CONVERSATIONS WITH MY FATHER

METHODOLOGY

 

1. Overview

 

When my father died on 9/11 my story became a part of history.  Though I didn’t realize it right away, I would soon come to understand that my experiences would be sought after and used to capture a unique perspective of that historic moment.  From newspaper and magazine articles to radio and Storycorps interviews, I quickly discovered that people wanted to hear my story. They wanted to know what it was like to lose a loved on September 11th.  For the purposes of this project, I have become my own research subject, exploring some of the same (and some additional) questions that others have asked of me.  Long before I imagined writing a thesis, I had unknowingly begun collecting the pieces that would become the subject of my research and creative work.   This section describes the theoretical framework that informed my process.

 

1. Autoethnography

 

Autoethnography has been described as “a genre of writing that involves personalized accounts in which authors draw on their own lived experiences, connects the personal to the culture and places the self and others within a social context” (Maguire 2006). Although not new, in recent history, this type of qualitative research has received increasing attention and scholarly merit within the social sciences and and humanities arenas (Bochner & Ellis 2016). My quest for exploring the impact that 9/11 has had on my life and how sharing my experience with others might influence future understanding, has led me to the creation of “Conversations With My Father.”  By reflecting upon both my creative and research processes, the qualitative research method of autoethnography is employed. Throughout my research and creative process, I kept both hand-written notes and a blog of my progress. This has allowed me to reflect upon my journey (see Reflective Analysis section) in order to better understand the impact that the creation of “Conversation With My Father” has had on me as well as the implications it may have on the way the world remembers 9/11.

 

1. The Creative Form

 

My creative project may be categorized as autofiction, blending elements of both biography and fiction. Jensen notes how writers of this particular genre of life writing must respond to the “demands (for) repeated self-revelation and intimacy with the truth of one’s own life history in a way that (traditional) memoir may not” (2011 ). She continues with “.... writers of autobiographically based fiction….process the truth of their pasts in order to reanimate and rewrite that past via a variety of imagined potentialities” (Jensen 2011). By choosing to use this unique form of write as opposed to a traditional memoir or novel, I have had the opportunity to question my decisions related to the recreation of my father in a way that would otherwise not have been explored. By taking on his voice and delving into the future, I was able to step back and consider the choices I made and how they relate to my memory and both past and future experiences. The insertion of 9/11 artifacts provided me with a sometimes sobering reminder of the reality of my experiences. As mentioned in the literature review section, using a genre blending format is not uncommon in 9/11 literature and my choice to do so has been informed by this knowledge.