Artemi Sakellariadis

Encountering “Gerald”: Experiments With Meandering Methodologies and Experiences Beyond Our “Selves” in a Collaborative Writing Group

This article describes a process of moving in and out of a place of “ordinary, transient and sustainable community” within a collaborative writing group. The group meets together both on- and offline. Over the last 5 years, the authors have developed an every day, meandering, and nomadic practice of being, talking, and writing. This enables frequent encounters with a very precious, precarious, and particular sense of collective energy. The group came to describe this experience of moving beyond, in, out of, and through their individual and collective selves as “Gerald.” This article comprises a narrating text in which quotations from the authors’ writing archives are embedded.

Friend and Foe? Technology in a Collaborative Writing Group

This is a partial account of the journey undertaken by a group of academic nomads in search of collaborative writing space. Never intending to permanently settle anywhere, we chose to explore writing technologies that supported collaborative forms of engagement with our task and with each other. Along the way we took up with, and discarded, a variety of writing technologies. Reflecting teamwork and collective biography practices sustained our work and our commitments towards collaboration. Although we have not found any electronic technologies helpful in creating or maintaining our sense of community, they enabled collective ways of re-presenting our work to ourselves and, later, to others. Twenty of us set out and twelve* remain on this journey. The current text includes three voices, each woven from writings and silences of many members of our group, thereby including traces of us all. The text explores our relationship with electronic technology and its role in our collaborative writing venture.

Collaborative Writing in Real Time

In this article we record, recount, and reflect on a 48-hour period in which we hang out in a rented house beside a lake with the intention of writing collaboratively. The writing emerges out of conversations. Our exchanges move back and forth and sideways between talking, writing, reading, and responding to each other’s writing. These exchanges are held together and created through cooking, eating, going to the pub, walking, making cocktails, singing, and arguing. This is a narrative account, in real/chronological time of a collaborative process of generating this writing. As such these are the raw, unedited texts. Our process includes three instances of talking, writing, and reading. We offer this as a backstage snapshot of collaborative writing.

Everyday Fragments on the Ceiling of Room 407 An Open Narrative Inquiry Space

Jane Speedy was leading the community of scholars in the “open space” session for March 2014 in Room 407. The Narrative Inquiry Centre held an “open space” session every month on the fourth floor of the Graduate School of Education. In “open space” sessions, one scholar led with exemplars of work that was troubling them/that they were troubling, after which others contributed their thoughts/comments and writing. Jane Speedy’s recent stroke had reduced/distilled/extended her writing into fragments. Her colleagues followed/responded with fragments of their own and thus this text was collaboratively written, in real time, on March 3, 2014.