Reading writing about writing

Read an interesting journal article today about the process and experience of writing. Maybe it's my love of blogging, but I really enjoy the emerging auto-ethnographic approach to social research. There seems something honest to me about hearing the voice of the researcher, and I think when it comes to the human condition, self reflection is an interesting 'data source' - as much as grand scale surveys and quant studies. As a form of identifying one of all the possible experiences, and exploring that in some depth. Enough chatter - here is a beautiful passage from that paper:

"Today, in the garden, I killed a snail. As soon as I did it, I vowed in my life never intentionally to kill another creature. But I have just woken up in the middle of the night, thinking about the snail. I only broke its shell, but breaking that shell ended its life.

What is the significance of that snail and its shell? For the snail, its shell was not simply its protection from being killed, or simply its home: It was the snail: Breaking the shell equaled killing the snail. What has that got to do with writing? In my sleepy reverie, I have connected writing with the shell. This is not meant to be a simple figure of speech, which allows me to think that cracking the shell of (my) writing will somehow crack some hidden code and lead me to a profound understanding of self. But there are some parallels. Writing is not simply a shell or a code which protects us or allows us to be identified in certain superficial ways; our writing is us, or to paraphrase Richardson (1997), writing becomes us, we inquire after ourselves through our writing. So finding out about our writing is also finding out about ourselves.

Every snail shell is idiosyncratically unique, allowing us to identify every snail. The snail’s shell is becoming, it grows with, the snail; there is no separation.
So my writing is not there simply to identify me, nor to protect me, nor to give me my home—it is me, its fluid, energetic, emerging shades, it is me becoming. It is identifying me, it is protecting me, it is my home but can only be characterized in these ways through the constant fluid movement of becoming. So between the two, me and my writing, exists a multiplicity of connections, a state of fluidity, an ever-changing nexus of identifications, infinitesimally small but hugely significant moments that give something to my sense, my feeling of knowing, of self."

Source: Ken Gale and Jonathan Wyatt (2006) Inquiring Into Writing: An Interactive Interview Qualitative Inquiry 2006; 12; 1117
Downloaded from http://qix.sagepub.com by on July 15, 2008

Reference cited above:
Richardson, L. (1997). Fields of play (constructing an academic life). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.