“To speak is to preserve the teller from oblivion.”
Alessandro Portelli
In the last five weeks Part I, II, III, IV, V of this article were presented. Now here is the last part, Part VI:
Behind-the-Scenes With Carolyn Ellis
More than a decade after writing and publishing an autoethnographic story with my partner Art Bochner about an abortion that occurred early in our relationship, I received this e-mail from a professor, who had assigned our story in an undergraduate class. “I gave the students the opportunity to write about it. Would you like to see what they wrote?” he e-mailed. I said yes, though I felt some anxiety when the responses arrived the next day.
The assistant professor begins this e-mail with:
The students were asked to write about how they felt while reading the text. This was optional, but many students indicated that the text was extremely evocative and I wanted to provide a space where they could express how they truly felt. So several decided to send me an e-mail while others chatted with me outside of class.
Scrolling down, I note the comments continue for six pages. I take a deep breath and read. Addressing her letter to Art and me, the first respondent describes the narrative as being very touching. She likes the openness of emotion and reflection. Acknowledging crying several times while reading the story, she thanks me for expressing the turmoil, reality, and emotional confusion associated with pregnancy and abortion. She continues:
Short of actually having experienced what you did, I don’t think I could understand or feel the reality of abortion more clearly. While I was uncomfortable in some parts, I think that the way in which the forbidden topic was portrayed was informative and beneficial. It was necessary to make the readers feel awkward in order to convey the emotions you felt.
She asks several questions:
What made you pick this intimate experience to share openly with so many people? Outside of the academic discipline, what was your purpose in writing on the topic of abortion? Very few people care to acknowledge their experience, let alone write about it. I was also wondering how the abortion impacted your relationship with the father? Our professor informed us that you are still together, but did it strengthen your love for each other or create some obstacles to overcome? What are your present views on abortion? Do you view the circumstances the same way after these years?
I feel relieved and pleased. The student shows an understanding of what we were trying to do in the story and an empathy for the difficulty of our choices. As I contemplate answering her questions, my eyes fall on the word father and my stomach involuntarily contracts. I move to her questions. A part of me wants to avoid revealing anything about my current relationship; another thinks she deserves a thoughtful and deep response. I type in her e-mail address, thank her for her astute and empathetic response, then say:
We wrote this primarily to work through our own relationship and the pain brought on by having the abortion. I’m happy to say that we have a wonderful relationship, now 10 years later, and that writing about the experience brought us closer together.
We would make very different decisions now if we had the opportunity. I try not to allow myself to second guess the decision we made in 1990. It felt like the best decision then. I feel very different about abortion for myself now, and would have serious difficulties ever having another one, though I still think women should have the freedom of choice—and I think we should try to educate everyone to be responsible regarding pregnancy. My husband and I would have liked to have had a child, but we did not have another opportunity. Nevertheless we are very happy with our family of four dogs.
I then scroll down to the second response. This student thinks the article is an insightful portrayal of emotions and especially appreciates hearing from the male in the experience, but she feels that as a reader she can only partially enter the story because each person’s story is so different. She objects to my referring to the pregnancy as a problem and interprets that to mean that I was not ready to be a parent.
I continue reading. The responses get more negative and I wonder if the professor of the class has organized them that way to soften the blow. If so, it doesn’t seem to be working. Without signing a name, the third student states that he or she is pro-life and found the article very difficult to read. This student appreciates hearing the father’s view and empathizes with the woman’s pain, but finds it disturbing to read what the baby went through given that he or she loves children so much.
The fourth student identifies himself by name and says he could feel every emotion and kind of physical pain as he read. He wonders, What if it was my parents who had to make a decision like that? What if I was a burden on them? He asks how Alice and Ted [the names we gave ourselves in the story] could possibly look themselves in the mirror for their actions. They, along with the doctor, played God, he says. At the same time, he professes to understand how tough the decision was and how heart wrenching and emotionally consuming this was.
I hesitate. It’s hard reading these things about Art and me, things that people ordinarily won’t say to you directly. This is certainly not the way I see myself. I take a deep breath and continue. The last one is the most critical. Though the student does not say, I think the response is from a male. A devout, antiabortion Catholic, he is appalled at the disregard for human life and the inability for anyone to look at this situation from the unborn child’s perspective. This decision, he continues, was made out of convenience. They both seem too wrapped up in their own careers to face up to the circumstances that they created for themselves. The arguments continue for several paragraphs and end
with, “Taking this life is murder.”
I am trembling by the time I finish. I want to dismiss these responses but, similar to the actual abortion experience, I push myself to face them. I know people react in these ways, but it doesn’t dull the pain of seeing the condemnation in print, a pain that is part of the cost of doing autoethnography deeply and honestly.
A few days later, I get an additional response from another student in the class. I am relieved when he tells a story—rather than condemns—about an experience in which the writer, at age 16, thought his girlfriend was pregnant. Since he tried to talk her into an abortion, he empathizes in particular with Alice. I do not take comfort in his empathy.
I write back to the teacher and thank him for sending the responses. I admit the responses were painful, but add that I welcomed pain as part of the lived experience, a truthful response but one no doubt engendered as well by my concern that he not feel badly for having sent the e-mails. I wonder how he, a religious grandson of a minister, responds to the story; how his religious beliefs affect how the story is given to and received by the students. Does being gay make him more open to this kind of complexity, or not? He doesn’t say; I don’t ask. I do ask him to thank his students for responding and to tell them I learned from what they said. As I click “send,” I wonder what it is that I did learn. I already knew that people usually had one of three responses to the piece—right to life, right to choose, or a complex emotional response that incorporated the lived experience of both positions.
I write Art an e-mail message asking if he wants to see the students’ responses. I found them painful to read, I warn. Though I don’t say so, I fear they will be even more painful for him. He writes back that he’d like to see them. Other than acknowledging that they were difficult to read, we don’t discuss them, bringing back briefly memories of the silence we endured immediately after the abortion, which was one of the reasons for writing this story in the first place.
When Art reads the paragraph I have written above, he writes in the margin: My sense was there was nothing more to say about them. I felt a closure at the time and know that my memory and feelings are significantly influenced by my immense love for you, what we have become together, and the occasional absence I feel from not having children. If there was silence, it was not the same kind of numbing silence I experienced after the abortion, at least not for me.
Nor for me, I think, in retrospect.
Not long after I received these student responses, I get an e-mail from Christine Kiesinger, a former student, who also had used the abortion story in a segment on relationship studies in her undergraduate Introduction to Communication class. Would you like to see what they said? she asks, and I respond that I would. She writes that their reading of the abortion story had occurred in the context of reading other autoethnographies, including a piece I had written on taking care of my mother, called Maternal Connections. The students had looked at the way Art and I had negotiated through our relationship dilemma, focusing on how the issue of choice is experienced as a constraint for both partners and on the relative newness (ten weeks) of the relationship and how it impacted the decision. Additionally they discussed the often contradictory feelings both characters experience—knowing you are going to terminate, yet rubbing your belly, knowing something living exists inside—the pull between fantasizing about a child, having and raising a child, and simultaneous need/decision to terminate. The students, she said, were not convinced that Ted wanted to end the pregnancy, and empathized with him, yet admired his stance to support Alice, regardless.
When I wrote Maternal Connections five years after the abortion narrative, I talked about desiring a child. Christine’s students felt that, in retrospect, I regretted the decision to abort. This, she said, made for very interesting classroom time. According to Christine’s interpretation, only one student struggled with the decision to terminate and that was Sara, self-defined as a feminist, whose philosophy included a pro-choice stance. This was the first time she felt torn, Christine said, as she thought about you as a character in Maternal Connections who later desired a child. . . . It bothered her to think that you might have some lingering regret or pain about the choice to terminate.
Throughout the semester, Christine writes me later, our names often would come up as the students struggled with some tough issues about intimacy: What do you think Art and Carolyn would do in this circumstance? they began to ask. It was as though, Christine reports, they really identified with Ted and Alice as a couple engaging in a very conscious, very communicatively strong relationship—a couple who might have insights and ideas that would assist others in moving through their own relationships. While I hardly wanted to be a role model, her message reminded me of the usefulness of this piece as a pedagogical device and as a point of comparison for discussing how to live.
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Note: See The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. (C. Ellis, 2004, Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press), from which this piece is partially excerpted, for a fuller discussion of this topic. For the original story, see Ellis, C. and Bochner, A. P.(1992). Telling and performing personal stories: The constraints of choice in abortion. In Investigating subjectivity:Research on lived experience, C. Ellis and M. Flaherty (Eds.) (pp. 79–101). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Also mentioned in the text is: Ellis, C. (1996). Maternal connections. In Composing ethnography: Alternative forms of qualitative writing, C. Ellis and A. Bochner (Eds.) (pp. 240–243). Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
• CONCLUSION
As you have seen, oral history is an intense, rewarding, and variable research method. It is particularly useful for gathering rich data from the perspective of those who have traditionally been marginalized within the culture and excluded from their own representation. In this way, oral history allows narrators to use their voice and reclaim authority in an empowering context where their valuable life experiences are recognized as an important knowledge source. Oral history is also an excellent tool for situating life experience within a cultural context. In other words, personal stories can be interlinked with collective memory, political culture, social power, and so forth, showing the interplay between the individual and the society in which she or he lives.
Oral history is a collaborative process that must be conceptualized holistically. Special attention must be paid to the relationship between the researcher and narrator, and clear guidelines should be employed through a rapport-building dialogue that is revisited throughout the project. And as we have outlined, a researcher needs to consider the oral history matrix: interplay between the method or tool, ethical considerations, and politics.
• GLOSSARY
Autoethnography: Research, writing, story, and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political. Autoethnographic forms feature concrete action, emotion, embodiment, self-consciousness, and introspection portrayed in dialogue, scenes, characterization, and plot. Autoethnographies may combine fiction with nonfiction.
Narrative Structures: There are three major narrative styles encountered in the oral history interview process: (1) unified, (2) segmented, and, (3) conversational. To this we would add a fourth category Kohler-Reissman calls episodic storytelling. As with all narrative forms, the way your respondent tells her or his story may largely be influenced by factors such as race, class, and gender. Related to these characteristics are education, work, and geographic location.
Oral History: A method of open-ended interview, usually occurring in multiple sessions, where a researcher aims at interviewing a person about their life or a significant aspect of it. This is a highly collaborative interview method resulting in a co-created narrative.
• DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Discuss some of the differences between oral history and in-depth interviews.
2. In what ways does oral history benefit the researcher and participant?
3. What is the significance/importance of building rapport with your research participant? How does the establishment of a good relationship between the researcher and research participant contribute to a successful oral history?
4. What is “shared authority” and how is it distinct in oral history? We note a few instances in which a shared authority would not be beneficial to the research process. Can you think of any other instances? What are some of the problems that can arise?
5. What are some things a researcher should keep in consideration when deciding whether to use a collaborative strategy? What are some of the ethical considerations a researcher must keep in mind when determining the degree to which an oral history project will be collaborative? What kind of guidelines can help collaborative research work effectively?
6. How does oral history help us to bring about social change and aid in social activist efforts?
7. What is autoethnography? Why use this method? How can this data be represented creatively? How can external assistance be beneficial to both the researcher and research project in an autoethnography?
8. Do you believe the collaborative process that shapes data collection should continue on during the analysis and representations phases of the research project?
9. In what ways can society impact the ways in which a person tells his or her story, and why is it critical for the researcher to cue into this?
10. Oral history can be an empowering experience for both the researcher and research subject. In what ways can this be true?
11. If, for example, you were interested in how teenage females internalize images of female beauty in American society, how would the use of oral history be beneficial as opposed to an in-depth interview method?
• SUGGESTED WEBSITES
The General Commission on Archives and History
http://www.gcah.org/oral.html
This website is a clear cut, easy to understand guide to oral history interviewing. It gives the steps of interviewing as well as useful tips and a reference list of books and articles.
How to Collect Oral Histories
http://www.usu.edu/oralhist/oh_howto.html
This website explains what recording oral histories entails. It also has a link to other useful websites dealing with collecting oral histories.
Oral History Interviewing
http://www.cps.unt.edu/natla/web/oral_history_interviewing.htm
This website gives a step-by-step easy guide to understanding and conducting oral histories. It also has a link to a sample release form and sample interview questions.
Center for the Study of History and Memory
http://www.indiana.edu/~cshm/oral_history.html
This site has links to techniques for oral history interviewing, resources, newsletters, and forms. The most useful link at this site is the techniques link, which provides a lengthy description of techniques for oral history.
Center for Oral History
http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/williams/index.html
This website offers a list of publications including some online publications. It also has links to projects, forms, other sites, and their newsletter. The mission of the Williams Center is to collect and preserve, through the use of tape-recorded interviews, unique and valuable information about Louisiana history that exists only in people’s memories and would otherwise be lost.
American Sociological Association
http://www.asanet.org/public/IRBs_history.html
This link contains information about oral history interviews and protection provisions.
• REFERENCES
Anderson, K., & Jack, D. (1991). Learning to listen: Interview techniques and analysis. In S. Gluck, & D. Patai (Eds.), Women’s words: The feminist practice of oral history (pp. 11–26). New York: Routledge.
Botting, I. (2000). Understanding domestic service through oral history and the census: The case of Grand Falls, Newfoundland. Feminist Qualitative Research, 28(1, 2).[AUTHOR: do you have a page number for Botting?] [pages 99-120]
Candida Smith, R. (2001). Analytic strategies for oral history interviews. In J. Gubrium & J. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook of interviews research: Context & method (pp. 711–733). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Crothers, A. G. (March, 2002). Bringing history to life: Oral history, community research, and multiple levels of learning. The Journal of American History, 88 (4). Retrieved May 27, 2003 from, http://www.historycooperative.org
Dumont, J. (1978). The headman and I: Ambiguity and ambivalence in the fieldworking experience. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: The methodological novel about autoethnography. New York: AltaMira Press.
Etter-Lewis, G. (1991). Black women’s life stories: Reclaiming self in narrative texts. In S. Gluck, & D. Patai (Eds.), Women’s words: The feminist practice of oral history. New York: Routledge.
Frisch, M. (2003). Commentary: Sharing authority: Oral history and the collaborative process. The Oral History Review, 30(1), 111–113.
Frisch, M. (1989). A shared authority: Essays on the craft and meaning of oral and public history. New York: State University of New York.
Kerr, D. (2003). We know what the problem Is: Using oral history to develop a collaborative analysis of homelessness from the bottom up. The Oral History Review, 30(1), 27–45.
Kohler-Riessman, C. (1987). When gender is not enough: Women interviewing women. Gender and Society, 1, 172–207.
Leavy, Patricia. (1998). Claire oral history session two transcript.
Maines, D. (2001). Writing the self versus writing the other: Comparing autobiographical and life history data. Symbolic Interaction, 24(1), 105–111.
Marshall Clark, M. (2002). The September 11, 2001, oral history narrative and memory project: A first report. The Journal of American History, 89(2), 1–9.
Minister, K. (1991). A feminist frame for the oral history interview. In S. Gluck & D. Patai (Eds.), Women’s words: The feminist practice of oralhistory. New York: Routledge.
Portelli, A. (1991). The death of Luigi Trastulli and other stories: Form and meaning in oral history. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Rickard, W. (2003). Collaborating with sex workers in oral history. The Oral History Review, 30(1), 47–59.
Shopes, L. (2003). Sharing authority. The Oral History Review, 30(1), 103–110.
Shopes, L. (1994). When women interview women—and then publish it: Reflections on oral history, women’s history, and public history. Journal of Women’s History, 6(1), 98–108.
Sitzia, L. (2003). A shared authority: An impossible goal? The Oral History Review, 30(1), 87–101.
Slater, R. (2000). Using life histories to explore change: Women’s urban struggles in Cape Town, South Africa. Gender and Development, 8(2), 38–46.
Sparkes, A. (1994). Self, silence, and invisibility as a beginning teacher: A life history of lesbian experience. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 15(1), 93–119.
Tenni, C., Smyth, A., & Boucher, C. (2003). The researcher as autobiographer: Analyzing data written about oneself. The Qualitative Report, 8(1): 1–12.
Thomson, A. (2003). Introduction: Sharing authority: Oral history and the collaborative process. The Oral History Review, 30(1): 23–26.
Thomson, A. (1998). Fifty years on: An international perspective on oral history. The Journal of American History, 85(2), 581–595. [AUTHOR: no volume number?]
Williams, R. (2001). “I’m a keeper of information”: History-telling and voice. Oral History Review, 28(1), 41–63.
Wilmsen, C. (2001). For the record: Editing and the production of meaning in oral history. Oral History Review, 28(1), 65–85.
Wilson, A. (1996). Grandmother to granddaughter: Generations of oral history in a Dakota family. American Indian Quarterly, 20(1), 7–14.
End of part VI.
Source:
The Practice of Qualitative Research by Sharlene J. Nagy Hesse-Biber and Patricia L. (Lina) Leavy (Aug 9, 2005), Part II: Methods of Data Collection, Chapter 5: ORAL HISTORY: A Collaborative Method of (Auto)Biography Interview
