Failing to come to terms with things: a multi-storied conversation about poststructuralist ideas and narrative practices in response to some of life's failures

This paper is designed to demonstrate some of the multi-storied representational possibilities available to us as writers and practitioner-researchers. It highlights some of the opportunities that are available to therapists and the people who consult them when they describe their conversational space as a site for co-research. It illustrates the reciprocity present in conversations, including therapeutic conversations, by juxtaposing three stories that are interrelated retellings from different writing genres. In positioning poetic, storied and more academic/interpretative texts alongside each other, we hope to trouble the edges between academic and creative writing and also between practice and research. In placing these stories next to each other we seek to disrupt carefully contained ‘client’ and ‘therapist’ positions. We intend to question some current bereavement orthodoxies by demonstrating some less taken-for-granted ways in which people, living and dead, can and do continue to sustain each other'...