Zona. I have always thought that names of diseases sound so beautiful. This is the story of a disease that lives with me.
In this story I shifted my attention to the young woman –a nurse or a volunteer– who sat beside me and held my hand throughout abortion.
The process of seeking pregnancy alone (by necessity, not choice) showed me how limited reproductive rights in the U.S. truly are—even before the recent loss of Roe vs. Wade, that policy that had so shaped my generation’s belief in our bodily autonomy.
"This autoethnographic poetry is born of my personal experience, witness, as well as currently chronicled and ancestral lore."
"Barriers melt like grilled cheese at the table when you're dancing for your supper like the old vaudevillians."
"Combining autoethnography and artwork, Supreme Justice aims to reveal the persistence of institutionalized oppression of women through history."
My weird depression showed up this summer like “hey sis!” And I was like “fuck my life”! I wasn’t ready. This time, it caught me off guard.
"A tree once taught me that those moments of ruin are only a pause, a passage really, on the way to something else."
"Ami Tau Ami (I Am Who I Am), is a story about a mother letting go of her own dreams but passing it to her daughter, as my mother did for me."
Ulla-Maija Matikainen·
All ContentAutoethnographic Literary FictionAutoethnographic PoetryAutoethnographic WritingVolume 2, Issue 1 (2022)
··12 min read"A woman alone doesn’t belong to any male power or protection sphere. She can be kidnapped into fears and dreams."
"My stories are meant to give women from Bangladesh a chance to show their strength and resilience. It is a way for me to try to connect with the rest of the world despite the differences in language and culture."
"My poems for this special issue seek to document a history of my choice, not just personally but humanly, to use autoethnography to weave through the personal and the political."