Aftershocks

Abstract

A disorganized narrative in both form and content, this article presents the storying and restorying of distant witness experience in the wake of recent natural disaster. A layered, fractured text; the writing blurs the lines between sense and nonsense making, self and other. Presenting the notion of verbal rumination as a theoretical method: This repetitive, ruminative narrative plays with the warm fuzzy and sometimes cold and prickly consequences of interpersonal storying. The resultant piece reflects a psychography of sorts, and seeks to make sense of the nonsensical, to organize the disorganized, to reconcile the irreconcilable. As with all natural disasters, it is a work in progress. My own little earthquake.

An Introduction to Responding Autoethnography

“…3 As Ellis said, we do not tell our stories using “a traditional authorial voice” (Ellis et al, 2018, p. 131), but “analysis” appears in the juxtaposition of many voices, their resounding together. Thus, a break with the curse of a linear story (Henson, 2011, 2017) is the answer to the problem of representation; poetic, dirty autoethnography creates a story that is being constantly written while reading. Third, when a mirror is broken, it is no longer about describing, but about changing and breaking hegemonic mirrors (Denzin, 2018): The poetic hammer has the magical power of claiming social justice.…”

Fragments and Fictions

“…In recent years, I've been interested in the ways we repeat ourselves in communication. I've played with the idea of verbal rumination as a form of narrative (despite my best of intentions I keep calling it the ruminarrative-so there, make of it what you will) (Henson, 2011(Henson, , 2013. And from this vantage point, I think of ruminarrative as a compulsion to communicative action: a repetitive dialogue that drives us, and reflects an ongoing attempt to "story [and restory] some sense into our lives" (Poulos, 2009, p. 27).…”

An Unauthorized Autoethnography of the Academic Life of Dr X

“…A central theme of my autoethnographic work centers on our preoccupation with coherence as a defining narrative structure (Henson, 2011(Henson, , 2013. Coherence, as McAdams (2006) reminds us, that encompasses both form and content-expectations around plot and character that are both normative and socially constructed.…”