Preserving Fugacious Stories Through Metho-pedagogical Gatherings to Carry Forth Otherworlds

The archive of scholarly communications holds stories-knowledge-worlds that we know, well-worn scripts, repeated and repurposed that come to contour our scholarship and our lives, and then there are stories that we need to know, vital lifegiving stories of otherworlding possibilities, stories of and from what Ursula K. Le Guin (2019) calls the Carrier Bag. It is these stories that take the shape of the carrier bag—filled with relational entanglements, in-process-ness, mess, tension, the daily repetition of gathering seeds—that tend to remain untold, ignored, glossed over, and actively disrecognized in the archive of scholarly communication that we are especially interested in. Through gathering as method, we share our relations and curiosities about how communication and (un)conventional publishing processes might yet create supportive mechanisms and mediums to amplify and preserve the relational-fragmented-ephemeral wisps and whispers imbued in the entangled processes of scholarly communication. Specifically, we consider how the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Le Guin 2019) invites more capacious understandings of how those who steward such re-worlding offerings of knowledge care with and for them. Sharing from our respective and collective carrier bag(s), we offer our stories of intimacy, vulnerability, and critical reflection and animate how our relations over the years have allowed us to bring forth fertile worldmaking potentialities into our teaching and scholarship in different but linked ways. We offer our everyday practices of gathering as practical reverence for the restoration of ourselves and our relations and the restory-ation of the scholarly archive. We hope these fugacious stories, some of which show up on the page, others that hover in the spaces between letters, words, lines, and images, materialize a container that can care-fully gather and hold these vitalities through spacetime—holding enough space for you to enter with all that you carry, enough time for you to dwell.