"What if autoethnography were treated not as an academic subject but as an artistic one?"
"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."
"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."
“A Seat at the Table” is the autoethnographic manifestation of my vulnerability, anger, and anguish, of my black feminist grit."
""Mourning (Unfinished)" is an essay about the way my experiences with farm animals helped me come to terms with a miscarriage."
New Issue! Volume 1, Issue 1, Summer 2021
“What if I were Offred? What if I was a handmaid or a gender traitor living in Gilead?”
"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 me, being a feminist simply means I am a strong, independent woman who has ideas and thoughts of her own; but it also means something else, which is an idea that confuses even me. I mean, how could I be a feminist when I am also a conservative woman?"
“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...
"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."
“A Quest for Social Justice: Notes on an Encounter” continues my accounting of having been falsely accused of sexual assault online.
