Liz's Reading Responses

(1) Mark Freeman: Autobiographical Understanding and Narrative Inquiry

Freeman’s chapter investigates the possibilities of narrative inquiry as a “way toward a more integrated, adequate, and humane vision for studying the human realm”. Current understanding of autobiography and narrative is relative to today’s society and culture, thus Freeman gives consideration to the development of autobiography and personal narrative.

The mythic tradition of universal stories about timeless characters and roles reflected a communal society where the individual understands their life as part of a community rather than an isolated existence. Freeman shows how this way of thinking shifted over time as seen in St. Augustine’s Confessions, an example of “autobiographical reflection”. Yet, the role of God as a … in a person’s life, as … St. Augustine, would change again and autobiography expanded with the belief that an individual was the “director” of their own lives, thus a more isolated understanding of humans compared to the community of antiquity, allowed for the possibility to account individual experience and interpretation of the personal past.

This history was interesting as it reveals the evolution of autobiographical thinking. It seems that as a larger society we are continuing on a trajectory moving from communal understanding toward greater isolation. I think about the online communities being formed and wonder how they exist in this framework. While it is a site of communal life and activity, the individuals, as they exist in the world, are often in total isolation as they engage with this removed community.

Freeman also demonstrates how autobiography and narratives invite questions about truth and reality. He asserts that creativity and skill in writing should be valued but not above “truth.” Yet, this is problematized as lived experience is inevitably altered when expressed in words. While objectivity and total ‘accuracy’ is impossible, creativity should be employed in an honest and responsible manner.

This portion of Freeman’s chapter has resonated with me. I thought about it during the class and continue to reflect on narrative, truth, creativity, and invention now that the course has ended. If five different people were asked to write a narrative of a shared experience, their accounts would most likely differ, perhaps significantly. Yet while none would necessarily be fiction, neither would any completely represent the reality of the lived experience. Some might remember things differently or have inaccurate recollections. Does this make their writing fictive or a lie? I believe not. I agree that it when writing personal narratives one must be as honest as possible while writing in the most interesting and creative way possible. However, I find qualities like exaggeration and embellishment sticky points. In writing I feel these techniques have a similar function to when one draws out the light and shadow in a painting. Ultimately, I think it is essential to employ these with responsibility and integrity.



(2) Ed Check: My Working-Class Roots in an Academic War Zone: Creating Space to Grieve…

Check’s article demonstrates how autobiography can give insight into one’s position, choices, reactions, motivations, art work, and pedagogy. He uses personal narrative as a method of research but discusses how this methodology is often met with criticism and skepticisms. Nevertheless, his narrative accounts of his experiences with class, gender, sexuality, and religion reveal a multitude of struggles. Through autobiographical writing he is thus able to not only articulate these struggles but how he responded to them and how they have and continue to inform his present life.

Check’s writing models how personal narrative can be used to grapple with past pain and conflict as well as construct an understanding of identity, motivation, action, and reaction. By reflecting on the failings and gaps in his own education and the negative effect it had, readers see how and why Check utilizes particular pedagogical practices and his positions on certain issues. He also succeeds in giving voice to a working-class, religious, homosexual experience and thus contributes to a community obscured by the a “main stream” middle-class heterosexual experience.

I often question the use of personal narrative when teaching and wonder how much (if any) it can or should be shared with students. Check demonstrates the way narrative can be used in a productive manner in the classroom. It might provide a different position, challenge the views held by the students, provide comfort for those feeling isolated, or model the benefits and possibilities of introspective behavior. I use my personal and family history for understanding my self and the world thus it feels natural for me to bring this into the classroom. Check’s writing has motivated me to not only continue to use personal experience (now with confidence) as I teach but perhaps incorporate more assignments that call for student personal reflection and narrative.



(3) Rosemarie Garland-Thompson: Shape structures Story

Garland-Thompson considers how shape (her term for the visible body) creates a particular story. She notes that our culture has a narrow conception of the body and difference or deviations are considered a disability. This term in turn has been used to tell a very specific and limiting story. Garland-Thompson thus describes four stories which “recast traditional disability plots” specifically in terms of positive narratives rather than negative with the often absent themes of sexuality and community.

The documentary Murderball reveals a community of male athletes experiencing success and growth because “rather than in spite of a disability.” Their sexuality and masculinity is not diminished but rather shown to flourish through the film. Garland-Thompson uses Cheryl Marie Wade’s poem, I AM NOT ONE OF THE as an example an artist weaving together stereotypic images and stories associated with disability with ones of power and strength creating a new narrative. My Body Politic, a memoir by S. Linton is praised for the way disability is shown to give the individual a new sense of self and community. Finally, Garland-Thompson shares her own experience at the annual Society for Disability Studies dance and reveals an energetic, wild, sexy group of scholars- not only challenging ideas regarding the “limiting” nature of a disability but also the reserved temperament of a scholar.

Like Clark and Eisenhaur’s articles, Garland-Thompson demonstrates how narrative can be used to build community, dispel normative myths regarding the body, and be empowering for the writer as well as readers.

I found the last portion of this essay the most engaging. It certainly was a personal narrative and Garland-Thompson was used it to reveal the same themes and challenge the traditional to the disability story as in her pervious examples. It was more interesting to read than her summaries and I felt she really succeed in showing as opposed to telling, making the story more personal as well as entertaining. I wished the rest of the article had been written in the same manner, however, as it stands it is an interesting combination of writing styles.



(4) William Tierney: Get real: Representing Reality

Tierney addresses the “crisis in representation”, an issue frequently discussed among qualitative researchers. He traces the usage of the phrase and shows that it ultimately calls for researchers to reconsider the way data and research is written and presented. Although the definitions of the crisis, as well as its solutions, differ among researchers and scholars, the general remedy has been to adopt narrative forms of writing and place an emphasis on the author/ researcher as a way of being reflexive and clarifying one’s position. Yet Tierney feels this is too simplistic and placing the researcher at the center of the writing is not necessarily the best solution.

Tierney criticizes the ‘one-size’ fits all approach and recommends researchers not only educate themselves and learn new forms of writing (rather than just assuming they are qualified or skillful enough to write a narrative or play) but to let what is going to be written, who it is written about, and who will be reading it, inform stylistic decisions.

Tierney lists the ways researchers have attempted to address this crisis: memoir, narrative, plays, autobiographical narrative. Yet he is critical of the assumption that a researcher, trained as a qualitative writer, can adopt new genres and styles of writing and successfully employ them without training or skill. He asserts that among those contributing to this problem are universities who continue to train graduate students in traditional ways of writing research and require assistant professors to publish in traditional refereed journals in order to secure tenure. Neither practice invites or encourages the exploration of new forms or writing let alone training. He also faults publication committees who only use traditional qualitative researchers to judge the quality of work and determine if it is publishable rather than those trained or skilled in creative writing or varying genres.

I wish Tierney had employed some of his own suggestions in this piece; or if he accompanied this chapter with the same information in another format. His suggestions and recommendations resonated with me. I love to read novels and creative writing and so many of the articles I have encountered in graduate school have been dry and often boring. The pedagogical suggestions at the close of the chapter are ideas I would like to employ in my classroom.



(5) Rachel Remen: Kitchen Table Wisdom

When I first began to read this article/ preface I could not understand why it was included in our reading list. It is preface to Kitchen Table Wisdom and describes the birth of the book. After being encouraged by a friend to submit a short story to a publisher, Remen found herself in a meeting with an editor. Unable to make an outline, come up with a theme, or identify a method of working, the editor sent her away with the task of writing four hundred pages about whatever mattered to her. She had an equally unsuccessful meeting with a writing coach who left her with the advice to remember that Remen was not a writer and to just write what she knew.

In the end Remen’s four hundred pages were a series of short stories. She was insecure about these little stories and felt there was much still to be done, especially since it lacked citations and references. However, her editor assured her it was complete in its current form and the book was met with praise and acceptance by a larger public.

I found Remen’s story motivating and feel it is an example, model, and rationale for narrative inquiry. The discussion of a writer versus author harkens back to Tierney’s article where he calls for researchers not to assume they can pick up and employ any genre of writing. Remen wrote in a narrative manner because she had a collection of stories to tell and that was what she knew, she did not try to put herself into a tradition that she did not belong in.

The writing itself, as a preface, is engaging and enlightening. It is both the story of a book as well as a story of Remen’s discovery of herself as an author (I contest her opinion that she is not a writer). It challenges ideas of who can be an author and how one must go about writing. Most importantly, it reveals the significance and importance of writing what we know, and that this can be a source of credibility. Her tale reveals the importance of telling stories and the importance of practicing truthfulness and honesty in our writing. Remen’s account demonstrates that narrative can indeed be a vehicle for understanding the world and ourselves, building community, and dealing with hardship. And although one must be responsible and reflexive about entering into the position of an author, it can be done successfully by those untrained.



(6) Jenny Newman: Short Story Writing

Jenny Newman’s essay, “Short Story Writing” provides practical advice written in a reader/ writer friendly manner. She addresses some basic elements of writing such as how to begin writing, the characters, point of view, dialogue, plot and ending your story. The chapter is broken into these six sections, each beginning with a description followed by tips and advice for the success, common mishaps and errors, and sprinkled with examples from successful authors. Her chapter also includes writing exercises to help writers develop their skills.

I found this chapter, as well as the other essays taken from The Writers Workbook, incredibly useful. I referred to it frequently during class and have continued to do so as I wrote my short stories. The following are points that I found particularly helpful and have made small comments about the ways I tried to employ them.

“Select those images and details which will resonate in the mind of her reader or listener, and make him feel he knows all he needs to know about characters and setting. The short story writer depends on what Raymond Carver (1986) calls ‘a unique and exact way of looking at things, and [on] finding the right context for expressing that way of looking.’” (53)

“Enter the first scene as late as you can without being baffling, and plant a ‘hook’ or attention grabber…Help your reader picture the setting…but do not load her with information, or insert long flashbacks which distract her from the narrative present.” (54) [I love this and definitely tried to start in the middle of a scene. However, I really struggled with extraneous and distracting insertions as I tend to take lots of tangents and incorporate flash backs in my writing]

“Keep an eye open for those who live at odds with the so-called mainstream” (54) [not really applicable to my current writing but something for the future!]

“Introduce your story people economically and memorably. It is more entertaining to reveal a character through the way he or she drives, smokes, or reads the paper than by resorting to tired descriptions of eye color.” (55) [Really hard to do!]

“Learn to be precise.” (55) [see previous comment!]

“Be sparing with adverbs. If you must mention volume, it is better to use a verb like bellow…dispense with speech tags where is it possible without sacrificing clarity.” (59) [I definitely tried this when writing dialogue, both in A Loose Tooth and Misunderstandings part 1)]

“Raymond Carver also identifies tension as a key element, but for him it comes from, ‘ a sense that something is imminent, that certain things are in relentless motion.’” (60)

“For Aristotle successful plots have a beginning, which introduces conflict, a middle section which develops it, and an ending which resolves it.” (61)

“It is better to focus on small disagreements, and let them be keenly felt, than to snatch at a huge issue and fail to develop it.” (61) [Both of these quotes from page 61 were very hard for me when writing Misunderstandings. I had a lot of small things I wanted to say and felt that focusing on just one would stretch it into flimsyness, thus I decided to tell a series of shorts. However, I still waver over if they are over or underdeveloped.]

“…you need not end with a spelt out statement, as long as you signal ‘a tangible change of some sort; a distinct shift in consciousness, a deepening of insight.’…either way, make sure a change or realization takes place, because without it there can be no story.” (62) [I constantly strive for this- I know I read a quotations in one of the readings, perhaps it was How to Write a Novel, that quoted an author as saying ‘figure out what you want to say then do your best not to say it’ (I paraphrase). This has been a sort of mantra over the past few weeks.]