"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."
"What if autoethnography were treated not as an academic subject but as an artistic one?"
"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."
""Mourning (Unfinished)" is an essay about the way my experiences with farm animals helped me come to terms with a miscarriage."
“A Seat at the Table” is the autoethnographic manifestation of my vulnerability, anger, and anguish, of my black feminist grit."
"First and foremost, one has to have the belief that if he builds the field, the major players are going to show up for the game. What has most surprised and moved me, however, has been the showing up. Indeed, folks have been showing up each week since the project's inception in late May."
"My poems are not entirely mine. They belong to the people and events of my passage through life. For once the dam is breached its contents flow unabridged. - Milton Carp, poet at 91"
"I had no idea what the repercussions would be should I disclose my identity to my students. Would I be fired? Would I be questioned? Would I be told not to talk of such things? This reticence is a sad reflection on my internalized homophobia, my being still uncomfortable enough with my identity such that I had to worry about keeping it secret."
"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."
“Tired,” the titular poem and the collection at large, is an autoethnography looking at the cause of so much pain, so much fatigue. Anthropomorphizing the feeling of being tired gave me creative license to dramatize and explore the real experiences of needing a break...
"This journal is the culmination of my life’s work as a writing teacher, writer, and farmer. In the pages of this journal, you will find coverage for everything from raising chickens to jam recipes to poetry about farming and Nature."
"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."
