Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos for Our Times (review)

I read the book Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos for Our Times while sitting on my front porch during a few extended days of fall, resisting the arrival of winter in Nebraska. The front porch is a relatively new experience for me. When I moved to the Mid-West USA from Western Canada, the weight of the summer heat reaching into fall, the humid, steamy air, the lightning bugs, the cardinals that flitted by in bursts of red, the stormy skies erupting in flooding rains were all newly experienced on my front porch. There is something so inviting about the space a porch provides. I can convey some of the undergoings and doings I encounter (Dewey 50, 51), but there is always more to be perceived, more than can be contained in any present moment of perception. So my encounters on the front porch insist that “my fundamental relation to the world is not that of an inner thinking subject gazing out upon an external world” (Crowther 1), but rather, about inherence in the sensible. The porch invites nearness, fostering the relationality that permeates this book. So it seems fitting that this book entered and became part of the sensible whole of my front-porch experience. The interconnected perceiving, thinking, and feeling entailed draw me near to the role and place of life writing as curriculum, research, and pedagogy. Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers, and Leggo embrace the multisensory engagement demanded, braiding multiple and layered texts into a cohering, qualitative whole that purposefully involves the reader in negotiating life writing as a fundamental human encounter between self (subject) and other (world). Each author knows this encounter to be the core to all meaning-making. The porch and the texts provide entry for me to join these authors in their inquiry-guided journey into life writing and to explore its interdependence with curriculum, research, and pedagogy.

A photograph of a woven métis sash on the cover offers artful imagery for the form the book takes—métissage, which the authors explain emerges from individual and collective experiences through writing together over time. The authors define literary métissage as a way “to generate, represent and critique knowledge through writing and braiding autobiographical texts” (34). Thus, conceptually and pragmatically, métissage embraces the authors’ distinct voices alongside the ensuing intersections and transformations. Akin to the strands of the métis sash, the narrative strands speak in different genres and draw on various traditions. And akin to the creating process of the métis sash, the individual/collective life-writing process itself suggests ways to weave across genres: mixing, blending, and finding new relations and possibilities. Seven themes emerge as an organizing framework, and each author braids narratives, weaving in and out of each theme. The authors insist there is not a formula to follow for the shapes and directions that each theme takes. Rather, an attunement to process is required that attends “to how each individual piece begins and ends in relation to another, how it contributes to the whole body of the métissage text, how all the pieces come together around each theme as an organic body without losing their individual and different textures and voices” (13). The book is composed with care, with each chapter illustrating one way life writing becomes métissage. Thus, each chapter provides concrete examples of what métissage might look like in practice, and the potential each holds for curriculum, research, and pedagogy. The parts-to-whole relationship is sustained through the life-writing movement, generating the form of métissage while concomitantly acting as a medium for sense-making. The book that is created is, indeed, a work of art.

I feel a strong affinity with these authors. In their stories, each recalls places I know. Geographical, situational, and emotional places resonate and...