How Writing Touches

Five scholars, with varying histories together, met as writers at a workshop at the 2007 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry and made a commitment to write over the following year to, for and with each other in an experiment in the craft of autoethnography, an experiment that led us to explore questions of intimacy and connection manifested through collaborative writing. Each year since then we have returned to Congress to read a small anthology of the year's writing—and to decide whether or not to continue. This paper is drawn from our third year of writing together across the changing distances, as our bodies moved and lay still in both unfamiliar and familiar spaces. Within castles and beside oceans, on pastures and in homes, at universities and hospitals, we wrote together, between and amongst our group of five, working, as always, it seems, at who and what we are becoming. The joy of our continuing writing presence in each others' lives, our pleasure and surprise at such friendship, earned through hard writing labor, is manifest alongside an awareness that there is always more to do. We turn and return to love and intimacy as scholarly, messy, complex methodology as we send writing to each other that we, in turn, pick up on—and sometimes do not—in our responses; writing that often affirms and sometimes disturbs.