“Mixed Drinks” by Brenda Miller & Julie Marie Wade

“Mixed Drinks” in Zone 3 Spring 2019 is one of many collaborative works by Brenda Miller and Julie Marie Wade, erasing their cross country divide to create a memoir which blends (no pun intended) a list of drinks with associated memories from childhood (Shirley Temple) through adolescence (Bloody Mary), college years (Old Fashioned) to adulthood (Cosmopolitan). Recipes included.

Told in the second person, each vignette contains vivid pop culture details of the time, relatable to many, as well as a conflicting set of feelings the speaker must overcome – between what is expected by others, what is expected of ourselves, and what we are able to finally experience and deliver. “You know that the beer and the hamburger will provide you at least five minutes of purpose in this bar where you don’t belong, and that you’ll walk home afterward in the dwindling light of autumn, along the river, to your sparsely furnished studio apartment, where you’ll feel both lonely and relieved.”

The end of the piece didn’t feel finished, but rather the start of something larger, yet unattached. This might seem a fault if it didn’t at the same time feel so polished. An interview with the two writers cleared this up. Wade comments on their collaborative style, “We don’t really know what’s going to happen or emerge, in terms of the content or the final form, until we reach an ending – and even these endings feel more like stopping points or plateaus in our momentum rather than definitive conclusions.”

For more on collaborative writing, including another by Miller and Wade, Jet Fuel Review #17 (Spring 2019) features a Collaborative Works Special Section: “These selections embody the magic that arises out of collaboration and the bringing together of separate voices and identities to craft a singular, resonant body of work.”

Review by Denise Hill