Keening for Carl: Mentor and Poetry Man

Abstract

This evocative autoethnography reflects the author’s grief following the death of a professor on her doctoral committee. She weaves poetic inquiry “to capture the contextual and psychological worlds of both poet and subject.” Autoethnography can “capture, probe, and render understandable the problematic experience,” and convey therapeutic stories as we write to make sense of ourselves and purge our burdens. Overall, autoethnography grounds the author with a deeper understanding about the personal and cultural influences of grief.

Keywords:

• Grief
• mentor
• autoethnography
• poetic inquiry

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karen V. Lee

Karen V. Lee, PhD, is lecturer, faculty advisor, area coordinator, and cofounder of the Teaching Initiative for Music Educators cohort (TIME), at the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada. Her research interests include issues of memoir, autoethnography, poetic inquiry, performance ethnography, creative-relational inquiry, women’s life histories, writing practices, music and music teacher education, and arts-based approaches to qualitative research. Her doctoral dissertation was a book of short stories titled Riffs of Change: Musicians Becoming Music Educators. She is a teacher, writer, musician, teacher/music educator, and researcher. Currently, she teaches undergraduate and graduate students in both traditional and online contexts alongside her academic and scholarly writing pursuits.