"My Old Kentucky Homo," highlights my failure to assimilate into the community in which I still live, fourteen years later.
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.
"Censorship via banned books is an attempt to censor the future but the youth of today will not allow their voices to be silenced."
I. Hate. Black. History. Month. And I’m hopeful, that in time, you will come to hate it too!
I provide context by referencing theory and practice in narrative medicine and current literary criticism around trauma plots.
"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."
This autoethnographic essay offers a musing on the intricate relationship between language, writing and identity through an autoethnographic account of my reading and writing experience from childhood to present, and from China to the UK via Germany.
"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.
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.
"I write at length about my experiences surviving rape and abuse as a Western woman in Japan. I was lucky to get out alive."
Astonishing Truth: Abortion is Everyone’s Beeswax Author’s Memo Madison, Wisconsin is full of surprises, sometimes entertaining, always enlightening. But I...
"The words we use and how we say them are much more than sounds, they tell a story that gives us away, revealing a history about and behind us, a place and a people that we have come from."
This piece works to contextualize aging in the queer community, the complexities of developing trends in spectacle versus intimacy, the depth and shallow natures that are found in performance, as well as the fear and hope that can be found as a queer person.