[ Contents ]
From: Terry Dartnall
Date: 10/20/03
Time: 5:59:26 PM
Remote Name: 132.234.9.87
Hi Derek,
“I think we’ve been taught to believe that it has to be one or the other. We see this issue all the time with so-called ‘blended identities’. For example, people of ‘mixed-race’ would argue the same thing: that our identity can encompass both sets of experiences.”
Funnily enough, I said exactly this in the first version of my reply to you, along with some other stuff about mongrels being stronger than pedigrees, and then deleted it. I thought I might have been overdoing the metaphor.
I write poetry and fiction as well. I recently got so hacked off with academia that I decided to spend less time on research and more time writing fiction. I had a few stories accepted and then moved back into research again. When you do research you’re putting something together, just as you are when you write fiction, but there’s the additional constraint of verisimilitude – of trying to capture the truth. There is a sense in which that constraint applies to fiction as well, but you have more leeway with it.
Cheers
Terry