Rodney L. Merrill contacted me for an interview about writing from personal experience. He explained that for his doctoral thesis, he is conducting a “research study on how skilled personal essay writers go about writing personal essays and how this process might be applied to improve the teaching of writing and writerly practice in the personal narrative genre.”

I answered the questions he sent and, of course, wanted to know more about Rodney L. Merrill, his project and his own writing (I assumed someone interested in this topic also wrote personal essays).

I believe this interview will help you realize much about the significance of writing in your life and in our culture. And if you wished your college took personal writing seriously when you were a student, putting it up there with psychology and sociology, you’ll be gratified learning more about Rodney L. Merrill’s background, how he values writing, and the foundation for his research. The wonderful answers and links he supplied to my questions are a course in themselves. Although the interview is a bit lengthy, keep reading so you can use the valuable knowledge bank he has offered. –Ed]

Sheila
When I was invited to participate in your research study, I immediately wondered where your interest in personal writing came from. Do you write? Have you observed benefits of writing in yourself or others?

Rodney
Yes. I’ve been a writer of one sort or another since I was a child. In fact, it is my favorite means of communication. I would much rather write than talk on the telephone or, in many cases, talk face-to-face. I enjoy informal situations, like parties or other social events. I’m often the life of the party and a good social mixer. People who have met me at social events are shocked to find out I have an aversion to the verbal communication. I do not like giving speeches or doing interviews (laughs). The key, I think, is this: I like chatting and jousting and just having fun verbally. But when there are formal expectations for communication either on my part or on the recipient’s part, when I think impact and outcome are serious and important, I much prefer to write. That’s why I’ve had some 400 articles published or reprinted but given only a couple of interviews and have actually turned down speech invitations.

Sheila
Wow! What are the subjects of the 400 articles? How long have you been publishing?

Rodney
I’ll come back to the nature of the 400 articles later, if I can remember. Most of them are not personal essays. Most of them are journalism of some variety: informatory, how-to, human interest, nature. I’ve also done a lot of technical stuff like annual reports, manuals, marketing communications and fund raising pitches. Whenever I can get away with it, I write these in the first-person with big human interest because they are more likely to get read.

I never finished answering your question about where my interest in personal writing came from. I think the most accurate answer might be that personal writing was initially an act of desperation.

 I used personal storytelling to convince my grandparents to rescue me from a very violent and abusive family situation. My situation was so bad that I became convinced that I would never survive into adulthood if I wasn’t somehow removed from it. To my astonishment and relief, my stories and my grandparents’ goodwill combined to have me sequestered at their rustic cabin in rural New Hampshire from age 12 until I graduated from high school. That was the beginning of my understanding of the power of words to change the course of events.

The bemused and amused faculty of Lisbon Regional passed around a 50-page paper I submitted in seventh grade on the mulish inefficiencies I saw all around me. Written in the style of a comedy roast but with a wider target, from the Board of Selectmen to the road crew to the school principal, faculty and staff, no one was spared. And I think that’s why it was passed around so widely – because no one was spared. As in a comedy roast, some of the “targets” called me in for a roasting of my own. I took it good-naturedly, and there were no further repercussions. That’s when I began to understand that humor could be both amusing and powerful, that it can be used to say things that one could not say with impunity by any other means.

Sheila
Did you see anything efficient get put in place?

Rodney
Hah! No, I doubt any efficiencies were enacted due to my “Twainish” hyperbole. But it was fun. I actually got a good mark on it. I got some positive recognition. Considering my situation at the time, it was time and energy well spent.

I went through a period of posting reactionary rhetoric under such noms de plume as Paul Revere (the midnight rider), Patrick Henry (“Give me liberty or give me death.”) and Ben Franklin ( “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”). I even tried some combinations like John Paul Revere, sadly striving to imbue more power and authority to the tracts.

I’ve been a bleeding heart liberal ever since but I loved my grandparents and they were reactionaries, so there you have it. I even won some sort of American Legion Reactionary Youth Award for a patriotic essay and was asked to present it as a speech before the entire student body, faculty, and staff of Lisbon Regional School. I accepted and that was a mistake. I botched the speech terribly, and – to the delight of the student body and the alarm of faculty and staff – even muttered “awh-shit” into the microphone when I lost my place. This may be the source of my dislike for live speech.

Sheila
I would imagine the incident could have lasting effects. Where did you post the reactionary rhetoric? What where you reacting to in particular?

Rodney
Where? Wherever I thought I could get away with it. A few times I was called on the carpet for it because I failed to get permission to post it. But, it doesn’t seem very Paul Revere-like to go around asking permission, does it?

What was I reacting to in particular? Hmmm …. Well, ostensibly it was the triumph of the American Way over the advance of godless communism, I suppose. But that wasn’t it, not really. I was reacting to a need for a community of discourse, a need to belong, maybe a need for a sense of truth and justice. For the world to make sense.

On the lighter side, this moment of celebrity resulted in the formation of a Free America Youth Organization. The group disbanded after the first meeting, primarily because they were looking for leadership and elected me as the first president and, I imagine, Freedom Führer. Being an anarchist, I didn’t believe in telling people what to do; being followers, they had no ideas of their own and FAYO suffered a swift, uncomplicated, and, I think, timely death.

Sheila
So were most of your writings political?

Rodney
Oh, no. Well, all writing is political from a constructionist and deconstructionist point of view. No statement is entirely innocent. It always has some purpose, strategy or endgame. But in the sense you mean here, no.

As a youngster, I saved the quips and sayings of my grandfather on 3 x 5 cards because, I felt loss when I imagined them vanishing when he died. And, being a man in his early sixties, he seemed to my young eyes ready to keel over at any moment. I did manage to get some of his sayings published under the title of “New England Witcracker” or some such. Looking back, I now sense that love made his stories a lot funnier than they might seem to a stranger not charmed by the twinkle in his eye and the cant of his toothless grin that implied Socratic irony.

I stopped writing for awhile after the school counselor informed me that my I.Q. scores indicated that I was inherently and immutably stupid and should prepare for a life of swabbing decks. I mean, why write? Who is going read the blathering of a retarded guy who thinks he’s smart – except maybe to laugh at him?

Sheila
Schools had the audacity to label you by one test score when they saw all you were doing–even if they disapproved, there’s no way I can see them really thinking this kid was a retarded guy. So was there something more sinister afoot like punishing you for your outspoken behavior?

Rodney
Well, it’s not that simple though. At the time I was given the I.Q. test and informed of its infallible and immutable results, I was a very depressed kid and I wasn’t doing a lot. Except staring out the window. I did a lot of that. And my parents, especially my father, liked to tell me what a waste of sperm I was and how stupid I was and the like. And as much as I hated the man and lacked respect for him, it still hurt and affected me to hear things like that. When I was disappointed with myself, I would have internal dialogs that sounded pretty much the same.

So, to be fair to the school, it wasn’t like there was this outgoing high-functioning kid who happened to do poorly on the I.Q. test and they just bought into the I.Q. test. It wasn’t that simple. On the other hand, a lot of educators seemed pretty eager to buy into the eugenics behind the I.Q. test. I mean, it took them off the hook if they could say this kid is failing because he just doesn’t have the wherewithal. With that backdrop, they don’t have to look at why they and the school system and maybe even society at large is failing the kid.

So there was that. In terms sinister, well, for me, sinister conjures up something planned and diabolical, so I’m not really comfortable with that word. But there was a lot of self-fulfilling prophecy due to pedagogical slack and laziness. I suspected as much and asked my classmate, Steve Howland, to do an experiment with me. Steve was a very sincere and ethical kid who turned out to be the Class Salutatorian or some such in spite of being a poor boy leased out to a farmer by his family because they couldn’t afford to support him. This kid was up at 4:00 o’clock every morning and got on the school bus smelling of cow and cow shit and stayed up late every night studying. I didn’t think he would do it because there were some very serious truth-claims at stake.

My experiment was this: On our next writing assignment, we would do our own work as usual but then we would exchange papers and transcribe each other’s paper into our handwriting and submit it as our own. In other words, Steve hand copied my paper and submitted it as his and I hand copied his paper and submitted it as mine. My hypothesis was that we would get our customary grade (him an A or B, me a C or D) despite submitting each other’s paper. If I was wrong, he was risking that he would get a lower grade. If I was right, he was risking the knowledge that he did better than I and I did poorer than he, partly, only partly now, due to tradition not effort.

When the papers came back, his paper (that is, my paper) got an “A” and my paper (that is, his paper) got a “C” just as I predicted. We shared this “local knowledge” quietly through the rest of high school.

Sheila
So, did you tell anyone about this?

Rodney
Nope. Part of the deal I made with Steve was we would keep it to ourselves no matter what the outcome, because, we believed, no good and only harm would come of exposing it. We knew and that’s all that mattered.

Anyway, yes, there was some of that kind of stuff going on. But mainly I think people just believed what they were told about the predictive value of I.Q. because (1) it came bearing the authoritative stamp of science, (2) it made teaching and academic counseling less complicated if ability is inherited, (3) it explained why poverty and “failure” runs in families as does success and (4) it fits our mythology that our system affords equal opportunity for equal ability.

What interests me, though, is the self-fulfilling nature of the I.Q. verdict. Once I “found out” I was stupid, I went to looking out the window pretty much full time. When I did poorly on assignments, I didn’t try harder. I didn’t argue the point. I just shrugged and accepted it. Sometimes I accepted it as evidence of my stupidity. Other times, I accepted it as my lot in life.

Then something interesting happened in a “Home Room” class meeting one afternoon. Someone made a hurtful rapier-like remark about me; I don’t even remember what it was. It had something to do with being a loser or stupid or something of that nature. But I shot back that I could do just as well as they did if I gave a shit but I don’t. Well, there followed a caterwauling of discredit and disbelief that normally would have sent me into a semi-catatonic depressive withdrawal. Instead, I proclaimed that this “The Year of Instant Genius” in which all would be revealed. And, by god, it was! My junior and senior years were a regular whirlwind of extra-curricular activity, a part-time job, and unheard-of grade point averages.

Looking back, I understand that I am not due the credit in our heroic tradition of Horatio Alger. I did not simply tap into my inherent inner resources. I did not simply lift myself up by my bootstraps. I came up to the plate and swung the bat, yes. But I owe the language of ability to the brother-in-law of our local minister and to Susan Hazelton, our high school English and drama teacher. While helping the reverend built a little cabin in the woods, I spent the evenings struggling with some of his brother-in-law’s college texts and began to ask questions. His brother-in-law, I wish I could remember his name right now, his brother-in-law said something to the effect that these questions reveal a sharp intelligence. I know that was pivotal for me because I remember it as though it happened only yesterday. Mrs. Hazelton, a towering powerhouse of a woman who barely broke 5 feet in stature, challenged me to audition for Oscar, the lead in The Odd Couple. When I declined, she fixed her gaze into my eyes and asked what I was hiding from. I still don’t know if she gave me the part for “therapeutic” reasons, but I auditioned for it, I got it, and I played it.

These pivotal people did not want to hear about I.Q. tests. Their experience told them that I was not living up to my abilities. So, the thing is, when the other students laughed, it was this man and this woman who had moved into my vocabulary for saying the world, it was they, not just some heroic me, who empowered me to step up to the plate and swing at the ball.

By the way, there is a kind of final chapter or epilogue on this I.Q. story. Some six or so years later, I was telling the story to Leroy Smith, my psychology instructor at Ventura College, and he grew distraught and insisted on giving me another I.Q. test right there and then. You’d have to know Leroy. I’m sure he is a fan of I.Q. tests and wanted to set the record straight. When he returned with the results, he bore a sly grin and the news that I am, in fact, a genius.

Ah well, the truth is probably somewhere between the two, if there is anything to it at all. At any rate, being a genius is not the point. I still remember the assured authority of that school counselor when she told me that my I.Q. was low, that it was inherent and immutable, that I should give up any ideas of college and begin planning a career of swabbing decks in the Navy. She had it all worked out.

This “news” that was so devastating to me, these “facts of life” as it were, turned out to be fallible and capricious science stories that did not take into account a host of confounding variables like nutritional status, parental attitudes toward education, concepts of self-worth, chronic anxiety and stress …. To my way of thinking, the only difference between my first I.Q. score and the later one is that a few people in the meantime had acknowledged me as a worthwhile human being and told me I need to give myself more credit. Inherent and immutable, indeed! I have been skeptical of “facts” ever since.

Sheila
What about those 400 articles?

Rodney
Well, you’ll notice that I carefully worded that. I said some 400 articles and reprints. Whenever possible, I grant only First Rights and retain the rest. A lot of my articles have been published more than once. Also, I’ve served as contributing editor on a couple of small print and online magazines. I remember getting one rural living magazine off the ground, it still exists, and I was writing about 75% of the content for the first year! We didn’t want that to be obvious, so I registered a couple of pen names so I could cash my paychecks!

I don’t consider myself a very good personal writer actually. I am quite competent at putting together how-to articles, persuasive essays and, hopefully, dissertations. I scored an unusual 12 out of 12 possible points on a mandated writing proficiency exam. I even managed to bill $70,000 one year for writing marketing materials and human interest with a commercial or fund raising motive. And I’ve done a lot of first person storytelling in the interest of making an otherwise tired article more interesting.

But when it comes to what is commonly meant by personal writing, I feel clumsy and ham fisted. I don’t think I am being overly self-critical to say that even the few personal essays that I’ve had published seem to miss the mark. I really think they were published because the publisher felt they ought to be rewarded for getting close to hitting the mark.

Sheila
But that’s what I think is so endearing about personal essays–how hard we try to find the intangible, the “unsayable,” how humble our efforts. The only way we can miss the mark, I think, is by walking away from the abyss we’ve written ourselves to. That we climb down awkwardly or fall flat on our faces down there is so human.

Rodney
Of course, you are right. We essayists pick the unfathomable as our topic then beat ourselves up for failing to fully unravel it. Beyond that, though, is the craftsmanship that produces emotional depth rather than maudlin wallowing and I am not sure I can always tell the difference. Well, let me take that back. I can tell the difference when it’s the writing of someone else. I can’t always tell the difference when the writing is my own.

But here’s the thing: good or not, this writing has been a generative and transformative dialog. It has played a huge part in creating the rehabilitated reality I inhabit today. Maybe we can talk a little more about that later.

Sheila
Yes, let’s talk about that because it is just what I think: writing the personal essay changes us–it’s the most powerful self-actualizing tool there is, I believe.

Rodney
Maybe we can hit on that more later on. For now, let me just say that my research questions whether this process is self-actualizing in the sense of the humanistic model developed by Abraham Maslow and others or if it is self-generating in the social constructionist sense of speaking or singing the world into existence?

There is an old but appropriate joke about the man who was looking for his keys under a street lamp, although he thought he might have dropped the keys elsewhere, because the light was better under the street lamp. I suggest that we are so indoctrinated by the “cogito, ergo sum” divisive and egocentric model of reality that it is hard for us to tell the difference. I suggest that we locate a lot of developmental forces internally because that is where we have been taught to experience them when the action really isn’t inside our heads but out there ?in the relational space between you and me, in the language we share, in the model of reality we share. I suggest that without a culture that tells us that we live inside our heads we would not experience it as such.

Sheila
How did you come to propose your research and why was your proposal accepted?

Rodney
To be truthful, it wasn’t my first idea. The Taos Institute-Tilburg University jointly sponsored Ph.D. program wants our dissertations to be related to our professions or at least something that is a very strong avocation. I was going to do something with distance learning since I’ve been interested in that since the 1980s and have been running DegreeFinders.com for 10 years or so. I also have a professional writing consultancy called Elite Word & Image that specializes in marketing and PR writing, so I thought I might do something with the increasing use of collaborative writing. I still think that has a lot of potential as a social constructionist project. But I also have a few hundred articles and reprints published in a wide variety of nonfiction subjects and many of them using the familiar first-person approach. And, really, writing is my passion. Well, writing and social studies.

The Taos-Tilburg Ph.D. program also requires that research be a contribution to the social constructionist viewpoint. Without going into all that means right here, right now, I will just say that social constructionism has a lot in common with other postmodern perspectives and takes the view that much of what we take for granted and for real isn’t necessarily the only way to see it – that we’ve come to construct reality as we know it through language which is very powerfully impacted by culture and social institutions. Reality isn’t just there. It is there largely as we have been taught. This is incredibly simplified rendition of a tradition launched by the publication of The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1966) some 240 pages of brilliant work, but the idea is that people agree on social institutions and give them meanings as well as agreeing on their roles and agency within these constructions. Socially constructed institutions and the social and power relationships authorized by them over time are experienced as not our own invention but an objective reality. The most important symbol systems in developing these institutions are religion, philosophy, art and science (Berger & Luckman, p. 40). From this it is a short step to hypothesize that church, education, and justice evolve to serve special interest communities and these socially constructed institutions too seem to be “natural” and as things ought to be. What may be less obvious is that the autonomous individual and the encapsulated mind are also social constructions and serve certain ends.

Sheila
Synchronicity is at work. I just finished reading an interview in the Sun Magazine with David Korten, “Putting An End to Global Competition.”

His newest book is The Great Turning: From Empire: to Earth Community. He says:

Most of our stories about the nature of prosperity and how it is achieved serve the cause of concentrating power, not meeting actual needs… I’m trying to help people recognize that these stories are not reality, and also to articulate alternative stories that promote the idea of the planet as an interconnected community. It seems he is working from a social constructionist point of view. He is also one of the founders of Yes! (www.yesmagazine.org), a journal I admire.

Rodney
Yes. Although these ideas have been hotly debated in academic circles since the 1960s, more so the 1970s, and especially the 1980s and ‘90s, they are just beginning to gain some Main Street currency. I think that may related to an increased acceptance that weeping on behalf of a declining planet is not just for (as Spiro T. Agnew said) “the nattering nay-bobs of negativity” but reflects justified alarm at our increasingly apparent collision course with extinction.

Einstein said we can’t solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. Without some very different thinking and doing in the near future, this precious blue ball we call home may become as noxious and lifeless as the remainder our solar system.

Social constructionists and most other postmodernists want to find a way to combine the best of enlightenment ideas while realizing that much, maybe all, of what we take as given and natural about life is really just a compilation of stories that need some really serious editing and re-writing. And one of those stories, one very dear to us, is the narrative of the encapsulated individual.

The upshot of this is that certain postmodern theorists have declared the “death” of the autonomous individual, the mind, and the author. What does this mean? If the autonomous individual, as an encapsulated mind, is fictive, that is, a social construction, how is writing done and who does it? And, in personal writing, who is the writing about?

I wondered: How might we talk meaningfully about personal writing in the context of this social turn and cultural “turn” in theory, as it is called? Here we have a subject— how writers write—that is normally considered a very personal, a very internal, a very mental activity. And I wondered: What if it just isn’t so? How might writing be understood in social terms that are useful to writers and writing?

I think my dissertation proposal was accepted because personal essay writing is normally studied by English and humanities scholars and sometimes by educational psychologists. Writing programs are dominated by one or more of these disciplines. These folks are interested in the mechanics of writing, the analysis of writing, and the cognitive processes involved in writing. All great stuff but I wanted to explore the “process” of personal essay writers from a different angle and see whether this can be usefully understood in social constructionist terms. In other words, I’m not sure personal writing is strictly the product of an individual encapsulated mind that somehow “invents” or “creates” ex nihilo, out of thin air. I want to look where, it seems to me, the action is—out there, in the social spaces in which you and I live, in the interactions we have and the culturally impacted meanings we generate from them. These are the social and cultural realms, not the personal. And that’s what I want to look at: Whether personal writing, one of our most “personal” of activities, can be understood as a social process and whether this understanding can contribute positively to the teaching of writing and writerly practice.

See, our culture, and most of Western culture for that matter, situates the individual as more or less the center of the universe. I mean, we don’t say it that way because that sounds kind of silly on the face of it. Yet, we do construe ourselves, our essences, if you will, to be individual minds encapsulated by a body. We are said to “have” a body. Meaning that who we are “really” is a kind of ghost pilot that sits behind the eyes and ears and nose of this bag of skin and bones kind of navigates and makes executive decisions for its meat puppet to carry out.

Even those of us who believe in souls tend to believe in individuated and isolated souls wandering the earth seeking a way to reunite with God or whatever our concept of the postmortem reward might be. And we take this view so much for granted that for me to even bring it up or suggest it is otherwise seems peculiar. Of course, you are an individual and I am an individual. And, if not, it is something we should try to achieve through personal growth. I mean, it’s right there ? personal growth. But is what we call personal growth really personal, that is, a welling up from within the individual or is it something that happens only when we are in dialogical relationship with others? Social constructionists and other postmodernist thinkers tend to think it is the latter.

Sheila
I know that when my son died seven years ago (he was 25 and hit a tree snowboarding in CO), I definitely felt the interconnectedness of us all–it was if the hundreds of people who knew Seth were like the aspen trees that he had told me are really one stand. I spent the next years writing about the first six months after he died finding out more about this larger connection. His death, that impression, and my writing have definitely changed me.

Rodney
Interesting that you bring up Seth’s comments on the aspens because the aspen, it turns out, propagates through underground shoots and roots known as rhizomes. If you cut down an aspen, the roots are still interconnected with the organismic whole so the trees grow back undeterred. Scientists speculate that the largest living organism on earth may be a huge grove of aspen trees along the Colorado mountainside. Fans of Deleuze & Guattarri’s A Thousand Plateaus like to use this fact to extol the superiority of communalist values and to devalue humanist individualism as a survival strategy. Although I am sympathetic to some aspects of their collaborative esthetic, I find the rhizome analogy a little repugnant because these trees are all identical. They are, in fact, clones of each other.

As many others born in the much maligned “me” generation, I’ve spent a lot of time and effort searching for my true self, the real me, and what that means in the larger scheme of things. As part of that quest, I’ve always wanted to learn something new and try something else, thinking in characteristically American style, that you find your true self through work. But, for me, work has proven splendid and rewarding but jobs have proven vacuous and life-depleting.

Since happening upon Buddhism, postmodern studies and the social construction of reality, I’ve come to the conclusion that trying to find my “true self” or “my true purpose” is banal. There is no one true self. There is no one true purpose.

Being a died-in-the-wool New England individualist, I met this conclusion with despair and mourning. But, as Werner Erhard said in est Training, “Don’t you get it? It doesn’t mean anything that it doesn’t mean anything!”

On the up side, if there is no one true self, life is an adventure. Without an a priori course or destination, I can give up a lot of painful stories of violence and abuse that I have lugged around for decades out of some misguided commitment to cherishing a pathetic and impoverished identity – first, as victim; later, as brave (victim) survivor; and, more recently, as (victim) thriver.

Now, as the ideas of a dialogical self and relational social constructionism become less alien and more “real” way of speaking the world, I find myself evolving a gossamer of stories peopled with more loveable characters and a narrative less rigidly tied to hurts of the past. I hold my historical narrative lightly and imbue it with less significance because, after all, it is only one telling of the story. Even granted that all of the events that I believe occurred actually occurred, and that becomes less clear with each telling, but even if they did happen, the story could have been stitched together with many threads other than cynicism and bitterness. Compassion, sympathy, humor, any number of other prisms might have been available with the proper resources, even to me, someone assaulted in every imaginable way.

Sheila
Yes, that’s how writing is I think: the pure act of paying attention and getting the details down and offering the experience on the page through images that appeal to all five senses, allows us to make meaning and it allows us to love, ourselves, life. As someone famous sad, there is always singing–in bad times we sing about bad times.

Rodney
I first lived this experience when I wrote and rewrote and rewrote Baking Powder Biscuits, a personal essay describing my tormented relationship with my mean-tempered and assaultive stepmother. The first draft of the essay was filled with bitterness, sadness and disappointment. With each rewriting, the “facts” of the story have remained essentially the same but by the last version, I was writing with tears streaming down my face just as they had when I wrote the first draft – but these were tears of forgiveness, compassion, and resolution, tears of relief to be free at last of a resentment that sat so heavily on my chest that I found it hard to breath, of joy at finding at last a way to love the violent, weak-willed and only mother I knew. (That’s not it exactly; I loved her always. More like: joy at finding a way to let loving her be okay.)

Sheila
Frost said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” What did you do with this personal essay? Can we reprint it for Writing It Real subscribers?

Rodney
Frost is from my neighborhood. And, although I think good fences sometimes do make good neighbors, I think he’s onto something there.

“Baking Powder Biscuits” is one of the essays I was talking about earlier, one of those that was published but doesn’t quite hit the mark for me. Writing it and re-writing it did wonders for me, though.

Did I finally arrive at the Truth of the matter? Probably not. I arrived at a truth that let me breath again, a truth that let me cry out in relief and satisfaction. But the Truth? I don’t think so. And I don’t think so because I’m not sure there is one. I have noticed that each time I tell this and other stories about my childhood, I discover more funny streams, more poignant rivulets, more somethings else. My “story” is evolving, not along some path toward some Ultimate Truth, but tangentially, more like a spherical web.

We tend to think of history as developing along a straight line toward some destiny or other. It makes more sense to think of personal history and maybe all history as multidimensional, multilineal, and rhizomatous, that is, best envisioned as developing holistically rather than traveling some predetermined straight line toward some end. And that means the trajectory of my history and what it “really means” depends on where in the web-ball I am standing when I tell it.

Sheila
Thank you for the definition links. Do you read a lot of the memoirs out today? If so, which ones have left an impression on you and why?

Rodney
Yes, I do. I especially like Augusten Burroughs. I’ve read most of his books. I knew a family very much like the one he describes in Running With Scissors. Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life. I’m reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls right now. I am so busy with other things that I am usually on the trailing edge. I picked up The Glass Castle because Kate (my wife) was getting ready to put it in the thrift shop box. I was drawn in by the end of the first page. I also like The Liars’ Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr. I enjoyed this story because my own childhood has a lot in common with the author’s. A crazy mother, an alcoholic fist-swinging father who spun tales with his cronies, the piles of empty beer bottles, and guns leveled at family and stranger alike. Even being sexually molested by my sister’s boyfriend. What I liked most, I think, is the clarity, the authentic ring, and the lack of self-pity in Karr’s telling.

Sheila
Back to your writing. Why did you enroll in social science program rather than a writing program or an English program?

Rodney
My two passions are storytelling and social studies. I want to find some way to join them in this doctoral project and dissertation.

The contemporary “turn to the social” in theory in many disciplines and the simultaneous “turn to the personal” in writing and reportage across the same disciplines strikes me as paradoxical. In so far as the “turn to the social’ downplays or excludes “the personal” in the sense of minds encapsulated within autonomous individuals, it seems odd that many proponents of constructionist and other postmodern ontological and epistemological models favor writing in a first person narrative style. That is, we were once expected to adopt the language of science and pretend we can be objective and now we are expected to reveal where on the web-ball we are standing while we are saying how the world is. And most of us don’t have a clue on how to go about that.

It seemed to me that the conversation might begin by talking to people who write the personal and asking them how they go about that. And rather than “interpret” what you “really mean” as scientists like to do, I thought maybe I could strike up a conversation about what that might look like to a social constructionist and see if anything useful comes of it.

Sheila
Oh, is that interesting. It’s almost like an organic rebalancing in action. We are one and we are many. We are part of a whole and wholly apart. We need to see each leaf on the aspen.

Rodney
Yes, and thank you for that. Except for the “clone” aspect, I agree. And as the poet John Donne put it: “No man is an island, entire of itself.” We cannot “become” alone. I become who I am because we are talking and you become who you are because your son was who he was and you know me and you know someone else who … Just like that web-ball of connections. We need each other and, in many ways, we are each other. At any rate, that’s what I think right now. Hah!

Sheila
From my experience as a poet and personal essayist as well as a writing teacher I think about that issue this way: We cannot open ourselves to all that is (the social) fully until we know where we are coming from (we are on the web ball as you say, but more importantly, what threads are tangling in us) – and working on that creates an ongoing body of work that involves writing from our obsessions, writing from the images and situations that our lives gave to us. We spend years seeing the narrative we constructed and in seeing it we offer it and others see their own in what we offer. In this way, reading one another’s personal work, we see that we are alike in our feelings, even though we think so differently so often.

What will you consider interesting results?

Rodney
That’s a very good question. Although any results will be interesting, I am hoping to find within the responses a legitimate place to identify writing as a social process disguised as a private, isolated, internal process. If it does, then that has some practical implications for the teaching of writing and writing practice. Like, why the hell are we locking ourselves up in our rooms searching for our deeper innermost selves when these are largely social constructs? Why aren’t we searching for the meaning of our stories out there – in the social space of relationships where the generation of meaning takes place?

I don’t know. It’s too soon to say right now but that’s the sense I have about the interesting stuff that could come out of this. There is a fellow, famous among social constructionists, who liked to say “the dog will tell you how it wants to be stroked.”

That’s what remains to be seen. How will this pooch want to be stroked?

Sheila
What might the impact of the results be?

Rodney
Well, writers of doctoral dissertations always hope their findings will overturn or create a breakthrough for their field of study, better yet, shift entire paradigms of thought.

In fact, dissertations usually sit on university library shelves and collect dust. The biggest impact of much dissertation writing is the additional expense the university incurs in storing them in perpetuity. In fact, there is a big push to find an agreeable standard for electronic storage to reduce storage requirements for a dissertation to a few hundred kilobytes on a hard drive or optical storage media.

My research is different, of course, and really will overturn entire fields of study and maybe even the entire paradigms of writing.
Hah!

No, realistically, it would be nice if people who read my dissertation began to dialog about writing, personal writing in particular, in terms of a dialogical and relational process rather than a purely mental one.

Sheila
Will you set up a website for that?

Rodney
Actually, I have a dissertation blog set up already at http://rodneymerrill.com where people can follow the research and, of course, offer comments and interaction. That’s what this is all about.

I am in the pilot study stage right now. Depending on how that goes, I may need a number of volunteers who regularly write personal essay to talk about their writing process. If any of your readers might be interested, they can contact me at rodney.merrill@rodneymerrill.com . Those who write from personal experience should feel free to interact with my dissertation blog as well, at http://rodneymerrill.com.

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Next week, we’ll feature one of Rodney L. Merrill’s personal essays.