Seeking permission

Yesterday during lunch I caught the end of an episode of  Masterclass, a series of HBO documentaries that follow emerging artists in masterclass environments. The mentor under study during lunch yesterday was playwright Edward Albee. (This may have been synchronistic as I had spent the previous day scouring the Web for video of Marian Seldes'--a master Albee interpreter---2010 Tony Award speech during which she said nothing. I wanted to show it to my speech students but couldn't find any video. Sigh.)

During the Albee segment, a protege asked about having permission to veer away from the writing adage, "write what you know." The young writer had been expressing interest in issues of human rights and abuses of those rights in other cultures. She was clearly hesitant about creating a life world that was not her own. Albee encouraged her and her peers to not be constrained by their own experience. It was crucial for writers to follow their own impulses and ultimately, the impulses and direction of the characters. And those impulses are sometimes outside of our own life experience.

I was struck by the polarity of the Albee protege's concerns to that of my own. While the protege was seeking permission to step outside of her life world and emotional background, I have been seeking permission to step back in.

In my conversations with committee members,  I have discovered an "aha" moment that occurred during my studies with Maxine Greene. The moment was when Greene encouraged us students to write from our own experience, to use "I" in our narrative assignments for her. This was the first time I had been given "permission" to use "I" in my academic writing and essentially, "I" in my creative process. It was scary. It was hard. It was Maxine.

I am adopting this practice in my dissertation work and in my methodology, or practice. My interpretation will be formed through my own reading and lens, perhaps without consideration of other writers' views on Greene's work. This may be truly hermeneutic work. There is tremendous responsibility involved in such a practice; it touches on issues of morality and ethics both in the process and in the interpretation. It's scary. It's hard. It's Maxine.