This article is part of the following series: Writing Life
Image 1: One of Ruth’s writing spaces filled with family and childhood photos, art and objects that inspire her and that are filled with memories.
On the laptop screen in my home in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in a Zoom call, Ruth Behar turns on her camera. In the background appear the bookshelves of her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, …
This article is part of the following series: Writing Life
Figure 1: Emma Kowal writing her thesis in 2006 with 7-month old Maya in Darwin, Australia. Image: supplied.
One evening in December 2021, in a small South African coastal town where my best friend’s bustling wedding preparations were underway, I got goosebumps. I turned off the music, looked up from my reading, and said “please listen to this”. Then I …
This article is part of the following series: Writing Life
Figure 1 (Jason): Writing is painful for me. I do TRX Suspension Training with an amazing online and affordable personal trainer/physical therapist (email me and I’ll give you his number) to correct my posture. I rest the nape of my neck on my orange wedge called a Davinci (try it), to release tension. I use Tizanidine (feels great), and sometimes This article is part of the following series: Writing Life
The anthropologist Stefania Pandolfo approaches ethnography as not just the depiction of a world but as what addresses and displaces both the writer and the reader, where ethnography itself becomes a site of transformation. Our conversations since 2014, first as she was completing revisions on her book Knot of the Soul and then as I was writing my dissertation, and …
This article is part of the following series: Writing Life
Image 1: The desk where Stacy writes when she is actually at a desk.Have you ever taken a walk inside your article?
Can you conceive of a piece of writing as a three-dimensional space?
Can we think of ethnographic expression beyond the question of ‘what’s the larger argument?’
It was an unusual summer day when New Delhi and Vancouver …
This article is part of the following series: Writing Life
Figure 1: Writing and thinking in anticipation of writing: notes stacked in files next to a computer (Warkwick’s desk).In the early days of freedom after a long lockdown in Sydney, I visited Warwick Anderson at his light-filled house perched at the top of a hill looking over rusted industrial relics to the shimmer and glare of the city. …