How Writing Touches: An Intimate Scholarly Collaboration - Hardcover

"What rare and wonderful gifts these authors have given us-a quintet of voices, each distinct, introducing a new form of collaborative work that reveals the vulnerability of each writer, the support of the others, and invites the reader to listen, partake. I highly recommend this book for its engaging writing and inspiring venture into community creation." -Laurel Richardson, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, The Ohio State University "This is a pathbreaking book. Collaborative writing, the intersection of multiple writing selves, is brilliantly wrought in these chapters. Collaborative writing is a relatively new writing form, in which writers write themselves into one another's lives. Coming together as friends, sharing identities as writers, the co-authors create a shared performance space. In this space they offer readers narratives filled with compassion, feeling, care and mutual concern. Out of this space emerges an ethics of love, and imaginings of a militant utopianism. Collaborative writing becomes a way of moving into a world that is ethical, and just. Future projects will stand [on] the shoulders of this book." -Norman K. Denzin, College of Communications Scholar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "This is an enchanting book. The reader is reminded that writing is a soulful, courageous, and loving act. Writing can break you open for the taking. Steal your heart away. It can be a necessary point of no return to make you more-more vulnerable, more curious, or just more ... It can charge you with breath, light, and language. All this is what the reader will witness and bear witness to in How Writing Touches. This book helps me know again and better that we are all here for each other and writing can make us and re-make us to be and do more than we imagined for ourselves, others, and the world-the glory of writing and its unrelenting reward. This book shows us that writing is always to be in communion with oneself and others, but to write within the circle of these blessed friends was more than being in 'good company,' it was a commitment to care-to respond, to answer back, to keep a promise and heed the call-for those moments that cannot bear the terror of silence, of nothing said. The reader is inside the unfolding generosity of this call and response among friends. This writing across distance that they do for each other is hard work. It is anxious work. It is generative and happy work. The reader is crossing distances with them-embodied and present-with every call and with every response we are turning the pages in anticipation and gratitude." -D. Soyini Madison, Professor of Performance Studies, Northwestern University "How Writing Touches is testament to the power of writing together. If it doesn't make you envious, it will at least make you want to form the kind of writing relationships that emerge among and between the authors-who transform before the reader's eyes with the kind of enduring magic only performance provides. Read for writing, read for performance, read above all for friendships framed by a collective commitment to performing writing." -Della Pollock, Professor of Performance and Cultural Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Five scholars 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. It became an experiment in the craft of autoethnography, exploring questions of intimacy and connection manifested through collaborative writing. Each year since then, the authors have returned to the Congress to read a small anthology of the year's writing-and to decide whether or not to continue. This book covers the first two years of that writing, offering stories of how writing touches, how it writes bodies into being and in between. It is an affecting, radical work, exploring love and intimacy as scholarly, messy, complex methodology-writing that often affirms and sometimes disturbs.