All posts by Demelza Marlin

Working with a Transcript

Creativity, Gift and Grace, Martin Buber, Time and Space

Colleagues of mine recently asked me to ‘teach’ them how to write first-person narratives using interview transcripts. What method did I use? What were the steps I followed? How long should they be? Did I edit out stutters and conversational fillers? Did I correct grammar?

They knew I had written first-person narratives before and knew that I advocated it as a honest and accessible form of sociological writing.  That is true, so I was happy to comply. However, what happened next surprised me. I found it incredibly difficult to describe how I edited a transcript or why I made the editorial decisions I did. Instead of a series of techniques to be learnt,  I found myself coming back to the form of relation I was in when undertaking the editing. What follows is one of  many attempts to describe how and why I work with interview transcripts. Continue reading Working with a Transcript →

Hold Nothing in Reserve

Creativity, Everyday Mysteries, Gift and Grace, Teachers and Students, Time and Space

One.

They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over.

A few years ago I read the Gospel of Mark with some friends. We moved slowly and carefully through the text, often spending a whole evening on just a few lines. One passage that struck me was the ‘feeding of the 5000’. In that story Mark describes the miracle of the fishes and loaves in which Jesus turns a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish into food for 5,000. At the end of the story Mark says, ‘They ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up the twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over’.

Those twelve basketfuls of leftover bread troubled me. I recall badgering my fellow readers about it. Why the excess? God knows the hairs numbered on your head, why not stop with food sufficient to feed the 5,000? Why create more than was needed? What would happen to those extra pieces of bread? Would they be eaten the next day or would they go to waste? What could this excess mean? Was it a symbol of luxury, a Gallilean potlatch?

My naive questions, generously accommodated by my friends, bellied a genuine concern about wasteful excess. But what I didn’t realise then was that the feeding of the multitudes isn’t a story about consumption. It is a story about what is given. It is a story about the abundance of a love sufficient to cover us all, a love that isn’t limited by number, a love available to any who might come.

‘Here, my brother, my sister, come and sit with us. We have food enough for you’. Continue reading Hold Nothing in Reserve →

Glory

Everyday Mysteries, Gift and Grace, Time and Space

‘They ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised’ (Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses).

I rode home last night through a bracing wind. It was coming up from the harbour when I crossed the bridge. The sun had just set behind the city buildings and the water was dark. Deep and blue, but only just.

The road leading up to Observatory Hill was dark too and the lights on passing bikes were bright in that darkness. It was hard to see and I was frightened, a little. Or tentative. The coming night held an animal grace that I did not. Elemental. And yet, there I was, riding in that alien beauty.

The Writing Life – Homage to Annie Dillard

Creativity, Everyday Mysteries, Gift and Grace, , , ,

One.

I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You abandon your masterpiece and sink into the real masterpiece  (Leonard Cohen)

Two.

In her book, The Writing Life, Annie Dillard talks about an American writer who has written a dozen major books over six decades. A book, she says, can take years to write. But this writer wrote one of his books, ‘a perfect novel, in three months. He still speaks of it, with awe, almost whispering. Who wants to offend the spirit that hands out such books’? (Dillard, The Writing Life, 13).

She describes the heroism it takes to write a book. The impossibility of the task and the humility required to meet it. ‘Courage utterly opposes the bold hope that this is such fine stuff that the work needs it, or the world. Courage, exhausted, stands on bare reality: this writing weakens the work. You must demolish the work and start over’ (Dillard, The Writing Life, 4).

The book, finally completed, conceived in your mind and constructed through your efforts doesn’t belong you. It never has. It came to you through an act of grace, unmerited. That it came to you at all is still a mystery. All you remember is the struggle, the awful daily struggle to find the words, the unease which remained with you from beginning to end: Can I do it? Can it be done? It was horrible. It almost killed you. It did, in fact, kill you and what was left in the wake of that devastation was the work, for which you are grateful. Continue reading The Writing Life – Homage to Annie Dillard →

Dialogue in class

Belonging, Creativity, Gift and Grace, Teachers and Students

Towards the end of my teaching session last year I experimented with a dialogue in one of my classes. We had read Bohm earlier in the session and although most of the students expressed disagreement with him, they seemed really interested in the ideas. When it came time to discuss their relationship to their research projects (how they were feeling about their research practices and work habits, their topics, the ethics involved in doing their research) I decided to run the class like a dialogue group. I explained what we were going to do. They would each have a turn offering something about their current relationship to their projects; together we would draw out connections and extensions between everyone’s comments and write them up on the board; then the dialogue would begin. Continue reading Dialogue in class →

unremembered love

Belonging, Bondi Beach, Care, Ecology, Gift and Grace, Time and Space

We belong to the world and are of the world because our formative experience was one of relation and involvement – with the maternal body, and through it, with the world. It is from that primary relation that we derive our ability to love, to feel loved and to be with. But we don’t remember it. We don’t remember the oneness of the womb or our infantile intertwinning with our mother’s bodies because memories belong to subjects and this foundational love was laid down before we became identifiable subjects [bounded subjects before an objective world].

Memory is about parts, separated and put back together. Member, dismember, remember. It is the job of the subject to undertake that ‘recollection’ of discrete events and experiences and forge them into a coherent narrative. But the primary experience I am describing happens to a self that doesn’t have parts, in a world that is without separations. Continue reading unremembered love →

greetings

Belonging, Everyday Mysteries, Gift and Grace, Uncategorized

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I am often struck by the different ways we use words.

Rereading a favourite book of mine recently I found myself marvelling at the author’s ability to evoke particular experiences and emotional states. Her unusual choice of words drew me into her world, but equally, caused me to consider their meaning. I had to read slowly and in reading slowly found myself consciously appreciating the craftsmanship of her writing. Continue reading greetings →

A Visit to L’Arche

Belonging, Care, Gift and Grace

Last Friday I took my Aunty Sheila to L’Arche for Spiritual Soup. Spiritual Soup is a gathering that takes place once a month at one of three L’Arche Houses in Sydney. Core members, assistants, coordinators, family and friends come together to share a simple dinner of soup and bread before adjoining to a quiet place in the house to celebrate the community’s solidarity through prayer, song and educational activities that core members are able to participate in. Continue reading A Visit to L’Arche →

Prenatal Screening – who we are

Care, Everyday Mysteries, Gift and Grace, , , ,

The Ethics of Prenatal Screening
Prenatal testing has become a standard part of antenatal care in Australia. At about 12 weeks pregnant women are offered a relatively simple, elective scan which, combined with a blood test, can screen for common chromosomal disorders such as Down Syndrome. Although this screening test is elective few women choose not to have the nuchal translucency ultrasound. Even fewer decide to continue a pregnancy after chromosomal abnormalities have been detected. Recent Victorian studies suggest that the abortion rate for Down Syndrome is something like 95%.

I came across this information whilst doing research for a course I was teaching on human rights, gender and justice. Continue reading Prenatal Screening – who we are →