“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...
"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."
I couldn't go to India for the past two years due to COVID-19 uncertainties and be with the rest of my family to help them navigate through this earth-shattering loss when they needed me the most, a sad reality of many international students.”
"And these are the things I carry: the memories of those gone before us; the names of those entrusted to me to care for."
I write of parental grief & my mother's sweater as a comfort to me, exploring cultures of grief where pain meets love and love meets pain.
""Mourning (Unfinished)" is an essay about the way my experiences with farm animals helped me come to terms with a miscarriage."
Dilek Isler Hayirli·
All ContentAutoethnographic Art & MultimediaEducationFrom the EditorsReflections on MethodVolume 2, Issue 3 (2022)
··13 min read"I had not been aware that this emotional research was also performing autoethnography, collecting memories from the field"