ABSTRACT Cultural institutions are continually responding and adapting to the pandemic and climate change, from operational challenges in times of lockdown and natural disasters, to rapid response collecting practices that document these ‘unprecedented times’. As part of their response, some of these institutions—known as LAM (Libraries and Museums)— have harnessed participatory media such as Facebook and purpose-built digital sites that simultaneously collect, curate and often exhibit life narratives in public archives of crises. This practice can be described reductively as crowdsourcing; however, I conceptualise curators’ rapid response collecting efforts of Covid-19 and climate change life narratives on participatory media platforms as crowd coaxing, and those who respond to the crowd coax are citizen storytellers, who co-publish archives of crisis with the institution. Whilst this is not without ethical and structural challenges, the National Museum of Australia’s participatory website, ‘Momentous’ and associated Facebook public group pages: ‘Bridging the Distance: Sharing our Covid-19 pandemic experiences’ and ‘Fridge Door Fire Stories’ show how such crowd coaxing practices create archives of crisis populated by citizen storytellers who exert agency within the traditional power dynamics of institutional frameworks and national identity for a more diverse historical record.

ABSTRACT Alison Bechdel’s 2012 autography Are You My Mother? makes visible the power of a feminist poetics of revision. In this graphic memoir, Bechdel uses women’s writing and texts, and the intertextual, intersubjective relationships they engender, to show and tell the story of the subject as revisable. To tell the story of such a revisable self, a self revised through reading and writing, is a form of feminist practice, and to tell it in comics is to render that practice uniquely visible. Close attention has yet to be paid in readings of Are You My Mother? to another feminist lesbian woman writer who was preoccupied with the process of re-visioning the subject through reading and writing: Adrienne Rich. Rich is a touchstone for Bechdel’s parallel self-narratives of erotic discovery and development as an artist and a writer. Bechdel learns re-visioning the subject, through writing and revising, as a feminist practice, from Rich. Evidence of this process and practice may be found in Bechdel’s intertextual engagement with Rich’s work along with the artist’s comments on Rich, as well as archival materials such as drafts of Are You My Mother? and letters to her mother, Helen.

ABSTRACT This paper considers essays from Canadian author Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony & God (1992) and Plainwater (1995). Carson has spoken of these as reshapings of her life experience and recollections on the page. I suggest that it is the essential quality of plasticity—inherent to the essay genre, evident in the workings of memory, and displayed in Carson’s hybrid and experimental writing—which makes these works so powerful and expressly suited to their purpose. By working through contemporary definitions of the essay, touching on the neuroscience of memory, and analysing key examples of Carson’s life writing, I will also suggest that the particular qualities of lyric essay, such as its reliance on metaphor, elision and allusion, echo the ambiguities and inconsistencies inherent to identity, interpersonal relationships and autobiographical memory. Thus, this paper shows Carson as reaching beyond traditional textual practices of remembering to develop a unique mode of life writing ideally suited to reshaping and thus handling emotionally and ethically charged material, in order to bring the experimental personal essay to its fullest expression.

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on Katherine May’s Wintering (2020), a self-help memoir that uses winter as a metaphor to explore an emotional state akin to depression. I situate the text in relation to autobiographical/critical work that reclaims rest and the restorative power of nature in contemporary life, as well as in relation to Michel Foucault’s ethic of the care of the self. Comparing Wintering more directly to Ann Cvetkovich’s experiment with memoir in Depression: A Public Feeling (2012), I examine how both writers’ focus on affective experience and everyday practices intervenes in contemporary understandings of self-care, a concept with a radical history but ambivalent character. Drawing inspiration from nature and its intricate system of survival is at the heart of the poetic/pragmatic resourcefulness of May’s memoir. I claim that rather than being a self-indulgent luxury, the process of wintering encourages a more generous stance to the world. However, I also address the limitations of May’s universalising natural analogies. I conclude with some theoretical reflections on ‘suspicious’ and ‘reparative’ readings of Wintering that show the importance of maintaining the internal tension of self-care as both a potential tool of ideological oppression and a vital practice of freedom carrying ethical and political possibilities.

ABSTRACT Autobiography in graphic narrative has been extensively used and studied as a wide concept; however, autofiction, as a liminal form of it, has not received the same critical attention. Despite this, autofictional creations have been present in graphic narrative since its beginnings. Self-representation has not only adopted transcendental intimate stories involving reflective traumatic experiences or confessional involvement but has also allowed sarcastic and parodic performances. This humorous possibility in autofictional practices is the one that Manuel Vázquez Gallego, known as Vázquez, used since 1958 to introduce himself in his stories and create an extravagant graphic double, famous for his fanciful (mis)adventures and crooked illusions. For more than thirty years, Vázquez represented himself in order to establish an imaginary identity and to place himself as a licentious ideal figure. What started as a simple satirical and self-deprecation mechanism became the central motif of his latest publications, to the point of blurring the limits of his fictional enterprises and his daily real life. In this text, I will analyse the way in which Vázquez articulated an absurd and picaresque legend of himself based on the subversion of the intimate story through an autofictional humoristic and fantastic self.

ABSTRACT This observation as a mature Latinx immigrant critiques the Canadian museum complex as an observer (Spectator) and a ‘curator’ of my own experiences. The non-linear texts borrow from Julio Cortázar’s Around the Day in Eighty Worlds. The formal shuttling between the essayistic register and the centre-formatted poetry borrows from the similarly auto-ethnographic, autotheoretical, work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, by Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1987).

ABSTRACT Three generations of Indo-Trinidadian women are the major subjects in the stories that emerge as the researcher/writer situates herself as an Indo-Caribbean Canadian. A traditionally patriarchal culture has previously rendered women as minor characters within the literature of the region. The writer gains new perspective after leaving a home country that has been characterised by colonisation. This work explores threads of memory in retrieving stories that are at risk of disappearing over time. Customs that characterised life for earlier generations of Indo-Trinidadian women show up as interesting details, giving insight into the resilience of people who had limited circumstances in rural Trinidad. As the generations progress, and as there is more urban exposure, identity is complicated by the dominant Trinidadian Creole culture. The stories offer glimpses into lives where traditional Indian culture morphs into a unique Indo-Trinidadian one. The three women embrace assimilation into a larger Trinidadian culture, but in varying degrees. For the researcher, learning to write about Indo-Trinidadian women’s experiences is as important as the stories that are written. Through interviews, questioning, authoethnography, memory work, and storytelling, events are reconstructed from snippets of inherited fragments of experiences.

ABSTRACT In Diana Abu-Jaber's The Language of Baklava (2005) and Life Without a Recipe (2016), the author uses recipes as a vehicle for recalling childhood memories, stories about her father's (Bud's) immigration to the U.S., and her family's navigation of life between Jordan and America. The inclusion of recipes becomes a popularized form of autoethnographic storytelling that locates the self within the culture produced through the memory of food. Drawing on the work of Brinda Mehta's Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women's Writing, this chapter explores how Diana Abu-Jaber creates a culinary sign system capable of transmitting hybrid identity throughout her memoir. As Mehta notes, this type of autobiography serves as a palimpsest preserving personal memory, familial stories, and socio-cultural systems within the contours of the memoir. Furthermore, Elizabeth Ettorre's Autoethnography as Feminist Method points out that feminist autoethnographic works use the personal to assert agency in the political. Taken together, the semiotics of food in gastrography becomes praxis of autoethnography, creating a space for Arab American writers rejecting marginalisation. Thus, this essay explores the richness of Abu-Jaber's life stories through the prism of food as she uses cuisine to autoethnographically locate the self within her diasporic Arab American community.

ABSTRACT In the decade following the Irish Civil War (1922–1923) the radical republican, socialist and writer Peadar O’Donnell (1893–1986) began a campaign of political agitation and subversion against the newly founded Free State government of Cumman na Gaedheal. During this time he also published four novels and was a contributor to and editor of the IRA newspaper An Phoblacht. Substantial amounts of this material were written on the run, in incarceration, or under harassment from Free State Forces, as was his autobiographical novel Storm (1925). The novel contains many incidents that are of interest to the history of the period and to an understanding of O’Donnell’s own life as an active participant in armed struggle. In particular, the violence within Storm can be identified with specific events in the Anglo-Irish War that throw light on that conflict and on the experiences that O’Donnell was able to utilise in the construction of the novel. These incidents, when read in conjunction with newly released witness statements and records from the Bureau of Military History, offer us a fresh insight in republican life writing and autobiography that can help us to better contextualise the period and enrich our understanding of the conflict.

ABSTRACT In this essay, the author discusses her work attempting to thread herself back into the narrative of a tiny Highland community on a rocky coastline on the northwest corner of Scotland, sharing a story that weaves in the Highland Clearances, an 18th century Gaelic bard, a 21st century ceilidh, immigration to the United States, the stories that get passed down, the stories that are lost, and the work of returning. She traces her family line from the Gaelic bard Robert Donn MacKay (1714–1778) through family cross-stitch samplers, through lives lived in MacKay Country and in the broader Scottish diaspora, and explores what it means to return as a visitor to the land where her ancestors lived.