Autoethnography
There are lots of fancy words academics use to describe writing practices and approaches to research and their scholarship.
Autoethnography is one of them.
But it is a very important practice - it requires writing about oneself as cultural research and in self-reflective practice.
Yesterday, while reading the book, Narrative and Grief, and I found a few things useful, especially regarding why so many of us write about our grief, loss, trauma.
“Writing is an act of inquiry” (Richardson and St. Pierre, 2005) and “Writing makes experience meaningful, it constructs our experiences, however insufficiently” Lesa Lockford, p. 42).
I was also taken with her claim that "each loss through death cannot but be singularly experienced; yet it is also to acknowledge that each death interpolates us.”
Essentially, I take that to mean that grieving and individual losses are personal experiences, and yet also, loss and bereavement is something we share through humanity.
Death—in interpolating us—also inserts itself into our lives and calls us into reflection into the meaning of life and death.
Death calls us into awareness of ourselves—as mortal, limited, and socially constructed beings; it also shapes our sense of selves.
How can it not? When we’re heartbroken at losing someone we’ll never see or talk to again, whom we loved so deeply.
The act of writing through these gut-wrenching experiences can help as reflect and reconstruct our lives (Barak and Leichtentritt, 2017).
The authors of this compilation also helped to frame autoethnography, and I’ll use it when I request my students, especially upper level students and grad students to engage in this type of reading and reflection.
But performative autoethnography, Nathan P. Stucky notes, connects a cultural critique with lived, embodied experiences (qtd Adam et al 2015 and Spry, 2011). I found a phrase that stood out to me and I thought - yes. That’s exactly it.
It can also “touch nerves” and “bring heightened attention to human suffering, injustice, trauma, subjectivity, feeling and loss.” We reflect and create new methodologies as we navigate through the landscape of lived experiences” (Bochner and Ellis, 2016, p. 45).
Autoethnography examines “insights about specific moments in time and offers possibilities, rather than definitive conclusions (Matthews, p. 2); it is also fluid (Matthews, Ellis and Bocher) and they have significant impact on the writer’s life. We analyze these moments and lived experiences to lead to epiphanies (Ellis et al, 2011).
The writing requires five practices: Reflexivity; thick description or vivid storytelling; evocative writing-emotional and aesthetic engagement; connecting personal to the cultural; and ethics- personal accountability/responsibility.
The book also noted that we write as a response to an existential crisis - a desire to do meaningful work and lead a meaningful life (Holman Jones 2013) and to [figure out how to] survive.
That’s it.
That’s me -
That’s why I write.
It’s why I started this substack.
It’s why I wrote my memoir.
It’s why I believe that stories are survival and they are lifelines and they can help us heal and process.
Frank W. Arthur writes that “Stories are a way of re-drawing maps and finding new destinations” (p. 53), in his book, The Wounded Storyteller.
I know that writing isn’t for everyone - not all have always loved to do it and have studied it for years and years and made it their careers.
But I really don’t think you need to have done all of that in order to benefit from writing through your own experiences and using writing to process them.
You also don’t need to be a greater writer.
When we write down our narratives, it helps us to claim or to reclaim our stories.
We also place some distance between what happened to us and hurt us - and can view it from a distance, on the page. This can be helpful for us. It creates both distance and helps us to name it and to own it.
I have heard conflicting research and advice on the idea that when we narrate our stories, we heal.
Sometimes, of course, it could have the opposite affect; we could become re-traumatized.
Sometimes there is no linear, coherent, easy-to-understand narrative. And that’s okay. That’s just as it should be/ as it was, how it happened.
Maybe it’s not always writing, but I also know others who use painting or drawing or making music or creative writing like poetry or other art forms - dance or theatre, in order to tend to their wounds of the soul. I also think even telling stories in video or oral modes is equally as effective as a tonic to our deep wounds.
A creative outlet is not only important for expression and release, but it also takes us out of our heads and hurting hearts and into creative play and often directly into our bodies, which is so important with so many struggling with mental health.
Autoethnography is just one of the possible modes.
It makes me smile though - how we retain certain lines from movies that we watched when we were young.
When I watched, “Girl, Interrupted,” one of the lines that Whoopi Goldberg’s character told Winona Ryder’s character (since Ryder, Susanna Kaysen, was in a psychiatric hospital) was this -
“Put it down, in your notebook. Get it out of you. So you can’t curl up with it anymore.”
I think it’s sage advice.
We all need some avenue, some method or outlet in which to express ourselves.
May you find yours.
I believe we’ll be all the healthier for it.
And for me, it is not hyperbole or an exaggeration, when I tell you —
It has literally saved my life.
