"Damned," the first publication in The AutoEthnographer's Bodily Autonomy issue, is the product of my confused reflection and internal conversations with the culture that raised me."
The Ultimate Wave: Prose Poetry of the Pandemic and Parents Author’s Memo “The Wave” examines the problem of pleasure and...
"This autoethnographic poem is a question about the power of autoethnography in the face of the climate crisis. It is an expression of my dark fears, my depression that keeps me away from writing."
“Tired,” the titular poem and the collection at large, is an autoethnography looking at the cause of so much pain, so much fatigue. Anthropomorphizing the feeling of being tired gave me creative license to dramatize and explore the real experiences of needing a break...
"I tend to take every loss of rainforest personally. My autoethnographic poetry 'The Threat' and 'John Doe' are reflective of this."
The poems in this collection are a reflection on my zero waste aspirations (and the values behind the movement at large).
Within the context of this poem, I tried to explain what was happening to my body because of SLE and what I was thinking.
Ulla-Maija Matikainen·
All ContentAutoethnographic EssaysAutoethnographic PoetryEducationFrom the EditorsVolume 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.
This collection of poems is a glimpse into the lives lived on the margins, where the laws put in place to protect basic rights and bodily autonomy cease to apply.
"While living in Ecuador, I wrote “Home” which essentially is an homage to the “third-culture kid” phenomenon, when your parents are from another country than the one you grew up in."
There are multiple approaches to find one's poetic voice depending on the lens one chooses as a part of the author’s creative process.
The dynamic taking place in these poems was autoethnography, a hybrid of my investigation of the 1960's coupled with my personal experience.