"This autoethnographic story is about mental illness, specifically bi-polar disorder."
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.
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."
“Cold Snap” is about two disparate adults, caught in the tumult of abrupt weather change, caused by the accidental detonation of an experimental meteorological weapon.
"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?"
"She needs to be an artist to be an artist-teacher in adult community learning. She needs to do both to become the best she can be."
"Unspeakable is a consideration of the silencing effects of stuttering, political censorship, unspeakable wartime atrocities, and the silent communication within virtual relationships."
"A tree once taught me that those moments of ruin are only a pause, a passage really, on the way to something else."
"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."
"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."
"When a favorite perfume ceases to exist, it is another kind of death. Having been created, it leaves a special sort of emptiness," from Eulogy for a Perfume.
I couldn't go to India for the past two years due to COVID-19 uncertainties and be with the rest of my family to help them navigate through this earth-shattering loss when they needed me the most, a sad reality of many international students.”
"Sookie was never meant to be my support dog. The subject of this autoethnographic literary nonfiction, I rescued her when I was 17 years old and it was by far the best decision I have ever made."