Jane Speedy

Using Poetic Documents: An Exploration of Poststructuralist Ideas and Poetic Practices in Narrative Therapy.

ABSTRACT This paper explores the use of poetic documents in narrative therapy practice. It considers the ways in which feminist and poststructuralist ideas inform these practices and speculates about the extent to which a ‘poetic-mindedness’ might sustain the practice of double- (or multiple-) listening. The author illustrates these explorations with examples from her own therapeutic practice.

Where the Wild Dreams Are Fragments From the Spaces Between Research, Writing, Autoethnography, and Psychotherapy

I come back from seeing my counselor, exhausted and inarticulate, yet strangely calm. I write. I come back from working with a group of clients/coresearchers. We write. I awake from a strange dream about an impossible, yet vivid conversation between two people long since dead. I write. I end up piecing together disconnected fragments of writing that leave traces, as if they are “a simultaneity of stories so far” across the spaces between therapy, writing as inquiry, coresearch, and autoethnography.

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.

Gatecrashing the Oasis? A Joint Doctoral Dissertation Play

This article explores the institutional and individual struggles surrounding the submission for examination of a jointly authored doctoral dissertation at a U.K. civic university. Two of the article’s authors (Gale and Wyatt) were the dissertation’s authors, and Speedy, the article’s third author, is their supervisor. Joint doctoral dissertations are rare and the dissertation was unique in this department’s history. The article is written as play script, which allows for different points of view to be offered and juxtaposed and for key issues to emerge and be explored. These issues include the institutional and individual impact of challenging what counts as original doctoral scholarship, the supervision relationship, and aspects of the experience of the completion of a doctorate. With a nod to the Deleuzian concept of the nomad, a significant theoretical component of the joint dissertation, the play works with the metaphor of nomadic journeying across desert terrain toward the “oasis” of membership of the academy as an image of the doctoral process. The play begins as the dissertation’s two authors hand in their dissertation for examination, and ends on graduation day, with its primary focus being the eleven weeks between submission and the viva voce examination.

“All Googled Out on Suicide”: Making Collective Biographies Out of Silent Fragments With “The Unassuming Geeks”

This article reprises and extends previous work coauthored by a middle-aged, female scholar/ narrative therapist and a group of young men. Those young men, who described themselves collectively as the “Unassuming Geeks” had all spent some time in their lives seriously considering suicide. This article focuses on the moment 10 years later, when the same group met together to mourn the loss of one of their members. This text articulates the collective witnessing and writing practice the group used and employs devices borrowed from ancient Greek theatre, together with fictionalized accounts, in an attempt to cultivate a “poetics of insufficiency” and disrupt notions of authenticity within “voices.” In looking back to what was silent/silenced and unsaid in previous work, the edges between therapy, research, and writing are blurred and troubled. Ongoing mutuality and accountability is considered.

Magical realist pathways into and under the psychotherapeutic imaginary

My experience of peoples life stories from my work as a narrative therapist consistently destabilised distinctions between imagined/magical and real experiences. I came to realise that the day-to-day magical realist juxtapositions I came upon were encounters with peoples daily lives, as lived, that have remained unacknowledged within the literatures of counselling. In this paper I speculate about the possible reasons for ‘smoothing’ magical realities into rational realist accounts within the literature of counselling. I tell short stories that illustrate peoples magical/realist manoeuvres out of impossible life circumstances towards different possibilities. I argue that just as writers on the margins have subversively written themselves into different spaces, people at the social and psychological margins have found imaginative pathways around lifes walls.

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.

Creative Practitioner Inquiry in the Helping Professions

This beautiful volume offers a range of research possibilities for practitioners. Bringing together the work of a community of scholars whose work blurs the edges between the arts and social sciences in the name of practice-based inquiry, Creative Practitioner Inquiry in the Helping Professions offers engaging and accessible exemplars alongside clear explanations of the theoretical understandings and backgrounds to the approaches offered. The book’s contributors are teachers, doctors, social workers, counsellors, psychotherapists, health and community workers and organisational consultants; together they passionately engage in arts-based research as an effective and accessible instrument of inquiry, knowledge dissemination and social change.

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.