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After 10 minutes or so, he would indicate that it was my turn, and I would do the
same. And we would continue to alternate until near the end; Michael would
summarise and arrange the next appointment time. When Michael was in
conversation, I would write down any question of his that took my interest, and
there were indeed many. From my perspective, he was indeed prolific. I would
then take my notes home with me, transcribe his questions word for word, and
practice or rehearse them first in my imagination. It did not take long for them to
start showing up in my conversations. And as well, I took a keen interest in the
effects of such questions. This encouraged me to start inventing questions of my
own which I could take back to Adelaide on my next trip and trade Michael for
more of his originals. One of Michael9s greatest achievements in the 1980s was
studying and cataloguing the wide range of his inventions with the help of a
student researcher. They compiled, in my opinion, his most important paper of
the 1980s on what became known as narrative therapy by the end of that decade.
It was titled The Process of Questioning: A Therapy of Literary Merit? with a
question mark after this proposal, suggesting that these questions might lead to
something that had literary merit. I will propose 8aesthetic or poetic merit9 for
8literary merit9. I believe narrative therapy has had, from its very beginnings, a
commitment to imbuing such therapeutic conversations with a poetics or an
aesthetics alongside its ethics. And I fear that is being lost, and my address seeks
to have us all explicitly consider this.
Michael would often characterise narrative therapy as 8a therapy of inquiry9 in the
late 1980s and the early 1990s. And I would like to do so as well in 2025.
Specific memories started flooding back to me of those times and events in my
reminiscences. However, there was one encounter that continually returned, day
after day. It concerned four meetings in the early 1980s with Dustin, then sixteen
years old, and his parents under the most dire of circumstances. Fortunately, I
had retained videotapes of those meetings, as well as transcripts, in my archives
and was able to revisit them some forty years later.
What Is a Good Question—and What Does It Do? A Forty-Year Reflection on Inquiry in Narrative Therapy
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, August 2026 Release, p. 9-45.
www.journalcnt.com
