The Canoe Trip: Confluence of Leisure Experience and the Self

Constitutive reflexivity, stories, and personal narrative were used to interpret leisure experience and provide insights for understanding leisure identity. I present a personal narrative of an annual canoe camping trip on a forested backcountry river. Stories are told in first person by the author about his trip of twenty years on a river with a small group of men. The author illustrates how personal narrative allows opportunities for understanding and interpreting meanings and changing leisure identities. The confluence of narrative, identity, and leisure experience is illustrated and discussed. The purpose is to bring the writer/researcher into the qualitative project as a subject and actor in the story and show how leisure identity images are created and affirmed through time.