Co‐creating real fictional characters: Virtual ethnofabulation

Abstract We generated these short fiction stories from a collaborative co‐writing practice. In this practice, we write ethnofiction together, alternating who is writing. When we write, we write live in a Google Doc while also on a video call; one of us lives in Sudbury, Ontario, and the other lives in Toronto. In our practice, we are interested in exploring the potential of collective world‐building as critical empirical and relational praxis. The three pieces included here are character studies, but they are also stories of characters studying. Each of them arises from an oblique or direct relation to our ethnographic fieldwork, one of us having worked with online queer and trans activists in North America, and the other having worked with working‐class community organizers in Barcelona. The first piece considers the role of representation in mediating violence and the emotional development of the observer. The second deals with the ways in which loss, abandonment, and inheritance are experienced through intimate attachments to place and to flesh. The final story was written as an exercise in listening: the one of us who works in Barcelona described an interlocutor to the one of us who works in North America. We then wrote a story about a character called “Arnoldo,” who is neither wholly fictional nor wholly real. This work develops a set of techniques for relating to others at the intersection of artistic craft, critical fabulation, and world‐building.