​I wanted to develop a document, a text that came as close as possible to painting with words.
I wanted to create a narrative that bridged the realms of science and art,
merging the systematic and careful description of good ethnography
​with the evocative resonance of fine literature.
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot "Reflections on Portraiture" 2003 

My Methodology

The art of portraiture is evident in my dissertation project, which is autoethnographic in the broad and narrow sense. She Used To Be Mine is a full length book of narrative nonfiction about a young woman (my maternal grandmother) who sells her three-year-old daughter (my mother) then spends the rest of her days cultivating a life she hopes will draw her daughter back to the home she builds for her, figuratively and literally, brick by brick. Ward: A Memoir of Ghosts, Grandmothers, and Little Girls Who Disappear is autoethnographic in the broad sense of an exo-autoethnography, which shifts from the self as center toward a trans-generational context with an emphasis on trauma as embodied and transferable. Anna Denejkina situates exo-autoethnography at the intersection of evocative and analytic forms, an approach to research sensitized by the understanding that any analysis of self is relational and directed by others’ experiences and histories. Exo-autoethnography seeks to better understand a history that impacts the researcher by proxy, as a-part of the personal and community experience related to that history. Ward: A Memoir of Ghosts, Grandmothers, and Little Girls Who Disappear stands alone but is also an integral part of my dissertation, which is autoethnographic in the narrower sense, a more recognizable form but one that is grounded in Relational-Cultural theory and thereby explicitly feminist, evocatively psychoanalytic, and provocatively interdisciplinary where analytical and evocative forms emerge as entangled. 

Place-Based Research Photo Journals

The images to the right were taken on my research trip at the beginning of November, 2019. I returned to the area on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana.

The following were my agenda items:
  • Get a sense of culture: the place and its people.
  • Locate Hester's grave at Garden of Pines cemetery (Hester is my maternal grandmother).
  • ​Locate Hester's home in Covington, Louisiana. 
  • Confirm the story about Hester building the home which is detailed in "Brick by Brick," the first issue of Beyond The Page.
  • Locate the site of Hester's business (the Wagon Wheel restaurant) in nearby Goodbee, Louisiana. 
  • Visit the country clubs that Hester mentioned her husband Sy was employed when interviewed for a news article published in The St. Tammany Farmer. 
  • Experience the Great River Road following the Mississippi River to Natchez Trace, a scenic route Hester frequented.