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CHAPTER 19 Geocommunication A Paradigm of Place CATHERINE BECKER AND FREDERICK C. COREY Fred: An Introduction The material in this chapter has roots in two vastly different places. One of those places is a nineteen-year-old, working-class woman from Buffalo who rode a motorcycle 9000 miles in search of her birth mother, a connection to nature, and spirit. The second is a forty-year-old gay man from the expensive suburbs of the Midwest who found himself lost in a benevolent desert, geographic as well as cultural. We met by way of empirical fiction. Each of us was working on a novel; each was engaging a resistance to the adoration of “communication science ”; each was in search of a meaningful explication of identity; interpersonal relationships, culture, and human communication. The editor of this volume convened a panel on ethnographic fiction in November 1999, and we met at the conference . We discovered we were drawing water from the same well. In the pages that follow, we discuss our novels in the context of theoretical propositions that have informed our creative processes. During the collaboration, we discovered that while our theoretical frameworks were different, they were complementary. In our writing, we are drawing from social constructionism (Gergen, 1982; Shotter and Gergen, 1994), Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1975), intercultural communication (Martin, Krizek, Nakayama, and Bradford, 1996), gender studies (Becker and Levitt, 1990; Behar, 1995), performativity (Parker and Sedgwick, 1995; Pollock, 1998), aesthetic engagement (Berleant, 1991), and postmodern geography (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 1994). The processes are cyclical rather than linear; that is, neither of us started with theory and proceeded 195 to fiction, nor did we begin with fiction and move toward theory. The creative processes described below are marked by simultaneity and a sense of “returning to” ideas, images, characters, experiences, and places. Catherine: Moving Between the Lines Its Saturday night, I am writing from my home that was built in the 1930s on an island that splits the Wailuku River, in the town of Hilo, on the island of Hawaii, in the middle of the Pacific. I hear the coqui frogs chirping outside. (I find I am tempted to share that there currently exists a movement to exterminate them by causing them to have a heart attack by overdosing them on caffeine because some people feel they are too loud. The Puerto Rican government has called for a reconsideration, because they are loved and considered a national symbol there. In a recent article in the Hawaiian Island Journal, a medical anthropologist discusses how our lack of adaptability is the problem, not the chirp of the frogs.) I am thinking that these details may be irrelevant for what I am about to write. I am thinking that I need to write these lines before I can address the ethnographic and communication implications of my novel, Moving Between the Lines. I must start in the present. I must start from a place. In some hula halaus students must grapple with four crucial questions, Who am I? Where did I come from? What do I do here? How do I do it? Each of these questions is also crucial for the autoethnographic encounter. There is a fifth question that is also crucial, Where am I? For this question requires a consideration of how history, politics, culture, economics, and environment shape my construction of this place. Tonight, as the chirp of coqui surrounds my home, I know what it means to be home, to have found my place, to be engaged with an environment, a culture, and a community. But when I was nineteen and began the motorcycle trip that is the setting for most of the scenes in Moving Between the Lines, I did not. Moving Between the Lines is a three hundred page novel about a nineteenyear -old, adopted, working-class woman from Buffalo, riding a motorcycle 9,000 miles across the United States, searching for her birth mother and a connection with nature and spirit. The trip leads the reader to encounter a variety of cocultures in the United States including working-class family life in the rust belt of the industrial North, the Roman Catholic Church, Fundamentalist-Christians, African Americans, Native Americans, bikers, strippers, Deadheads, communes, and others. These encounters are based on a solo trip that included twenty-two states and Mexico that I actually did take when I was nineteen. The novel was developed from journals that I had kept throughout the early part of my life...

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