I strived to represent the experience of being a pediatric healthcare worker during COVID.
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.
"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."
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.
"How universal homesickness is, even for those who didn’t come from the best homes; these salmon came from Concrete, Washington, and they still fight like hell to come back every single year."
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."
“Letter from Okinawa” describes my research and observations into the impact the U.S. military has had on the island, and tells the story of the Japanese government’s historical culpability by colonizing, controlling, and discriminating against the island.
"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."
This piece recounts a trip I took to the Czech Republic and it is proof that language barriers similarly embolden people to speak cruelly.
Leavy is more than the mother of the social fiction movement in the social sciences; she’s its fairy godmother.
"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."
"Ami Tau Ami (I Am Who I Am), is a story about a mother letting go of her own dreams but passing it to her daughter, as my mother did for me."
This story explores childbirth-related trauma and postpartum mental health through the lens of a ‘good birth.’