Perhaps as a way of resisting the neoliberal university, this chapter follows my personal/professional longings for meaning. Responding to a desire to connect and ‘be’ differently in academia, for more than a year I have been initiating conversations and collective writing with colleagues/now-friends and engaging in open, personal and aesthetic ways of communicating. Embracing these invitations, women in my life and work have joined with me in storying their lived experience across personal and professional spaces of writing and research. Together we have embarked on an agentic adventuring and unearthing of our individual and collective voices, creating and expanding safe – and perhaps risky – spaces for scholarly, professional and personal disclosure in the academy.