After Writes

Abstract

In this paper we write our way into the space generated by the ending/not ending of the Bristol Collaborative Writing Group that we had all engaged with for over seven years. This writing was to have taken the form of a post script or ‘after writes,’ since we ended, or ‘petered out,’ some months before. Rather than ending responsibly, with attention to matters of ‘closure,’ talk of transition and carefully held space for reflective thinking (Birnbaum & Cichetti, 2008), we unravelled somewhat unceremoniously on the way back from lunch at the Pizza Express, perched outside the gents in the downstairs foyer at the university, unable to find an empty room to host our farewells. Yet in a manner completely congruent with our starting out and working together, the task we had set ourselves to end did not materialise as it ‘should.’ This special issue has afforded us the opportunity to attend differently to our endings/beginnings and also to each other “as if for the first time” (Eliot, 1944). And in doing so, we have learnt more about a richness of being together, an invisible dynamic, that has lurked secretly throughout our meanderings, revealing itself only when we abandoned intentfulness and allowed ourselves the indulgence of being, rather than doing.