Thursday, July 29, 2010
Laura Friday's Presentation
The Yarn Kids
Laura
In the corner of the classroom, there is an oak-colored wooden closet with a rod to hang
the student’s coats and cubbies below to store their book bags and lunchboxes. I am a
third grader with shoulder length, medium brown hair and big, brown eyes who
reluctantly takes off my coat and places it on a hanger. It is Tuesday morning, a little past
9:00, and I’m wearing an itchy, knitted, pink acrylic yarn dress. Not only is my dress
made from this uncomfortable material, but so are my thick stockings and my matching
pink headband. I peer around the corner of the closet to see the other girls in my class
wearing their cute t-shirts and designer jeans. Jordache and Sergio Valente are the brand
names of choice. The circle of girls with their pretty hairstyles and fashionable clothes
are happy and giggling among each other as they have fun whatever games they play. I
never know their games or their conversations. I am an outsider. I am different because
of my stupid, pink yarn dress. I don’t only have a pink yarn dress, but a blue one and a
yellow one too. I have one for each week of school. Oh yes, I have to wear the same
dress day after day all week long because Mama tells me that is doesn’t smell. I hang
back near the closet for as long as I can until the teacher announces that all of her students
need to take a seat at their desks. Embarrassed and ashamed, I walk from around the
closet with my head hanging heavy, avoiding eye contact with my peers and take a seat at
my desk. I know that I am different from the others because Mama made me so. My
sisters too are clothed in the familiar yarn dresses, yarn stockings, and yarn headbands.
And, my brothers are also not spared the yarn. Mama has knitted countless sweaters and
socks of the same scratchy acrylic yarns. My sisters, brother and I are known as the yarn
kids among the teachers and we are different. Thanks Mama.
Laura
In the corner of the classroom, there is an oak-colored wooden closet with a rod to hang
the student’s coats and cubbies below to store their book bags and lunchboxes. I am a
third grader with shoulder length, medium brown hair and big, brown eyes who
reluctantly takes off my coat and places it on a hanger. It is Tuesday morning, a little past
9:00, and I’m wearing an itchy, knitted, pink acrylic yarn dress. Not only is my dress
made from this uncomfortable material, but so are my thick stockings and my matching
pink headband. I peer around the corner of the closet to see the other girls in my class
wearing their cute t-shirts and designer jeans. Jordache and Sergio Valente are the brand
names of choice. The circle of girls with their pretty hairstyles and fashionable clothes
are happy and giggling among each other as they have fun whatever games they play. I
never know their games or their conversations. I am an outsider. I am different because
of my stupid, pink yarn dress. I don’t only have a pink yarn dress, but a blue one and a
yellow one too. I have one for each week of school. Oh yes, I have to wear the same
dress day after day all week long because Mama tells me that is doesn’t smell. I hang
back near the closet for as long as I can until the teacher announces that all of her students
need to take a seat at their desks. Embarrassed and ashamed, I walk from around the
closet with my head hanging heavy, avoiding eye contact with my peers and take a seat at
my desk. I know that I am different from the others because Mama made me so. My
sisters too are clothed in the familiar yarn dresses, yarn stockings, and yarn headbands.
And, my brothers are also not spared the yarn. Mama has knitted countless sweaters and
socks of the same scratchy acrylic yarns. My sisters, brother and I are known as the yarn
kids among the teachers and we are different. Thanks Mama.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Marissa's Friday Presentation
STEPPING INSIDE THE BUBBLES
I’m still jet-lagged; our interview about my “dreams for the future” keeps getting interrupted when I blurt out stories from the recent trip. I babble and stare off into space, trying to account for my professional ambitions while my imagination lingers several time zones away.
“Where do you want to be?” she asked.
“Geographically, you mean?”
Perhaps that sounded like a silly clarification, but geography seems out of my hands. It is foolish to make such fantasies tangible: I will go where a good job is, just like I have always moved in search of work or school. Ties to family, friends, places, relationships seemed secondary; I learned early on that to be an achiever meant to give up sentimentality, that to be “realistic” meant setting aside romance, that cutting ties means you are smart. I have moved nine times in the last sixteen years.
Sometimes, I just want to stop moving.
HELSINKI, FINLAND: KIASMA MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
I am supposed to be on a group tour with thirty other people, American and Finnish students joined together for a two week course. The concrete floors and high walls create an echo, and I have difficulty understanding the guide. She is thoughtful and articulate, but the space is more compelling than the loose collection of words I can piece together from her talk. My classmates chatter excitedly; the galleries fill with sound. I want to block out them all, be in the space, see into the artwork – uninterrupted.
In one gallery hang three large plastic bubbles. I gather you are supposed to stand in them, one person at a time. People line up, continue to chatter, pull out cameras. I stay to the edges, overhear the guide explain – the artist worked with a perfume maker to capture her scent impressions of three cities important in her life – Paris, Helsinki, and…was it Budapest? I am intrigued, but I absentmindedly glance through some photographs I can no longer recall, then the group is whisked away to the next gallery. I don’t stand in a bubble.
I try to catch up with the group, be a good student, listen to the guide. But, they move so fast – walking through the galleries, the way I often go through a mall – get what you need, and get out. Snap a picture, read the label, comment to a friend. Next. I can’t keep up. The galleries loop around, connect. The bubbles are now empty.
Three spheres hanging in the space. A diagram on the floor tells you where to put your feet, like those instructions for ballroom dance – stand here, feet together, be still. Bend down, step inside, straighten up.
So, what does Helsinki smell like in the bubble? I don’t have good words for smells, they seem so abstract, but Helsinki in a bubble was definitely different from Paris in a bubble, and you have to be there, stand right in that spot, feet on the diagram, to tell. Be there. Pause. Inhale. Cameras, Facebook updates, blogs can’t capture this. For a moment, I am alone. I relish the bubble, though I can’t stand the perfume. Time to move on.
What would my bubbles be?
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS: REFRIED BEANS, DRY GRASS, FABRIC SOFTENER
Boredom, confinement. Need something more. Age fifteen: my grades and ability to take tests earn me a spot at a prestigious math and science program, at a university 300 miles away. Do I like math and science? I like anything that means I can leave. Breaking up with my high school boyfriend is devastating, but I understand it is what you do if you are smart. You don’t let attachments hold you back.
HELSINKI, FINLAND: THE FINNISH NATIONAL MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Our hosts are the overachievers of the class: not content to plan just one outing, they organize five, split up the members of our group so we each have a custom, individual tour. We are to work alone, consider themes of familiarity and belonging. At this point I’m confident enough navigating the tram, no longer too embarrassed every time I have to say, “I’m sorry, I can only speak English.” Armed with a carefully marked map courtesy of Elsa, I set out.
Eventually I find my way to the building I am supposed to be at, but since I can never seem to follow directions exactly right I end up at the wrong door, for the third time. I land in a museum instead of artists’ studios, find no one to strike up a conversation with as directed. Except for the kind woman at the desk, it is empty and quiet.
We are supposed to be investigating ideas of “gaze.” Funny to do that in the photography museum, where the gaze has been partly predetermined for you, and where you feel under immense but invisible scrutiny for the part you determine yourself: what am I looking at? Why? Am I really the one choosing?
Finland really has seemed magical – so clean, so polite, so full of light. I’ve been on a break from real life, where as a tourist it is easy to wander and end up mostly in places that seem engineered for your comfort. Helsinki bustles with activity like any modern city, but a sense of calm undergirds everything; life’s urgency is restrained. The people are just so nice.
Then there was the exhibit – just one, tucked in a corner, a secret, as if perhaps the museum’s board wasn’t entirely sure they should let you see it. A sign posted at the entrance gave some warning to children and sensitive patrons, but as it is my practice to ignore such signs, I went right it. It is also my practice to embrace stoicism; I don’t cry at movies.
I didn’t cry at the exhibit either, didn’t hold my breath, felt only a twinge of anxiety as I watched the young woman in the video installation draw a razor across her knee. Oh good, its on a loop, I can stop watching now. The photographs were clearly staged. This boy is a model, this is an artist, not a photojournalist. How did she get the makeup right for those bruises on his spine? How long did it take to get the duct tape just so across his hands, to pose him, motion limited, on the floor like that? How did she get permission to photograph that baby for this project? Wait, what’s up with the toilet in that photograph? That’s not a sparking Finnish, low-flow dual-flush toilet. That looks more like what you’d find in the storage room –turned restroom at a tiny highway gas station somewhere in Texas…
Well, maybe I held my breath a bit. After two weeks of being the last one through the museum, the one dangling at the back of the tour group, the one wanting for just a bit more time to be present, I couldn’t wait to get the hell out. The gallery was small, probably 10 pieces in all. I was stuck. Rooted. Had to walk around and around, staring, one eye open and the other one shut tight. The artist mocked me, screaming: You want Finland, lady, this is Finland! You want social welfare? It can’t catch everyone! You think the best health care and education on the planet makes us safe? Screw healthcare – does this look healthy? You like polite? This is what polite does at home. This is our home, this is someone’s home.
This is your home.
DENTON #1: VOMIT, CARESS BODY WASH, CLARK HALL CHEESEBURGERS
Anxiety, 4.0, more anxiety, 18 credit hours, A is for anxiety achievement afraid. Afraid of myself so I sleep on the floor of my friend Julia’s dorm room, two doors down from mine. She sees me through crisis after crisis, reveals the secret I don’t yet have words for, gently secures my freedom. But, no one stays at North Texas unless they’ve failed. Moving is the expectation. Julia transfers to UT, but I need even more distance.
CLAREMONT, CA: SWEAT, INCENSE, RAIN
It takes me a year to catch up with everyone – they’ve all been together for two years, I feel like an imposter thrust into a tight-knit club at my small college. I’m the young one, book smart but experience dumb. One at a time they leave to go abroad; I stay to finish my degree “on time.” At 19 I’m the youngest in my graduating class, but this is like being the baby bird getting flung from the nest too soon – I only just barely keep myself from smacking into the ground. I don’t want to leave, but I have a degree now so there’s no way to stay. Moving again.
ROVANEIMI, FINLAND
I’ve walked this trail for five days now, back and forth between hotel and university, minus a few mornings once the bus arrived, and that one time at the end of the day when I was totally exhausted and a new friend pulled off the road, ran over to the trail, surprised me, offered a ride. I still can’t pronounce his name correctly.
This morning I sleep in, deliberately miss the bus. There is a side trail, an arrow and I word I can’t understand carefully printed on a wooden sign to point the way. I’ve passed this sign at least nine times by now, never allowing the luxury of an extra moment to see where it goes. Silly, really. It can’t be far, we are at the edge of the water and there isn’t much land left for a trail to meander through. It always seemed unnecessary. This morning, I revel in the unnecessary. It is my last chance to take it.
The short trail leads to a small lookout tower after only a moment. I climb the steps, and like everything in this country, the dimensions seem off. Each step is a little too short for my size 42 feet, the distance between them requiring my knees to lift ever so slightly higher than I am used to. This tricks me into feeling unbalanced, despite my certainty that the stairwell is solid and level, like so much here.
For the first time in a week, I feel like I can breathe. I’m in a city, of course, but the scenery is beautiful. I can see the buildings rising up on the other side of the pond and hear occasional road traffic behind me, but that doesn’t diminish the effect. Someone remembered what was here before the city showed up, was careful that some of it remained. A bench sits at the rear of the tower, calling to me. I have reading to do; this would be the perfect place to contemplate phenomenology.
The mosquitoes, of course, have other ideas. Perhaps they were sent to keep me from retreating into academia yet again, focusing my energies too narrowly on what Gallagher and Zhavi have to say about perception. The mosquitoes call me to my own perception of what is now (buzz), what I remember (my jacket still smells like the bug spray that I’ve brilliantly left on my dresser), what I imagine could be (becoming someone’s blood-feast.) I stay standing, pull my sleeves down over my hands and constantly shift my weight back and forth, eyes focused on the horizon, then the ducks, then the initials carved by generations of Finnish teenagers, many of them probably desperate to get away from this small town. Approaching midsummer, I think, you don’t know how lucky you are, A. G. and R.T.
LAPLACE, LA: SPIT, ANTIBACTERIAL SOAP, CHINESE FOOD
I love teaching but am miserable in my classroom. Emily and I rent a house, are clearly outsiders, commiserate about teaching, but she is more graceful than I am. My students provide the kind of challenge I crave, but the situation breaks me. A mysterious seizure lands me in the hospital; the ensuing medication rollercoaster makes work impossible. I get a medical leave. Regret. U-Haul. Regret.
DENTON #2: DEAD CRICKETS, CIGARETTE SMOKE ON MY CLOTHES, SWEATY HAIR
Admitted to Cal Arts; declining, it felt like a loss to give up California and the fantasy of a reunion with my college friends. “We think you have a lot of potential to contribute to the field,” they said in my interview; thus I am back in Denton, this time, at the other university, this time, on my terms. MFA in dance, sealing the deal that engineering is off the table. By my final semester I finally feel settled, confident, connected. Then they give me a degree, time’s up, move on. I spend my last summer there house sitting for my professor; she and her daughter have a brief weekend at home before leaving the country, and a barbecue on their back porch fills me with longing.
SUOMENLINNA ISLAND, HELSINKI, FINLAND
I pull the thin pink scarf across my face and lean back onto the rock surface. The sun has sapped my energy, yet I have no desire to move indoors, little desire to move. For once, I’m with a large group of people and they too seem content to stay put: stretched out in shorts and bikini tops, their bodies anchored to the rocks, cameras nestled safely inside tote bags. Later we will justify this as an excursion to study the visual culture of the city, but really, we know it was an excuse to hang out on the beach. I’m not complaining.
Yesterday Sauli passed around his iPhone with pictures of a smiling baby; today, he passes around the actual baby. I marvel at how relaxed the parents are, handing her around a group of strangers. I push myself up, squinting; Baby Liina lands in my lap. I am surprised by how solid she is; its not so much that I am holding the baby as I am sitting there and she is holding herself and just happens to be temporarily residing on my lap. I’m content with this arrangement; it keeps either of us from getting attached and reassures me that she’s strong enough to keep her head upright.
Later, leaving the island, I’m surprised at how difficult pushing a stroller over the rocky walkways is, and our conversation breaks as we meander in search of smoother ground. I’m more surprised, though, at how relaxed everyone is. The baby has fallen asleep despite the bumpy ride, and we chat about school, work, plans for the future, about milk and gas prices and why Americans think we need so many cars. Departing the ferry, we say our good-byes; I think about family and fear, about the tightness that comes up in my throat whenever I think about wanting a child, and the fact that I couldn’t see a trace of it in Liina’s mother.
CLEVELAND, OH: DUST, CIGARETTE SMOKE ON HIS CLOTHES, CAT POOP
The bathroom in my apartment is so tiny you have to hold your thighs together when sitting on the pot in order not to burn your leg on the radiator. Three months into my job, I realize that it is a glorified internship and I’m not really there to do what I signed up for. I’m broke. Student loans are coming due. I have to negotiate nightly with my neighbor for a parking spot. It’s freezing. I come home from the theater exhausted. My cat shits in the bathtub since I don’t clean his box enough.
Then I fall in love.
Dream job posted, brilliant cover letter, phone interview. Breakfast in Pittsburgh, high on the promise of escape. Offer. UHaul. No time for regret. He helps me move.
CHARLOTTE, NC: BASIL, MELTING CRAYONS, EGGPLANT PARMESAN
He says he will come in six months. I don’t trust myself enough to believe him.
I finally have a grown-up job, doing work I love, that I’m good at. The randomness of past jobs and schooling gels, makes sense. He does come, though, gets a good job too. Occasional cooking replaces frozen pizza. I plant a container garden on the porch. Our rent goes up and we consider buying a house.
Job posting on the email. Cover letter, sample syllabi, new suit, two-day interview. “All I know is that if I were young, and wanted to get into academia, I would be a fool to pass this up.” Tearful resignation letter. We move together.
ALTA, NORWAY
It is the warmest day all year, the waiter tells us. My toes feel suffocated inside the wool socks and responsible shoes I packed for the Arctic – why did I leave my Chacos behind?
Stretching out from the deck of the museum is some of the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen. My friends compare gift shop finds, postcards to send home; they pose for more photos against the stunning backdrop. My piriformis nudges me with tension. I am standing at the edge of the Arctic Ocean and the most prominent thought in my head is that my right butt hurts. The deck looks like a good yoga space, and I sit down, ease into stretch. The air invites me to relax. Too soon, another well meaning, over-informed guide beckons those of us tagged with blue stickers. Time to move on.
Carefully carved trails deposit us at strategic points to observe the ancient rock carvings. Twenty or so people, cameras around their necks, huddle around a stone. From where I’m standing, its nothing special. The guide explains that the carving is of a reindeer and, is it a boat? Her eager voice floats past me, all I see is a flat hunk of rock.
Moving on. The next rock has carvings in red, so I clearly see a human figure, a reindeer, a boat. I catch bits of the explanation – the curators have been experimenting with pigments that will not damage the rock, that will last – that will reveal the shallow carvings to rushed and impatient tourists. (This, of course, she states more diplomatically.) I’m thinking, now who is shallow here? But I smile and nod, “amazing,” to the camera-wielding couple next to me. Reindeer and hunters and boats and sun gods, all revealed before us. Amazing.
Amazing that when the group passes, I go back to the first rock. I know where to look now, but it takes some time. I have to close my eyes, open them anew. Breathe. Let my vision hover over the rock face, wait. (Patience has never been one of my virtues.) Eventually, I make out parts of something that could stand for a human figure. My imagination fills in the rest. I want to reach out and touch the rock, feel the cracks that crisscross the carved surface, run my finger into those grooves made thousands of years ago to mark – I look up. The group is way ahead. I quickly snap something as I am pushed out of the way by the next gaggle of tourists. Moving on.
I want more than a moment. I am greedy about space and time. I don’t like the vacationers next to me, and I detest the rope separating me from the rocks. I want to be present in this landscape, let my attention fall on the complete picture – rocks, carvings, moss, trees, ocean. Breathe it all in at once. Work at it to climb to the higher rocks, the hidden rocks, grip them and pull myself up. Work at it to let my eyes find their way into the space where the carving merges into smooth rock. Work at it to imagine what meanings these artifacts might have – to the people who made them, to the ones who uncovered them, to us who see them today.
The package of tourism doesn’t seem to care about my body, the wanderings of my mind, my cravings for space. Tourism doesn’t want me to have to work, offers preplanned ease and timed comforts. My desire to linger cannot be accommodated, lunch is ready. I feel as if I am trying to slow down my breath and the nurse at my side is inducing hyperventilation. The trail takes me right where it has been determined I should be – quickly and efficiently carved up this space, convenient to visitors. What is wrong with me that I can’t take my art in quick does, experience my nature efficiently?
CHATTANOOGA, TN: ROSEMARY, OFFICE AIR CONDITIONING, CURRY
We only sign a six month lease on a cookie cutter apartment. Tall trees abound. My mother gives me a luggage set for Christmas; it gets well used in my new job. We think we will scope out the area, then buy a house. “Marriage = Man + Woman” bumper stickers scare the shit out of me. I never call a realtor. A few boxes remain unpacked. I can’t find a nice bookstore. I cynically write “Crappanooga” on my address.
We get married but I remain the only one in the office without children. He adopts my system for organizing grocery lists: Produce, Dairy, Frozen, Packaged, Bulk, Miscellaneous; we buy a bread machine. After two years, I start writing out applications to PhD programs. I make friends at a yoga workshop, get invited to dinner, celebrate acceptance letters. How many cities can you kayak through downtown, or have a hiking trail in your backyard? I realize I will miss it.
COLUMBUS, OH: RUBBER, BUS EXHAUST, PAPER
We volunteer one rainy Saturday for a community graffiti cleanup. One of the longtime residents chats: the economy will pick up, the governor’s new plan will bring lots of jobs, why don’t you buy a house? Columbus is a good place to live and raise kids. If only I could.
I am assigned to work on a group presentation about Columbus to present to our Finnish classmates. Everyone else shares stories of OSU football games, walks through German village, sites on their bike ride home. I don’t know about these places, these markers of Columbus in the world. On my bike ride home I often pass more private markers: the bungalows in Clintonville, modest homes with cheerful landscaping and the sounds of laughing children coming from the backyard, those signs of a familial permanence just beyond my reach. Columbus to me is like everywhere and nowhere rolled into one; sometimes I walk out of the Target on Olentangy River Road and I can’t remember where I am. Now I’m getting ready to go abroad and have nothing good, nothing interesting to tell about where I’m coming from.
HELSINKI: STRAWBERRIES, LICORICE, SOAP
A recording announces that the museum will soon be closing. I am the last of our group to leave, and even then I find myself skimming through some exhibits. It takes me so long to just be there, be present.
On the tram I sit at the joint where two cars meet. I don’t realize this, and am surprised when my body moves and my feet don’t; a moment later the second car turns and my feet swing to catch up. It takes awhile to get used to this sensation, but it doesn’t bother me. It does, however, make me acutely aware that I am in a place that is not, and never will be, home. I am clearly a visitor, a tourist.
I visit the home of another student for dinner. Her apartment is small but cozy, filled with artworks she has collected and made. I am grateful for the home cooked meal and impressed with her generosity. But unlike visits to the homes of American friends, I don’t feel envious. In American homes I think about who lives there, how long they have been there, if they own the house or not. I fantasize about being in a settled space. But in Helsinki, I can’t imagine being in her place, don’t want to be. I’m free to just enjoy the evening, untethered to longing.
That, perhaps, is the ultimate magic of this trip – finding a space so foreign that it never could be home, frees me from the nagging question that follows me everywhere in my own country – “could this be it? Is there a university in this town? What are the schools like?...” and on and on, as if I could take other cities into the fitting room and try them on, tuck price tags under my armpit, give a little twirl, imagine myself there. But European sizing is different and I don’t feel like trying anything on.
Here in Helsinki, then, I’m just an admirer. An admirer who has been confused by the roads at odd angles, who has relied on graphics more than ever, who was jarred and unsettled by art, who stood in the Baltic Sea until her toes went numb. This amounts to far more than window shopping, far more than a casual gaze. Something of Finland will stay with me - the affinity for salmiakki, perhaps, the urge to literally run to the exits with my elbows and knees at perfect sharp angles as commanded by green signs, the humility of hearing my native language spoken flawlessly by those who learned it as their third or fourth.
Finally, in a place I could never settle, do I begin to sense what I can’t ever stop moving long enough to notice: I’ll be OK wherever I end up.
I’m still jet-lagged; our interview about my “dreams for the future” keeps getting interrupted when I blurt out stories from the recent trip. I babble and stare off into space, trying to account for my professional ambitions while my imagination lingers several time zones away.
“Where do you want to be?” she asked.
“Geographically, you mean?”
Perhaps that sounded like a silly clarification, but geography seems out of my hands. It is foolish to make such fantasies tangible: I will go where a good job is, just like I have always moved in search of work or school. Ties to family, friends, places, relationships seemed secondary; I learned early on that to be an achiever meant to give up sentimentality, that to be “realistic” meant setting aside romance, that cutting ties means you are smart. I have moved nine times in the last sixteen years.
Sometimes, I just want to stop moving.
HELSINKI, FINLAND: KIASMA MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
I am supposed to be on a group tour with thirty other people, American and Finnish students joined together for a two week course. The concrete floors and high walls create an echo, and I have difficulty understanding the guide. She is thoughtful and articulate, but the space is more compelling than the loose collection of words I can piece together from her talk. My classmates chatter excitedly; the galleries fill with sound. I want to block out them all, be in the space, see into the artwork – uninterrupted.
In one gallery hang three large plastic bubbles. I gather you are supposed to stand in them, one person at a time. People line up, continue to chatter, pull out cameras. I stay to the edges, overhear the guide explain – the artist worked with a perfume maker to capture her scent impressions of three cities important in her life – Paris, Helsinki, and…was it Budapest? I am intrigued, but I absentmindedly glance through some photographs I can no longer recall, then the group is whisked away to the next gallery. I don’t stand in a bubble.
I try to catch up with the group, be a good student, listen to the guide. But, they move so fast – walking through the galleries, the way I often go through a mall – get what you need, and get out. Snap a picture, read the label, comment to a friend. Next. I can’t keep up. The galleries loop around, connect. The bubbles are now empty.
Three spheres hanging in the space. A diagram on the floor tells you where to put your feet, like those instructions for ballroom dance – stand here, feet together, be still. Bend down, step inside, straighten up.
So, what does Helsinki smell like in the bubble? I don’t have good words for smells, they seem so abstract, but Helsinki in a bubble was definitely different from Paris in a bubble, and you have to be there, stand right in that spot, feet on the diagram, to tell. Be there. Pause. Inhale. Cameras, Facebook updates, blogs can’t capture this. For a moment, I am alone. I relish the bubble, though I can’t stand the perfume. Time to move on.
What would my bubbles be?
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS: REFRIED BEANS, DRY GRASS, FABRIC SOFTENER
Boredom, confinement. Need something more. Age fifteen: my grades and ability to take tests earn me a spot at a prestigious math and science program, at a university 300 miles away. Do I like math and science? I like anything that means I can leave. Breaking up with my high school boyfriend is devastating, but I understand it is what you do if you are smart. You don’t let attachments hold you back.
HELSINKI, FINLAND: THE FINNISH NATIONAL MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Our hosts are the overachievers of the class: not content to plan just one outing, they organize five, split up the members of our group so we each have a custom, individual tour. We are to work alone, consider themes of familiarity and belonging. At this point I’m confident enough navigating the tram, no longer too embarrassed every time I have to say, “I’m sorry, I can only speak English.” Armed with a carefully marked map courtesy of Elsa, I set out.
Eventually I find my way to the building I am supposed to be at, but since I can never seem to follow directions exactly right I end up at the wrong door, for the third time. I land in a museum instead of artists’ studios, find no one to strike up a conversation with as directed. Except for the kind woman at the desk, it is empty and quiet.
We are supposed to be investigating ideas of “gaze.” Funny to do that in the photography museum, where the gaze has been partly predetermined for you, and where you feel under immense but invisible scrutiny for the part you determine yourself: what am I looking at? Why? Am I really the one choosing?
Finland really has seemed magical – so clean, so polite, so full of light. I’ve been on a break from real life, where as a tourist it is easy to wander and end up mostly in places that seem engineered for your comfort. Helsinki bustles with activity like any modern city, but a sense of calm undergirds everything; life’s urgency is restrained. The people are just so nice.
Then there was the exhibit – just one, tucked in a corner, a secret, as if perhaps the museum’s board wasn’t entirely sure they should let you see it. A sign posted at the entrance gave some warning to children and sensitive patrons, but as it is my practice to ignore such signs, I went right it. It is also my practice to embrace stoicism; I don’t cry at movies.
I didn’t cry at the exhibit either, didn’t hold my breath, felt only a twinge of anxiety as I watched the young woman in the video installation draw a razor across her knee. Oh good, its on a loop, I can stop watching now. The photographs were clearly staged. This boy is a model, this is an artist, not a photojournalist. How did she get the makeup right for those bruises on his spine? How long did it take to get the duct tape just so across his hands, to pose him, motion limited, on the floor like that? How did she get permission to photograph that baby for this project? Wait, what’s up with the toilet in that photograph? That’s not a sparking Finnish, low-flow dual-flush toilet. That looks more like what you’d find in the storage room –turned restroom at a tiny highway gas station somewhere in Texas…
Well, maybe I held my breath a bit. After two weeks of being the last one through the museum, the one dangling at the back of the tour group, the one wanting for just a bit more time to be present, I couldn’t wait to get the hell out. The gallery was small, probably 10 pieces in all. I was stuck. Rooted. Had to walk around and around, staring, one eye open and the other one shut tight. The artist mocked me, screaming: You want Finland, lady, this is Finland! You want social welfare? It can’t catch everyone! You think the best health care and education on the planet makes us safe? Screw healthcare – does this look healthy? You like polite? This is what polite does at home. This is our home, this is someone’s home.
This is your home.
DENTON #1: VOMIT, CARESS BODY WASH, CLARK HALL CHEESEBURGERS
Anxiety, 4.0, more anxiety, 18 credit hours, A is for anxiety achievement afraid. Afraid of myself so I sleep on the floor of my friend Julia’s dorm room, two doors down from mine. She sees me through crisis after crisis, reveals the secret I don’t yet have words for, gently secures my freedom. But, no one stays at North Texas unless they’ve failed. Moving is the expectation. Julia transfers to UT, but I need even more distance.
CLAREMONT, CA: SWEAT, INCENSE, RAIN
It takes me a year to catch up with everyone – they’ve all been together for two years, I feel like an imposter thrust into a tight-knit club at my small college. I’m the young one, book smart but experience dumb. One at a time they leave to go abroad; I stay to finish my degree “on time.” At 19 I’m the youngest in my graduating class, but this is like being the baby bird getting flung from the nest too soon – I only just barely keep myself from smacking into the ground. I don’t want to leave, but I have a degree now so there’s no way to stay. Moving again.
ROVANEIMI, FINLAND
I’ve walked this trail for five days now, back and forth between hotel and university, minus a few mornings once the bus arrived, and that one time at the end of the day when I was totally exhausted and a new friend pulled off the road, ran over to the trail, surprised me, offered a ride. I still can’t pronounce his name correctly.
This morning I sleep in, deliberately miss the bus. There is a side trail, an arrow and I word I can’t understand carefully printed on a wooden sign to point the way. I’ve passed this sign at least nine times by now, never allowing the luxury of an extra moment to see where it goes. Silly, really. It can’t be far, we are at the edge of the water and there isn’t much land left for a trail to meander through. It always seemed unnecessary. This morning, I revel in the unnecessary. It is my last chance to take it.
The short trail leads to a small lookout tower after only a moment. I climb the steps, and like everything in this country, the dimensions seem off. Each step is a little too short for my size 42 feet, the distance between them requiring my knees to lift ever so slightly higher than I am used to. This tricks me into feeling unbalanced, despite my certainty that the stairwell is solid and level, like so much here.
For the first time in a week, I feel like I can breathe. I’m in a city, of course, but the scenery is beautiful. I can see the buildings rising up on the other side of the pond and hear occasional road traffic behind me, but that doesn’t diminish the effect. Someone remembered what was here before the city showed up, was careful that some of it remained. A bench sits at the rear of the tower, calling to me. I have reading to do; this would be the perfect place to contemplate phenomenology.
The mosquitoes, of course, have other ideas. Perhaps they were sent to keep me from retreating into academia yet again, focusing my energies too narrowly on what Gallagher and Zhavi have to say about perception. The mosquitoes call me to my own perception of what is now (buzz), what I remember (my jacket still smells like the bug spray that I’ve brilliantly left on my dresser), what I imagine could be (becoming someone’s blood-feast.) I stay standing, pull my sleeves down over my hands and constantly shift my weight back and forth, eyes focused on the horizon, then the ducks, then the initials carved by generations of Finnish teenagers, many of them probably desperate to get away from this small town. Approaching midsummer, I think, you don’t know how lucky you are, A. G. and R.T.
LAPLACE, LA: SPIT, ANTIBACTERIAL SOAP, CHINESE FOOD
I love teaching but am miserable in my classroom. Emily and I rent a house, are clearly outsiders, commiserate about teaching, but she is more graceful than I am. My students provide the kind of challenge I crave, but the situation breaks me. A mysterious seizure lands me in the hospital; the ensuing medication rollercoaster makes work impossible. I get a medical leave. Regret. U-Haul. Regret.
DENTON #2: DEAD CRICKETS, CIGARETTE SMOKE ON MY CLOTHES, SWEATY HAIR
Admitted to Cal Arts; declining, it felt like a loss to give up California and the fantasy of a reunion with my college friends. “We think you have a lot of potential to contribute to the field,” they said in my interview; thus I am back in Denton, this time, at the other university, this time, on my terms. MFA in dance, sealing the deal that engineering is off the table. By my final semester I finally feel settled, confident, connected. Then they give me a degree, time’s up, move on. I spend my last summer there house sitting for my professor; she and her daughter have a brief weekend at home before leaving the country, and a barbecue on their back porch fills me with longing.
SUOMENLINNA ISLAND, HELSINKI, FINLAND
I pull the thin pink scarf across my face and lean back onto the rock surface. The sun has sapped my energy, yet I have no desire to move indoors, little desire to move. For once, I’m with a large group of people and they too seem content to stay put: stretched out in shorts and bikini tops, their bodies anchored to the rocks, cameras nestled safely inside tote bags. Later we will justify this as an excursion to study the visual culture of the city, but really, we know it was an excuse to hang out on the beach. I’m not complaining.
Yesterday Sauli passed around his iPhone with pictures of a smiling baby; today, he passes around the actual baby. I marvel at how relaxed the parents are, handing her around a group of strangers. I push myself up, squinting; Baby Liina lands in my lap. I am surprised by how solid she is; its not so much that I am holding the baby as I am sitting there and she is holding herself and just happens to be temporarily residing on my lap. I’m content with this arrangement; it keeps either of us from getting attached and reassures me that she’s strong enough to keep her head upright.
Later, leaving the island, I’m surprised at how difficult pushing a stroller over the rocky walkways is, and our conversation breaks as we meander in search of smoother ground. I’m more surprised, though, at how relaxed everyone is. The baby has fallen asleep despite the bumpy ride, and we chat about school, work, plans for the future, about milk and gas prices and why Americans think we need so many cars. Departing the ferry, we say our good-byes; I think about family and fear, about the tightness that comes up in my throat whenever I think about wanting a child, and the fact that I couldn’t see a trace of it in Liina’s mother.
CLEVELAND, OH: DUST, CIGARETTE SMOKE ON HIS CLOTHES, CAT POOP
The bathroom in my apartment is so tiny you have to hold your thighs together when sitting on the pot in order not to burn your leg on the radiator. Three months into my job, I realize that it is a glorified internship and I’m not really there to do what I signed up for. I’m broke. Student loans are coming due. I have to negotiate nightly with my neighbor for a parking spot. It’s freezing. I come home from the theater exhausted. My cat shits in the bathtub since I don’t clean his box enough.
Then I fall in love.
Dream job posted, brilliant cover letter, phone interview. Breakfast in Pittsburgh, high on the promise of escape. Offer. UHaul. No time for regret. He helps me move.
CHARLOTTE, NC: BASIL, MELTING CRAYONS, EGGPLANT PARMESAN
He says he will come in six months. I don’t trust myself enough to believe him.
I finally have a grown-up job, doing work I love, that I’m good at. The randomness of past jobs and schooling gels, makes sense. He does come, though, gets a good job too. Occasional cooking replaces frozen pizza. I plant a container garden on the porch. Our rent goes up and we consider buying a house.
Job posting on the email. Cover letter, sample syllabi, new suit, two-day interview. “All I know is that if I were young, and wanted to get into academia, I would be a fool to pass this up.” Tearful resignation letter. We move together.
ALTA, NORWAY
It is the warmest day all year, the waiter tells us. My toes feel suffocated inside the wool socks and responsible shoes I packed for the Arctic – why did I leave my Chacos behind?
Stretching out from the deck of the museum is some of the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen. My friends compare gift shop finds, postcards to send home; they pose for more photos against the stunning backdrop. My piriformis nudges me with tension. I am standing at the edge of the Arctic Ocean and the most prominent thought in my head is that my right butt hurts. The deck looks like a good yoga space, and I sit down, ease into stretch. The air invites me to relax. Too soon, another well meaning, over-informed guide beckons those of us tagged with blue stickers. Time to move on.
Carefully carved trails deposit us at strategic points to observe the ancient rock carvings. Twenty or so people, cameras around their necks, huddle around a stone. From where I’m standing, its nothing special. The guide explains that the carving is of a reindeer and, is it a boat? Her eager voice floats past me, all I see is a flat hunk of rock.
Moving on. The next rock has carvings in red, so I clearly see a human figure, a reindeer, a boat. I catch bits of the explanation – the curators have been experimenting with pigments that will not damage the rock, that will last – that will reveal the shallow carvings to rushed and impatient tourists. (This, of course, she states more diplomatically.) I’m thinking, now who is shallow here? But I smile and nod, “amazing,” to the camera-wielding couple next to me. Reindeer and hunters and boats and sun gods, all revealed before us. Amazing.
Amazing that when the group passes, I go back to the first rock. I know where to look now, but it takes some time. I have to close my eyes, open them anew. Breathe. Let my vision hover over the rock face, wait. (Patience has never been one of my virtues.) Eventually, I make out parts of something that could stand for a human figure. My imagination fills in the rest. I want to reach out and touch the rock, feel the cracks that crisscross the carved surface, run my finger into those grooves made thousands of years ago to mark – I look up. The group is way ahead. I quickly snap something as I am pushed out of the way by the next gaggle of tourists. Moving on.
I want more than a moment. I am greedy about space and time. I don’t like the vacationers next to me, and I detest the rope separating me from the rocks. I want to be present in this landscape, let my attention fall on the complete picture – rocks, carvings, moss, trees, ocean. Breathe it all in at once. Work at it to climb to the higher rocks, the hidden rocks, grip them and pull myself up. Work at it to let my eyes find their way into the space where the carving merges into smooth rock. Work at it to imagine what meanings these artifacts might have – to the people who made them, to the ones who uncovered them, to us who see them today.
The package of tourism doesn’t seem to care about my body, the wanderings of my mind, my cravings for space. Tourism doesn’t want me to have to work, offers preplanned ease and timed comforts. My desire to linger cannot be accommodated, lunch is ready. I feel as if I am trying to slow down my breath and the nurse at my side is inducing hyperventilation. The trail takes me right where it has been determined I should be – quickly and efficiently carved up this space, convenient to visitors. What is wrong with me that I can’t take my art in quick does, experience my nature efficiently?
CHATTANOOGA, TN: ROSEMARY, OFFICE AIR CONDITIONING, CURRY
We only sign a six month lease on a cookie cutter apartment. Tall trees abound. My mother gives me a luggage set for Christmas; it gets well used in my new job. We think we will scope out the area, then buy a house. “Marriage = Man + Woman” bumper stickers scare the shit out of me. I never call a realtor. A few boxes remain unpacked. I can’t find a nice bookstore. I cynically write “Crappanooga” on my address.
We get married but I remain the only one in the office without children. He adopts my system for organizing grocery lists: Produce, Dairy, Frozen, Packaged, Bulk, Miscellaneous; we buy a bread machine. After two years, I start writing out applications to PhD programs. I make friends at a yoga workshop, get invited to dinner, celebrate acceptance letters. How many cities can you kayak through downtown, or have a hiking trail in your backyard? I realize I will miss it.
COLUMBUS, OH: RUBBER, BUS EXHAUST, PAPER
We volunteer one rainy Saturday for a community graffiti cleanup. One of the longtime residents chats: the economy will pick up, the governor’s new plan will bring lots of jobs, why don’t you buy a house? Columbus is a good place to live and raise kids. If only I could.
I am assigned to work on a group presentation about Columbus to present to our Finnish classmates. Everyone else shares stories of OSU football games, walks through German village, sites on their bike ride home. I don’t know about these places, these markers of Columbus in the world. On my bike ride home I often pass more private markers: the bungalows in Clintonville, modest homes with cheerful landscaping and the sounds of laughing children coming from the backyard, those signs of a familial permanence just beyond my reach. Columbus to me is like everywhere and nowhere rolled into one; sometimes I walk out of the Target on Olentangy River Road and I can’t remember where I am. Now I’m getting ready to go abroad and have nothing good, nothing interesting to tell about where I’m coming from.
HELSINKI: STRAWBERRIES, LICORICE, SOAP
A recording announces that the museum will soon be closing. I am the last of our group to leave, and even then I find myself skimming through some exhibits. It takes me so long to just be there, be present.
On the tram I sit at the joint where two cars meet. I don’t realize this, and am surprised when my body moves and my feet don’t; a moment later the second car turns and my feet swing to catch up. It takes awhile to get used to this sensation, but it doesn’t bother me. It does, however, make me acutely aware that I am in a place that is not, and never will be, home. I am clearly a visitor, a tourist.
I visit the home of another student for dinner. Her apartment is small but cozy, filled with artworks she has collected and made. I am grateful for the home cooked meal and impressed with her generosity. But unlike visits to the homes of American friends, I don’t feel envious. In American homes I think about who lives there, how long they have been there, if they own the house or not. I fantasize about being in a settled space. But in Helsinki, I can’t imagine being in her place, don’t want to be. I’m free to just enjoy the evening, untethered to longing.
That, perhaps, is the ultimate magic of this trip – finding a space so foreign that it never could be home, frees me from the nagging question that follows me everywhere in my own country – “could this be it? Is there a university in this town? What are the schools like?...” and on and on, as if I could take other cities into the fitting room and try them on, tuck price tags under my armpit, give a little twirl, imagine myself there. But European sizing is different and I don’t feel like trying anything on.
Here in Helsinki, then, I’m just an admirer. An admirer who has been confused by the roads at odd angles, who has relied on graphics more than ever, who was jarred and unsettled by art, who stood in the Baltic Sea until her toes went numb. This amounts to far more than window shopping, far more than a casual gaze. Something of Finland will stay with me - the affinity for salmiakki, perhaps, the urge to literally run to the exits with my elbows and knees at perfect sharp angles as commanded by green signs, the humility of hearing my native language spoken flawlessly by those who learned it as their third or fourth.
Finally, in a place I could never settle, do I begin to sense what I can’t ever stop moving long enough to notice: I’ll be OK wherever I end up.
Marissa's Bio About Someone
The dollhouse full of silkworms sits in her studio – a space within a space, salvaged, a coincidental home. “The worms aren’t for silk,” she says. It takes awhile to understand that they aren’t for anything, they don’t exist to serve a purpose than to live out their own lives, evolved without agency, marked by dependency.
“Silkworms have had their instincts bred out of them by the silk industry,” she informs me. I learn that they are, or have evolved into, somewhat stupid creatures. She has to literally drop their food on their heads, or they won’t travel to eat it. She picks one up to move it closer to a potential mate. She knows they have to choose a place to spin, but she monitors and suggests suitable locations in the dollhouse. “They can’t spin on a flat surface, they need some kind of wall.”
They need a lot, it seems.
Home. She has lived in the same house for eighteen years. She has wanted to make art, and finally carved out a space for it by returning to student-hood. School as a job marks out the necessity of her work, legitimizes the space and time needed to create. Witnessing becomes necessary on many levels.
Dependency. Addiction. Intervention?
“Sometimes your interventions backfire. You see them suffering and you try to go in and help, but it ends up causing more suffering. And then they die. Slowly.” All life is finite, and many things go wrong. With silkworms, the better care they get, the shorter their lives are. Is a short life any less meaningful than a long one?
“Silkworms have had their instincts bred out of them by the silk industry,” she informs me. I learn that they are, or have evolved into, somewhat stupid creatures. She has to literally drop their food on their heads, or they won’t travel to eat it. She picks one up to move it closer to a potential mate. She knows they have to choose a place to spin, but she monitors and suggests suitable locations in the dollhouse. “They can’t spin on a flat surface, they need some kind of wall.”
They need a lot, it seems.
Home. She has lived in the same house for eighteen years. She has wanted to make art, and finally carved out a space for it by returning to student-hood. School as a job marks out the necessity of her work, legitimizes the space and time needed to create. Witnessing becomes necessary on many levels.
Dependency. Addiction. Intervention?
“Sometimes your interventions backfire. You see them suffering and you try to go in and help, but it ends up causing more suffering. And then they die. Slowly.” All life is finite, and many things go wrong. With silkworms, the better care they get, the shorter their lives are. Is a short life any less meaningful than a long one?
Marissa's Responses to Readings
Check, E. (2006). My working-class roots in an academic war zone: Creating space to a grieve and honor. Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education , 24, 23-35.
Summary:
Autobiographical piece tracing his development as an artist and scholar from a working-class upbringing. Interweaves stories about his art with religion, sexuality, and academia.
Reflection points:
“I work in what feels to me like an academic war zone (that the middle class don’t see) where my research, teaching, and outreach is dismissed, misunderstood, demeaned, or contested.” (p.23)
I am surprised by how overt Check is in these statements that he makes, given that he is publishing them in a public venue likely to be read by his colleagues. Although he does not outright label Texas Tech or any colleagues by name, he seems to have an unfavorable stance towards his employer and academic community. I have a hard time understanding his tactic or what he hopes to gain by publishing this kind of work, with regard to his local community. He seems to be looking for a venue to promote visibility of those with marginalized identities, but at the same time he seems to also be dismissing the very colleagues who form his local academic community, stating that he doesn’t trust them, that he feels like an imposter, etc.
In terms of the narrative, I actually felt it lacking. Although he reveals quite a bit about his personal history and how it has impacted his pedagogy, I found the writing less evocative than the author may have intended. Although he gives many descriptions of the places and people he grew up with (pp. 25-26), I found these statements to read like an accounting or listing of activities, rather than carefully selected scenes that would place the reader in his struggles. It is like we were to read about the struggles, not to read the struggles directly.
As a graduate student very nervous about finding an academic position upon completion of the PhD, I found it hard to be very sympathetic to his difficulties of feeling accepted in his institution. They hired him, after all! He has a job! He has tenure! They hired him and gave him tenure knowing the kind of teaching and research he was interested in; while not all members of the faculty may have selected him, there were at least some who were/are interested in his work.
I also take issue with his statement about pedagogy: “Take care of the students’ physical and emotional needs, and the intellectual needs will take care of themselves.” (pp.31-32) I find such statements disturbing and liable to play into the labeling of the arts as “non –cognitively challenging” and lending support to notions that caring about students’ personal histories and identities through teaching and modeling activist stances is somehow not part of rigorous academic training. While certainly acknowledging that teachers should attend to physical and emotional needs is important, and indeed the forms of activism that Check discusses play a vital role in this, I think that attending to intellectual development in the art education classroom is very important. As a dance educator, I often find that I need to downplay the affective aspects of our work in order to make the cognitive aspects apparent, to the point where I perhaps do not give enough attention to affective development. However, as a student I have found that the teachers I felt who cared and supported me the most were those who had high intellectual standards, as well as a supportive climate, in their classroom. Those who emphasized emotional or activist content, without substantive development of concepts and skills, I often found to ultimately be less supportive. I doubt that Check would have been able to build an academic career if he had not had teachers who applied rigorous intellectual work in their classrooms. Of course, those who did so at the cost of supporting students’ personal growth- including dismissing ways of knowing informed by diverse religious, racial, class, and sexual identities- probably are what he is working against.
Ely, M. (2007). In-forming re-presentations. In Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology (pp. 567-598). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Summary:
Discusses the ways that different narrative forms can be used as ways of informing the research process and presenting data and conclusions to the reader in a way that supports the theory being generated, draws the readers interest, and is respectful of the research participants. Includes discussions of stories in the first person, poetry, layered stories, anecdotes, pastiche, and drama as forms that have been used to share research i written form.
Reflection points:
Ely’s discussion shows a range of forms that can be suitable for not only reporting on qualitative research, but more importantly, informing the research process as new aspects of the data are revealed and considered for their meanings when handled in an artistic way.
(p.581) – Layered stories – “…the idea that one event can have many meanings and that there is no such thing as an objective truth are key to narrative research.”
I particularly liked the examples of layered stories. It seems like a very powerful technique for expressing multiple points of view of a situation, yet allowing each one to remain intact and in the voice of its owner. Partway into the example shared on p.591 I was curious what the other participants in the situation were thinking, as it was clear to me that the person’s behavior described might cause some reaction. The remaining two voices completed the picture.
Ely goes on to discuss the ethical considerations and how layered stories can help researchers achieve balance: “The attempt to understand our participants deeply, no matter our personal opinions about them, is at the crux of narrative research…Involving oneself in writing layered stories and reflecting on them is ne way of providing sufficient distance for better understanding.” (p.582)
Pastiche (p. 588) – the example of “Buddie’s [sic] with books” was particularly striking for me, because I have visited classrooms like the one described, complete with misspellings on the wall displays which frequently make me cringe. The piece makes a powerful statement about the kind of literacy teaching that is provided to lower-income students, simply by presenting the text of the teacher’s speaking along with the spelling of the wall sign. More than the lack of positive feedback, I was struck by the fact that the children’s voices are almost unnecessary to this depiction of classroom discourse: the teacher is running a virtual monologue, responding only to her expectations of the children (“No wonder they thought you needed extra help…”) and not to the children themselves. We don’t need their voices to understand the pastiche, because their voices were not important to the research subject.
It does make me question, however, how the researcher would deal with the participant, whom she does present in a negative (though possibly fair and apt) light. Was the participant given an opportunity to see and respond to the pastiche that was created? Because the researcher left it to her audience - presumably, educators and academics with pedagogical training that would incline them to see the deficiencies of Ms. Wrights approach – to make the larger interpretations, how would a less-informed research participant be able to be aware of the negative impression being given by the research?
Freeman, M. (2007). Autobiographical understanding and narrative inquiry. In J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology (pp. 120-45). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Summary:
Discussion of autobiographical process as a way of researching and representing lives and experiences; describes the history of conceptions of the self/individual that allowed autobiography to come about as a form of knowledge that is valuable; offers idea that autobiography offers a form of understanding about human lives not accessible in other research forms.
Reflection points:
(p. 132) “Undoubtedly, there already exists the recognition that the autobiographer is likely engaged in a process of justifying himself or herself somehow and that the resultant portrait is bound to entail a measure of artifice, but this is not necessarily seen as a liability, much less a danger, for the aim of autobiography is not simply to depict the past as it was but precisely to understand it, to make sense of it, to fashion meanings that were not, and could not be, available in the flux of immediate experience.”
This sense of understanding and meaning is at the heart of what makes autobiography compelling to readers – an “objective” accounting of events from an outside source would not offer the same kind of access to meaning that a personal account might. The layering of meaning – and the selection of events to describe in the first place – provides insight into that person’s worldview that would not be possible otherwise. The selection of events as significant, and the meanings attached to them, likewise would not be accessible to the author in the moment of their occurrence- the layering, interpretation, meaning-making that the writer does has to take place at some point afterwards, in order to benefit from the richness of reflection.
“’[A]utobiography is [thus] condemned to substitute endlessly the completely formed for that which is in the process of being formed. {p.41}” (p.133, citing Gusdorf)
This statement stood out for me because of its relevance/applicability to so many of the forms of research. In particular I have confronted this issue when looking at art forms deemed representative of particular cultures, and the tendency to ahistoricize them; to substitute traditional forms as representatives of contemporary forms, or to substitute what in our culture would be considered a folk form as representative of all forms (including fine art, contemporary art, theatrical forms, etc) within that culture…
Our desire as readers and consumers of research and artwork often makes the “completely formed” desirable; readers/viewers have little patience for untangling that which is in-process, so we look for the version/vision that can be fixed, tamed, meaning easily ascribed to. The task for writers then may be to present the in-process, to fix it only enough that it can be seen, but not so much that it appears settled.
(p.134) “Narratives often seem able to give us understandings of people in a way that more “objective” methodologies cannot. This is because they often emerge from a true, rather than a false, scientific attitude, one that practices fidelity not to that which can be objectified and measured but to the whole person, the whole human life, in all of its ambiguous, messy, beautiful detail.”
This statement really seems to capture the idea of epistemology – of what counts as knowing and what counts as the way to get at that knowing – and suggests that attending to people as holistic beings is the preferred way. Certainly, the idea of holism may best be served by narrative, and narrative cannot be judged against criteria established for other forms of inquiry which have a very different underlying attitude.
(p. 136) “..the challenge at hand is a poetic one, the foremost aim being not to reproduce reality but to actualize and explicate it, to bring meaning into being in such a way that the world is made visible.”
(p.137) “We often do not know what is happening when it is happening. Instead, and again, we are often late, sometimes too late, and all that can be done is to tell the story: Appearances aside, this is what happened.”
(p.142)”…’poetic science,’ a form of critical narrative inquiry that would lie at the intersection of art and science and that would support not only the epistemological aim of increasing knowledge and understanding of the human realm but also the ethical aim of increasing sympathy and compassion.”
Garland-Thompson, R. (2007). Shape structures story: Fresh and feisty stories about disability. Narrative , 15 (1), 113-123.
Summary:
Working from the premise that “shape structures story”, Garland-Thompson challenges traditional disability narratives based on loss or lack with narratives where the “shape we think of as disability structures positive instead of negative stories.” (p.114) She describes four narratives in different genres and offers analysis around the concepts of sexuality and community, two ideas often missing from disability narratives.
Reflection points:
Although her analysis of the other works are certainly well written, I found Garland-Thompson’s discussion of her own participation in a disability community to be far and away the most compelling description in the paper.
I particularly loved the description of the SDS dance event where people with various disabilities create their own way of moving together and participating with the music. I imagine that many of their movements are probably more interesting and creative than what is seen at a nightclub frequented by “norms”, where people replicate movements popularized by others and seen on television and in movies. Because such movements may not be accessible to the conference participants, they find movements expressive of themselves in many regards – expressive of their physical bodies and expressive of their own ideas, impulses, and motivations. The “tongue dancing” sounded particularly impressive and creative; the author’s desire to see it go mainstream was interesting – are they searching for validation from the wider society through adoption of this activity? Or is it just an inner validity which has already been established that she is describing? Certainly, the idea that actors with disabilities could and should play parts of disabled characters (both when a script specifically calls for them, as well as for other parts where a disability isn’t specified but could be played by a disabled actor) is important, but I’m really curious about her desire for wider media portrayal – is it enough that she has found her own community she longed for seeing movies about “ethnic” families, or does she need/want a media portrayal of this community?
Tierney, W. (2002). Get real: Representing reality. Qualitative Studies in Education , 15 (4), 385-398.
Summary:
Discussion of narrative form in relation to research writing. Tierney argues for a larger scope in narrative strategies being used, but also cautions that the forms being used need to serve a purpose in relation to the research being written about – not simply replacing one narrative voice with another.
Reflection points:
(p.390) “…I highlight the difficulty an individual faces when he or she realizes that traditional texts are boring and wants to try a different format…We cannot simply assume that because the genre or voice that an individual has perfected over an academic career is no longer suitable that the individual will be able to simply pick up a different genre or voice and do it well.”
Yes, very true. Especially when the problem may not be simply that the voice or genre that the author is using is the cause of it being boring, but also the underlying assumptions about what information is worth sharing and what constitutes knowledge. Also, the duties of the author with regard to making the information meaningful to the reader – in some instances it may be that the author resists making applications or conclusions, but in some venues a gesture toward helping the reader make use of the information to his or her own context may be important – often I find that narrative structures help me do that, because a description of a person or situation allows me to think of how I have encountered similar situations or people, and then how the research ideas might apply to those situations as well. With large theoretical statements only, I find that I sometimes loose the connection to the ideas or fail to have them stick with me. However, sometimes the author will then draw out “actions” from the research – but if the author has a stance that this is not something that he or she should do, that can be another cause for disengaged writing.
(p.391) “If anything, we need greater narrative diversity rather than less, and the choices that authors make do not turn on dictates, but on epistemological and strategic assumptions about the kind of text that the readers and those whom we interviewed and observe deserve. Just as I once was concerned with the unreflexive absence of the author from a narrative, I am equally concerned with the unreflexive insertion of the author into a narrative. The use of my voice in a text is always an epistemological concern about studying/working/collaborating with the Other, to ignore this issue from an end of a narrative continuum or another is to overlook the critical relationship of the researched, the researcher, and the reader. “
This statement to me seems to sum up the critical point for the entire article – it is not simply about inserting one’s voice, but about how and why in relation to the data, the methods, the participants, the readers, and the goals of the written piece.
(p.392) “An additional concern I have with the move toward reflexivity is that it appears to be a movement away from trying to understand the world of the “other” and toward a more cathartic psychological agency of the self. This form of reflexivity represents a turn away from praxis and toward humanist, modernist ideals that focus on the concerns and inner worlds of the author.”
And (p. 393) “An additional caution is that although I fully agree that social science texts need to embrace different representational strategies from those of the past, I also hope we do not lose a concern from trying to understand the lives of the “Other.”
It is hard to understand the “other” – and while self-examination can indeed be difficult, it does not substitute from doing the really difficult research of getting inside and making meaning from experiences that are not your own. Sometimes when I read or hear presentations that are about an author’s personal experience, I start to get frustrated, because I think that person did not do as much difficult work as he or she could have. It is even more frustrating when a large part of someone’s body of work seems to be focused this way – I think – how much more knowledge and understanding you could have brought to the world if you did this same level of investigation about others, particularly others who do not have the fortune of being educated and articulate, able to voice all of their concerns and ideas and get them into these academic and other public venues.
(p.396) “I am suggesting that the author create an entirely different landscape that befits the genre rather than assume that he insertion of the first person makes a text experimental.”
The form should come out of the aims of the writing, with attention to creatively investigating the form as well as the content of the research.
Ewald, W. (2001). Introduction. In I wanna take me a picture (pp. 7-15). Boston: Beacon.
Summary:
Introduction to a book describing her teaching methods for photography and literacy. Give background on how she came to teach photography, with anecdotes about her experience in different teaching situations.
Reflection points:
(p.7) “I’m forever noticing how classrooms are set up – how the furniture is arranged, what’s on the wall, how it’s displayed. Its disconcerting to come up against a lack of sensitivity about what our visual surroundings communicate to people, and how they are affected by it.”
I have a similar reaction to many of the classrooms I have visited, only my impressions tend to focus more on the physical environment and how it allows or restricts movement. I visited one classroom where the desks were in long rows, side by side, and the desk on the far left was up against the wall. This meant that the student in the far left had to walk behind every other student in the row (about 8) to get out and back in, and the teacher likewise had to walk through the entire row to get to this child’s desk. The room was huge, so there was no reason for it to be arranged that way – but it was, and it stayed that way when I visited a few months later. It was not efficient, and for many of the students was confining. In other rooms, I have seen teachers create more flexible spaces, where tables are used in place of desks, and they can easily be rearranged and reconfigured for different activities, and open space is left at one area so students can stand, lie on the floor, and move around as they do their work – all strategies which make the space also more welcoming to me if I am visiting as a guest teacher.
(pp. 11-12) “It’s unlikely that the young people would ever have written what they did without pictures to prompt them…, and the pictures would have been difficult to decipher without the stories to accompany them.”
I find a similar situation when teaching creative dance and asking students to write or talk about their dances. Without the physical experience to reflect on and prompt them, many students have a hard time connecting to words. But, without their words and descriptions, sometimes their dances make little sense. In some cases it is because they are so skilled at abstracting movement, that although I read meaning and feeling into what they perform, the very specific ideas they attach to it are not accessible to the viewer (and I think in contemporary dance, that is the idea). Their stories sometimes function the way many choreographers use titles – to point or suggest the particular context they might be imagining. For other students, their basic performance skills are still developing, so they do not perform exactly as intended – though with an explanation, I can see then where a movement may have suggested an idea.
This is why I think it is so important to include language in the dance class – discussions about what we are doing, what we intend, what we see, and why it is meaningful to me make the experience more multi-dimensional, and allow the students to claim ownership in a way that they cannot otherwise. Although much is communicated physically through dance, I sometimes wonder about the implications of too much silent voice – I feel that it is important for students to verbalize about their experiences and write about their dances.
Eisenhauer, J. (in press). Writing Dora: Creating community through autobiographical zines about mental illness. Journal for Cultural Research in Art Education.
Summary:
Discusses how writers with mental illness create and distribute personal zines to challenge dominant stereotypes and create community through shared writing about their experiences. Includes ideas about how the zine authors confront and disrupt relationships in the medical model such as doctor/patient, reader/writer, etc to create empowerment.
Reflection points:
(p.6) “So, while I tried to separate my zine from my academic life, in the end the zine did something I did not imagine. It changed my academic life.”
The relationship between personal and academic interests seems to find a home in many forms of narrative inquiry, where authors can draw on experience to explore, illustrate, and generate theory. It also seems a place where seemingly disparate ideas and interests can be drawn together to strengthen academic work. At first I did not have a clear idea about how Dr. Eisenhauer was going to make a connection between mental illness advocacy and art education- they seemed like radically different areas. And if someone without the personal experience/motivation/understanding were to randomly combine these topics it is unlikely that fruitful research would result. But, Dr. Eisenhauer was able to make a powerful connection because she lived both of these areas, both were important to her life, and therefore she could find meaningful threads connecting the two as ideas about expression, agency, advocacy, visual representations, and community provided clear linkages in her healing process.
(p.10) “Likewise, within medical discourses, people reconfigured as ‘patients’ often experience the loss of their personal narratives and agency even though they might be asked multiple times to ‘share’ their stories of the experience of illness.”
The same could be likely said of people who are recruited as “subjects” for research that is only concerned with narrow aspects of their stories/experience – for instances approaches that use surveys or interviews with very prescribed questions – narrative inquiry, on the other hand, seems to call for an open ended interviewing/storytelling structure where participants are invited to make meanings and have those meanings heard – though this does invite questions around representation as discussed in the other papers – I think that this description of the medical model provides a very stark contrast to highlight the loss of agency common to both “treatment” and “research” protocols that only concern a narrow slice of experience, from a predetermined framework.
Palaniuk, C. (2004). Escort. In Stranger than fiction (pp. 195-199). New York: Anchor.
Summary:
Short story describing his experiences working as a volunteer with a hospice organization.
Reflection points:
I was struck by how effective this story is in such a short amount of space. By focusing on mainly just the one person and his mother, the author pulls you in to the story. You get the feeling he started to know and care for these people, but had so little time to develop a relationship with them.
The description of the afghans is particularly strong – it lets the reader know that many other patients were part of the story. The author’s ambivalence about what to do with them really sums up the challenges of the relationships with the hospice patients, in a way that just outright trying to state his feelings would not convey.
Remen, R. (1996). Preface. In Kitchen table wisdom. New York: Riverhead.
Summary:
Preface to her book; describes the process of assembling stories and thinking of herself as an author.
Reflection points:
(p. xix) “Because I am not a writer, when I sat down to write, all I had were my memories.”
This short introduction to her book – which I would like to read in its entirety – is a good motivation for those of us with no formal training in creative writing. Drawing on her years of life experience, the author was able to write about those experiences without technical considerations of how it “should” be, the way a “writer” might be able to approach the task. This story seems like a good piece for our class, where many of us are not specifically trained as writers but where we have a lot of interesting experiences and are able to think creatively about how we relate to those experiences and put them together for sharing with others.
Summary:
Autobiographical piece tracing his development as an artist and scholar from a working-class upbringing. Interweaves stories about his art with religion, sexuality, and academia.
Reflection points:
“I work in what feels to me like an academic war zone (that the middle class don’t see) where my research, teaching, and outreach is dismissed, misunderstood, demeaned, or contested.” (p.23)
I am surprised by how overt Check is in these statements that he makes, given that he is publishing them in a public venue likely to be read by his colleagues. Although he does not outright label Texas Tech or any colleagues by name, he seems to have an unfavorable stance towards his employer and academic community. I have a hard time understanding his tactic or what he hopes to gain by publishing this kind of work, with regard to his local community. He seems to be looking for a venue to promote visibility of those with marginalized identities, but at the same time he seems to also be dismissing the very colleagues who form his local academic community, stating that he doesn’t trust them, that he feels like an imposter, etc.
In terms of the narrative, I actually felt it lacking. Although he reveals quite a bit about his personal history and how it has impacted his pedagogy, I found the writing less evocative than the author may have intended. Although he gives many descriptions of the places and people he grew up with (pp. 25-26), I found these statements to read like an accounting or listing of activities, rather than carefully selected scenes that would place the reader in his struggles. It is like we were to read about the struggles, not to read the struggles directly.
As a graduate student very nervous about finding an academic position upon completion of the PhD, I found it hard to be very sympathetic to his difficulties of feeling accepted in his institution. They hired him, after all! He has a job! He has tenure! They hired him and gave him tenure knowing the kind of teaching and research he was interested in; while not all members of the faculty may have selected him, there were at least some who were/are interested in his work.
I also take issue with his statement about pedagogy: “Take care of the students’ physical and emotional needs, and the intellectual needs will take care of themselves.” (pp.31-32) I find such statements disturbing and liable to play into the labeling of the arts as “non –cognitively challenging” and lending support to notions that caring about students’ personal histories and identities through teaching and modeling activist stances is somehow not part of rigorous academic training. While certainly acknowledging that teachers should attend to physical and emotional needs is important, and indeed the forms of activism that Check discusses play a vital role in this, I think that attending to intellectual development in the art education classroom is very important. As a dance educator, I often find that I need to downplay the affective aspects of our work in order to make the cognitive aspects apparent, to the point where I perhaps do not give enough attention to affective development. However, as a student I have found that the teachers I felt who cared and supported me the most were those who had high intellectual standards, as well as a supportive climate, in their classroom. Those who emphasized emotional or activist content, without substantive development of concepts and skills, I often found to ultimately be less supportive. I doubt that Check would have been able to build an academic career if he had not had teachers who applied rigorous intellectual work in their classrooms. Of course, those who did so at the cost of supporting students’ personal growth- including dismissing ways of knowing informed by diverse religious, racial, class, and sexual identities- probably are what he is working against.
Ely, M. (2007). In-forming re-presentations. In Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology (pp. 567-598). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Summary:
Discusses the ways that different narrative forms can be used as ways of informing the research process and presenting data and conclusions to the reader in a way that supports the theory being generated, draws the readers interest, and is respectful of the research participants. Includes discussions of stories in the first person, poetry, layered stories, anecdotes, pastiche, and drama as forms that have been used to share research i written form.
Reflection points:
Ely’s discussion shows a range of forms that can be suitable for not only reporting on qualitative research, but more importantly, informing the research process as new aspects of the data are revealed and considered for their meanings when handled in an artistic way.
(p.581) – Layered stories – “…the idea that one event can have many meanings and that there is no such thing as an objective truth are key to narrative research.”
I particularly liked the examples of layered stories. It seems like a very powerful technique for expressing multiple points of view of a situation, yet allowing each one to remain intact and in the voice of its owner. Partway into the example shared on p.591 I was curious what the other participants in the situation were thinking, as it was clear to me that the person’s behavior described might cause some reaction. The remaining two voices completed the picture.
Ely goes on to discuss the ethical considerations and how layered stories can help researchers achieve balance: “The attempt to understand our participants deeply, no matter our personal opinions about them, is at the crux of narrative research…Involving oneself in writing layered stories and reflecting on them is ne way of providing sufficient distance for better understanding.” (p.582)
Pastiche (p. 588) – the example of “Buddie’s [sic] with books” was particularly striking for me, because I have visited classrooms like the one described, complete with misspellings on the wall displays which frequently make me cringe. The piece makes a powerful statement about the kind of literacy teaching that is provided to lower-income students, simply by presenting the text of the teacher’s speaking along with the spelling of the wall sign. More than the lack of positive feedback, I was struck by the fact that the children’s voices are almost unnecessary to this depiction of classroom discourse: the teacher is running a virtual monologue, responding only to her expectations of the children (“No wonder they thought you needed extra help…”) and not to the children themselves. We don’t need their voices to understand the pastiche, because their voices were not important to the research subject.
It does make me question, however, how the researcher would deal with the participant, whom she does present in a negative (though possibly fair and apt) light. Was the participant given an opportunity to see and respond to the pastiche that was created? Because the researcher left it to her audience - presumably, educators and academics with pedagogical training that would incline them to see the deficiencies of Ms. Wrights approach – to make the larger interpretations, how would a less-informed research participant be able to be aware of the negative impression being given by the research?
Freeman, M. (2007). Autobiographical understanding and narrative inquiry. In J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology (pp. 120-45). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Summary:
Discussion of autobiographical process as a way of researching and representing lives and experiences; describes the history of conceptions of the self/individual that allowed autobiography to come about as a form of knowledge that is valuable; offers idea that autobiography offers a form of understanding about human lives not accessible in other research forms.
Reflection points:
(p. 132) “Undoubtedly, there already exists the recognition that the autobiographer is likely engaged in a process of justifying himself or herself somehow and that the resultant portrait is bound to entail a measure of artifice, but this is not necessarily seen as a liability, much less a danger, for the aim of autobiography is not simply to depict the past as it was but precisely to understand it, to make sense of it, to fashion meanings that were not, and could not be, available in the flux of immediate experience.”
This sense of understanding and meaning is at the heart of what makes autobiography compelling to readers – an “objective” accounting of events from an outside source would not offer the same kind of access to meaning that a personal account might. The layering of meaning – and the selection of events to describe in the first place – provides insight into that person’s worldview that would not be possible otherwise. The selection of events as significant, and the meanings attached to them, likewise would not be accessible to the author in the moment of their occurrence- the layering, interpretation, meaning-making that the writer does has to take place at some point afterwards, in order to benefit from the richness of reflection.
“’[A]utobiography is [thus] condemned to substitute endlessly the completely formed for that which is in the process of being formed. {p.41}” (p.133, citing Gusdorf)
This statement stood out for me because of its relevance/applicability to so many of the forms of research. In particular I have confronted this issue when looking at art forms deemed representative of particular cultures, and the tendency to ahistoricize them; to substitute traditional forms as representatives of contemporary forms, or to substitute what in our culture would be considered a folk form as representative of all forms (including fine art, contemporary art, theatrical forms, etc) within that culture…
Our desire as readers and consumers of research and artwork often makes the “completely formed” desirable; readers/viewers have little patience for untangling that which is in-process, so we look for the version/vision that can be fixed, tamed, meaning easily ascribed to. The task for writers then may be to present the in-process, to fix it only enough that it can be seen, but not so much that it appears settled.
(p.134) “Narratives often seem able to give us understandings of people in a way that more “objective” methodologies cannot. This is because they often emerge from a true, rather than a false, scientific attitude, one that practices fidelity not to that which can be objectified and measured but to the whole person, the whole human life, in all of its ambiguous, messy, beautiful detail.”
This statement really seems to capture the idea of epistemology – of what counts as knowing and what counts as the way to get at that knowing – and suggests that attending to people as holistic beings is the preferred way. Certainly, the idea of holism may best be served by narrative, and narrative cannot be judged against criteria established for other forms of inquiry which have a very different underlying attitude.
(p. 136) “..the challenge at hand is a poetic one, the foremost aim being not to reproduce reality but to actualize and explicate it, to bring meaning into being in such a way that the world is made visible.”
(p.137) “We often do not know what is happening when it is happening. Instead, and again, we are often late, sometimes too late, and all that can be done is to tell the story: Appearances aside, this is what happened.”
(p.142)”…’poetic science,’ a form of critical narrative inquiry that would lie at the intersection of art and science and that would support not only the epistemological aim of increasing knowledge and understanding of the human realm but also the ethical aim of increasing sympathy and compassion.”
Garland-Thompson, R. (2007). Shape structures story: Fresh and feisty stories about disability. Narrative , 15 (1), 113-123.
Summary:
Working from the premise that “shape structures story”, Garland-Thompson challenges traditional disability narratives based on loss or lack with narratives where the “shape we think of as disability structures positive instead of negative stories.” (p.114) She describes four narratives in different genres and offers analysis around the concepts of sexuality and community, two ideas often missing from disability narratives.
Reflection points:
Although her analysis of the other works are certainly well written, I found Garland-Thompson’s discussion of her own participation in a disability community to be far and away the most compelling description in the paper.
I particularly loved the description of the SDS dance event where people with various disabilities create their own way of moving together and participating with the music. I imagine that many of their movements are probably more interesting and creative than what is seen at a nightclub frequented by “norms”, where people replicate movements popularized by others and seen on television and in movies. Because such movements may not be accessible to the conference participants, they find movements expressive of themselves in many regards – expressive of their physical bodies and expressive of their own ideas, impulses, and motivations. The “tongue dancing” sounded particularly impressive and creative; the author’s desire to see it go mainstream was interesting – are they searching for validation from the wider society through adoption of this activity? Or is it just an inner validity which has already been established that she is describing? Certainly, the idea that actors with disabilities could and should play parts of disabled characters (both when a script specifically calls for them, as well as for other parts where a disability isn’t specified but could be played by a disabled actor) is important, but I’m really curious about her desire for wider media portrayal – is it enough that she has found her own community she longed for seeing movies about “ethnic” families, or does she need/want a media portrayal of this community?
Tierney, W. (2002). Get real: Representing reality. Qualitative Studies in Education , 15 (4), 385-398.
Summary:
Discussion of narrative form in relation to research writing. Tierney argues for a larger scope in narrative strategies being used, but also cautions that the forms being used need to serve a purpose in relation to the research being written about – not simply replacing one narrative voice with another.
Reflection points:
(p.390) “…I highlight the difficulty an individual faces when he or she realizes that traditional texts are boring and wants to try a different format…We cannot simply assume that because the genre or voice that an individual has perfected over an academic career is no longer suitable that the individual will be able to simply pick up a different genre or voice and do it well.”
Yes, very true. Especially when the problem may not be simply that the voice or genre that the author is using is the cause of it being boring, but also the underlying assumptions about what information is worth sharing and what constitutes knowledge. Also, the duties of the author with regard to making the information meaningful to the reader – in some instances it may be that the author resists making applications or conclusions, but in some venues a gesture toward helping the reader make use of the information to his or her own context may be important – often I find that narrative structures help me do that, because a description of a person or situation allows me to think of how I have encountered similar situations or people, and then how the research ideas might apply to those situations as well. With large theoretical statements only, I find that I sometimes loose the connection to the ideas or fail to have them stick with me. However, sometimes the author will then draw out “actions” from the research – but if the author has a stance that this is not something that he or she should do, that can be another cause for disengaged writing.
(p.391) “If anything, we need greater narrative diversity rather than less, and the choices that authors make do not turn on dictates, but on epistemological and strategic assumptions about the kind of text that the readers and those whom we interviewed and observe deserve. Just as I once was concerned with the unreflexive absence of the author from a narrative, I am equally concerned with the unreflexive insertion of the author into a narrative. The use of my voice in a text is always an epistemological concern about studying/working/collaborating with the Other, to ignore this issue from an end of a narrative continuum or another is to overlook the critical relationship of the researched, the researcher, and the reader. “
This statement to me seems to sum up the critical point for the entire article – it is not simply about inserting one’s voice, but about how and why in relation to the data, the methods, the participants, the readers, and the goals of the written piece.
(p.392) “An additional concern I have with the move toward reflexivity is that it appears to be a movement away from trying to understand the world of the “other” and toward a more cathartic psychological agency of the self. This form of reflexivity represents a turn away from praxis and toward humanist, modernist ideals that focus on the concerns and inner worlds of the author.”
And (p. 393) “An additional caution is that although I fully agree that social science texts need to embrace different representational strategies from those of the past, I also hope we do not lose a concern from trying to understand the lives of the “Other.”
It is hard to understand the “other” – and while self-examination can indeed be difficult, it does not substitute from doing the really difficult research of getting inside and making meaning from experiences that are not your own. Sometimes when I read or hear presentations that are about an author’s personal experience, I start to get frustrated, because I think that person did not do as much difficult work as he or she could have. It is even more frustrating when a large part of someone’s body of work seems to be focused this way – I think – how much more knowledge and understanding you could have brought to the world if you did this same level of investigation about others, particularly others who do not have the fortune of being educated and articulate, able to voice all of their concerns and ideas and get them into these academic and other public venues.
(p.396) “I am suggesting that the author create an entirely different landscape that befits the genre rather than assume that he insertion of the first person makes a text experimental.”
The form should come out of the aims of the writing, with attention to creatively investigating the form as well as the content of the research.
Ewald, W. (2001). Introduction. In I wanna take me a picture (pp. 7-15). Boston: Beacon.
Summary:
Introduction to a book describing her teaching methods for photography and literacy. Give background on how she came to teach photography, with anecdotes about her experience in different teaching situations.
Reflection points:
(p.7) “I’m forever noticing how classrooms are set up – how the furniture is arranged, what’s on the wall, how it’s displayed. Its disconcerting to come up against a lack of sensitivity about what our visual surroundings communicate to people, and how they are affected by it.”
I have a similar reaction to many of the classrooms I have visited, only my impressions tend to focus more on the physical environment and how it allows or restricts movement. I visited one classroom where the desks were in long rows, side by side, and the desk on the far left was up against the wall. This meant that the student in the far left had to walk behind every other student in the row (about 8) to get out and back in, and the teacher likewise had to walk through the entire row to get to this child’s desk. The room was huge, so there was no reason for it to be arranged that way – but it was, and it stayed that way when I visited a few months later. It was not efficient, and for many of the students was confining. In other rooms, I have seen teachers create more flexible spaces, where tables are used in place of desks, and they can easily be rearranged and reconfigured for different activities, and open space is left at one area so students can stand, lie on the floor, and move around as they do their work – all strategies which make the space also more welcoming to me if I am visiting as a guest teacher.
(pp. 11-12) “It’s unlikely that the young people would ever have written what they did without pictures to prompt them…, and the pictures would have been difficult to decipher without the stories to accompany them.”
I find a similar situation when teaching creative dance and asking students to write or talk about their dances. Without the physical experience to reflect on and prompt them, many students have a hard time connecting to words. But, without their words and descriptions, sometimes their dances make little sense. In some cases it is because they are so skilled at abstracting movement, that although I read meaning and feeling into what they perform, the very specific ideas they attach to it are not accessible to the viewer (and I think in contemporary dance, that is the idea). Their stories sometimes function the way many choreographers use titles – to point or suggest the particular context they might be imagining. For other students, their basic performance skills are still developing, so they do not perform exactly as intended – though with an explanation, I can see then where a movement may have suggested an idea.
This is why I think it is so important to include language in the dance class – discussions about what we are doing, what we intend, what we see, and why it is meaningful to me make the experience more multi-dimensional, and allow the students to claim ownership in a way that they cannot otherwise. Although much is communicated physically through dance, I sometimes wonder about the implications of too much silent voice – I feel that it is important for students to verbalize about their experiences and write about their dances.
Eisenhauer, J. (in press). Writing Dora: Creating community through autobiographical zines about mental illness. Journal for Cultural Research in Art Education.
Summary:
Discusses how writers with mental illness create and distribute personal zines to challenge dominant stereotypes and create community through shared writing about their experiences. Includes ideas about how the zine authors confront and disrupt relationships in the medical model such as doctor/patient, reader/writer, etc to create empowerment.
Reflection points:
(p.6) “So, while I tried to separate my zine from my academic life, in the end the zine did something I did not imagine. It changed my academic life.”
The relationship between personal and academic interests seems to find a home in many forms of narrative inquiry, where authors can draw on experience to explore, illustrate, and generate theory. It also seems a place where seemingly disparate ideas and interests can be drawn together to strengthen academic work. At first I did not have a clear idea about how Dr. Eisenhauer was going to make a connection between mental illness advocacy and art education- they seemed like radically different areas. And if someone without the personal experience/motivation/understanding were to randomly combine these topics it is unlikely that fruitful research would result. But, Dr. Eisenhauer was able to make a powerful connection because she lived both of these areas, both were important to her life, and therefore she could find meaningful threads connecting the two as ideas about expression, agency, advocacy, visual representations, and community provided clear linkages in her healing process.
(p.10) “Likewise, within medical discourses, people reconfigured as ‘patients’ often experience the loss of their personal narratives and agency even though they might be asked multiple times to ‘share’ their stories of the experience of illness.”
The same could be likely said of people who are recruited as “subjects” for research that is only concerned with narrow aspects of their stories/experience – for instances approaches that use surveys or interviews with very prescribed questions – narrative inquiry, on the other hand, seems to call for an open ended interviewing/storytelling structure where participants are invited to make meanings and have those meanings heard – though this does invite questions around representation as discussed in the other papers – I think that this description of the medical model provides a very stark contrast to highlight the loss of agency common to both “treatment” and “research” protocols that only concern a narrow slice of experience, from a predetermined framework.
Palaniuk, C. (2004). Escort. In Stranger than fiction (pp. 195-199). New York: Anchor.
Summary:
Short story describing his experiences working as a volunteer with a hospice organization.
Reflection points:
I was struck by how effective this story is in such a short amount of space. By focusing on mainly just the one person and his mother, the author pulls you in to the story. You get the feeling he started to know and care for these people, but had so little time to develop a relationship with them.
The description of the afghans is particularly strong – it lets the reader know that many other patients were part of the story. The author’s ambivalence about what to do with them really sums up the challenges of the relationships with the hospice patients, in a way that just outright trying to state his feelings would not convey.
Remen, R. (1996). Preface. In Kitchen table wisdom. New York: Riverhead.
Summary:
Preface to her book; describes the process of assembling stories and thinking of herself as an author.
Reflection points:
(p. xix) “Because I am not a writer, when I sat down to write, all I had were my memories.”
This short introduction to her book – which I would like to read in its entirety – is a good motivation for those of us with no formal training in creative writing. Drawing on her years of life experience, the author was able to write about those experiences without technical considerations of how it “should” be, the way a “writer” might be able to approach the task. This story seems like a good piece for our class, where many of us are not specifically trained as writers but where we have a lot of interesting experiences and are able to think creatively about how we relate to those experiences and put them together for sharing with others.
Marissa's Response to CMA Exhibit
Marlene, 2004
I suppose your Aunt Greta has you ruffled up again. She has been going on about it lately. You need to understand that all that happened long ago, and really, there is nothing much to tell. Those nurses just keep encouraging Greta, but mark my words, you’ll see, they just keep letting her go farther and farther away, lost in her own world. We do miss her.
No doubt you’ve heard about the black horse, Charlie, that she rode in that Fourth of July parade. Yes, it was the Fourth of July. Our Uncle Mason brought him down from outside Wausau and us girls, we begged for a chance to ride Charlie. Uncle Mason – you know, he wasn’t really our uncle but he fancied your Grandma and when she married Daddy you know, he just suck around like he was family anyway. So Uncle Mason, he says I hear a parade is coming up, and wouldn’t you girls like to ride in that show? But Ma had already signed us up to carry roses from June’s flower shop, and insisted we had to march with the other rose girls. Oh we whined and carried on, till Ma had no choice but to admit that Miss June really didn’t need both of us. I was older, and I had ridden horses before, so naturally it should have been me. But Greta, with those big pouty eyes, went straight to Uncle Mason and declared she would positively die of sadness if she didn’t ride with Charlie. So that settled it. Be mature, Marlene, they told me. I was expected to ‘suck it up’ as you kids say.
Ma called Miss June and had her make Greta’s bouquet into a headpiece, and the rest of us followed her, carrying the yellow and red roses especially arranged by the flower shop girls. I remember mine and Tilly’s were connected by a long garland, so we had to always walk four feet apart, exactly, so it would hang just so for Miss June. Poor Margaret got stuck with the sign, a heavy wooden plank advertising the flower shop like she was standing there on a street corner. She protested about carrying it, but that board it did save her life.
By now she’s made it out to you like it was some fantastic magical procession, like Cinderella’s wedding party on Christmas Eve. Did she tell you about the angels in the trees? In the early years after it happened, she would go on and on about those angels. On and on. Nonsense about them doing acrobatics, hanging upside down and swinging from the branches by just their pinky fingers. Uncle Mason said he thought she was just remembering the balloons, but sometimes you just have to wonder what it is she was seeing.
And her dress. Oh, I will never forget that dress. I wanted it so badly, the first time I ever wanted one of cousin Susan’s hand-me-downs. But my figure had already been becoming too womanly, and I couldn’t button it up. The dress went to Greta. Charlie, and the dress. On her, it looked like freedom. Not red, white, and blue stripes, none of that silliness that people think stands for freedom, but really, like the feeling of freedom cut and stitched together and worn to show the world you’re not standing still. Freedom. Gown up. Soft neckline, gentle waist – a dress you could lift your arms in, run away in. Looking at her riding that black black horse in that blue dress, lifting her hand to adjust her crown of roses, I thought, my sister is the luckiest girl in the world.
You’ve visited her many times, you want to know what really happened. She has told you some foolishness no doubt. No one was watching the parade, because everyone in the whole town left their houses to join in. It was so hot that all the ladies stripped naked to feel the breeze on their bosoms. Sarah Montgomery rode an elephant from the Madison Zoo. And little Jimmy Grayson rode beside her on his new ten-speed.
Well, the part about Jimmy Grayson was right, only wasn’t so little any more, and it wasn’t a ten speed but his daddy’s Ford that he stole from the garage. Jimmy Grayson. After it all ended, he disappeared. I heard he is somewhere in New Mexico, but who knows?
In the days afterward, we were all in shock. Then, no one spoke of it, hushed up. Want to know why your daddy can’t say “accident” without a stutter? Ma shushed him at every mention. He wasn’t allowed in Greta’s room, but I snuck him in. He didn’t believe me that she was in there under all those bandages.
Sometime around October Greta gradually got better – I remember it was unusually cold and the trees lost their leaves early that year – she woke up but her memory was never right. She would smile and go on and on about leading the angels, about the Fourth of July, about “her parade.” In truth, we were near the back, several blocks from Miss Milwaukee and her carriage. But I suppose it doesn’t matter – if Greta wants to be Miss Milwaukee in her mind, let her.
Probably better that she doesn’t really remember. It was actually kind of overcast that day, and as we neared the end of the parade, we were tired from walking and our hands ached from holding that garland. Even Greta was drooping sitting there on Charlie. Miss June had promised us ice cream at her house, but we never made it that far.
Jimmy Grayson didn’t have a license, and his daddy’s sedan handles different than a tractor. His rage built up by the time he turned on to third street. I don’t think he meant to hurt any of us girls, we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time the morning Jimmy’s daddy told him he wouldn’t amount to nothing for the last time.
That parade may have been magical for Greta. There weren’t any naked housewives, you know, but maybe there were angels in the trees. She shouldn’t have made it, for sure. I don’t like those nurses encouraging her, but after a life like hers – what all with Michael leaving, John in that war and little Rebecca running off with what’s-his-name – I suppose they don’t mean much harm. Her mind is going now anyway. If you’ve only got one memory left, maybe better to have it be a really good one.
I suppose your Aunt Greta has you ruffled up again. She has been going on about it lately. You need to understand that all that happened long ago, and really, there is nothing much to tell. Those nurses just keep encouraging Greta, but mark my words, you’ll see, they just keep letting her go farther and farther away, lost in her own world. We do miss her.
No doubt you’ve heard about the black horse, Charlie, that she rode in that Fourth of July parade. Yes, it was the Fourth of July. Our Uncle Mason brought him down from outside Wausau and us girls, we begged for a chance to ride Charlie. Uncle Mason – you know, he wasn’t really our uncle but he fancied your Grandma and when she married Daddy you know, he just suck around like he was family anyway. So Uncle Mason, he says I hear a parade is coming up, and wouldn’t you girls like to ride in that show? But Ma had already signed us up to carry roses from June’s flower shop, and insisted we had to march with the other rose girls. Oh we whined and carried on, till Ma had no choice but to admit that Miss June really didn’t need both of us. I was older, and I had ridden horses before, so naturally it should have been me. But Greta, with those big pouty eyes, went straight to Uncle Mason and declared she would positively die of sadness if she didn’t ride with Charlie. So that settled it. Be mature, Marlene, they told me. I was expected to ‘suck it up’ as you kids say.
Ma called Miss June and had her make Greta’s bouquet into a headpiece, and the rest of us followed her, carrying the yellow and red roses especially arranged by the flower shop girls. I remember mine and Tilly’s were connected by a long garland, so we had to always walk four feet apart, exactly, so it would hang just so for Miss June. Poor Margaret got stuck with the sign, a heavy wooden plank advertising the flower shop like she was standing there on a street corner. She protested about carrying it, but that board it did save her life.
By now she’s made it out to you like it was some fantastic magical procession, like Cinderella’s wedding party on Christmas Eve. Did she tell you about the angels in the trees? In the early years after it happened, she would go on and on about those angels. On and on. Nonsense about them doing acrobatics, hanging upside down and swinging from the branches by just their pinky fingers. Uncle Mason said he thought she was just remembering the balloons, but sometimes you just have to wonder what it is she was seeing.
And her dress. Oh, I will never forget that dress. I wanted it so badly, the first time I ever wanted one of cousin Susan’s hand-me-downs. But my figure had already been becoming too womanly, and I couldn’t button it up. The dress went to Greta. Charlie, and the dress. On her, it looked like freedom. Not red, white, and blue stripes, none of that silliness that people think stands for freedom, but really, like the feeling of freedom cut and stitched together and worn to show the world you’re not standing still. Freedom. Gown up. Soft neckline, gentle waist – a dress you could lift your arms in, run away in. Looking at her riding that black black horse in that blue dress, lifting her hand to adjust her crown of roses, I thought, my sister is the luckiest girl in the world.
You’ve visited her many times, you want to know what really happened. She has told you some foolishness no doubt. No one was watching the parade, because everyone in the whole town left their houses to join in. It was so hot that all the ladies stripped naked to feel the breeze on their bosoms. Sarah Montgomery rode an elephant from the Madison Zoo. And little Jimmy Grayson rode beside her on his new ten-speed.
Well, the part about Jimmy Grayson was right, only wasn’t so little any more, and it wasn’t a ten speed but his daddy’s Ford that he stole from the garage. Jimmy Grayson. After it all ended, he disappeared. I heard he is somewhere in New Mexico, but who knows?
In the days afterward, we were all in shock. Then, no one spoke of it, hushed up. Want to know why your daddy can’t say “accident” without a stutter? Ma shushed him at every mention. He wasn’t allowed in Greta’s room, but I snuck him in. He didn’t believe me that she was in there under all those bandages.
Sometime around October Greta gradually got better – I remember it was unusually cold and the trees lost their leaves early that year – she woke up but her memory was never right. She would smile and go on and on about leading the angels, about the Fourth of July, about “her parade.” In truth, we were near the back, several blocks from Miss Milwaukee and her carriage. But I suppose it doesn’t matter – if Greta wants to be Miss Milwaukee in her mind, let her.
Probably better that she doesn’t really remember. It was actually kind of overcast that day, and as we neared the end of the parade, we were tired from walking and our hands ached from holding that garland. Even Greta was drooping sitting there on Charlie. Miss June had promised us ice cream at her house, but we never made it that far.
Jimmy Grayson didn’t have a license, and his daddy’s sedan handles different than a tractor. His rage built up by the time he turned on to third street. I don’t think he meant to hurt any of us girls, we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time the morning Jimmy’s daddy told him he wouldn’t amount to nothing for the last time.
That parade may have been magical for Greta. There weren’t any naked housewives, you know, but maybe there were angels in the trees. She shouldn’t have made it, for sure. I don’t like those nurses encouraging her, but after a life like hers – what all with Michael leaving, John in that war and little Rebecca running off with what’s-his-name – I suppose they don’t mean much harm. Her mind is going now anyway. If you’ve only got one memory left, maybe better to have it be a really good one.
Marissa's Response to Bradford Work
Mark Bradford
Bag of Tricks
2009
--
Owning
“You just don’t care about my stuff!”
(Silence.)
-THUMP-
“Why do you have to go and mess it up?”
(Silence.)
-THUMP-
“Well, what the hell were you thinking?”
(More silence.)
-THUMP – THUMP –
“Next time I’ll shred up all your stupid reports and stuff them in the trash too!”
“Kayla said you were done.”
-THUMP THUMP THUMP –
“What does she know? She just wants my room.”
“It has been three years.”
“Two years, nine months, and eight days.”
-THUMP-
“You’ve been counting?”
“Yes I’ve been counting. Of course I’ve been counting. All of them.”
“I’m sorry, we really thought it was scraps.
We thought you were finished, you didn’t come back.”
“Why would I come back if all you’re going to do is throw my collection away?”
“Joseph and Brian came by,
they didn’t know what you were keeping them for.”
THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP
“I am keeping them.”
THUMP
“Yes.”
“Keep.”
“Yes, of course.”
THUMP THUMP
Keep keep longer and longer and ever forever
THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP
Just scraps
THUMP THUMP THUMP
No, pieces, pieces of being right
THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP
Scraps
THUMP THUMP
[He tries to hold them together but they slip from his fingers. He weaves them together but then one gets loose.]
“Why did you have to go and mess with my stuff?”
(Silence.)
Pieces, each a bit of energy, one for every time I got it right and some curved and
THUMP ---THUMP ---THUMP ---THUMP --- THUMP---
tied in knots and some stuck together the way my stomach felt two years, nine
THUMP ---THUMP ---THUMP ---THUMP --- THUMP---
months, and eight days ago when I was right for the last time.
THUMP ---THUMP ---THUMP ---THUMP --- THUMP---
“You are right, I should have asked you first.”
“He gave them to me, you know. Mine kept breaking.”
-THUMP-
“I know.”
-THUMP-
“Breaking”
“Breaking.”
-THUMP THUMP-
“Mine”
-THUMP-
Bag of Tricks
2009
--
Owning
“You just don’t care about my stuff!”
(Silence.)
-THUMP-
“Why do you have to go and mess it up?”
(Silence.)
-THUMP-
“Well, what the hell were you thinking?”
(More silence.)
-THUMP – THUMP –
“Next time I’ll shred up all your stupid reports and stuff them in the trash too!”
“Kayla said you were done.”
-THUMP THUMP THUMP –
“What does she know? She just wants my room.”
“It has been three years.”
“Two years, nine months, and eight days.”
-THUMP-
“You’ve been counting?”
“Yes I’ve been counting. Of course I’ve been counting. All of them.”
“I’m sorry, we really thought it was scraps.
We thought you were finished, you didn’t come back.”
“Why would I come back if all you’re going to do is throw my collection away?”
“Joseph and Brian came by,
they didn’t know what you were keeping them for.”
THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP
“I am keeping them.”
THUMP
“Yes.”
“Keep.”
“Yes, of course.”
THUMP THUMP
Keep keep longer and longer and ever forever
THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP
Just scraps
THUMP THUMP THUMP
No, pieces, pieces of being right
THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP
Scraps
THUMP THUMP
[He tries to hold them together but they slip from his fingers. He weaves them together but then one gets loose.]
“Why did you have to go and mess with my stuff?”
(Silence.)
Pieces, each a bit of energy, one for every time I got it right and some curved and
THUMP ---THUMP ---THUMP ---THUMP --- THUMP---
tied in knots and some stuck together the way my stomach felt two years, nine
THUMP ---THUMP ---THUMP ---THUMP --- THUMP---
months, and eight days ago when I was right for the last time.
THUMP ---THUMP ---THUMP ---THUMP --- THUMP---
“You are right, I should have asked you first.”
“He gave them to me, you know. Mine kept breaking.”
-THUMP-
“I know.”
-THUMP-
“Breaking”
“Breaking.”
-THUMP THUMP-
“Mine”
-THUMP-
Marissa's 100 Word Biography
Born to plan. Came out with a scream, no doubt. Then grave, they said.
Off to school soon.
(Catch up.)
Too young for all of this.
I want to dance, she said. If you just want the clothes, we can skip it, she was told. No, dance.
Straight A’s, use your mind, hide the dates of loss. Try to leave all the time but held back.
Split, then still,
risk, trust? No, dance. Move through it.
(Burn it in the woods: flames eat that which no one knows.)
Try to find the place to be where one lets go. Sighs.
Off to school soon.
(Catch up.)
Too young for all of this.
I want to dance, she said. If you just want the clothes, we can skip it, she was told. No, dance.
Straight A’s, use your mind, hide the dates of loss. Try to leave all the time but held back.
Split, then still,
risk, trust? No, dance. Move through it.
(Burn it in the woods: flames eat that which no one knows.)
Try to find the place to be where one lets go. Sighs.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Laura's Friday Presentation
Sleepless Nights
Up late again, my head is buzzing with a million thoughts running through, but not one
that is very clear. The baby mobile is playing twinkle, twinkle, little star. The ceiling
fan is whirling above my head lending a gentle breeze that feels good as I try to pull my
thoughts together. I am trying to write about an experience, a memory of my past, but
I can not concentrate because I am also trying to get my tiny, little five month old baby
boy to fall asleep. He keeps stirring in his crib, getting stuck in a corner of the bumper
as he attempts to master rolling over. I get up from my comfortable little corner of my
bed that I like to write on to soothe him, hold him, and replace his pacifier that fell out
of his mouth. I then return to my bed to try to begin something, anything! But, I am
interrupted once more as my baby begins to cry because he is annoyed with the light of
my bedroom that we share. At the moment, this is the only space that I can retreat to for
a moment of some sort of silence and reflection because downstairs, my two year old
is running around with his daddy way past his bedtime. His schedule is off because he
normally only goes to sleep when I go to bed. I try to stay calm and relaxed while trying
to get my work completed, but I also feel a slow, but great amount of pressure building
up inside of me. I am feeling overwhelmed, tired, and guilty. I often feel that I am being
pulled in several directions.
Being a mother is very significant to me; being an excellent mother that is. It is what
I have always desired since I was a young girl. I often imagined what motherhood felt
like. It took a long time for me to become a mother. It wasn’t easy. Three years of
unexplained infertility. Years of fertility treatments with numerous doctor appointments,
self-administered needle injections, uncomfortable speculum insertions, and then the
devastating miscarriages. But, I was willing to do anything and pay anything to have a
healthy baby. I finally was successful and gave birth to my beautiful baby boy, Liam.
The world stopped for a moment as we exchanged glances. I then proclaimed to all the
doctors, nurses, and my husband standing around me in the operation room, that “He is
MY baby!” I was so happy in that moment. I succeeded in achieving one of my dreams.
Two years later, I gave birth to my second sweet boy, Landon whose smile melts my
heart every day. This is the one that now stirs in his crib, aching to fall asleep. Thoughts
of anxiety and guilt flood my mind because of the steady reminder that being a mother
is not enough. I was taught from an early age that having a career, a purpose outside of
the home is what is valued. I need to prove not only to myself, but to others that I am
capable of thinking, working and contributing to not only by household income, but also
to the progress of our society. So, I find myself compressing in as much as I can into
each day to fulfill all of my duties as a student, teacher, wife, and mother which leaves
me ultimately with many sleepless nights.
Up late again, my head is buzzing with a million thoughts running through, but not one
that is very clear. The baby mobile is playing twinkle, twinkle, little star. The ceiling
fan is whirling above my head lending a gentle breeze that feels good as I try to pull my
thoughts together. I am trying to write about an experience, a memory of my past, but
I can not concentrate because I am also trying to get my tiny, little five month old baby
boy to fall asleep. He keeps stirring in his crib, getting stuck in a corner of the bumper
as he attempts to master rolling over. I get up from my comfortable little corner of my
bed that I like to write on to soothe him, hold him, and replace his pacifier that fell out
of his mouth. I then return to my bed to try to begin something, anything! But, I am
interrupted once more as my baby begins to cry because he is annoyed with the light of
my bedroom that we share. At the moment, this is the only space that I can retreat to for
a moment of some sort of silence and reflection because downstairs, my two year old
is running around with his daddy way past his bedtime. His schedule is off because he
normally only goes to sleep when I go to bed. I try to stay calm and relaxed while trying
to get my work completed, but I also feel a slow, but great amount of pressure building
up inside of me. I am feeling overwhelmed, tired, and guilty. I often feel that I am being
pulled in several directions.
Being a mother is very significant to me; being an excellent mother that is. It is what
I have always desired since I was a young girl. I often imagined what motherhood felt
like. It took a long time for me to become a mother. It wasn’t easy. Three years of
unexplained infertility. Years of fertility treatments with numerous doctor appointments,
self-administered needle injections, uncomfortable speculum insertions, and then the
devastating miscarriages. But, I was willing to do anything and pay anything to have a
healthy baby. I finally was successful and gave birth to my beautiful baby boy, Liam.
The world stopped for a moment as we exchanged glances. I then proclaimed to all the
doctors, nurses, and my husband standing around me in the operation room, that “He is
MY baby!” I was so happy in that moment. I succeeded in achieving one of my dreams.
Two years later, I gave birth to my second sweet boy, Landon whose smile melts my
heart every day. This is the one that now stirs in his crib, aching to fall asleep. Thoughts
of anxiety and guilt flood my mind because of the steady reminder that being a mother
is not enough. I was taught from an early age that having a career, a purpose outside of
the home is what is valued. I need to prove not only to myself, but to others that I am
capable of thinking, working and contributing to not only by household income, but also
to the progress of our society. So, I find myself compressing in as much as I can into
each day to fulfill all of my duties as a student, teacher, wife, and mother which leaves
me ultimately with many sleepless nights.
Laura's Bio
Wrong Turn
I believe that every decision you make takes you down a path that another decision
would never have taken you to. It is usually unlikely that one knows what lies ahead on
that path once you have started down it. The adventure of the journey is the unknown.
Decisions made sometimes may seem right at first because of what you envision at the
end. However, as you begin the journey, new choices and decisions present themselves
to further complicate or make your initial decision become more rooted and committed.
I was 17 years old and enrolled as a fine arts major at Alfred University in the valley of
the Allegheny Mountains of New York. My parents just dropped me off with all of my
belongings, which wasn’t very much at my dormitory. While I witnessed other students
cry as their parents drove off, I felt excited and ready to start this new beginning. I was
a runner and joined the cross-country team. I liked how my medium-length brown pony
tail bounced from side to side as I ran around campus and the small town in which it was
located in. Life was exciting at the moment as I was pursuing my dreams of becoming
a painter or a potter someday. I equally liked both art mediums. My parents were also
both very supportive of my career path although they were a little hesitant at first. I was
confident in my abilities because I was given the sole art award from my high school
during my senior year. I liked all my classes although some really challenged my ideas
of art until that one day in my professor’s office.
It was a Wednesday morning at the end of the first semester. I had carried my large,
heavy black portfolio down from my dorm room to present my work to my professor. It
was filled with numerous drawings and paintings from the entire semester. I was eager
for a response of my work from my much admired professor. I proudly unzipped my
portfolio and turned to my first drawing. There was a silent pause. And then, he closed
folded the portfolio shut and looked at me. I will never forget the words he spoke to me
that morning. He said that he didn’t need to look at my work because he can not take me
seriously until I take myself seriously as an artist. He advised me to cut off my ponytail,
dye my hair, get a couple piercings and a few tattoos. I was stunned and mortified. The
meeting was over. I left ashamed, confused, and angry and I didn’t know what to do. I
just took it all in and sadly enough began to believe him.
I never cut off my ponytail or dyed my hair and never got a tattoo. That wasn’t who I
was and I didn’t want to become an imposter. I liked how I looked and I didn’t want
to change because someone told me to. But little did I know, that he did change me in
a different way in that moment whether I liked it or not. I finished my first year as a
fine arts major, but returned the next year as a Ceramic Engineering student. I guess
my appearance fit that mold better. The transition into Engineering wasn’t difficult
academically because I earned strong grades in math and science during high school.
However, emotionally the transition was very difficult as I dropped a pottery class for
Chemistry and painting for Calculus. My decision over the course of the summer forever
changed the direction of my life. I finished my degree in Engineering with honors and
began to work for a manufacturing facility for four years. Throughout my time as a
student and a professional in the engineering world, I felt empty. It didn’t fill me up
and I just didn’t care about it. It wasn’t terrible, but just not right for me. I searched
and searched my soul to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life because I
knew I couldn’t work as an engineer anymore. I thought maybe I would apply to Med-
School or maybe work towards an MBA but none of them felt right for me. I still loved
art, but was afraid of it now.
One morning, I met my sister for breakfast and she told me that she thought I would
be an excellent art teacher. At first, I dismissed the idea because I didn’t think it was
prestigious enough, but then the idea lingered in my mind for days, weeks, and months.
The more I thought about it, the more the idea appealed to me. I went for it. I quit my
job and returned back to school to attain a Masters in Art Education. I would become an
art teacher who inspires students to achieve their dreams no matter what they looked like.
I believe that every decision you make takes you down a path that another decision
would never have taken you to. It is usually unlikely that one knows what lies ahead on
that path once you have started down it. The adventure of the journey is the unknown.
Decisions made sometimes may seem right at first because of what you envision at the
end. However, as you begin the journey, new choices and decisions present themselves
to further complicate or make your initial decision become more rooted and committed.
I was 17 years old and enrolled as a fine arts major at Alfred University in the valley of
the Allegheny Mountains of New York. My parents just dropped me off with all of my
belongings, which wasn’t very much at my dormitory. While I witnessed other students
cry as their parents drove off, I felt excited and ready to start this new beginning. I was
a runner and joined the cross-country team. I liked how my medium-length brown pony
tail bounced from side to side as I ran around campus and the small town in which it was
located in. Life was exciting at the moment as I was pursuing my dreams of becoming
a painter or a potter someday. I equally liked both art mediums. My parents were also
both very supportive of my career path although they were a little hesitant at first. I was
confident in my abilities because I was given the sole art award from my high school
during my senior year. I liked all my classes although some really challenged my ideas
of art until that one day in my professor’s office.
It was a Wednesday morning at the end of the first semester. I had carried my large,
heavy black portfolio down from my dorm room to present my work to my professor. It
was filled with numerous drawings and paintings from the entire semester. I was eager
for a response of my work from my much admired professor. I proudly unzipped my
portfolio and turned to my first drawing. There was a silent pause. And then, he closed
folded the portfolio shut and looked at me. I will never forget the words he spoke to me
that morning. He said that he didn’t need to look at my work because he can not take me
seriously until I take myself seriously as an artist. He advised me to cut off my ponytail,
dye my hair, get a couple piercings and a few tattoos. I was stunned and mortified. The
meeting was over. I left ashamed, confused, and angry and I didn’t know what to do. I
just took it all in and sadly enough began to believe him.
I never cut off my ponytail or dyed my hair and never got a tattoo. That wasn’t who I
was and I didn’t want to become an imposter. I liked how I looked and I didn’t want
to change because someone told me to. But little did I know, that he did change me in
a different way in that moment whether I liked it or not. I finished my first year as a
fine arts major, but returned the next year as a Ceramic Engineering student. I guess
my appearance fit that mold better. The transition into Engineering wasn’t difficult
academically because I earned strong grades in math and science during high school.
However, emotionally the transition was very difficult as I dropped a pottery class for
Chemistry and painting for Calculus. My decision over the course of the summer forever
changed the direction of my life. I finished my degree in Engineering with honors and
began to work for a manufacturing facility for four years. Throughout my time as a
student and a professional in the engineering world, I felt empty. It didn’t fill me up
and I just didn’t care about it. It wasn’t terrible, but just not right for me. I searched
and searched my soul to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life because I
knew I couldn’t work as an engineer anymore. I thought maybe I would apply to Med-
School or maybe work towards an MBA but none of them felt right for me. I still loved
art, but was afraid of it now.
One morning, I met my sister for breakfast and she told me that she thought I would
be an excellent art teacher. At first, I dismissed the idea because I didn’t think it was
prestigious enough, but then the idea lingered in my mind for days, weeks, and months.
The more I thought about it, the more the idea appealed to me. I went for it. I quit my
job and returned back to school to attain a Masters in Art Education. I would become an
art teacher who inspires students to achieve their dreams no matter what they looked like.
Meg's 100 Word Biography
My life, in 100, Single Syllable Words
Born, west, Mom Dad Anne. Dog, then dogs.
Move north, new home, new dreams.
Friends, few, more, lots.
Dreams dreamt - sad dreams, happy dreams.
Dreams do come true.
Hurt, love, hurt, hurt, then E.
Last love, True love, Pure love, Good love!
Move East, the mid point, Big town, Bright lights.
New friends, new fun, new life. Same love.
New dreams, new job, new joy.
Shared dreams, warm dreams.
Dreams do come true.
Move South East.
New job, new dreams.
Scared. Still hope.
Loss, tears, dark. Strength, from true love.
Strength from dreams yet to come.
Dreams do come true.
Born, west, Mom Dad Anne. Dog, then dogs.
Move north, new home, new dreams.
Friends, few, more, lots.
Dreams dreamt - sad dreams, happy dreams.
Dreams do come true.
Hurt, love, hurt, hurt, then E.
Last love, True love, Pure love, Good love!
Move East, the mid point, Big town, Bright lights.
New friends, new fun, new life. Same love.
New dreams, new job, new joy.
Shared dreams, warm dreams.
Dreams do come true.
Move South East.
New job, new dreams.
Scared. Still hope.
Loss, tears, dark. Strength, from true love.
Strength from dreams yet to come.
Dreams do come true.
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