I wrote a study of my own faith, bankrupt as it may be, using story of my father, through the lens of Jewishness as I define it for myself.
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.
"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!"
"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."
My weird depression showed up this summer like “hey sis!” And I was like “fuck my life”! I wasn’t ready. This time, it caught me off guard.
Commercial genetics has become a cultural phenomenon. In this piece, I use autobiography to document discovering my biological father.
Can a colorless person have any sense of what it feels like to be prejudged against, before “the you - inside yourself” opens your eyes in the morning?
"As a New Age Sage or “Saxion”, it’s important to understand that to move things forward I must accept a challenge - to reinvent myself."
"I’m Pinkie, the brash I don’t give a fuck alter ego of Renata Ferdinand. I am emerging from the shadows, and blissfully, with my own column."
In this story I shifted my attention to the young woman –a nurse or a volunteer– who sat beside me and held my hand throughout abortion.
"My stories are meant to give women from Bangladesh a chance to show their strength and resilience. It is a way for me to try to connect with the rest of the world despite the differences in language and culture."
Tabitha Chilton and Gioia Chilton·
All ContentAutoethnographic EssaysCelebrating Dr. Patricia Leavy's Social Fiction 2024Special Issues
··23 min readLow-Fat Love Stories is the result of arts-based research on romantic, familial, and intrapsychic dissatisfying relationships, written by Patricia Leavy.
"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."
