The otherness is not somewhere out there. It’s in me. Still, my search did not stop to this discovery. It took me profoundly even further. It took me to love and poetry.
JoinedDecember 21, 2021
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Ulla-Maija Matikainen is a Finnish poet and writer who has lived in Europe, Asia, and Africa. After earning an MA in Cultural History and MSc in Political Science, she worked in Finnish embassies and taught/conducted research in Finnish academia. Recently, she has been concentrating on writing poetry. Her philosophical interests are existentialism and phenomenology, particularly Merleau-Ponty, as well as the philosophy of language. Ulla-Maija thinks that artistic expression holds one of the most important positions in the learning process; as a poet, she hopes to convey and share her own search with others through her poetry. Besides poetry, her most beloved way of self-expression has long been dancing but she also enjoys listening to music. Ulla-Maija speaks English and French fluently, dreams in Italian, manages her Swedish and German, and to her own astonishment, hasn’t forgotten everything she has learned of Russian. Ulla-Maija believes that speaking another language and encountering different cultures as well as our own historical background enriches us.
Ulla-Maija Matikainen·
All ContentAutoethnographic EssaysAutoethnographic PoetryEducationFrom the EditorsMoreVolume 3, Issue 2 (2023)
··4 min read A tsunami of words, images, learned and pushed feelings and thoughts go through us every day. Poetry is a way to find our own voice.
Our editor Ulla-Maija Matikainen is questioning the call of otherness and narrates her discovery about the sameness that she has seen.
What is autoethnography? The AutoEthnographer's international team of editors offer definitions & suggested readings.
"One can’t write poetry without love. It is the strongest and the most vital root in poetry."
"Ongoing horrific events painstakingly filled my mind when I submerged into Dante’s Commedia Divina. Our tragedy with nature revealed itself to me in its deepest form."
Ulla-Maija Matikainen·
All ContentAutoethnographic Literary FictionAutoethnographic PoetryAutoethnographic WritingVolume 2, Issue 1 (2022)
··12 min read"A woman alone doesn’t belong to any male power or protection sphere. She can be kidnapped into fears and dreams."
