So basically the kid is headed toward dropping out of school. This is disturbing, to say the least. We are trying to get her to pay attention to the credit rehabilitation program she is in now, but even this seems to get her down. Frankly, I have no idea what to do. She is drowning. and I am stuck on shore. One of the suggestions on the table is that she enroll in the Gateway to College program. I think this is a terrible idea since the Gateway program includes college-level classes. The kid’s butt is being kicked by high school at the moment.

This is too depressing to continue with this line of thought. We do need to figure something out, though.

Writing is a kind of cathartic exercise, but I do find that I pull back when I hit on an emotional issue. I should be able to write out my thoughts with regard to the kid, drilling down on the problem so as to bring all my ideas to light. Something about personal issues keeps me from putting too much out there.

And I think that VJ is emotionally constipated. I’m just as shut down in many ways.

But back to writing. I’ve just been looking at John Van Maanen’s book Tales From the Field: On Writing Ethnography to get some ideas for helping my writing move along. One of the concepts that has stuck with me is what is now called autoethnography (Van Maanen calls it impressionist ethnographic writing). The idea is that since one’s presence within a cultural group necessarily affects the group, the most honest way to approach ethnographic writing is to write about one’s own experience. If I had been writing this blog while we were in Carriacou, for instance, I would have simply written the story of my experiences on the island; the ethnography grows out of my writing on the subject I know best.

In any event, I need to re-read Van Maanen’s book to get some sense of how I can deepen my writing. Freewriting is bringing me along in terms of being able to pump out text, but at some point I need to have some direction other than what flits through my head while I type. Some kind of autoethnographic focus would help to bring some substance to my daily freewriting.

This also brings up the subject of next steps where my freewriting is concerned. Freewriting by itself only produces raw text. At some point the text needs to be revised. One way to accomplish this would be to blog revised text developed from this freewriting blog. In order to do that, though, I will need to gain more focus in what I am freewriting about. I can’t just take any old writing and polish it up - there needs to be some thematic consistency. So far I have written about writing, coding, and life, none of which I have tackled with any depth. Or maybe my writing is more depthful than I think (not).

In any event, at some point down the line I need to work on revising. For now, though, just keep pumping out the freewritten text.