Walking and Making: A Collaborative Autoethnography of Our Creative Recoveries

This chapter is a collaborative autoethnography that explores the authors’ search for a new way of being in their creative practice to help them move through past experiences with cancer. Building on the work of other autoethnographers who have combined evocative images and text (Sava and Nuutinen, Qual Inq 9(4):515–534, 2003; Scott-Hoy and Ellis, Wording pictures: Discovering heartful autoethnography in handbook of the arts in qualitative research: Perspectives, methodologies, examples, and issues, pp. 127–141, 2008), the method the authors identify starts with discussion and walking, that motivates practice (image and text) and evolves as an autoethnographic cartography whereby poetry, images and maps tell the story of the research. The collaboration is an example of arts-based autoethnography that uses evocative stories to intersect with evocative images of the research process (see also Clark-Keefe, Alberta J Educ Res XLVIII(3):1–27, 2002; Scott-Hoy, Ethnographically speaking: Autoethnography, literature, and aesthetics pp. 274–294, 2002, Qual Inq 9(2):268–280, 2003).