Failing to come to terms with things: a multi-storied conversation about poststructuralist ideas and narrative practices in response to some of life's failures

Abstract

This paper is designed to demonstrate some of the multi-storied representational possibilities available to us as writers and practitioner-researchers. It highlights some of the opportunities that are available to therapists and the people who consult them when they describe their conversational space as a site for co-research. It illustrates the reciprocity present in conversations, including therapeutic conversations, by juxtaposing three stories that are interrelated retellings from different writing genres. In positioning poetic, storied and more academic/interpretative texts alongside each other, we hope to trouble the edges between academic and creative writing and also between practice and research. In placing these stories next to each other we seek to disrupt carefully contained ‘client’ and ‘therapist’ positions. We intend to question some current bereavement orthodoxies by demonstrating some less taken-for-granted ways in which people, living and dead, can and do continue to sustain each other's lives. We also hope to invite the readers and future writers of this journal to play alongside us in this conversation.

Keywords:

• Writing as inquiry
• multi-storied texts
• poststructuralist ideas
• narrative therapy
• research practices and discourses of bereavement

Acknowledgments

Jane Speedy, the principal author of this text, would like to thank all other contributors, both living and dead, including her mum, her brother Chris and all members of the ‘Jones’ family past and present. She would also like to thank the unknown JCPR reader/gardener with the reserved seat to Penzance on the 16.00 train from Paddington on Tuesday September 24th 2002 (and wishes she had spoken to them) and Betts Fetherston for her contributions to this conversation.

Notes

After much discussion of issues of authorship versus issues of anonymity/confidentiality, all ‘Jones’ family members names have been changed to collaboratively generated pseudonyms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janice Jones *

After much discussion of issues of authorship versus issues of anonymity/confidentiality, all ‘Jones’ family members names have been changed to collaboratively generated pseudonyms.