"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."
"Because I was so immersed in both history, bound in good-smelling leather, no less, and in beautiful and evocative little bottles around me as playthings, I guess it needed no further prompting. It was within my blood before I could think about what I wanted to do with my life!"
"When I review evocative autoethnography I look for that layer in the contribution that will entertain and connect to a cultural issue."
"Everybody is a poet in the sense that everyone was/is making do—and making magic—with what they had/have."
Diane Riggins·
All ContentAutoethnographic EssaysAutoethnographic WritingReflections on MethodVolume 1, Issue 2 (2021)
··5 min read"My thesis began to unfold after doing some research on my final topic idea about Tolkien’s world, female characters, female gamers, and the stereotype that females are the love interests or damsels in distress. I chose autoethnography because it allowed me to add that personal angle to the paper because I am a female writer, reader, and gamer."
"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."
"Congratulations to Shanita Mitchell, Editorial Board member of The AutoEthnographer and multimedia artist, for her recognition by the International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry (IAANI)."
"Once I have the first line or two, the rest of the poem seems to flow rather easily. I write whatever comes to mind. Somewhat like a story rather than a poem. I then start to take out the excess words and phrases and pare it down to the essence of what I wish to say. Other times I do not change a word. The muses come and go on their own. I also believe poetry has chosen me."
"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?"
"Then comes that special brand of rage and dejection that the patriarchy inspires by attempting to steal away with my bodily autonomy."
"I called out the demons one by one. I named them. I gave them precise blocking and ultimately, I controlled where they stood, breathed, and bourréed. I gave them an entrance, and a stage, and then I sent them away."
Volume 1, Issue 2, Summer 2021
