Creative writing practice can be a performative act, a process through which a range of subjectivities can be construed and disseminated. This essay responds to Rebecca Solnit's provocation on stories and Sara Ahmed et al.'s assertions on home/belonging. What sort of “inventive, chance-taking” text might appear, that acts up, or “performs”? I investigate questions of definition, prepositional thinking, affect, and the grammar of dying and death as essay, poetic prose, and the “unconvention” of toggle and weave in a kind of “collective transit.”

In this essay, the four authors explore the material and affective agency of art-making in a collective biography workshop. We work with our memories of the death of someone close to us, through stories, and through making art. Collectively we explore a specific, embodied moment of the particular deaths we have each experienced. The substantive focus of our work is methodological. We concern ourselves with what is made possible through including art-making in intra-action with the more usual storytelling/listening/writing/reading/making of collective biography.

Following H. L. Goodall Jr.'s call to employ narrative ethnography to help re-establish “the centrality of personal experience and identity in the social construction of knowledge,” 1 this essay examines one scholar's efforts to identify with her student, Anna, during her battle with terminal Ewing's Sarcoma. Using performative writing and the lenses of literary devices and relief humor, we seek mechanisms for grappling with the complexities of life and death: labeling devices and tropes, using what we know to figure out what we do not know, and thinking critically and reflexively.