I am completing a series of linked short stories that comprise a collection that present varied facets of the character of Julia as she responds to and interacts with the stories of other characters. As a teacher, researcher and mother, Julia finds her personal life spinning an internal thread through her work and connection with young people, immigrant women and elderly people.
Each week, after taping immigrant Central American mothers, Julia, an ethnographer, wrote fieldnotes in her car by the overhead light, the neighbors probably wondering. Having achieved a motherhood she had never been able to garner for herself, the women and their lives stayed with Julia in the years ahead. This story captures her conversations with the women, represented by one character—an immigrant mother in an imaginary relationship with Julia. The story brings to light an ethnographic process of reaching deeper into oneself by reaching out to those who so generously share their lives with the anthropologist.
A fifteen-minute segment of this story was read at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology (Sfaa) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, March, 2009. This reading can be heard on iTunes between the 16:40 and 30:00 mark on the link below:
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