Based on a number of PhD workshops called Wandering Feasts, in collaboration between Monash University and Design School Kolding, this article explores academic writing as both a mode and a method of inquiry. The article both points to and performs five creative-relational orientations to alternative academic writing: Performativity in challenging dominant ways of knowing and representing knowledge in the academy; emergence as mindfully holding open ideas of purpose and destination in favour of not-knowing; reciprocity in collectively creating charged encounters that spark new ways of knowing; improvisation in building social space where we felt comfortable jamming and givenness as a fundamental playfulness in which an academic community nurtures the courage to give–of ourselves. The article is in itself a manifestation of exploration writing in a playful and loosely defined process.