Fable-ing/Telling Tales-ing/True Story-ing/Creative Writing: A Critical/Collective/Auto/Ethnographically Informed Process Aiming to Deepen Analysis of What Is and Support Imagining What Might Bes

Abstract

A journey that we have been travelling along for the last few years has been a research project that explored engaging with the experiences of queerly identifying tertiary students. This project involved collecting and analyzing stories, and a lot of dialogue, reading, writing, and thinking. This journey has been bound up in describing, investigating and critiquing ‘what is’; including the relationships between contexts and the lives, experiences and journeys that take place in those contexts. This journey has in turn provoked further thinking, talking and writing, and this has provoked even more understandings and preoccupations. This chapter continues our journey but shifts the focus from analysis and critique of ‘what is’ to scribblying, imagining and articulating ‘what might bes’. In particular, we will discuss and demonstrate a diffractive imaginative strategy that we call fable-ing/telling tales-ing/true story-ing/creative writing that we deploy to help emergent unformed thinking and journeying towards and into ‘what might bes’. We also include excerpts from fables that we have written. This fable-ing is driven by persistent preoccupations or re-realizings that research projects have provoked or made clearer. At the same time we argue that they do some of the work of laying the foundations of experiences, lives and contexts yet to be.