fitch use transcription as a method of preservation and transformation. The original event happened once, while the written version can be reread, rearranged in memory, and understood through the visual structure of the page.
This gives their work a documentary dimension. Dana Teen Lomax’s documentary practice offers another route into the literary arrangement of records, evidence, and lived material.
Interdisciplinary Transcriptions
Cotner and Fitch co-edited Interdisciplinary Transcriptions, a large digital anthology devoted to transcription-based writing and art. The project extends the same central question found in their collaborations: how attention to speech, place, duration, and recorded events can become a literary method.
Transcription crosses disciplinary boundaries easily. A conversation, performance, interview, walk, lecture, or sound event can all become textual material once recorded and rendered into language.
The anthology therefore places literary practice beside documentary work, performance, sound art, and other forms whose source exists in time.
Urban observation
New York functions as both setting and generator. Dense streets supply constant changes of scale, social encounter, advertisement, infrastructure, architecture, commerce, and speech. The city offers more material than any writer can include, making selection central.
Cotner and Fitch respond by preserving the partial nature of attention. Their walks do not claim to represent the whole city. Each route becomes a temporary cut through it.
This selective structure keeps urban experience vivid. The city appears through what was noticed during one hour, under one weather condition, from one moving body.
Friendship and collaboration
Collaboration changes authorship because the work develops through relation. Cotner and Fitch bring different memories, habits of attention, references, and rhythms into the same project.
Friendship becomes formal. Familiarity permits quick shifts, shorthand, disagreement, and the confidence that a conversation can wander without collapsing. The writing benefits from that social history.
Lewis LaCook’s collaborative writing provides another example of authorship becoming relational through exchange, continuation, and mutual alteration.
Speech, place, and American poetry
Cotner and Fitch’s work belongs within contemporary American poetry where speech, field recording, social encounter, walking, and everyday observation become structures for composition.
Their writing shows how modest acts can generate complex form. Walking supplies sequence. Conversation supplies variation. Transcription supplies a visible record. The city supplies an inexhaustible field of changing detail.
Together these practices create literature from the social act of paying attention in company.
Further reading
Ugly Duckling Presse documents Ten Walks/Two Talks and the collaboration. PennSound preserves recordings by Cotner and Fitch, while DIAGRAM publishes material from their conversational work.