The purpose of this course will be to explore autobiographical writing, our own and others, in the context of our living, learning and teaching. Through writing and journalling, we will participate in activities that assist us in making sense of experience and memory, life and text, self and others. We will write autobio-graphically as an act of undoing silences, turning our writing over and over as a means of experimenting with what is said, unsaid, between the lines, "entredeux," in Hélène Cixous' terms. By examining our/selves in all our capacities, in the context of many living and textual others, we will engage in writing and thinking of our places in the wor(l)d.
             Through reading selections of women's autobiographical writings by authors such as bell hooks, Doris Lessing, Jill Ker Conway, Natalie Goldberg, Dorothy Allison, and others, we will consider "where is the autobiographical," "what the autobio-graphical does," and how we are shaped by autobiographical language as we simultaneously shape it. We will explore the textual layers and telling silences of the selections we read (and write.) We will consider the authors' stories and not-stories in relation to our own.
             Discussions will be threaded with the themes and issues that arise from our individual and collective autobiographical gestures, entering the spaces between who we think we are, how others see us, how we see others, and all the ramifications that occur when we write, read, record, share, re-write lives...
             Our concerns will be related to pedagogy and re-search, generating questions such as: How is autobiography pedagogy? re-search? How does women's autobiographical writing contribute to pedagogy? re-search? How do we re-present our/selves and move with/in those re-presentations as we write autobiographically, as we read autobiographically? How are we disrupting notions of what constitutes pedagogy? re-search? How do we live with, learn about, teach our/selves? What implications does all this hold for our teaching? learning?
             Writing practice will include: writing autobiographical episodes and re-writing them in several different versions; responding to the selections we read; keeping an ongoing journal; meta-writing (writing about our writing); writing poetically; and dramatic readings of our work.