Permission to Write

In this narrative auto-ethnographic paper, I experiment with a version of “post-academic” writing. I explore how I could improve and develop my craft as a narrative inquirer and strengthen my written voice as an expression of my practitioner-researcher autonomy. I tell the story of two writers, myself and Laura, my student, by bringing us as characters into the same story. We are both students of writing and in the process of developing our thinking and awareness of educational experience through our writing. We use writing as inquiry, as a method, and our texts emerge from the shared storytelling world of language counselling. We both experiment with personal reflective writing as a way of claiming ownership of this open-ended writing practice and of expressing our autonomy. In this paper, I give glimpses of our stories with a view to how Laura’s story worked on me as a practitioner-researcher and a scholarly writer.