Too much happening!

We've now got to the point in the congress when there is too much happening for any of us really to have time to blog. The congress is in full swing and it has (to quote Tami Spry) definitely got swing Now its  all about choice...if you are presenting, of course, you have no choice, but at other times, you have the choice to sit in the courtyard coffee shop and chat, go to the bookshop, take a nap and/or go to a session which means you miss nine others. Sometimes these choices are hard!!

Yesterday started at 8 o'clock sharp with parallel sessions. I went to a session shared by Jonathan and Ken with Tami Spry, Larry Parker and Ron Pelias continuing with an online collaborative writing venture they've been engaged in for three years now. Things are getting a little messier in this group now which I found more interesting. It seemed as if their performance was neater than their experience which I found engaging and intriguing. I was interested in what was not said. There was much talk and writing in this session about what was possible between them, which of course left me gripped by what is impossible, not said and unsayable (preoccupations of mine generally in this kind of work I should admit... I sort of wanted them to read a bit more about other online collaborative writing groups and in particular Annie Rogers on the unsayable and Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler on blindness in the accounts we give, but (and you gotta laugh at this) I did not clearly say so - much food for thought, and some discomfort for me in this session.

Next I was part of a panel 'review  for Laurel Richardson's book 'Last writes"

a daybook for a dying friend. Each of the panellists took a piece of the book that struck a chord in some way to read out and then ask the author about. This worked well and was well attended.
We all chose different aspects of the book, mine being pages 152-153 about (and also not abou) shoes...shoe fittings, shoe sortings and ways of relating with our shoes and their meanings as a parallel process with our ways of relating with our dying. It was a funny passage as a lot of the book is ...and what I particularly liked about the book was the  everydayness of the days spent with a dying friend.

The session seemed to work well, although perhaps lacked critical edge, which may be inevitable when the author, much liked at this conference, is present and is clear from the outset ( we know this because Carolyn Ellis asked her) that there was nothing she would change in the book, that this was the only book she COULD have written.

To be honest I didn't know what to make of that. As soon as I've 'finished' writing, I can always think of other ways of doing that writing, other wishes for the writing as an event in the world etc, even in those rare moments when I am really pleased with my work. Nonetheless its a great book and it was very interesting to hear Laurel speak of the writing of it, of the use of doubling and rhythm and musicality  in its construction. This was a really useful conversation.

As soon as this finished I had to do a high speed whiz across the campus because I was taking part in a performative writing  spotlight on Narrative, Health and Healing. Viv (Martin) and Elyse Pineau  had brought this panel together. We knew each other in this panel and had planned it as a concept, but had no sense of how it would work together as a whole, or exactly what each other was going to present on the night, so we had a great time discovering, in the moment, that our texts were in many ways interwoven in both content and form. Viv's auto-ethnographic presentation was very gently given and softly spoken and I was struck by the the relationship between the day to day and the extraordinary life and death experiences that she has endured.  I hope she writes this as a paper. My presentation was three fragments of a work in progress called ' Dying on the NHS:  a daughter's soliloquy' and although I am immediately critical, I was also pleased with 'how this went' and 'where I am going to take it'.



One of the advantages of being in this panel,was that my presentation was sandwiched between two performance studies scholars, which made me more acutely aware of my own presentation as a performance, but also excited about how much I have to learn about performance and the performative in the development and future of my own work.

Okay I'm fast running out of blogging time here, I might have to come back to this, but i spent the rest of my day, meeting with Dione Mifsud from Malta, discussing some work I am going to be doing with him there in the Autumn, going to Sue Porter and Anne Rippin's rescheduled 'heavenly and legless' performance, which deserved a bigger audience, but had been rescheduled and was therefore difficult to find (they are going to have to publish this, if only to get the feedback they wanted).

Their very creative use of their ipads as interactive visual add ons in this session nearly converted me, but for the moment I am still holding onto my money!! (if you could also write and draw on an ipad with a pen-like gadget I'd be there like a shot, but it lacks this facility).

The working day ended with Tami Spry in performance, which was superb, engaging, scholarly and musically and poetically gripping. Glenn filmed this performance, so hopefully, with Tami's permission we'll be able to show this to people later - although live performance is sometimes hard to capture. I was struck by small things...like maybe even just learning/knowing  the words of a presentation frees you up to engage with your audience so differently from traditional academia.

After Tami's performance most of us went out to supper together at the bread company, where a good time was had by all. I came along later I went to a conference banquet organised by Norman Denzin, which was fun in a different way. I spent most of the banquet swapping stories of how we got here with Suzanne Gannon, who I like more and more. I found out more about her work, what she hopes to do, the constraints imposed by the academy, etc, as she did about me. I also caught up with Patti Lather, who is coming to Bristol later this summer and worked out with her exactly what that workshop will entail, who I should invite etc.




An interesting day, lots of food for thought...increasing domination for some reason by D and G ...

Deleuze and Guattari (which was a bit dull after a while, I feel as if we're done with the D and G a bit in Europe, It is as if North America has suddenly discovered D and G and frankly I wanted a bit more variety, diversity and above all edgey political and feminist thought...
Why don't they think more actively and or with Cixous, Cavarero, Butler and Kristeva I wonder? All these women are alive ...what's the problem with them? The fact that they are women or the fact that they are alive?
Anyway, I must go, because its Saturday morning and we have our group presentation to deliver today...