How Do You Tell a Secret? Not why? or how do you summon the courage to? tell a secret, but how—mechanically, structurally, with effectiveness.
How do you convey a secret experience you know—because you’ve been there and done that—to someone who doesn’t know it? Every qualitative researcher faces this primary task. How do I tell my reader what my participant felt, believed, or did? What quotations tell that story? What themes? How do I get my readers to understand another way of being human? To know what it looked or felt like? Autoethnographers are no different than, say, grounded theorists in this regard; they just focus on their own experience in addition to the experiences of others.
I have a secret experience. My daughter Matilda was stillborn in 2006. She is my wife’s and my first child.
Our stillbirth experience, according to a helpful statistical chart (MacDorman, Kirmeyer, & Wilson, 2012), connects me to the parents of 25,971 other stillborn children (Matilda makes 25,972) in the United States in 2006 alone. In almost every way, I do not know these parents. In one very important way, though, I do.
I’ve told that secret already in an article called “Waltzing Matilda: An Autoethnography of a Father’s Stillbirth” (Weaver-Hightower, 2012). I suppose, then, for those who have read the article, the secret is out. It has transmogrified into a revelation. I won’t rehearse the whole secret again. (I’ll wait here if you want to go read the article first.) Rather, in this chapter, I answer my opening question. This story, as the title of this book promises, pulls aside the curtain of themes emerged. This is how I came to understand my secret well enough to tell it.
***
Autoethnography, much like creative or arts-based research forms, relies on analysis processes perhaps even more elusive and ephemeral than those in traditional qualitative research, such as grounded theory (e.g., Charmaz, 2006; Glaser & Strauss, 1967) or phenomenology (e.g., Moustakas, 1994). The paper trail in autoethnography evades auditing because so much happens within analysts’ heads.
As antidote to such analytical lacunae in autoethnography, this chapter goes beyond simple labels and shorthand (Dickie, 2003) to uncover challenges of data analysis about the self and researchers’ close social networks. “Waltzing Matilda” provides a powerful example, I suggest, because I used numerous analytical approaches—drawing comics, analyzing photos, policy analysis, gender theory, discourse analysis, and medical literature—to assemble a multifaceted understanding of the larger, usually hidden experience of stillbirth.
This chapter is a kind of autoethnography about making an autoethnography, and it adds to the larger collection by consciously using the self as data rather than hiding the self behind third-person pronouns, statistics, and (feigned?) methodological confidence. Autoethnographic analysis instead necessitates total honesty, self-critique, and vulnerability—all the things our masculinized disciplines demand we hide in order to be scientists.
In autoethnography, data collection and data analysis intermingle. (It does in all research, even quantitative.) Just distinguishing an event as data represents analysis. In autoethnography one must, within the flow of thousands of events and interactions, either in the moment or as memory, recognize one’s own experiences as relevant data.
Understanding how humans learn ways of thinking and behaving when they set out to do or become something has defined my intellectual career. How does one learn to be a boy, especially a real, appropriate, masculine boy (Weaver-Hightower, 2008)? How does one learn to be a groom (Weaver-Hightower, 2002)? How does one learn to be a father—or, at least, an almost-father to a dead child? What I counted as data for “Waltzing Matilda” were those people and things I encountered that were trying to teach me.
I tried to stay aware of cultural artifacts I came across that provoked a feeling. I would collect mail from companies that kept me on their mailing lists even after Matilda was dead and would no longer need their diapers, formula, or insurance products. I read books, whether explicitly about grief or about fathering that did not admit to grief. I pondered objects related to Matilda and why they were so meaningful (this eventually became a section in the article on “Things”). I stared at photos of Matilda and of us, trying to capture exactly what it was I was saying to myself and feeling.
The analysis that led to “Waltzing Matilda” started almost immediately after her death and continued as each new datum appeared, happened, or arrived. The disembodied researcher persona I wear so comfortably surfaced very soon into the experience of losing Matilda, a coping mechanism providing distance between myself and the simmering horrors of it all. I could engage my cool, interested ethnographer’s brain and tamp down the emotional brain that seemed raging, muddled, sometimes out of control. Analyzing became balm.
Literature, both literary and scientific, played a central role in the analytical construction of “Waltzing Matilda.” Reading or hearing “other self-narrators” (Chang, 2008, pp. 100–102) with similar experiences provided critical analytical tools. These let me know that my thoughts and experiences weren’t unusual. Yes, I experienced that, I would say. I quoted from C. S. Lewis’ (1996/1961) memoir of his wife’s death, for instance, because his articulation of spiritual doubt resonated with me.
Or, at times, the contrasts would be instructive. For example, McCracken’s (2008) memoir of stillbirth was ripe with stark, emotionally potent metaphors that I quoted. Yet, we had contrasts. She never saw her stillborn son, a choice different from mine, which provoked my pondering about the importance of the body, seeing the body, touching the body, knowing the look of death. Insights from this reflecting appear in my thematic section called “My Daughter’s Body.” (As I write this, I worry that such a section affronts my fellow parents of stillborns, like McCracken, who chose not to look.)
I also found the scientific literature—medical and psychological discourses—to hold tremendous value for analyzing my own experience. Some participants in empirical studies had it so much worse than me. Some had nightmarishly cruel relatives. Their relationships fell apart (e.g., Vance, Boyle, Najman, & Thearle, 2002). They descended into addiction or pain seeking (Aho, Tarkka, Åstedt-Kurki, & Kaunonen, 2006). Discovering these dynamics in the literature led me to consider reasons why I did not experience some of the worst possibilities. Did the strength of my relationships protect me? Was it my race or income? Did my background in gender studies afford me identity flexibility beyond just stoic masculinity? Such introspection directly impacted the analysis, such as discussion of the “politics of crying” (Weaver-Hightower, 2012, pp. 483–484). No other act is as gender-regulated, by self or others, as crying. I might have discussed crying without seeing it in the literature, but having seen it so often made discussing crying mandatory.
I collected the scholarly and literary references, their abstracts, notes of my impressions, and detailed keywords in a database of references using EndNote software (see Figure 1.1). As I composed the autoethnography, certain keywords in the database became themes, points of reference for common experience. Layne’s (2003) ethnographic work, for instance, introduced themes of material culture—things that I then began to notice in others’ works. Having the detailed keywords in the database then allowed me to search for other writing about “things,” “stuff,” “pictures,” “materials,” “memories,” “keepsakes,” and other terms related to material culture. Grouped together in a search result, the matching works became themes that spoke to common experience.
Ultimately, common themes in the literature became a guiding influence, and I “often selected points specifically to reflect themes prevalent in the larger literatures” (Weaver-Hightower, 2012, p. 463). Other stillbirth narratives describe pregnancy events that quickly went from normal to horrific, they focus on hospital scenes, they discuss difficulties of asymmetrical grief between men and women, they lament feeling unprepared for the possibility of stillbirth, they challenge authors’ religious beliefs, and they contemplate what could have been done differently (e.g., Conklin, 2006; Schwartz, 2006). By structuring my own story with these themes, I aligned my analysis with the experiences of others to whom I am connected. Although it feels strange to see yourself represented as coldly described themes—realizing you are the rat in the maze—it can also feel oddly comforting. I might not have the free will I initially assumed (for how else do I fit so many of the typical reactions), but these also let me know I’m not alone, not unusual—just human and grieving.
My autoethnographic analysis involved listening closely to my internal dialogue—what I said to myself. Much as Dickie (2003) describes, I had to try to catch insights made in the stream of consciousness while contemplating a topic, doing “activities that allow[ed] my mind to wander and puzzle over what I [was] finding” (p. 53).
Listening to oneself is harder than it sounds. In autoethnography one must be vulnerable, honest, and self-critical—acts that can be hard for humans. We want, instead, to be the heroes of our stories, always knowing the right answers and projecting confidence. For researchers, this can be doubly hard because admitting mistakes remains the easiest way to get an article rejected; admitting human frailty is like blood in the water to reviewers for whom scientificity is next to godliness. Lest I risk diluting insights with my impulse to appear as the confident, infallible hero, I had to listen closely and record quickly (sometimes a sticky note before going to bed, a jotting on my phone in the car, and—rarely—sitting in front of my computer), with fearless dispassion about how I would look to others for telling the truth.
I usually keep a physical file folder of data, even in our digital era. Paper-based ephemera remain a huge part of the world we learn in, so these scraps contain invaluable information. For this study, I kept a file that included ads, hospital documents, brochures, notes, and miscellanea. Storing files and notes, and moving them around from folder to folder, provided an easy, basic form of analysis for me. What other ideas does this one belong with? What labels will I put on the folder and subfolders that will give me new insights into organization and themes? (My “Waltzing Matilda” electronic parent folder eventually contained subfolders called ARTICLES, COMIC, Interviews, IRB, EndNote Library, MISS Fndtn, and Share Initial Packet; about 60 files were loose in the parent folder, as well.)
I almost always work from what I call a junk drawer note (Figure 1.2), a Microsoft Word document where I stash theoretical and exemplar odds and ends—things I want to make sure to say. Sometimes I wrote polished, expansive notes, and sometimes I simply jotted a key phrase. Often I cut and paste from this junk drawer into the final manuscript, sorting the disparate ideas into the emerging structure. These rambling, unordered notes functioned much like the grounded theorist’s memos (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), allowing me to work out ideas on the screen that need articulation and explaining. Frequently, whole chunks of this text made their way into the final draft with only minor changes.
Autoethnography has been a fertile ground for experimenting with mixing representational genres. Crystallization, Richardson (1994) called it, where validity arises from multifaceted ways of knowing and representing (see also Ellingson, 2009). Poetry, for example, requires different means of encoding and decoding knowledge than does, say, a medical journal article. Ethnographic fieldnotes have different epistemological means than a memoir. Each genre provides its own knowledge structure for the writer and reader. Cobbling several together into a single manuscript positions writers and readers at varied standpoints from which to view and understand a phenomenon.
In developing “Waltzing Matilda,” I used crystallization both behind the scenes and in the article itself. Each use—seen or not—provides a genre-based scaffolding for analysis, a cognitive structuring device. For example, how does encoding an experience in free verse poetry help one understand an experience? How about a limerick? A sonnet? How does creating a drama from ethnographic research (e.g., Saldaña, 2005) structure the analyst’s thinking? In my case, I wondered how translating a story into the comics form—words and images in panels with speech balloons, etc.—creates analytically productive, cognitive affordances (Kuttner, Sousanis, & Weaver-Hightower, 2018).
This notion of creating a comic to represent experience first occurred to me in 2007 as I was trying to decide how to represent Matilda’s death (see Figure 1.3). I needed a form that could help me show things that I didn’t quite know how to say. I was a comic book fan in my youth and quite familiar with the form, but it struck me suddenly, long before I had tried much writing about Matilda, that I might attempt a graphic version to convey my story. Although I ultimately decided that comic pages were not (yet!) the right format for Matilda’s story, my efforts to narrate the tale in comics influenced my eventual prose telling. (I returned to the comics form for another father’s stillbirth in Weaver-Hightower, 2017; see also Weaver-Hightower, 2013).
To make a comics page, one must choose the important moments, frame them using distance and angle, style the images, choose words that work well with the images, and make it flow around the page (McCloud, 2006). These are analytical decisions, much like choosing moments from interview transcripts or participant-observation events. Importantly, though, drawing can lead one into a flow that clears out the cache of language that often dominates thinking. It allows a different form of thinking—visualization—that can, in turn, inform language again later.
In Figure 1.3, my comic page gave me a way to visualize what caused Matilda’s death—a fetal-maternal hemorrhage—not possible to see by other means. I had to investigate medical illustrations to make the images on the page, to imaginatively look inside the body, which helped me understand the probability that Matilda’s death was a slow process—a drip, drip, drip and a weakening heartbeat. In notes for an early draft of the prose manuscript, I extended the heartbeat “THUMP!” sound effects from this page—my visual solution to show her death process by the thumps becoming smaller and smaller—into a list of sounds associated with our stillbirth experience. Although that full list did not make the final version, creating the comic provided the realization that sound details were a key analytical tool. The comic thus originated the lines “I asked the doctor to … check with the handheld Doppler, that device that had always so reliably found the thump-thump-thumps of Matilda’s heart. But no thumps sounded, only the swishy, marine-like sounds of emptiness” (Weaver-Hightower, 2012, pp. 466–467). It was an image—converted as if through synesthesia from sound—that stuck with me from graphic narration to prose.
Some might misperceive autoethnography as quick and easy, as if “It’s just telling stories about yourself.” That’s not true if you do it well. “Waltzing Matilda” was in production for five years. Because my personality drives me to research anything and everything (natural to the academic’s life), “Waltzing Matilda” quickly became a project I knew I had to do, even just a few weeks into our stillbirth experience. I knew that understanding myself, and helping others understand the experience, would be a way to heal.
It took years before I could finally write down a full draft of “Waltzing Matilda.” Over that time, I realized that a one-time analysis (a cross-sectional writing of an event, if you will) would have been dangerous. I could perhaps plot my arc of grief and my arc of analysis on correlated trajectories. If one day I was angry with the world for spinning on despite my despair, I wanted my autoethnography to be angry, to be in the face of readers. (It was not rational or nice, but it was how I felt.) On other days when I felt more accepting—to use Kübler-Ross’s (1969) famous terms—I could be clinical, detached, forgiving. The autoethnographer perhaps must be more vigilant of this day-to-day emotional entanglement with the analysis, but I would venture that everyone who pursues qualitative research suffers this effect, even if they do not know or admit it.
Analysis in autoethnography often happens during the writing—by writing (Richardson, 1994). You can find out what you know by writing it, a kind of ouroboros of analysis and writing. As Richardson (1994) says of “evocative experimental forms” like autoethnography,
evocative writing touches us where we live, in our bodies. Through it we can experience the self-reflexive and transformational process of self-creation. Trying out evocative forms, we relate differently to our material; we know it differently. We find ourselves attending to feelings, ambiguities, temporal sequences, blurred experiences, and so on; we struggle to find a textual place for ourselves and our doubts and uncertainties.
(p. 521)
The struggle Richardson notes is an analytical one. It is the struggle I asked about at the outset: How do you tell a secret?
In my experience, the analysis-writing infinity loop included cognizance—in a sense of metacognition—of how I was writing. How did the ways I wrote show meaning? A perfect example was a tendency to say she or her when speaking of Matilda. As I was writing then—and now—I struggled to put Matilda into the story by name. Pronoun-ing Matilda perhaps demonstrated my acquiescence to the prohibition against naming or talking about stillborn babies. She who must not be named. Often others do not talk about Matilda by name, at least not as often as they use my living children’s names. In turn, that discursive conduct invades my language, too. Seeing this, analytically, while writing led to more explicit and frequent use of Matilda’s name.
Another subtle shift that happened through the writing was moving from describing fathers as invisible to fathers as hidden. In my first, abandoned draft (one of several versions), I wrote:
I am six feet and two inches tall—not unimposing—but I am often invisible… . I am invisible in doctor’s offices, where the nurses and doctors caring for my wife do not ask my name, do not ask how I am coping. I am largely invisible in the scientific literature. I am invisible in society and in the culture. I am a father whose baby has died.
Invisibility doesn’t capture it correctly. I’m not invisible, but hidden or overlooked. The latter are more active, more purposeful. They take effort to accomplish. Invisibility denotes a characteristic of me, but hiding stillbirth was something others (and sometimes I) do. That small change of diction provoked the analytical breakthrough for my section on “The Sociopolitical Economy of Stillbirth,” that “Yes, the average person finds it hard to bring up in polite conversation (the micro-level hiding of stillbirth), but much more is needed to keep stillbirth a little-known pregnancy outcome throughout an entire culture” (Weaver-Hightower, 2012, p. 477). It takes no less than the cooperative efforts of media, businesses, the baby advice industry (often including doctors), and the government. Of course, I realize no grand conspiracy operates behind the scenes, in some smoke-filled star chamber, but obscuring the death of 25,000 babies a year is no small feat.
During the writing of “Waltzing Matilda” I also struggled to contain angry Marcus. In early iterations, including notes relegated to the junk drawer, I just seemed mad. I felt mad, honestly. And I was taking it out on the reader, with challenging tones and presumptions that readers would have dismissive attitudes. Consider “You want valid data? Holding your dead baby, cold, heavy and lifeless in your arms is the most valid data you may ever see.” I’m glad that line didn’t make it to the manuscript. Yet it was also true at the time I wrote it.
Most importantly, why was I so angry at the future reader who was nice enough to pick up my article and begin to read? I had to interrogate my emotional drive toward anger in the writing, not solely to calm myself and avoid offending, but also to think about places where I could constructively (rather than alienatingly) present anger as a very real emotion of the stillbirth experience (again, language from Kübler-Ross, 1969). Anger has acceptability for men that other emotions do not. Was I using anger to hide other, more masculinity-threatening emotions? Such are the kinds of analytical decisions one makes in deciding how to tell secrets.
A basic way that humans devised to communicate across their differences is comparison and contrast. I show you an apple, put it next to your orange, and—see!—they are different. In “Waltzing Matilda,” I felt I could help readers relate to the stillbirth experience by having them compare it to what I think of as the movie montage, a kind of ideal progression of images about childbirth. Readers have likely seen the montage of ideal pregnancy countless times on film, or perhaps done it themselves. It goes something like this: extreme close up on pregnancy test with a pink plus; quick cut to happy embrace; transition to an ultrasound where the doctor points out a heartbeat and genitals; cut to setting up a crib (perhaps with frustration/hilarity); close up on the expectant mother holding up cute clothes during a baby shower; jump cut to water breaking at an inconvenient time; medium shot of huffing mom rolling in on a wheelchair to the hospital desk; pan over to same huffing mom, knees spread wide while a doctor works away, dad holding mom’s hand; slow motion as the tightly bundled baby is handed to the exhausted but ecstatic parents. I basically lay this out in “Waltzing Matilda” to establish the known, and then it all comes crashing down, all the harder because of that identification readers have been doing with these representative scenes.
I particularly found contrast analytically and rhetorically productive in the section “My Daughter’s Body.” Holding Matilda’s body was a kind of out-of-body experience for me, so to speak. Even knowing she was dead did not deter my utterly compulsive behaviors of touching her gently and swaddling her. I wanted to understand how my rational mind could so easily go absent. The answer came in the contrasts: she was dead but she was also a baby. Being a baby overwhelmed any other consideration, so everyone treated Matilda as a baby, carefully and lovingly. Being present but not feeling, being a baby but not alive: such contrasts are overwhelming to the mind, so we hold on to the hopeful one. I hoped my readers would hold on to their favoritism toward living babies, too, because it held the key to understanding the sorrow of it simply not being true. As I noted in the article itself, these dualities—“the body as beautiful and horrible, simultaneously saying hello and goodbye, giving birth but leaving with empty arms” (Weaver-Hightower, 2012, p. 470)—are defining characteristics of the stillbirth experience.
I want to keep this next part secret. It seems crass, manipulative, mercenary. Yet, I am an autoethnographer, so secrets must be revealed. I hope readers will pardon my purposeful manipulation of their emotions. Stillbirth, grief, and bereavement are emotional topics, though. How could I accomplish my goal to share what it’s like without provoking reactions like sadness, shock, disgust, fear, or sympathy? I needed to manufacture emotional connection for understanding, through moments and scenes that touch or perhaps even assault.
Transferring the story from my mind onto the page required carefully crafting the language, a set of analytical decisions meant to break down and best share the content. (Of course, part of the content of an evocative autoethnography is a particular emotional resonance.) Thus, part of interpreting through writing was looking for creative nonfiction techniques that fit my intentions.
Many of my techniques were simply playing with sentences. Short sentences have impact. The essay starts simply with “My baby died” and ends with “I miss her.” Digressions (appositive material) break down the fourth wall, as it were, between reader and writer. As Brecht (1964) imagined happened in Chinese theater, moments of the narrator stepping out of the narrative flow eases readers’ exhaustion from complete, unceasing empathy—which a more straightforwardly written narrative might provoke.
I employed figures of speech frequently to convey my meanings and the emotional context. Dotted throughout, for example, are numerous words that can refer to birth used in alternative ways, such as borne, stillness, breathe life, and expected. I used verbs and nouns meant to kick the reader squarely in their assumptions, like using “father” for my role even outside of a biological context. I have Christmas “sleigh by.” The three of us—Matilda, her mother, and me—“fall in love.” I wished to see my daughter “completely naked.”
Double entendres layer on meaning, as well. The title has them—“A Father’s Stillbirth” referred to Matilda’s actual stillbirth as well as my fatherhood’s stillbirth; “Waltzing” refers to the song “Waltzing Matilda,” which, if you know the Australianisms, means to carry while the Matilda of the song refers to a blanket tied up into a backpack and containing one’s worldly possessions. I could not have known when we named her just how I would have to carry Matilda (and her few worldly possessions) the rest of my days.
Naturally, metaphors abounded. I am particularly pleased with the layering of metaphors in the second paragraph of the section, “The Long After,” where “wound … sutured,” “tear … knit … fabric” and “laundry” weave together a metaphor for how death slowly incorporates itself into a resumed life. The metaphor of a curator provided a productive “far-out comparison” (Strauss & Corbin, 1990, pp. 90–91) in the “Things” section; this image opened my eyes to many of the actual properties of the stillbirth experience, particularly parents’ almost fussy curatorial behaviors around their child’s artifacts.
I used gerunds (losing, becoming, waltzing) for activeness, which I learned from Charmaz (2006, p. 49) who, in turn, learned it from Glaser (1978). Questions posed rhetorically, if phrased just so, can seem desperate or angry (“Would my wife and I ever have a date again—or sex?” or “Whose baby dies?”). I used the orator’s standby of repetition in key places (“The laundry must be done. Meals must be cooked” in the section “The Long After” and “I have learned …” in the “Not a Conclusion” section). And literary allusions were made to Eliot’s (1922) The Waste Land (“a brown fog” on p. 471), Shakespeare’s Hamlet (“pale cast” on p. 473 and “undiscovered country” on p. 486), and Judy Blume (1970) in my section heading, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Marcus.”
I also intentionally played with tone, register, and genre throughout “Waltzing Matilda.” As discussed already, the article purposefully combines numerous genres—crystallization. I wanted to do the voices of each genre, discussing sociopolitical economy in my sociologist voice, death rituals in many cultures in my anthropologist voice, depression and psychological distress in my psychologist voice, fetal-maternal hemorrhage in my medical voice, and horrible, beautiful, maddening in my father voice. The diction changes with each voice as do the sentence structures and uses of literature.
All these writing conventions are, again, analytical decisions. In other words, the how of telling my secret was crucial, for telling it in these ways helped me understand the experience and hopefully aids others in their understanding, too—hopefully subtly rather than didactically.
The academic peer review process also aided analysis. Having that back and forth with reviewers forced me to think about how others viewed the situation and my representation of it. I typically take reviews quite personally and defensively, but probably never quite so much as in the reviews for “Waltzing Matilda.” Luckily, I also always wait to respond to reviews until I have had time to talk myself down! (I know it had to be hard for reviewers, too; how does one diplomatically critique a story about not only a dead baby, but the author’s dead baby?) Still, reviewers’ commentary frequently sent me back to helpfully recast some explanations or expand certain avenues. Take my discussions of stillbirth support groups. In the original draft, I had very few references to my support group, but a reviewer picked up on underdeveloped references and how, if further explored, these might fill out the picture of fathers’ actual supports.
In other cases, reviewer reactions forced me to clarify my own understanding, to ponder more deeply why some things were important and others were not. I especially think about one reviewer’s questions about the ethical acceptability of using the photograph of Matilda (Figure 1.4). The reviewer suggested that, “surely Matilda, even though she never lived on this earth, has a right to be considered ethically in relation to the publication of her photograph.” My first reaction was to angrily rebut that the reviewer simply didn’t want to look at a dead child—another iteration of everyone urging us to hide her away.
I knew Matilda’s photograph would be distressing for some people. Hell, I wanted seeing Matilda’s photograph to be distressing. Not as an act of cultural ignorance or insensitivity (some cultures are distressed by viewing photographs of the dead), not as a cruelty to readers, and not as an insensitivity to our families or to Matilda (she is dead, which has specific spiritual meaning to me about how much she would care about such things). Rather, perhaps with a quantum of malice, the provocateur’s handiest tool, I intentionally rattled social mores because—let’s be real—some readers don’t want to see her and don’t want me to show her. I sympathize. I do. Yet that is the very problem, the core of my argument. Some readers’ desires for me to hide her, to keep it to myself, or—worse—forget her so that social comfort can return, creates an unbearably painful oppression for me, my wife, and millions of others. Matilda’s picture offered resistance. Besides, she’s beautiful; I’m just as proud of her as I am my living children, and I want to show her off.
Even so, I felt I needed to try to better understand exactly what the reviewer’s concerns were about using the photograph, for the reviewer was surely being more charitable than my initial reaction credited him or her with. The reviewer’s comment forced me to really ponder and analyze why I felt so strongly that the picture be included. Thus, I added a lengthy footnote that spoke to the ethics, and it ended up taking me in directions that underscored the importance of things and of social acceptance to the parents of stillborn children. It was a kind of analysis team—the reviewer and me—who created this insight.
Of course, I cannot ignore my most important reviewer, my wife. Though her name does not appear on the article’s byline, I consider her a co-analyst. We have spent many years analyzing together the data of our everyday lives. Naturally we have discussed Matilda’s death thousands of times. What-if scenarios, member checking, replaying events, discourse analysis, applying theory to experience: These are the analytical routines we share on long car rides, in quiet moments before we crawl out of bed, or while dinner simmers on the stove. She is my first and last reader, and nothing about Matilda goes out of the door without her feedback. Not approval per se, for our experiences are individual, too, and we are each the final arbiter of that. Indeed, our individual experiences deepen our collective experience, showing each other through our differences the complexity and variability of grief. At times my wife’s and my interrater reliability (e.g., MacPhail, Khoza, Abler, & Ranganathan, 2016) might be low, but that turns out to be a strength rather than a weakness for the autoethnographer. No one could better teach me about Matilda and grief than my wife.
As I look across the analytical processes that led to “Waltzing Matilda,” the distributed, wild, and hybrid nature of my analysis fascinates me. Analysis happened informally as well as formally. It happened simultaneously with collecting artifacts and living experiences. Analysis happened within my lifeworld and in reading about others’ lifeworlds. It happened of my own volition, through dialogue with others, and as a reaction to peer review. Analysis happened in pictures and in prose, before writing as well as during and after.
Perhaps such feral diffusion of analytic processes particularly afflicts autoethnography. To be one’s own subject demands constant analysis of experience, and all experience might count. I think, though, that all qualitative researchers experience this wild diffusion of analysis to some degree. We may not notice as it happens. We overlook our inspirations. Or we might not feel free in our disciplines or publishing venues to admit that our processes are anything but clean and seamless. We may spin fictions of systematic, stepwise progress through our studies, unadulterated by bias. In the end, though, these are just fictions.
To counter these inventions about our analyses, I hope that qualitative researchers learn to tell that important secret we share, that our analyses, like our lives, are often messy, partial, influenced, and time- and culture-bound. It’s a powerful secret, yes, and a dangerous one, too. Qualitative researchers have much to lose from telling this secret wrong—to suggest that it is somehow a failing inherent to the methodology. If other forms (quantitative, positivist forms) of research refuse to admit their human-produced frailties, too—numbers are as arbitrary and biased as words, even if they appear to work predictably—divulging this secret could be doubly dangerous to qualitative methodology. So, enough! It’s time to tell secrets.
Aho, A. L., Tarkka, M-T., Åstedt-Kurki, P., & Kaunonen, M. (2006). Fathers’ grief after the death of a child. Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 27, 647–663.
Blume, J. (1970). Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret. New York, NY: Yearling.
Brecht, B. (1964). Alienation effects in Chinese acting. In J. Willett (Ed.), Brecht on theatre: The development of an aesthetic (pp. 91–99). New York, NY: Hill and Wang.
Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as method. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis. London: Sage.
Conklin, M. (2006). Hieroglyph. Water-Stone Review, 9, 200–217.
Dickie, V. A. (2003). Data analysis in qualitative research: A plea for sharing the magic and the effort. The American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 57, 49–56.
Eliot, T. S. (1922). The waste land. New York, NY: Boni and Liveright.
Ellingson, L. L. (2009). Engaging crystallization in qualitative research: An introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Glaser, B. G. (1978). Theoretical sensitivity. Mill Valley, CA: The Sociology Press.
Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Chicago, IL: Aldine.
Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On death and dying. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kuttner, P., Sousanis, N., & Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2018). How to draw comics the scholarly way: Creating comics-based research in the academy. In P. Leavy (Ed.), Handbook of arts-based research (pp. 396–423). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Layne, L. L. (2003). Motherhood lost: A feminist account of pregnancy loss in America. New York, NY: Routledge.
Lewis, C. S. (1996). A grief observed. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco. (Original work published 1961).
MacDorman, M. F., Kirmeyer, S., & Wilson, E. C. (2012). Fetal and perinatal mortality, United States, 2006. National Vital Statistics Reports, 60(8). Retrieved from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_08.pdf
MacPhail, C., Khoza, N., Abler, L., & Ranganathan, M. (2016). Process guidelines for establishing intercoder reliability in qualitative studies. Qualitative Research, 16, 198–212.
McCloud, S. (2006). Making comics: Storytelling secrets of comics, manga, and graphic novels. New York, NY: Harper.
McCracken, E. (2008). An exact replica of a figment of my imagination: A memoir. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Co.
Moustakas, C. (1994). Phenomenological research methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Richardson, L. (1994). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 516–529). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Saldaña, J. (Ed.). (2005). Ethnodrama: An anthology of reality theatre. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Schwartz, J. B. (2006, December). The waiting room. Vogue, 196(12), 134, 140, 142.
Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1990). Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Tillmann-Healy, L. M. (1996). A secret life in a culture of thinness: Reflections on body, food, and bulimia. In C. Ellis & A. P. Bochner (Eds.), Composing ethnography: Alternative forms of qualitative writing (pp. 76–108). Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Vance, J. C., Boyle, F. M., Najman, J. M., & Thearle, M. J. (2002). Couple distress after sudden infant or perinatal death: A 30-month follow up. Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, 38, 368–372.
Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2002). The truth about grooms (Or, how to tell those tuxedoed men apart). In F. V. Tochon (Ed.), The foreign self: Truth telling as educational inquiry (pp. 201–217). Madison, WI: Atwood.
Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2008). The politics of policy in boys’ education: Getting boys “right”. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2012). Waltzing Matilda: An autoethnography of a father’s stillbirth. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 41, 462–491.
Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2013). Sequential art for qualitative research: Making comics to make meaning of the social world. In C. Syma & R. Weiner (Eds.), Graphic novels and comics in the classroom: Essays on the educational power of sequential art (pp. 260–273). Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.
Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2017). Losing Thomas & Ella: A father’s story (a research comic). Journal of Medical Humanities, 38, 215–230.