Abstract
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.
Keywords
It seems hard to believe when I think about it now, but you know what, this was my idea this special issue—what was I thinking? I e-mailed people straight after the 2011 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, excitedly. I was enthusiastic about the conference panel on research and/as therapy that Sophie and Jonathan had put together and that we might yet build on. I was energized by our collective contribution—about collaboration with each other, across differences, across continents and disciplines—and about what we had to say to the world, between us. I was very certain then, whenever that was, that I had a great deal to impart about all this and had many possible positions to take up in the space between writing, talking, therapy, and research. This special issue seemed to be at the very crossroads of my own life’s work.
And yet, when it came to it, I stuttered and spluttered and found no voice to speak of. All I could manage was a frail whisper. One by one the papers came in—Carolyn’s then Laurel’s, Jonathan and Sophie’s and then Amia’s—these rich, complex, storied, vibrant texts landed in my inbox and formed a web of gossamer threads, beckoning connection and resonance. Meanwhile I sat disconnected, haunted by my own silence and surrounded by disjointed fragments of writing that refused to write themselves into anything coherent. Then on the day before the final deadline I got a “gentle reminder” e-mail from Jonathan:
Research and therapy special issue. Hi Jane, Just checking in, in a pestering kind of way. How’re you getting on with the paper? Looking forward to Bristol and Elyse in a couple of weeks’ time. Is dinner or something on for Wed 12th? Ken might be able to make it too. Jonathan xxxxx
I remained silent. I could think of nothing to say. We were having a freak autumn heat wave in England and in the park across from my house the returning Bristol students were having a mini festival in the sunshine, but I remained huddled inside, resolutely cold and grumpy. I roamed around the house sulking and wondered about starting the whole paper again, perhaps not on the computer. This time I would write with a fountain pen, with green ink on thick parchment, as an act of solidarity with the original, ancient monastic scholars. It seemed I could not join with my contemporaries. It seemed that I was out of sorts or at least out of sync with them. But perhaps I could join with our ancestors, those communities of scholars of long ago scratching away at their illustrated manuscripts in order to form a “feather on the breath of God?” 1 Perhaps that would not feel so lonely.
A second beginning
The geographer Doreen Massey describes space as “dimensions of multiple trajectories, a simultaneity of stories-so-far “(2005, p. 24) and I have found this a useful way of understanding the trajectories and dimensions that crisscross the spaces and silences (inhabited and as yet uncharted) between auto-ethnography and therapy.
I walk around the shifting parameters (perimeters?) of this space as a client myself, unable even to articulate or craft my personal anguish into coherent verbal forms of communication, let alone writing, let alone writing that it might be possible or useful for other people to read. I navigate the space again, with groups of people who consult me, as we talk and write back and forth, sometimes as therapy, sometimes as research, sometimes the one blurring into the other. The space shifts again as readers contact me to describe their encounters and responses to some unpublished writing about my relationship with my long-dead and much loved brother and about different ways of remembering and being with the dead people in our lives. I could go on and on and on - but this is already a very messy, multidimensional space and I probably need to stop and trace some of the ‘simultaneity of stories so far’ that inhabit my version of this territory.
And now I’m starting again.
That all seemed very clear—and troublingly neat—(a) outline the borders, (b) set the scene, (c) describe the space, and then (d) illuminate the manuscript—or write my way into it. Except that I am not a woman of absolute faith in God. Nor would a silent, contemplative order suit me. I am a woman of great noise, excess, and uncertainty, currently in something of a muddle and finding it very hard to make sense of this process and this silence. The artist Annette Iggulden who has spent a great deal of her scholarly time re-creating and re-presenting the practices of the silent monastic women scholars of the past claims that silence is generative and is both “debilitating and liberating” (2002, p. 15), but the latter sense of liberation eschews my company thus far. I am in a funk.
Having spluttered to a new halt I find that I have now abandoned the green ink, the parchment, and the cardigan and resorted to writing with crisply sharpened pencils on firm white paper. If I have a faith, I realize, it is in this process. It is in the writing—writing as inquiry. Despite having spent the greater part of my professional life engaged in the practice of the “talking therapies,” it is to writing that I have turned time and time again, from a very young age, in order to make sense of what is happening in life and in the world. I come frequently but reluctantly and as a last resort to the talking therapies for myself—most usually if and when the writing has failed me—or to be more specific, when I have failed the writing.
That is what is so discombobulating about the process of (not) writing this paper. The writing keeps wandering off and disappearing into silence—not an empty silence you understand, but a deeply inhabited silence, about which I am not, to quote Mazzei (2007, p. 42), “keeping silent, but keeping the silences as data.” I remember that Lacan (1977) talks of the human predicament of both gaining and losing one’s “self” in language and begin to speculate about losing myself in silence. I experiment with replies to Jonathan’s e-mail like:
Research and therapy special issue. Hi Jonathan, Just responding to your “pester” about how the paper and I are getting on to say that the paper will not write me. Annie Rogers (2007, p. 113) has taught me that the unsayable lies both beyond and within speaking and can be detected within “negations, revisions, smokescreens (diverting attention to a safer place) and silences.” I am in the throes of all of the above and am beginning to wonder if perhaps this paper is unwriteable for the moment? I am curious about this situation, as I know you will be, but I am also strangely unnerved. Elyse will be here this Sunday and dinner on Wednesday at the Lido with Ken et al is on—Tami may come down too. I’ll book a downstairs table because there’s no wheelchair access for Sue upstairs and no lift. Looking forward. . . . Jx
But I do not send it. I remain silent. Who might understand my predicament and stand alongside me I wonder? And I return for solace to my long-term companion and sage, Hélène Cixous (2008), who reminds me of the differences between three distinct ways of communicating: everyday talk, “writing orally,” and writing.
We all need, I would suggest (although Hélène does not), everyday talk: a “small” kind of talk that establishes the parameters and prepares the ground for day-to-day lives, for writing and for writing orally, for speaking into fresh and uncharted spaces and extending what it is possible to know. Equally “everyday talk” can act as a smokescreen. What Cixous describes as “writing orally” seems a more profound endeavor, the kind of conversation that takes place sometimes in therapeutic exchanges, wherein you become aware of something vital, something brought to light in the space between the two (or more) of you. But even this is ephemeral, fleeting, and can be lost if it is not captured and represented in some way. I write to myself all the time and in my professional life I write to the people I work with. I send them poetic documents, many of which they, or I, have published (see Speedy, 2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2011). I write with and to people, drawing from Michael White (2004), to exoticize their rich and extraordinary lives and set these down before them “as if at a poetry recital’” (Speedy, 2006, p. 296). But I also write to them and to myself. Writing opens up an indirectness, layering, and multiplicity of meanings that talking (or writing orally) alone cannot. Cixous (2007, p. xiv) sums this up eloquently for me:
Why do I say writing orally? Because it is writing. It’s simpler, thinner, a threadlike writing. I don’t reject the idea of it, but I know its less illuminated, less inspired.
My own work and habits of life, then, hang somewhere between the talking cure and the writing cure, but I also write and publish as a scholar, as a narrative inquirer and autoethnographer and perhaps that is why this article is beginning to unravel. I am coming into this conversation with a complex and contradictory set of claims on the space. It is as if I keep meeting myself arriving at the same brief clearing that this special issue is attempting to make in the woods, but each time I arrive it is from setting out along a different pathway: The client, the psychotherapist, the writing therapist, the coresearcher, and the autoethnographer are just some of the fleeting, partial, overlapping identity claims that I might take as starting positions from which to write my way into and out of these woods. I could equally well have chosen the friend, the narrative inquirer, and the journal writer, or the poet, the scholar and the Facebook member. It is when I reread Cixous’s (1978, p. 56) claim that “Quand je n’ecris pas, c’est comme si j’etais morte” (when I do not write it is as if I had died) that I begin to feel less lonely and stuck. In fact as I read this piece I start to giggle—I do love Hélène, I always have, but she is so ridiculously “over the top” French sometimes.
“Get a grip Hélène,” I say to the photo on the front of her book. And somehow this brings me at last to the point of realizing that some of the irritating background noise to this silence around me is the sound of all these supposedly disconnected fragments of writing I am surrounded by, buzzing and scratching to be read. Perhaps, now Hélène has contacted me, I’ll try and make contact too; I’ll e-mail the above to Jonathan and Sophie and see what transpires. . . .
Research and therapy special issue. Hi Jonathan, I’m sending you what might be the start to this paper. Is it Bollocks? There’s no ending by the way—just a series of fragments that fizzle out—and the middle’s a mess. Jxx
And Jonathan writes back:
Research and therapy special issue. Hi Jane, We’ll take a look and get back to you. I like the bullish pitch. :-) J xxx
And I am grateful for the three kisses and the smiley face. This bodes well. Although I was not at all sure I had a pitch, let alone a bullish one. I tentatively look up “bullish” in my thesaurus and find that it is synonymous with optimistic, upbeat, confident, buoyant, cheerful, chipper, and enthusiastic.
Blimey!
Nonetheless, the idea of somehow having inadvertently written myself somewhere toward “buoyancy” has an interestingly upbeat effect on this work, and slowly, aided and abetted albeit inadvertently by Hélène’s excess and Jonathon’s irony, I begin to piece a few of the disconnected fragments of writing that I have strewn about the place into some kind of haphazard collage. And so, “Je vous présente” three fragments on the ladder of inquiry into the many converging spaces between research and therapy:
Fragment One: Snot, Tears, and Mascara
I am currently having one of my bouts of personal therapy. Personal therapy is a resource I’ve tapped into throughout my life (at times this has been a training requirement, but mostly it has been one of my ways of sustaining myself in the face of the little blips and major fissures that life has thrown up). The present moment is definitely one of those “major fissure” times.
Recently I went to see my therapist. I parked outside her house, sat down in her front room, and almost immediately began to cry. I sat down and began to weep and then to sob loudly. This was followed by a long-drawn-out bout of loud, incontrollable wailing and beside-myself wolf-like howling. Sixty minutes in I was exhausted, covered from the head to kneecaps in snot, tears, and mascara, and the carpet surrounding my chair was a sea of soggy Kleenex and discarded Kleenex boxes. My eruption had been reduced to a quiet uneven shaking and gasping for breath between hiccups and eventually, to smiles and soft hiccuppy giggles. I went upstairs and washed my face, came back down, paid by check, booked another session and left. I felt a lot better. This had been a helpful session. It had been both personal therapy and therapeutic. Much was unsayable; almost everything was, at the time, left unsaid. When I got back to my car I sat for a while writing, writing myself back to normal, whatever that means, and then I drove home.
I cannot articulate any more about this event; it was therapeutic, but not deeply autoethnographic. Not every personal narrative can be articulated into an autoethnography. For that to happen I would need to gain a critical edge (as I write I have no kind of edge on this whatsoever). I would need to be able to reflect, theorize, and imagine. . . . I need to step up and back and around and through my story of this performance of sobbing my heart out, to gain sufficient space as an inquirer into my own life. Such a process will not necessarily render me, Jane Speedy, the person, any less mad or more sorted out as a human being. It will just give me a different place to stand in relation to exploring this performance of sobbing in its cultural context. My reasons for presenting/not presenting this as (not) autoethnography then are reasons of time and hindsight and of personal and narrative ethics and aesthetics.
So why mention this at all? Why begin with a fragment of story about an incident that I’m (going) not going to bring to the table today?
I mention this to mess a little or even a lot with some of the discussions around the therapy/autoethnography borders in the literatures of this field. I want to communicate some of the discomfort that I feel when I get wind of an underlying “othering” agenda among qualitative researchers, autoethnographers in particular, who make clear demarcation lines between the stories from their articulate, emotionally sorted lives—stories that have been “worked on for many years in therapy” and are now officially “sorted out” and can now be safely told as research tales without even a whiff of cathartic intent and the stories the other side of the line. These other unsorted stories, by implication, are stories from another sort of people, stories from the unsafe, stories within which shades of madness lurk. I want to be quite clear that I make no such identity claims either for myself or for my own work. I continue to claim a solidarity in my life and in my work with the unsorted, the unsafe, and the unhinged—sometimes from my own life experience, but even more importantly, from my very real and imagined sense of what might have been.
In thinking of this I draw again from the Australian narrative therapist, Michael White. In 1993 he wrote about the kind of therapist he might want to be, but his thoughts might equally apply to the kind of qualitative researcher he might want to be, when he wrote:
I am thinking of a solidarity that is constructed by therapists who refuse to draw a sharp distinction between their lives and the lives of others, who refuse to marginalize those persons who seek help, by therapists who are constantly confronting the fact that if faced with the circumstances such that provide the context of troubles of others, they just might not be doing nearly as well themselves. (White, 1993, p. 112)
There is solidarity with others, and then of course, there is solidarity with ourselves.
Just as I can’t imagine working as a therapist outside White’s (1993) ethic of solidarity, I cannot see the point of writing research papers in ways that I don’t, at least in part, find personally sustaining. I write for a living, but I also live to write . . . and on more than one occasion have written myself back into life.
What I wrote in my car, outside my therapist’s house, just like my actions inside her counseling room, was raw and somewhat incoherent. I do not even understand what I wrote myself yet, and it is not for your eyes. The writing I’m offering you now is carefully edited and crafted, with hindsight, to speak to both the sharp and fuzzier edges of these dimensions in my life. Much of the autoethnography that I write, like the writing in my car that day, I write initially to and for myself, but unlike the writing in my car, it is then crafted and shaped into a form that does no intentional harm and can speak also to others. I write a lot, all the time, and this writing lurks for years, misspelt, ungrammatical, private, and sometimes even undecipherable to its own author. My writing for publication, by way of contrast, is mostly worked and reworked and read aloud and then reworked.
I make several differentiations here—differentiations that other scholars might contest. I differentiate between the process and practice of personal therapeutic writing and writing for publication that both writer and readers might yet find therapeutic (albeit one genre might become the raw “data” for the other). I also differentiate between personal narrative and autoethnography. I do not do so on the frequently implicit, but often hard to spot, grounds that autoethnographers, like social researchers in general, have somehow benefited from more profound insight or are more recovered or sorted out or mentally stable or emotionally mature than the hapless bystanders and family members they might expose or the readers they might empower. I do so on the grounds that personal narrative, autobiography, and life writing in general, however reflexive and however evocative, poetic, and compelling, lack the critical, political edginess of ethnographic work. It is in this dimension, in the further troubling of the auto(biography) with the ethno(graphy) and vice-versa that the strength and excitement of this work lies—and in this bumping and grinding of contradictory and multiple narratives, perhaps, that the most collectively therapeutic dimensions reside.
Fragment Two: Cinquians From and for the Geeks
Picking another slither from the writing detritus that surrounds me I happen upon a collective poem written in 2003-2006 by five young(ish) men who had spent much of their early adulthood considering suicide and had became collectively known as the unassuming geeks and the (middle- aged, female) therapist who had worked with them. We have written a lot together, the geeks and myself, and have published a performance piece (Speedy & Worth, 2007) and several journal articles (Speedy, 2005b, 2011). Much of our writing is still lying around the place unpublished, including this piece, written in the form of cinquians.
2
I no longer remember quite who wrote what in this collectively autoethnographic piece (just to mess with at least three formerly contradictory genres) and neither do the remaining geeks, whose permission I sought by e-mail in order to include their writing here. As one of them replied:
Hi Jane, I remember us writing that piece—vaguely—although I no longer know nor care what a “cinquian” is. Fine by me to put this in your journal article. Good luck with struggling to unravel the knots between therapy, research, auto-ethnography and writing!! I should leave some of the tangle if I were you—you were never a very neat person and this is messy territory. You went right out on a limb with us in that therapy-group-that-became-a-writing-group-that-produced-collective-auto-ethnographic-research-pieces-in-ways-we-all-found-therapeutic. I suppose the common thread in all of that is integrity, multiple integrities, and we had them aplenty. Watch out The dust has not Settled in the channels Of life as we knew it, but stopped/ Caught short And now We watch you come Across the blue courtyard Wanting a quick chat/we don’t think That’s it Spare us Prevention talk Let us tell you our lives A little window into these still Light times The grass Is greenest green Over there they say, but We are just putting up a fence In case Last night I heard guitars Playing in the park and Longed for sunlight and soft music And love You could Take all our words And thro them in the air And we could stand where they landed Or not Planted Under the ground Where might our words pop up? In the café or cemetery Perhaps? Before We were some group Of men you could call geeks Even unassuming geeks but Not now Because We were always less and more than that always becoming something less and more Maybe We are not here Any more/we might have Slipped off in the night and stolen Some tarts Gather Us together and we become a trace a piece of those young geeks we were for now And then We disappear Into lives that hold shards Of geeks betwixt a whole raft of Others Watch out The dust has not Settled in the channels Of life as we live it, but moved/ Somewhere
And in setting down their words here, carefully choosing fonts and layouts and so forth, I realize how in love I still am with these young men. I remember that I am always a little in love with each of my clients. Maybe not at first—it is not necessarily love at first sight—but for this work to work, there is always an element of falling in love. This is not often talked about in the literatures of the nonpsychoanalytic therapies (there is much talk of love and of “letting the patient matter to us”; for example, Yalom, 2002, pp. 26-30) but not of “being in love”—too risky, too much Eros, too near the critical edges and slippery slopes away from professional practice. But for me at least, there has been a kernel of being in love in all these many therapeutic relationships—being a little in love with them and (therefore?) a little in love with myself.
And it dawns on me once again how much I have been helped over these many years by my clients, the geeks in particular, to recognize and make meaning of events in my own life. I have to be a little in love with myself to write, exuberantly and excessively so for the writing to flow freely across the page. No wonder then that my current shame and sadness evoke such a silence and no surprise that writing about and into that silence released at least the memories of being in love the geeks and with myself. I remain disconcerted by shame and inarticulate about my sadness, but I am also reminded by the geeks of how loved I have been—how loved I am—and this draws me immediately to another fragment of writing.
Fragment Three: Barbara Myerhoff Interviews Chris Speedy
This last fragment is a short extract from my own unpublished work that has been read aloud to many groups. It is a piece of writing in the form of a remembering conversation (Hedtke & Winslade, 2004) that sustains me. I know it also speaks to others. The fragment comprises a short extract from a conversation between the North American anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, who has been very influential in my work, and my brother Chris Speedy.
The interview takes place between them in 2008 long after they’ve both died (in 1985 and 1989, respectively), thus both addressing and troubling discussions about truth, memory, and the ethics of autoethnography (see Sikes, 2010; Tolich, 2010) since this is clearly an autoethnography of the imagination. In this instance, it was this process of continuing the conversations not only with, but between, dead people that has given me the space I needed to write, imagine, and think myself and my memories into a different take on the history of the present and future.
Extract From the Transcripts of Barbara Myerhoff’s (2005) Documentary Film, a “Beyond Our Days”
Barbara Myerhoff’s seminally reflective ethnographic work with the elderly Jewish population of Venice Beach California can be accessed through both the book (1978) and Oscar-winning documentary film (1976) “Number Our Days.”
From “Love Poems,” Brian Patten (1981).
And I think we’ll leave it there, between the fragments, not because this is the ending exactly, but rather because there is something important and urgent about the therapeutic space that the magical and impossible opens up in the here and now. I started this article by writing into the silence that surrounded and engulfed what it was not possible to write and have emerged writing the impossible. I am no longer attempting to articulate an “authentic,” frail, whispered, singular voice. I end by eavesdropping on a conversation in multiple voices from another time/space dimension. This writing and I have made each other up. I feel a whole lot better.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author declared the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article : The author is grateful to The Narrative Inquiry Centre Graduate School of Education for the support of the unassuming geeks’ project, University of Bristol, UK.