Remembering Sue: Last Writes

Abstract

We are members of CANI-Net. Sue Porter was pivotal in our efforts to create and sustain the necessary, loosely fashioned spaces to inquire artfully and collaboratively into our fragile existence on this shared and damaged planet. Then suddenly she died. We were grief-stricken. There was a pause. We reconvened, to honour Sue through the ways of On collaborative writing and editingThere were nine of us involved in producing this text. We came together over a long weekend retreat in Wiltshire. We wrote and we played -drawing, cutting out and printing; activities that Sue had loved. And we remembered Sue, keenly and meaningfully, touching on other losses in our lives.A few months later about half the group were able to meet in Edinburgh, to edit our collection of writing into this paper. We were the 'hard core' editors, spreading the hard copy out in front of us, and armed with scissors and glue sticks. We went in with decisive actions, joining the pieces together with collating material here; slicing sentences away there; and generally guiding readers into the text, differentiating between the original writing 'between the nine' and the editing process 'between the four', with different fonts.After this process the document was returned online to the whole group, and was, quite unusually, accepted 'as is' as the final document. Even the person who had initiated and co-ordinated the 'remembering Sue' project, who had expressed a deep reluctance to 'relinquish' the editing process, had acknowledged that these mo(ve)ments (Davies & Gannon, 2005) and diffractions (Barad, 2007) of place, space and assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004) had given rise to unexpected and greater clarity in our text. Subsequently, another configuration from the original nine came together to perform parts of our text as a reader's theatre performance for a conference and, later still, yet another configuration came together to write the introduction to this paper. This has prompted multi-faceted discussions (still ongoing as we write) to take place amongst us, about how the process of editing the text that you are now reading has been a many-layered, multiply-peopled, geographically and ethically challenging and entangled process.