Re-Composition: Autoethnography and the Writerly Self

7/28/2026

by Dr. Nancy Effinger Wilson

In 2011, I was writing my dissertation, the inspiration for which came from being a fifth-grade student in 1972 when Oklahoma City forced desegregation of its public schools. It seemed a perfect example of “hard multiculturalism,” defined by Sears, et al. as imposed government action to maintain “equally worthy cultures” (39). The backlash came in 1975 when a race riot broke out at my high school, resulting in the shooting death of fifteen-year-old Randy Truitt by fifteen-year-old James Briggs.

Despite a clear link between my life and my dissertation topic, it took an advisor’s urging for me to write my story. Perhaps after slogging through hundreds of pages of my academic prose, he craved something written in my voice, a story from my life.

Although I didn’t recognize it at the time, my final product and my process were autoethnographic: auto (self) + ethno (culture) + graphy (writing). It’s a combination of writing moves that I love, beginning with mining personal experiences, then reflecting on them, and finally using these insights in order to understand the cultures that inform them. An autoethnography is thus personal and public; academic and creative; observational and reflective.

According to Heewon Chang in Autoethnography as Method, there are four main types of autoethnographies. I recommend experimenting with all four, at least in the drafting phase. You can dial up or down any of the four emphases in the final product, bearing in mind that some analysis/interpretation is required. The autoethnographies below represent the full gamut.

1. Descriptive-Realistic: “depict places, people, experiences, and events as ‘accurately’ as possible with minimal judgment and evaluation” (143).

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau chooses to live “deliberately” and apart from society (100). Among his many depictions of the natural world are his records of Walden Pond’s melting, noting “It indicates better than any water hereabouts the absolute progress of the season, being least affected by transient changes of temperature. . . . A thermometer thrust into the middle of Walden on the 6th of March, 1847, stood at 32°, or freezing point; near the shore at 33°; in the middle of Flint’s Pond, the same day, at 32½°; at a dozen rods from the shore, in shallow water, under ice a foot thick, at 36°” (330).

1. Confessional-Emotive: “expose confusion, problems, and dilemmas,” often “hidden from public view” (145).

In her “I Grew Up in the Westboro Baptist Church. Here’s Why I Left” TEDTalk, Megan Phelps-Roper shares a photo of herself as a five-year-old child holding a sign that reads “Fags Doom Nations.” She recounts how engaging on Twitter with individuals outside of Westboro enabled her to reconsider the church’s, and thus her own, hurtful practices.

1. Analytical-Interpretive: “make sense of the relationship between your case and the context” (146).

In “Torpified by Gaming: Three Ways Video Games Electrified Me into Consciousness,” Yacine Kout plays video games, recording moments when he experiences torpification. Kout’s goal: to analyze video games to understand their educational potential, especially related to fostering empathy.

1. Imaginative-Creative: channel “imaginative energy . . . through a variety of genres—for example poetry, fiction, and drama” (148).

In Borderlands/La Frontera, to great effect, Gloria Anzaldúa includes academic explorations of history and linguistics, as well poetry. For example, she likens linguistic erasure to having one’s tongue “tamed” at the dentist: “I hear the anger rising in his voice. My tongue keeps pushing out the wads of cotton, pushing back the drills, the long thin needles. ‘I’ve never seen anything as strong or as stubborn,’ he says. And I think, how do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you bridle and saddle it? How do you make it lie down?” (357).

When I began working on my (back) story for my dissertation, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, so I plumbed my memories for examples of times when I was exposed to racist ideology. I recalled using the n-word and being shocked to learn that it was a racial slur because this was the only term my family used for Black people. I had also traveled with my best friend and her dad to rallies protesting the desegregation of Oklahoma City schools (Wilson 37). Turns out, what I didn’t know was just how racist I actually was, that I was being trained to be.

However, going to desegregated Stonewall Jackson quickly revealed to me how illogical racism is. My brainstorming eventually led me to this traumatic memory:

“Four years into desegregation, walking out of the U.S. Grant High School girls’ gym, suddenly I am caught between two mobs of boys. To my left, White guys brandishing nunchucks and baseball bats; to my right, similarly armed Black guys. Two lines of pumped-up teenage boys prepared to attack their enemy, to attack their classmates. I witnessed firsthand the ‘backlash that comes from hard multiculturalism.’”

To corroborate/challenge/complicate my memories, I began reading news reports from that time. I didn’t recognize the school environment being described. I had no clue that White students “dominated the east, west, and south halls” of my high school nor that Black students controlled the north hallway and the cafeteria area (Bromley 64). I didn’t know that fellow ninth-grader Janet Laskey had been attacked that day by “six white boys” when she went to her sister’s locker located in “the white people’s hall” (64). Obviously, I do not condone the rioters’ actions, but I had been wrong to assume that they were living the same reality as I.

The day after the riot, The Daily Oklahoman ran Bromley’s story with the headline: “Color Line at Grant Unbroken.” Truer words.

1. Adapted from Georgina Figueroa and Georgia Dodd’s writing exercise: Having determined a potential topic for your autoethnography, make a list of stories related to it. Write each story idea on a separate Post-it note.

• Your earliest memory related to your topic

• Your most recent memory related to your topic

• Moments of epiphany

• Moments when you felt integrated into your community/culture

• Moments when you felt separated from your community/culture

• Moments of miscommunication and/or misinterpretation

• Moments when you used words or phrases that are typical within your community, but not widely known

1. Recall a moment related to your topic that affected you profoundly. On the diagram below, chart the physical effects of the event. These can be literal or symbolic.

1. In “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together: A Creative Process,” Gloria Anzaldúa invokes Coyolxauhqui (Koy-ol-shauw-kee), an Aztec moon goddess who is decapitated and dismembered by her brother, in order to describe her own writing process, explaining that “organizing the parts into a unified whole and drafting a full version el cuento is the act of putting Coyolxauhqui back together again” (251). The race riot at my high school shattered my sense of safety. By recalling and researching the events and discovering interesting connections, I was able to move beyond my anger at my classmates and community. Ultimately, I had to admit that I had oversimplified the situation. Although the effect was de-privileging my perspective, this was a necessary step for me to grow and to heal.

   1. Employ Anzaldúa’s writing process as outlined in “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together” by creating “constellations” of your Post-it notes from #1 to clarify interesting connections and develop generative drafts. As Trae Stewart notes, “Coyolxauhqui’s head ascended as the moon itself, while her limbs reorganized into celestial constellations—perpetually fragmented yet eternally luminous, cycling through phases of disintegration and radiance” (1197).

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