Abstract
Nine members of the Collaborative Artful Narrative Inquiry network (CANI-net) gathered to explore a regenerative intention. This article tracks our interplay of writing, making, and moving together and questions that arose: How do we go about regenerating? Can we find openings to processes happening outside awareness? How does the refrain “now let’s write” act in relation to the un/intention of regeneration? Is our material, embodied co-presence regenerative? Answers were intimated through listening, touching hands, printmaking, and sculpting clay; in letting things be said and unsaid, writing as response, in making shapes and animal sounds, and dancing
Keywords
We Came Together With Histories of Sorts
During that time of prolonged separation, the COVID-19 pandemic, CANI-net—the Collaborative Artful Narrative Inquiry Network—departed its place of origin in what had been the Centre for Narrative and Transformative Learning at the School of Education, University of Bristol and re-formed as an independent, virtual entity (see www.cani-net.com). In the wake of these physically isolating events, nine of us—artists, writers, students, therapists, academics, and the like—tenuously affiliated through past experiences of collaboration, or drawn by the open invitation, gathered physically for a 3-day writing retreat in the Welsh borderlands at the end of June 2023, to feel our way back together.
To regenerate implies renewal and restoration; a return to life and liveliness following damage or disturbance, and the theme of “regeneration” seemed a fitting point of focus for our coming and being together. Our days were spent between scattered cabins, and an old stone house, between meals made with vegetables grown on the land, and restful spaces of withdrawal. In a pavilion with wide windows opening onto a Welsh vista, we came together in what became a rhythm of writing, sharing, responding, and writing together again. Into this rhythm came other movements too—playful embodied, sensory, and mindful inquiry. In this regenerative space, we found common purpose and activity, tentatively re-entangling ourselves in an energic process of
We spoke together of our experiences, our relationships, our stories, then wrote for a while in response, then read aloud. Spoke and wrote and read again. To receive and have received in this way became a regenerative process. Our re-entanglement was both aided and represented through this process of
Writing in
Nature
Solvitur ambulando
I really wanted to be able to go on a CANI-net writing retreat again . . . something that, living far away and being parent of a young child had not been accessible to me. I thought I would offer to help make it happen, put time and energy into the process and have my dream of being able to write collaboratively again.
The relational element of our inquiry was there for the exploring, but this was a very personal process. Little of what we encountered or consciously, deliberately explored, was at a group level. Our differences were laid bare though, as we shared our writing, and wrote again from this. Could we have explored individual relational challenges and differences, as and when they were exposed? I am drawn to the thought of some sort of family constellation dance with concepts and meanings not necessarily people and their own personal failings but stuff that comes up and is displayed in people in a group while on collaborative writing retreats. I see a play emerging. A powerful playscript of conflict and challenge and love and listening and beyond it all, a core essence of sticking it out, learning, being and becoming together. For this iteration of nine, it wasn’t just those few days in June on the Welsh borders; it has continued and is continuing . . . perhaps we need to be brave and explore the grit of process, talk that talk we don’t like to have. . . without judgment . . . a celebration of the richness that our differences bring to the space.
The environmental nature of our process and experience became perhaps a safer element to bring in, as doors, windows, landscapes and horizons, berries, trees, and birdsong, all made their presence felt.
We did not require agreement. The multiplicity of voices and experiences was/is always there. But this process, this becoming, this writing, this being together, mattered for each of us.
Swooping Freely
Human Between 1
After the retreat, we continued to meet online—and shared our thoughts and writings virtually. There were no decisional processes overlain. We just carried on meeting, carried on writing. There emerged, more consciously with time, an ethic of care (Ellis, 2004), as we navigated sharing and drawing upon each other’s words, eventually consenting to a process of making agential cuts (Barad, 2007) through our collective catalog of writings, to craft an array of layered pieces loosely aligned through felt senses of thematic narratives that mattered to their individual makers. We called these pieces collectively “The Underbelly,” a repository of themes that had apparently been in motion, that were now surfacing, or emerging into our awareness. Then we then worked with The Underbelly pieces again, each in our own way, cutting in further and stitching these smaller pieces together into what we called “re-mixes,” then
Skin Casting
We are in the process of reflecting upon our process of regeneration. We are processing. Yes, I prefer the active form of this verb as it resonates more with how I think about living in general. As we are processing, we are living our lives during our collaborative writing venture. In our own individual ways, we are thinking, talking, and reflecting on our truths while together today, formulating some end goals as an outcome. Whether we stay together as a group or not, has been mentioned. I cannot process that at this present moment. The individual truths that we create alone when we write are dependent on us being together in relationship.
Moving and Creativity
The space between us, our betweenness. How we relate with one another seems important. How alike are we? How different are we? Does it even matter? Our social etiquette has a regard for respecting one another whatever our differences. I’ve felt safe to air my thoughts knowing that they will be tolerated even if challenged. Equally, I have felt comfortable to withhold what I do not feel like saying. I hope we have all felt like that, which we have consciously been creating an environment to feel safe with one another whether in person or online. To pay attention, to be attended to. To challenge or be challenged. To inspire and to feel inspired. What is at the other end of this spectrum? I think it is to feel silenced or to enforce silence on others. I’m conscious of this having felt rejected when my teachers at secondary school silenced me by saying: “if you don’t have anything interesting to say, don’t say it at all.” Did they know about the long-lasting effect of their words?
Contact
I want to be in an environment that creates opportunities to share our voices. And in our regeneration processing, if the voices in our writings merge, as we hear each voice, we honor them. Someone mentioned earlier that we are like a choir where voices merge as they sing together but individual voices can still be heard. Reflecting on our processing seems to have been about a space in which we have been sharing, respecting, and honoring each person and their voice.
Human Between 2
I was in bed feeding my child to sleep urging them that sleep would come but my anxiety was flowing in my blood, in my milk and my heart was beating quickly as I would check the time on my phone. Would I get out of here to meet the others?
No, not tonight.
I was on the backfoot of parenting and writing and space holding something that was spinning away from the original vision.
There’s a lost feeling here. I remember this from before (Mendus et al., 2022). But this is different. Lost feels urgent, like an urgent need to find the page before it all runs away without me.
Human Between 3
We are writing about process. We have missed writing about process. Digging back into my memory of where we have been across the months, started by the few days in Wales. Or are we writing about the few days in Wales? We’ve probably met for longer online than we were together for those few days. Recognizing my child-like need to know what we are doing and to do it properly. It is that part of me that feels unsafe and thinks that safety is in the getting it right.
I wonder, should I have stepped in here to say “Oi, what about me?”
We have talked about the individual or the personal versus the collective. Are these two separate universes? I think not. I cannot be part of the collective without bringing my individual self.
A silent vibrate, a message would come through . . . as I snuggled my child.
I often try to merge, to become, to be more like, so as not to annoy, stand out, piss off, or any such thing that makes me visible. This has never worked for me.
. . . other times once asleep I would run across the wet grass and creep into the quiet room of scratching pens and tapping keys and occasional sighs and try and catch up.
So, I need to allow and celebrate my individual, my personal. But I come to this with a willingness to let go, to feel my own response and ability to hold myself where needed, to speak up where needed, and contribute or not, depending on my capacity and my intuition of what might be needed in the group—but the latter suggests an omnipotence. How do I know what is needed in the group? All I can know is what I think I know is needed. We talk about the group as an amorphous thing . . . that is, a collection of individuals, but on collecting, does the group become its own living agential being?
Collaboration
When we met, I was blown away by our process that allowed us to become a community of regeneration. We began as distinct, and separate, some of us scared and uncertain, worried about how we would be welcomed, not welcomed, trying to prove our belonging or to identify with our separation. Yet slowly, slowly, mostly through our writing, but also through conversation, through art practice and through movement, we aligned, with all of our differences, or perhaps because of all of our difference, we aligned and we wrote as one. Sometimes we genuinely wrote as one. I was blown away. I was heartened. Ripples, repetitions, and resonances shone through. This process of moving where the energy took us, of hitchhiking through collaboration, became regenerative. I was regenerated through this alignment.
So, process. I think that our writing shows our process. It reflects the difficulty, the ease, the coming together, the falling apart, the need for separation, the need for unity, the need for each of us to find our mutuality in difference, and respect for sameness.
We Will Leave Traces
Solvitur Ambulando (Solved by Walking)
Do I need to dig back into my days of understanding group process from a transpersonal, psychodynamic perspective? Thinking through Gestalt, Heron (1999), and other great writers on group process? This does not feel congruent to me. Thinking through (or with) new writers, on when matter comes together, with individual agency, but then intra-acts (Barad, 2007), and changes, or perhaps becomes through these intra-actions; this feels more pertinent.
This makes me think of the space. Aligning with space, with land, with matter, human and nonhuman. Aligning but enjoying difference. Not separate, not even discrete, but agentically aligned (Barad, 2007). Being okay with difference, this is for me an internal deeply personal process, where I need to be OK with my own capacity to allow my difference. When I can do that, I can then welcome others. Agentically aligned. I’m interested in this idea. What happens when we are agentically mis- or dis-aligned?
What’s coming now is the sense of body. To what extent is this material aligning only possible when we include the body? In my mind, this is crucial. Is it not the materiality of the body that speaks with the materiality of nonhuman also?
I realized that my issue with process in this group . . . was about my access to the space in which to write . . .
. . . how does a parent who is needed at bedtime and overnight and at other times of the day write in-person with others if their child is not nearby? They need me . . .
. . . the energy and the drive were different. I realized . . . the space and the group in its regeneration was beyond us . . . wanted more writing time into the evenings to make the most of these moments together. Greedy? Definitely hungry, after so long writing virtually, to be together in the same space. I understood the need; it was exciting, invigorating and inspiring. I just could not be there; I had to let go.
It hurt.
Sometimes, I realize that magic happens, words spill out of me coming from some other place, responses to others, yet deeply personal. An experience of release. The writing together has created a vessel in which to let go, to fill with my tears of grief and joy. I realize that reading our words aloud has an important role in our time together. The words written to be heard not read. The tone and pitch of our own voices, the differences and similarities, the patter and connections between us all. I began to think with affect theory and think of Erin Manning (2010). As each person in the circle shares their thoughts and reflections we have an e/affect on each other in the space—the bubbling pot of the moment. A disagreement, a transition to eat, a change in the weather affects that moment and if we do not write or share in that time and space, that moment is lost but not the affect as it permeates into our being, into my fingers that type these words, now affected by each of you.
Past participants, who have co-created with the ideas that constellate the network, cast shadows, leave traces, remain significant in spite of a desire to make afresh. The new is not new but a re-making, re-creating, what has been. I want to cut up and splice it and tag it and craft something new. We will leave traces.
What about parenting? Maybe we do not need to write all the time, let us hang out more? But it did not seem to be the case . . .
It continued after, I felt I had to be my advocate: I can not meet at that time of day, it is dinner time and I have a small child. Although many people are parents in the group, I am the only one with a small child just now so I know it is not part of people’s immediate worlds, but in a world where we are striving for inclusion, I am asking to be remembered as well. Parents of small children can be part of collaborative writing groups when the space allows.
I Was, I Am, I’m Hoping to Be
How does our writing from that time reveal the regenerative process? Reflecting back, theories of embodied/ying consciousness (Damasio, 1999; Dolphijn, 2021), and of being and doing horizontal group relations (Bion, 1961; Mitchell, 2023), intermingle with ongoing theoretical evolutions from absent members of the network who have collaborated through artful narrative before (Kirkpatrick et al., 2021). The fresh, spontaneous gestures of those present, (re)produced ways of being that were familiar to some, new to others, (re)encountering a process that processed us, a little less, a little
The staying present with one another was difficult, and yet there was a strong sense of everyone wanting to be there, to be together, in all our quirkish difference. Someone expressed surprise that “we” did not take the opportunity to explore individual relational challenges and differences, as and when they were exposed. I did not feel there was permission, or energy, to attend to individuals in this way.
Each step of the way, on the retreat itself and then after, we talked about what was next, or took turns to introduce an idea to try out, through an evolving ethic of sharing our personal concerns and desires and then trying to find a line, a next move forward, that each of us, in our different ways, could get behind—this was the challenge—not the personal reflexivity of the therapeutic encounter, or the heuristic (Moustakas, 1990) or autoethnographic (Ellis, 2004) inquiry, or some other expression of a single subjectivity on a journey of becoming, but still a kind of inner work—the challenge to each of us to internally supervise (in Casement’s (2013) language) our own responses, to “stay with the trouble,” as Haraway (2016) would have it, that we each evoked in one another, to relinquish to some degree our personal investments in having the wider world (or the group process) structured a particular way, in order for it to satisfy particular desires or unmet needs within us.
In the absence of predetermined pathways, desires became visible through the longing. The desire lines that we treaded point the way to ongoing developmental journeys, separate yet intertwined.
It happened . . . without planning, that there was enough pull, an investment within each of us to remain present, in spite of the difficulty of . . . well . . . each other . . . no one wanted to be left out, even if that meant enduring the challenge of allowing others to be as they are . . . not attempting to negotiate our group relation itself, but relinquishing—that word again—an idea of how things should be, in order to have movement, in service to the regenerative process itself.
For me, the process became one of regenerating this capacity to be with others, and I experienced that as a political longing in myself; is this the heart of democracy? To allow others to exist with their own perception of events, their own priorities, moralities, while finding ways to move forward with mutually significant, meaningful endeavors? Finding lines along which mutuality flows: perhaps we can each bring ourselves to that place, and no further. Let internal challenges that result be personally managed, without being made the business of the collective.
The work that emerged has a quality that we experienced as posthuman, in Braidotti’s (2019) sense that it “assumes radical immanence, i.e., the primacy of intelligent and self-organizing matter.” As Barad (2007) put it “there is less an assemblage of agents than there is an entangled state of agencies” (p. 23). Perhaps I am describing the experience of being in the entanglement, the challenge to a singular subjectivity of holding with posthuman knowing of being a “relational embodied and embedded, affective and accountable entity . . .” (Braidotti, 2019).
We move forward, yet there is repetition. We find ourselves over and again returning, and in this way, we learn what matters. The repetition re-iterates moments, accentuates, and significates their passing. This becomes part of what I understand by “doing” theory, “the act” (Manning & Massumi, 2014) reanimates Deleuze’s (1995) words:
“I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentered center, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differentiates them” (p. xxi).
I have a strong memory of the sense of infinite space peeking through the leaves, sparks along a sunbeam. Relentless precision of flow. Time folding into softness, sunbeam, and gently warming my arm that day. I remember sunbeam, spectacular. Remember how to be, to be with one another in connection, without troubling. This forgotten art of being. I remember now.
The recognition of interconnection and interdependence as material fact, a matter (in fact) of nature, may undo urgencies that spit psychic realities into opposing forces one body at a time, and many bodies in time.
The Lowering Sun Glows in from the West
I am moved by this incantation, this weaving of voices, of writings and repetitions, light refrains, and echoing motifs.
Could we look at this process as a series of translations? An imperfect copying from one set of instructions to the next, recast in each iteration?
Each of us have a different idea of what has been said or not said. Each of us understand differently.
I am struck for a moment about the speed of tapping to my right. There is something satisfying about the physicality of writing side by side; even in the sounds and the smells, even in the sharing of breath.
When I listen . . . I want to shift some of the words. Rub them out with a board rubber and chalk different ones over the messy chalkiness left behind. For me it is not so much about relinquishing our individual writing—each part of the writing has come out of lived experience, and it remains rooted to that. But as the passages are placed alongside other passages their meaning shifts. I think of it more as building a layered, multifaceted, enriched, and shining entity. Like individual voices in a choir, distinct, forming a whole thing of beauty to fill the architectural space.
Entanglements
I got quite excited by making connections with the politics of collaborative writing as a model for the wider world and links with democracy. It resonates with some work I have been doing helping groups to deal with the fall-out from the Israel/Gaza events. Everything is so polarized at the moment, with the expectation that we have to be on one side or the other—and whichever side we choose, we are supposed to make banners, march, join vigils, write to MPs, and so on. I have been co-facilitating workshops in different contexts where we sit in a circle and tell our stories with others listening and not interrupting—nor diving off into heated discussion, which tends to polarize. Two in-person ones have been moving and appreciated; one on Zoom still to come. There is interest around, so more may be in the pipeline. The method is similar to many circle conflict resolution processes I have used in the past.
The process of the writing retreat deliberately did not go into exploring group relationships in depth. I was grateful for this, as I have sat through many T-groups in the past, which I found frustrating—it is easy to get a group into conflict, but so difficult to find a way out or forward. To be together as a group, accepting our differences of history, outlook, aims, and so on, seems a new way forward that has something to offer in these polarized times.
I was also interested in our discussion about contributing our work to a larger whole but not feeling that we had lost our individuality. Many years ago, I wrote a chapter about work with a women’s group in which they all contributed a piece written by themselves (Liebmann, 1997). I remember saying, “Of course I’ll change all the names for confidentiality,” and being quite surprised when they said unanimously, “No way—we’ve worked hard and we want our names there.”
Conclusion: Dancing Zorba’s Dance
Nonverbal explorations of embodiment felt apt and necessary, to mark and ease the journey out of physical isolation back into attuned co-presence. We shared gestures and movements, marking turns, processing challenges and delights nonverbally, regenerating our physical relation to one another.
Talking about how we might move together, the dance we know as ‘Zorba’s Dance,’ created for the film
As we concluded our time together, the dance seemed a fitting way to end, and so we performed it together.
Perhaps, through our embrace of movement and embodied forms of dialogue, we tapped into
Momentary challenges of (and to) our embodied co-presence, could be tempered by these reinvigorating (or regenerative) dialogues between body and mind, between wild, natural spirit, and the containing forces of language and reason. To know and accept both parts of ourselves and one another . . .
. . . this deep fingertip embrace . . . Regeneration . . . . . . finding myself where I am.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Ruth Tudor at Trealy Farm for hosting them in her space and to CANI-net (the Collaborative Artful Narrative Inquiry Network).
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
