Creative ethnography borrows much from John Van Mannen's description of confessional and impressionist tales of ethnography.1 Confessional tales are highly personalized accounts which emerge from a readily identifiable and self-conscious author. Impressionist tales use dramatic language and imagery to produce an imaginative account of ethnographic research. Both styles share much with what Lee Gutkind and others have called "creative nonfiction," a poetic blend of nonfiction analysis and literary techniques.2 By merging close description with creative prose, such writing attempts to create a text that is accurate, informative, and at the same time narratively compelling. My own work in this area has focused on the concept of change -- change within organizations and within cultures. "Rodeo" emerged as an early narrative from this study and helped me to form several preliminary impressions about change. The story is about a rural couple who seemed to exist outside of change; it is also a story about the interpretations and individual perceptions of change. What follows are two brief excerpts from this ethnography.

Seated along wooden planks overlooking the sandy pit of rodeo grounds, we are watching and admiring the clamor of neighbours and relatives waving, talking, and rescuing children who have wandered too close to the bulls. Despite our attempts to pass as locals, we always miss the subtle and not so subtle signs of membership exchanged in rural America. Our jeans carry the wrong designer label and they have faded too much in the wrong places. My shirt is wrong, and even with Rebecca's authentic red cowboy boots (mine are brown) we simply don't fit in. Like most small-town rodeos, tonight's event is the capstone of a fun week's activities. There has been a beauty contest for the crown of rodeo princess, a pancake breakfast, parade, and amusement rides at the fairgrounds. But these are an preliminary to the rodeo, tonight's big event.

To start things off, a group of eleven cowgirls riding quarter horses gallop into the ring carrying an assortment of coloured flags. In silent ritual, the men remove their hats, and the crowd stands up to greet the town's rodeo princess atop a huge white horse. She's carrying the Star-Spangled Banner and the national anthem rumbles the loudspeakers. No one waves, no one takes a picture, no one sings. At the conclusion of the anthem, to the whoops and cheers of the crowd, the women spur their horses and the princess leads a chain of unbridled energy around the ring before bolting out of the arena. The dirt is phenomenal. The loudspeakers switch to America's current Francis Scott Key, Garth Brooks, and the announcer preps the crowd for the first event, the bareback ride. The actual event is a bit anticlimactic as six of the eight cowboys get thrown early. The audience does not mind, they've settled in. The teenagers have taken daddy's money and are beginning to congregate around the competitors, trying desperately to be seen while feigning dispassionate coolness.

Between the bare backs and the saddle backs, the announcer successfully wins the audience's attention and polite applause by announcing local birthdays. Then he asks us to direct our attention to the far end of the ring "just above the Dodge Truck sign." He asks an elderly couple to stand. "I'd like to introduce a special couple who you probably all already know." The crowd begins to hush. "Ted and Mary Heber met each other at this rodeo 55 years ago today. Five years later they were married and for their honeymoon they came right back to those two seats. And folks, they've been coming back to those two rodeo seats every year for the last 50 years. Let's wish them a happy 50th and many more rodeos! In a world of constant change," the announcer booms, "it sure is nice to see that a few good things never change."

This scene occurred nearly five years ago. At the time, I was a Canadian graduate student studying organizational communication at an American university. I was living in my fifth city in as many years and I could not imagine the kind of fixity Ted and Mary represented. Here, at this rodeo in central Utah, I was astonished to see two people who were reported to have spent the past 50 years immune to change. As I thought more about Ted and Mary, I started to doubt the rodeo announcer's claim. I started to wonder about the relative and interpretive aspects of change. Perhaps change is a highly individual phenomenon: Where one person sees change, another will see the status quo. Perhaps where we all saw Ted and Mary holding out against change, they saw themselves as having changed a great deal. I began to wonder if there were other accounts and different interpretations of the events I had witnessed. Interpretations that were meaningful, but not available to me. Interpretations that would be forced to remain Actions, but nonetheless would still be relevant to an understanding of change.

"Well, we'd better get a move on if we're going to catch the rodeo this year." Ted slides back from the dinner table surveying the devastation they have jointly wrought to another anniversary meal of Chinese food. Ted used to be strictly a steak and potatoes guy until he discovered the joys of Chinese take out. 'Lou load up the dishwasher while I Jim my hair," Mary shouts en route up the stairs.

Ted always feels conspicuous driving to the rodeo in a sedan. He'd much rather be in his pick-up, but several years ago he hurt his back shingling the porch roof The pickup seemed to aggravate the injury so he traded it in for a used Oldsmobile. Truthfully, he prefers the ride, the comfort, and the spaciousness of the Olds. But it's tough for an old rancher to be without his truck. Ted parks the Olds a few rows away from the entrance to the rodeo arena. Looking around, he is still surprised at how different the rodeo has become. He first started bronc riding as an eight year old on his father's ranch. Then, ranches had competitions among their cowboys to see who could rope the best, who could ride the fastest, who could outlast the ranch's toughest bull. Now, Ted knows that few of the competitors work ranch lip. He knows about the rodeo schools, the training camps, the big time management, and the ways rodeo has become big business. He's disappointed when the competitors are from places like Texas, California, Missouri, or Canada. On the one hand, he identifies with the story about the old rodeo, about local kids testing their strength and testing their animal stock. On the other hand, he knows the story about developing the west, about bringing money to these deserts they call towns, about leasing something behind for the next generation who win try to scrape a living off of this land. Yet, as he watches the first four cowboys get thrown off their bare back mounts, he has yet to reconcile the two accounts.

Mary grabs his hand as the announcer starts reading off birthdays. He'd almost forgot about this, the special welcome they would be getting at tonight's event, it being their 50th and ale Ted looks over at a delighted Mary, brimming in the glow of her anticipated 15 seconds. He listens as the announcer shouts out: "I'd like to introduce a special couple who you probably all already know. Ted and Mary Heber met each other at this rodeo 55 years ago today...." As the announcer drawls on, Ted gives Mary a quick kiss on the cheek and whispers in her ear "I'm sure glad we do this every year, it gives me a chance to see just how much our life has changed."

Although it is not acceptable to pass fictional events off as reality, my own work on change has suggested that in changing contexts, the distinction between fact and fiction is often arbitrary and is itself changing. This results in numerous problems for the ethnographic researcher intent on documenting what is "real." Yet, this unique context becomes a rich territory for stories, interpretations, myths, and tales -- communicative devices that are essential to culture building and to the processes that maintain and change those cultures. Change seems to exist somewhere in the divide between fiction and nonfiction, between what we know and what we invent. What this will ultimately mean for academic reporting I am not sure. But I do know that studies of change offer ethnographic researchers rich, multi-dimensional texts, intriguing, dynamic subjects, and creative ways to report, narrate, and engage the subject. As Perkins and Blyler have recently argued, "researchers in professional communication are just beginning to be influenced by the concept of change in professional environments and to contemplate the effects [this study may have] on our field. . ."3 Studying change is a significant project, and it will undoubtedly produce many interesting and well textured stories.

1. Van Mannen, John. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

2. Gutkind, Lee. "The Immersion Journalism / Creative Nonfiction Interplay: Living and Writing the Literature of Reality." In More than the Truth: Teaching Nonfiction Writing through Journalism (Dennie Palmer Wolf, Julie Craven, and Dana Balick eds.). London: Heinemann (pp. 7-21).

3. Perkins, Jane M. and Blyler, Nancy. "Introduction: Taking a Narrative Turn in Professional Communication." In Narrative and Professional Communication (Jane M Perkins and Nancy Blyler eds.) Stamford CT: Ablex (pp. 1-34).