3/2: an unexpectedly timely conversation

A friend from Little Rock came to campus for a lecture this evening, and Chris and I had dinner with her beforehand. At the restaurant we ended up talking about the poetics, rhetoric, and ethics involved in using the 1st person in writing (especially when it's a fictitious "I" that sounds like an autobiographical "I"). And then at the lecture the risks of that kind of writing were played out: one of the speakers at the lecture had distilled people's spoken accounts of their own lives into brief write-ups presented as if the people themselves had written them. It didn't seem like he always did this in a kind and careful way, and the three of us were a bit angry with him. But it did make us laugh to have had our conversation so close to the (negative) example--and it helped that we could share our exasperation in the parking lot before heading off on our separate roads home.