TC!

i finished a draft of the intro for my thesis last weekend and, as we’ve talked about, i wanted to use a section of that for the essay to go along with my poems for the Volta. i can’t make it work. this whole paper is about liminality, people whose primary life’s work includes purposefully creating home there in the middle ground, and how re/integration happens for folks who are born into such spaces and/or otherwise occupy them with their lives. specifically, it’s about some of the ways American Indian authors experience liminality, how biculturalism and other types of liminality require them to confront questions about their authenticity and artistic authority, how they work around and within the constraints of what Andrew Wiget calls the “Anglo-authored discourse on Indianness,” and a few examples of how some authors have done this.

i told you that i was worried that it would turn out to be too “school-papery” to accompany my poems in the Volta and it is. what i wanted to do was to turn the focus on my experiences of liminality, my occupation of middle spaces on multiple fronts, and how that affects my writing/creative expression. i hoped to draw comparisons between the ways i seek re/integration through my writing and the ways the authors i discussed do it. i hoped to talk about how i confront (and either thoroughly shy away from or attempt to navigate) issues of authenticity and authority, since, as it turns out, i’m not really an “authentic” anything, by most standards, except a pretty good human and even that may be up for debate. all this is to say that i’m having a hard time making the leap, connecting all this stuff i’ve researched and written about so far with my experiences straddling the gender binary and dwelling in other socially constructed middle spaces.

sigh. i’m sorry. this is probably frustrating for you...

but love me all the same!

i love you.

ian