I came to teaching in my early 30s after a brief career in standup comedy and a slightly longer one in journalism. All three fields share a focus on storytelling: the relationship between presenter and audience is key. Eleven years ago I added another such gig to my resumé: dad. Yarn spinning has never been so much fun.
The shift from physical periodicals to online publishing was one of the reasons I got out of journalism. It was the early days of the web — people still hyphenated ‘e-mail’ and capitalized ‘the Internet’ — but even then, decent paydays for freelance writers were becoming fewer and farther between. Why pay someone colourful a decent salary for local content when you could skim banal articles from the wire for pennies on the dollar? Despite leaving the editing room behind, I’ve followed the creative souls who have made alternative choices in the modern communicative landscape. As a master’s area of focus, Writing & New Media is a compelling field to explore, from self-publishing to disinformation, from ebooks to ebots. I look forward to digging further.
When Writing & New Media caught my eye, I was roused by questions of how technological advances might affect communication. Theory abounds! How do handheld electronics affect form and genre? Can the current waves of disinformation be tempered, or will things only get worse? Are silos of hate speech and domestic terrorism inevitable when anyone can run a publishing company out of their pocket? Will the metaverse be a death knell for intelligent discourse? Or, taking things down to academically-minded minutiae, can a tweet be considered literature? Is listening to an audiobook reading? Are podcasts merely time wasted, or the Elizabethan pamphlets of our age?
However many topics the focus area inspired, I did not expect to be delving into Writing the Self and Bereavement: Dialogical Means and Markers of Moving Through Grief. Both intellectually stimulating and perfectly heartbreaking,Reinekke Lengelle’s continuation with autoethnography is a natural evolution of her work after the death of her husband and research partner (2020). In this case, she hopes to enter deeper understanding of grief through dialogue between separate facets of her identity. Like actors, comedians, and influencers playing multiple characters in conversation on TikTok or Instagram, Lengelle wears different hats to investigate divergent viewpoints on her journey through bereavement.
In a sense this is a self-contained version of the interdisciplinary enterprise. Instead of bringing together professionals from disparate fields to share challenging metaphors (Dalke et al, 2003), or enjoining life partners in work that adds one and one to make three (Lengelle & Meijers, 2019), dialogical self uses the variant personas that we all possess to express and challenge ideas more fully. In my case, I engaged in a conversation between I-as-biological-father (of a baby an ex and I placed for adoption 26 years ago) and I-as-day-to-day-dad (of an 11-year-old, with whom I have a traditional, nuclear family-style relationship).
The part of me that identifies with I-as-storyteller has long struggled with this particular event in my life. While I will not share the particulars of this thought experiment here, I can certainly see the therapeutic value therein. It is clear that there are many elements of being separated from my child — and later, her mother — that remain unresolved. However, the dialogue thus far has been both illuminating and encouraging. Perhaps with continued discussion, these two selves will part the sea to reveal exactly what swims under the surface. Moving forward, the main question is whether I’m gonna need a bigger boat.
References
Dalke, A., Grobstein, P., & McCormack, E. (2003). Theorizing interdisciplinarity: Metaphor and metonymy, synecdoche and surprise. Mss. in circulation.
Lengelle, R., & Meijers, F. (2019). Poetic reflexivity and the birth of career writing: An autoethnographic love story . In K. Maree & C. Wilby (Eds.), Innovating career counselling theory, research, and practice. (pp. 539–555). Springer.
Lengelle, R. (2020). Writing the self and bereavement: Dialogical means and markers of moving through grief . Life Writing, 17(1), 103–122.