In this autoethnography, I layer a childhood memory of playing chess onto the experience of watching a video about chess. In doing so, I hope to bridge past and present to build future.

In this article, I offer an autoethnographic examination of unexplained infertility. The narrative is driven by a central question: how does unexplained infertility mean in my life? By exploring the how of unexplained infertility, narrative inquiry emphasizes the long-term impacts of a persistent diagnosis. As an unstable diagnosis, unexplained infertility presents a complicated site from which to consider family planning and gender work. Narrative vignettes occurring over a period of years explore identity. These experiences highlight moments of conflict and upheaval where the abstract diagnosis derails heteronormative and cisgendered constructions of fatherhood and masculinity. This infertility account disrupts codes of silence around experiencing infertility.

Arthur Bochner 1 wrote that even though he’d written about grief, he never really understood it until the death of his father. I suspect many of us recognize a truth in what he said. Often unannounced, death creeps like an unwelcome stain into our lives. I wonder how many of us are ready for it, and what narrative scripts are available to us at these times as we try to make sense and bring meaning to our loss. In sport, the path that I trod for my first occupation, the pervasiveness of the performance narrative means that following the death of a parent, an athlete is expected to continue with their sport, regardless of their pain and grief. “The show,” or that competition you trained so hard for, so the story goes, “must go on.” Within high performance sport the grief and loss experienced by well-known athletes seems also to provide an additional newsworthy opportunity for reporters and journalists to spice up their copy with stories of how “I did it for Dad.” But is winning the only way to represent or honor this relationship? And what of those athletes who never win? How do they honor their dead? Over the past twenty years, I have often drawn on my own experiences in professional sport to challenge the dominant performance narrative that frames winning as the only accepted and valued goal of the athlete. In this performance autoethnography I hope to extend my previous work by turning the spotlight on some of the ways the performance narrative frames how athletes and media alike represent grief and loss and what the father–child relationship means. My aim and purpose in this work is to contribute to the creation of counterstories and alternative narrative maps. Through creating such resources it may provide some athletes whose lives and experiences are currently disenfranchised or silenced, and I include myself in this group, a way to negotiate this difficult terrain in ways that are more authentic. In Mark Freeman’s terms, I seek to “break away” from this powerful monologue and sap its “coercive power.” 2

In this autoethnographic text I talk about my relationship with my father and my older brother as a way of analyzing the construction of my masculinity. In addition, I use the layered-account technique to alternate my personal history with fragments of texts that talk about masculinity as a social construction. In this way, I propose to turn my story into a way of showing how hegemonic masculinity is constructed through pain and violence as the bases of this gender identity.

This article offers an account of the author’s experience after being falsely accused online of sexual assault by a former student. More than a chronicle of events, the article serves as a critical, self-reflexive inventory of thoughts and feelings, as the author looks to come to terms with the allegations and their consequences, as well as practice concern for his accuser. More broadly, the essay serves as an inquiry into the complexities of storytelling and self-research, in relation to shame, truth, and social privilege.

One of the strengths of autoethnography is the connections that can be made through the telling of story. This article is an compilation of the connections made during presentations at the International Symposium on Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry. Despite age differences, situations, and ways of being in and of the world, there were overlaps in the experiences of the authors. Three individual conference papers are merged to begin a conversation of queering queer narratives through an exploration of embodiment, relationality, and self-presentation without resorting to an established, and perhaps reified, queer iconography. From our queer identities, we offer narratives that are neither settled nor normative from our individual queer standpoints. We write to champion a different view of possibilities for queer non-normativity.

This collection of autoethnographic eco-poetry offers a pedagogical vision for environmental education in an age of Climate Change (and its denial). The poems reflect on the author’s 10+ years of teaching environmental storytelling. Differing in tone and thematic and emotive imprint (ruminative, conciliatory, angry, deliberative), these autoethnographic eco-poems offer entry points for the reader/educator to engage with the coming crises of Climate Change in their own lives and work. The poems reflect on the complex, contested, and incomplete journey of the author in seeking, implementing, and developing a pedagogy of investment in and for students of media—and ecology (the author teaches in both a school of communication and ecology). The poems are “Interventions” in every sense of the word—political, ecological, pedagogical, and, above all, personal.

This evocative autoethnography reflects the author’s grief after she learns that a past teacher candidate was killed on Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) flight 752. Grief washes over her as “writing down our worst experiences can also offer a way to cope with some of life’s horrors.” 1 The autoethnography becomes “interventionist, seeking to give notice to those who may otherwise not be allowed to tell their story or are denied a voice to speak.” 2 Memorable stories from the trauma become a composed collection of touchstones. In the end, the author discovers how “weaving personal experiences with academic research can reveal an understanding of complex, painful issues, such as death, grief, and traumatic loss,” 3 in hopes to inspire others to share their autoethnographic experiences.

Becoming , a concept from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 1 is an asignifying process of transformation that unsettles the taken-for-granted. Engaging with micropolitical movements of power and resistance, becomings generate fissures and lines of escape that are difficult to classify or categorize. In this Deleuzio-Guattarian intoxicated poem, the author explores his imperceptible becoming following the surgical removal of an oral cancer.