Playful and Serious Adventures in Academic Writing

In this reflective article, I examine three versions of adventurous writing. The first contrasts academic writing as either (or both) an anxiety-inducing task or a potentially animating and enjoyable quest. The second takes an auto-ethnographic approach to argue for the making of academic texts that are intended to be truthful and detailed accounts of their authors’ embodied experiences. The third version, playfully and even subversively, uses the example of a modern novel to suggest that all writing is “a trying adventure” where writers adopt whatever roles or stances suit their own critical and social purposes for verisimilitude.