In April 1965, Harper’s Bazaar unveiled an edition of the magazine guest-edited by photographer Richard Avedon and dedicated to “the off-beat side of Now.” Borne of a moment of upheaval not unlike the one we’re currently living in, the issue explored the people and ideas that were shaping the era. Sixty years later, we’re marking its anniversary by talking to some of our own era's most influential figures and faces about the idea of the Now.
For four years, I was the secretary of Periplus, a mentorship collective serving writers of color. We made decisions collectively, which meant that anytime someone had a proposal, it fell to me to send out surveys to everyone—by my fourth year, a community of 250 writers—to gather our thoughts and opinions about it. I would send the surveys using Google Forms and then share the responses with the collective in Google Sheets.
What often struck me was the depth of what people wrote, particularly when they had the option to be anonymous. It made me think of the broader literary potential of shared, living documents. What if I came up with a survey about people’s lives—their pasts, their presents, their futures—and posted it online? What kind of collective narrative might emerge from the answers?
I wrote a survey in the fall of 2023 and shared it with friends, on social media and through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, where I paid people 25 to 50 cents to respond. I had been reading Audre Lorde’s writings about female collective knowledge. “For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered,” she wrote. And so I addressed it specifically to women.
It was only when the responses started coming in—more than 120, in the end—that I realized that the survey was in conversation with another question-and-answer form that had become pervasive: the AI chatbot dialogue. Where ChatGPT-produced text was bland and generic, I found the answers to the survey gloriously original. I wanted to know the women who had filled it out; in a sense, actually, I felt I did. The survey is still open. You can respond if you want.
