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Feeling my Way into Embodied Writing
Summer, 2014

(Note to the reader: This is the companion piece to my previous essay, Feeling my Way into Embodied Research . Reading that one first will provide context.)

During the year in solitude I recorded field notes in a daily journal. These notes were empirical observations grounded in my inner and outer lived experience, and, since they were research data, I wrote them as accurately and honestly as I could. But they didn't adhere to a regular patterned structure other than being dated and reflecting the temporal flow of days and months. Sometimes I included the time I made the entry; often, but not always, I included a brief weather report. Some days or weeks I made no journal entry; other days I made numerous ones. In the actual process of writing, I generally wrote whatever seemed important to me in the moment—descriptions of the outer world; descriptions of my inner world; reflections on what I was doing and thinking—although at times I also rehearsed ahead of time what I intended to write. My voice reflected my emotional and mental states: sometimes clear and logical; sometimes amused; sometimes emotionally charged; sometimes filled with joy and wonder. My intention was always to be aware, honest and reflective about what I was experiencing.

These intuitively selected dollops of life scooped from the vast swirl of daily experience told one among many possible tales. I returned to UBC with 900 pages of notes, and I had zero idea how to turn them into a dissertation. Still tentatively obedient to my idea of standard qualitative research writing protocols, I believed I needed to create a coherent conceptual frame to structure my dissertation and discuss the effects of my year in solitude. Within that overarching framework, I would embed excerpts from my journal to add a layer of lived experience that would embody my findings and increase authenticity.

But I had a problem. After living alone in the wilderness for a year, I felt I no longer knew anything for sure and that I hadn't brought back from solitude any original conceptual knowledge. What I'd learned that most deeply mattered to me had come through daily living rather than through analysis, and I felt it could be shared only by telling a tale of that living. It was knowledge of body and heart as much as of mind, and I wasn't sure I could even put it into words, much less concepts. Slowly, I began to realize that I didn't want to write about solitude, but to let the voice of solitude speak directly to readers; to evoke for others the actual experience as I'd lived it. Little by little I recognized that an edited version of my wilderness journal would have to be the heart of the dissertation. The unifying element wouldn't be conceptual, but temporal—a living narrative out of which I would step from time to time into interlude essays that would both create a broader cultural context and cast an analytic eye on my personal lived experience.

It was difficult to switch to a narrative approach, and I think one main reason was that I didn't yet clearly grasp the differences between quantitative and qualitative research. My undergraduate background had been in quantitative science, and I still thought that qualitative explanations are more or less the same as quantitative ones, but use personally descriptive, often ambiguous, words instead of precise numbers that yield repeatable results. I finally recognized that this isn't the case. The difference between these approaches does not lie in degree of rigor. They are fundamentally different modes of explanation and reflect distinct ways of knowing the world.

In everyday life I don't consider an event senseless because it cannot be explained quantitatively or located within an abstract category. Rather, an event seems senseless when I cannot fit it into the stories I tell about the world. When asked why I'm doing something, I usually answer with a personal narrative, rather than a mathematical equation or statistical analysis. However, quantitative knowledge is also important. It can help to maintain perspective and place my own immediate experience into a broader context. One style of knowing and explanation is not better; both are valid, and each complements the other. Once I became clear on this distinction, I felt much more comfortable in writing my dissertation as a first person narrative.

During this time, I was also questioning what I understood to be the traditional standard for academic research writing. From the perspective that the fully embodied person is always involved in any research, the impersonal, supposedly objective, voice seemed misleading to me. I also felt that in many of the research papers I'd read, too much power and foresight were attributed to the rational mind; too little recognition of other aspects of being. It seemed to me that the widely used format of the 5 chapter dissertation—introduction, literature review, methodology, results, and discussion—gives the impression that the research process is more linear and controlled than it often is. My own work was a much messier and more organic unfolding. Although I kept trying to imagine how to fit my research into that format, I couldn't, and I finally acknowledged to myself that I'd need to allow the structure of the dissertation to follow where the experience of a year in solitude led.

I would still need to orient readers to my exploration, contextualize my experience in the literature and in the physical and cultural world, report what had happened, and attempt to make meaning of it all—or openly acknowledge that for me life is its own meaning and profoundly mysterious. But the form of the work would emerge organically from within during the process of writing and would be shaped by the actual content of what I wrote, rather than being constrained by an external standard. With joy, I tossed the APA guide out the window and celebrated my freedom to follow my heart and the emerging narrative…wherever they led me. Writing the dissertation would be as much a process of exploration and discovery as the year in solitude had been.

One of the discoveries was that I couldn't write only about spending a year alone in the wilderness. Exploring my relationship with myself, with the non-human world and with Spirit while in solitude would remain the central theme, but to be fully inclusive I needed to add another layer: a description of the process of earning a PhD. Later, in reflecting back on the process, I wrote:

In editing the original journal, I at first believed I should carve that mass using a single consistent narrative voice for the whole year. That dream slowly faded as I sat [in front of my computer] for months trying to develop a coherent plan. I finally gave up and let each paragraph emerge in its own way. Instead of one, there [were] many voices. Some [were] cultured and insightful, full of analytic critique and aesthetic caress. But there [were] also frightened, enraged, and uncivilized voices—howling from dark distant places.

Then in a moment of sudden clarity I realized what I'd begun to do, and I shrank back. Because having given up the traditional form, I no longer knew what a dissertation actually is or how it should differ from a memoir. I requested a meeting with my committee and humbly (abjectly, some might say) asked for guidance on the academic bottom line for a dissertation. What are the minimum requirements? They smiled with compassion, but refused the bait. They told me that I'd fought for the freedom to follow my own unique path in my research and they were not going to put me back in the box now that things were getting juicy. They encouraged me to give up my preconceived notions about what a dissertation is or is not and to simply write from the heart with no ulterior considerations. Then my task would be to convince them that what I'd written deserved a PhD.

I tried to describe to them my still vague vision of what I felt I needed to write. They told me that including the full journal, or even an edited version of it, in the body of the dissertation wouldn't work, and that it should be included, if at all, as an appendix. But I believed the edited journal needed to be the heart of the work and that I would have to write it on my own and then show them a completed draft.

I went into solitude again for most of the following year; not physically since I was working in my office at UBC, but I didn't discuss the details of what I was doing with my committee. I began to work the swing shift, coming into campus late in the afternoon and working until two or three in the morning. With so many hours at the computer, the shoulder I'd injured in a nasty fall during the year in solitude started to trouble me again, but I kept writing. During this time, and still now, my friend Patti Kuchinsky contributed enormously to the process of editing, and she mirrored back and helped to clarify what I was doing. Sometimes writing a dissertation is portrayed as a solitary endeavour carried out by lone individuals, but for me, even though I was in and writing about solitude, the work was always collective. It's just too damn hard to do alone.

When I finally came out the far end with a completed draft, I started to feel seriously anxious. It had been a huge task, as all dissertations are, and if my committee rejected my idiosyncratic approach, I didn't think I had the energy to begin again. Happily they thought it was great and we started to work together to polish it into the finished product I would eventually submit and defend.

In the defense I continued to follow the path I'd been creating with my footsteps. Rather than simply talk about my research, I evoked for the examining committee and audience a small taste of the spacious stillness I'd discovered deep in the wilderness. Following the form of my dissertation, I moved back and forth between reading passages from my journal (while projecting photographic images from solitude) and discussing some of the conceptual ground I'd covered in the interlude essays. During the questioning, one of the examiners asked: “What is solitude?” I reflected on the question in silence for some time and finally acknowledged that I didn't know. On January 14, 2002 , near the end of my year in solitude, I'd written in my journal:

The frog calls and I hear: life calling to life. Telling me that I too belong. In these moments it doesn't matter if others are interested in my experience or whether I have anything to teach. More and more I must admit I know less and less. It may be hard to turn such awareness into a Ph.D. dissertation, but that's ok too. This is worth so much more.

It was both liberating and a bit scary not to assume the role of expert authority. My committee was pleased with my (our) work, and the event was a joyful celebration.

Bringing all of myself into my research and writing was one direction of flow; the complimentary direction was to take my research and writing beyond the university gates where I gave slide show, storytelling presentations about my work and participated in interviews for radio, television and print. I continue to believe that if we don't share our explorations with the communities that support our universities, we aren't fulfilling our mandate.

Once I'd defended my dissertation and had taken some time to recover, I began to translate the work. My intention all along had been to write the dissertation in non-academic language, and I thought I'd been successful. Not so much. As I started to rewrite for general readers, I began to realize how deeply academic tone and terminology had crept into my aesthetic sense. I would rewrite a section of the dissertation using what seemed like conversational language and feel I'd been successful, but on returning to it later, I'd realize it still sounded stilted and that I wouldn't write that way if not under academic constraints. Removing the technical terms was a fairly straightforward task. It was much more difficult to perceive and soften the subtle formalisms of academic writing that over the years I'd internalized so deeply I could no longer easily see them. Learning to tell the story using more relaxed language was challenging and rewarding.

I wonder if I could (or should) have written and defended my dissertation in the form and tone of the eventual book. Maybe next time…

Ellis, C. 2004. The Ethnographic I . Walnut Creek , CA : AltaMira .

Polkinghorne, D. E. 1988. Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences . Albany , NY : State University of New York Press.

Richardson, L. 1997. Skirting a Pleated Text: de-disciplining an academic life. Qualitative Inquiry , 3 (3),
p. 295-303.

For me, Spirit is mysterious and sacred. It can be directly experienced, but not defined. Spirit and consciousness might be two different but equally valid terms for this undefinable something—as long as consciousness isn't reduced to brain activity or equated with thinking.

Robert Kull, Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes ( Novato , CA : New World Library, 2008), p. 44-45.

Kull, B. 2005. A Year in Wilderness Solitude . p. 519. Ph.D. dissertation. UBC.