"We were constantly in fear of her hitting or pushing a friend, destroying a friend's toy, or throwing a block at someone’s head. We started to isolate ourselves because we were embarrassed of how our child acted around others."
Autoethnographic Writing
Whether short-form or long-form, personal memoir or speculative fiction, The AutoEthnographer seeks to publish your evocative expressions of the cultural made personal.
"I'm not exactly sure when I decided to make a performance piece about my sister's traumatic brain injury and death. In fact, I'm not sure there ever was a single moment of decision. Her story had become public in many ways, from online care sites to prayer chains to social media posts from family and friends. Her story was being performed out in the world before I started telling it."
"For the first time since my adolescence, I am recognizing that I don’t have to believe what everyone believes, nor do I have to base my morals on faceless strangers who don’t know who I am, or what my experiences are."
"For me, being a feminist simply means I am a strong, independent woman who has ideas and thoughts of her own; but it also means something else, which is an idea that confuses even me. I mean, how could I be a feminist when I am also a conservative woman?"
“What if I were Offred? What if I was a handmaid or a gender traitor living in Gilead?”
"If abortion can be banned, largely due to Christian beliefs, what is to stop an overturning of the legalization of gay marriage or the disestablishment of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?” If The Handmaid’s Tale taught me anything, it is to never believe that I am truly safe, untouchable."
"I have personally been that teenager, marking down “white” on a school application, hesitating to answer when an Anglo-American asked me “what are you?”, and leaving those experiences with a deeper sense of displacement."
"When I was first accepted into the PhD by research program in the UK, I had mixed feelings, mainly because I was about to pursue a career that I didn’t have the heart for, and partially because I would need to explore yet another new culture, country, and environment."
"As fragrance, and perfume in particular, has played a major role in the shaping of my writer’s voice, and participation in cultures of fragrance has had a major impact upon my identity, it is impossible to situate myself outside of these cultures. It is because of this privilege of “insider identity” within the global fragrance community and my natural inclination towards narrative research that I turned to autoethnography."
"When I return to Sam’s place with the cheesecloth, I smell our “soup” pot. Shit. I envision the blotter headline: ECU Professor busted for marijuana. What a way to make my graduate mentors proud and to show success at this professor business."
"Because I was so immersed in both history, bound in good-smelling leather, no less, and in beautiful and evocative little bottles around me as playthings, I guess it needed no further prompting. It was within my blood before I could think about what I wanted to do with my life!"
"She has been so careful at work; she has had all of her shopping delivered for weeks, actually for months, now; she's even wiped down the items with bleach as they are delivered, and still does. How can this have happened?"
