Excursions – telling stories and journeys

The old ways prevail. The gift of telling with the written word remains one of the most powerful currencies available to us. Especially so when it is done well. Think about the sculpting of a story, or the chronicling of a journey taken. Remember a combination of the two that compelled you. Or stopped you in your tracks. Given its power and potential, telling ought never be thought of as an easy option or an innocent act. There are significant questions of style and shape to be addressed, as well as of content and purpose. There are duties and responsibilities to be observed, sometimes of more than symbolic import. There might even be risks or dangers attached. Misjudge your readership, and all too easily the point of telling falls flat. Misdirect the writing, and what is being told is liable to fall on deaf ears. Mistime the exercise, and rejection may well result.

The academic community has long been aware of these facts, a collective awareness partly explaining the scarcity of research in which the author consciously sets out to craft a creative form of telling. These scarcer styles of telling reflect a level of attention paid to matters of composition, expression, voice, language, tone, cadence, and mode of address. Fairly or unfairly, such literary ambition has also been seen as a bit full of itself. Too fussy, cocky even. Traditionally, it has also found a poor fit with the system of peer review employed by academic journals and the standards issued to reviewers for judging the value and contribution of academic writing. As a consequence, the general preference has been to treat telling and the teller as the subjects of scholarly attention, with inquiries channelled through criticism, interpretation, or technical analysis of prose. Put bluntly, telling is what the novelist, essayist or artist does, a job qualitatively different from that of the scholar who follows in the wake of such creative work, unpicking its literary merits, defining its form, studying its constituent features for pattern and purpose.

But times change. Of late, a preparedness to experiment with different ways of telling has surfaced, and steadily spread, in contemporary cultural geography and cognate subject areas extending to the emergent field of geo-humanities. ¹ Modern precedents have been set, influential enough to induce a second and (depending on how you chart your disciplinary history) third wave of creative geographical writing. ² Critical mass has been reached as the range of ways of telling extends: evidenced by articles reviewing the assembled literature, earmarking specific approaches worthy of close attention, and opinion pieces that propose a typology or tactics for telling. ³ If it can be argued that geography’s ‘telling-turn’ has come of age, what cumulatively can be said about the field?

First, it is characterized by writing designed to induce feeling. Depending on the author, and according to the topic, it might aim, variously, to woo, engage, surprise, persuade, rattle, disarm, or disquiet the reader. The well-formed sentence, the expressive language of sensation, and the association setup between words and images can be put to varied use. All are tools for engaging the full range of human sensibility, and a deeply felt politics. Second, it aspires to generate a particular mood for appreciation – immersion even – and not unrelatedly, is less intent on repeatedly pressing home a set of prefigured arguments; although ‘parables’, old and new, can also be imagined. Third, it explores the art of description, not simply for the pleasures this can bring (and these are great pleasures), but also to open up alternative routes to the sort of conceptual thinking that has generally come to be expected as an intellectual return from cultural research. Fourth, by modulating ethnographic method, it searches out a language attuned to affective worlds of hope, anxiety, care, desperation, joy, wonder, enchantment, dread and desire. Fifth, it is often adventurously formulated. The teller is endowed with an authority not to resolve the classic narrative arc, resisting the structural artifice of ‘closure’, except when wittingly rehearsing standard story conventions (with ‘beginnings, middles and ends’). Taken to extremes, adventure may involve dispensing entirely with the explanatory exoskeleton generally expected of academic literature. Finally, it tightly tethers language to place, sometimes to person too, and (without fear of contradiction) at a different level seeks to unhitch words from source or situation, so that stories and journeys themselves become significant gathering places. This effect is not easily accomplished, but by such writing craft, the dictionary of geography is rendered at once transporting and transferable. ⁴

Our efforts at itemization are not intended to be indicative of a settled project, far less a finished one. Nonetheless, the kind of storytelling most obviously attributable to the ‘telling-turn’ has found common cause in a recognizable aesthetic: a geo-poetics valuing lyricism, and tending toward landscape as milieu. ⁵ There is, undoubtedly, an ease to be found in this terrain. The range of telling could yet be extended. Excursions into situations that are more mundane, malign, or messy could prove less comfortable, more confronting. Would the tales told of such encounters, we wonder, aspire to status and reception as works of art, affect and revelation? Or perhaps strive for something entirely different? What certainly needs to be avoided is any tendency to push the world-as-told into a prescribed set of forms, reflecting back a limiting sense of what storying should do. ⁶ It is notable how other story-led approaches in social research and critical narrative inquiries understand telling as an expression of radical practice, aligning theoretical advances with transformative rupture and therapeutic intervention. ⁷ Caution can also counsel the impulse to keep on telling, or to quicken the effort. What of worldly site and things that, seemingly, refuse to be told? What is it to dwell in such spaces and still write of them? We should not assume all geographies and every journey can be storied or, for that matter, should be. Instead, we might consider more carefully what kinds of things and people and events do not make for (compelling) stories, and why this might be so. The refusal of the world to be structured or to disclose itself in ways sympathetic to a story form is a particular kind of ‘act’ that also requires consideration by those whose craft is words, if only to know more about what kinds of discordant elements cannot or will not be woven into a tale for telling.

Amid these shifts, and envisaged futures, in the discipline’s literary landscape, cultural geographies has emerged as an important outlet for the publication of material that experiments with stylistic and structural form. The openness shown by the journal to a range of writing and presentational styles is reflected in this special issue, and was also in keeping with the spirit of the academic symposium that is its point of origin. Excursions: Telling Stories and Journeys was a two-day event, hosted at the University of Glasgow in December 2011. Speakers were granted greater freedom of expression than is generally the norm at academic conferences and were invited to put their stories in motion. Those who grasped the opportunity with both hands are included here. Most of the essays and articles began life at Excursions. Others have drawn inspiration from it, or are the result of collaborations initiated at the time. The issue’s contents, encompassing standard articles and shorter ‘cultural geographies in practice’ pieces, reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the original symposium, and the fact that complementary experiments with creative forms of telling are ongoing in subject areas such as performance studies and cultural anthropology.

In our capacity as symposium organizers, and later as special issue guest editors, we found ourselves repeatedly revisiting a pair of questions, namely, ‘What sorts of creative work can a story do?’ and ‘What journeys are taken when a story is told?’. The paired questions served us well, holding together the enterprise of creating embarked upon with a series of fellow writers. In the very different kinds of excursion taken across these pages, it is possible to see how stories and journeys have served as an imaginative axis. Rather than introducing each contribution in turn, our preference is to reflect more generally on the spectrum of approaches taken.

Different registers for telling are deployed, variously: objects as things-in-themselves and things-of-use; the material assemblage; rhythms and atmospheres; motion, energy and flux; and sensual attachment and emotional estrangement. Different voices are used for telling too: accounts range from the semi-autobiographical to the composite, the co-authored to the confessional. Sometimes the story told, and the story of the story’s collation, proves inseparable, caught up in tense relation. Some of the storytelling presented here is imaginatively styled, to narrate the actions of real-life protagonists, inhabiting places, or travelling through them, in the past or the present. The admixture is as yet relatively unfamiliar in academic research, akin to a literary form once famously described as a ‘non-fiction novel’ and more recently as ‘the perfect reality of an invented thing’. ⁸ Another type of telling, one derived from issue-led research, is done with clear social use in mind. Styled with necessary levels of delicacy and tact, personal stories and journeys take on the status of testimonials, readied for wider circulation as a means to enable greater public awareness and professional understanding of traumatic life events. Telling as a public form of art-practice is also in evidence. The sociality of reading and writing is retold through the performance of travel, an artful sort of exercise where words are renewed through the shared experience of setting off, journeying and arriving. There are also tales of tactical intervention, where the creative arts operate as a means to expose or reclaim hidden worlds. Other instances of telling – or re-telling, more accurately put – are described as a technical exercise where style is dependent on a toolbox of editing skills, and animated according to a visual aesthetic for story-building.

Of course, other questions hang about our collective enterprise, impatient for answers. How should episodes of personal history or travel experience be integrated with stories of and from other people, distant sites and past times? How does narrative style or social scripting reshape the relation expected between teller and listener, writer and reader, and witness and subject? New challenges have already arrived as we write these introductory words. What happens to literary values in an age of digital storytelling and socially mediated journeying? Prescription is not possible here, nor is it the purpose of so brief an introduction. It is in stories not yet written, of journeys soon to be taken, where creative responses to such questions are likely to be found.