These two words – artful and collaboration – resonate deeply,

almost as lightning rods of resistance to a world that is currently

so fragmented, isolated, transactional and consumerist. Tami
Spry’s attention to the ‘somatic and semantic’ in this volume
leads us also into considerations of the temporal within this
writing group’s works, which cheekily reference other times,
places and ‘enhanced’ human and more-than-human ways of
being, a speculative future brimming with both anxiety and
possibility, as unknowns always are. These essays are like
gleaming crumbs in a dark forest of self-interest and
xenophobia, leading us out to the light of belonging and I
connection. Do yourself a favour and get this book today, or
better yet: give it to a loved one.
(Anne Harris, Principal Research Fellow, RMIT University)

This beautiful, enlivening book draws us, as readers, into its

multi-voiced flow. It invites us to come inside its exploratory,
experimental, collaborative processes of becoming, alongside
a bunch of ‘unruly, rebellious, lively, heartfelt, heartening, angry
writers, artists, performers’. It is a book about listening to the
other, and becoming other. It is about the material, emotional,
spiritual, and political specificity of lives; it is about the
relationality that provides the conditions of possibility that
make this poetic writing, image making, and love possible. This
book invites us to leap with the authors into an endless, artful,
becoming through collaborative storytelling, through ‘seas of
stories flowing into an ocean yet only dipped into’.
(Bronwyn Davies, Emeritus Professor Western Sydney
University, Adjunct Professor University of Melbourne)

At a time when the word 'performative' is used to derisively

signal falseness and the inauthentic, this book reclaims its
potential for intimacy and radical openness. Together, the
contributors employ collaborative transdisciplinary writing
practices to do things with words, dissolving the distinctions
between bodies and language, deeds and thought, self and
other, near and far, joy and grief.
(Roberta Mock, Professor of Performance Studies, University of
Plymouth, UK)

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 1 25/05/2021 13:46

 An inspired, creative and utterly transformational book that lives
and breathes artful collaborative inquiry. A diverse collective
of creative scholars lay their writing lives bare, embracing an
embodied collaboration by weaving their voices throughout
this evocative and provocative text. Together they trace their
storylines, find and play with fragments of memories and found
text, tease out conceptual struggles, debate in safe yet vibrant
ways, and confront personal and professional taken-for-granted
beliefs. The book is an intense and abiding commitment to
inquiry in every way. Yet what is perhaps the most profound
II contribution is the disruption to publishing norms. The
network that spawned this remarkable collection are committed
to non-competitive, non-hierarchical open inquiry spaces that
encourage experimentation in visual arts, writing and working
together. As readers, we imagine a sparkling creative hub that
nurtures a rich scholarly atmosphere not only during
monthly meetings, but at regular social occasions. Witnessing
this remarkable collaborative becomes a beacon for all of us
wishing to create similar spaces. We should all be so lucky!
I highly recommend this important book for all artist-scholars
interested in artful collaborative forms of inquiry!
(Rita L. Irwin, Distinguished University Scholar and Professor,
Art Education, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver,
Canada)

This is a magical book of daring intelligence seeped in

virtuosic co-creations and enduring questions. We feel the
pulse and fragility of human yearning on every page coupled
by a precision and respect for method, both as emergence
and technique. This book offers both a performed event and a
visual feast, a poetics that wavers between creative non-fiction
and fiction all in the service of what is good and true for
qualitative researchers. The reader does not simply open a
book but enters a collage of scenes, a commons of witness-
es that are meaningfully sad, nervously funny, and profoundly
useful in the way the reader is both inspired and enlightened by
word and form. Readers will learn much from the crosscurrents
of knowledges, affect, and forms offered here. This magical
book is a consummate example of the urgency and gravitas of
this recurrent phrase, “We are all in this together.”
(D. Soyini Madison, Professor Emeritus of Performance and
Communication Studies, Northwestern University, Chicago,
USA)

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 2 25/05/2021 13:46

 This book is…
an intimate place/ for making an equal world/ art-words-people-
things

memento mori/ ‘Porter’ in French – to carry/ blue overtakes me

a crip-tych café/ you dare me to make these rhyme/ ‘haiku’ and

‘review’

“scraps of old postcards”/ “tattered old bits and pieces”/

tickets to elsewhere III

a diffractive stroke/a drawing into being/ a vanishing point.

a place of refuge/ unabandoned vehicle/ on tremulous ground

an uncovering/ pages interleaved with snow/ new shoots

pushing through.
(Sheridan Linnell, Associate Professor of Art Therapy and
Counselling, University of Western Sydney)

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 3 25/05/2021 13:46

 IV

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 4 25/05/2021 13:46

 Artful
Collaborative
Inquiry
Making and Writing
V
Creative, Qualitative
Research

Edited by
Davina Kirkpatrick, Sue Porter, Jane Speedy and
Jonathan Wyatt.

With editorial help and other contributions from Melissa Dunlop,

Mike Gallant, Carol Laidler, Alys Mendus, Margaret Page,
Artemi Sakellariadis and Tessa Wyatt, and further contributions
from Joanne Barber, Prue Bramwell-Davies, Catriona Brodie,
Laurinda Brown, Marion Donaldson, Janice Filer, Ken Gale,
Luci Gorell Barnes, Donna Kemp, Chara Lo, Marion Liebmann,
Lynn Maddern, Marina Malthouse, Viv Martin, Jelena Nolan,
Sarah Nymanhall, Katrina Plumb, Bubu Pyrsou, Peggy Styles,
Jane Reece, Malcolm Reed, Chris Scarlett, Tami Spry,
Goya Wilson Vasquez, Andrew Walls and Louise Younie.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 5 25/05/2021 13:46

 First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group

© 2021 Davina Kirkpatrick, Sue Porter, Jane Speedy and

Jonathan Wyatt
VI
The right of Davina Kirkpatrick, Sue Porter, Jane Speedy and Jona-
than Wyatt to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted
by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Designed by Davina Kirkpatrick. Typeset in Helvetica Neue

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or repro-

duced or utilised in any other form or by any electronic, mechanical or
any other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or reterival system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be

tradmarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catologue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-0-367-42750-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-42752-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-85484-3 (ebk)

Publisher’s Note
This book has been prepared from camera-ready copy provided by
the author/s/editor/s.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 6 25/05/2021 13:46

 In memory of Sue Porter, 1954–2017

VII

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 7 25/05/2021 13:46

 Artful Collaboration Forward.

Tami Spry.

Living in the context of a global pandemic makes writing about

anything else seem dismissive of the personal, social, and
systemic pain and chaos occurring in and around us in myriad
forms. I know it marks this essay, carbon dates it perhaps in
the geographies of the body politic. We have been brought to
our knees by a microscopic organism, and look to be kept there
VIII by those in power advocating lies, leeches, and blood-letting
rather than present-day science.

However, the wisdom in Artful Collaborative Inquiry suggests

that being on our knees may perhaps be viewed not as a defeat
in brutal patriarchal terms but rather as a time when we have
been invited/required to kneel down, to feel the earth on our
hands, to view the body politic from a different angle, to invite a
knee-deep episteme of embodied collaboration. ‘We have
developed a form of collaborative writing’, affirm the Bristol
Collaborative Writing Group (many of whom are contributors to
this book), ‘that allows us to listen intently from within this
constantly shifting space, but to also listen out for the
irreducibility of our constantly moving selves to their
constituting conditions … Our writing rarely finishes itself, but
is woven together from traces, lacunae, fragments, debris, and
bits and pieces’ (Speedy and Wyatt 2014: 148). This is a
methodology for the age of COVID-19, for the rage of
continued violence toward people of colour, for our viral and
violating responses to the ‘fragments, debris, and bits and
pieces’ of human and non/human environments. In the shifting
entanglement of language, writing, affect, agency, non/human
bodies, and things, collaborative writing and performance
methods insist that we speak from and with our body’s
interactions with hegemonizing performativities to offer
subversive and transformative narratives that assist in
‘listen[ing] intently from within this constantly shifting space’.

Though the essays in this forum were written before the

pandemic they speak from multiple perspectives about our
necessity to recognize the foundational significance of knowing,
feeling, seeing, and regarding the material body whatever the
configuration. Body as text. Text as body. The works in Artful

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 8 25/05/2021 13:46

 Collaborative Inquiry write from the transient borders between
the semantic and somatic offering a language, a way to
articulate multiplicities of interconnectedness. There is an artful
and aching beauty in these works illustrating Elaine Scarry’s
activist notion of the power of beauty; ‘At the moment we see
something beautiful,’ writes Scarry ‘we undergo a radical
decentering…we cease to stand at the center of the world, for
we never stood there’ (1998: 77). The stunning beauty of
creative collaborative intervention suspends a moment in time
long enough for us to see not only what is wrong but what can
also be right, possible, and especially in these times, utopian. IX

The time spent in Bristol with Prof. Jane Speedy’s students and
colleagues in CeNTraL: the centre for transformative learning
was, as the title promised, transformative in my work and
writing. The somatic and semantic weave of collaborative
inquiries continually reveal knowledge about the relationality of
bodies, things, selves, and others. And in particular, I would
recognize the incredible work, humility, deep humanity, and
lionheartedness of Sue Porter. She lives, breathes, and speaks,
in these pages. Some knowing about copresence, some
cellular discernment about assemblages of being opened up for
me in the so little time I spent with Sue and her mates in
Bristol. Body as text, text as body, was never more apparent to
me after that.

Languages of joy are left in the wake of her loss, along with
the realisation that we seldom have the control over language
we may think we do. Words seep out through pores, run down
cheeks, and sometimes become airborne before you can grab
them. Sometimes they try to speak before you have carefully
considered them, disciplined them, caressed them. They can
love you and in the next sentence turn on you, thinking they
know best. Perhaps they do.

As you move into the works that follow, I invite you to ‘listen
from within [their] constantly shifting space’ (Speedy & Wyatt
2014: 148), feel them, collaborate with them, heal our body
politic.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 9 25/05/2021 13:46

 X

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 10 25/05/2021 13:46

 XI

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 11 25/05/2021 13:47

 XII

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 12 25/05/2021 13:47

 Contents.

Acknowledgements. XVII
List of figures. XVIII
Introduction(s) to this body of works/bodily workings/works of
these bodies. 3

Part one: Keeping the Inquiry Space Open.

Introduction to part one. 32
Chapter one. Everday Fragments on the Ceiling of Room 407:
An Open Narrative Inquiry Space. 36 XIII
Chapter two. Making Meaning of Life-Changing Events. 63

Part two: Inviting Other Scholars Into Our Space.

Introduction to part two. 84
Chapter three. Riffing off Tami: Tami Spry’s Performative Call
and Our Collaborative Response. 92
Chapter four. Meandering and Writing Alongside
Doreen Massey. 133

Part three: Playing in Other/Outside Spaces.

Introduction to part three. 152
Chapter five. Pockets. 154
Chapter six. Cozy Crimes and Deadly Deeds. 181

Part four: Coming Together and Falling Apart.

Introduction to part four. 212
Chapter seven. Remembering Sue: Last Writes. 213
Chapter eight. Epilogue. 245
References. 253
List of contributors. 262
Index. 270

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 XIV

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 14 25/05/2021 13:47

 XV

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 XVI

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 Acknowledgements.
This project has taken a very long time to materialize. There
have been two major interruptions: halfway through our
endeavours Sue Porter, a linchpin in our team, died suddenly
and unexpectedly (more of which, later) and we would like to
thank all those who stepped into the fray and helped out at that
time, particularly her husband, Glenn Hall. The second
interruption, the advent of COVID-19, was a worldwide event
that threw us off course just as the project was coming to an
end and we would like to thank our editor at Routledge,
Hannah Shakespeare, and her team, who cut us all a lot of XVII
slack as we readjusted to new ways of working in the final
stages of the book.
We would also like to thank the audiences who asked questions
and made comments on our work at the European Congress
for Qualitative Inquiry in Edinburgh (2018) and the extraordinary
Norman Denzin, and his teams at Cultural Studies – Critical
Methodologies and Qualitative Inquiry for feedback and
editorial comments on earlier versions. We are grateful to the
University of Bristol’s School of Education for their commitment
to public and community engagement and for hosting and
supporting the Artful Narrative Inquiry network (ANI-net), which
did not contribute in a direct way to the research infrastructures
they had built, but nonetheless brought inquiry spaces into their
midst that intrigued some staff and students and created inter-
disciplinary mo(ve)ments.
We are indebted to all the ‘visiting magicians’ (as visiting
scholars to the network came to be nicknamed) who visited
Bristol – challenged our thinking and extended our work. In
relation to this particular body of work our gratitude goes to
Doreen Massey from the Open University (even though she
never made it to Bristol in person, just knowing she intended
to come was enough!) – Bronwyn Davies and Susanne Gannon
from Australia and Tami Spry from the USA.
This project would never have got underway at all without the
support, commitment and wayward attitudes of quite a large
number of dogs, most of them Irish Terriers, in particular,
Morgan, Erik the Red and Ulf. Last but not least, we’d like to
thank Giles Aston for stalwart last-minute help with InDesign™.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 17 25/05/2021 13:47

 List of figures.

1. -
Sue Porter on the First Severn Bridge with
Morgan, Erik the Red and Ulf, photo (Glenn Hall). VII
2. - Postcard, ink on paper (Jane Speedy). XI
3. - Postcard, ink on paper (Carol Laidler). XV
4. - Postcard, ink on paper (Davina Kirkpatrick). 1
5. - Artemi’s Garden, photo (Artemi Sakellariadis). 10
6. - Snow Angel, photo (Alys Mendus). 12
7. - Worm, photo (Carol Laidler). 16
XVIII 8. - Postcard, Ammerdown photo-montage (Jane Speedy).29
9. - Artemi’s Tree of Visual Knowledge
(Artemi Sakellariadis). 56
10. - Tree, iPad drawing (Jane Speedy). 58
11. - Postcard, red dogs at Fernhill, photo (Carol Laidler). 61
12. - Postcard, ink & pastel on paper (Carol Laidler). 81
13. - Body/Sculpt 1, photo-montage (Jane Speedy from
photos by Tami Spry). 93
14. - Body/Sculpt 2, photo-montage (Jane Speedy from
photos by Tami Spry). 104
15. - Postcard, photo (Carol Laidler). 131
16. - Postcard, ink & pastel on paper (Jane Speedy). 149
17. - Pockets workshop, photo montage ( Jane Speedy from
photos by Davina Kirkpatrick). 154
18. - Filmstrip – participants, photos (Davina Kirkpatrick). 154
19. - Filmstrip – participants and heat-press textile printing,
photos (Davina Kirkpatrick). 155
20. - Filmstrip – heat-press textile printing, photos (Davina
Kirkpatrick). 156
21. - Filmstrip – heat-press textile printing, photos (Davina
Kirkpatrick). 157
22. - Filmstrip – artwork Alys Mendus and Ann Rippin, photos
(Davina Kirkpatrick). 158
23. - Filmstrip – artwork Davina Kirkpatrick and Carol Laidler,
photos (Davina Kirkpatrick). 159
24. - Filmstrip – artwork Jane Speedy and Mike Gallant, group
sculpt, photos (Davina Kirkpatrick/Glenn Hall). 160
25–40. Filmstrip – group sculpt, photos (Glenn Hall). 161–176
41. - Pockets workshop, photo-montage (Jane Speedy). 177
42. - Filmstrip – Hawkwood gardens, photos (Davina
Kirkpatrick). 177
43. - Postcard, photo (Davina Kirkpatrick). 179
44. - Monoprint (Carol Laidler). 182

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 18 25/05/2021 13:47

 45. - Monoprint (Davina Kirkpatrick). 184
46. - Monoprint (Davina Kirkpatrick). 186
47. - Monoprint (Carol Laidler). 188
48. - Moonprint (Davina Kirkpatrick). 190
49. - Moonprint (Davina Kirkpatrick). 192
50. - Monoprint (Sue Porter, Ann Rippin, Jane Speedy). 194
51. - Collage with pastel and kisses (Carol Laidler, Davina
Kirkpatrick, Jane Speedy). 196
52. - Monoprinting, photo (Davina Kirkpatrick). 198
53. - Shelling peas, photo (Davina Kirkpatrick). 198
54. - Monoprinting, photo (Davina Kirkpatrick). 200 XIX
55. - Monprinting, photo (Davina Kirkpatrick). 202
56. - Dinner discussions, photo (Davina Kirkpatrick). 202
57. - Erik the Red, photo (Davina Kirkpatrick). 204
58. - Postcard, photo (Carol Laidler). 209
59. - Monoprint with collage (Tessa Wyatt). 215
60. - Monoprint (Tessa Wyatt). 216
61. - Monoprint (Tessa Wyatt). 217
61. - Tessa’s cutouts in the bin, photo (Davina Kirkpatrick).
218
62. - Monoprint (Alys Mendus). 219
63. - Photopolymer print (Davina Kirkpatrick). 219
64. - Collage (Davina Kirkpatrick). 220
65. - Monoprint & collage (Melissa Dunlop). 221
66. - Monoprints produced by the group, photo (Davina
Kirkpatrick). 221
67. - Drawing (Tessa Wyatt). 235
68. - Postcard, photo (Davina Kirkpatrick). 243
69. - Postcard, photo (Davina Kirkpatrick). 251

Postcard backs hand written by Ann Rippin.

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 XX

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 20 25/05/2021 13:47

 1

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 1 25/05/2021 13:47

 2

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 2 25/05/2021 13:47

 Introduction(s) to this body of works/bodily workings/
works of these bodies.

Jane Speedy with Davina Kirkpatrick, Sue Porter,

Seema Shrenk and Jonathan Wyatt, including contributions
from the EPTU project 3091, Melissa Dunlop, Carol Laidler,
Margaret Page and Artemi Sakellariadis.

Notes on the international symposium on the findings from

ETPUi project 3091: the remaining realized archaeological 3
excavations (actual fact; speculative fabulation and digital
modelling) from twenty-first century southwest Britain/Albion.
Symposium chair: Seema Shrenk. Panellists: Ho Ping Hung,
Akiba Mordechai, Sonja Wedderkop, Owain Griffiths.
Notetakers: Bahardhar Singh and Angela Dweck. Signer:
Lucretia Kellog.

This symposium, facilitated by the global and pervasive

archaeologies grouping, was held at the International Centre for
Accessible Scholarship Decemination (ICASD),ii Addis
Abbaba, March 3091. Seema Shrenk chaired the meeting,
assisted by three human colleagues from the pervasive
archaeologies network: Hung; Mordechai and Wedderkop
and the project’s trained sniffer dog Owain Griffithsiii – a Welsh
border collie. The simultaneously available digital notes of these
encounters were taken for Eurasian language users by myself
(Bahardhar Singh) and for the Scandinavian and Afro-Chinese
delegates/readers by my colleague Angela Dweck.

Shrenk: I’ll just continue, if I may, from our last webinar: At

some point quite late on in our excavations of this
documentation and related matter(s) we found these scattered
paper/digital files. They are believed to be a series of attempts
by the original group of twenty-first century scholars to
introduce this body of work in some kind of coherent fashion.
It seems they had been writing/making the ensuing chapters
in parts one to four of this volume between the years 2015 and
2020. The digital documents are auto-dated and were all found

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 3 25/05/2021 13:47

 ‘permanently’, holographically zip-sealed. 2020 is the year from
which popular European historians (and indeed historians and
historiographers of Europe) have traditionally tended to date the
death of ‘advanced capitalism’. There is, nonetheless,
significant contemporary evidence to suggest that this
extremely slow death and period of economic and social
stagnation and unrest started at least half a century before
2020; long before any of the recorded comprehensive planetary
viral or meteorological interventions. In our facsimile 3091
edition of this work we have kept the (tentatively) plural title
4 ‘Introduction(s)’ from the original manuscript. The laws of the
explicit/implicit multiplicities of all species/things were not com-
monly established in early twenty-first century material/cultural
life. In these vitrines displayed around the rooms of the museum
of scholarship we have copies of the original digital and paper
manuscript versions of the text, as well as first and second
editions of hard copies of the original book; all of which Owain
found during the initial excavations. In the display at the far end
of the seminar room we have set out all the texts that constitute
the introduction(s). These are the texts we shall be referring to
in this seminar/webinar:

Introduction one:

This introduction to the contributions in this book is in three

parts that have been loosely quilted together. The first part is
this, the work of myself, Seema Shrenk, archaeologist, archivist
and academical from the thirty-second century PAE. My
contributions form an integrating overview into which the other
two parts, both fragments of writing from twenty-first century
AAE British scholars, are integrated. These fragments have
been excavated from sites close to Bristol in south west Britain,
and are believed to have been written in the era running up to
the great human decline and coronavirus pandemic, just be-
fore the building of the great cyber-wall between the USA and
continental Europe in 2035. These unedited writings are placed
below in ‘chronological’ order. The first fragment,
entitled ‘prologue’ was written only a year or so before the
second and, interestingly, quotes from some of my earlier
archaeological recordings, as if ….
This book of collaborative writings produced by Ani-net (the
artful collaborative inquiry network at the University of Bristol)
was originally intended to be edited by Jane Speedy,

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 4 25/05/2021 13:47

 Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Bristol and
her colleague Sue Porter, Senior Research Fellow in the Norah
Fry Centre for Disability Studies, University of Bristol.
Unfortunately, shortly after the two scholars started the editorial
project, Sue died unexpectedly, throwing both Jane as co-writer
and friend and, indeed, the entire artful inquiry network, which
Sue had co-co-ordinated, into disarray.

The writing below in Italics is taken from Jane Speedy’s eulogy

at Sue Porter’s funeral in February 2017 at Hawkwood College, 5
Stroud:

Sue and I wrote together a lot – we wrote together in a variety of

groups over the past decade or so and we also found ourselves
tidying up after collaborative writing retreats – collecting up
people's writing and tying it together .... We wrote a number of
academic papers and book chapters together. She was my
favourite writing companion – she wouldn't hesitate to cut into
my writing with her own, or completely re-arrange it on the
page, which gave me similar permissions.
We would sit in cafes in Bristol – or at each other's kitchen
tables ... our coffees getting colder and colder .... constantly
swapping over writing machines and notebooks, as we wrote
ourselves into and out of each other's lives. Recently we have
been bringing together a series of pieces of people’s
collaborative writing and collating these into an edited book, the
third in the series from our research network.
I'm going to read you our last piece of co-writing, destined for
the prologue to our artful collaborative inquiry book. It's not very
polished or finished, in fact it's hardly started, and it’s not one
of the finest, most poetic pieces of Sue’s writing, but it is one
of the last things Sue wrote and does demonstrate three things
about her that I cherish dearly: her scholarship, her subversion
and her humour. I cannot extract just Sue’s writing from this
piece because we wrote collaboratively and I can no longer tell
what bits are hers so I'm going to read it just as it came out –
this is the first draft: There are three characters in this piece:
Seema Shrenk an archaeologist from the 32nd century
[this was a typical Sue Porter manoeuvre .... in order to gain a
bit of distance on our writing, she brought in a character from
11 centuries into the future, to narrate the chapter].

Seema Shrenk had apparently uncovered a treasure-trove of

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 5 25/05/2021 13:47

 collaborative writing documents, largely from the archives of two
twenty-first century scholars in the south-west of Britain.
Seema narrates the piece and introduces the other characters:
Sue Porter and Jane Speedy …

The prologue begins:

Seema Shrenk: I am drawing your attention now to a

conversation between these two twenty-first century scholars –
they are clearly friends as well as colleagues, sitting together
6 writing the prologue to their latest, edited book 2. By this stage
in their co-writing relationship they routinely wrote into and out
of each other's writing, so I would not assume as readers that
the words coming out of Sue Porter’s mouth were put there by
her, or equally, that Jane Speedy's words were sole-authored.
My words as Seema Shrenk, thirty-second century
archaeologist are of course my own, verbatim. Still, it is up to
you as readers to make what you like of all this pre-historical
material ... back to the dark days of the twenty-first century...

JS: ‘We are just a couple of crippled old ladies sitting in a café.’
SP: ‘Speak for yourself. I'm no lady.’
JS: ‘I'll start that again... we are just a couple of old cripples
sitting in a café.’
SP: ‘Speak for yourself. I'm not old.’
JS: ‘Well you're exactly the same age as me - a month older in
fact.’
SP: ‘Exactly. Spring chickens the pair of us...’
JS: ‘So. I'll start that again, again. We're just a couple of
cripples sitting in a café ...’
SP: ‘That's more like it....’

SS: I shall just contextualise this transcribed conversation for

contemporary thirty-second century readers. This tongue-in-
cheek exchange between the two scholars exemplifies and
references twenty-first century attitudes to women and aging.
Let me fill you in on some of the background: 1) Both these
women had been engaged in the mid twentieth century bubble
of feminist activity in the West known as the 'second wave'.
2) It was not cool to be old in the early twenty-first century as
the aging population was a relatively new phenomenon (in fact
by thirty-second century standards these two women were
incredibly young - and had only just reached their early sixties).

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 3) This conversation predates the early cyborg movement by at
least half a century – these two women were still moving around
their world on electrically operated chairs on wheels that could
not go upstairs or ladders or hover above the ground in any way
and they were often found propping themselves up with a series
of crutches and canes – domestic robotics was still in its
infancy in this era. 4) In this dialogue the two speakers are
heard reclaiming the word 'cripple' in the manner of Mcruer's
(2006) crip theory, a spin-off from the use of the word queer in
Butler’s previously reclaimed queer theory. There was, it should
be said, quite a generic and much-needed queering of the 7
academy in the early twenty-first century …
Now ... Let's return to their conversation a little later on that
same morning:

SP: ‘Fancy another coffee?’

JS: ‘Is it too early for a glass of fizz?’
SP: ‘Is it ever too early for a glass of fizz?’
JS: ‘And maybe a chocolate brownie?’
SP: ‘Or a rocky road, they do a very good rocky road here ...’

I'm afraid that's as far as we got but I will finish it for us later ...
and get the book published ...

Seema Shrenk:
Postscript: These were the only documents we recovered from
this writing as Sue Porter quite unexpectedly died in 2017, just
as the two scholars were beginning to edit their volume of
collaborative writing. Posthumous co-writing was not a
commonplace twenty-first century practice. Mind-archiving
technologies were in their earliest infancy in this era and
therefore Porter’s collaborator, Speedy, had no access to
Porter’s unformed and semi-formed thoughts and imaginings,
much less psycho-neurologically accurate predictions and
estimations of her future thinking. The prologue to the book
stops rather abruptly here and is later picked up in the form of
an introduction (now following on from this prologue, we do not
know if anything else fitted into the year-long gap in the
writing, nothing else has come to light in our excavations).
The second introduction (below) was written collaboratively
by Dunlop, Laidler, Page, Sakellariadis and Speedy,iv who are
believed to have met in one of their homes in Bristol, just over

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 7 25/05/2021 13:47

 a year after Porter’s death, and continued with this project, this
time writing very much in memory of Porter (see: Chapter
Seven: Remembering Sue, this volume) and her interest in this
work. It was decided at that time to keep Porter’s name on
the front of the book (although it was not common twenty-first
century practice for authors who were already dead to continue
writing) in order to honour her contributions to this group of
collaborative artful scholars and her influence on their work:
past, present, and future.

8 My colleagues from the Pervasive Archaeologies Grouping,

United Universities of the Mid-Planet (Earth) and myself found
these documents as an unanticipated and rich extension of our
excavations into early twenty-first century rural habitations and
culinary customs along the valley of the eastern Usk. We have
attempted to tidy the layout and collate and annotate these
documents, whilst keeping the original archaic language;
spellings, fonts, etc. (prologue for prolog/ conversation for
facetalk/scholar for academical), we hope we have left them
sufficiently intact and untampered-with to be found useful and
accessible both to other anthropological and archaeological
academicals, particularly socio-medical historians with an
interest in earth at the time leading up to, and during, the 2020
coronavirus pandemic, and also to lay readers with an interest
in earlier planetary histories and geographies.v

Introduction two/ or, perhaps, more of a methodological

exemplar.

(Dunlop, Laidler, Page, Sakellariadis and Speedy)

Opening Up Space (for Gerald/ine)

Snowstorm Emma, the Beast from the East is wreaking havoc…

The plan took – I don’t know – 100 emails, maybe more, and
many weeks. It was finally settled some months ago: a small
group of us would gather and assemble this book, give it shape,
form, clarity – perhaps even a sense of intention (“is there even
a theme for this book?” someone maybe asked me in an aside
– I think it was someone) – though that would be contrary to a
process that that is mainly about allowing what is to emerge
amidst the momentary flow, back and forth, between us. Is that

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 8 25/05/2021 13:47

 what we are doing? Trying to record this between space
somehow? Who knows?

Saturday and Sunday

10am to 4pm
with lunch at The Greenbank Pub, Bristol

We would write small explanations – like this one – to situate

the reader (that’s you), link the sections, and help the whole
hang together.
9
But time moved differently that weekend, refusing the confines
of the clock and stretching out in all directions - the way it does
around certain life-defining processes – things like birth, death
andvi – in the UK – snow. Is collaborative writing, then, a life
defining process? By Friday there was no denying, we would
have to change our plans. The emails began again and before
we knew it …

Displacement; a deep intake of warm breath pushing out an

exhalation of cold breath, dry icy air from Siberia, a product of
global warming. Several people have lost their lives,
photographs of cars in long queues; Do not abandon your
vehicle! Or is it – Abandon your vehicle! What is the advice?

Carol seems to have started our writing together … This

weekend we were going to Greenbank but as we speak I am
still in snowbank watching the blizzard whirling around outside.
It is thick and deep ... the weather has me under house arrest.
I am looking out across the rooftops through the swirling snow.
Outside no traffic is coming down the road. They have all
abandoned their journeys or their vehicles.

If this is the field it (we) is all snowed in and we are a disparate

group. A sediment is forming, intensities are clustering
together, deterritorialising method, disrupting ways of knowing
and doing.

We will just have to not know what to do or how to do this.

We are being re-invented by this writing across time/snow/

cities/countries/ we are not 'in the know' about this
'collaborative writing/artmaking' as inquiry malarkey, despite
this being the third volume of our writing about it.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 9 25/05/2021 13:47

 I am writing by way of welcome to this book, but to be honest,
I don’t know a whole lot. I don’t know the history of this group
– or if it even is a group. Perhaps more of a grouping? I haven’t
even met everyone who features in these pages and that must
go both ways. Most of these tales happened without me, and
every one of them happened without someone, so I am (we are)
like you in this respect: onlookers. I feel a twinge of exclusion
even as I open up to you here, trying to be a good hostess, but
winging it all the same.
10
Is this too much/too strange/what are the rules? We have
developed a way of doing this… in real time/ face to face/ and
now we have started, differently, somewhere else, on a different
day when I was down to be at home, writing other stuff to go in
this book (or was that other stuff down to write me?).

5
[note from Seema Shrenk and thirty-second century overview
team: there were many versions of this document, in some of
which appeared a photograph of a snowy garden in others the
parentheses above appeared, together with the large gap in the
text, below]

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 10 25/05/2021 13:47

 11

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 11 25/05/2021 13:47

 Night Falls

It moves. Working from home

There is always On snowy days
movement. There is Knows no boundaries.
always becoming. We were
just a bit too One dining table.
certain, before we We eat here,
started, of what we were I work there.
going to do. I even knew
which pub we were going I move around.
12 to eat our lunch in. Sit someplace else.
Break habitual patterns,
Could someone send us See things afresh
some angels? Are angels Conjure up energy
allowed, because some- For mundane necessities.
body died, quite a few Check email first?
people died in fact, and
now we are snowed in and My Inbox overflows
we could do with a few Carol in Spain
angels. Angels would be Thinks, worries, writes.
the kind of unpredictable Jane in Bristol
leverage that could get us Wants an angel
out of this mess. Wants more writing
Alys in Scotland
Sends snow angel
Tessa is typing
And from Edinburgh Mike is amending
(where another group Jon is reading
is silently watching on / Melissa is drinking
watching over this group): Davina was editing
Artemi was working
(No, not me)
I’ll join in
Send another angel

6
Sending you all a snow
angel... x

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 12 25/05/2021 13:47

 Well I am in the lunch pub My Guardian Angel
- The Greenbank - now, a By Judith Weir: www.youtube.
day before I am meant to com/watch?v=ydSJcPrGYlM
be. I’m getting drunk with (poor recording, listen out for the
my neighbours because it drone)
has snowed and it seems
we have some need to Cold snow angels
connect, be a Musical guardian angels
community, bodily close Fresh collaborative angels
while cut off from our usual Blowing writerly winds
worlds. Everything is ahead Across snowy terrains
of time and warped. Connecting us all 13
Tomorrow I will write, of In solitary union
grief perhaps. Today it is Rediscovering writing
the apocalypse, time to possibilities
face the facing of an end of In remembering Sue…
an era... argh! To quote
Joseph Dodds - We are all
fucked.
vii

Day One or is it Two? …. Apart

Hello … What shall

we do?

No swirling today
but I really don’t
want to venture out
in this ...

Are Artemi and

Melissa going to
meet?
Are we going to
Skype?
What do you think
Melissa and Art?
I think I’m staying
at home.
You could come
here ... but what

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 13 25/05/2021 13:47

 about Melissa’s
kids?
O I dunno!
We could start at
10 with a cuppa
and write together.
Then share it on Yup. Very few trains
Skype. running today, and
Yes, I don’t think it those very delayed.
What do you Not worth it, much
14 is driving weather
think? yet. I am here but though I’d like to
are the trains still see Melissa. Let’s
cancelled? Maybe start with what
So maybe today tomorrow we could Jane suggests
we’ll have a late think about and make it up as
start. Say 11? And gathering and we go along. Two
all write into writing today we Skype degrees today.
at our own tables and drink our own Almost.
with our own cups tea ...
of tea knowing that
is what we are all
doing for 30 mins
... then we put it
up here by noon
and read it and see
what we’ve got and Clocking in.
where we are? Waiting for Jane’s
doc, ready to read,
Agreed? then write. I’m still
in my pyjamas. Can
Art? do five-way skype
later (not in my
Sorry ... I don’t pyjamas!).
know how to at all
... praps just email
... get ready to start
at 11am GMT ...
and we’ll all write
about / into writing
in this way in this
place ...

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 14 25/05/2021 13:47

 I will send a let’s
start email
Phew!! Just
changed out of my
pyjamas and
dressing gown
in case someone
masters Skype and I’m here. Dressed.
catches me Ready to be
unawares!! writerly. It’s our writing time, 15
I say we get/carry
How hard can it on with writing and
be? I used to have hope Jane is well…
3-way doc
supervision with
Ken in Plymouth Jane are you there?
and Jon in Oxford (are you there
... have a feeling Jane?)
Jono organised
that ... or more ... feels dark and so
likely Tess ... quiet
anyway am in jeans
and jumper now so
ready for anything!

I wonder if Melissa … is staring at her screen willing an email

from Jane to appear or if she, too, has made a start. My mind
turns to Jane. Is she happily writing away having forgotten to
send an email … has she forgotten about us altogether? I am
not sure if Margaret or Carol even planned to write together –
separately – this morning.

Here we are writing an introduction to a book about writing

together. This book: I don’t even know what it’s meant to be
about, though from what I can tell it has … become about this
moment … the perpetual motion of becoming something new
and letting go of what was … just a moment ago. Crossing
space and time like a matrix of neural pathways. The snow is
preventing us meeting face-to-face so we are writing in
temporal synchrony in our own homes, with our own cups of
tea … We are writing together, but separately. Differently.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 15 25/05/2021 13:47

 … this is strange … when we are in the same room writing
together we usually just write alone, feeling the presence of
others around us, each in a little bubble of our own, co-floating
in a shared space, and now that we are apart there is much
more nudging going on – perhaps in the way that we’d look up
from our writing and acknowledge someone.

… this [separateness] makes a difference. It makes a sonic

difference. I hear the Dunnocks in the hedge in the garden, but
I do not hear the sounds of you typing or the scratch of your
16 pens. I do not see you, cannot touch you. I do not know your
colours … do not know what you are wearing today. Although
I imagine that Artemi has lots of bracelets that jangle as she
writes, which at some point, will irritate her, and she will take
them off. Or perhaps she believes that they will irritate others
and that is why she takes them off when we write. I should tell
her that I associate the sound of them jangling with the sound-
scape of our writing together. Today they are a soundtrack
playing only in my head.

So right now I feel super-connected to Melissa, Jane and Carol,

knowing that we are in this together, writing together in real time
and yet separately in space. I am intrigued by this sense of
connectedness which has no name other than Gerald.viii How
can I describe your presence here, in this room – well no, not in
this room, but in the act of writing?

I got out of bed this morning, the shutters

were pressed down with tiny slits of light,
sunlight? No sound of the downpour …
Shoeless down the cold stairs to the living
room to open the shutters and reveal a
windless mottled sky. Inside the room two
large thick black worms slither across the
white marble floor.

7
Somehow the sight of those worms makes my stomach clench,
it’s irrational but inevitable perhaps. I find a biro and pick them
up one by one, plop them into a glass bowl and carry them
grimly out to the sodden grass. A blackbird hops
expectantly nearby – they have as much chance as a character
in The Hunger Games. They seem to have two heads, or two
tails, or perhaps no head at all – blindly ambidextrous.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 16 25/05/2021 13:47

 ‘The end is in the beginning, and yet we go on’.ix How many
ways do ends and beginnings slip into one another? I will find
out more about worms later I think; how on earth did they get in
through the locked windows and shutters?

This is a different kind of intimacy, a different writing space, a

different proximity. We are all trapped in places on a map,
separated by space, connected by the ether, intra, inter,
computer trails, pipelines that really do exist below the sea,
lying in the hollows of old trading routes. The deep waters of 17
knowing mingle with the shallows of the new, unknowing,
unknown.

I am not sure if their willingness to write together from a

distance is buoying me up in some mysterious way or if it’s a
little trick of the mind, that I tell myself that this is a ‘peopled
space’ to bring myself to the task. With the loss of a place or a
person known well, I feel how much they have become a part of
me, of having built a shared history, even if it was only a
fragment of all there was … just enough for a sense of
connection, for the knowing that goes beyond words, a
powerful feeling transmitted with a glance, a sense of another
feeling how I feel. Knowing. Known. It certainly is an incentive
to write, but it’s not, I am absolutely sure that it’s not … how
shall I put this? The abstract knowledge that they are there and
writing does not generate this sense of connectedness for me,
it is the felt knowledge, my sense of their presence, that makes
the difference for me. And the weirdest thing is that I felt their
presence even at the very beginning, when I started writing, not
knowing if anyone else was there ready to write.

I feel the gossamer threads pulling me a short distance east

to Melissa; a short distance south to Margaret, busy in the city
hall; much further west to Artemi by the sea and very much
further south, bursting right out of this snowbound silent
membrane towards Carol, stuck in Spain … The cartographies
of our intimacies and proximities are viscerally, almost
visually, laid out before me … Writing to you in a parallel place.
Our words will combine, creating new meanings, new
pathways. Writing about writing, about connections, leaps of
imagination, building on thoughts, conversations, coincidence.
My incident is connected to your incident. I feel the
connectedness pulling me away from everyday life; the

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 17 25/05/2021 13:47

 Dunnocks in the hedge; the bright light of the snow. And yet
this is a different connectedness from our usual writing together
moments. Here we are, all writing together, and later we are
going to share our writing with each other, but this is different,
this being kept apart, this lack of physicality, from our more
usual writing ‘with’ each other.

Materials of the internet age, rotting in waste heaps in

Africa, the electronic graveyard of Agbogbloshie, where
children scavenge for the most precious parts, while the rest of
18 our waste slowly rots down and poisons the land.
Interconnected through waste. I like the irony of paradise on an
off day, weather no longer permitting, creatures all in the wrong
places, nature fighting back. It doesn’t take long as we know,
we have plenty of evidence … but still the governments cow-
tow to the machinery of global corporations and profit and we
turn our faces from the what-will-come to keeping comfortable
in the here-and-now. Oh, the grieving – and blended in, the
possibility of something new. And the challenge to allow
ourselves to feel both, to be both. The continuous state of
journeying, away from all that gave meaning, purpose,
connection to being here, finding meaning and purpose in some
new way. Connected. Alive.

I offered to connect us all on Skype to read our writing, so that

we can listen to what the others have written. Well that brings
an interesting new dimension because that would somehow
draw in all our significant others in this space. Anybody else
who is in our homes right now, will also be present in our
togetherness if we connect via Skype. That would feel really
weird… I hear the noises of preparations to go to the park - an
excited dog; the pulling on of waterproof over-trousers; the
search for the keys; the finding of the collar. Soon I will be here
alone with you as usual. But this is not at all usual. We do not
bring the people we share our lives with when we come away
writing together. This is a different kind of proximity. There he
lies … Mysterious on the inside. The lack of a reference point, a
shared history, rendering him opaque, a surface that cannot yet
be penetrated, seen into, recognised on a vibrational level.
(Un)known. The strangeness of the new, compelling yet painful
for not being old. A doorway opens. A doorway closes.
Goodbye and hello and goodbye, all at once. I miss the old
ways so much and yet, I wouldn’t have missed this moment
now – not for all the world!

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 18 25/05/2021 13:47

 Just realised everyone else is dressed and proper. Here I am,
lank hair and pyjamas, draped in blankets. I am sitting here,
as yet unwashed ... And the rain has started again … I am
wrapped in a blanket to keep warm ...

I am indeed dressed – but in truth I have returned to bed and

am addressing you from there. I was going to say something
about your undress – but it slipped away ... or perhaps I felt
inhibited about drawing attention to your unmade state. I am
not sure why we have all reached for our clothes to type!
Perhaps it is about our intimacy. I am moved to write again, 19
whether or not it is time. Ready to reveal yourselves?

I am at my table in the living room. I hear only the Dunnocks. No

traffic. No aeroplanes. At last a distant car. There are no buses
or lorries. The quiet has followed the snow, both covering the
city. Two membranes of whiteness and silence. We are beneath
them writing to each other. We are attempting collaborative
writing across countries, across cities. For the first time we are
not all in the same room and this feeling is echoed in the layout
of the writing.

Wonderful

to read you all into being

We are all trapped by the weather and find ourselves where we

should not be.
We should now be going to the pub, but I went yesterday,
sucked in to the proximal world around me, a world which I
normally avoid, consider not my world, and yet (I now realise) it
has been calling me, gently, persistently …
We have written ourselves into proximity, into each other’s lives.
The neighbours came around in the evening and drank wine
around my fire. It seems they have been waiting for my
invitation all this time. I have indulged myself in a story of
being alone, when I am only elsewhere, not where I once was,
not with whom I was once with. [Not] who I once was?
I feel very interconnected with the three of you in this writing.
And the worm.
The worm has made its way through the worm hole into our

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 19 25/05/2021 13:47

 worlds, as mysteriously as it did into your apartment.
And I have travelled through a wormhole into a different part of
reality. We are all on the move. Like the worm, our direction of
travel may take the form of a u-turn, but movement is,
nonetheless, always already in the frame,

I have felt myself trapped by geography, space crowded

round, by needing to wait for time to pass. I have been
connecting - in a more real way within the virtual world,x
where we are now – virtually present, connected through
20 this task, the writing ... I am here now. Virtually and
actually.

I’ve just spoken to Melissa on Skype and was reminded what a

difference it makes to have a face-to-face conversation, even
if we are still separated by distance, by snow, by computer
screens. It feels great to have reconnected …
I think of myself as a new person here, still arriving, but actually,
I realise, it has been three years since I first encountered this
group … I could tell immediately – it made complete sense to
me … kind of a home … I love this, what’s happening between
us … why has it taken me so long to say?

Truth is sometimes produced through standard

experimentation, through tried and tested methods, but also
through ‘looking for the blue’xi for the struggle to find different
pathways that lead to more hopeful outcomes.
The trouble with making things up as we go along is that we
amend the rules … so whatever you do, you end up following
and breaking the rules.
We make and break rules. We flout the fences that we have put
up around the fields of play.

I’ve been wanting to explore what it feels like to write

together and separately, but have found it difficult.
Perhaps because I found the uncertainty of what we’re
doing unsettling?
I realise how tentative I have been, not wishing to
impose myself upon an established group of writers …
wondering how things work, who is in charge, where the
centre lies. I have been occupying a two-dimensional
space.
On this occasion, these ways of being together, of writing

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 20 25/05/2021 13:47

 together, were happened upon, and in opening these spaces
we discovered the multiplicity of simultaneous stories and
geographies had overblown themselves like snow blowing
through roof tiles.
.
I quite often do my first stint of work for the day in my
pyjamas … but there is nobody around to see and I
don’t go around – telling anyone. So I’m intrigued that I
told you I was in pyjamas this morning and am even
more intrigued to see others either rushing to get
dressed or declaring that they are not even in pyjamas. I 21
have been wondering if I am welcome …

We were multiply connected, misshapen by events into a

different map of where we once were.

I also intrigued by newfound intimacies in this way of

writing together … things we would not ordinarily
mention when we meet face-to-face because there
would be no need … if we are in clothes or pyjamas …
or if we are wearing anything at all, get mentioned here
and, by virtue of having been written, leave a larger foot
print than any casual remark about a nice jumper.

In my uncertainty, I have been unable to reach past the layers of

clothing, unable to show you what is inside.
We were not looking for the blue, but rather, caught in the white,
and as such found ourselves, as the blue found us, inventing
and circumventing in new ways, worming our way out of a hole
we had been in for some time. Certain we knew what we were
doing.
At the same time, precisely because we are not meeting
face-to-face, we can take liberties about doing our writing in
our pyjamas or just wrapped in a blanket. And this is where this
way of being together becomes different from any other: we tell
one another of these things, inviting in our midst little intimacies
that we may not ordinarily have brought into the fold.
… now I think perhaps it is you who has been wondering …
why has she brought herself here to us?
Making u-turns like the neighbours, waiting patiently for my
invitation, while I wrestle with the time-space continuum.
And this, in turn, these little shared moments of indiscretion (is
that the right word?) create, at least for me, even more intimacy.
In this writing, we are shaping each other.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 21 25/05/2021 13:47

 I am beginning to grasp these threads, these tendrils of
connection.

In this introduction to our work, we are trying to describe a

non-fixed, moving way of writing, a way of writing that inquires
into the spaces between us and tries, in these
moments, to hold up to the light; to hold up for consideration,
some of the ‘emergent possibilities’ that some have sometimes
named ‘Gerald’. Some of these ways, these possibilities might
include proximity, coming together, talking, listening, witnessing
22 even and, held in this space, might then include more writing, a
more extended inquiry.

Some of what we have done, made, written, and included here

in this book could be named ‘collective biography’, some could
be named ‘collaborative writing as inquiry’, but given that all
writing is collaborative, between writer and audience, some
could equally be named ‘writing as inquiry’; yet again, some
could be named artful inquiry. It is all inquiry. It is all inquiring
into emergent possibilities.

It is all Gerald.

There is a thumping overhead, birds stomping away on my

rooftop: gathering, surveying, territorial. They don't care how
much I paid for that roof. They aren't asking my permission;
they have their own agenda.
In the garden, the snow is melting and the Dunnocks are out,
pecking about. All this space just to themselves. They are
spoiling themselves with noisiness. I think they are louder than
usual. So do they.
I have been out to look at the world, and it is melting, the snow,
going slushy and transparent, on the turn from white to black,
like my mind which is changing, isolated yet connected, trying
to make sense of today’s writing and wondering where to go
from here.

There lies the joy and absurdity of naming this space

Gerald.

I name this Spanish worm Geraldine. For she wriggles, full

of emergent possibilities, across a cold marble floor. As do
we.
There is tomorrow.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 22 25/05/2021 13:47

 * Night Falls Again *

I have sneaked a moment to respond

respond to you. Wish I could be
there
there with you all…

I read
read through
through yesterday’
yesterday’ss writing… wish I could see you
all.

The writing turns

turns from
from confessional to making sense. It’s
It’s
true that writing from
from afar involves describing things that 23
would otherwise be noted and forgotten
forgotten in a quick peruse,
and the sense of what is said is amplified.

Life bleeds into our writing.

Last night I watched the last episode of The Detectorists,

which is all about men and sheds, and searching
searching and not
finding treasur
tr easure,
e, while not noticing the true treasur
treasuree in
life... and it made me cry.
cry. In a sense, that is what we areare
doing in our writing connections, our artful inquiry,
inquiry,
searching
sear ching for treasur
treasuree and discovering it’s
it’s been there
there all
along.

Day Two or is it Three - Together

We are writing an introduction to a collection of writings I have

not read. But really we are just writing - entering a zone where
quiet connection is written into being.

A space of meditative possibilities

I/we spoke ourselves into connection by attending to each

other’s words, with care. A careful attention. Moving into inquiry
away from the realms of ‘facts’.

In the listening this morning I heard the differences between

our voices, accents, diffidences, confidences, tones that come
across only sonically. As a reader yesterday, you all spoke with
my voice in my head, and in the speaking, I did not hear the
sense that my writing made to me yesterday. Today it was not
nonsense but it did not make the same sense. There is a

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 23 25/05/2021 13:47

 sensory difference: in the where and what of felt sense.
There are sonic and aesthetic differences; are there ethical
differences, I ask myself? Three of us have laptops, but
Margaret is writing with pen and notepad. This sounds different,
does it read differently?

We are, we said, writing to inquire - how is writing in physical

proximity different to writing in the same real time from separate
physical spaces and in email contact? I could not have written
this from a separate space without seeing, hearing, sharing
24 quiet concentration …

Hearing voices. Seeing us all wearing jumpers. Melissa has a

wood burning stove.

I did say when I arrived that coming here was like joining
another planet – space and time travel – but I wanted to and
here I am and I am finding that this writing is grounding, life-
affirming – is that what doing inquiry is?

… above the fireplace is Klimt, wrapped in only a bedspread,

having a golden, sensual cuddle. Yes, this is different from
writing by myself: aesthetically, sonically, contextually different.

I am feeling moved … moving into intimacy is not so

straightforward … fishing for something that can’t be caught.
Until it is, of course. An intangible quality that isn’t there to
begin with and then some time later, is. I am here wondering if
we are all here trying to catch a moment, grasping at the magic,
unknowable, in between, liminal (and now I know who Gerald is)
Gerald-ness of being?

The pleasure of writing together by firelight – pleasure of writing

together ... We are painting on our separate easels. We
encourage, contribute to a space that enables, focuses our
individual creativities … In writing like this we ‘see’ each other
and each our own self.

What is the value of this - beyond a process of self-healing?

How does the writing produced contribute to knowledge,
beyond the personal?

Carol writes about the futile efforts of people looking for

treasure when treasure has been in their midst all along …This

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 24 25/05/2021 13:47

 is how I feel about collaborative writing … it's the process that
brings me back again and again, carving out time that wasn't
available, to take part … Yes, the process is pleasurable, but
what I really wanted to say is that I've found that by not
constraining ourselves by preconceived notions of outcome –
or, indeed, of process, as it turned out this weekend – we open
ourselves up to possibilities and can become the river that is
surprised at its own unfolding.xii The process is not an end in
itself.

Room 407 is not a home, I am not at home, but here, in 25

Melissa’s house, where I have never been before, I feel an
at-homeness … that I did not feel yesterday at home.

If our writing were water flowing through channels let loose or

held by complex systems of interlocking gates – sluices –
irrigating life.

Perhaps liveliness.

If this were a metaphor for this type of writing – a moment in

which the channels were opened – channels traditionally shut
fast against free-flowing imagination so that thinking is deprived
of nutrients and starved of imagination – forced to make do
with poor soil, chemically enhanced to support lists of facts,
neoliberal bureaucracy, the planning process – starved, poor,
soil dead words. Lists, lifeless words without content, plants
without scent of colour that is brilliant, lucid – lucida – lucid, that
shines out sparkle. Sparks alive. Life force.

… change can happen in the most unexpected places … in

leaps and bounds – and dreams will not be curtailed.

An introduction then. Apparently that is what this is. So, by way

of introduction I would like to share a desire not to frustrate the
reader with nonsense … Artemi wants us to write for ourselves,
without reference to the audience for now. So it seems
inevitable that someone else, me for example, might feel an
impulse to do the opposite and write to you, the invisible
reader, silent up until now; I can only imagine what you must
be thinking. Shaking your head maybe, or perhaps you will be
a little intrigued because here is a bit about you, and you might
be curious to know what I have noticed about you. How I see
you. And all I can say is that, well, we probably don’t know each

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 25 25/05/2021 13:47

 other, but I really want you here.
This has opened up a different space again. More
cacophonous and giggle-filled than before, with immediate
feedback: we are pleased with our writing, but will you be, the
silent reader who was evoked just then? Are you silent or are
you adding to the cacophony? I see you also as a writer, with
your own group of writing companions, your own woodburner…
or maybe you are from a warmer country and you are reading
this beneath a different palm tree in a hammock …

26 Our themes elide but we are all different. I was thinking when I
read that last piece aloud that I seem to be trying to write more
like Artemi, but then I slid back into myself again. It is so hard to
avoid, even in speaking to you, my own positioning.

There has been so much journeying, so much ground covered,

and the words can’t capture it, not all of it, only sensation. The
moving through, becoming, sometimes in isolation and
sometimes in unity.

Oh, the anxiety of it, the coming into contact. The sensation of
a moment of meeting.xiii And then the need to rush away … And
I have felt it, the difficulty coming together until the moment
came where we were. The circling around, the reaching for
something more familiar, or less. After we have written, when I
stop writing this, we will go for Sunday lunch at the Greenbank.
We will let it go and you go. And then we will return. In and out.
Close and apart. With one another, then somewhere else
completely. We breathe … and then we do not breathe … and
somebody new breathes in their turn.

My wish for you, then, is that when you read this you will feel
close to us, touched, allowed inside and intimate. Not looking
in through a window upon a world of people who once talked
to one another, wrote words to one another, knew each other –
without you.

You are here.

We are writing the introduction to a book and we have tried to

tell ourselves that we are just writing for now, unconstrained
by any writing conventions, trying to speak as us … here we
are… trying to speak to invisible others as ‘just us’... And you
know what? Everyone else seems to be talking to our invisible

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 26 25/05/2021 13:47

 audience in one way or another, so hello from me too. I’m not
going to … sound more serious, more formal, if you like. There
is something about connecting with one another as human-to-
human, without the pomp and circumstance of particular roles
in particular institutions, or assuming a position of authority
because

I am tapping away on a keyboard,

complete
with 27
jangling
bracelets.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 27 25/05/2021 13:47

 Endnotes
i. ETPU: a meaningless academic acronym.
ii. see above.
iii. Owain Griffiths, like the entire Griffiths Border Collie dynasty,
was well versed in olfactory methods for the identification and
excavation of twentieth/early twenty-first century digital tech-
nologies.
iv. Dunlop, M., Laidler, C., Page, M., Sakellariadis, A. and
Speedy, J. were all affiliated to ‘ANI-net’ (the artful narrative
inquiry network) a loose grouping/participatory platform for
28 academics; writers; artists and other interested local community
members, whose body of work emanated from the school of
education at the University of Bristol.
v. See also Shrenk, S., Mordechai, A. and Wedderkop, S. (3057)
Excavations along the Usk: changes to culinary habits and food
hoarding/ordering at the time of the first global coronavirus
outbreaks, in: Journal of Historical Sustainabilities, IV (12) 124-
186.
vi. Quick explanatory note from Seema Shrenk and thirty-
second century ‘voices of the Gods’ overview team: Readers
are reminded here that this version of the introduction was writ-
ten at least two years before the global coronavirus pandem-
ic of 2020, which explains the glaring absence of the phrase
‘global pandemic’ in this list of time-bending events.
vii. Dodds, J. (2011) Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of
Chaos: Complexity theory, Deleuze|Guattari, and
psychoanalysis for a climate in crisis. London:Routledge.
viii. ‘Gerald’, for a more detailed explanation of the sustainable
and salugenic sense of community, ethical know-how and
connectedness created/experienced by this form of
collaborative writing/art-making together, see: Speedy. J. (2010)
Encountering ‘Gerald’: Experiments with Meandering
Methodologies and Experiences Beyond Our ‘Selves’ in a
Collaborative Writing Group, in: Qualitative Inquiry 16 (10) 894-
901.
ix. Beckett, S. (1958) Endgame, London: Faber and Faber.
x. DeLanda, M. (2015). The New Materiality. Architectural
Design. 85. 10.1002/ad.1948.
xi. Levitas, R. (2007) Looking for the blue, the necessity of
utopia, in: Journal of Political Ideologies. 12 (3) 289-306.
xii. O’ Donohue, J. (2000) Unfinished Poem.
xiii. Buber, M. (1958) I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor
Smith. Scribner Classics Edition. New York, London: Scribner

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 28 25/05/2021 13:47

 29

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 29 25/05/2021 13:47

 30

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 30 25/05/2021 13:47

 31

Part one

Keeping the Inquiry Space Open.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 31 25/05/2021 13:47

 Introduction to part one.

Jane Speedy and Artemi Sakellariadis.

The phrase ‘open space’ has its origins in organisational

studies and participatory inquiry movements. Delegates to
organisational studies conferences (like delegates to many
conferences) began to find the open discussions between the
formal agenda items the most fruitful and inspiring spaces to
32 meet. Gradually, ‘open spaces’ began to be inserted into the
timetables of organisational studies, group and community
work (and other) conferences (see: https://openspaceworld.org/
wp2/) and advocates of ‘open space’ and similar practices (see,
for example the ‘world café movement’) began to form a
participatory movement. Open space meetings began to have
an agreed (lack of) structure, whereby:

‘Whoever comes are the right people; Whatever happens is the

only thing that could have; Whenever it starts is the right time;
When it’s over, it’s over’ (Deutsch, 2018).

For many reasons, some documented elsewhere (Speedy,

2015), the artful/narratively informed teaching and research
programmes at the University of Bristol were gradually phased
out during 2012/3 and replaced with a less formal network: the
artful narrative inquiry network (ANI-Net).
One of the disadvantages of the previous research centre
(CeNTraL: the centre for narratives and transformative learning)
was its adherence to the hierarchical university structures and
formalities, which were perhaps not the best fit for
participatory, collaborative artful, storied forms of inquiry, or for
thinking with feminist, post-structural and post-human ideas.
Once this centre had been replaced by a more loosely defined
network, the people (some university staff and students, plus
other people interested in these ideas) who presented
themselves as the ‘movers and shakers’ at the start of the
network’s life wrote the text that defined the interdisciplinary
network’s interests:

‘ANI-net scholars are committed to exploring interdisciplinary

ways in which artful and collaborative practices of narrative
research can extend and enhance the parameters of qualitative

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 32 25/05/2021 13:47

 inquiry with people; environments and communities. We are
informed by post structuralist, post-human, post-colonial and
feminist ideas, as well as cooperative and participatory inquiry
practices.’i

They were eager to open as much of the network’s space as

possible to anybody interested in its ideas and practices. They
were particularly interested in emergent, facilitative and
iterative inquiry forms; in all forms of collaborative art-making
and writing and in creating atmospheres of accessibility and 33
inclusivity: thus, alongside more formal annual lectures and
scholarly seminars, the monthly ‘narrative open space’ was
started. Anybody who came was welcomed, and given the
space on the timetable if they so chose, to speak and/or
present their work and ideas to the group at some juncture.
Rather akin to Manning’s ‘senselab’ii in Montreal, the
members of ani-net were ‘drawn and held together by affinity
rather than by any structure of membership or institutional
hierarchy’ (see: Manning and Massumi, 2014).

This was not a chaotic, ‘anything goes’ atmosphere, but rather

a welcoming, inclusive space, conducive to experimentation,
whereby each month, one person was invited to present their
work or practice or ideas as a way of opening the space for
conversation, then at some point the whole group would write
and /or make visual images collaboratively into the space that
had been offered by that conversation/presentation.
Subsequently, each person would read out what they had
written, or show what they had made. Sometimes this
collaborative process of talking/writing/reading/talking was
repeated several times, which gradually, iteratively, became the
network’s culture of collaborative working/writing/art-making/
book making.

The two chapters in part one of this book offer an insight into
this practice: chapter one shows a group meeting to witness
the struggles that an established, founding member of the
network was having with a book she was writing and includes
collaboration with whoever turned up that evening: some
established scholars, some people passing through, some
others. Chapter two demonstrates the use of the same, or
similar, practices over several sessions (lasting about a year) by
a scholar from another local university who was not

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 33 25/05/2021 13:47

 initially as familiar with this process. Both chapters document
the response-ability and responsibilities of the group of
inquirers. Contemporary university scholarship offers people
very few non-competitive, non-hierarchical open inquiry
spaces that encourage creative expression and
experimentation in making, writing and/or speaking
together. The liveliness and creative, scholarly atmosphere of
these monthly meetings would be hard to find elsewhere within
the contemporary academy.

34

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 34 25/05/2021 13:47

 Endnotes
i. see: http://aninetwork.wordpress.com
ii. see: https://senselab.ca/wp2/

35

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 35 25/05/2021 13:47

 Chapter one. Everyday Fragments on the Ceiling of
Room 407: An Open Narrative Inquiry Space.

Jane Speedy with Prunella Bramwell-Davis, Jan Filer,

Lynn Maddern, Jelena Nolan Miljevic, Sarah Nymanhall,
Sue Porter, Bubukee Pyrsou, Malcolm Reed,
Artemi Sakellariadis, Peggy Styles, and
Goya Wilson Vasquez.

36 A GROUP OF SCHOLARS INTERESTED IN COLLABORATIVE/

NARRATIVE INQUIRY HAD GATHERED IN ROOM 407 to listen
to Jane Speedy talking about her latest book Staring at the
Park. Jane talked about how she had come to write/draw this
work by setting down the fragments of her everyday life, as
she had experienced/imagined it after having suffered a severe
stroke. Disconnected experiences had seemed to blow about
all around her. The fragments that make up this article
consist of Jane’s call (Gale, 2014) and some of the responses
to her writing/drawing that were evoked in the atmosphere of an
‘open narrative inquiry space.’ This text offers/ invites us not so
much into a ‘stream of consciousness’ as to invite us across the
threshold into a uniquely fragmented experience of life. But as
Wyatt (2014) reminds us, thresholds are multiplicitous and
always present. Like Wyatt, these authors ‘argue for
scholarship that embraces the discomfort – the terror – of the
threshold’ (p. 8).

(Jane Speedy reads from her book, 2015:45)

A PROCESS OF WRITING DEVELOPED EVENTUALLY/OR AT

LEAST A METHOD OF PLACING ALL THE SCRAPS
TOGETHER; alongside, in juxtaposition emerged/staring then
writing or drawing/staring again/blatant scrutiny of a local
habitation with a name/St. Andrews Park/chronicled/

Scraps and fragments of work from Sappho, written on

papyrus, float in on the red dust of a wind from Africa: ‘they
arrived. But you, O blessed one smiled in your deathless face
and asked what (now again) I have suffered and why (now
again) I am calling out’ (Carson, 2003:3).

I write these scraps and fragments from my life and toss them

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 36 25/05/2021 13:47

 to the Westerlies, in imitation of a heroine long since dead,
unlike her Gods, who cannot, do not, ever die, presenting us
with deathless face/ We grasp at Sappho’s words between the
silences and blanks across the centuries/ I imagine into her
spaces/ I imitate these scratchings with my justifications/
borders/edges/verges that draw lines down and across my
scribbled notes from times in hospital/etched onto the scraps
where I start to write my musings on the park/she has papyrus
that we will yet find/I have an iPad that justifies the edges of my
text/
37
AND SOME OF YOU ARE CONCERNED/

With how my words sit on the page/

This work in stanza form/

squeezed into the centre of the page/

You try to work out reasons for these line breaks which some

times chop WO RDS in half/

Funnelled down the page/

Is this intentional or just a formatting error, you ask?

OLD BITS OF CLOTH, LEFT ON AN ISLAND BY

SAPPHO/

‘Breaks are always’, to quote Derrida (1981: 24), ‘and fatally,

re-inscribed in an old cloth that must continually and
interminably, be undone.’

Translators, like Anne Carson (2003:xi) use square brackets ‘to

give an impression of missing matter’ or ‘the presence of letters
not quite legible’ . . .
Not every gap or space or illegibility is indicated as ‘this would
render the page a blizzard of marks and would inhibit reading.’

Similarly, I leave an uneasy silence when you ask for

justifications of all my margins, verges, and justifications as this
would render the text awash with justifications for my

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 37 25/05/2021 13:47

 formatting/narrow margins are probably

just that/equally wide verges/

The gaps are where the excitement lies for the reader who sees
them as part of the text/

it is a visual text/and all about staring into space and walking

down narrow passages/

38 ‘brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure’ (Carson,

2003: xi):

And we are left, from Sappho, the lyricist, with:

‘]

]thought

]barefoot

]’

(Carson, 2003, p. 12)

and our imaginings/in the spaces/where the writing has faded/

and I am left/

staring at the park/

marked and spattered with spectral traces/

mapped by foxes and humans along pathways/

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 38 25/05/2021 13:47

 stories of the park and recent memories
of the hospital that seem larger and more
substantive and densely peopled than the rest of life/ standing
alone without a blizzard of

justifications /frail/

THE NOTES FROM MY DAYS IN THE HOSPITAL TWO YEARS

AGO/PRESERVED IN TWO NOTEBOOKS/
39
Are faded in places and water-stained/

I too use square brackets in my text to

‘give an impression of missing the fragments we have from the

texts of the ancients/

were recorded by scribes onto papyrus sheets and written

down in straight, narrow columns - as if taken from oral
renditions/

giving no hint of spacing or intonation’ (Carson, 2003, pp.

ix-xii).

I have tried to emulate this style in my own text/

writing in narrow columns as if

listening and translating my thoughts and imaginings while

staring at the park/

taking

them down in translation/

the stanzas and spacing indicating not the rhythms the

author

envisaged in the flow of the work,

but the gaps and disjunctures between fragments of

thoughts/ stories/

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 39 25/05/2021 13:47

 found poems in conversations overheard/

BORROWED FORMS FROM ANCIENT POETS/ ORAL

WORKS

INSCRIBED WITH TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

TECHNOLOGIES/

40 marks made on paper in narrow columns/ emulating ink

stained texts/

Contemporary stains and emulations made by formatting

processes and drop- down menus/choices to
justify selected work/

whole documents or lonely only paragraphs/

the poetic inquirers, both linguistic and literary (see

Prendergast, Leggo and Sameshima, 2009) tell us that verse in
stanza is the closest written form to spoken
words/but I invite the readers to construct their own stanzas
and accents from my narrow columns/translated from
snatches of conversation buried in some pocket of my
mind/

like discarded tissues in cardigan sleeves

/these scraps are slowly teased out/

This work in stanza form/

squeezed into the centre of the page/

You try to work out reasons for these line breaks

which some

times chop WO RDS in half/

Funnelled down the page/

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 40 25/05/2021 13:47

 Is this intentional or just a formatting error, you ask?
OLD BITS OF CLOTH, LEFT ON AN ISLAND
BY
SAPPHO/

“Breaks are always” to quote Derrida (1981: 24) “and fatally,

re-inscribed in an old cloth that must continually and intermina-
bly, be undone.”

Translators, like Anne Carson (2003: xi), use square brackets ‘to
give an impression of missing matter’ or ‘the presence of letters 41
not quite legible’ . . . Not every gap or space or illegibility is
indicated as ‘this would render the page a blizzard of marks and
would inhibit reading.’

Similarly I leave an uneasy silence when you ask for

justifications of all my margins, verges, and justifications as this
would render the text awash with justifications for my
formatting/narrow margins are probably

just that/equally wide verges/

The gaps are where the excitement lies for the reader who sees
them as part of the text/

it is a visual text/and all about staring into space and walking

down narrow passages/

‘brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure’ (Carson,

2003: xi):

And we are left, from Sappho, the lyricist, with:

‘]

]thought

]barefoot

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 41 25/05/2021 13:47

 ]

]’

(Carson, 2003, p. 12)

and our imaginings/in the spaces/where the writing has faded/

and I am left/
42
staring at the park/

marked and spattered with spectral traces/

mapped by foxes and humans along pathways/

stories of the park and recent memories

of the hospital that seem larger and more

substantive and densely peopled than the rest of life/standing
alone without a blizzard of

justifications/frail/

THE NOTES FROM MY DAYS IN THE HOSPITAL TWO YEARS

AGO/PRESERVED IN TWO NOTEBOOKS/

Are faded in places and water-stained/

I too use square brackets in my text to

‘give an impression of missing the fragments we have from the

texts of the ancients/

were recorded by scribes onto papyrus sheets and written

down in straight, narrow columns - as if taken from oral
renditions/
giving no hint of spacing or intonation’ (Carson, 2003, pp. ix-xi-
ii).

I have tried to emulate this style in my own text/

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 42 25/05/2021 13:47

 writing in narrow columns as if
listening and translating my thoughts and imaginings while
staring at the park/

taking

them down in translation/

the stanzas and spacing indicating not the rhythms the

author
43
envisaged in the flow of the work,

but the gaps and disjunctures between fragments of

thoughts/ stories/

found poems in conversations overheard/

BORROWED FORMS FROM ANCIENT POETS/ORAL

WORKS

INSCRIBED WITH TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

TECHNOLOGIES/

marks made on paper in narrow columns/emulating ink

stained texts/

Contemporary stains and emulations made by formatting

processes and drop- down menus/choices to justify
selected work/

whole documents or lonely only paragraphs/

the poetic inquirers, both linguistic and literary (see

Prendergast, Leggo & Sameshima, 2009) tell us that verse in
stanza is the closest written form to spoken words/but I
invite the readers to construct their own stanzas and accents
from my narrow columns/translated from snatches of
conversation buried in some pocket of my mind/like
discarded tissues in cardigan sleeves

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 43 25/05/2021 13:47

 /these scraps are slowly teased out/

(Whereupon Malcolm replies:)

I’VE GO Tan hang

44
Over well I ...

Where are the para ceta Troopers when you need them?

Beyond the fragments Sheila do we Ever

Fig Ments and frag…ile frac Tious

Norm likes/hates has to Have it norm-al-Ised / Won’t

publish without self-Reference

I could murder a smoke right now Dis-appear in wreaths

Wassafeckinword?

Croquet

Play croquet with my own smoke

Rings A bel
Tingaling
Wears red where the cab Ernie Patch it up with
alcohol Glyssop
Mead honeyed or Margaret Mines a shaft
You can’t say that You cannot say that O go on
GO ON
Goon
Lotsa peepholes paddling in a pool Piddling on a

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 44 25/05/2021 13:47

 Lie low
She asked for fragments And had me in bits
Maybe I’ll go and set up Sit on that bench
And buy me some Draw
No Might do No Might Go on
One step backwards two step Forwards step outta
Babylon

(To which Sue adds:)

HOW DO YOU WRITE YOUR experience of everyday 45

life?

It comes in rushes and then stumbles to a stop ... / A

career of coherence, disrupted by a grinding/
snarling, snagging . . . For eight few moments the words
flow/
so fast and sure that I cannot re-member what I said ...
/ And then, like riding a bike and looking down I wobble/
correct, re-correct and finally crash to the ground/

What I’d like is all those stories written in my mind to

flow onto the page in the rhythm of
my soliloquy/Here I’m being somewhat in control, just
enough authority to hand it all over to Jane – and to
collect it back again before we leave/

Oh hell, I’d meant to mention the Book hive – will I

remember before the end? Will people stay?
Jane is talking about her stroke –
and the words sound so solid, firm/And I remember the
sharp feeling of tears again/
Not this time for Jane but for
the words I read in the email from my brother this
morning—saying, oh so casually, asking
whether he’d told me he’d had a small stroke (NO)
but not to worry (NO?) he’d had lots of tests (tests?
India? Oh yes)/

They were so reassuring when I was sick with dysentery/

The doctor followed by his bag carrier/
No carrying your own bag in India, so reassuring,
it somehow felt so much better than the NHS
(National Health Service) with its long

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 45 25/05/2021 13:47

 waiting lists,
appointments, cubicles, and consultants who spread
their fingers on the desk and don’t look at you
when they say ‘incurable,’ ‘nothing I can offer,’ and
‘let us know if anything changes’/

ANYTHING CHANGES?

EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED,

IS CHANGED
46
—Enough, Enough—
My brother, in his email, telling his sadness at having
to leave his lover/My brother, not wanting to come back/

Me—planning a rescue: a job for him, a place to stay/

Cutting through all the other tasks/ driven by
the need (I have) to salve the pain and solve the problem/

(. . . and Sarah writes:)

THAT WOMAN:
WHO DO I COME HERE AS?
COULD I BE THE MYSTERY GUEST?
My disguise perhaps that of a carer
or partner or assistant to Jane.
But ...
my underlying motivation could be construed
as malevolent.

Fairly Freaked:
I’ve been watching that woman who came with Jane/
What do you think she’s doing here? She has a
conspicuously suspicious look about her

Somewhat Spooked:
I agree ... there’s something aloof and slightly sinister
about her/

Fairly Freaked:

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 46 25/05/2021 13:47

 Maybe she’s here to gather information about us ... you
know one of those Undercover
Infiltrators who join radical groups and feed
back information to their bosses/ Just be careful what
you say to her if she asks you any questions ... and
don’t approach her ... she could be dangerous/

Somewhat Spooked:
It’s just as well we’ve got the door open/
otherwise the situation could develop into one of those
awful Agatha Christie moments/ 47

Fairly Freaked: What do you think she’s writing about?

...
She’s staring around the room a lot/ in between plying her pen/

Somewhat Spooked:
It’s really creepy, the way she stares ... and writes ...
then stares ... and writes ...

Fairly Freaked:
Just keep your head down/

(And Bubukee contributes:)

A BODY HERE, A DISCOURSE there,

A thought, an idea, of a body Pear

Some noise of the projector, Its by-product spat on the

wall,

I feel like I was here always, and yet can’t remember a

minute ago/

Lungs keep breathing, spine set on its half bone

It’s scary to think of my body – as if – having to run it on
my own/

Plenty of wear and tear, 2 breasts missing

Even Devon was flooded by reminiscing/

Stanza or Prose I get on a rhythm, It suddenly changes,

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 47 25/05/2021 13:47

 the winter is finishing/

(And Goya, who did not read out her writing in the room,
silently wrote/thought:)

PAIN . . . DREADING TO FALL ASLEEP, postponing it,

I
don’t want to face my dreams ... pain ... I just want to numb my-
self and forget ... pain ... I know I won’t remember the dreams
48 next day but I know they will exhaust me, those dreams ... pain
... my dreams have been populated by other people’s stories ...
pain ... stories I’m re-listening (again) and trying to write ... pain
... yes, coherently of course ... pain ... but in my dreams (day-
dreams included) they get wildly mixed with each other and my
own stories
... pain ... in my dreams I can recognize it’s time to wake up
because the pain will slowly start creeping in ... pain ...
time to wake up ... morning pain ... heavier body, another day
ahead, what level of pain awaits me today? Slowly checking my
joints, yes, they’re still stiff ... pain ... time to get up ... and don’t
forget to breathe ... I sit, I do the usual wandering online with
the laptop ... pain ... time to change, switch position, stretch
... pain eases ... start writing, and write some more, keep it up
...pain ... look up for this or that event, look up for this or that
date, maybe there are photographs online, or a news article?...
pain ... time to get up ... pain ... imagine it written already (but
it never looks as I imagined!), stretch, stretch, stretch ... pain ...
don’t forget to breathe ... sit down, keep writing ... pain ...
continue writing ... pain ... I wonder how they are doing? Drop
an email ... pain ... as if communicating with them about their
present lives would make it easier to write about them ... pain
... maybe if I find them online, we can chat ... pain ... maybe if
I only knew they are alright, writing about their painful stories
would be ok ... pain ... get up, stretch, switch to something else,
and don’t forget to breathe ... Pain ... get out, run some errands,
get back, sit down, write some more ... pain ... get up, listen to
recorded conversations from years ago ... pain ... switch posi-
tions, stretch ... pain ... get back to writing ... pain ... breathe ...
pain ... drink some, smoke some, watch some ... pain ... don’t
forget to breathe ... pain ... keep going ... pain ... time to go to
bed ... pain ...

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 48 25/05/2021 13:47

 (Next to Jan, whose silent writing and thoughts in this
community she was new to, went thus: )

PICTURES ON MY CEILING
Same cuckoo, different nest
I ask myself as always, “What am I doing here?” Feel no
different than the very first time I came/ Cuckoo in the
nest /whistle’s not from me don’t belong here/not
among people I don’t really know/people who don’t
know me /why should they? Why should I? 49
gate crashing their open space I want it to be mine too/
don’t want to let go of attachments to places and
spaces of my past how sad!

My slant on life/ the lifelong student trying to please the

academic mother and mathematicians and scientists
In a family who don’t get my position – the one I have
slowly sunken into by default?
More like secret desire /my need to find a space in an
academic field that entices me /a field of study that/
when I learn and know enough about it, will become a
place where I can write about the ‘stuff’ contained
within all the unread pages, sitting in bookshelves and
in piles around my own house now/ retrieved from a
person you know, as I do more even, who once used
this open space/ told me about it/ said I could belong/
she said my ‘stuff’ as I called it would fit in/ hundreds
of books full of my automatic writing poured out with no
conscious thought, pictures and computer-generated
collages, all my stuff that cluttered up her home until she
was gone, as it cluttered mine/
precious, as she called it?
I think not/
it was my ‘stuff’
This cuckoo needs a new nest for a while; will I find it
here, in this open space? is this a space that is not open
to me yet, a place for a cuckoo? lying on my back again!
Watching pictures on my ceiling
Watching images fast forward in the process she taught
me as they pass me by. How dare I lose my reality in this
place here, in a space for discussion that has silenced
me?

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 49 25/05/2021 13:47

 How dare I slip into to automatic mode with words
spilling out of me because of some unexpected
connection and feelings of strong resonation? I thought I
came here to listen about someone else’s piles of stuff
documenting their life lived.
I won’t read my words/ I don’t know what they say/
On automatic mode/ Will I walk soon? Will I get out of
bed?
Can they see my pictures flashing across the ceiling as I
do? Can they see my invisible illnesses? Do they know
50 what is wrong with me? I expect not.
Still cannot connect as the cuckoo in a new
uncomfortable nest.
Might fly away soon/ Might not/ Might stay and write the
automatic stuff that pours off the pen and fills up the
books that chronicle life not always well spent/ Get lost
in the process/ Won’t speak.
Not my time yet Cuckoo can’t whistle/ Can’t trill the right
tune It’s lost in the pictures/ Pictures on my ceiling
The ones I see when I’m in bed.

Will I move away from the pictures that fast forward

across my ceiling? Pictures that now pile up on the floor
beside me in every space alongside my bed among all
those handwritten journals she took and stored for me.
When I can face the ‘me’ residing in all those little black
handwritten words between the pages, will I be able to
write my story like these people do? In the new-found
process that I came here to learn about.
A title in an email seduced me into coming back to a
place I feel I don’t quite fit.
I’m hoping to hear about someone else’s stuff piling up
around their rooms, the recorded words and pictures
that hold the story of their life, hoping to gain
knowledge of a process that appeals to me. I’ll sit in this
stolen world, on the outside. I’ll lose myself in the writing
as I always do/ dissociate from my surroundings quite
easily.

I have been here before/ An outsider whose life unravels

upon a ceiling/ Whose feet can no longer touch the floor
Do they see me?
Do they know my hidden story?

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 50 25/05/2021 13:47

 Do they know I am a cuckoo in their nest?

Excitement!
Excitement of the creative possibility/ Holding my breath
Waiting.
Waiting to hear about a methodology/ A way of
documenting my untold story. No not here/ Not now.
These people don’t know me.
This space might not be the space for me to be/ I don’t
know yet.
No one wants to talk about the papers, the stories, the 51
drawings and stuff that piles up around me/ Waiting
Waiting for what?
Another book I dare not submit when I’ve written so
many. A way to document an ordinary life lived
The title seduced me. Brought me here.
The poetry of life/ My life.
If anyone wants to hear me/ Silenced by the thought
Silenced with many frozen words on the tip of my
tongue/
Frozen, speechless/ Why did I come here?
Why do I want to connect with this process? With these
people who don’t know me?
Cuckoo in the nest.
What am I doing here in this open space when there is
no green to be seen?
Not my usual open space/ This is not my safe place.
No, not the place I run to when my legs are able to carry
me.
When they do work in the way I want them to work
When I can get out of bed to turn off the pictures on my
ceiling.
When my feet can touch the ground.

(Whereupon Jelena, who was born in the “blocks” in

Serbia, but has moved to the United Kingdom to study,
erupted into:)

I am in constant
Two minds two writings
Two languages or more.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 51 25/05/2021 13:47

 That is My ‘NORMAL’ Mode.
That is How I write. Yes, I need To practice
Better writing
Attention to Detail
more English words,
letting go in
The flow.
Details.
Yes.
No.
52 I don’t know.

IT’S LIKE A SHADOW

BETWEEN/ OVER/AROUND.
IN PLACES. SHADOW.
SENKA. (shadow)
SPIDER.
OCTOPUS.
LIGNJA. (squid).

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 52 25/05/2021 13:47

 Writing right now is
Life right now
gray Sweater Chair
Some sort of linoleum
flour Gray
as the blocks are gray.
Grey. Sivi

53
right now I am next to Bethany boo and Sarah

Нисам заборавилаЋирилицу колико

јеОна заборавиламене.Превише
опште?У сенкама.
Сређујем торб

the train ticket to Brighton

on
22/02/2014
(auto-ethnography
conference)

receipt from the shop in the

blocks which is called the
‘shop of goodwill’
(circled)

the train ticket from

Brighton on 22/02/2014

Busplus public
transport ticket
from Belgrade

Wessex adult single

ticket

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 53 25/05/2021 13:47

 weighing writer.
scrappy
Now I am:
STUDENT
RAIN WRITER
SURVIVOR
LOVER
54 FRIEND
(the only way is
Wessex messy way…
Adult single making sense is
ticket messy.)

(whereas Lynn, who lives down the road from Jane, oppo-
site the same stretch of Bristol parkland, said:)

BACK IN THE OPEN SPACE SESSION . . . LATE AND WE ARE

SPEAKING OF THE PARK
For a while, I grin foolishly at the pleasure and warmth of being
with this group of people once again/ My window on the park
shows Sarah walking past with Rubi and mums with buggies
pushing boldly up the hill to Jane’s corner/Jane’s corner; funny
that, the local name for Jane’s corner is ‘ketamine corner’ on
account of the amount of dealing that’s done on warm sunny
days when the park is like a festival, alive with bongos, the dahl
seller busily doing business and people relieving themselves in
the hedge/the next day there is a riot of litter/
‘Guess what!’ said Claire from No 14. ‘Just seen the first sign of
spring—a sofa dragged into the park’
The ketamine will surely follow/ mobile phones, their faces
reflected in the light of the screen; that one pouring out through
the biro roller something strong and coherent
Jane says: ‘That’s half an hour’ and there is a gentle sough-ing
sound, a sigh, a relinquishing
the texters take no notice, they’re fellow travellers — and I’m

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 54 25/05/2021 13:47

 back in the gray world I assume is ‘normalcy’—opinions…

(And Peggy reflected on how she came to be part of this

community of scholars on this day:)

HOW
DO
I
WRITE 55
about
this
small
corner
of
Monday
third
March
unique unrepeatable
unexpected
The word that
Repeats
And repeats
Is how
How is always
the big
big question...
How did I become
The I that sits
Here in this place
with these people
That I
Might sometime
Meet again
But we would
All be different
As the colours
And shapes
In the magically

re-imagined
Park

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 55 25/05/2021 13:47

 Where
Only
The
Trees

Have
Some
Semblance of
Solid
Stable
56 Reality

(whereas Artemi answers visual knowing with her own

personal tree of visual knowledge)

The flowers read from right to left.

I enjoyed translating my friend’s book

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 56 25/05/2021 13:47

 (and following on from I enjoy) plus writing a few
Words of my own.
I am in the middle of an email argument
With my sisters (following on from I am).
I am increasingly more travelling to Athens to help my mother.
I love spending time with family and with friends.
I must send the new report to the publishers.
(Also, following on from this work-related must)
I must plan the workshops for parents ...
(and also from the same must) make sure the new project gets
off to a good start. 57
I still have lots of unfinished writing projects.
I try to get fit and make time to walk, jog or swim.
I am enjoying hearing Jane talking about her new book.
I enjoy singing in two choirs

The ‘vase’ is made up of

What is this space which holds all these fragments
And inside it: FRAGMENTS OF MY LIFE
And all this standing on
HERE AND NOW.

(And Prue, who had travelled down on the train from

London, especially for this session said:)

IF YOU WERE USING WRITING TO REFLECT ON THE FORM

OF YOUR LIFE NOW, HOW WOULD IT BE?
Disjointed conversation in my head – my head separate from
the rest of this inhabited space, now trying to
bring in some “framing” of the here and now: this group of
people in this space, this darkening evening (I am hot . . .)
Our feelings in this space
The evidence of us choosing to be here this evening. Quite a
few people in a cramped space; are we together? We’re all
separately writing. I can only see different people in various
poses of concentration, not what they are thinking.
We are generally calm and harmonious, safe, and feel we are
doing something worthwhile.
Generally quiet, though the projector fan blows above, and
I can hear Jane’s hits on the alphabet on her iPhone screen.
Suspending an agenda, like and disliked. I’m not at all anxious
in this moment about having to produce something; I’m aware

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 57 25/05/2021 13:47

 of the like and dislike, but turn back to what just being in this
room means. I realize I know nothing ‘of’ or ‘about’ these other
human beings, the more I can just concentrate on being here,
I feel my heart opening. The temptation is strong to speculate,
to make up stories, to try and portray some ideas embodied in
someone in the room, to notice contrasts —

(And Jane finishes the session in Room 407, writing in

58 response to these responses, offering you, our
eavesdropping readers, an opportunity to respond to this
call for poetic fragments:)

MUTTERINGS IN THE CORNERS/ CLANKING/ DIGITAL

WHIRRING/ who are all these people?/
I don’t know their names and they now know an awful lot about
me/
this gives me a strange anonymity/

It has gone dark outside/ are the foxes out I wonder?/

what is the relationship she asks, between the drawings and
the writing/ hard staring and hard listening/ the trees at first
evoked the drawings and then the residual traces that you did
not find in the park during the day – but the drawings are not
just illustrations they are texts in their own right.

10

We scatter these fragments like scraps of old postcards and

throw them into the westerly winds that blow around the top

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 58 25/05/2021 13:47

 floor windows of the Education building in Bristol. As Pullman
(2003) would tell us, ‘All these tattered old bits and pieces have
a history and a meaning. A group of them together can seem
like traces’ (p. i). They present ‘multiplicitous thresholds’/one
short extract from one woman’s fragmented text about her
everyday life, leads us in the course of a couple of hours spent
together in Room 407, through multiple diffractions across the
everyday lives of her colleagues, and now leads you in reading
this, towards and through multiple simultaneous diffractions/
directions of your own.
59

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 59 25/05/2021 13:47

 60

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 60 25/05/2021 13:47

 61

11

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 61 25/05/2021 13:47

 62

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 62 25/05/2021 13:47

 Chapter two. Making Meaning of Life-Changing
Events.

Margaret Page, with Laurinda Brown, Marion Donaldson,

Janice Filer, Marian Liebmann, Marina Malthouse,
Katrina Plumb, Artemi Sakellariadis, Jane Speedy and
Andrew Walls.

A small stroke at the end of a hiking holiday in Turkey, a

decision to retire from my job as a university faculty member.
How to make sense of these two events, each of which have an 63
air of unreality?
Since the stroke I have been driven to write. To find out ‘who
am I now?’. Was I a recovering small stroke survivor on my way
back to work with the help of medication? You would be crazy
to give up your job said the doctor, no reason for this at all, you
will soon be back to normal. Or was I a 65-plus-year-old
overdue retiree, seeking to reinvent herself? Was I an aspiring
artist; a creative writer; an adventurer traveller? The narrative I
chose would, I felt, determine my course of action, and was
determining responses from friends, former colleagues, and
family. Which narrative would choose me? I could not decide. I
was pulled between the desire to let go and the desire to hold
on to projects that now had lost their shine. Could this be a
narrative inquiry?
I had kept a notebook to track my health issues, and soon
found myself weaving a number of different narratives about my
situation. This led me to question what I was doing – had I
‘retired’ or chosen to withdraw? For health reasons or from a
desire to make a change? I soon found myself regularly
journaling, drawing and painting. I joined a creative writing
course, where I was introduced to Julia Cameron’s ‘Artists
Way’. I began to follow her workbook for people in mid-life
searching for a new direction (Cameron, 2016).
As an academic, schooled in action inquiry, I had for years
encouraged students to ‘live their lives as inquiry’ in order to
do research (Marshall, 1999). Now it made sense for me to
turn to inquiry to help me make a new life after leaving full-time
employment. The ANI-Net (artful narrative inquiry network) at
Bristol University’s School of Education offered a space that
was both academic and not. I had already taken part in
collaborative inquiry events organised by its founder, Jane
Speedy, and members Ann Rippin and Sue Porter. At these

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 63 25/05/2021 13:47

 experiential events members and visiting speakers introduced
artful and performative methodologies. Through collaborative
autoethnographic writing we explored and illumined social
dilemmas (see for example Davies and Speedy, 2012;
Rippin and Porter, 2012; Page and Speedy, 2012). ANI-Net now
seemed to offer a perfect space to nurture an inquiry into life
changes with members of a network where collaborative,
autoethnographic writing was an established culture and
practice. When opportunity arose, I offered to facilitate a
session for the ANi-Net network on the theme of ‘How to make
64 meaning of a Significant Event?’ This led to a sequence of three
sessions over a period of a year.

In what follows I tell my story of how the collaborative inquiry

evolved, and then reflect on the process and methodology. At
each of the inquiry sessions I introduced a modified version of
the collaborative inquiry processes introduced in Sue Porter
and Ann Rippin’s workshop, and Ani-net ‘open space’ events
(the introduction to part one and chapter one, above):
• A reading of an extract from my own writing on the
workshop theme; 

• An invitation to write individually for 10 minutes from
memories, thoughts, feelings 
evoked while listening to
the reading; 

• An invitation to pair up, read out loud and listen in turn
to each other’s writing, 
without question or comment; 

• An invitation to write again, from what was evoked by
the reading and listening;

• A round of reading to the whole group. 


ANI-net Open Space 1 ‘Making meaning of a life-changing

event’

Dear All,
This is a space to discover how we make meaning of
significant life changes. We may explore the impact of a
single event or a series of events that have led us to
changes in our sense of self in relation to others, of who
we are, of how we are perceived and perceive others,
what motivates us, what is important, or no longer
important, what we desire - or no longer desire to be or
to do.

I am interested to explore subtle processes of shift and
change that may be embodied, and revisited, in the

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 64 25/05/2021 13:47

 aftermath of such an event, or events, and how we make
meaning of them. The changes I am living relate to my
decision to retire from my academic post, following
collapse at the end of a hiking holiday, later diagnosed as
a stroke. Did I retire because I could no longer manage
the institutional demands and pace?
Because I was ill? Because I was too old? Because I
was bored and ready for a change?
This narrative mattered to me because it carried
implications for the future. But this narrative is still
revealing itself, in conversation with others, and with my 65
body.

Please come prepared to write, to read your writing, to
listen, and to write again. We will aim to build up a
collage of experiences of life changes and of the
shifting meanings that we, and others, attribute to them.

If there is interest, and potential, I am hoping to form a
writing group to explore this further.

This invitation was circulated to members of ANI-net. Members

include faculty members, research students and graduates and
interested local community members. The session was small
– there were five or six of us. I was nervous and read a piece
I had written, and read, in a creative writing class the week
before.

An extended holiday in Marmaris

It is the last day of our women’s walking holiday off the

coast of the Aegean. We have breakfasted on the East
Meets West, a converted fishing boat or ‘gulet’, where
we have spent the week sailing up the coast towards
Greece, stopping off for hikes and swims. We are now
moored in Marmaris. We are on deck, sitting round the
breakfast table, but I have little appetite for the spread of
olives, tomatoes, omelette, crusty bread and jam that I
have previously enjoyed. Sitting is painful, I slipped and fell
on the marble floor in the hammam the previous day and I
am still sore and a little shaky. I am ready to go home and
my companions are engaged in end of holiday talk,
preparing for the bus ride to the airport.

Without warning, an extreme pain grips my temples, as if

a vice were clamped around them. I instinctively drop

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 65 25/05/2021 13:47

 my head between my knees. This eases the pain, but
nausea surges. I’m about to vomit; I just get to the side
of the boat in time. Then I’m somehow back in my seat,
head down. I glimpse the startled faces of the others, ready
to disembark and begin the journey to the airport. I can’t
raise my head without the pain clenching its grip again.

One of the women offers me her medication for headaches.

I don't take it. A member of the crew offers the same. I don't
take it but wait for the pain to ease. It doesn't so I find a
66 way of propping myself up on cushions on deck, the
cushions that days earlier we had been lounging on after
one of our hikes. Right now I can do no more than hold on.
Keep my head down. I tell A, the walks leader, I am waiting
for it to lift, to get back to normal. Then A’s husband says
‘she must go to hospital’. I’m admitted to casualty, all
white sheets and whirring machines. I’m wired up, stickers
on my chest, different coloured wires pegged to ankles, feet
and wrists. They tell me my heart rate is dangerously low,
and I am to be admitted to cardiology. I feel relieved to be
taken care of. The headache has gone - for the moment.

As I read, I was aware of how shocking my story sounded.

It was as if I was writing about somebody else, someone
else’s drama, an adventure that I could enjoy in the telling. I
had told this story many times to different audiences. Yet it
was as if only through the reading of it aloud, in the context
of this collaborative inquiry, and hearing the response of
others in their writing that it became mine, and I began to
inhabit the experience. In reading it in this context, emotion
welled up into my voice from a place from where I thought it
had faded.

Participants wrote and read in pairs, wrote again and then read
to the whole group. What was striking was that my reading
evoked memories and writings of equal drama and personal
significance, but in totally different contexts. Each was in some
sense a turning point, to be made sense of later: a first meeting
with a person who would become a future life partner;
victimisation at work, that led to a decision to leave; receiving a
diagnosis that a partner’s illness was life threatening.
My invitation to identify ‘research questions’ that emerged from
the readings did not elicit a response and seemed irrelevant.
There had been deep sharing of life-changing events and this

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 66 25/05/2021 13:47

 seemed to be complete. At the same time there was eagerness
to continue, and to develop a seam of writing on the wider
theme of making meaning of a significant – rather than a life-
changing event.
On this basis we continued our inquiry at an open space
session six months later.

ANI-net open space 2 ( 6 months later)

The next Open Space took place at the end of the university
autumn term. This session was advertised throughout ANI-Net
and 15 attended, including several Master’s students new to the 67
network, alongside the older faculty and former postgraduate
students who were more used to collaborative inquiry
methodologies. This lent an intergenerational and
intercultural dimension to the group inquiry, which was
remarked on in discussion at the end of the event. Most had not
attended the previous sessions.
I decided at this reading to move away from the stroke event
and into current writing. This was hard. In comparison, my
current writing was without drama and felt insignificant. I
recognised that there was something about the drama of the
story of the stroke and subsequent hospital stay that I had
enjoyed narrating. It was as if this drama lent legitimacy to the
story telling, with qualities to grab attention and to shock. In
contrast, it was difficult to select an extract to share from the
considerable volume of journaling I had been doing. This
writing was a narrative of the day to day, often without any
defined plot, or commotion. In the event, the piece I chose to
read was not the one I had planned in advance; it felt best to go
with what captured a sense of the moment, even though this
felt less significant. It turned out that this sense of insignificance
was the very issue I was struggling with and needed to
articulate.

My reading

Smoke drifts
I thought a cloud of birds
Distant murmuration of starlings

Letting go of paid work

As an organising focus
Retirement is an artful process

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 67 25/05/2021 13:47

 How does one find purpose?

I wake up lost
Frequently, often
Envy those driven people
Compelled to
Paint draw write play music
As necessary to them as breathing.

Make do
68 With momentary purpose
Snatches of conversation
On WhatsApp, or Skype
meaning found in moments
of reflection on the past
lily pads on moving streams
tethered, rooted, mobile.

Retirement is
fragmentary
moments of interaction
strung together in a diary.

Retirement is
the struggle to make coherence out of activities
strange and unfamiliar.

Retirement is
allowing leisure to become ‘work’
from background to foreground.

Retirement is
sitting here in pyjamas
writing
with no expectation or purpose
beyond a sneaking aspiration one day
to publish.

Retirement is
living with an undertow of panic
what am I doing
what will I do now
with whom
why?

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 68 25/05/2021 13:47

 So why not write about perspective?
How in my art class I learned of vanishing points
of line and tone
A darker line brings the object forward
A lighter line pulls back
A darker tone pulls back
A lighter tone pulls forward
How can both be true?
Yet sure enough
a moment of magic 69
when from my pencil
emerged a shape
a cylinder with volume
placed in space
A flash of wonder when I saw this
and just as my students
cut and paste to create an image
of the world they recognized as theirs
could I not draw
myself into being
just as I am writing
a new self into being
now?

Co-inquirers’ readings

Laurinda

Letting go – letting things come to you

Being bored
Life-changing events; auto-ethnographic writing – of
interest to others? Action inquiry – holding an intent.
Why do we need questions? Painting, drawing, walking,
making jigsaws.

Going back to bed. 
Sleeping
. Letting what to do come

to me. Being in the moment.

I take my driven, obsessed writing self with me – so the

task for me now is to be a writing self but not driven and
obsessed perhaps? Is it possible to write without a
deadline? Is it possible to write whilst enjoying the

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 journey? Is it possible to not only write but have a
structure to it all? I have a resistance to structure that’s
been part of me for a long time now. Distractions are
useful sometimes, at others, avoiding the experience of
being bored to let passions emerge (Phillips, 1993). I
have a resistance to having a question – it’s not the way
I write academic papers, so why would this be any
different?

Jane
70
The end of paid work/

Not the end/

Of being driven/ obsessed/

I have replaced the university wage slave/ with a
woman/ obsessed with making art/ I wake up and
consider/ what I must do/ what I must make today/
obsessed with colour/ texture/ form/ I have left paid
work/ but have taken my obsessed and driven self with
me/

Laurinda and I have parallel lives/ parallel stories/


Not for us this time spent doing nothing/ meditating/

lazing in the sun/

Now we invent our own deadlines/ no other pipers or

systems to call the tune/ women who always got things
done continue to get things done/

Being in the sun eludes us ... getting old is not a life

changing event/ it is a state of play that has been
creeping up on us since we were born/ the deadline we
all have/ all need, perhaps, but don’t want/

Andrew

Behind the eyes today is still the little boy

That ran round the well with snot on his lip and a voice
that shrilled, just far too loud.
He ate for England, not much now.
He used to laugh, much less now.
As his elder, one November, he gave me all his Rollos!
We were on the sofa, tv blaring, eyes alive with sugar

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 and so small and silly it seems on paper,
there isn't any other gesture that meant so much.
A chocolate smudge.

The skin around his eyes is different now, more worn,

more weathered,
the world has had its way with some of him it seems.
His smile today is clouded, fleeting -
losing momentum as soon as it’s born.
No weight of words or hugs will help now it seems.
Or maybe not. 71
It does hurt to see the petals drop,
a brittle one from a weighty sunflower.
Catching wind and whisked away.

Every week another friend.

Every year another trend.
Text messages I never send.
Compliments I never told.

I still remember him as a soft-rolling ball of boy. My

brother. Easy.
But now the window’s not as clear.
And whispers creep into my ear.
I hate to think of the look that spreads across my face
when I say hello these days.
A distance felt, but nothing spoken.
Guilt and pain are then awoken.
Our bond is away among the flux.
The yellows, reds and sugar from the hot days spent
outside seem frozen now - relentless change is tough to
swallow...

Katrina

Where I Am

If it were a moment of resistance

it could be a fine thing. Chronic disease
is not. I am neither trying to please
the experts nor dwell in fear. A pittance
of trust in their system. No remittance
from the symptoms of their treatment. I freeze
in a double bind, neither the big cheese

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 71 25/05/2021 13:47

 authority asked me to be – askance
I look to the skies above – not some dupe
who believes they understand their practice.
They comprehend their theory that is
informed by a database, in a loop
of terminal circular reference
diurnal acts can no longer make sense.

Marina

72 Retiring from medicine

In July 2015, I changed the direction of my life, from a

33-year career in medicine, to...to what? Well, I had
nothing planned! But this was a purposeful act.
 Two
days later, my annual General Medical Council
registration fee was due. I went onto the website and
read that I had two options – pay £650 to continue with
my full registration as before, or pay £100 as a retainer
fee. Choosing the latter meant that I would relinquish my
license to practice. Finding it difficult to make such an
on-the-spot decision, I read the small print, which
informed me that I would no longer be able to sign
prescriptions or sign death certificates. I never even
knew this detail! Having signed my name on countless
prescriptions and countless death certificates
(particularly as I’d worked in palliative care for the last 20
years), I felt comfortable choosing the retainer fee – full,
satisfied, replete.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve had so many new

experiences that have filled my time since stopping
work. I’ve continued to see familiar faces and have met
many new ones. During this time, on hearing my
situation as retired from my career in medicine, I’ve had
various responses from several of these people.
Somewhat surprisingly, I’ve found that it is their
responses and how I have reacted to these responses
that have shaped and moulded who I am now.

‘So what exactly are you doing with yourself now?’-

Thanks for asking but I’m not going to justify my
existence by announcing a formulated list of future
plans.
‘Retired? You look far too young to have retired!’

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 - What on earth does that mean? OK, I’ve stopped
working as a medic. Might this be a better way to
describe my new position in life?

‘Dealing with all that death in your work. I’m not

surprised you’ve chosen to retire.’ - I loved my job
actually, and could have looked after dying patients
forever.

‘I assumed you’d burnt out.’- Oh did you? I feel it would 73

have been fairer or even kinder if you’d asked me about
my decision to stop work. I dislike people making
assumptions about me.

‘What are your plans for today?’ or ‘What have you

done today?’
- Can the way I spend my time not –
working only be understood from a list made up of the
tasks I’ve achieved that day?

‘You’ve had NHS training. I haven’t, so be patient with

me.’ Hmmm, you’ve given me something to think about
here.

These questions and statements have come my way in

one form or another and they have made me think. Each
time I’ve responded, my answer has had a slight
variation from the last. I’ve reflected on these and in
time, I began to realise how they have helped to
modify my identity or who I am, as Marina, who has now
stopped working as a doctor.

Marian

Making Meaning from Fragmentary Activities

I like this phrase –

How do we make meaning or Meaning?
Supervising a young social worker at a hospice,
She said, ‘What is the meaning of it all, when we die,
And some so soon, my age even.’
Why are some things meaningful and others
Empty of all meaning?
Is it about enjoyment or fun or feeling alive?

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 Is it about having others to relate to?
Retirement is hard work because
We have to weave the fabric, find the pattern,
The warp and weft
In which the fragmentary activities can
Find a home and be part of something
Larger than themselves.

There was a sense of deep sharing in the session that came

from each in turn reading our writing out loud to each other
74 without question or comment. Then a sense of wonder and
surprise at the variety of contexts and depth of experiences
shared through this process. Participants remarked upon the
variety of writing styles, some poetic, some brief sentences,
from those used to working in this free-associative way and
from those for whom it was countercultural, unused to sharing
personal experience in an academic context, or at all, but who
nevertheless did share emotion related to loss through illness
of close friends or family members. A web of connection was
created, based not on similarity of experience but difference,
deeply felt empathy made possible by speaking each in our
own unique voice. Participants noticed potential for
intergenerational, intersectional and intercultural dialogue for
which the ground was created through this process. The space
offered an opportunity to reject and to voice refusal of
assumptions placed on one in the context of a life-changing
event. As one of us observed:

‘It is important to avoid having assumptions placed on one. To

become a “stroke survivor” could turn you into a victim –
similarly “diabetic”. It is as though people expect my identity to
change just because of some label they have given me.
Although it may be significant to them, to me it’s just a
category’.

We decided to continue with a broader line of inquiry into

life-changing events at other life stages, and Jane followed up
with an invitation to put a chapter together from our writings for
this volume on collaborative inquiry.

ANI-Net open space 3. Twelve months after session 2.

This time I read out the same writing as for session 2. This was
a different and smaller group of six participants, three of whom
had been present at earlier sessions. A year had elapsed since

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 the previous session. Participants shared their writings from
each of two cycles of writing, often expressing contrasting
feelings:

Co-inquirers’ readings

Katrina

A poem about the desire to interpret symptoms

Space created itself: 75

Internal disruption;
Clank crescendo.
Inner director expects
forming one’s own sense of purpose.
Something inhabits the space
Not expectation
Not motivation
Nothing I have ever
identified with
and begins to clank.
External expectations on hold
Does this percussion signify old age?
And the space has its meteors too.
They Hitler the living space
death camp some cells.

Jan

Why so different now?

Watching emotion rising in the reader as I listen to her

experience of retirement, unexpectedly draws me into
another aspect of my own experience. Brought on by
being in this moment of listening to each other’s writing,
suddenly I hit something in my subconscious that is
bothersome to my body. Eighteen months down the
line of a new chapter in my life I suddenly feel loss of a
lifetime working for a system that once held me in the
safety of its structure and routines. Letting go. My pace.
Not driven by an organisation that is well past its sell-by
date. An organisation that held so many debilitating
expectations of me. Yet why the guilt tonight when I
connect with someone else's tears in an open space for

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 the creative exploration of self? What happened to my
previous self-assured positivity about giving up my life-
long work and all that accompanying paper stuff? What
happened to me in that moment of deep connectivity to
each other as we reflected openly about our life-
changing experiences?

Artemi

First cycle of writing

76 I turn on my laptop to write, with Margaret’s words
echoing in my mind. The possibility of drowning in
nothingness... The image of retirement I had in my mind
gets shaken to its core. The jolly anticipation of
peaceful timelessness, each day an empty canvas to
create fun on, with no set tasks robbing my choice of
Wants with my choice of Musts. And now it seems
possible that without the interjection of Musts all the
Wants can end up joining forces and creating a huge
lacuna in which one can drown?!? All my life I have
longed for the peaceful moments to dwell in
nothingness, however temporary, and have
regularly found that any let-up from the Musts is
overshadowed by thoughts about future Musts, or silent
reflections on Musts that have been ticked off the
perpetual list.

Second cycle of writing

So here is to the new definition of retirement for the
twenty-first century. It is a label worn with pride, full of
possibilities for what is yet to come, not defined by
reflections of what was. Begone images of idle little
women, whiling away their hours volunteering in charity
shops or knitting for the grandchildren. (In my case
that’s done and dusted anyway, I’ve already knitted for
the children and the children have volunteered in the
charity shops so we can cross that off too.) At a time
when retirement may well be as long as employment
had been, and when what we occupy ourselves with can
be anything under the stars, how come anyone can
expect the word ‘retirement’ to convey one’s
occupation in a way that the single word ‘employment’
never could? I suggest ‘retirement’ is consigned to
describing what we do at the end of each day (when I

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 expect most people retire to bed) and we look for more
imaginative ways to refer to the more imaginative things
we bring into our lives day after day...

Marion
First cycle of writing
Hello, hello...I’m over here...I’m over here. Do I exist any
more? I feel lost but not fearfully so. There is a frisson of
excitement at the altered possibilities.

Hello, hello....I’m still here. The same person I was 77

yesterday, except I am not sure if I still exist, can you
see me without my status, my job title, my ID card? Can
you see me? Can you see me with my new label?

In my mind’s eye I see a maelstrom, a huge swirling

mass of bodies spinning towards a huge drain, a black
hole. People spinning towards it in ever-decreasing
circles until poof...all gone. The skills, the knowledge,
the energy, all gone.

I refuse to use the word retirement. I’m still here. I

haven’t gone anywhere. I’m still me. Nothing happened
overnight. Now is my time. My time to do things for
me. My time to do new things. Things that energise me.
With freedom from work I realise that this is what my life
has been building up to. This is where I can put all of
that experience and knowledge, doing things for me.

Hello, hello. I’m here. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere
unless it suits me. This is not the end. It is just the
beginning. This time I’m doing it my way.

Second cycle of writing

It is not a sea of endless time
It is not a warm, sleepy bath
It is not cosy
It is not constant coupledom
It is not quiet
It is not Monday mornings doing your bit in a charity
shop
It is not anonymity
It is not becoming the member of an anonymous tribe,
heading for the final cliff face

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 It is not a social perception
It is not what others might want it to be
It is not defined by them

It can be naughty
It can be noisy
It can be stroppy
It can be colourful
It can be liberating
It can be liberated
78 It can be argumentative
It can be reflective
It can be useful and sharing
It can be supportive
It can be revolutionary
It can be re-written, redefined
It can be...whatever we want it to be
It should be respected
It should be the best time
It should be individual – defined by each of us in our
own way
It should be fun
It should be OUR TIME.

After reflections

This chapter is a collage of writing fragments, provoked and

written in response to an initial reading on the theme of ‘making
meaning of a significant event’. The collage is framed within
a narrative that is mine alone. Yet it is deeply collaborative in
the sense that the narrative, and the writings, emerged from
a collective space to which we each contributed. Each piece
contributes to a complex picture, real or imagined, of what it is
like to give up or lose a loved one, health, or employment. The
writings tap into a pool of lived experience and offer rich
material to explore further.

In writing the chapter, I have seen more clearly how my

approach to inquiry shifted through the collaborative process
of these sessions. Schooled in participative action research
(Reason and Bradbury, 2001), I had imagined a cyclical inquiry
process in which we would collectively draw out inquiry
questions from our writings as a focus for subsequent sessions.

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 This did not happen. In the limited time available, within each
session I discovered that it was enough to dwell in the power
and resonance of the writing that had emerged and was read
aloud in the moment.

I noticed significant shifts between sessions in how I was able

to hold the space through my reading. It took time to inhabit the
words I had written, embodied in voice tone and pace of
reading, and to create a quality of holding that participants
experienced as empowering.
 The invitation to write from
thoughts, memories and feelings evoked by readings seemed 79
to prompt and enable a free associative leap, into embodied
remembered experience. There was a mirroring in the tone and
themes of our writings, while the subject matter was
individual and context specific. There was no felt need to
attempt to arrive at a shared analysis of themes. Rather, this
would seem to move away from the embodied experience in
the context of a collaborative process. In the words of a
participant after the event:

‘It is as though ‘making meaning of Significant Events’

necessarily involves making sense, where sense is the point:
not an abstract rationalisation, but the interweaving of different
internal sensory experiences, followed by using a group as a
sounding board’.

The depth and quality of engagement with the collaborative

inquiry processes in these sessions was unusual. It was
facilitated by the culture and history of collaborative inquiry that
was well established in the research network. While sessions
included students and individuals new to the process, it was
this history, and commitment to the principles of collaborative,
arts-based inquiry embedded in established practice that lent
meaning to the process and enabled our engagement with them
(Speedy and Wyatt, 2014).

The inquiry process that evolved with participants in these three

workshops seemed to have taken on a life of its own. I had
introduced the first session as a form of action inquiry, designed
to surface and engage with specific inquiry questions (Marshall,
1999). Then, in the context of a network schooled in artful
collaborative writing – described by Jane as a ‘mash-up’ of
collaborative inquiry/collective biography and a/r/tography’, the
need for predefined intent beyond the process seemed to fall

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 away. In letting go of inquiry questions I had arrived at a
different place, a collaborative practice to support life beyond
externally defined purpose.

80

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 81

12

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 82

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 82 25/05/2021 13:47

 83

Part two

Inviting Other Scholars Into Our Space.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 83 25/05/2021 13:47

 Introduction to part two.

Melissa Dunlop and Margaret Page.

ANI-net holds a regular open space in which scholars from

across a range of disciplines, and anyone interested in their
work, are invited to share research findings and methodological
developments. The community then explores and works with
ideas coming from those outside the network by writing or art
making together in response. For the individual working with
84 collaborative research processes, themes of voice, place and
space are multilayered. In this section we present two different
methodological approaches for exploring these themes: the
work of Tami Spry, a leading practitioner of performance
authoethnography, and that of Doreen Massey, a human
geographer whose work uses Marxist, feminist and cultural
approaches to engage with understandings of space and place.

Tami Spry has been a frequent guest of the Network, and an

important source of academic support for the Centre. Spry’s
‘performance autoethnography’ moves autoethnographic
practice from writing into an embodied performance, in which
both writer/performer and audience are active participants in
the research process. Her performances challenge
researchers to address the absent ‘other’ in narratives of the
self (Spry, 2016). The authors of ‘Riffing off Tami: Tami Spry’s
Performative Call and Our Collaborative Response’ describe
how they drew from Spry’s methodology to ‘perform’ their
collaborative inquiry into space for the individual within
collaborative research.

Doreen Massey’s work (alongside that of other human

geographers such as Rebecca Solnit and Tim Ingold) helped
the network to engage with conceptions of place, space and
other (human and otherwise) emotional geographies
pertaining to their collaborative work. Particularly significant
was Massey’s expression of how space is not a static entity but
intertwined with time (Massey, 2005), which speaks to the idea
of making space, that is, opening up the inquiry space, as an
essential practice of the community. At the time that the group
convened to write about her, Doreen Massey had very recently
died and her loss was keenly felt by many in the room.

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 Both Spry and Massey’s ways of thinking felt important to the
community in considering, developing, and expanding its
collaborative practices and thus, chapters on each of them are
included in this volume.

In their different ways, these two chapters may also be

understood as inquiries into relationality within collaborative
spaces – the intersubjective tensions between individual
desires to maintain distinctive personhood, and to join in a
process of collective becoming.
85
We have each chosen to introduce this section because we are
engaged with these themes in our practice within and outside
the academy. As a psychotherapist, Melissa is drawn to ideas
of relational space-making and performativity, and to the
collaborative writing process itself, as representative of the
dialogic improvisation, performed and contained within a
space-time, which is fundamental to her working practice.
Margaret has taken part in workshops with visiting scholars
hosted by ANI-net (see for example Page and Speedy 2013).
Inspired by these experiences, she facilitated a collaborative
inquiry with ANI-net members into experiences of retiring from
full-time employment. In Part two of this volume she describes
how collaborative writing expanded and enriched the scope of
her auto-ethnographic inquiry (see Part two of this collection).

This introduction has been written through dialogue between

Melissa and Margaret. In the writing above, our voices are
tightly intertwined, merged even, so that it would be hard to
distinguish one of us from the other. From this point forward, we
are leaving our separate parts exposed so that you, the
reader, may have the opportunity to perceive some of the
tensions between individual and co-authored voices. Our aim
is to voice our thoughts as we each engage with the texts, and
in this way to invite you, the reader, to give space to memories,
thoughts, and feelings evoked as you read these chapters,
concerned as they are with sharing – giving, receiving,
allowing - space. We hope our expressions of call and response
will enable you to engage more fully with the chapters by
putting you in the frame of mind to notice whatever thoughts,
memories, and feelings the act of reading provokes and evokes
in you.

Here are Margaret and I, two distinct individuals who have

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 volunteered to see what happens when we two write –
separately for now – this one thing. Personally, I wanted to be a
writer of this introduction because it is in my mind how hard it is
to truly make space for others, to step aside from one’s own
desire, hear what is needed elsewhere, and allow oneself to
move with, be moved by, another.

And here am I, Margaret, remembering that working with

performance authoethnography has sometimes evoked
powerful memories and unexpected emotions, not always what
86 I was ready to expose to others in collaborative spaces. How
to help the reader into a space created by the authors of the
chapters to follow?

Oh, this is already more interesting than I meant it to be! I am

instantly aware of how affectively charged this process could be
for Margaret and fear I have already exposed, stepped on toes
so that some pain that was being kept out – out away – away
from this space - has entered in. Thoughts are safer. My
curiosity. It lands me in too deep sometimes. I don’t mean it to
but here you see how easily it can be done.

Yes, and rereading this, after we have met and discussed our
exchange of emails, I am rather taken aback by the strength of
my response … Already the embodied feelings have receded
and I am back again, comfortable sharing my thoughts.

The chapter ‘All Tangled Up with Doreen Massey in Room 407’

is an exploration of space, and of belonging. In it distinct and
individual voices interweave their narratives of remembered
physical and social spaces, exploring the distinctive relational
qualities of each physical space through story. A narrator tells
us that
it is as if participants move through space, writing our
selves and our lives into and out of our meetings
together in room 407...

After I wrote this I thought about how memory fills the places
I visit. As I walk on The Downs here in Bristol my mind is filled
with the memory of being with others with whom I have walked
in this place. Places become ‘peopled memory-filled spaces’.
I might make a map of peopled spaces I inhabit - the nodal
points of our intersecting lives. When I first arrived in Bristol I
thought to myself, the air here is thin, I have no memories to fill

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 it. I have not yet created meaning in my being here - no sense
of home or of homing-yet.

Yes. I mean no. I am still not sure about Bristol. Memories made
on the Downs always tentative… mine can only ever be false
nostalgia because I am (still) not ‘from’ this place … ‘it’s like
being on holidays’ somebody said when I first made to stay
here, and had visitors curious from the world beyond. And I feel
it like that – like a place outside reality that is also part of reality.
A holiday that never ended - now post-strange. Would getting
over it be a good or bad idea? How many of us have this 87
experience of being new somewhere… of time passing… and
asking the question: am I yet at home? Or, where is that place
called belonging? Or, how long does it take to feel meaning?
Or, what does it take to be knowing? Or known? Should I drop
anchor here or in the next place? Or should it have been the last
place? Or should I never have set sail?

My fear is that the more we reach for others’ experience, the

greater the danger that we will fill their image with our own
imagination. The more closely we feel we relate, the more likely
it is that we hear nothing at all of them - only those parts of
ourselves they unwittingly bring us into contact with. Yet, when
voices come side by side, recollections equally weighted, it
becomes possible to see the real resonances – echoes of truth
perhaps – of what passed between participants of that meeting
in room 407, as they tried to make space for Doreen. It is hard
to give space – perhaps impossible – but a worthy aim.

I like the idea of voices side by side, resonating. Let them stay
side by side, without pretension or ambition to entwine with me,
I say! We do not yet have the shared memories to make this
space meaningful for me. How can I enter it? what might entice
me and invite me in?

The stories inspired by Doreen are layered, evocative of

subjective and intersubjective lived experience. In them,
physical space becomes multi-layered, psychosocial,
atemporal. The stories are connected through associations,
each evoked by the other. The article ends on a note that
gathers the associations up as if pausing for breath within
an evolving emergent inquiry, ‘the space of … belonging, for
instance … how is such a thing made? How can we know
space?’

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 I wonder how to make this clearer, to offer experience of
space-making that may help make sense of what is to come in
this section?

Is it not enough to let the reader be, in their response, without

attempting to make sense for them, in advance? In reading the
paper, or this introduction, what will resonate for you, the
reader, will be different to what resonates for Melissa, or for me.
And different each time we read. Is giving space in the listening,
or in the responding?
88
I read ‘All Tangled Up…’ more easily than ‘Riffing off Tami Spry’.
Melissa and I discussed why this might be and noticed the
contrasts: the ‘…Tangled Up…’ stories lie paradoxically tidily
alongside each other, the voices distinct, while the voices in
‘Riffing…’ are in fact entangled, jumbled up. I read their
detailed description of how they did collaborative inquiry
through performance with a sense of suspended impatience.
The co-authors seemed to invite the reader in to look in, on an
intimate family interaction, a scenario created through
collaborative bodywork. What had this process to do with me,
an outsider to the group of co-authors? After struggling with
this insider/outsider feeling, it was a relief to have distinctive
voices to engage with, inspired by Doreen Massey.

As a reader of the Riff, I felt, too, Margaret’s feeling of being

outside, trying to distinguish unknown bodies, none of them
mine ... I want to be in there, feeling the breathing bodysculpt,
finding my space within its alternating form.

I prefer to be on the outside! There it is again-a sense of

impatience – inside feels claustrophobic – false intimacy! I want
to assure you, the reader, that it is ok to take a position on the
edge – to be an outsider looking in, with a sense of
suspended curiosity! You might, for example, write down what
resonates for you in reading this … express doubts! Move back
and forth, in and out of engagement with the text …

And I am all riled up like there’s an argument happening, though

it’s only a difference of … position … yet, I feel a need to fix
something … to agree with Margaret’s call for your right to
maintain your space … even if that means not ever knowing
what you think or feel. I want to make it good between us even
if that means I lose something – a sense of connection with

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 88 25/05/2021 13:47

 you … or myself. My curiosity round – or desire for – a sense of
inclusion with the work prompts me to want to include myself
and you, yet sparks in Margaret that need for distance – her own
space, cool and clear and free of false intimacy! But, why is it
false? Outside-inside: sometimes the membrane feels like glass
… a surface we can look through, or paint upon or touch, but
never penetrate lest it shatters. Staying separate, in one’s own
space then … has its merits. The separation of the voices in ‘…
tangled up …’ seems to allow some easier sense of growing
intimacy than the merging flow of ‘Riffing …’. I hesitate to agree
with Margaret in case that is too much for her … violates her 89
need for us to hold our different positions … some threat of
fusion. In any case, I disagree, or I think that’s what I am doing.

Saved by expressions of doubt and irritation in the ‘Riff..’, I read

on. I noticed that there seemed to be pivotal moments, in which
different voices moved in and out of collaborative
authorship. Questions emerged – how to find a place in a
collective body sculpture? The strains and stresses of holding
a space. At what points do the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ dissolve in the
merged body of self sculpts? How does stepping out of the
picture, observing the place taken up in relation to others in the
sculpt, frame ‘one’s thoughts’ about relationality between self
and other?

Jane once said to me that Sue once said to her that they
needed to look out for me. She didn’t know me very well but
she must have seen something when she looked in my
direction. I don’t know what. Perhaps she recognised something
– or thought she did. Perhaps she did. To find out afterward
that I had been thought of, caring words spoken about me by a
woman I barely knew… made me realise that I had been there,
somewhere I felt myself outside of. A me-shaped space had
been created, even though I did not know it. Or how to be part.
What did she see?

We leave traces of our presence even when we feel we are

absent?

Was that you Margaret? Yes, there’s my surprise, because I

sometimes struggle to imagine myself being held in mind by
others. I can so easily slip away it seems … or be let slip. Not as
solid as I seem on the surface … Perhaps that underlies my
desire to make contact – to join the body sculpture and in that

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 way be certain of my own embodiment. And to let you know
that I am paying attention to what you say, feel even, though I
probably shouldn’t mention it.

The ‘Riffing …’ chapter engages with Spry’s challenge to move

out of a binary focus on either self or other, into an experience
that evokes the relational in performative authoethnography. My
response as a reader moving from reluctance towards positive
engagement – seemed mirrored in the writings of the individual
authors. There are moments of ‘hope’ lodged in the embodied
90 collective, and moments of doubt and exasperation. This
moving back and forth held my attention.

Inside-outside. We (if I may, Margaret) perhaps embody (and

equally, disembody) this oscillation, some constant of alternating
positions. It seems we reach in different directions – or perhaps
we reach the same way only see the thing differently. How slow
is slow? How fast is false? Yes, fake makes me claustrophobic
too. But what is ever real if we don’t, at some point, decide to
trust in something, someone or somewhere? Or our own eyes
and their reflection maybe …

It has come to me as a slow dawning realisation that I am

needed about as much as I feel a need to be – here. The space
… or was it Jane … or Sue … called me to fill it in my own way.
I felt both gifted by others and compelled from within to step up
to the task. We made space for one another … and now I am
here, part of this book … trying to make space for you.

Mid way through the Spry chapter there is a shift of tone when
the writing moves into reflection on the ‘work’ of the process as
research methodology: creating a holding space within which
an ethics of practice can emerge. ‘It’s all about the body’, and
claims are made for this collaborative embodied practice
concerning generating new knowledge, writing process,
educational process and the ethics of education. But this is not
a closure. Doubt explodes again at the end of the article, and
re-engages me as an admittedly outcome-focused reader. How
can we hold to the value of these processes as players within
the outcome focused academy?

Making space requires flexibility. And so does taking space.

It means not sticking to the plan, or swapping plans with one
another part way through. It means not holding on too tightly

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 to whatever originally drove the impulse to begin. And I have
begun to revel in the joy of the unexpected, which is what
others bring when we listen to them without being too invested
in expectation of what we need to hear.

This speaks to me now! It’s so hard to hold open to the

unexpected when under pressure to complete a task, within
a time frame. Wanting to get this done, I just want to get this
done! I want a plan to stick to! Yet, as I write into this text I am
finding myself slowly drawn in, word by word, I am almost ready
to come into this space … 91

In ‘Riffing …’ the group make bodily contact with one another

– but I can’t touch you. They leave a space for each one who
leaves the formation, holding space open so that the absent one
may return. Can we leave each other space? I wonder if you can
stay open as you observe – allow the writing to move you and in
so doing, move with? You perform the part of reader, needed for
the writers to perform … even though we dance together out of
time – I wrote these words long before you came to read them,
but they were always for you. I feel a need to look out for you.
So I have made a space for you in my imagination, and in doing
so, I make space for myself.

This is a great place to end our introduction! I feel I have

entered this space now – in writing from ambivalence, through
this dialogue, and now there is space for each of us – you, me,
the readers that will follow.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 91 25/05/2021 13:47

 Chapter three. Riffing off Tami: Tami Spry’s
Performative Call and Our Collaborative Response.

Joanne Barber, Ken Gale, Luci Gorell Barnes, Chara Lo,

Viv Martin, Jelena Nolan Miljevic, Sue Porter,
Bubukee Pyrsou, Jane Reece, Ann Rippin,
Artemi Sakellariadis, Jane Speedy, Tami Spry, Peggy Styles
and Jonathan Wyatt.

92 The paper has been produced by fifteen scholars from North

America, Europe and Asia who gathered together at NIC for
a collaborative writing workshop following a performance/
workshop exploring performative auto-ethnography, which had
been conducted the previous day by Tami Spry. This account
was created through cycles of image sculpting/ talking/writing/
reading aloud/ talking and planning together - all informed by
a process of ‘riffing’ off Tami’s and each other’s work, using
collaborative writing as our means of inquiring into and out of
Tami’s performance/workshop.

There were various interconnecting networks of people and

places represented in our small gathering, some of us had
written together at workshops, on projects of joint interest, and
for publication. We were experienced writers, but this group had
not yet attempted real-time collaborative writing for publication.
Spectral traces of other collaborative writing communities that
had been part of, or connected to our research centre could be
glimpsed, silently accompanying us, from the shadowy
corners of the room (see: Speedy et al., 2010; Speedy et al.,
2012, Gale et al., 2012, 2013; Wyatt et al., 2011, Speedy and
Wyatt, 2014).

Our writing, set down here in the order it occurred, serves as a

‘response’ to the ‘call’ of Tami Spry’s performance/workshop,
which was:

Our autoethnographic work thus far has richly developed and

critiqued the subjective "I" in qualitative research. However,
autoethnographic research has yet to study how the Other is
represented in autoethnographic writing, sometimes resulting in
Others being used as a supporting role in service of the storied

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 92 25/05/2021 13:47

 "I" rather than engaged as an entity with agency. What if our
autoethnographic writing focused on Barad's and Haraway's
effects of difference in human engagement rather than
viewing self and other as different entities which, even in its
most critically reflexive, continues the binary comparison
between Self and Other? Performative auto-ethnography
seems a deft methodology for charting the effects of our
differences within the entanglement of self/other/language/
culture. Further, how might articulating the effects of difference
in performative autoethnography assist in articulating a utopian
performative of being which is open to continued change and 93
pedagogy? As Jill Dolan (Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope
at the Theatre) suggests, "Any fixed, static image or structure
would be much too finite and exclusionary for the soaring sense
of hope, possibility, and desire that imbues utopian
performatives" (8). Let's engage a ‘critical modality of hope’
(Munoz) using movement and writing in performative
autoethnography that articulates the possible utopian effects of
our differences. I will do a short performative autoethnography
that might move us into these ideas and writing.

Having spent the previous day engaging in a performative

autoethnography workshop exploring these ideas, our group
gave a further ‘doubled’ response to Tami’s call through
collaborative writing, whereby a small group (15) of us met
together again and started our day constructing an image
sculpt embodying our response to the idea of writing at that
moment. This sculpt we stepped into, one at a time, and then
out of, in order to look at the whole, then we photographed our
sculpt from all angles:
13

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 We talked together, briefly, about the sculpt, which we all then
sat and wrote our way into and out of. We then read our writing
out loud to each other, circling around the room anti-clockwise.
Here is what we wrote, in the order in which we first heard it:

Confusion on people’s faces incites bossiness on my part.

Inveterate facilitator /helicopter tactics kick in.

Is this a personal congenital disorder

94 that no amount of neurological damage can stamp out?

I have an overview, but there are many multiple views.

I don't have to ‘hold the reins’. I'll lean on Sue.

I've lent on Sue a lot this last three years.
Oops! Now I'm giggling and I think I'm dribbling on her,
that's taking ‘riffing off Tami's Gram’ a stage too far.
Drooling down Sue's lovely shirt.
Too much information, and too many cooks at the beginning
Of this workshop. Still our intentions are kindly and respectful
of each other. Ann is going to explode if she does not get to
write.
I am giggling uncontrollably.
I must not have a choking fit, that'll scare people.
Hell, it'll scare me, or maybe set Tami off too,
and we'll spend the rest of this workshop in ‘Accident and
Emergency’.
The sculpt is a crystallising;
a coming together;
an act of intimacy.
At one point I thought that Sue was going to run Jonathan over–
a bit of a ‘Quentin Tarantino’ beginning to our day.

****************
Talking-writing-reading-talking-reading-writing.

Making a move! I spin into the space, and take a pose.

Reaching down for my left leg, my forgotten leg, the leg that is
forgetting, forgetting how to lift, to pivot, to feel (other than to
feel irritable). I clutch my leg, echoing the lifting of legs
yesterday in the sculpting, the echoes of concrete socks.

Still feeling a little shocked at taking the floor so decisively I

wait, and feel other’s hands touching, first my back and then

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 my chair. ‘It’s ok to lean on me, just for once,’ I say. And people
do, they lean and grasp, clinging like barnacles to the extended
me that is my wheelchair. Bodies accumulate at my feet and
to both sides of me. Without looking I get a sense of growing
people-mounds branching off from this point, and when I later
look at the photos on Tami’s phone I see whole links of people
spinning off from our starting, curling in group.

’Look at what's happening here, there’s some great,

connecting going on here’, I look down and the poetry of linking
limbs curves away to my left, the bent backs and arching 95
shoulders speaking the strains in the connecting. Risk takers
have stretched their bodies to touch, reach, point, all in the
moment. The generosity of spontaneity speaking our
connection without thought for sustaining it. Some of us groan,
giggle, suck in breath as sustaining becomes suffering.

Members leave one at a time to view, and we perform their

absence for them, filling their spaces with our attention until we
can take them back into the whole.

Later, looking at the photos as the mound disperses I see the

curling, curving, the elaborate connecting together. A shared
straining and paining?

An effort written in our bodies.

****************
I have a wonky ticker, a heart that beats irregularly.

You know, atrial fibrillation or a-fib as they call it in the TV ads for
medications such as Xarelto. I take a medication that slows my
racing heart to a normal beat which is fine most times. But when
I climb the hilly streets of Bristol strange things happen.

I’m staying near the top of St. Michael’s Hill near the hospital.
It’s a very steep, cobblestoned hill and I have found all the rest
benches on my way up it. Because my heart beat will not
increase, my pace slows to a near halt until I rest it out.

Seated on a bench yesterday, a very stoned young man asked

for money. I gave him some to go away. Do I look vulnerable like
prey on this bench? A second man, fortyish and athletic, was
striding uphill and asked me if he could carry my heavy bag. It

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 95 25/05/2021 13:47

 startled me – odd request in England. Was he a good Samaritan
or hitting on me? At my age, he probably saw a nondescript,
cardigan-wearing woman who reminded him of his mother.

****************

Connecting and disconnecting

Entangling and disentangling
Leaning, resting
96 A process of reconnecting
becomes one of gradual extrication
Bodies, minds interwoven slowly withdraw
peace comes upon me
writing myself into silence
and solitude
rest and restoration

***************

Random thoughts on body sculptures and connections

How rarely we connect with one another simply as human

beings - we are islands of sound and silence even in familiar
environments.

Why is touching each other so 'verboten' in a people who pride

ourselves on being free?

BUT HERE AND NOW WE CAN BE WHO WE REALLY ARE

WELL ALMOST
NEARLY
BUT NOT QUITE...

and I can hear a bird singing in the Square

****************

Bodies. Sitting, standing, lying, scrunching, stretching,

touching, leaning, spooning, relaxing, tensing, connecting,
sculpting. Forming. Togethering. Keeping still and holding
position whilst one at a time stepping outside the assemblage

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 96 25/05/2021 13:47

 and looking. Then returning. Resuming. Freezing. Holding.
Sustaining. And then the moment is over, the bodies begin
reversing, dismantling the assemblage, each moving in its own
direction, finding a space, occupying it, writing.
Together. Alone. I look around me and wonder what histories
these bodies carry with them. What was each of these bodies
doing this morning? What would our body assemblage look
like if we were to bring into it our most recent memories? Who
was reading this morning? Who was writing, typing, drawing?
Who was making love and who was thinking about making love?
Who was taking their clothes off and who was putting them on? 97
Who was out walking, jogging, running? How would all of this,
if visible, have made our sculpture at 10:30 on this Tuesday
morning in room 3.13 different?

****************

Slight hysteria bubbling, clasping Ann’s hand; her other hand to

her brow in a characteristic, feigning ‘Oh my head…’ pose. But
touched, too, at the real connection between us, ‘though I am
not one for spooning or closed, embracing, clutches. I like the
presence of bodies but love the singularity of my own. I like best
the space between us.’

****************

I cannot ask a man to be an abattoir, I do not have the mind

to conceive a way to shape the human body into an abattoir
without strafing bullets and land mines and razor wire. I have no
way of visualising or externalising such industrialised slaughter
in one fragile human body. It will not do, and I cannot do it.

And then again, it is such an interior thing, such a nested thing

in me for all these long, painful years that I don’t think it is for
external consumption. With the best will in the world, even the
most sensitive pro-feminist, right-minded, feeling good in his
skin man cannot ever understand the abattoir in me. He could
understand the economics and logistics and industrial
processes of death, but not the feeling of your own hormones
as agents of death, monthly, yearly, regularly, irregularly,

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 97 25/05/2021 13:47

 ceaselessly doling out death and blood.

This is a dyad between it and me, not him and me.

I find myself one radiant summer morning on the Piero della

Francesca trail in Italy. His Risen Christ in San Sepolcro blasts
me almost as the blast of energy shot the lid off that tomb. I
am transfixed. It is one of my few aura moments. Looking at
that fresco makes me question why I don’t believe. That which
seemed logical a minute before now seems illogical. The resur-
98 rected Christ, plaster white, radiates through pigment on chalk,
eyeballs me. It is too much. I creep away.

Earlier the same day, I queue through makeshift tarpaulin tents,

white in the blazing Tuscan heat. I queue with Italian women,
snaking round the information panels and the bulletins on the
construction work, silently sweating from the trapped heat, to
see the masterpiece, this time in oil, The Madonna del Parto.
The famous altarpiece of the Virgin Mary, great with child in her
fifteenth-century maternity dress, unlaced at the sides, her hand
resting lightly on our Saviour, big in her belly, smiling vaguely
down at us.

And as I stand there, I feel the blood between my legs. So

copious and viscous that I can slide around on it. I can feel the
blood like I can feel a well-oiled cake tin. I can, I swear, smell
the salt and the metal and the strange bloodness of blood.
There is so much of it.

The small, personal abattoir is at it again.

****************

Sue moved in voluntarily,

in her wheelchair.
People started to pile up
on the base she made on her chair.
It was always a start point –
something solid that you could rely on.
Here I meant the solid material chair,
and Sue’s will and power
to start and to move the chair.
After a few people started to do the body-linking,

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 I spotted the place by the wheel of the chair,
a very solid but movable thing,
that I felt like leaning on,
and I moved to it quickly
before anyone else might do.
I sat on the floor
leaning my entire back on the wheel,
holding my two arms and two legs towards myself.
And I lifted my head, looking up to the sky.
What I’d liked to describe myself as, was that
I was only an ‘auditor’ in this writing group. 99
I didn’t feel like making too much effort
in the process of ‘producing knowledge’.
Instead, I was intending to wait
for the production of the knowledge
created through the writing process,
dropping on me from above.
When others kept on making efforts
to connect to each other
and to hold their bodies
to form the sculpture,
I felt a bit guilty.
But I could just tell myself again, at heart
I’m only an ‘auditor’.

****************

I am on the floor, letting myself touch Jonathan, his back on

my chest, or my chest on his back. My arm reaches towards
Sue’s chair; it ached after holding it there for a while. Yesterday
Ken talked about how tense he’d felt trying to reach out of the
window whilst keeping another part of himself anchored to the
ground.

My feet grow out of the chalk. I know this because when I walk
back down the church path l leave a map of white footprints.
The Marsh brothers who do the graves round here have dug the
hole, and they will fill it in once we have all driven away, back up
the hill to the village.

Her wicker coffin was covered in flowers. It looked like an

oversized picnic basket. We stood round the grave edge and
looked in. The next day, back at home my mind returned to her

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 99 25/05/2021 13:47

 white chalk grave, lowering her into light.
I grew up on chalk. I am made of chalk. I ate plants and animals
reared on the North Downs. Chalk was in the water, and with
every glass of lemon barley I drank, I took in a little more. I drew
with chalk on the lane outside our house; drawings coming from
my chalky fingertips.

It is over three years ago, and her picnic basket will have melted
away to fragments of straw. The chalk that made her bones will
have taken them back. At home, I get into my car; white
100 footprints in the foot well. I am older now, but my bones will not
crumble. They were fashioned from the chalk downs, and they
are strong.

*****************

Bodies just come out of everywhere really, and at a

pivotal attempt of association they broke their classroom in bits.
Chairs pushed, desired, handled, tables against the wall and
the smooth space in the middle, violently serene, occupied an
artificial stillness. Like LEGO pieces intersected by blood flows
and giggles, it contained a small piece of matters that mattered.
Breasts hanging, legs protruding, faces reading what was to be
written. In an exquisite tidal assembly-line the focussed LEGOs
piece by piece tormented each other in an uninterrupted
motionlessness that was soon to be broken. Yet eager to
congregate, matter with its own precarious rules and limits
contrasted with a picture that was to be examined by a set of
eyes each time.
---------------
SMALL bang … a missing piece … you would assume the
convergence would break, but the rest of the pieces,
re-imagined and re-positioned themselves in the exact manner,
as if the missing piece never left. Some circles tend to call that
a piece of negative space. My idea of it was that the carpet was
providing a joke for our pains, literal and metaphorical ones. It
introduced the pain in space and delivered it into its rightful
position. The remnants of an art-piece that withdrew, or
suspended, its allegiance to the individual.

Yet the stories that were performed had no indication in the

slightest of the effortful manner in which they displayed self and
other. Another pause to affirm the gaze and in a split second

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 the architectural imposition of blood/ bones/ mechanical zones
broken down into its constitutive elements, by an entropy that
was reminiscent of a small bang . One of those that announced
the beginning not of life, but of writing…

****************

Let’s create the sculpture she said. Everyone joins in

And in their joining
Space for me emerges I step 101
in
join in as well
and:

It is my place your place in this space

Everyone has a spot
Unique their own their own
Place to space out
Riff off.

When you learn to live with fucked up hat

It is hard to take it off
It becomes your place my place in this space
Spot you stand on
And stand off.

I keep standing. Bend my head down:

I know how to do crisis. Survival. Shit.

(my place my place in this space)
I’m good at it. I rock at it. You should see me …
… ah you should have seen me during the war organizing kids
from neighbourhood in a shelter
playing games
Making a space for that time-place for laughter.
Anyway – as I said – good at it.
Bastard child. My hat of fucked-up. Crazy weird cuckoo
fucked-up hat &
Postmodern Fashion Sense (thank you Bubukee and Luci).

I step out of the sculpture and look:

Our place our place in this space:

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 People of writing persuasion
People of creative kindness
People of unusual abilities and genders and races and
politics
People of at least three continents
and names which sell books and articles
People of multicoloured fucked-up
hats
In a frozen parade of knowledge
Embodied.
102
Our space my space in this place

Bending over collaborative effort

I take my fucked-up hat off and put it back on.

I come back to my place in sculpture and voila!

Music!
Parade starts!
And all the jugglers
And all cheerleaders
And all the smugglers
And acrobats and clowns and abilities and kindnesses and
multicolours
Jump and scream and shush and do and hope
and pour out and spit out and drop
(very carefully)
Their writing in
Their spot unique just their own our my our place to space out
And riff off.

****************

I curl at Sue’s feet

Embracing her
My belly at her footrests –
Her feet –
Left arm outstretched,
Fingers touching Sue’s left side –
the hub of a wheel

I sense another’s body

Lucy curling at my back

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 I sense her forearm on my side but it is wishful thinking
Peggy reaches down to touch
A crutch in hand
Ken crouches at my feet and grasps an ankle

Other bodies arrive and surround and fold

A mess of matter
A mélange of flesh, clothing, metal and plastic
Breath, sweat, scent, touch and laughter
An economy of hopes, meanings, yearnings, doubts and
fractures 103

****************

It is the heat of bodies that is so generative

Intensive multiplicities open up spaces …
Bodies tensing, losing their extension in the melding of poses, in
the intricacies of the sculpting.
Sculpting clay as metaphor for the achingness of bodies of
posing, of connecting, of drawing, of reaching out, of burrowing
in.
It is the never losing of sense, sense of self, that seems so
viscerally potent in this process: it is the always gaining of a new
sense of self in the acrobatics of the becoming pose that is so
agentic in making the latent manifest, the manifest latent, the
latent manifest, the manifest …?
And then ‘I’ is gone; the concentration on the pose is a
becoming of the new and, if only temporarily, a losing of the old.
This newly configured body loses a self in the observed
objective capturings of the camera and the strained physicality
of the holding on that rinses out the predispositions of those
troubling affects that were taken into the pose in the first place.
For a moment that trembling, troubling of self that lives in grief,
depression and sadness gives way to the labourings and
concentrations of this sweating, physical emergence.
And then it is gone …

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 103 25/05/2021 13:47

 104

14

We’ve just done an add-on sculpture of where we are in this

process, at the beginning. But not beginning surely, as so many
of us are assembled differently, and so numerously, with one
another bodies doing and being other-wise of one another. The
Image Theatre sculpture is as sculpture does, gives us a bit of a
freeze frame of a moment, but surely not once again since the
energy of our bodies is making split second connection after
connection, and disconnection too. Jonathan lying on the floor,
Ken holding his foot, Sue leaning over in her wheelchair, Jane’s
cane hooked on Sue’s chair, all of the matter, all that matters, all
of the matter of our bodies simultaneously pulling and pushing
us into assemblages of our making and not. This and that, to
and fro, static and moving.
Our individually collective intentions clashing,
embracing, colluding, cajoling, colliding into whatever this
is that we are body-writing together. The sculpture moving,
breathing pulsing as we are staying still, Tami (me) ordering us to
hold our pose, be non-verbal, stay in focus and
concentration. Who does she think she is anyway? What does
she think her place is here amongst us? She did her bit
yesterday, others want a chance to influence the process. Does
she know she is influencing it? Does she care that others would
like her to sod off? Getting all American and expecting attention
to be paid.

After quietly sitting together writing and then listening to each

other reading our writing out loud, we broke off into chatter and
clatter. It was suddenly lunchtime and we could hear tea/
coffee and large platters of ‘standard issue’ University of Bristol

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 sandwiches being delivered to the corridor outside our room.
We brought the lunch in and placed the sandwiches under a
sign saying ‘no food or drink to be consumed in the teaching
rooms’ and our group broke up into smaller groups – some went
shopping, some stayed to eat lunch, some took themselves and
their laptops off into corners of the room, or elsewhere in the
university, to talk to their nearest and dearest on skype, and yet
others, the most digitally able amongst us, made a slide show
out of the photos of our sculpt, to project onto one of the walls
of our room. Some of us commented on how the images look
as though they are still frames from some sort of action; a dance 105
perhaps, or even a brawl. After the break, we returned to our
seats and after some discussion and dissent, re-read our first
cycle of writing to each other. After listening again we wrote
again, this time into and out of our own accumulated writing.
This time we read our work out to each other going clockwise
around the room.

Here is what we wrote:

We are here after lunch, and are reading all of the first round
again. I think this is going to homogenize our engagement with
the material. The second reading is a performance as well, but
not as intentional as the first one. This isn’t going to work, it is
going to dull the process. The here and now the liveness and
the…the…the…the…
Oh. Ok, now we are hearing the readings, while the photos
of the sculpture are appearing in round upon the screen. Oh,
extraordinary. Something is happening to the photos they are
ventriloquized, ventriliquied, voices diving in and out of them, in
and out of the static, but not bodies on the screen.
But something is wrong. We are sitting while the voices
are moving.
Something wrong, can’t identify it. And of course, that is my
stuff, something wrong in me. No. That is not it either. It is not
that there is something wrong. It is that something is
emerging, a voice, a thing, a spirit, a way of being that keeps
getting choked out, choked up choked off of me at the moment
of beginning, at the bottom of breathing.
‘We perform their absence for them’, says Sue. Yes, what
comfort that could be, what trust it requires to be the one who

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 105 25/05/2021 13:47

 is being performed while absent. Is that what I am doing?
Performing until she, who is absent, is ready to speak? Ready
to breathe? Will I choke her out with my own fear of who and
what is always assembling in me/us/we? Can I get myself out of
my way? Can I let my throat open? Can my gram help me? Help
me Gram. I’m not sure who I am. I’m a ventriloquist to my own
body.

*****************
106
The new in the old,
representing a fold?

See the pictures, hear the stories, make bread out of crumbles,
eat it and spit it … in words.
Cremate the idea, give birth to another year, but stay focused on
the text, oh dear this photo looks weird.
Re-read the word written, that’s six sandwiches intercepted, the
monument that presented what the breaking has not ended.
Carry it through to another side, change perspective, address it,
redress it, it’s not time to forget it.
The rooftops were screaming that what’s here we are not
bringing.
Carry it through to another side, change perspective, a Rubik’s
cube told me the secret of how to assemble it.
Pretend you forgot it, a certainly passed park, in to the middle
re-break it apart.

Carry it through and sidestep it, the writing will blend it, will
bend it, will melt it, and ferment it, but amongst the viscerally
acidic nature of its, … the mail will not send it.

A walkthrough looks back at us, like a map of a dark corner,

devoid of sun but fully present in this moment.
It’s the room that did it, a sunless small space, we met
somehow else and we ended dis-embraced.
Yet words will not tell it, are not there for that, instead like a port
we’ll each sail on our stride.

Behold of the statue that keeps us within, the assemblage of

matter that attempts to sink in.
Behold of the worry of ‘what does this mean’, and in relation to
that I stay in the seam.

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 Yet nothing to hold it,
Plenty to keep,
A small evening treasure,
That erased our in-between.

****************

‘And now we have to write into and out of that for fifteen
minutes’. (Speedy, 2014: p.1)
107
A question?
A presumption?
A suggestion?
An order?

Who knows?
Here goes…

So much of the writing I have listened to talks of the foldings of

connection, the sense of limbs winding around bodies, of the
flow of bodies static in frozen moment, suggesting a capture of
Old Master time. I can only wonder at the words and remember
the aching in my limbs as I tried to hold the pose.
And so as the memory diminishes, I am left with the presence of
the stories, all of which somehow felt different in their repetition.
Somehow, listening to those words again, this time left me limp,
when last time they made me want to jump around, laugh and
cry, and write some more words of my own, which I could then
share, and keep the movement flowing in always new moments.
And of course this sense is my sense: I make of those words
what I will. So whilst I sense the performance of those words
was somehow different, less immediate, less enthusiastic or
nervous, I also felt that the repetition of my performance of a
listening self was also different. I wasn’t being such a good
listener, I was …
I was distracted,
I was listening to the wind through the open window,
I was thinking about Phoebe, my daughter,
I was feeling myself dancing barefoot with Joy in the imaginings
of my naked soul.

****************

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 107 25/05/2021 13:47

 The photographs on a spool, close-up then distant,
Five seconds there, five seconds gone

A wheel, hands and arms,

Gone,
Denimed legs and stockinged feet,
Gone,
Blue and red and white, arms with bracelets, feet in sandals,
Gone,
108 Hands on head, hands on heads,
Gone,
A pair of eyes peer upwards to a distant, misty land,
Gone.

We are pilgrims on a quest.

We are worshipping an icon.
We are revelling at a classroom carnival.
We are travelling to ecstasy,
Revealing our fragility even as we strive to escape it,
Prevailing over nothing.

****************

Time and time and time again

The room is/ feels silent
Every body writes/ its ...
Listeners
Persuasion.

Once upon a time and time again

We all emerged from a sculpture
Co-constructed
From the jungle of our roots
[Writing roots. Teaching roots. Experience-roots.
English. Asian. Greek. American. Canadian. Balkan
Lived/ experience roots.]

The jungle spreads and writes itself

Into space
Making decisions
Bleeding
Performing absence of others

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 108 25/05/2021 13:47

 Giggling, Self-conscious of the roots
Very conscious of sky above
And watering holes around
As well.

Time and time and time again

Two days to submitting
Week for commenting
15 minutes for writing and weaving
threads of thoughts.
109
Time, again.
Time to write and listen
Feel the body forgetting the words
Feel the jaw relaxing
The pain subsiding
The breath deepening framing the silence

Really, Bubu: bodies, everywhere.

The body our body of sculpture
The branches of experience
Of thoughts
Feelings
Smells
Bones and no-bones
Teeth and no-teeth
Blood and no-blood
Every ‘where?’
Every ‘body’

Writing
Time and time and time again.

***************

It is suggested that we read again. I feel resistance. I don’t want

to do that. I want to write more, or make what I have already
written better. Polish it; make it beautiful.

As people read, I write about Mum calling me Leaky Luci, when

I was little, if I’d wet myself. I think this is a clever commentary
because we just talked about leaks, adding on, adding into, and

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 109 25/05/2021 13:47

 if it was OK to do that – to leak.
It gets closer to being my turn to read. I try to catch Bubu’s eye,
hoping to incite a paired insurrection with him, but he is listening
and looks – rather annoyingly – at peace with himself. I consider
reading my Leaky Luci bit out loud instead of my other writing,
but this is the first time I’ve met Jane and I am a bit scared of
her. She looks like she doesn’t take prisoners.

Then I hear a thought from Artemi that I missed the first time
110 she read, and as Ann tells us about her abattoir, I realize I’m
happy to hear it again. I want to hear it again. My bottom
unclenches and my resistance dissolves. Sometimes it is good
to be prodded in annoying ways. I read my piece again.

****************

Can you make a portrait of an animal? Where the hell does that
question come from? Can you, asks the philosopher-art
historian, make a portrait of an animal? When does the drawing
of your best heifer cease to be a figurative piece and become a
portrait? When does that happen? And where does that
happen?

I am struck by the way that these great paintings have been

coming into my mind. Yesterday it was all Caravaggio and La
Tour and their stage-set chiaroscuro. This morning Piero della
Francesca and his San Sepolcro and Monterchi altar pieces.
And the sculpt this morning pushed me straight into grand
galleries of the Louvre, and Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa.
Why, in a workshop on body work and writing, does my mind fill
up with fine art? What is going on?

I stop. Take a deep breath. The Raft of the Medusa is an

extraordinary painting of an extraordinary disaster. The survivors
of a shipwreck in nineteenth-century, French territorial
waters, in the heyday of DOMTOM colonialism, lived on a raft
for what? a fortnight. They resorted to cannibalism. The
gruesome accounts and the horror of those, ‘what would I have
done?’ moments, made this a succès de scandale in Paris.
Then Géricault, and what a great name Gér-i-cault, painted
it, just at the moment, I believe when they first spot land. The
sinews are taught, the effort is knotted into the muscles: survive.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 110 25/05/2021 13:47

 It can tip easily into lazy comedy about drinking urine and eating
cabin boys, but the sheer will to survive stretches and pulls the
painting forward. Concentration is complete.

Now, I could steer my own raft towards a point about the

thunderous seas of academic publishing and our flimsy little
collaborative raft, pitching like balsa wood in a mighty ocean.
But it is the poses that strike me.

We are knowing. Now freeze. And we do, in poses we would

never adopt anywhere else, but we know from somewhere how 111
to do it. From Géricault? From our culturally constructed image
repertoire as Barthes puts it? We know how to strike a pose.

Which brings me back to Stubbs, away from Géricault’s salty

horror and into the bracing fresh air of an English field. Those
horses. They gleam from the paper and canvas, but they are not
portraits because they are not complicit. You only get a
portrait when the sitter knows they are being portrayed and
colludes, strikes a pose. Portraits, paintings: performative acts.

****************

(I didn’t read the first part of my writing, because it was in

Chinese. Now I put it here along with its English translation.)

(Linking to bodies, triggers emotions,

Infectious emotions burst more emotions,
and deepen the linking
– linking of hearts and cultures)

Jane said to me, “As an auditor, you are stuck in.”

Some made the description in words ending with –ing

on the postures of the bodies.
Some added on the flesh, the blood and even the sounds.
The link of the bodies became the link of the affections

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 111 25/05/2021 13:47

 and there would not be an end.
****************

Hearing the words again, they don’t sound so vibrant. They’ve

been sandwiched between trays of Hawthorns’ food – all the
plastic ham and white bread remaining.

The words now sound so established, fixed even, but the slide
show running distracts and changes them into a moving
image once more. Some of those bodies contorted into shapes,
112 stretched out full, drawn up, close. Bits of head here, an arm
there, hand here, eyes cast to the heavens. Limbs and joints and
dead hair matter, formed into sentences connecting us in this
room.

That gust of wind shifted the energy, moving pens across the
desk like glasses in a séance. And as magical and alchemical as
when the words form on the screen, from the bodies that move
from one to many in one and on that screen, each angle shows
another take.

No one knows what happened in the room in that movement,

yet we all know that something did, a little. Like when the train
grinds to a halt and doesn’t move, and doesn’t move, and then
everyone sighs and looks out through the window, up and down
the tracks. And it is then that the English start talking to each
other. We work well in blitz situations. Then, we pull together,
grow carrots, make coffee from dandelions, and bricks from old
newspapers. We recycle and re-cycle, pedd(al)ling words slowly.

****************

Bodies. Sculpting, performing, conforming, subverting.

Together. Individually. Bringing all manner of personal histories
to bear in the writing. Sharing, spreading and reaping personal
congenital disorder. Bringing hidden personal abattoirs to light,
leaving chalked footprints on the floors and on the walls.
Hanging from the projector on the ceiling, pinching one's fucked
up hat and wearing it, then popping it on someone else's head.
Watching still life become a dance, then a brawl and an art
piece. Wondering what the rules are, or if there are any.
Engaged auditors of our own process, watching rules being
made, enforced, occasionally negotiated, assumed, broken, or

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 112 25/05/2021 13:47

 assumed broken. Making up a puzzle of missing pieces.
Implicated in the unfolding picture. Watching bodies blending,
merging, welding themselves into one another and loving best
the distance between them.

****************

This place, my space, your space

BUT this is our space 113
here and now, this minute
fleeting yet life changing.
how does change happen?
and how do we recognise it
when it has
perhaps only in retrospect
or thinking wakeful
three o'clock in the morning thoughts
when sleep eludes a weary body
a body freeze famed in a moment
when connections were made flesh
and I became conscious
of another heartbeat under my hand
and another's breath on my hair.

We disentangle our bodies

Make some kind of order from chaos
with our words
We write through our bodies
and engage through words
Though solitary
we reconnect
in dialogue
interacting intertwining anew
ephemeral and elusive
process refusing to be pinned down
by language
ungraspable
not fixed but forming
formative space

****************

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 113 25/05/2021 13:47

 There is a place for me in this space. Leaning in or out, touching
or not touching, reaching or retreating, connecting or
disconnecting.
In the space between – above or below ground.
I can only imagine what they mean as I can only imagine what
the heap of entangled students means in the park in Berkeley
Square on this sunny day.

****************
114
Sculpture is as sculpture does
I like best the space between us, as I lean back on the solid.
Here, for one moment, I am just an auditor to our producing this
knowledge.
An economy of hopes, taking our places in this space, my place
in our space.
For a moment ... wishful thinking, is it a hub of a wheel?... and
then it's gone.
Stand still, without voice, taking advantage of a wonky ticker,
listen, don’t speak.
Listen, you can nearly, but not quite, you can nearly hear a bird
singing of slaughter, a bird singing in Berkeley Square.
Where we are lowering her into light, plaster white, smelling of
salt and metal.
We lean on her, giggling, looking into the picnic basket of her
face for the Lego and the legs.
Lost legs, blood, bones, anxiety. Damaged, depressed, a
starting place here, our A&E: connecting to each other in the
heat of aching bodies, burrowed in, ‘It’s gone.’

****************

The writing together brings

us hope/ together / sums / parts/ forms / put together this can
seem
like traces/ our bodies winding dancing leaping /

In the break we
introduce ourselves to Barry / our identifiers oddly contrasting
choices with our earlier connecting writing:
“I am the Greek tranny”, he says (as if this is a statutory category
for every group). Oh, now I have a flash of envy, one of those ‘I

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 114 25/05/2021 13:47

 wish I'd said that’ moments – you know
– I wish that I'd said, “Hi Barry, I'm the crippled Lesbo”
And then she says “I am the only Asian”… and faces me with
my whiteness, and with the look she gave me yesterday when I
said, in my best ‘Princess Anne’ voice:
“we're British, dammit”
– Insider jokes are only funny on the inside, I guess.

I sit and wonder if Princess Anne tells ‘crippled Lesbo’ jokes,

whilst behind me pictures of old masters in their blue period
flash up on the wall. The winged Tami, in her dreadlocked cloud, 115
is missing from the painting. The supplicants and disciples
surround the sainted Sue in her chariot/ the crowds have
reached Mount Olympus and are spooning with each other at
her feet.
Shantih. Shantih. Shantih.

****************

After this the room was filled to the rafters with our words
and their echoes. We were accumulating a jumble of stories
and meanings in all the corners, cupboards and crannies of
the classroom. It was a hot, stuffy summer afternoon and we
had been working together for two days without much of a
break. We talked our way through a dissonance over what to
do next. Should we attempt to articulate a collective critical
stance to our writing, or should we simply 'put it out there' and
let it speak for itself? If we are to offer today's writing to an
audience, can we write about its value and place it on the map
without reference to relevant work of others? And if we choose
to do this, can we do so without recourse to our bookshelves?
One implication was that there was an element of discomfort at
how such an attempt might be inadequate, or might
compromise our scholarly standing, another that some of us felt
that we could not gain a critical stance in relation to our
writing (above) without ‘thinking with theory’ (Jackson and
Mazzei, 2014); without stepping out of writing in ‘real time’
together to consult with other writers who, although not now
present in our group, had been walking this road alongside
and ahead of us: consulting, thinking and ‘plugging in’ (ibid.,
2014) to the works of post-structuralist, post-humanist and
feminist theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari (1980), Butler
(1990), Barad (2007) and Haraway (1988), or the work of others

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 115 25/05/2021 13:47

 engaged with collaborative writing as inquiry such as Davies
and Gannon (2006), Jackson and Mazzei (2012), and Diversi
and Moreira (2009) or yet others, such as Conquergood (2013),
Madison (2005), Pollock (2005), Gingrich-Philbrook (2001), and
Pelias (2004), working alongside Spry (2011) at the frontiers of
performative auto-ethnography. We considered adding to this
section later, but dismissed this as inconsistent with our agreed
purpose of presenting collaborative writing in real time. In the
end, and after those who had remained silent were encouraged
to voice their concerns and were listened to, we arrived at a
116 consensus of opinion. This had been hotly contested
territory, discussion continued around the room as to what we
were really doing here and what we should include, or could
ethically be included in a paper that purported to be written in
‘real time’. In the end it was agreed that our critical/reflective/
diffractive third cycle of writing together should not embed our
writing its theoretical/contemporary academic context revolve
around our answers to Ron Pelias’ (2004) question, ‘What work
does it do?’

And here is what we wrote:

This workshop brought me here in a group, working together in

a way that I haven’t done for a long time. It feels like a home-
coming and it feels supportive, familiar. The unstructured
writing exercises that become something else through
connected words, riffs, synchronised phrases, makes its own
meaning.

Collaborative work in this scholarly space to which I have

belonged for a long time. In doing it I have missed the discipline
of the other academic work I’ve been doing.
It is also a re-turn to writing freely, without intent or purpose,
responding to a moving performance of movement and words
that brought out three subjects for writing that would not go
away in the distillation process of Tami’s post-performance
exercise. If it won’t go away then let it in, respect and write it.

The re-turn began three weeks ago on a train journey between

Chicago and Champaign. Following a landscape of stubbled
field and small towns, I saw a man in overalls, crossing the rail
tracks holding a brown paper bag. Containing what …? Lunch?
Dinner? Medicine?

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 116 25/05/2021 13:47

 I project my view of life in the American mid-west onto the
paper bag contents but for now that is not important. What
matters is that this man crossing the tracks in his overalls made
me pull out my notebook and write. Not for the academy, not to
strengthen an argument, not to reiterate an important point so
that the examiner really ‘gets it’ but because I wanted to respect
what I had witnessed.

And it continued back in Chicago at the French Vietnamese

bakery where the shop owner short-changed me, insisting that 117
I had given her five dollars not ten; where I watched a shaky
woman on sticks drop her sticks, the black plastic bag she was
carrying and wedged herself between two rubbish skips. The
sun glistened silver on the river she made down the path before
she reappeared, picked up her sticks and walked on.

This writing is to be continued.

*****************

These days in this place

with these people
have re-connected me
with those things
I really value

That is: a recognition of the need

for an integrated view of
wholeness.
Wholeness in the sense
that wisdom resides
in every part of our bodies
as well as
in our brains
that thinking and feeling
are visceral
and not
abstract concepts for academics
to categorise into hermetic theories
alien to human experience.
That spending time
writing, talking and being

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 117 25/05/2021 13:47

 with a group of disparate
but like-minded people
is to be valued
above rubies.

****************

What work does this do?

I am really not sure
118
Maybe it challenges
the conventions of academic writing?

I really don’t know

I don’t know

I am not sure if I know anything

It’s the ‘so what’ question

And I wonder
‘So what?’
Jane asks, ‘What is it doing for us in the place and space we’re
in?’ The question which for me goes to the heart of what I’m
doing here. Why us? Why here? Why now?
Are we reclaiming space?
Reminding the University of Bristol that narrative practices have
not died
discreetly withdrawn
indiscreetly withdrawn?

****************

What work does it do? It was for me the embodiment of

embodiment.
My body has been embodied today with an embodied
understanding of embodiment. Embodiment has been
embodied in me.

It has gone from a cerebral notion of, yeah, we all have bodies
(make sure that you get some reflexivity and embodiment in that
essay!) - in the formulaic way in which a scrunched up
academic writer might add salt and pepper and maybe a little

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 118 25/05/2021 13:47

 chili powder to a dish.
It has given me permission to attend to what bodies are doing.

*****************

The last two days, what was the point? you ask. Bluntly.
Here we are community: for all our differences, our thinking
aloud at odds to the proposal, our securities and our
insecurities, we are Community. 119

Yet again I am reminded of what I know in my body, what I can

evoke through my body, how it knows without the propositional
’me’ of my head being engaged.

My body knows, and my body knows how to ask questions

about that which it does not know. I can perform questions, and
they may have resonance with others here.

Together we can create a holding space for this to happen;

permitting exposures and withholdings, without mouthstopping
censure.

I can engage with my damaged body, and lose my otherness,

and keep my difference, we enact our diversity (we can all envy
the Greek Tranny calling card).

And from the body the words can flow, I can move into the
feelings evoked in the movement, I can consider my responses
to others’ observations. My body can speak the truth of my
experience, and I can sidle up to others here with mirrors,
trading reflections for insights.

Here we do not jostle for attention. Mostly. In two short days we

have learnt the etiquette of when to challenge and when to roll
with power, and how to hold open temporary spaces of
comradeship and permissiveness.

Here there is an ethics of practice that moves beyond the usual

scrum to publish, that holds us mindful of each other's needs,
and vulnerability, and squeamishness, and says let's talk and try
to find consensus, and maybe we will, maybe not - but what we
owe each other is to talk.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 119 25/05/2021 13:47

 ****************

I walk down the corridor / I meet old colleagues:/

“hello what are you doing here?”

‘… oh is there something narrative going on?’/

I often meet these people (from our centre) here in this building/

but there is something about taking over the space-

120 not in the evenings when it is convenient for us/

there is a politics to being here for two days all day –

the pirates are in the building during the festival of education/

I wanna shout:
‘we're here/we’re queer/get over it’
down the silent third floor corridor/ - is everybody dead on the
third floor?/
were they always this monk-like in their behaviours?/

This has been a healing experience for me –

we have been starved of oxygen for a couple of years and
our brains have been clotted and scrambled/
but we can still come together and do this work and hear
traces of our words and images refracted in the glowing after-
noon light
- we are shoved out at the end of the corridor/but boy can we
stride and
wheel our way down in.
And my are we noisy – raising the roof off this modern-day
cloister – this temple to data and sorting and putting us all in
boxes/ we can strut the catwalks in our fucked off/ fucked up
hats ...
Singing and dancing and leaking our bodily fluids as we go/
this is no cyborg manifesto - we are …

****************
And so it is about the body. It is always the body. The body in all
ways material, the colour of its skin, the read of its gender, the
movement of it, the size of it, the narratives put upon it by those
in power and by those in our power. Writing about how and why
this is a useful enterprise requires that I sit with Dwight

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 120 25/05/2021 13:47

 Conquergood, Augusto Boal, Soyini Madison, Della Pollock,
Karan Barad, Elyse Pineau, Ron Pelias, and so many others
whose writing and being I need to be in-body with to make
claims about how and why what we have done here is valuable.
Folks in performance studies would be interested in how
collaborative writing ensues from Image Theatre. Folks who do/
study collaborative writing might be interested in how
interactional body work effects and affects the writing process.
Folks who do and study performative writing and
autoethnography might be interested to see the genome of
writing, how this body of writing in real time might demystify the 121
beginning processes of writing. And on and on into more epis-
temological potentialities.
I need to engage the words of Conquergood and so many
others body to body, I must move with them so we can craft
a knowledge claim within the real time of long and considered
reflection. Because I know in-body that what we are doing here
with one another is deeply valuable pedagogically, politically,
personally. And so I will sit, stand, and otherwise be with my
sister and brother writers here knowing that meaning will be
made.

****************

(After Reed, 1942/2000)

Here, today and yesterday, we have had naming of parts.

The body’s parts, our bodies’ parts.

The flesh, blood, ligaments, digits, cells, organs

In their readiness and unreadiness, the bloodiness and
bloodlessness

Their use, abuse, misuse, uselessness

Today, we have had the naming of parts.

Today and yesterday we have had the framing of parts.

Our writing comes in fragments of narratives as yet untold,
The moments, the here-now-this-ness stolen from time’s
Heavy beat and light, unnoticed touch.
The writing has lifted off, riffed off, sniffed off the body’s shapes
And shaped into folded, gripped, touched, rested gestures of
text and forms
Today we have had the framing of parts

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 121 25/05/2021 13:47

 Today and yesterday we have had the reclaiming of parts
In the academy, in this academy,
In cycles of moving and writing and reading and writing
Talking and eating and walking and wheeling along corridors
And lifts and stairs, past offices of professors and teaching
fellows
And readers, alone and empty and unknowing of the orgiastic
Cataclysm of encountering that has been enacted and
embodied
122 Today we have had the reclaiming of parts.

Today and yesterday we have had the reclaiming of hearts

The reclaiming of the land of Pelias and Richardson, of Deleuze
and Spry,
Butler and Speedy and all,
Of all that this place and this work means, where body and
mind,
Pen and keyboard, fingers and wheels, and spooning and
forking
Are what we have and all that we have
Today we have had the reclaiming of hearts.

******************

It has helped me to come to terms with the closeness of my

body and the materiality of my circumstances to the writing I
do and to my ability to write. I have sensed it bringing my body
into play with my writing in ways that I have not been aware of
before.

The sculpting process, for example, brought me close to

other people in the group: my senses felt heightened, my
abilities shifted. I found the intimacy of physical space
powerfully influential in freeing me from some of the discursively
constructed orthodoxies and conventions that sometime
restrictively play a profoundly intensive part in the enabling and
disabling of my writing self.

It has helped me to think about writing as part of an

assemblage. It has shifted that sense of a becoming self that
simply sits on a chair, at my laptop and that taps at those keys.
A physicality in assemblage, yes, but somehow one that seems

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 122 25/05/2021 13:47

 substantively diminished when there is a sense of the presence
of movement and the body of (an)other.

It is about my sweat, my beating heart, my spontaneous and

sometimes nervous laughter, the excitement of my presence in
the entanglement of other that now seems to be so important in
my engagement in creating space and in this with my
inhabitation with other. So … it is also about the room, the smell
of bodies, the rising heat of the lazy June sun and how my body
feels in agentic relation with this and how writing easily flows
with the slippiness of my leaky pores. 123

(I wrote more about appreciating being with others and about

sharing writing with others and it doesn’t say anything more
than what has been written hundreds of times before so I will
leave this out)

*****************

I was here teaching last week, it was certainly different in the

sense that there was no edge in it, no collaborative essence but
rather an automatic process of exchanging knowledge. So what
has this day prompted again? That the question of where, and
how the politics of knowledge sharing, and meaning making
takes out of the equation, the affective dimension of knowledge.
There is a qualitative difference of perceiving self and others as
collaborators, or as empty vessels to be filled. Some sort of
juxtaposition of a commoditised, compartmentalised education
of the livestock with a living breathing educational process from
and between life forms. Maybe a fake binary here, but in
reflection even the idea of a false binary between the two is only,
can only, be produced in the performative space, that allows a
complex ethical relation between self and others to reveal itself
in the making. In the doing.

So what has been achieved? What has been articulated ? Not

some sort of a novel ethic of education, but a way of putting
ethics in education, not as an answer, but as a perpetual
question that needs to be on-going. Personally (and that must
be the joke-word of the day) speaking, feeling like one of the last
zombies of a narrative centre that has been closed down, not
in a bang but in a prolonged whisper, that the rest of the school
prefers not to remember, letting it drift into the ocean. I find

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 myself happily afraid in a raft, not really knowing anymore where
it is taking me.

****************

We get so in our heads. Talking about will we move or not …

and decide not to.

I want to move. The room goes still and quiet. I itch, and feel
124 too bouncy to be in here. People are tired, and I am too, but it’s
more effort to stop my body than it is to just move.

Everyone is sitting, writing. I am walking around, writing, but I

am not in my body. I am just taking steps round a room. What
pose would I take if we were all moving now? I am frustrated
and want someone to play with. Tough. I play with myself,
connect with myself, and ask myself what work did these two
days do for me?

It’s helped me, first of all, voice and then explore anchoring
myself. Anchor my body to the physical world, not displacing
myself, absenting myself from my self when I have
uncomfortable feelings. Yesterday, above my waist my body
felt electric and dangerous. Below it felt leaden; sandbagged to
the ground. Writing and moving together-alone-together-alone
helped me explore it, stay with it.

Now I’m lying with my back on the ground and my feet up in the
air. These two days have let me invert myself; know myself
differently. I think of the Winnie the Pooh books and imagine
joining wise Owl and bouncy Tigger to do collaborative writing
in real time in the 100-acre wood.

****************

I’m writing at, and from, a corner of the room where the writing
group is taking place. The writing starts with a move of “image
theatre”, followed by reflecting, writing, reading, re-reflecting,
re-writing, re-reading. One’s self melts into others’ selves.
Others’ feelings fuse into one’s feeling. I can hear my voice in
others’ voices and other voices in mine. The small ‘i’ seems to
be replaced with the big ‘I’ … seems to be.

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 What is it to me? To be honest, it is ‘not-me’!

I’m poor; Thou art rich.

I’m weak; Thou art strong.
I’m pale; Thou art colourful.
I’m quite; Thou art alive.

Why am I so reluctant to disappear into the big ‘I’?

**************** 125

Very reluctantly, I haul myself back onto the raft of the Medusa.
I have found this so difficult. So much work to be done else-
where: so much marking, so much arranging and managing and
administering, so much energy draining out of me with a suicidal
friend who, in the age of smart phones can constantly be with
me although physically distance in space. And now you want
me to fart about for two days striking poses and pretending to
find it meaningful? I’m paid to think, not to be an acrobat or
contortionist. If I’d wanted to play Twister with people I
vaguely know I’d have taken a mat to a family party. This is not
stuff for grown-ups. This is people trying desperately to
recapture a sense of play and self-esteem. If we all say this is
special and purposeful, then it will be.

At this point, I should do a rhetorical volte face and say, Ah, but
at 14.43 this afternoon, I suddenly had an epiphany and it all
fell into place. Suddenly I saw my study and my soma as one.
Suddenly I realised that I am not a brain in a jar but an organism
among organisms and that my poor, vilified body had finally,
after years of being shouted down, found its voice. Period
pains, they told me, are feedback. Listen to your body and the
pain will cease.

But no. When Tami says, ‘I am the ventriloquist of my own

body’ she is so right. If I throw my voice hard enough and far
enough maybe no-one will notice the body that produced it.
How do I find myself here? How do I find myself so enmeshed
in the mind-body split that I really don’t want to touch other
people in an academic space, a safe space? How did that
happen? How did I end up at this particular party trying to kick
the Twister mat surreptitiously out of sight, under the bed?

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 And why am I so outcome focussed? Why do I believe this stuff
is only, if and only if, valuable if it leads to an outcome? A three-
star-plus paper. Look what they done to my soul, ma. Can I
reclaim an embodied me in two days? Can I begin not to give
a shit about the Academy which has been my home for twenty
years in two days? The spirit surely is willing but the flesh is
weak.

At the end of the day with Tami, after we had worked together
126 and shared our writing, we turned our attention back to the idea
behind the workshop: to see if we could achieve a
collaboratively written paper in real time. We discussed ways
that we might do this, but there was a strong feeling of wanting
to stay with the process rather than turn it into a product. As
Jane had initiated the project there was an assumption in the
room that she would transform it into a paper. One of the group
who had considerable experience of academic publication and
the amount of energy it consumed asked, ‘How are we going
to support Jane in getting all this into a paper?’ There was little
enthusiasm for exploring this, and so it was agreed to collate
the writing into Dropbox, and there it remained for two months,
until Jane called another meeting.

Four of us gathered to turn the draft into a paper by developing

this final section which would outline why the writing and the
experiment were significant. These were mainly people who had
spent time previously thinking about the ethics and practice of
collaborative writing, and who understood the ‘hidden’ work in
collaborative writing, including meeting either digitally or face-
to-face and reading and re-reading drafts.

One of the first and most important points to emerge from that
meeting, was that on re-reading what we had written, we were
struck by just how much embodied writing it contained. Our
normal practice of collaborative writing in this research centre/
group, while mindful of the body, is very often intellectual and
dis-embodied, as we have been dealing with abstract concepts
such as love, writing communities and the act of writing itself.
The difference with this work was that the workshop which
produced it emphasised the contribution of the body. Indeed,
the workshop leader, Tami’s monograph is called Body, Paper,
Stage and very definitely starts with body work and the
embodied author. Her work also leads to performance: the

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 126 25/05/2021 13:47

 embodied performance of the text, and this provides a
challenge in the written presentation of our real-time text which
is that to experience it fully is to witness it as it is performed,
something which is impossible in a retrospective written
account. Our work replied to Tami’s invitation to perform in the
here and now, but this makes it difficult to reproduce that
process for a distant reader.

As we reflected, we realised that we had moved into another

stage of the embodied process: to sit in a room as a sub-group
of the authors and reflect on our experience. This again raises 127
an ethical question about collaborative writing. Can a sub-
group work on such a project? Does this mean that it is no
longer producing collaborative work, but an edited and curated
version of a work, with a similarly synoptic approach to drawing
conclusions? Or do we move into a different kind of
collaborative work in which there is shared or distributed
leadership in which people step forward in turn in order to
complete a task? Such a process is similar to the notion of
fluid expertise described by Fletcher and Kaufer (2003, p. 32)
in which any learning group tacitly agrees to share expertise in
the moment, so that all members can be leaders or followers,
experts or novices at any point in a learning group, in a similar
way to parents learning from their children. We reflected on how
this particular sub-group came to be in the room. It was not
that we had more time than any other members, but we had a
geographical proximity to and familiarity with each other and
a particular sense of responsibility towards the project which
came from our previous writing together. We did not want to
let the whole down. We were committed to the project and to
extending the ethics and practices of collaborative writing but
we were also committed to each other.

The notion of difference and similarity in writing groups was

highlighted by the sub-group process. Two groups seemed to
emerge from the original group when the question of finishing
the work arose, one the people interested in process and
writing as a method of inquiry, and the second career
academics, perhaps, who were concerned about having an
output from the process, either to share what we had learned
from the process or as a result of neo-liberal regimes of audit
and accountability which mean that they had to self-police into
producing articles to account for their time. The latter approach
runs the risk of destroying the joy in creating together. Tami, the

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 127 25/05/2021 13:47

 person who had led us into this highly embodied process,
wanted recourse to what we came to call the ‘bookshelves’
before she was prepared to commit an article to paper.
Possibly these kinds of concerns can be attributed to the
onward march of positivism in the academy whereby we
become insecure about our own lived expertise and knowledge
and need to shore up what we say by referring to an extensive
body of literature already published on the subject.

The sub-group also raised questions about the ‘afterlife’

128 (Benjamin, 2008) of the article. The next stage in its
development would be to send the paper back to the whole
group for approval/amendment and thence to submit it to a
peer-reviewed journal. Again, this raises ethical choices and
methodological issues. This writing was produced
in-relationship out of a particular embodied experience. Is it
then permeable to outside intervention? Exactly who is
in-community with the writers? Does this include editors and
reviewers, and what can they legitimately suggest to strengthen
the article? The ethical choice resides in how much the group
is prepared to compromise on alterations to the text from those
outside the initial writing group in order to secure
publication. This is particularly acute when the writing comes
from an experience of sculpting. The sub-group felt strongly
that ‘you needed to be there to write or contribute’, and this
implies that we could respond to requests to clarify or expand a
point, but not to change the writing itself, which was the
product of the moment.

From this we began to wonder about potential collaborators we

would probably never make individual contact with: the
readers. Could they collaborate? Could we continue our
inquiries into doing this sort of writing with a much wider group
who had read the outcome, but not been part of the original
writing group, and might that relationship confer
responsibilities on our readers? A metaphor emerging from this
part of the discussion was that of a nucleus, a group of cells
which could potentially become anything once out of our hands
and in the wider world. Always already out of our hands and
engaged in a process of becoming, perhaps?

We close by quoting an extract from our writing on the day and

leave the ball in the court of our readers:

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 128 25/05/2021 13:47

 ‘And why am I so outcome focussed? Why do I believe this
stuff is only, if and only if, valuable if it leads to an outcome? A
three-star-plus paper. Look what they done to my soul, ma. Can
I reclaim an embodied me in two days? Can I begin not to give
a shit about the Academy which has been my home for twenty
years in two days?’

129

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 130

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 130 25/05/2021 13:47

 131

15

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 132

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 132 25/05/2021 13:47

 Chapter four. Meandering and Writing Alongside
Doreen Massey.

Jane Speedy with Prue Bramwell-Davies, Catriona Brodie,

Melissa Dunlop, Jan Filer, Marina Malthouse, Sue Porter,
Chris Scarlett and Louise Younie.

It was an open narrative inquiry space: a meeting of narrative

researchers held once a month to talk and write together. This
time they were gathered together in memory of Doreen 133
Massey: feminist, activist and academic who had opened up
new geographic spaces and territories to them all. Before they
had begun there had been an e-mail exchange:

On 16 Mar 2016, at 20:43, Sue Porter <Sue.Porter@BRISTOL.

AC.UK> wrote:

Hello all,
Some of you will have heard the sad news of the death last
week of Doreen Massey, an inspiring, committed activist,
feminist and socialist, who wrote so beautifully about space and
reshaped geography so radically (try For Space as a starting
place if you don't know her work).
Jane Speedy and I would like to suggest that we use the April
Open Space session to share readings and responses to the
woman Ann Rippini taught us all to think of as 'the blessed
Doreen Massey'. For those who don't know her work then a
treat awaits you, and for those of us for whom she has been a
significant influence it will be a chance to share stories.
Read about Doreen's socialist activism here:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/hilary-wainwright/how-we-
will-miss-that-chuckle-my-friend-doreen-massey
and more about her work here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doreen_Massey_(geographer)
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/society/politics-policy-people/
geography/ou-radio-lecture-2006-the-world-really-shrinking

We meet as usual 5.30–7.00, April 4th, in room 4.7 on the fourth

floor of 35 Berkeley Square.

Hope to see you there,

Sue

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 Thanks for drawing my attention to this news Sue. I had missed
it and felt real sadness reading your email. I once worked with
Doreen many years ago on an OU Women's Studies summer
school at Keele and it was a privilege to spend the week with
her. Her influence on me, the way I looked at the world, lasted
beyond that week to a lifetime. I also taught her geography
module on the OU Foundation social science course in those
days and was blown away by it – a highlight in my working life.
Students were fascinated by looking at the world in this way
and related to it immediately – so many of them said it was
134 their favourite module in the course. It was mine in teaching
it. I loved doing that module with different groups of students
– I always knew the discussion would go electric, voices and
passions raised. It was her genius to connect together place
and class in a narrative which storied lives in a new but instantly
recognisable and oh so powerful way.

I shall be with you in spirit at the Open Space meeting – enjoy

sharing your memories of Doreen.

Warm regards,
Chrisii

Each of the scholars had arrived trailing and/or holding specific

elements of their lives outside the room, some of which were
later to be written and stitched into this text: the first to arrive,
sitting alone with her view across the whole city, was
somebody new to this community of scholars. She was
followed by the ‘old’ professor. Then seven or eight others
meandered or wheeled themselves along to the fourth floor of
the school of education, which had a magnificent panoramic
view across the city and quite an intimate, detailed window into
the backs and back gardens of the Georgian houses down the
hill below. They were situated in Clifton, where two centuries
ago the slave-ship owners had built their tall, imposing houses
with views of their vessels in the floating harbour below. Now in
the twenty-first century, these houses, in turn, had been turned
into blocks of flats and they too were overlooked from the plate
glass windows of the university buildings at the top.
The scholars began to talk about Doreen Massey, her life and
her work, and of the spaces she had opened up for them with
her conceptualisations of space, place and power. They came

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 from disciplines across and beyond the academy: from
mathematics education; from medicine; from across the
humanities, arts and social sciences; from social, political and
educational activism, and as they did so, they took out Doreen
Massey’s books and spread them across the tables in the room,
quoting her description of space as a ‘simultaneity of stories
thus far’ (Massey, 2005:20-31), opening up books they had
written themselves that cited her work (Bramwell-Davis, 2015;
Speedy, 2008), and in so doing opening up connections with
each other.
They met together twice in open, inquiring memory of Doreen: 135
gatherings of women on both occasions. Many of them knew
each other: different generations of the same research net-
work.iii They had heard of each other or had read each other’s
work. After their meetings they each wrote into the space they
had produced – a series of writings emerged, which was later
woven together into a layered account (Ronai,1998), first by one
of them, and then by all, into this paper:

As a mental health social worker, I have lived professionally in

a world of inter-disciplinary exchanges, boundaries, common
ground as well as argument most of my adult life. But never
before have I joined a group of women who came from such
different ‘places’ and yet who all in some way or another held a
part of me: dance, art, research, poet ...

Jane described it on different occasions as ‘chatting’ and

‘meandering’ and she was right on both accounts, as it was
similar to any walk I go on with a friend and my dog. Sometimes
the chatting relates to the places we are meandering through.
Sometimes there appears no connection at all; we are so
engrossed in another world and some other time, almost
oblivious to the path under our feet or our surroundings.

And so it was this group of Massey disciples travelled back in

time to the ‘place’ of the GLC and the ‘time’ of the Thatcher
years. As I connected to the stories, I saw my younger ‘self’
standing on the bridge outside Parliament protesting against
the Poll Tax. I remembered I was so full of hope that I would
somehow change the world but underneath that passionate
activist, I despaired I could even change ‘me’. When Jane
reminded us of the Communard’s cry at the time: ‘don’t leave
me this way!’ it was bittersweet. I recalled that I had so loudly

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 echoed their cry.

Don't leave me this way

I can't survive, I can't stay alive
Without your love, no baby
Don't leave me this way
I can't exist, I will surely miss your tender kiss
So don't leave me this way
Oh, baby, my heart is full of love and desire for you
So come on down and do what you've got to do
136 You started this fire down in my soul
Now can't you see it's burning out of control
So come on down and satisfy the need in me
'Cause only your good loving can set me free

(a Tamla Motown hit from 1975, re-recorded by Jimmy

Somerville and his band The Communards, topping the
British charts for a month in 1986. This became the theme tune
to protests against the demise of the (left-wing) Greater
London Council, orchestrated by Margaret Thatcher’s
Conservative government)

Suddenly, it felt like we fast-forwarded just like Alice falling

down the hole to ‘today’ and the impact of a new ‘places’: the
computer, the internet, Twitter, email, Facebook, iPads and
mobiles. The time is ‘now’ but unlike the youth of today, ‘five
minutes’ seems to have a whole different length the other side
of 40.

Then we shift back to the end of the Second World War and
the remains of the concentration camps. We seamlessly move
through the meaning of places, the reclaiming of places to the
intended demolition of places. We notice shadows on a wall, we
pick up the bricks of slavery and oppression in our hands and
question whether it is even possible for evil to be tangible in the
land. So just like Alice ‘there’s no rule that (we) mayn’t go where
(we) please’ (Carroll 1865).

And through all of it Massey had something to say about time,

space and place, as if she had been the White Rabbit
pioneering it all and we were just following: ‘Wait for us, Doreen
Massey, we’re coming too!’
§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

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 Time and Space, the x and y axis of our lives, mathematically
entwined into four dimensions, binding us in our Earthly
existence; they give form.

But time, the process of forward motion, confuses us; so

simple, yet so unimaginable, that we forget it’s relentless
momentum, refusing to live within the limits set forth, the
conditions of mortal life.

Instead we travel where we will, through memory and

imagination, our fifth and sixth dimensions. 137

Music and dance, the seventh and eighth planes, carry us into a
given moment, a sacred space of flow, and there we reconnect,
keep pace for a while with time itself, and though we are
journeying, yet we feel an exquisite stillness, as if balanced on
the zero point of being. And it may seem like a jolt, but here Red
Ken works his way into the room. He represents all meaning in
a life lived here in this place in these times just going by, just
gone ...

And underlying these, a spiritual dimension, the unseen,

unconscious – or is it? The land of dreams and intention: ninth
and tenth dimensions.

Behind what is spoken, in the slipstream, I contemplate the

perfection of certain beings – from certain angles, at certain
points in time. How beautiful it is possible for humanity to be …
yet how disappointing – yes, that part was spoken aloud. If only
we could all go about without that hindrance of time, flattened
to perfection, the image we seek to project. If only there were
not so many people – not us of course, but other people – we
could do without them.

I’m sorry – did I write that aloud? I didn’t mean it – I love them,
we love them, the other people, the far away and dispossessed.
We know they are just like us, and that we, in our way, are
suffering too by their suffering. We are connected, all one. It’s
the thing we struggle with you see, the love-hate relationship
with ourselves, with each other, and with the planet that
sustains us. Perhaps it is right to recognise that we are not on
the planet – we are the planet. We are The Earth, doing this to
itself. And yet, that is hard to feel as reality. We are drawn to
being separated out, even as we crave to be united.

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 And now that I have said this, put it out to be seen, it seems like
such a small thing. A few words on a screen – was that all I was
holding, that felt so pressing inside me? Yet small as they are,
these words must now compete with the words of others, for
space. For Space, as Doreen Massey’s book is called,
competes with all the rest – it arrived in the post, waiting when I
returned from the meeting. Now it lies, there in my private
space, waiting for the time – will there ever be a time? – when it
will be read. Can I open up a space, somewhere between now
and the WHOLE OF THE REST OF MY LIFE for Doreen? And
138 you will tell me, the power is mine to make time.

§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

The consultation – The Royal Gwent Hospital, Newport. The

consulting room, a tiny space, paint scabby and a tired
tobacco colour. I would have thought it might create an
intimacy, the proximity, but instead we were both pinned by the
closing together of walls. Even as I could analyse the problems
written on the face of the hospital parking attendant confronted
by a seemingly endless stream of patients trying to park in time
for the appointment they have waited too long for (his stress
and avoidance of eye contact, pushed as he was into the front
line of patient frustration by his managers), I could not extract
myself from feeling overshadowed by you, consultant, and I felt
unseen even as our knees almost touched. In that small space
my only opening was to perform as professional patient,
despite your enthusiasm for the heights achieved by the
neurologist who diagnosed my condition (nearly 20 years ago)
– president of the college of neurologists no less. My inability
to be sufficiently impressed by his elevation brought into sharp
focus the two different worlds co-existing in the tiny consulting
room: your progression through your list towards a welcome
G&T, student by your side, specialist nurse on tap; as compared
to my own stopping off here in an attempt to gather the data to
inform my next move, to help me make those difficult choices
about how to spend limited resources of energy and time.
The setting reduced me to a passive recipient, debarred me
from having a space to have my own set of questions to answer
and choices to be made that could flow from an understanding
of my position, as written by the pictures of the progress of the
virus, it's path through my brain. I asked for another MRI scan,
it having been nineteen years since I glimpsed the damage

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 caused by the virus – marks on a brightly coloured picture of
my brain-world, hard to interpret beyond the labels ‘virus’ and
‘MS’. Are they destinations or journeys, or just labels to make
the mess speakable? ‘I would do nothing different as a result,’
you said, closing the thin folder containing my medical notes.
The consultation was at an end.
How about that for a map, Doreen?

§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

139
So, here we are, a group of white European women gathered
together in a university room, brought together through the
scholarship and ideas of Doreen Massey, in a city built on
slavery; in a country soon to become obsessed once again,
via our EU referendum, with Doreen’s intersectionalities (Hill-
Collins, 1990) of race and gender and class. Doreen Massey’s
‘open space research centre’ was embedded in the culture of
the Open University, to which she held a ‘fierce commitment’
(Featherstone, 2016). Our ‘open narrative inquiry space’ lives at
the University of Bristol, a ‘Russell group’ university to which we
are perhaps not so deeply committed, a culture in which we are
not so much embedded, as tolerated. We were poised all this
way up above the harbour, our own power geometries of
professional and personal and relational space and place,
tangling up with the hierarchies of the academy and the histo-
ries mapped out in the city stretching out beneath us, carving
and connecting up the spaces between us. Too many lines
drawn and entangled: ‘To live, every being must put out a line,
and in life these lines tangle with one another’ (Ingold, 2015:3).
Lines and divisions: pathways and trajectories;
intersectionalities and multiplicities mapping out and slicing
up the place we have arrived at together. It seems important
to have described this place and circumstance of our meeting
in some detail because, if according to Doreen Massey, space
is no longer seen or experienced as a surface, but rather as a
‘pincushion of a million stories’ (Massey, 2013), then places are
collections of those stories. Here we meet, explicitly collecting
even more stories and setting them down in an act of
remembrance in space as ‘a cut through the myriad stories that
are all happening over time as we live our lives’ (Massey, 2013).

§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

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 The multiplicity of happenings across spaces, the power
differentials of different spaces, reminding us just how
narratised and storied spaces are. Here are some storied
spaces across a section of time …

A collaborative writing space, Hawkwood, 2009:

What if the life between us was like a garden? What kind of
garden would it be? How are we tending to that life? What does
the garden look like that we are raising? How do we water it
140 with our words, our kindness, respect, listening? Are there dry
parts where the rain cannot yet reach? The compost heap, the
muck, the smell, the discarded and unlovely stuff, how does
it fertilise the soil? What about the stones, pebbles, rocks, do
we keep some for their own beauty, remove others so we can
plant? When will we see the flowers? What seeds are planted in
our imagination, hearts, minds, souls, beings? How might they
take root in our collectiveness? I see crocuses of early spring
just poking out of a hard and wintry soil, I see the late autumn
seed pods shaken by the wind, the seeds scatter.

Doctor-patient spaces, 2011:

Just as the chart ‘flattens’ the patient and reduces the
three-dimensional person to a two-dimensional caricature, so
the medical education process can do the same thing to
students (Shapiro, 2009:7).

Patients need space. Doctor’s space is in ‘ever greater degrees

of collapse’ (Scannell 2002). Offering space is one of the most
‘powerful yet underused skills’ of a doctor (Street, Gordon &
Haidet, 2007). Medical students are flattened, rendered
breathless by the educational processes they go through.
Space does not come naturally to us as practitioners (Street,
Gordon & Haidet, 2007): How then might we offer
hospitality? A friendly emptiness for our patients to dance their
own thoughts in their own languages. For year one medical
students, even just choosing to produce a creative piece might
be like a space to breathe, an island in the ocean of medical
facts to be learned. It is a time where they can attend to their
clinical experiences not just intellectually, but by engaging with
their emotion, imagination and creativity.

An illness space 2014:

Space, just dark space, space that wants to swallow me up.

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 Should I resist being sucked into the vanishing black hole?
Space to be and be and be, but this space is unwanted. I want
to be doing and productive, to be full of hope and for my body
to behave. I stare at the iPad looking desperately for some kind
of TV to get me out of this space, to anaesthetise me so I no
longer know where I am.

§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

The ‘dancer’ in room 4.07 - 9th May 2016 141

Jane introduced me to the group as ‘the dancer’. One of many
possible descriptions of me. I haven’t been introduced that way
for more than forty years. Yet in that space, that night, I related
to others as the ‘dancer’. That part of me who engaged more
readily through body, movement and feelings than words was
well aware of what moving through space meant. It took a while
to find my voice, my dancer’s voice – the part of me that found
it hard to engage with Massey’s understanding and
theorizing about space. Generally, in my world of space as a
dancer, I don’t talk. Rather I communicate emotions and stories
with and without meaning in a non-verbal way from the
position, dimension, time and quality of my movement in
personal and general space. Sometimes telling a story – my
story or that of others, either alone, with a partner or in a group
of people. As the dancer, communication in a non-verbal way
within my own personal space is second nature to me. I tell
my story by moving my body through my own personal space
to occupy what had previously been someone else’s space or
the general space around me. The occupancy of such a space
is always a work in progress on whatever plane the person is
moving through it or more often reclaiming it. In dance one
travels in and out of places in space and time.
Memories of people, places, spaces and stories of my
involvement with dance filled up my head space with no room
to connect with Massey. Difficult then. How could I with my
dancer’s head and body on, connect with Massey’s geopolitical
take on the topic of ‘space?’ What about the sense of
spirituality and dancing from the soul, the smell of me that
added to the atmosphere of the story I left in any given space I
moved in? How do I add all those important ingredients into the
pot? Such deeply personal, intimate things belonging to just me
are entwined with all the other stories held there?
These inner musings take me into a new space beyond the

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 reading I have done in preparation for the evening’s discussion.
I listen, wait and hear connections to Massey’s views on space
from many different perspectives – all of which resonate with
me in some meaningful way. Group collaboration for someone
like me who prefers her own space and who changes like a
chameleon is never an easy option. As the dancer tonight, what
do I know about Massey’s concepts of space despite reading
about them over and over again? Gone is the part of me who
read Massey’s words on a computer page in stolen time from
another place (work!) in space.
142 Our meandering ‘chatterings’ as Jane called them, exposed
shared ownership of spaces and places we have all passed
through at some moment in time. Individual experiences
interweaving to grow into a more global story of what happened
in some space or other.
I know space is alive, organic even – I’m a dancer! I sense it,
feel it and use it with every ounce of passion in me as we all
have done in our own ways. Massey’s notion of space as living
– that’s something the dancer in me can easily resonate with.
Lost in my own head space, I am stuck with the barefoot, naive
dancing hippie girl in me in this space where we are all been
reminiscing of the places we’ve been that have both personal
and global meaning to us. How can my experiences of dancing
through it all add anything other than personal to the global
picture of understanding meaning in connection with using
space? We have a similar mission Massey and I - we have
tried to bring space alive, her in words, me through movement.
Shame I didn’t know Doreen Massey in my dancer’s world. A
world where we could have shared a set of examples that are
missing for me in any discussion about space. Those of
spirituality, of being at one with oneself or others in the
present moment in space. Feeling the emotions, sensations
and physicality of movement that embodies and grounds you in
that place to that time and space. How then do my views find a
place in the conversation without any speaking or writing about
it? ‘Not here. Not now’, I tell myself before the dancer lets lose!
This isn’t the place or the space for practical demonstration.
How then do I find a voice for my dancer where everything is
about putting theory into practice?
After explaining about being outside my comfort zone in
discussing space rather than using it, I attempt to link the
notion of space to my knowledge of it as a dancer in relation
to Massey’s work. Rambert is mentioned by another member
of the group. I reconnect with my voice and try to describe the

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 indescribable when now I can only connect with the topic of
moving through space through my body not my head. I garble
something about the missing aspects for me in Massey’s work
regarding space. Where are the concepts connected to
spirituality of space, the aspects of a living space that are more
to do with human emotions, sensations and feelings, traditions,
rituals and long forgotten ancient histories? All the missing
things that make up some shifting foundation of the space
travelled through thus far. The unspoken marks of life left in
those sacred spaces.
No, space is definitely not a flat surface across which we walk. 143
In ‘dancer’ mode, it’s a moment in time when a body can fly
weightlessly through the air, touch the sphere of the
atmosphere as invisible boundaries fall away reform again and
again in tune with the motion of the person/people using it.
Space is all about perpetual stories in motion until it’s time to
touch base, to be grounded, form relationships with oneself,
another, many others before taking flight again to take up
another space to bring it alive in a personal way. Space is
caught up in a continual process of development. It is a
continual process of development just like anything else in life.
Time owning space is but fleeting, you are but a slice of life like
the myriads of others who chance to go there before and after
you. Sometimes playing parts in a shared story, other times not.
For a brief intimate moment in time captured in a memory, a
photograph, book, a movement even. When you move through
space, you leave an imprint of yourself in time, a slice of your
story to add to the longer story that may never be told.
As the dancer in the group tonight, not as any of the other more
intellectual parts of me that might have changed the course of
our moment in that open discussion space. My wordless
sensations, the feelings of an embodied mind and soul sharing
space with words from women operating from a very different
space. My contribution to the discussions about space came
out in response to the idea of space as being the place where
transient never-ending processes go on in a limitless,
boundary-less environment. I lived, slept, breathed in that
notion of space and used it accordingly and knowingly from the
wordless movement in me that was the life blood of my very
being from the perspective of a dancer. Tonight, and in all those
other times and spaces, memories and recollections we talked
about in our homage to Doreen Massey, even as the dancer, I
can align myself more closely with her and her understanding of
the world.

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 Like the ‘mental health social worker’ I too have lived
professionally in a world of inter-disciplinary exchanges. I have
worked in many a tight, inflexible system that calls itself
inclusive yet stifles individual creativity and difference within
strict boundaries. The group gave the dancer equal opportunity
to travel back in time with them to the GLC and the Thatcher
years. She too protested in a gentle activist kind of way, joining
the picket lines with women to protest about some cause or
other that we all believed in. I sensed the fusion of our many
different perspectives on space. My little moment as ‘the
144 dancer’ in space is no less or no more significant than anyone
else’s time in space.

§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

The path through the olive grove that led to our villa was a
quarter of a mile long. At least, this is what I used to hear my
father say when describing our situation in Corfu. The road from
town that turned from tarmac to dust only went so far towards
our destination. Our parking spot for whichever vehicle had
transported our family of seven from Kent to Corfu was just
short of this olive grove – to reach our villa, we had to walk this
quarter of a mile stretch.
I can’t begin to count the number of times I must have walked
that path. The terrain was stony and dusty, and the feel of feet
crunching on dead leaves underfoot. For six weeks of every
summer, from the age of three until well into my adult years, this
topographical distance held no significance of measured
distance or time. More, a space where I not only walked, I
skipped, I ran, and I jumped. I saw, I heard, and I smelt. And in
that space, I felt. Feelings of happiness and sorrow, of comfort
and the freedom to grow. One summer I even learnt how to
dance, Greek-style.
You needed a good pair of shoes or sandals to walk along the
varied terrain of the olive grove. I would always regret wearing
flip-flops as my sweaty feet would slide off their platform onto
the earth only to dirty both my feet and my footwear. One year
when I was about eleven, in an attempt to overcome my
problem, I remember cutting out the shape of my flip-flop from
an old towel and sticking it to its surface. A temporary
solution that seemed to work although I don’t remember
repeating this any other year. I preferred instead to enclose my

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 feet in more substantial footwear to give me more freedom to
adapt to the various physicalities of the path. Knowing the
difference between a smooth, firm, trustworthy surface of a
large grey boulder from loose, small stones scattered in the
dust which could make you skid and fall. I learnt a great deal
about where to plant each foot, how much weight to place in
each step and when to transfer to the other foot just to stay
balanced and upright. Once when I fell, a snake uncoiled itself
and slithered into the shrubbery, rustling the dry, sun-weathered
foliage as it left from the rock just beside me. This was far too
close-a-call for my liking, and I have held a wariness of snakes 145
ever since. But I have since learnt not to fear that same noise
whilst walking in the Greek countryside as it can be lizards in-
stead, running away from the threat of danger.
Sometimes I had a hand to hold whilst weaving my way along
the path through the grove where olive trees, maybe hundreds
of years old, were positioned here and there, their seniority
giving them a priority of way. I find it hard to recall whose hand
I might have held except for one, the hand of a man who I can
now identify as the first, deepest, truest love of my life. At the
age of eleven or twelve, he was old enough to be my father. I
skipped and trotted along by his side whilst often his own son
who was a few years younger than me held his other hand. That
firm, loving hand of this visitor to Corfu who was renting a villa
with his family along through the olive grove from ours. They
holidayed there for one or two more summers during which time
we became very close and developed a beautiful friendship. I’m
not sure if he knew how much I wished for him to be my father,
one who showed an interest in me, and one who gave me a
love that felt safe and secure.
One summer when I was around fourteen or fifteen, I felt a
different kind of love in that olive grove by learning the steps of
Greek dances. With my two sisters, our tutors were three hand-
some young men who danced for tourists at a restaurant we
would frequent. That summer, they became regular visitors to
our villa and together, we’d carry our portable record-player to a
clearing in the olive grove. We’d start the music, lift up our arms
to lock our hands onto one another’s shoulders, and together
we’d move and sway as one to the steps of the Hasapiko.
There was also a practical purpose to this walk through the
olive grove. Whether from villa to car or from car to villa, as for
the workings of any household, the path was a route by which
provisions and materials for the home were ferried to and fro.
My parents preferred early morning or evening as the cooler sun

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 rose or died down. I never minded the heat of the day myself
but whatever I carried, mostly food and drink, I learnt the
importance of us as individuals needing to provide for the good
of the family. It was learning about the need to walk from one
place to another in order to survive. A need that demanded
stability and sure-footedness as slips and falls caused delay
and irritation to my father.
That quarter-mile stretch of land was a timeless space in my life
where I learned to breathe, to feel and to move.

146 § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § §

And so we moved through space, writing ourselves and our

lives into and out of our meetings together in room 407, as if
tangled and tumbling together down a vortex: yes, vortex is the
what comes to mind – the opposite and yet the articulation of
space. We fear, are exhilarated by the vortex, but are calmed
by the space though it is a much more anarchically configured
‘thing’.
As a thing it becomes jelly, I am always outside it. How to
become it – only that which is not physical can do that: all the
religious stuff about the perils of the flesh. Something topologi-
cal, both inside and outside, but it’s still a thing!
The space of … belonging, for instance … how is such a thing
made?
How can we know space?

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 Endnotes
i. Ann Rippin, Reader in Management, School of Economics,
Finance and Management, University of Bristol – a member of
the network who did not take part in these conversations.
ii. Chris Scarlett, former co-ordinator of women’s education for
the WEA and a doctoral graduate member of the network.
iii. ANI-net – the Artful Narrative Inquiry Network at the
University of Bristol.

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 148

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 149

16

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 150

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 151

Part three

Playing in Other/Outside Spaces.

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 Introduction to part three.

Davina Kirkpatrick, Carol Laidler and Jane Speedy.

The two chapters that comprise this section of the book look
very different to each other, although they were both inspired
by the same fragile sensibilities that form post-human (see:
Braidotti, 2013) windows to our world(s). Both chapters were
informed by an understanding that collaborative inquiries work
best when there is a shared awareness of the importance of
152 holding a space of not-knowing: a space of fluidity; of
becoming; leakage; and loose boundaries: the fertile space
at the borders of all our certainties (Anzaldua,1994). The pro-
cesses of putting these ideas into practice and of presenting
them to you as readers of these text were very different and as
Sameshima (2007:xi) would say: ‘form determines possibilities
for content and function thus the use of an alternative format
can significantly open new spaces for inquiry’. There is
considerable overlap between the people working on both
these projects, and, indeed, in the ideas that contributed to
them, but, as you can see from the introductions to each
chapter below, they took place amidst different environmental,
material and interpersonal ecologies, all of which evoked
different issues of intimacy, familiarity hospitality, generosity and
diverse practices of collaborative writing and art-making.

The method across both chapters was being together

sharing space, meals, walks, anecdotes and stories. Starting
with conversation, then a discussion of the length of writing
time, it tended to be short bursts of stream of consciousness
writing from ideas triggered by our interaction or that were
bubbling away in people anyway.

There were tensions – assumptions of what could be written

and how prior relationships inflected our expectations (in
Pockets, some people had written together before, some had
not, we all had different connections to each other). In Pockets
we continued with this process of talking, writing, then reading
out what we had written, before writing again, until on the last
day we passed our writing on to another in the room and wrote
into each other’s writing. Whereas, Cozy Crimes is the result of
writing, reading out, passing on and writing into five times, until
the circle was complete. By the end there were five

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 different pieces of writing, which were edited together to make
one. At different points of the process in each chapter there was
a shift to working with visual imagery. The act of writing
collectively, flouted established academic traditions of
authorship, ownership and individual authenticity. These
subversive acts of collaboration, problematized not only the
idea of individuals writing by themselves in a creative and
relational world in which non-human factors – the food people
ate, the hills and valleys they saw and the dogs that
accompanied them – were equally the co-authors of this
experience. 153

In the writing below, the art seemed to the group always to take
second place to the writing practices, although as much of their
time was taken up with both. Indeed, this parallels the way the
practice had developed over time, starting with collaborative
writing and adding the visual art element and mark-making later
in the Centre’s history, concurrent with adding artists into the
community of writers later in the group’s history.

The handling of the diverse materials that people were using,

the different papers, fabrics, glues, threads, inks, writing and
drawing tools and colours that were used, all informed the
process. This layering of how meaning is made from word to
image and image to word and back again creates a darning of
art and writing. This is a ‘khadi’ collaboration or ‘cardi
writing’ by our definition, akin to A/r/t/tography a methodology
of embodiment and rendering and ‘a doubling’ where art and
words “complement, extend, refute, and/or subvert one
another” (Springgay et al. 2005:900). The community wanted,
and advocated, a seamless shifting and leaking between the
two practices, but had to acknowledge that they had always
started with the spoken word, rather than visual linguistic forms.

The collective intensity and focus create a spark of energy in

the room – how it relates to the particular in each person, how
we build intimacy around other’s intimacy. This creates a rich
palette that can be inspiring, triggering, overwhelming for those
present and could be problematic for the reader unless they
are willing to give themselves over ‘to being with’ the text and
image produced. Let the introductions guide you.

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 Chapter five. Pockets.

Davina Kirkpatrick and Alys Mendus with Carol Laidler,

Sue Porter, Jane Speedy, Ann Rippin, Donna Kemp and
Mike Gallant.

154

17

18

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 Introduction

Here we are again

a writing together circle
and it has gladdened
my heart, my spirits
to hear you all so
that the words, the language,
the phrases, the prose, the poetry ….

A group of eight scholars and practising artists at all ages and 155
stages of life, and of careers within the academy, came together
for a week at a retreat centre in Gloucestershire.

Look up and gaze down the valley as the hedge between the
garden and the wild gets trimmed back into shape. For a mo-
ment, now past, I felt a distance between me (I am) and the
green and yellow and the russet early autumn reds, the dark
trees lining the verdant fields and the distant passing
unidentified bird.

We were an interdisciplinary gathering of scholars from across

the creative arts and social sciences intent on developing a
collaborative writing/making project together. A number of us
had considerable experience of writing together collectively,
whilst others brought skills in collaborative art-making. We had,
we felt, much to offer to each other as a group. The theme of
'pockets' had been mooted by some of the group in an email
exchange before we met, and at our first session we talked
about both the practicalities of making pockets and the mean-
ings and histories of pockets in our lives and the lives of our
ancestors down the ages.

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 Following Gannon and Davies (2006:3) telling, listening, writing
– we talked, wrote, read during the days and each evening we
made visual responses. We spent the third day writing; writing
into each other’s words. On the final day borrowed from Spry
(2011) (also, see: chapter three, this volume) we performed an
embodied sculpt of collective experience.

Here we were, gathering in an idyllic rural retreat centre to work

at what could be seen as the frontiers, where research
methodologies and arts practices meet, whilst elsewhere in
156 the world vulnerable people with absolutely nothing left in their
pockets were washing up on the shores of Europe.

I want to tell you

that I love you
that the word we are looking for here is love, not trust or truth.
This process is founded on our search for love.
Our search for knowing how to love each other and how to risk
entanglements,
love even, with these new people who are coming towards us
now, marching
across Europe, walking down railway tracks, small children
hanging
down their backs and round their necks, their hands laden with
plastic bags ...
Love ... pockets of love is all it takes, it’s all we have, are,
perhaps for each other?
Open our borders ...

This chapter has been edited by two of the participants and we

offer you here our ‘assemblage’, following themes that emerged
through our writing and art-making experience: words written
during our time together are italicised and those added
subsequently are in regular font. Images from our making and

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 sculpt run throughout the chapter.

Pockets

conceal
reveal
reversible
invisible
divisible
evidence of use 157
useful
carry
support
show power
remove power
bestow power.

Is memory just a series of pockets? Why do I remember some

and not others? And
how much is true?
Be here now. What does that mean? To forget the pockets? The
past?
What is now? But now has already gone. Snapshots. Pockets.
Glimpses of life.
I want more than: be here now. I want: be here now, and there
was then.

I find myself forgetting, as the coverings on the connections,

the wiring in my brain shreds and the myelin sheaths decay. It
started as a need to consciously make each movement, being
unable to take my attention away from what had once become
automatic (but, I remember now had once been learned too, I

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 once needed to form a step, to step out by lifting, carrying and
placing each foot, eurythmy-like). Tiring, absorbing, irritating and
distancing. How can I be with you when I need to attend to the
physical me so much?
But now, I find that sometimes trying doesn't work. I simply
cannot remember the act of standing. I sit re-membering,
remaking the memory through rehearsing the moves, hoping
I will reconnect with a groove made by moving. We speak of
being in the now, and yet so much keeps going on,
automatically being yesterday, and yesterday. I wonder about
158 the possible freedom of not remembering that automatic
background hum of movement, what space it could make for
another sort of being in the now.
Not remembering as meditation.

It is just a batch of pockets full of stories floating along. But

some of these stories are more powerful than others/some are
in a language that catches us all in its nets and verbs and doing
words and some of our languages are lost or hidden, floating,
garbled, whispered in the wind.

Things/Loss

A paradoxical moment of climbing over the edge of the pocket

and into the world of its inside-ness. I turned so far in as to be
out; a restricted focusing on what I hoped to find in my
treasured pockets in my thinking mind. So far in, that the
darkness of the unlit pocket’s depth captured and held, just for
a tentative moment, my fears of who I am.

Is it subversive to turn the inside outside? Show the inner,

hidden lining. What would be on the inside? Maybe the most
22

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 fearful would not be the vivid hue of shock and revelation?
Maybe the tawdry, pen-stained, fluff-encrusted, sagging, white
tinged grey from too much washing?

She took me to the market-hall as there are stalls selling vintage

fabric, and, of course, my finely-tuned proboscis sniffed out
some packets of Laura Ashley fabric which I collect. When I got
home, I took out the finds and was a bit surprised to discover
that I had bought, by accident, a packet of small denim pockets,
which looked about the size to have come from a teenager's 159
shirt.
They found their way into my bag and my home. These
pockets have agency. They want to tell me something. They
have joined my happy domestic ecology for some reason. They
want. Clothes want. Clothes matter. Clothes, the sensitive insist,
carry the energy of their previous owners. Clothes resonate on
a level, which we barely discern. Widows used to make quilts
from their dead husband's shirts. Let him be with me just a little
bit longer. Let me smell him, feel him even though he has gone.
Post-humanism. The power of the thing. The power of clothes.
Mighty and pedestrian.

I wore my father for two years eight months.

We took him, a coffee can of ash, up onto the common, where
he and my mother had sat together, while first me and then me
and my brother had played in the grass, chasing butterflies,
exploring small holes in pursuit of their mysterious makers. My
mother chose the exact spot, where she said he'd said he
wanted to be spread. She tipped the first fall of silvery grey ash,
with its gritty inclusions, onto the summer dried grass. She
faltered, as if the can had become heavy, her mouth working,
eyes dry but distant. My brother took over from her, emptying
23

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 the last of him as a small wind rolled up the rounded slope and
over us.
Later, as I rolled back towards the car I looked down and
noticed the small gathering of ash in the seams of my cardigan. I
could not find the heart to brush him off, and continued to wear
him.
His ashes sifting into my cardigan.

About the writing process

160
The tears surprise, seemingly so near the surface, some lock
turned and now they continue to fall. There is such intimacy in
the allowing of how the conversations have leaked and stained,
how the edges between one and another and another have
already blurred, intimacy in the telling and listening and being
moved by. If theatre allows you to try on and try out emotional
realities in order to try out other ways of seeing, understanding,
living (as Juliette Binoche said), so does collaborative writing.

So why am I here?
In pockets of emptiness,
I ask myself now.

All so eloquent.
Powerful transporters.
Raw tears.

Talking ... hearing words

about ... no ... hearing the
word was it safety, safe?
I did not think I wasn’t.
Was it ignorance? I don’t
know – I am lost – at
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 a loss, divorced from the
now almost beloved safety,
of that once damned word
pockets. Why do we have to
discuss process, I wonder now
as the pen moves – here is a product in process
self, selves, in process
an endless becoming
through us in context.
At last I am warm.
161
I guess one of the ideas,
maybe even lessons learned
as gospel, was that one –
I – must write across
the threshold – the public
private one –

The power of a moment when an idea leaks through writing

individually separately, jumps that divide of self and appears like
a magic 100th monkey moment in someone else’s written word,
a thread identified and pulled on at the same unknowing
moment.

Example of writing into each other

Writing knowing you are going to write into my writing.

Writing knowing and not knowing.

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 162

Trust/Truth

This morning we talk about boundaries, without naming them

trust. We share our frameworks for understanding the
relationships built between therapist and client, parent and
child, lover and lover, writer and writing others (without
naming the writer bit). The slippery slope from isolation to
intimacy, and into confluence - the abyss, the ecstasy of loss of
self into another, THE LOSS OF SELF that threatens to
obliterate us, the retreat into comforting and familiar isolation.
This morning we spoke of loss of self, losing our self/ourselves.
We named the pockets of intensity called being in the NOW,
being outwith myself. We did not speak of trust, and yet we
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 spoke of trust.
This morning we approached cautiously, sniffing. Circling
around each other, our different stories, our seas of stories
flowing into an ocean yet only dipped into.

An ethics of writing together,

how shall we make this happen?
We started without protocol
no manners
I did not give my spiel about the process
the history 163
this is not a university seminar for Christ-sakes
enough bonds of friendship between us for the process to begin
and speak and start for and of itself
This is asking a lot of Carol and Alys
risktakers both
we’ve collected a couple of high wire trapeze artists here
methinks... today there is talk of safety nets at the circus and
strictly no clowning before
lunch
what if? What if?

Tightrope Walker
How did you know
in my pocket
I carry a card
that says:
I am a Tightrope Walker
without a safety net?
I smile inside,
warming to the low murmur
of words in the room,
public and privately uttered
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 inside
as well as
out.
Trust.
There it is
the word not spoken.
Trust in me,
hold me in your fold
certainly,
certainty.
164
We are all one yet we are different. Our own sea of stories. Like
Haroun. He had a sea of stories, and Salman Rushdie had a
fatwah on sharing his. This links to freedom and vulnerability.
To share a story with others when the future is unknown and
the impact on others is unknown. This is the power of narrative
it has been said by others like Tami Spry (2001). Yet trust and
safety raise their head. To share a word orally means it can be
heard and quite possibly changed in its retelling. The analysis in
the audience as Carolyn Ellis (Ellis and Bochner 2006) explains.
However once it is written and shared in hard print (even if
virtual) it doesn’t not become unwritten. It can be shared by a
click of a button to whom, by whoever, and whenever. Where
does consent come into each of these ‘transactions?’ Trust
hangs over the procedure like a dark cloud, ripe with moisture,
ready to leak, but also in balance in equilibrium. This equilibrium
of trust. In each other and in the process that we are all part of.
Our stories are our own and they float with us in the sea.

I’m surprised by the common sensibility of it all

– of how your hands seep into my pockets, of how your hands
are slipping into, over the thresholds of, my pockets, of my
hands may be closer to yours ....
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 Let’s be radical, but not too radical/subversive, but not too
subversive
is it possible to be quietly truthful? How come truths are so loud
and raw and impolite to utter?

I am topless and shaking my body wildly to the music. The beat

flowing through my torso. My breasts bouncing and my nipples
erect.
Being naked.
Being topless. 165
Being the first.
Being confident.
Does not always bring me favours. It masks my vulnerability.
My being me in one essence prevents the other from seeing my
vulnerability. From trusting me and seeing potential depth. The
confidence masks depth and creates a pocket/a space for me to
hide and sadly in many times it seems to be judged and labelled
not as free but as wanton. The feminist discussion may have
begun/have been going on for a long time but the patriarchy still
hangs out even in the liberated.

In this place where children are closer to the angels than we are
I wonder suddenly, if I am the oldest ...what does it matter?
suddenly it does and I want to be old, wrinkled, a crone,
dancing topless, breasts hanging down, downwardly mobile,
sagging nipples, am I further from the angels I wonder, or am I
coming towards them from a different direction, in a circle?

Writing about making

Trust and truth are big words

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 too big for my writing
I cannot grasp them,
cannot make them in this form
I want to go back to making
She drew my gaze down to my dye-stained hand
I showered too
honest
Honesty
Truth
Trust
166 these are to be made, not written, made in gauzy
ephemeral, floaty, fabric.

The art of facilitation - a light touch of try this, this is possible,

scanning the fairness quota, is everyone equally engaged? Is
everyone getting what they want?
“You can’t always get what you want. You get what you need” I
sing silently. And I want everyone to get what they want.

I sit here wondering and reflecting on the process of making and

this need to be good enough to need appreciation and praise
and support from others.
And then I begin to wonder about our individual artistic journey
and actually are we not being truly collaborative? Why are we
not making one thing for all of us? For the project rather than
our own. Or is this only me who is planning where I might put
my pocket or use my pocket as a memento of this week?

Making art is fun. There’s no getting out of it. People call it work,
works of art, tell it how you like, but it’s fun. It brings joy.
Making stuff, making images, marks on paper, canvas, cloth,
stone, wood, celluloid, is compelling and absorbing for me like
no other activity. To make stuff that represents, performs the
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 worlds we imagine ourselves to inhabit is, I cannot help
thinking, the main reason we humans are all here. Whether it is
an activity we participate in or witness, audience or artist, there
is something purposeful, resilient, relational, like nothing else:
art, making stuff is the story that gives our life on earth meaning,
that gives meaning to the stories of our lives.

The press of the heat machine

- blue
back dropped by so much
- rural green and purple 167
in the bay of windows
twelve disciples
of light perhaps
thrown upon
the stage of
pressing pockets into existence
colour, space, curls, figures
pink holding hands bold
and the longing for, was it red?
vibrancy, nurtured notes
of fucking pleasure – pinking
shears where no wanton
men exist, it seems was
said.

a scent of alchemy afoot.

There is something about the making that confounds me: I

hesitate, sketch some ideas, put them aside, hesitate, wonder
at others, envious of their mark-making (so much better than
mine), wish it was ok to copy (and know it's not), withdraw a bit,
watching, waiting for some inspiration...
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 I feel I ’should’ know, have missed the cue, I didn't pick up the
package of talent as I passed ’go’. Lacking, looking, longing ...
Eventually I start touching things, a brush, a knife, some dye,
dragging colour onto paper, composing not comparing,
exploring not envying. I mix dye, add texture to dragged marks,
tear masking tape, rub wax into fibre. The laying of hands onto
paper, fingers curling around brushes, fluid dripping, I explore
and let go a bit. I know more through my hands than my
imagination. I leave off making with a mixture of hope and
anxiety: the optimism of the heart, the pessimism of the
168 intellect (Gramsci 1935/2005).
Seeing my prepared paper printing its pigment into new fibres is
curious: I like it, and I want more. I test ideas ‘doing’ is making
an imprint in me, as the tape and thread, the very moire makes a
texture on the printed cloth...
I need some space, and after lemon and hot water comes a
softer eye: I catch the complement in a fragment of my print-
ing that resonates with the quilted textile of the backing cloth.
A wholeness is appearing through the blending of parts, the
interactions of seeming dislocated marks makes a piece that
has a hum. Listening to the humming I am led to new questions
beyond the answers I could have imagined before. Now the new
work begins: opening myself to the suggestions that arise from
the interactions, not confined in my mind but something in and
of itself; it’s hatching (and) already softly singing.
Action research, making to know, listening to the objects, letting
go and going on.

Dialogue on making

I write a message to post in my time machine:

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 Dear younger self
when you are 60
you will still be excited by the thought of the new.

I desire a pocket. I desire a momento. I desire to leave my mark.

Remaining curious about how we might collaborate further
perhaps, already disappointment at the now perhaps not to be
cushion, that I had come to want for me.

You have heard a call. An appel. The not-yet-in being object has
called to you from some world where it already exists. It is a call 169
makers hear. And it is not a tiny whisper, a gentle sighing. Please
come and find me when you have a minute. It is sometimes
subtle and sometimes scrambled, but it also thunders and
importunes and forces you to not sleep. Shutting it down and
off is to do damage to your soul. She said pompously.

As an artist and maker I know that call. I also know the

frustration of making everything else more important than
being in the studio. The way my body holds and relaxes tension
through the process of making. Making can be fraught with
frustration and disappointment, if I hold too tightly to the idea in
my head, but if I let the idea shift and adjust, listen to the
materials I am using, I can enter a concertina-ing of time where
three hours pass in the blink of an eye and my childhood
wonder and delight at the world is replenished.

So I wonder if your genes were calling out to the thing which

was on some post-human level that few of us can ever really
grasp and I am looking at you Karen Barad (2007) – to call into
being a pocket.

Making calls out to me, hence my desire to include making of

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 objects in our process of making writing together. I think it
accesses another strata of being, enriches the writing, allows
more risk-taking perhaps?

And there I was in tears in my room, I had just had a terrible

row with Sue. I wasn’t going to stay here and put up with this
shit and then Davina came into the building carrying a sewing
machine and loads of bags of stuff – intriguing. I was able to go
and apologise to Sue, whose fault this all wasn’t, who was
having to deal with this situation every day just as I was.
170 Davina came past carrying a big blue machine that looked lethal,
would we be getting a go on that? By this stage, I was hugging
Sue, we were both in tears, friends again. What an outburst,
life’s a bitch and then you die... only on this occasion we were
going to do disperse dying on fabric, making pockets.... And all
this time, we have sat here together whilst a whole other story
trickled on in our midst, with Glenn coming and Sue going –
another pocket of stories, a whole other coterie of issues under
the cover of ground floor darkness.
What are the stories the others aren’t telling? What are the
images we are not making on cloth? Does what has not been
said/made/marked on paper leave residual traces in and around
our group like a refuse worker’s strike?

It is borne of incomprehension really and incredulity that things

are still so unfair. Why can’t they make provision for more than
one fucking cripple in this place? Perhaps, cripples are closer to
the angels too? Why is there no provision for fallen angels with
broken wings?
Don’t be careless with me and my stuff and my life, don’t be
careless with me. I am trying to live like this, just as she is trying
to live like that. And we can all make stuff, we can make a
contribution, just grant me access to human life, life as a
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 human, making stuff.

Body sculpting

Conceal
Reveal
I had wanted to write these words subtly onto my pocket
but had somehow not quite managed it.
The tension that I had slept with
fell away 171
as we played our game,
twisting our bodies around each other
touching
carefully
holding the red thread
between
attentive fingers,
making faces
laughter
crumpling the surface.
So many things I forgot to say
things that I had wanted to reveal
left unsaid.
Trust
Love
and my words of the week
Reveal
Conceal

I felt a need to illustrate the struggle of trying to put on my

pocket, to get inside it, to wear this idea of ‘pockets’, and
especially my pocket.
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 Humour cut the air, and was in the pit, for a moment being
brought to my solitary maleness in this female bodied
wellspring. There was the solidity and isolation of the floor
relieved by the proximity of bodies, and then warmed by the
touch of a back and my shoulder supporting each other briefly
whilst the risky reality of Alys’ cartwheels played overhead. A fair
representation of theme and counter-theme.

I do not understand – Perform

172 sculpt sculpt sculpt
someone wants to be between
sex and death, I don’t, do I?

Refugees

I don’t want the money I send out of recognition and empathy

with those
fleeing from their homes,
to line the pockets of those
who trespass against them.
It feels like the world is all sewn up.
We think we are a force
but perhaps we are just a small pocket.

Another plane rumbles overhead. Reminds me of other lives. Of

those refugees that could not fly. I wonder at my own bubble.
My life pocket. Is it arrogance? What can I really do? Am I
selfish? Do I not trust aid agencies? I sigh…
Pocketing my disapproval, my disconnection, my sense of
outrage. Withdrawing it into my fist, and transferring it from fist
to pocket, pressing it down deep into the cloth bag of secret
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 thought, of separate existence.
On the bus I listen to the waves of conversation, listening for a
familiar word used in a familiar way. But the drift goes
elsewhere, I disconnect. Down there in my pocket fingers work,
fretting the tough ticket into a hairy pliability. Transferring anxiety
into activity. Displacing it, placing feelings into threads and tufts,
a fabric of familiarity in-folded.
When they approach the border, where are their hands? The
taughtness releases where? Through what comforting action? Is
there a kernel of essential self tucked safe into some fabric fold,
or held between tightly curled fingers? Voices are shouting out, 173
but what is being said, is it a welcome or another rejection?
One small body face down on a beach - tiny fingers fold over
drying salt. For three or four days the world finds its ethical heart
and, digging it out of that tight buttoned pocket, pins it on its
sleeve. The doors creak open for 20,000 others, manufacturing
a trickle of gratitude to soothe the sting of guilty complicity.

‘Everything?’
‘Everything!’
Their eyes met for a moment, more than a moment,
uncomfortable stuck glutinously together, the hard resin of the
one with drained out wetness of the other.
He reached inside his coat, a scrap of paper, some numbers,
nothing identifiable, frayed at the edges, the aftermath of a
downpour in the forest, masked, dried, desiccated. A broken
biro, plastic whitened with nervous teeth, a take-away knife and
fork tied with elastic like a young daughter’s ponytail. He laid
them to rest on the chipped Formica and returned to another
pocket. A scarf, a small split piece of pine, the incongruous
tartan cloth carefully folded and placed in line. Now his left hand
reached into the heavy coat and pulled out a paper package.
Carefully wrapped, protected, squirrelled away, half a cheese
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 sandwich from the previous day laid in the graveyard of all he
carried.
Their eyes once more joined, the other’s gesture of ‘and the
rest’ taking him back to the closer pockets, the ones he felt next
to his skin. Some coins, maybe half a dozen Euros mixed in a
well-used pocket handkerchief. He gathered the light metal in
his fingers and touched the smooth stone of her brooch. No, not
that. His eyes flickered and flitted, barely grazing the resin stare
of the other. The coins scattered on the floor and he rushed to
pick them up one by one, placing them in the ordered rows of
174 his life.
‘That’s all,’ he muttered unconvincingly.
‘Belt,’ said the other, pointing at the worn leather. He unbuckled
it, pulled free from its loops and added it.
‘Shoe laces.’
He crouched down and untied them, removing them one then
the other, the second requiring another unknotting where he’d
tied it together two days ago as they crossed the fence.
‘Arms up!’ He spoke gently and began the process of patting
down his body, over the coat, down the sleeves, under the coat,
down below the belt loops. They both felt it at the same time.
‘Out!’
He could feel the tears dissolving their connection. He shook
his broken head and complied, the tips of his grasping fingers
lingering on the smoothness as he left her on the cold Formica
slab.
‘What’s that?’ He was aware of the hand pressing on the
firmness of his right-hand trouser pocket. It was where he
secretly touched a smile from his childhood before all this.
‘Turn them out! Come on! Turn it out!’
The tears ran, leaving estuary markings across his cheeks as he
mouthed a ... a word
... a ‘please’….
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 ‘Turn them out! Turn your pockets out!’
He took what time he needed, slowly, with reverence, pulling the
cloth back out of its entrance, inside out the dust began to fall,
the ashes caught the light breeze drifting
to the floor. A small handful. An urn.
‘Papa - sorry,’ said the dry mouth and the drained eyes.

Pockets of Lesbos
They arrive on the beach.

I realise the most important thing in everyone's pockets is the 175

mobile phone.
Watching people staggering on the beach in floods of tears as
they spoke to their mother or grandmother in Afghanistan or
Syria.

I was wondering how these phones stayed dry after a four-hour

boat crossing in a tiny rubber boat and then I saw the plastic
waterproof pocket hanging around many of the people's necks.

And then the fixed smile was no longer glued to my face, a real
smile had begun to spread across as I remembered my week in
Stroud at Hawkwood College. I remembered our group
pondering on the refugee crises and the people with plastic
bags walking down the train tracks in Hungary and I thought
about our sewing and making actual pockets. And the history of
pockets flooded back, that pockets were hung outside the body
on the hips and I thought about the little bag I had made
that would hang over my shoulder.
And here I was on Lesbos gazing intently at another pocket, this
time a waterproof one that held safe the most treasured(?) or
maybe just essential, most needed belonging of those on a long
journey, let alone a refugee in 2015... a phone.
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 This is the modern refugee crisis where the waterproof pouch is
the essential pocket.

I am thinking about ashes and family treasures secreted into

pockets of those fleeing and I
know here I will never know about the secret pockets and
treasures, yet I am hoping they are somewhere and have not
been washed away to sea….

176
Final thoughts

Amazing, each time I am amazed.

Ordinary human beings, give us this privilege.
This space, this time together and we riff off and into each
other’s words and lives/syncopation/rhythm. Why don’t they
teach this in schools?
This listening, this empathy, this aesthetic ethic of
collaboration?
Are we a multitude, she asks, or just a pocket?

40

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 177

41

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 178

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 179

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 180

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 Chapter six. Cozy Crimes and Deadly Deeds.

Carol Laidler and Davina Kirkpatrick, with Sue Porter,

Jane Speedy and Ann Rippin.

Cozy Crimes was created by five women who knew each other,
in one of their homes. This time there was no theme. Starting
with a conversation that meandered, a moment of ignition. We
sat and wrote, we read it out loud and passed it on, always to
the same person next to us to take out a portion and write into
it. From nothing the thoughts and words gathered, sparking 181
new thoughts and memories; from small ripples, conversations,
intricate interweavings. We continued with the writing, starting
the next day with the visual playing and making. This cycle of
talking or hearing spoken words and then writing into the space
those words evoked, continued in several iterations, the subject
of cozy crimes emerged through the talking/writing process and
leaked into the making.

What became exciting were the shifts and changes, the echoes
of recognition that one hears as the listener changing the angle
slightly to add one’s own resonance; her writing of her memory
became my writing of my memory, and then a further writing of
memory. New shifts, subtle reimagining of experiences,
palimpsests, exposing new angles, shimmering like a cubist
painting.

How to read this text –

Start where you like, read one column before another, read right
to left or vice versa.
We have placed a relationship between the columns, and the
pictures but you may see another connection.

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 182

44

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 Welsh countryside with oak Five women came together
trees, sun pouring down to write.
the Usk valley. The sound
of women sitting together
writing, twenty-first century Who? artists-writers-
women earnestly tap tap academics-teachers-
tapping. women-curious-interested in
thinking-interested in words.
‘What are we doing,’ she
asks, ‘just writing or doing
collective biography?’i
We sat and talked about a
I have sort of forgotten the theme and didn’t find one 183
difference. Lost the plot, but as we wrote the
dropped stitches all over the conversation bled into the
shop. I realise I hadn’t given
any thought beforehand to words.
what we were going to write,
or read, only to what we
were going to eat and drink, Even the definitions require
and when I anticipated this teasing apart, labels to be
event, I imagined only the
process, not the outcome. I troubled at, questioned,
have been looking forward to loosened with laughter.
the experience of writing and
making together but have
given no thought at all to the
shared theme, which I have
just assumed will emerge
from this process of being A method we utilize –
together. What if it doesn’t conversation/ writing/
emerge till Wednesday, I reading/ editing/
wonder? It will emerge we conversation/ writing/
say, we trust, we hope. It has
before, but will it be reading/ editing -
transformed by its transit repetition as method.
from there to here? Iteration as ‘guided
rediscovery’ (Ingold,
It’s here in the folds – cozy 2000/01), and as he says,
crime ii/family murder/
deadly deeds/dis-location/ ‘But each retracing is an
dis-placement/dis-tress. original movement, not a
replica’.
I keep thinking of the WI iii
and meetings of formidable
women who hold the
community together through
routine, dependencies and
a capacity to dream, even
when the dream plays out
through a flower
arrangement in an egg cup.

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 45

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 Today the hedges gave up Over the gathering,
a variety of flowers and comfortable and gemütlich
fruits to dress the house, and hygge as it is, hangs the
a welcome, evidence of
thoughtfulness. I notice what thin miasma of doing it right.
it feels like to trust another In later summer and early
to choose and arrange them. autumn in Britain there
To know how much it means is often a thin mist in the
not to be able to check the morning, which hangs low
towels and how they lie on
the bed, to straighten the blotting up the thin sunlight.
bottom sheet, to place the Then the sun burns it off
vase where it catches the and we have a glorious day 185
eye and the light. How of golden light and brilliant
hospitality is enacted, laid blue skies. Our hovering
down in a myriad of tiny
choices that started to be mist is the fantasy of doing it
made weeks ago. right or getting it right, being
right, being wrong, being
We disconnect from there to good enough. I wonder how
assemble here, overcoming we position and pin not only
obstacles small and larger.
Emerging into a place that ourselves but each other in
wants to be found. Finding a the assumptions and
mirror in each other. An adornments of expertise or
adventure too risky to those novice. Even the old stagers
left behind. Out of earshot, begin by invoking Frigga
but very much in mind.
Haug (1987) as our muse.
Last week with my girls What would Frigga do?
deconstructing the home, What question would she
picking through the bones of frame to get us
our family. Tensions run high, addressing the issues we
we snarl at each other,
recrimination and want to explore? How could
resentment. I behave badly, she help us to creep up on
we all behave badly and I am ‘it’ from some oblique angle,
the worst. I feel blamed for catching it unawares before
the disintegration of a it has time to shoot back into
marriage I couldn’t keep
whole, blamed for the its burrow or allow us to slip
breakdown of the home, for and shift sideways?
the crumbling of the
insulation in the roof, the
piles of dust and rubble in
each corner of the attic, for
the rats that have infiltrated ‘Completion’ – in an
the roof tiles and chewed incomplete house.
bags of soap and old
cosmetics and shredded
boxes of books that I left on
shelves a decade before,

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 46

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 shat-on memorabilia. The
bags and boxes are
carried down and dumped
in the front garden in a great
pile till there are enough to
fill the car and ushered to the I notice a tentativeness
tip: book to paper, metal to coming and going as we
metal, wood to wood. This is start/stumble… lurching
the burial of our family home, into eloquence in our talk
the interring of the stuff.
Where are you to gather up and then in our writing. The
the cables, the connecting tyranny of getting it right is
devices with unrecognizable strong as our different 187
uses? In one corner you’ve experiences meet
left the remains of an entire together, fantasies of how
feature-length film, boxes of
inflammable materials tightly any other could be
regardless of safety. No holding to (a version of) the
taking care there. form, fears of not being
rigorous enough, of not
We all know that the boy is being fluid enough, of not
a dog whereas the girl is a
bitch, a bloody conniving, being enough. Do men write
nagging bitch who asked for like this when they write
it. together? – on reflection I’m
A dog in the night-time,iv wondering about gender and
perhaps? confidence, and hoping that
A bitch in the daytime, for
sure. they too get lost, wander
We also know what the away from academic
boydogboy means to her. certainties into the
messiness of stumbling and
He’s enabled me to stay stuttering, of Sartre’s (1956)
still,
at home, becoming…
given another context
to the presence of absence
of the dead man.
The sound of Radio 4v
quietly bearable again.

I was warned once by my

friend, Naughty Tina that
I was turning into a Dog
Woman. ‘Look at your
scrubbed face,’ she said,
‘Get some Parallel Redvi on
and find some heels.’
Dog. She’s a dog. Not what
you want to hear. I wanna
be your dog somehow has a
different nuance when sung

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 by Iggy Pop.vii

The visiting dog has scent-

marked six times. Unable
to settle, connected across
space, we all have to keep
moving, as if kinetic energy
can safely simulate a life well For me, coming into this
spent. writing at this time from a
Turn around three times, former position of ‘old
touch the table, stager’: a veritable doyenne
cross your fingers, of the processes of 189
cross your toes, collaborative writing and
focus on the reuniting, collective biography, not to
not the imagined catastrophe
assume any ‘established’
Losing your dog will do that cloak of authority or position
to you. Folk magic, White of leadership in this activity,
magic as she was taught but to come to this practice
to call it in the sixties. In anew and fresh, donning a
times of great loss she
prays to Saint Anthony. She mantle of naivety and
lost her dog when he was curiosity is very liberating.
quite young and wandered Each time we engage with
off. Panic welled up in her. this process the experience
Sympathy, feeling with that is different, so coming to it
dog and for that dog and
smudged and distorted when in an unknowing way is, after
he wasn’t there. She prayed all, not an act of subterfuge,
to Saint Anthony, ‘You bring but rather a performance of
me my dog back,’ she life from a place of shifting,
bargained, ‘and I will give uncertain, unfixed thinking
something to charity.’ She
walked on maybe 50 yardsviii and being.
and there was her dog,
placidly paddling in the
shallow river, looking up at
this mad woman gasping, on
the brink of weeping. He was
back in sight. Back on visual.
Back on the grid.
Saint Anthony was not on
my grid, so I looked him up
on the net: St Anthony of
Padua, born in Lisbon in the
thirteenth century. Well dead
then, but patron saint of lost
things nonetheless. I don’t
really understand about
saints, only a string of

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 prophets with beards,
begetting their way round the
middle east.

Family configurations
Murder investigations
A murder of crows
A parliament of rooksix
A gaggle of quilters Even when I teach these
And a cauldron of spooks
Patchwork quilting us forms I lose my way back to
Murderers’ guilt what I have known … I start
A bag full of mending as a beginner, not knowing. 191
Our stories extending How do I hold myself to the
Dislocated, displaced best of not-knowing, the
Unrelated, unchased
Related unchaste. open moment for creating,
Stop! while not getting so lost I
A grandmother who was lose the rest of the tribe who
never married at this moment are looking to
An acre field that was never me to show the way, before
ploughed
A stream not dammed they gain some sense of their
A family photograph of a own way, as they will once
wedding the process overwhelms that
That was not a wedding doubting part of them and
Teaches not to assume the sweeps them up on a
missing groom
A scrapbook not for thrilling tide of their words
shredding melting into our words?
Lurch in the stomach
recognition
A tatter, an echo
of conversation
One people, one party and
all one nationx
Ah yes the gentle bubbling
of conversation Being a new person, means
That circled through and being a follower (a leader in
danced a rhythm
A rhythm echoed in the disguise?) not taking
clicking of keys responsibility, playfully
Sitting with laptops on their playing, throwing words up
knees into the air and seeing where
A rhythm of five very much they land. Being new means
alive
Older women everything is possible, fresh
Writing thoughts, new ideas, tackling
Being what is allowed. Or it means
Laughing doing everything wrong,
Palpable intensity and focus tripping up the process,
Shared propensity to find

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 the locus adding weights to something
A quilt with a graveyard that could fly. Lying below is
appliquéd in the centre a range of constraints about
A coffin pinned on to be
sewn on the quilt not wanting to dominate, not
A quilt-maker riddled with wanting to be too big, or too
murderous guilt loud, taking care to be
Did the dying person know generous with the listening,
they with the responding, not
Were pinned like a butterfly?
Poised, waiting for the wanting to step with heavy
moment when boots over other people’s
The passing could be creative process. It’s the 193
marked expert within each of us that
Did they know this was is laying down the rules.
happening
And were they narked?
The pin already chaffing their
shoulder blades
A circle of women sitting
round sewing
As the sunlight on the Usk
was gently glowing For others, the assumed
Cosily communing, expertise of the three women
murderous importuning who had done this before
and published the results
Here now sitting in a circle, erected itself like a picket
despite our reservations,
lifting the shears to cut the fence. Not electrified and
cord, tying in a loose thread. razor-wired and impassable,
Words like blades carving friendlier and with gaps, but
meaning, tapping out the a barrier all the same. They
stories of our lives instead of must know what they are
fabric, pins and thread.
doing. They must know what
Her Granny’s uncle the end result should look
committed a murder and was like. This barbaric dashing
transported to Australia. through the precious texts,
My mother’s quilt was slashing and burning as they
transported to Australia and
transformed. Returned in a go, must be valid. They must
large box, a different quilt. know what they are doing. I
Who knew the quilt? sit in the room with wisps of
Where is the haptic paper collecting round my
memory of drawn threads, feet, watching them fly off
raised padding, the catch of
silk on skin, the dusty suede our texts as delete buttons
of washed cotton? Who slice into them like buzz-
knows where the original saws and planes. Curls of
now lies, folded or lain out text skim into the air and
on the bed of a woman that land quietly at my feet.
my father desired. A bed for
How to do this… how to do

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 one, transacted for favours. it well… how to be me, and
Evocative objects,xi even the us…
wrong quilt can’t be let go of.
Discarded but transformed, a
conduit of broodiness.
Dislocated. Lost. Fabrics
woven with stories
navigating continents. In this
is a beginning.

The Guardianxii runs a

feature on a woman recently
widowed who has cut up 195
her husband’s shirts and
sewn them into a quilt. “How
marvellous,” they gasp, “how
inventive.” Quilters sigh and
roll their eyes.
Women have always done
this. And some have just cut
the collars from the shirts of
adulterers prior to throwing
them out of the window.
If I cut up your shirts, as you
expect me to do, what Five women came together
pattern would you like? to write. Who? artists-
Crazy Anne? Old Maid’s
Puzzle? Robbing Peter to writers-academics-
pay Paul? It will be blue and teachers-women-curious-
white because that is what interested in thinking-
you wear. Tiny florals on interested in words – white –
pure cotton. I could kiss you. middle aged. Are we middle
Exactly what I need. I should
kiss you, then. Kiss you while aged? At what age does
you are alive. Blue and white middle age merge into old
quilts betoken the age? Can I use the word
nineteenth century white without evoking
temperance movement. The notions of privilege? These
irony will not be lost on either
of us. I will call them indigo words are not casual
pieces. I will remember days descriptors. How do I start
dyeing indigo. Always to define who I am without
sunshine, because only in falling into someone else’s
sunshine does the chemical preconceptions of what that
magic work. The olive green
giving way to the rich indigo means? When you look at
blue. Magic. me who do you see? I don’t
Practical magic. Shibori. stand for, represent,
Japanese indigo dyeing constitute, delineate,
intricacy. Hundreds of tiny embody, signify…
rubber bands alchemising

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51

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 cloth into bursts of stars on
that inked background. You
are everything to me. I have
never been to Japan, but if I
had, I would have wanted it
to be with you. A thousand
stars and you.xiii

Loss is a deadly, cruel,

crushing thing. I have a life
stuffed full of things, pressed
down, pushed in, heaped up
again. 197
At the centre a hard kernel, I don’t want to set down
a peach stone of loss. A loss
so leaden that I don’t even middle-aged. I’m old. I want
realise I carry it. to be recognized as old. I
don’t see why I should wait
Give in, lean back, hold on to until I’m 67 to get into the
me, to you old category just because
floating like a mote of dust
in sun shining into the room that’s when this particular
floating like our minds sifting government has decided I’ll
through words on a page get my old age
connecting my life with your pension. I’m old. Over 60 is
life old. I am 62. That is by any
my memories with yours.
culture’s standards in the last
Loss comes like a thief in the third of my life. In the UK the
night. average female lifespan is 85
Sudden violent theft/gone years. I am old. I am an old
now/dissolved. European woman. Stuff the
If you’re lucky it will leave
behind a scent ‘Brexiteers’ and the
like a serpentine trail of government. I’m in the last
Chanel No. 5. third of my life. This ageing
Poor dead Marilyn.xiv process is a source of some
How much loss in that anarchic satisfaction to me. I
brief life.
She scent-marked the don’t want to be in the mid-
psyche, dle, I’ve never claimed the
swirling round notions of middle ground for anything -
femininity, not politics, not family
contested or not. dynamics. I have always
Sudden violent death,
leaving its stain, gone too far…. And now I’m
leaving its scent, heading right for the end.
leaving a wardrobe
full of clothes
to scratch and sniff.

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52

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 The visiting dog has
scent-marked six times. Who do I think I am? Scholar
activist, crip, writer, maker,
We have all been scent-
marked by men one way friend … and at what stage
or another. “I only meant in my life? One hour an
to burn his feet so that he adolescent, later a creaking
couldn’t run after me,” says ancient, another adrift in the
the woman whose husband middle somewhere …
had burned her face with
the iron as she did his work We sat and talked about a
shirts. Scent-marks fizzle theme and didn’t find one,
into brands. She burned him but as we wrote the 199
in his bed to a crisp. conversation bled into the
Premeditated murder was words, and flowed onto
the verdict. No one seemed
to question how the scent paper in writing, printing,
led him to do the scalding drawing and kissing.
and the punching and the
raping in the first place. It is
exhausting, the washing off
the smell every morning, only
to have it return by night.

Do I refuse the scent

marking?
I loved that salty smell,
rubbed my face in it,
enjoyed the purity of his
unwashed sweat,
no soap, no perfume.
Once lovers would court and
woo
by taking a slice of apple,
dance with it
slipped under their arm pit,
give it to their
loved one to remember them
byxv,
to gulp a case of youxvi.

And my daddy’s mother/

standing there in her
family-quilted photograph/
a performance for the
neighbours callous/
keeping a stiff upper lip/
hard faced and stern/
growing a callous over the What mechanisms do we
rub … have to learn to command
respect from the group? Is it
Family murder/

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54

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 recriminations/ crime found in the spaces in
thrillerations between, the fissures where
Passive aggressive/ layered no one wants to squeeze
misreading/ misconceptions/
half-truths/ half-lives/ Nana’s themselves, the articulation
uncle’s murder/ cozy crimes of the unacknowledged?
hidden in the silences
between/ deadly deeds.
Here in the shadows falling
down the Usk,xvii the male
moles leave their runs, 201
starting the spotting of the
green field with brown hills
made from desire and the
usual greed; ravenous and
lonely moles looking to be
the daddy.

There is a particular
companionable thickness I am not expert at typing,
between us, before the
measuring begins, the my fingers stomp out my
jostling of ideas and the cool thoughts slower than most.
turning of words into My mind chews my thoughts
wonders, amongst which slower than most.
we/she wanders.xviii So much It is not a race, she thinks as
before us, that will slip
sensitively into shared sense, the one-minute-left is called.
nonsense, new sense. This is a chance to play and
be joyful.
We are the demographic
referred to as ‘older women’
but so far the sagacity talked
of in myth and fable has
eluded us. What our
gatherings lack in dignity,
they make up for in fits of
girlish giggles.

Crones, turning the cards

The hanged man
Death
The tower
Their cheating husbands
discarded
Not recycled
Or maybe quietly turning into
mulch
For the garden they plant
Dealing effortlessly with the
fall-out

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55

56

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 Of family drama by
Stitching
Pinning
Shearing
Not like us.
I have a new mother, I like
her more than the old dead
one.
Who will they like more than
me when I am old and dead,
I wonder? And what
happens to those of us with 203
no daughters to remember
us if the dead don’t die till
we do.
A new family configuration,
a breath of fresh air as yet
untangled threads, not
impenetrably knotted: new
dramas, new kitchens, new
sinks.xix

What are the threads that

connect?
Are they tangled, messy
Like the strings in a green-
house
Suggestion of runner beans
once grown and eaten. Will
they still be there when we
are dead?
A scaffolding without the
core of life.
Is there always a better place
waiting somewhere?
Are we there yet?
Is this it?
Are we here ‘looking for the
blue’xx in this green valley?

And we have given ourselves

longer this time, another
kindness, for our writing into
each other’s writing, tapping
away together. Yet all time
periods feel the same, the
minutes slippery and
elastic, stretching and
springing back.

Older women writing

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57

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 together and then quilting
our writing together again
and again. We are engaged
in a kind of smocking
process with each other’s
words – I am taken back to
the first year needlework
classes with Mrs Wood, with
whom we learned smocking.
I was called up to the front,
to show my grubby,
unevenly pleated crumpled
work, as an example of what 205
not to do. Mrs Wood
scissoring-into her class,
cutting down the less than
adept, contemptuous of
difference and the struggles
to find the pattern into which
to mould oneself, the mould
into which to con-form. And
it’s the con we are good at
too, the ‘just enough’ to pass
as something ‘other’.
Taking care, care-taking,
curating, editing.

A memory that came earlier,

fleeting now, leaving just a
trace.
A flutter at the corner of the
eye.
Don’t turn your head, let the
sensation form.

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 Endnotes:
i. Collective biography is a research strategy that works with
memory; its roots can be traced back to the work of Frigga
Haug and her collaborators (1987). It is a set of research
practices that engages in a movement away from individualized,
liberal-humanist versions of the subject, toward a post-structur-
al conception of the subject – a subject-in-relation, in-process
(Davies & Gannon, 2006).
ii. Cozy crimes are a subgenre of crime fiction in which the sex
and violence is less evident or treated humorously and are often
206 set in small, socially intimate communities. The detectives tend
to be female.
iii. The Women’s Institute was formed in 1915 with a remit of
involving women in food production during World War One and
improving rural communities. It is now the largest voluntary
women’s organisation in the UK with 6,300 local groups and
220,000 members.
iv. Haddon (2003) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-
time.
v. Radio 4 is a radio station owned and operated by the British
Broadcasting Company (BBC) that broadcasts a wide variety
of spoken-word programmes including news, drama, comedy,
science and history.
vi. Parallel Red is an Estee Lauder lipstick.
vii. I wanna be your dog is a 1969 pop song by the American
rock band The Stooges, with Iggy Pop on vocals.
viii. 50 yards is 45.72 metres.
ix. A Rook is a part of the crow family distinguishable by its bare
grayish-white face, thinner beak and peaked head. They are
very sociable birds, rarely seen alone.
x. David Cameron, British Prime Minister from 2010 to 2016
used this phrase from Sybil the mid-nineteenth-century novel
by Diserali in his first Queen’s Speech after taking office.
xi. This phrase is used by Sherry Turkle as the title of her
book that looks at “objects as a companion in life experience”
(2007:5).
xii. The Guardian is a British newspaper, whose readership is
generally considered on the mainstream left of British political
opinion (www.theguardian.com/uk).
xiii. A Thousand Stars and You, a novel by Isabelle Broom about
friendship and adventure in Sri Lanka.
xiv. Marilyn Monroe said in an interview that what she wears to
bed is a few drops of Chanel No. 5 (Marilyn and No. 5 – Inside

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 Chanel, 2017).
xv. This old Austrian custom is noted by Benjamin Brody in his
paper ‘The Sexual Significance of the Axillae’.
xvi. A case of you is a song by Joni Mitchell from her 1971
album Blue.
xvii. The Usk valley is in Monmouthshire (now within Gwent),
Wales.
xviii. ‘She wanders/wonders’ is the title of a short film made
by Davina Kirkpatrick as part of the PhD Grief and Loss: Living
with the presence of absence, a practice-based study of per-
sonal grief narratives and participatory projects. The idea for the 207
film was seeded at a collaborative writing group in 2012. Also
see the paper Inquiring into Red/Red inquiring (2013).
xix. The phrase ‘kitchen sink dramas’ was coined in the 1950s
and early 1960s to describe a British cultural movement that
used a style of social realism in theatre, art, novels and plays to
depict the domestic lives of predominantly working-class peo-
ple to explore controversial social and political issues.
xx. The title of an article by Ruth Levitas, ‘Looking for the Blue:
The necessity of Utopia’.

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 209

58

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 210

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 211

Part four

Coming Together and Falling Apart.

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 Introduction to part four.

Jane Speedy.

Part four of this book examines the collaborative processes of

mourning and moving on with life, both for this group of
people and this genre of work. Chapter seven, ‘Remembering
Sue’, explores a presence of absence that exists in the
restorative space of mourning that took place between “that
212 which was lost’ and ‘that which continued to exist’ in this group
of inquirers (Kirkpatrick, 2017).

In remembering or re-membering our friend and colleague Sue

in an artful and collaborative way that honours both her
absence and presence in our midst, we offer our readers a
different practice of re-membering to established Western
traditions of ‘coming to terms with things’ (Speedy, 2008:137-
142).

Carrying a similar sense of absence and presence, chapter

eight looks at the contexts and atmospheres in which this kind
of work might take place within the academy. This book is
regarded almost as a ‘swansong’ for the collaborative, artful
inquiry-making that has emerged from the University of Bristol.
At the same time this juxtaposition of ideas and practices has
been taken up, and continues, elsewhere – in particular at the
University of Edinburgh.

This artful combination of more-than-human ideas and

more-than-‘academic’ practices and practitioners has a
tendency to emerge and develop in collaborative atmospheres
of attunement and affinity rather than of institutional hierarchy
(see: Manning and Massumi, 2014), which is a difficult, but not
impossible, environment to create within, betwixt and between
twenty-first century communities and academies. These ways
of working, and the ethical know-how that emerges with them
(Speedy, 2012), are never long-lived. They do not ‘belong’
anywhere or to any particular body or bodies, they are,
rather, more of an intentionally ‘pop-up’ presence with a
built-in sense of their own absence and obsolescence.

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 Chapter seven. Remembering Sue: Last Writes.

Davina Kirkpatrick, Mike Gallant, Alys Mendus and Tessa

Wyatt with Melissa Dunlop, Carol Laidler,
Artemi Sakellariadis, Jane Speedy and Jonathan Wyatt.

Sue Porter, 1954-2017, succeeded by her husband

Glenn Hall, her brother Philip and her little old mum
up in Minchinhampton; two red dogs, Morgan and
Eric; multitudes of friends, colleagues and students; 213
a murder of crows, a flight of cormorants and a
gaggle of artful collaborative inquirers. She left
behind a number of electric wheelchairs, many
scarves, piles of modernist jewellery and paintings,
a many-windowed house overlooking the Usk,
and a vast open space in which to write, make art,
take off our clothes, make love by still waters, and
dance.

Friday 24th November 2017: 6:20pm

In the sterile room; it’s the lights more than anything, the ticking
clock, the uniform chairs, the green baize notice board marked
only with drawing pins.
We crack the silence with nervous jokes and Jane stands to
make a diagram of the history of this thing that has brought us
here. Of Jane and Sue and the development of collaborative
writing; it spills excitedly on to two, three, four, five pages. Tess
and Davina hold the sheets and then we talk.

I need to care about something. Where does emptiness come

from? How can it be so noisy?
I do care about being here remembering Sue; holding the
presence of her absence. I have cried in this room before. I’m
part of this history that Jane told, interleaved and interwoven
with these people present and these people absent, some
dead.
I remember the first time I met her. I was looking for a doorway,
an opening to the next place, the next journey, or was it the
continuance of the present journey?i It was dark outside and the
lighting was dim in the room. There were biscuits. There was
Sue’s presence. She was talking but I felt more she was

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 listening. Didn’t she have a thing she did with her eyebrows?
That made the presence of the unspoken thoughts clear. As if
she were listening with her eyes.

Dear Sue,
This time we started with a talk about ‘white running
man’ii which would have amused you as a white woman
on wheels ....I did not bring a wheel chair because the
electric one is broken, and I hate being pushed around. I
hate being pushed around. But now I am here I have
214 remembered how much walking there is. They have
replaced the pee-able carpeting with wooden flooring in
most places, although there is still carpet for cripples to
pee on in our work room.iii
Why am I telling you all this? Because now I am here I
think I might cry unless I maintain a chatty tone.
I missed you doing the ‘you and me’ presentation.
I miss you at the university.
I miss you at the café.
You’re here,
You’re here in the talk of lemon curdy pudding,iv here in
the image of your chair that could rise to great heights.
You’re here in the sound of your voice; its dry, deliberate
wit. You’re here in the circle in this room, like you were
five or six years ago, writing and making red with us all
(Gale et al., 2013).v You’re here in other ways, other
ways I have forgotten; here in the missed opportunities,
the moments we didn’t linger, the time we didn’t get.
You’re here in a regret, you’re here in how you brought
us together, you’re here, you’re present, even in your ...
No, I’m not going to say it. I refuse. It’s just too obvious,
even if it is true, and I refuse. You’re here and that’s it.
You’re just here.
And I am aware, in this room with its Flotex carpet, that
although you would be pleased I stood firm alongside
the word cripple, you would have noticed, maybe you
even have noticed, that we have started once again,
with the writing, not the making …
I see no reason why art and making cannot exist without
words, for instance ...

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61

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63

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65

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 221

66

67

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 221 25/05/2021 13:47

 There is no one recipe for memorialising a life. No manual
for reconstructing the shattered narratives of lives that have
intersected with the one whose body no longer responds in
the old expected ways. When the breathing stops. When
the heart.
Out of the blue. From a cloudless sky, shattering the
predictable news of the day.
Of course, there are the cultural rituals: the funeral, a
religious service perhaps. But how does a collaborative
writing group, a loose collection of academics, educators,
222 artists; how do we, as such a band of sisters and brothers,
gather our grief; re-member? This chapter is a record, in
word and image, of our gathering for Sue (and most
certainly also for us), when we came together to create our
own unique eulogy, to discover how our paths might move
on beyond this fracture in our lives. Yes, this work is in a
sense a signpost, a signpost at a major junction of loosely
trodden tracks, of the muddy doggy fox-runs that were, are
and will be our lives.
At the end of November 2017 we had come back to
Ammerdown, that familiar retreat in the southern English
countryside where most had been many times before, with
the intention of celebrating a life and exploring the nature of
personal and shared grief; of how that might be expressed
through collaborative art-making and writing. This
chapter follows a loose chronology (inevitably fragmentary)
of a long weekend of discovery, the traces of experience of
a very particular collective biography, grieving Sue.
(Writing written retrospectively is in bold).

Saturday 25th November 2017: 4.45 pm

What did Sue like? The art materials were spread around the
room.
Crows, votive legs and trees, red dogs and knickers.
I fell into my recent safe way of working with silhouettes and
paper cuts. Then tried the mono printing - not splashing large
amounts of teal paint around the room, but carefully adding a
thin layer of black onto a piece of perspex.
The magic happened as I learnt how to use the process. Circles
of crowsvi (small, medium and large) appeared; crows on
magazine paper, text, printing with thick black paint, thin black
paint, layers printing crows, ghosting shadows, burnishing

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 edges, scribbling nonsense.
I remember how you challenged me. I always started, you said,
with words, with the talking, then the writing, never the making,
and how you quoted the a/r/tographers (Springgay et al., 2007)
that I gave you to read right back at me.

Loss, shift, and rupture are foundational concepts or

metonyms for a/r/tography. They create openings, they
displace meaning, and they allow for slippages. Loss,
shift, and rupture create presence through absence, they
become tactile, felt, and seen. (Springgay et al., 2005) 223

And you have been here in the process of making; making has
absorbed you. It is the making that makes this a different kind
of remembering: remembering from all the talking and writing
and gatherings of people that have gone into the other
memorials.

It was mentioned that Sue liked looking at cormorants drying

their 'wing pits' and how she would sit for hours at a window in
Laurghne watching them. Cormorants are not as easy to draw
as crows.
The white paint stuck to the masks, the colours were wrong, the
shapes looked like double-headed Nazi eagles. The birds were
fighting me, refusing to play nice.
Be intuitive, don't worry about mistakes; go with it! I tried a
knicker mandala – which had to become a thong, and a lot
of cormorants went in the bin. Jane’s poem crept on to some
crows.
Dropped dead, silence,
No more chats,
An empty space where you used to be
Empty, loss.
A lot of cormorants are in the bin.

I can’t find the art work that I did for you this morning. If I could
find it. If I could find you.
I have used A3 paper. Or card. Card I think. You needed A3
space, I felt.

She liked looking out the window along the estuary – the picture
of the red dogs, alert sentinels commanding the road. She liked
watching cormorants lifting their wings, Patti Smith and Patti
Smith concerts, votive legs and silver brooches and modernist

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 223 25/05/2021 13:47

 paintings and mid-century furniture.
She wanted to bring the outside in. She liked crows, crows
in the branches of the trees, black against the sky. She had
a dead crow roadkill frozen in her deep freeze and she asked
me if I knew a taxidermist. I did, as it happened, and I sent her
the email, but it didn’t work out. I’m not sure why, only that the
crow was still in the deep freeze when she died and at some
point the deep freeze was moved and left unplugged for four
days before it was remembered, too late for the crow.

224 but we still don’t have you, we still can’t get you back,
no matter how much beauty we make … no matter how
many crows, cormorants and red dogs we make … we
can’t make you….

The thing is, I didn’t really ever know Sue – sure, we shared
spaces, wrote into one another’s words and images,
blasphemed together, posed together, passed through the
same doors. So now, when I seek out what or how to express
‘Being with Sue’, I feel stuck on what is the nature of knowing!

The group breathes in and out, here in the room, our words
bouncing and echoing from one image, one story to another, a
giving to, an offering, a lighting up, an illumination, a shedding
light, a listening, a remembering.

So the tree chose her today and she felt comfortable to go with
the flow and see where that would take her. She had cut out
some more images of trees, and the word ‘breathe’ because
what it said underneath went straight to her heart. And then
she instantly regretted the resonance, realising that this is not
about her. And when later her feet had taken her outside to the
leaves and she was no longer thinking about a collage, she still
looked for ‘Breathe’, still wondering how she could weave that
in, thinking she wanted to will the leaves to breathe themselves
back into life, or her friends to will their missing friend back in
their midst, keeping her alive in the stories they tell and the art
that they make ….

I am Gesso, all thick and white

Like a smutty putty, I am slathered all over somebody’s
old images
Leave me to set
You do not care as you slop me on, leaving remnants

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 smeared on blue plastic cloth
I wait
The heat of the room, the busy-ness of the bodies
intensely doing, mixing, rolling, splatting, washing up
Someone returns to me.

Wetting the paper and rubbing inexpertly at the paper, again

and again, rubbing and shredding the milky white back of the
paper into worms, with my fingers again and again, my
impatience scrubbing through the layers of paper, gouging
holes, scarring tears. Sue had more delicacy and much more 225
patience, much more care. Or rather I imagine she did.

I keep starting and erasing the words.

What if I don’t write?
I’m thinking about Sue writingvii about stopping before the
allotted time, allowing herself to stop, to not be the good girl, to
not fill the space.
I liked when the room was set up, before the making began full
of potential and possibility and then the shared play.
I can’t seem to do this, pull myself from image to word. I think
I’m going to fail this time round.
Sue would have written beautifully and lyrically, noticing the
shifts in energy between us, the nuanced details, noticing the
unnoticed.

How to use this process? What process? What constitutes

collaboration, collaborative writing? I want to write into the
personal emotion, to open my own explorations of self and
other to that melding, mixing metamorphosis – that metabolism
on the contact boundary as Fritzviii would have it.

Just as we thought to take a walk

on the wilder side of the fence
over the stile and far away
down came the hail in little jewels
and shut out the sun

Just as well we explored the labyrinth

in the dewy, shaded endings as
down came the hail in little jewels
and shut out the sun

the ending ….

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 Now, the red leaves fall
and in the gasping last gusts
the feather black bin bag ripped, recycled, barbed
and caught on the wired boundary fence
shaking, rattling and rolling –
a balancing crow hanging on
against the last storm
waiting for the new moon
energised, wounded, unwounded, confused
and darkly black in the
226 low light of autumn silhouette
So Sue, that is how I wanted to know now
how
to know you
amongst the falling November leaves.

The day Sue died we were in northern Vietnam. An idyllic

wooden hut overlooking the paddy fields
It poured with rain
We had sex.
Ventured out a little bit on some wonky pushbikes along paths
cut into the edges of the flooded fields
Soaked to the skin we peeled off our clothes
Had more sex
And some more
Sated, we slept in the next morning
Next day, I was first up and pulling back the mosi net I flicked
open my laptop to see what
was going on in the world
And saw Glenn’s postix
A sense of free-fall
So far away.
I got pregnant that day and for a while I felt like there was some
balance in the world – one in, one out
And then I wasn’t pregnant any more
And Sue still had gone …

One in, one out. Tired tears gathered and fell as they spoke of
satiated sex, procreation and loss upon loss. Collaborated felt
sensex spilled in the space between – the Flotex could take the
strain – encouraging Sue to join us, emergent amongst our art
materials and images. Layers of print, traces of previous
transfer created, rolled and revealed. Life leaving embers while

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 ashes blow in the wind, these bellows of creative endeavour
feeding the glowing fires of re-membering.

It takes some energy, this spiriting of time together, of bringing

the past and wrapping it carefully in the present. I imagine this
rubber-sheet plane of my present moment shaped, contorted
by the intervention of the experienced, and yet unseen
presence of Sue passing through, stopping in that instant
before moving on, tossing vitality affect (Stern, 2004) through
the folds of time.
227
This weekend your hand resting warmly in the small of
my back is sorely missed
I miss you
I miss your gravelly soft voice making a sardonic
comment here and there
I miss your sideways glances twinkling across the room
I miss those defining eyebrows.

So there you are; words are indeed obfuscating, and yet

apparently less so than just images (that are unlanguaged? Is
that a word?) The traces, the layers that print methods leave,
the multiplicities of images.
***
My dream in the night was of the labyrinth, built outside this
place where we are staying, writing, creating, remembering Sue.
But in the dream it had been built upon a swimming pool, as
a means of filling in the space, of changing its purpose. It was
only half built though and water seeped up around the stones,
as if the decision to put it there was tentative, or recent, or an
unhappy one. A single woman lived in the house, and looked
back on the life within it, as she stared out of the back door
toward the water-logged muddle, the rocky maze. She had
arranged the changes that were made. They were to say that
things were not the same, and would not be the same again.
I watched the woman, me a floating dreamer, and her a solid,
dark, rather curvaceous, painterly figure. If she was sad she did
not want anyone to know that. She had decided not to be. And
she was someone who believes such things can be decided.
She had covered the pool with a labyrinth. A riddle to wander
within, a spiritual journey, in place of the play the pool had
signified, invited. All gone now; over with. I had arrived
somewhere new, only to witness an ending.

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 ***
Collaborative writing can be a messy business: hidden red
lines in the sand may be crossed, and buttons pushed with
explosive results. The dynamics of a supposedly leaderless
and potentially rudderless gaggle of ‘creatives’ sparks with
energy and potential.

‘Messiahs’ are thrown up in order to be shot down; a

common enemy set against an indulgent and bountiful
carer; the pre-conscious striving for trust and safety in a
228 single partner within a potentially dangerous tribe (Bion,
1961). There are the maintenance needs of the group and
the individual needs of group members as well as the
(apparently) agreed task we have set ourselves (Adair,
1973). We noticed how this time it seemed to be different.
Put simply, we seemed to be getting on better together,
supporting each other more in our explorations of grief.

We are all here collectively together in Remembering Sue,

knowing there are so many different ways to ‘know’
someone and somehow energetically giving space so that
all have their own authentic experience with the ‘memory
work’ (Haug et al., 1987). And as time goes on, for many it
is through the art that we move forward, explore unspoken
emotions, embody our own journey with Sue, now, then and
in the future. I wonder if the art can give an illusion of an
invisibility cloak (Rowling 1997), a place to play and print
and make ... not give words.

It is a new day. This morning we made art rather than

words. It is a way of externalising our emotion, giving it
distance so that we can look back at ourselves with some
new perspective. Sue took herself to the thirty-second
century to look back on her place in the twenty-first
century (see earlier in this volume). We looked at visual
images. Talking about our art-making we notice and put
words to them. We talk about words; their impossibility,
their irrelevance, their intrusion, their necessity. People feel
differently. About words. And about Sue. But as we share
what we have written, we begin to feel together. It begins
to come alive, the grieving. And in coming alive we want
to finish, to end for now, to shut it down, this emotion, this
physicality, this visceral process. I wonder about the body;
the asset that becomes a liability, all the more precious as

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 the vulnerability increases. It reminds us of Sue’s body, of
pain, of carrying on. Until she didn’t.

Sunday 26th November 2017: 10.45am

This morning there was frost

coating the cars outside
a shock behind the curtain

This morning at breakfast 229

some told tales
of evening encounters

This morning
we found ourselves talking
with yesterday’s pages and colours and textures
between us

a tumble, a weeping
of love and joy and loss and struggle

This morning, this slow-slipped morning

this slow-slipped morning with Sue
with Sue
mourning Sue

The art contains fragments; new ideas that contain something

of the old. What was present peeling away, until the remnants
slip to the ground, or blown away on the breeze, or simply
aren’t there anymore. I think about the process of
re-absorption, into the whole, of integration into us. I did not
know what would happen when I offered up this process but I
did know its potential for trace, repetition – 'yet each retracing
is an original' (Ingold, 2000/01).

Still stuttering. We are stuttering slowly forward as much as we

are still. Still stuttering. There is much stillness in what
happens here, much silence in our talking, which may get lost
in the writing or in the doing; I counted thirty-five ticks at some
point this morning, and if you add in the thirty-five tocks that is
quite a long time for nine people to be silent.

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 I wasn’t expecting a writing retreat on remembering Sue to be
so difficult. We gather and we talk, and write, and make art, as
we’ve done many times before, all in Sue’s memory and yet we
seem, more than a day into the retreat, to still be stuttering a
slow way forward.

Time past, time presentxi and time arsing about ... reflecting on
images laid out.

In the ecotone, stepping through the no-mans-land

230 Are we in the river or now in the estuary
The marginal spaces
Yet the motion from rolling, cutting, observing and the
perspiration from practice
Keeps going
The energy changes
The words shared earlier
The grief left hanging in the air
Now shaken slightly and becoming
Rewritten
Or re-drawn.

Caught by the richness, the subtle connection of image and

process but also how that process has shifted with each
person, the ‘serious play’ (Schechner, 1993). The anxiety, the
uncomfortable-ness, the frustration of working with and around
people outweighed in this moment by the visual diversity,
depth, texture, of multiples spilled over the floor.

Most of our talking (and writing, and arting, and doing and
playing) revolves around Sue, but it is ten months on from when
she quietly slipped away and we occasionally acknowledge that
this is happening today against the backdrop of other big things
going on for us right now - and here we are, remembering Sue.

Sue’s voice was one I admired so much. Quiet, beautiful,

noticing the details, summing up. Being rude at just the right
moments. The text message that pinged on my phone three
weeks after you died, telling me how happy you were floating
on the boat and how you’d eaten all the cake and can I just say
I don’t believe in life after death but I knew it was from you any-
way. DylanThomasyblackbroilingsortofaway, it’s all gone in an
instant, in the wink of an eye, in a ping of a ring of a phone.
And my mind fills with holes, cutout, cutup, and all the meaning

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 230 25/05/2021 13:47

 leaks out on to the Flotex.

There is a sorrowful statue outside the Russell Room. It has

been sitting there all on its own for years, its head bowed down,
buried in its folded arms. The small fountain at its feet may have
tried to cheer the statue up but by now it, too, has given up and
stands still, its idle presence reminiscent of the jollity that might
have once been. I want to bring the statue in, welcome it into
our fold and ask it to write of its pain with us. It, too, has known
Sue. I want to hug it, to make it feel better, but know it’s too
cold and set in its ways to lift its head up and smile. 231

It’s hard grieving, delving, stepping into the space

The void and getting lost there
The art helps
Slowly rebuilding life, diffracted slightly to what it was
before
Each print, and cut moving a step further out of the
Emptiness
A remembering and forgetting
How long can a wake go on?
Three days, ten chapters?
A book and a year?

As the hours passed with intense reflection by day and

rumination by night, the supportive environment fed
soul-searching and day-dreaming, and we sought familiar
comfort blankets of our pasts. And yet we were not
altogether calm and contemplative. There was an edgy
energy, a dissonant tension, more within our individual bod-
ies than between members of the group. We found
ourselves digging into our own personal repositories of
loss, trauma, passing and rupture. Searching for
wholesome and satisfying gestalts, hoping in our
structure-seeking minds to find a familiar pattern, a
convenient suspension file in which to hold safely (in
suspense) the truths of our intersecting experiences, to
close the drawer of our filing cabinet long enough to take
breath and re-energise our spirits. These personal patterns
of grief and loss spilled into our writing, and we recognised
how we were supporting each other, honouring the intensity
of others’ grief, hearing with our open eyes and ears (and
even our eyebrows perhaps?) the raw emotion of the words

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 231 25/05/2021 13:47

 we had scribed and subsequently read aloud to each other.
These stories have not appeared in this narrative, for this is
our biography of Sue, not a record of every word and image
shared within that powerful long weekend.
By attending to the needs of individuals and the group,
recognising the inevitable dynamics of such gatherings and
their developing process (Rogers, 1970), we were able to
allow the intrusion of Sue into the images and words of our
minds as we relaxed further into this ‘safe space’.

232 Sunday 26th November: 3.50pm

Echoes back, echoes forward, life is a succession of moments -

I like the confusion - we are performing our loss. I tell myself off
for allowing such a drift away from here and now, this collective
of explorers into life and death.

Sue found Jonathan in the wood today and got a lift

back with him
Stumbling through the sticky, clarty mud
He almost fell over her
He picked her up
Unfurled her in the palm of his hand and holding her
close
Safely nestled her in his pocket
for the long walk back to Ammerdown.
Now she lies, still slightly sticky on the Flotex
A piss-poor framing
Straight legs
Bent legs
Blue legs
So many legs
A muddy path
Somewhere a chair could not go
Out-of-bounds to Sue once
Was in bounds again
Those legs
Those dogs
Sue
On a walk?

Echoes back, echoes forward

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 232 25/05/2021 13:47

 LOVE
Love for Sue and for this process of collaborative inquiry
I am seeing the magic begin to happen
My hands are twitching wanting to be playing with the
black ink
To bring a dark, dusky agency to my side of the
assemblage of art that grows in the centre of the room
Inspired by others creations and words
I want to make more
Make more art
Make more meaning 233
Into this space

Echoes back, echoes forward

Sue is lying on the floor, a little contorted, a black and white

representation of her whole self.
The Inspector takes a step back.
‘Where’s the evidence then, constable?’ he inquires. ‘What the
fuck’s gone on here?’
‘Well, that’s the interesting thing ma’am’, says the constable, ‘it
appears to be still going on now!’
‘Indeed …?’
‘The protagonist, a label called Sue, has intervened in her own
investigation and, to put it bluntly, I can’t help thinking we’re in
danger of getting hoist on a petardxii or two …’
The inspector is shaking her head.
‘Come on constable,’ she says, ‘you know better than this –
concrete evidence, concrete evidence is the name of the game.
What are the objects saying to us; where are they? And where
the fuck’s the CSI?’xiii
‘They came and went ma’am – said they couldn’t find anything
that would stand up in court – said it’s down to us.’
‘Typical – no-one taking responsibility, no-one got the answers
– the label just appeared you said?’
‘Yes ma’am, apparently just grew out of the soil underfoot!’
‘Well, what the fuck now then?’

Echoes back, echoes forward

I do like a good murder

And so I learn did Sue
A good
Murder of crows

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 233 25/05/2021 13:47

 Echoes back, echoes forward

Back in the room Jonathan tells us of how he found a piece of

paper in the mud and he places it on the floor. It’s a sticky label
with a hand-written S U E on it and we make another collective
noise, this time an in breath, a taking in, a breath, a Sue breath.

He came back from the pub with you in his pocket.

Carol came back from the woods with muddy dog paw
234 prints right up her legs ... no I don’t want to tell you
about what we’ve been doing, after all, if you still
exist in any shape or form, you already know that. I
want to ask you what you would do now … I’d suggest
you’d stay with the confusion … you’d enjoy the
confusion and smile, which would, about now, be giving
you a bit of a headache.

It’s interesting to see how different people respond to not

knowing what the fuck to do, what the fuck is going on, and to
wonder whether these are to do with what’s happening now, or
to do with our personal and professional histories. Are we
experiencing ‘disciplined’ confusions?

Sing a song of Ammerdown a pocket full of Alysxiv

Four red dogs and 9 crows ate a lemon curdy pie
When the pie was eaten the birds began to sing
Oh wasn't that a collaborative dish to set in memory of
Sue

Sue was in her heaven house looking out the window

Jon was in the Kitchen eating all the food
The maidxv was in the garden hanging out the knickers
When down came a cormorant and dried its wing pits

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 234 25/05/2021 13:47

 235

68

The surprising, even discombobulating, intervention

of the still-sticky name label ‘SUE’ acted as an extreme
example of the agency of objects. As it lay on the floor
amongst our art-making its revenant power made more
sense of our visceral experience, the felt sense of absence
and the search for representative objects: an additional
diffraction grating (Barad, 2003) through which to peer into
the traces of Sue’s passing through us all.

Sunday November 26th 2017: 4.40pm

What is the nature of collaborative grieving?

I am thinking about grieving, and the process of meaning
reconstruction (Neimeyer 2002) and us here, trying to construct
this process as we go. Should there be audio of this
discussion now, to help us remember what to write? Sue did
that. Sue’s input, missing, seems to call for some
reconfiguration of the group. A reconfiguration not from what
was but from what might have been. An imaginary present
based on memories of how it has been. Gaps arise,
unexpectedly, or perhaps they are obvious. What is happening

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 235 25/05/2021 13:47

 here today is we are carrying on. Without Sue. An expectation
of going on being alive. Even though we know we will all die.
How do we grieve? How do we remember? Are we doing it
right? Are we doing it? Is this grieving? Is that the same as
remembering Sue? And close around lurking just out of sight
are other losses. Some are in the room, others unspoken still.
Should we let them in? And then there is theory. The question of
whether we ought to do this more properly. With some
acknowledgement of theoretical, methodological ancestry.
What would it be? A bit of this and that? How do we integrate
236 all this? Are we moving backward or forward? Is this moment
part of it? And as I look again at the art on the floor I am aware
of the energy being evoked.

Grief - what does it look like? Enrobed in grief

Like a coat? Or encased in warm, sticky pudding

Hard to write now. We speak here of loss and pain and we know
little of each other. We are strangers. I realise I know nothing
of you, or you of me. Yet my heart leaps with sadness for each
of your losses, each of your sadnesses. We are here to mourn
not one death, not one loss, but many. All the liquid in my body
is gathering towards my eyes and nose, a pouring out and a
dribble.
We are speaking of loss and uncertainty, of not knowing, of the
sadness we carry and what more we will certainly meet.
It is what it is to be alive.
And words don’t and pictures don’t and tears don’t.
And even this feeling that is my feeling about you doesn’t.
I miss you.

I am wearing the earrings

I bought in Spain because
they reminded me of yours
and yesterday I asked Glenn if
I could have your silver leafy earrings
because then I would have something of yours to wear
things
these are not just things
they are YOUR things
they have their own agency
they have a particular power, a materiality, a secret
multi-storied life of their own

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 236 25/05/2021 13:47

 These kind of ideas are talked about these days by the likes of
Braidotti (2006) and Barad (2007), as post structuralist,
post-human ideas; they are referred to as the ‘new
materialities’... but their substance carries traces of very old
ways of knowing about the power of things.

A continuity, a multiplicity, a liveliness, a loveliness, a loneliness,

a gathering sense of being held in a shared space, ships
passing in the night, the green light blobs on the radar, just
enough to know they are there now, and then gone, passing,
influencing our journeys without the crashing, crushing 237
intersection of us-ness. I am moved by others’ emotive
connections, and setting that against the humour inherent in my
own ‘you’re in danger of going up your own arse’.

They speak of ‘dark dusky agency’: it brings me in contact with

the energy of the shadow and the illicit, the necessity of the
hidden or the forbidden. Sue had access to that – a dark, dusky
agency.

I want to write about rituals, the ritual we are creating here –

giving the time and the space to be, remember, laugh, cry,
create. The spontaneous creation of ritual; the fears – that we
don’t know, have forgotten, the way to do meaning-making
rituals. I remember the bodily sensation – tentativeness, sensing
and observing those around and of the power of being. I
remember the tentative stepping into and walking the labyrinth.

We all bring our assumptions, our own ‘rule book’ of how

collaborative writing is done, based on past experiences
and our daily work roles. A professional artist may privilege
one aspect more than an academic or psychotherapist, may
indeed remember differently ‘how it is done’. And yet
there is an intense quality of attention when our purpose
is shared. We do find that intensity alone, but there is the
additional commitment, expectation and warmth of others
being in the same physical space all agreeing to do this – to
write and create, allow one’s thoughts and ideas to bleed
into. To reverberate with, a recognition of tribe. One of our
tribe is dead, others are absent. Adjusting to change is
uncomfortable, spiked with ire and frustration, and weary
acceptance that we are not in control. Might collaborative
grieving simply be re-membering (Myerhoff, 1986; White,
1997; Hedtke & Winslade, 2004); reconfiguration of our

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 237 25/05/2021 13:47

 tribe?

Monday Morning, November 27th 2017

This has all been written sitting on hard chairs or the even
harder ground. I wonder how that has influenced our writing.
But we’ve been here before at Ammerdown. That was a very
intimate love making – no, love-aching – kind of process, for a
Sue that was still alive and well.

238 Each of us holding other dead loves in our memories. Each step
taking us nearer to our own death. Will you think of me? Will
you think of we? Of us when we are gone?

So, to return to this last write – Sue, you, you a-part with us;
what is the contract here? I didn’t get a chance to negotiate
that before you went. You thrust me into this uncertain position
of power. What is the dynamic of being amongst, of belonging
without having material contact? What a simplistic view of
material contact, and a glimpse of anger: ‘You thrust me …’
could be experienced as my lack of agency, I didn’t choose you
to go, to leave. You had to leave it seems, only partially known,
(how could it ever be otherwise?) You speak, mediated by
strands of colour, swirling across paper, now digitized, ossified
until corrupted in the Cloud or manipulated by hands of gods
choosing how to see and how to hear and how to maintain a
fluid homeostasis of this.

The art I am making is me - but there wouldn't have been any

crows if it hadn't been for this group, this time and Sue. There
wouldn't have been the sticky, velvet black, the magic that
happened as the factory art self-spun into action - dusky black
had agency. I have been using so much colour recently it has
been a refreshing contrast to use the black ink. To be
searching through to the dark side, playing with the grief in
the room, channelling it through a sticky, velvet, dusky black.
Death and crows and Sue. The collaborative knot of entangled
lives that is our existence. Touching upon, rubbing up against,
influencing, nurturing, scarring, warming, changing; each one
glowing for a moment, then gone, separately and together.

This morning sometimes I heard people's words but they

seemed to have too many different interpretations, not

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 238 25/05/2021 13:47

 necessarily those meant by the speaker. What does it mean to
collaborate? I assumed we would write into the writing, write
into the art. To merge and swirl the images into a coherent
whole - my assumption.

We’ve struggled over what it looks like to collaborate, what

collaboration does; what erasures, what cuts, what belongings,
what acknowledgements, we assume, make explicit, negotiate,
concede. We’ve noted the significance of histories and their
acknowledgements and belongings, their cuts and erasures.
What’s here and not here. What’s lost. What’s retrievable. 239
What’s redeemable. What’s not.

The parallel process of Melissa, who left early, speaking from

the grave to those left behind …. I have a sense of privilege in
being amongst the remaining, and also of being able to hear the
voice of one who mourns the loss. Perhaps a sense of
derealisation as I ponder over whether I am one of the dying or
one of the living … and yet there is a part of me that wants to
be clear that I am living because I am a-part. I am living
because of my presence as a separate part. So to hear Melissa
(mediated through time, space, the written word and another’s
voice before I even get a chance to bend it to my own world-
view), as apart from this collective, is at once confusing and
valuable in order to define in some way the permeable
boundaries of understanding, being and belonging.

The pictures and the art equipment are all packed up

Housekeeping has taken up most of the morning, we
have been
Clarifying the role of the group and
Photographing the prints.
I found talking as individuals about this harder than the
writing, reading aloud and talking
about Sue.

I’d have liked to go to Sue’s house

I heard so much about it
And that stained glass window

Their design growing in the artist’s studio

The beauty of the window, the story that it captured
That has agency and the window lives on and in and
through Sue.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 239 25/05/2021 13:47

 She is the window, but so is the artist and the glass
And glass moves – slowly but over time it begins to
slide, pool away
Changing, living beyond the maker, the dream, the
composition,
Remembering with motion.

And that home, Sue’s home, Sue’s window changes

As new people move into the space
But the presence, the energy still seeps and flows
240 The matter of the place, the home, the window, Sue,
give agency to whoever
lives there next.

And my home
I like the intrigue and the unexpected
But not things or people dropping dead
Drop, dead, gorgeous.

Coda
I have left the group early, re-entering the world of black
country roads and city streets, children, a house that hasn’t
been cleaned. I wanted to write again because now I feel like
one of the refracted images from the floor. A crow? A dog? An
old pair of knickers? I have enacted absence and yet I am still
present somewhere in the world, still here to wonder if you no-
tice the blank space I have left there.
I realise now how deep we had sunk, how far into whatever it
was, that we were. How closely we had edged up to the pain of
loss. How we had, somehow, in that higgledy process, opened
up a space for sharing in grief. And how hard it now is to
explain that space I have been in, sharing. It felt simple. But
here on the outside, it is quickly an experience that I cannot
discuss. Here it makes no sense.xvi
The gallows depths are close at hand and it is time to say
whatever is left to be said. All of it. Out. Now. And tomorrow you
will give it a final glance, one more going over perhaps, before
you parcel it up, pack it away, stick it somewhere safe for when
the next moment comes, the moment when you will take it all
back out and try to understand it again.
What is there?
What is there?
What is there?

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 240 25/05/2021 13:47

 Endnotes
i. Sue organised the Open Space sessions of ANINET.
ii. We were given a health and safety introduction from a
member of the Ammerdown staff where the fire exit sign was
referred to as ‘the white running man’.
iii. Flotex carpet, popular some years ago as a
hard-wearing, washable firm but ‘warm’ surface for domestic
kitchens, also suitable for wheelchairs, children’s nurseries and
art rooms.
iv. Lemon Curdy Pudding: 2 large eggs separated, 55g self-
raising flour, 285ml milk, 55g butter, 115g sugar, lemon, grated 241
rind and juice.
v. A collaborative writing retreat happened in 2012 at
Ammerdown.
vi. Crows that make us think of the poet Ted Hughes’ crows and
Max Porter’s poetic novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers.
vii. Sue writes about this experience in her notebook for her
PhD proposal notebook.
viii. Fritz Perls, the charismatic figure associated with the
development of Gestalt Psychotherapy (see Perls, Hefferline &
Goodman, 1953)
ix. Email from Glenn Hall, Sue’s husband, January 10,
2017.
x. Eugene Gendlin (1962; 1984), developing Carl Rogers’ hu-
manistic understanding of human being, suggested that by
focusing on the ‘felt sense’ we experience physiologically in our
bodies we can access ‘the more’, the additional understanding
of the nature of our moment-by-moment embodied existence
normally kept outside of our immediate awareness. In the
context of collaborative writing groups, see also the concept of
‘Gerald’ in Speedy, J. (2005) and broader concepts of
co-presence etc. in Gallant et al. (2014).
xi. This the start of a line from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets
(2009/1943).
xii. ‘Hoisted by one’s own petard’ is an old English saying that
means injured by the device that you intended to use to injure
others.
xiii. Crime Scene Investigation.
xiv. ‘Pocket’ refers to an earlier collaborative writing retreat
where the theme was pockets (see Chapter 5 Pockets).
xv. A Cornish term of endearment.
xvi. We have struggled as to how to explain being here to those
not? Note the implication that we are still ‘here’ that simply

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 241 25/05/2021 13:47

 slipped out of my writing consciousness. This retreating space
in which we have all come forward and shared the intimacy
and vulnerability of writing, listening, eating, being together. I
think of the story Explaining death to the dog? (Perabo, 2000) –
something that feels impossible. It will be in the words – an
essence, a maturation of the experience of being
together.

242

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 243

69

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 243 25/05/2021 13:47

 244

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 244 25/05/2021 13:47

 Epilogue.

Jonathan Wyatt and Jane Speedy.

It’s April 2020. Due to the spread of COVID-19 we, many

millions of us across the world, are in what our governments are
calling epithets such as ‘lockdown’, ‘rest in place’, or ‘stay at
home’ regimes. In the UK the majority seems to accept it as in
our best interests only to go out to brave the supermarkets or
for a walk. We do not see our friends, we don’t go out to work,
we don’t visit any of the places that we are used to visiting 245
and assume we have a right to visit. They are too far away or
closed; restaurants, cafés, addresses, will continue to be for
weeks. To leave home is to put ourselves and others at risk, we
are told (and we, mostly, seem to agree). People are becoming
sick, too many are losing their lives, the politics of inequality
and injustice enmeshed in these risks, these vulnerabilities,
these losses. The virus does not discriminate, but our systems
and structures do. The people we laud for their service at this
time and who are most at risk, like those who nurse us when
we’re ill or serve us in supermarkets, are those we have taken
for granted and pay less well.

We are in a time out of place, a place out of time, a world

disrupted, disturbed. Or it may be that that’s how the world
was before: disturbed, disrupted, and, surely, unsustainable.
Maybe the pandemic is our chickens coming home to roost,
a fitting response to humanity’s hubris; and/or the pandemic
and its impact is an opportunity for the world, for us, to pause,
take stock, wonder and imagine how life could be otherwise,
a demand we get out of ourselves and use our imagination.
The universe is giving us another chance, one more chance, to
learn. Perhaps.

It feels fitting, poignant, to be writing this epilogue during the

time of this pandemic, given how the introduction to the book
was written during snowstorm Emma, the ‘beast from the east’,
which meant the writers could not meet together as planned
and were, in some cases, stranded, either in or away from their
homes, isolated from each other. If we knew what was to come
some years down the line, we would have been more grateful
for how quickly that crisis passed.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 245 25/05/2021 13:47

 The poignancy also connects with what makes ‘artful
collaborative writing’, and what makes Sue Porter so much part
of the lives of all of us who have contributed to this book.
Writing, art, performance, and bringing these together as this
book does (and as Sue did), are a way of challenging and
disrupting the isolation of academic and professional work, and
(as we are experiencing now, writ large) the isolation of life itself.
Whether the artful collaborative inquiry has been undertaken by
people in rooms together, the presence of bodies together key
to what emerges, or by writers/makers exchanging their
246 material remotely in some way, connection, ‘flesh-to-flesh
scholarship’ (Spry, 2001:726) is at the heart of the work and at
the heart of this book.

I am writing also at a time of personal disruption, where I am

not living at home but in a nearby flat, the early days of an
intimate world turning upside down, inside out. The view
outside this Edinburgh window is different from the one I have
become used to writing with. The cold April sun shines outside,
a narrow band carving its way into the living room across the
wood-laminate floor and the grey, unfamiliar rug.

I haven’t been able to write for weeks, even months. Jane sent
me a gentle nudge two weeks ago to say that if I had time for
a project with Sophie Tamas at Carleton University in Canada
collecting stories of living in the coronavirus,i which she’d seen
I’d posted on Facebook, then might I not also have time for
writing the epilogue to this book, which I have been part of from
the start but distant from for too long.

It is only today, a lockdown weekend in April 2020, where I

have found the space to breathe and think and write. I have
been reacquainting myself with this book during the past week
in my new, temporary home. So much of the book is familiar
from those occasions of being in the spaces and places the
text takes us to. Ammerdown, Hawkswood, Fernhill, the top
floor of the Graduate School of Education at Bristol. South-west
UK gatherings of unruly, rebellious, lively, heartfelt, heartening,
angry writers, artists and performers. I am nostalgic for those
times when it was permissible for bodies not living together to
share the same room. When it was possible for bodies to touch,
as they do throughout this book.

This is a book about collaboration, about the ethics and

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 246 25/05/2021 13:47

 aesthetics that are possible as we work and create together.
Collaboration, and its ethics and aesthetics, was at the core of
the Narrative Inquiry Centre (NIC) that Jane Speedy established
in the early 2000s, and its life continues to be felt through the
Artful Narrative Inquiry Network (ANI-Net). The NIC brought
people together from Bristol, the south-west of England, the
UK, Europe, and beyond; from many, varying backgrounds,
professions and experiences. The centre brought us together,
caught up those of us lucky to be around at the time (for me, it
was when I was undertaking my doctoral programme, between
2004 and 2008) and took us flying and whirling in unexpected 247
directions and to unexpected places. The NIC managed to find
a place at the University of Bristol, an august, conservative,
traditional institution, the centre both belonging in and
challenging to the customs, practices and regimes of that body.
The NIC took the university, and all of us, by surprise; it’s a
tribute to the NIC that that ANI-Net continues and is still
connected to the university; and it’s a tribute to the NIC that this
book is possible.

The NIC, ANI-Net, and this book all speak to how much we
need each other, and will continue to do so, in our collective,
uncertain future. Not only for support, for community, but in
order to produce and create, and to do so not for the sake of
meeting targets and institutional expectations but as an
expression of the joy and pain of life itself:

‘And why am I so outcome-focused? Why do I believe this

stuff is only, if and only if, valuable if it leads to an outcome? A
three-star-plus paper. Look what they done to my soul, ma. Can
I reclaim an embodied me in two days? Can I begin not to give
a shit about the Academy which has been my home for twenty
years in two days?’ (‘Riffing off Tami’,142).

This book’s playfulness, its critical, lyrical, performative texts,

reclaims the embodied scholar-practitioner-writer-artist-
performer, and manages, at the same time, to give a shit. It
gives a shit about what matters: “This listening, this empathy,
this aesthetic ethic of collaboration” (‘Pockets’, 263).

The work of the NIC and ANI-Net has found form, shape and
energy in a more recent project in Edinburgh, the Centre for
Creative-Relational Inquiry (CCRI),ii where artists, staff and
students in the academy, and practitioners of various disciplines

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 247 25/05/2021 13:47

 are all, like the NIC, seeking to find ways to do scholarship
differently. They are working at undertaking inquiry that places
the relational at its heart, attuned to what does and doesn’t
matter:

Because things happen – work, love, joy – through the

relational. We are relational beings, and we are always
already a part of larger communities of belonging and
communities of practice, we just forget it. So …
practicing creative-relational research in the
248 academy can serve as an intervention that invites and
rejects. That invites as it rejects. That performs a
continuous movement of inviting-in-rejecting. Invites
small, sometimes silent, encounters. Encounters that
deepen our commitment to research that matters.
(Harris, 2020: 16-25)

CCRI seeks, as does this book, to offer ‘a space [and] time

together [to] riff off and into each other’s words and lives/
syncopation/rhythm’ (Pockets). I think Sue Porter would have
felt at home in CCRI, and with its aspiration for the thoughtful,
present, personal, positioned, artful, collaborative, committed
scholarship her presence brought over the years to the life of
NIC.

Following its inception in the early 2000s, the NIC was

periodically ‘reviewed’ under Bristol’s processes, where the
centre was assessed as to how it was performing against the
set institutional criteria for research centres. These criteria
prioritised neo-liberal, individualised, funding-driven measures
of ‘success’, which made the NIC vulnerable. CCRI will be
reviewed in the coming year, COVID-19 permitting, and its
survival is also at risk. CCRI’s emphasis, like NIC’s, on the
personal, the embodied and the relational does not easily lend
itself to research grant success (although there have been
significant ones). Our hope is that, whatever the formal outcome
of the review, the power of CCRI’s work will continue to find its
way, as with ANI-NET’s continuing presence, to bringing people
together (remotely or otherwise) to create meaningful, artful,
collaborative inquiries.

***

An historical/conceptual and somewhat time-bending note for

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 248 25/05/2021 13:47

 thirty-second century readers from Seema Shrenk (in
collaboration with the 3291 global archaeological symposium
discussants and their body of work/work of bodies): the above
epilogue by Wyatt was written towards the beginning of the first
global COVID-19 outbreak, at some point in early-to-mid 2020,
and is quoted ‘verbatim’ here. Wyatt is writing from Edinburgh,
the then seat of the devolved Scottish (Alban) parliament. He
is writing (unbeknownst to himself) several years before the
time-of-the-disunification of the so-called ‘United Kingdom’;
the collapse of the first incarnation of the European Union, and
Edinburgh’s (now Dùn Èideann’s) rise to prominence in the great 249
post-colonial and inter-species land rights movements (in
collaboration with the (then) peoples and creatures of Te
Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotoarea (then Wellington, New Zealand).

Wyatt was writing several decades in advance of the death (and

sustainable rebirth) of the advanced capitalist economies. He
shows some prescience in his comments about the
second chances the universe was affording humanity during
such times, but nonetheless, he refrains from straying into the
adjacent territories of speculative fabulation (SF), and/or
science fiction (Haraway, 2016) and from predicting the
scholarly and globally sustainable cross-species collaborations
of future symposia such as our own (Shrenk et al., 3291a). As
was mentioned in the various layers of introductions to this
book, the explorations into artful collaboration(s) presented in
this volume were taking place at a time (the early
twenty-first century) when the generation of impossibility(s)
was a radical achievement and a minor gesture an often seen,
but rarely cited (and barely sighted) occurrence (see: Manning,
2016).

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 249 25/05/2021 13:47

 Endnotes
i. https://carleton.ca/emogeolab/coronotes/
ii.https://www.ed.ac.uk/health/research/centres/ccri

250

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 251

70

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 252

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artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 261 25/05/2021 13:47

 List of contributors.

Joanne Barber is a retired university lecturer in counselling

from Newfoundland, Canada and a member of the
collaborative artful narrative inquiry network (CANI-net) at the
University of Bristol, UK. She has a lifelong love of writing and
telling stories: an attribute that her grandchildren in Australia
particularly benefit from.

Prue Bramwell-Davis’ doctorate explored the bridges

262 between visual thinking and the development of wise design
skills. This work grew out of teaching visual thinking and
user-centred principles to engineers learning industrial design.
Later she taught research skills to textile design practitioners
at the Royal College of Art. She is now exploring the kinds of
knowledge generated by the intelligence of the hands. Her
research is grounded in her own practice as an exhibiting
textiles designer making various constructed textile forms such
as rag-rugs, sprang and spinning. A paper in the recently
published ‘Storytelling: Global Reflections on Narrative’ (Brill:
2019) maps knowledge perceived by the hands onto broader
social and personal narratives.

Catriona Brodie is a policy and quality assurance officer for

Kent County Council. She is also a part-time PhD student at the
University of Hull and is currently writing up her thesis, which
focuses on mental health and spirituality. Catriona loves to walk
along the cliff tops near her home in Walmer and swim in the
sea.

Laurinda Brown is a retired reader in mathematics teacher

education from the University of Bristol. She enjoys editing,
particularly international mathematics education journals and,
also, recently Storytelling: Global Reflections on Narrative
(2019).

Marion Donaldson is a qualified teacher of the visually

impaired. She is currently freelance, working ad hoc for the
RNIB (Royal National Institute for the blind, UK) and
supervising teaching placements for Birmingham University.
Marion is preparing to carry out narrative research in the area of
SEN (Special Educational Needs) and inclusion.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 262 25/05/2021 13:47

 Melissa Dunlop is a doctoral researcher at the University of
Edinburgh, writing a ‘something’ to do with psychotherapy and
fiction and indulging loves of language, the human condition,
creative, collaborative and relational processes. She lives and
works as a psychotherapist in Bristol, UK.
Website: www.melissadunlop.com

Angela Dweck: Note taker. (Scandinavian and Afro-Chinese

languages grouping) Pervasive Archaeologies Network.

Erik the Red, Irish terrier, belonging to Sue Porter. 263

Janice Filer is an International Trainer of Sherborne

Developmental Movement. She supervises students of dance
and play therapy alongside her work as a mental health and
well-being education consultant. As a trauma psychotherapist
with a private practice in North Bristol, she lives with her
husband and spends time painting, writing and enjoying family
life with their five children and eight grandchildren.

Ken Gale works in the Institute of Education at the University of

Plymouth, UK. He has published and presented widely on the
philosophy of education, research methodologies and
collaborative approaches to education practices. His most
recent book: Madness as Methodology: Bringing Concepts to
Life in Contemporary Theorising and Inquiry (2018) explores the
(non)methodological ways in which more-than-simply-human
forms of inquiry might take place.

Mike Gallant is a psychological therapist working in

adult mental health psychology for the Scottish National Health
Service and online through the Dr-Julian.com platform. He is an
occasional tutor in counselling and psychotherapy at the
University of Edinburgh.

Luci Gorell Barnes began her professional life in physical

theatre but migrated to the visual arts. Her work revolves
around themes of childhood, place and belonging, and she
writes and makes artist’s books, maps and animated films that
explore these ideas. Her participatory practice is concerned
with those who find themselves on the margins for one reason
or another and she develops responsive processes that aim to
help people think imaginatively with themselves and others.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 263 25/05/2021 13:47

 Owain Griffiths: Welsh border collie: archival sniffer dog:
pervasive archaeologies network (PAN).

Ho Ping Hung: Research Fellow (Beijing) Pervasive

Archaeologies Network (PAN).

Donna Kemp: Deconstructing the dominant three (bloody hell)

lines cannot (can they) express the fury she feels. Denied (bury)
that PhD which she won, the University of Bristol centenary
scholarship to do and did (buried). A tour de-force arts-based,
264 hyper-textual, writing as inquiry, recovery from trauma (buried
still), institutionalized silencing, perhaps (buried).

Davina Kirkpatrick is an artist, researcher and lecturer, utilising

arts-based methods and serious play to explore grief, loss and
chronic pain. She is a visiting Research Fellow at the University
of Plymouth. She is writing a novel about equivalent intensities
to grief and shares her life in Cornwall with a red dog.
Website: www.davinak.co.uk

Carol Laidler is an artist based at Spike Island, Bristol. Her

work explores memory, perception and the conflicting
narratives that emerge within the history of a place. It takes the
form of site-specific installations. She uses writing,
photography and walking as part of her process.
Website: www.alldaybreakfast.info

Marian Liebmann is a mediator and restorative justice

practitioner and trainer, also an art therapist who has worked in
a community mental health team for 19 years. She has
developed art therapy work with anger and conflict issues, and
runs workshops in these around the world. She has written/
edited 12 books on art therapy, mediation and restorative
justice.

Chara Lo is now working in both China and Taiwan as an ESL

(English as a second language) teacher. She has a doctorate
in education from the University of Bristol. Her doctoral thesis,
giving an account of her suicidal self, took the format of a play
script. She finds non-traditional texts easier spaces in which to
reveal the unseen.

Lynn Maddern received her doctorate from the University of

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 264 25/05/2021 13:47

 Bristol in 2011. During a career as a clinical psychologist in
Child Health and CAMHS (Child and adolescent mental health
service) settings, she specialized in developing services for
asylum seekers and refugees. She now provides expert witness
reports for immigration tribunals, in relation to unaccompanied
minors.

Marina Malthouse spent the last 20 years of her medical

career working as a palliative care physician. Attending to the
dying inspired her to broaden her approach to medicine and
medical education by studying further - an MA in Medical 265
Humanities at Swansea university, and an EdD in Narrative
Inquiry at the University of Bristol. She has now retired as a
physician but continues with academic work in Palliative
Medicine at Cardiff University; writing creatively and
volunteering in refugee camps and a holistic education centre
(both in Greece).

Viv Martin has a professional background in teaching,

counselling, and healthcare research. She is now retired and
still a curious story reader/listener/writer who prefers bridges to
walls.

Alys Mendus is a radically ill-disciplined and knicker-loving new

mum who loves teasing and learning and crafting and jumping
in the Australian sea. She also has a radically ill-disciplined PhD
(in Education), wherein she used her scholarship to fund living
in a van and visiting over 180 innovative schools in 23
countries. She is currently writing a book on performing school
tourism and revelling in the joys of washable nappies, as well
her toddler’s delight (similar to Sue’s: see chapter 7 of this
book) in crows.

Akiba Mordechai: Laboratory technician and technological

consultant. Pervasive Archaeologies Network (PAN).

Morgan, Irish Terrier, belonging to Sue Porter.

Jelena Nolan is Research Impact Officer, University of

Leicester, feminist mother of an extremely sociable toddler and
a creative writer of between-the-worlds experiences. She is also
a psychologist. Her search for a missing parent brought her to
doctoral study in Bristol, and now she mainly writes herself in
and out of things.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 265 25/05/2021 13:47

 Sarah Nymanhall’s retirement (from a career in teaching and
counselling) re-ignited her passion for the written word, and
she has been writing poetry and prose ever since. She mostly
writes with the spoken word in mind, with the belief that the
performative element of creative writing offers an impactful way
of reaching an audience. Her experience, both as a performer
and audience member in the immediacy of that shared moment
of the spoken word, has fed this belief.

Margaret Page is a visiting senior research fellow in the Faculty

266 of Business and Law at the University of the West of England
in Bristol, England. She is a feminist activist, developing artist,
and writer, and is currently co-authoring a book on how UK
feminists are engaging with Brexit. She loves to travel, to visit
friends, to stay home with her cats, to tend her garden, and to
speak in Italian.

Katrina Plumb is a poet who works with society’s outcasts,

creating space in which they can explore their emotions for the
first time and leave a verbal record of their experience. She
recently worked with a Professor in India on a chapter for a
book on storytelling and sustainability, to be published by
Routledge later this year.

Sue Porter was formerly a senior research fellow in disability

studies in the Norah Fry research centre and also co-ordinated
the monthly narrative inquiry space for ‘ANI-net’ for many years
at the University of Bristol. She was an ardent feminist and
community activist. Sue died in 2017.

Bubu Pyrsou has a PhD in education from the University of

Bristol. She currently lives in Athens.

Jane Reece combines writing, research and teaching in

community and higher education. She worked in higher
education and publishing in Africa for some years before
completing her MA in creative writing and personal
development at the University of Sussex and her doctorate in
narrative inquiry at the University of Bristol. She has taught
creative and life writing in prisons, health and wellbeing groups
and adult education settings. She is a research advisor for the
MSc creative writing for therapeutic purposes (Metanoia/
University of Middlesex) and visiting tutor at the Centre for

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 266 25/05/2021 13:47

 African Studies, University of Copenhagen. She is always
writing or thinking about writing.

Malcolm Reed previously taught narrative and cultural-

historical research methods at the University of Bristol. He is a
former Inner-London secondary school teacher of English and a
former English teacher educator. Now retired, Malcolm is
improving his Italian and exploring the southern Mediterranean.

Ann Rippin was a reader in management studies at the

University of Bristol until she had a teeny tiny breakdown. She 267
is now a humanist celebrant and textile artist. She is frequently
skint, but much happier.

Artemi Sakellariadis is a teacher committed to developing

more inclusive education. She is director of the Centre for
Studies on Inclusive Education (www.csie.org.uk) and honorary
research associate at the University of Bristol, where she
coordinate’s ANI-Net’s ‘Narrative Open Inquiry Space’
meetings. She enjoys writing alone and with others, often
parting with convention in the name of stronger engagement.

Chris Scarlett is an educator in lifelong education who worked

in prison and trades union education, for the Open University
and as national women’s education manager for the Workers’
Educational Association. She retired and completed a doctorate
with the University of Bristol. She is now active as a trustee to
voluntary sector women’s charities, as an amateur musician and
knitter. Her forthcoming book is entitled: Sisters: Secrets and
Subjectivities.

Seema Shrenk: Lead Professorial Executive, Pervasive

Archaeologies Network (PAN) United Universities, Mid-planet
earth4. Professor Shrenk led multiple pan-global excavations
into the everyday lives of humans and other species in South
West Albion in the mid and post-COVID era: a highly contested
body of archaeological/geo-political scholarship.

Barhardar Singh: Note taker. Eurasian languages grouping,

Pervasive Archaeologies Network (PAN).

Jane Speedy is Emeritus Professor of Education at the

University of Bristol, where she founded and directed the artful
inquiry network (ANI-net). She now lives and works as a fine

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 267 25/05/2021 13:47

 artist (painter) and continues to be curious and to write. She
divides her time between St. Davids, West Wales and Bristol,
England. Her most recent book is: Staring at the Park (2015)
Left Coast Press, USA. Website: janespeedysart.co.uk

Tami Spry is Professor of Performance Studies in the

Communication Studies Department at St. Cloud State
University in Minnesota, USA. Her publications and
performance work focus on sociocultural issues articulated
through performative autoethnography and non-traditional
268 texts. Her latest book is Autoethnography and the Other
(2016).

Peggy Styles is a doctoral graduate and ANI-Net member at

the University of Bristol. At 89 years old, Peggy also holds the
honour of being the University of Bristol’s oldest doctoral
graduate.

Ulf, Irish Terrier, belonging to Davina Kirkpatrick.

Goya Wilson Vásquez is a Nicaraguan/Peruvian based at the

University of Bristol, working on memory struggles and creative/
radical methodologies in Latin America. She is transforming her
doctoral research on post-war testimonial writing in Peru into a
digital archive. She co-organised a peace festival with Peruvian
and Colombian memory activists and is now leading the
‘Creative Methodologies for Unearthing Hidden War Stories’
project in Latin America.

Andrew Walls has been a primary school teacher for the past
eight years in the UK and in Central America. During his MA at
the University of Bristol he explored the narratives of academic
underachievement amongst primary school children. He now
works at Calder House, a school specialising in teaching
children with dyslexia, dyspraxia and dyscalculia.

Sonja Wedderkop: Honorary Research Fellow, University of

Leiden: Pervasive Archaeologies network.

Jonathan Wyatt is Professor of Qualitative Inquiry and Director

of the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry at the University
of Edinburgh. He is the author of Therapy, Stand-up, and the
Gesture of Writing: Towards Creative-Relational Inquiry (2019),
which recently won the 2020 International Congress of

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 268 25/05/2021 13:47

 Qualitative Inquiry book award.

Tess Wyatt is an artist/teacher living in Edinburgh. She has

been working over the last couple of years experimenting with
art journaling, as a therapeutic group process. She is an active
mixed-media artist and is currently interested in big stitch
embroidery and boro-inspired work. [Accessed 30 October
2017].

Louise Younie is an academic/GP with a passion for creative

inquiry as a vehicle for practitioner development and human 269
flourishing. She completed a doctorate at the University of
Bristol, which explored the multiple benefits of arts programmes
as part of medical education.

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 269 25/05/2021 13:47

 Index.

Page numbers followed by ‘n’ indicate a note.

abstract knowledge 17
Anzaldua, G. 152
artful narrative inquiry network (ANI-Net) 4–5, 32, 63–80, 84,
247
art-making 9, 33, 152, 155, 156, 228
a/r/tography 79, 153, 223
270 assemblages ix, 97, 104, 122, 156
autoethnography: performative 84, 86, 90, 92, 93, 116, 121;
writing 64, 92–93

Barad, K. 115, 121, 169, 237

Barber, J. 92
Barnes, L. G. 92
Bion, W. 228
Boal, A. 120
body(ies) 95–97, 100, 104, 119, 120–121, 126; interactions viii;
and language i; politic viii, ix; sculpting 171–172; and text viii–ix;
of work 3–10
borders ix, 37, 152
brackets 41
Bradbury, H. 78
Braidotti, R. 152, 237
Bramwell-Davis, P. 36, 133, 135
Brodie, C. 133
Brown, L. 63
Butler, J. 115

Cameron, D. 206nx
Cameron, J. 63
‘cardi writing’ 153
Carson, A. 36–39, 41–42
CeNTraL (centre for narratives and transformative learning) 32
Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry (CCRI) 247–248
collaboration/collaborative 22, 33, 78–79, 239; autoethno-
graphic writing 64; grieving 235, 237; group 142; inquiry 63–64;
‘khadi’ 153; practices 32, 79–80, 84, 85, 90; process 33, 64, 78,
79, 85; research 84
collaborative writing 4–7, 9–10, 22, 25, 33, 79, 85, 92–93, 116,
126–127, 140, 152, 153, 155, 207, 222, 228, 237

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 270 25/05/2021 13:47

 collective biography 183, 206ni
Conquergood, D. 116, 120, 121
cozy crimes and deadly deeds 181–207
creative-relational research 248
cripples 7, 170, 214
crip theory 7

dancing 105, 137, 141–145

dark dusky agency 233, 237
Davies, B. 64, 115, 156
death 8, 73, 133, 232, 238 271
Deleuze, G. 115
Derrida, J. 37, 41
Diversi, M. 116
doctor-patient spaces 140
Dolan, J. 93
Donaldson, M. 63
Dunlop, M. 3, 7, 8, 84, 85, 133, 213

edges 37, 160

embodied/embodiment 58, 64, 90, 118, 126, 143, 153, 241,
247–248; experience 79, 128, 156; performance 84, 126–127;
process 127
entanglement 88, 93, 123, 139, 238
ethical know-how 212
everydayness 36
evocative objects 195, 206nxi

felt sense 226, 241nxi

feminist/feminism 6, 32, 33, 84, 97, 115, 133, 165
Filer, J. 36, 63, 75, 133
Fletcher, J. 127
fluidity 127, 152, 238
fragility ii, 97, 108, 152
fragments 4, 36, 39, 57, 58, 78, 229

Gale, K. 36, 92, 214

Gallant, M. 154, 213
Gannon, S. 116, 156
gathering 22, 92, 135, 155, 156, 223, 232, 237
Gendlin, E. 241nx
Gerald 8, 16, 22, 28nviii
Gingrich-Philbrook, C. 116
grief/grieving 18, 222, 228, 231, 235–237

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 271 25/05/2021 13:47

 group collaboration 142
Guardian, The 195, 206nxii
Guattari, F. 115

haiku iii
Hall, G. 213
Haraway, D. 115
Harris, A. 248
Haug, F. 185, 206ni, 228

272 illness space 140–141

Ingold, T. 84, 139, 183, 229
International centre for accessible scholarship decemination
(ICASD) 3

Jackson, A. 115, 116

Kaufer, K. 127
Kemp, D. 154
‘khadi’ collaboration 153
Kirkpatrick, D. 3, 152, 154, 181, 207nxviii, 213
‘kitchen sink dramas’ 207nxix
knowledge 123; abstract 17; generating 90; visual 56

Laidler, C. 3, 7, 8, 152, 154, 181, 213

Leggo, C. 40, 43
“Letting go – letting things come to you” 69–70
Levitas, R. 207nxx
Liebmann, M. 63, 73
life changing events, making meaning of 63–80
lipstick 206nvi
Lo, C. 92
loss 158–160, 197, 223; and emotion 74; and grief 231; and
pain 236, 240; of place 17; of self 162

Maddern, L. 36
Madison, S. 116, 120
making, dialogue on 168–171
“Making Meaning from Fragmentary Activities” 73–74
Malthouse, M. 63, 72, 133
Manning, E. 33, 212, 249
mark-making 153, 167, 169
Martin, V. 92
Massey, D. 84–85, 88, 133–146

artfulcollaborativeinquiry25052021.indd 272 25/05/2021 13:47

 Massumi, B. 33, 212
Mazzei, L. 115, 116
Mcruer, R. 7
meandering 135–147, 181
Mendus, A. 154, 213
Miljevic, J. N. 36, 92
Moreira, C. 116
more-than-human ideas 212
mourning 212
multiplicitous thresholds 36, 59
multiplicity/simultaneous stories 21 273

Narrative Inquiry Centre (NIC) 247–248

Neimeyer, R. 235
Nymanhall, S. 36

open space 32, 49; ANI-Net 64–80; events 32, 64; meeting
134; narrative inquiry 33, 36–59, 133, 139; research centre 139;
session 54, 133

Page, M. 3, 7, 8, 63, 64, 84, 85

Parallel Red 187, 206nvi
Pelias, R. 116, 121
Perabo, S. 242nxvi
performative: acts 111; call and collaborative response, Spry’s
92–129; methodologies 64; see also under autoethnography
Perls, F. 225, 241nviii
Phillips, A. 70
Pineau, E. 121
Plumb, K. 63, 71, 75
pockets, theme of 154–176
“poem about the desire to interpret symptoms, A” 75
Pollock, D. 116, 120
Porter, S. 3, 5–8, 36, 63, 92, 133, 154, 181, 213–240
postcards 2, 30, 62, 82, 132, 150, 180, 210, 244, 252
post-human 32, 152, 159, 169, 237
Prendergast, M. 40, 43
Pullman, P. 59
Pyrsou, B. 36, 92

queer 7

Radio 4 206nv
Reason, P. 78

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 Reece, J. 92
Reed, M. 36
refugees 172–176
‘Retiring from medicine’ 72–73
Rippin, A. 63, 92, 133, 147ni, 154, 181
rituals 237
Ronai, C.R. 135

Sakellariadis, A 3, 7, 8, 32, 36, 63, 76, 92, 213

Sameshima, P. 40, 43, 152
274 Sappho 36–38, 41
Sartre, J. 187
Scarlett, C. 133, 147nii
Scarry, E. ix
Schechner, R. 230
sculpting 92, 103, 122, 128, 171–172
sculpture 89, 96, 97, 101–102, 104, 114
second wave 6
sessions for ANI-Net 64–80
‘She wanders/wonders’ 207nxviii
Shrenk, S. 3, 4, 6, 7, 249
significant event, making meaning of 63–80
Solnit, R. 84
space: discussions about 143; doctor-patient 140; illness
140–141; patients need 140; see also open space
Speedy, J. 3, 5–8, 32, 36, 63, 64, 70, 92, 133, 152, 154, 181,
212, 213, 245, 247
Springgay, S. 153, 223
Spry, T. 84–85, 92–129
Staring at the Park 36
Styles, P. 36, 92

things/loss 158–160
thresholds 36
time 9, 15, 21, 24, 84, 85, 135–138, 141–145, 230
trees 56, 58, 224
trust/truth 162–165

Vasquez, G. W. 36
visual knowledge 56

Walls, A. 63, 70
“Where I Am” 71–72
“Why so different now?” 75–76

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 Women’s Institute 206niii
work of bodies 3–10
world café 32, 35ni
writing: and art-making 33, 152, 155, 156; autoethnographic 64,
92–93; collaborative 4–7, 9–10, 22, 25, 33, 79, 85, 92–93, 116,
126–127, 140, 152, 153, 155, 207, 222, 228, 237; collage of
fragments 64–78; drawings and 58; example of 161; experience
of everyday life 45; about making 165–168; process of 36–39,
160–161; in real time 16, 92, 115, 116; using to reflect on form
of life 57–58
Wyatt, J. 3, 36, 92, 213, 245, 249 275
Wyatt, T. 213

Younie, L. 133

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