The authors engage in an evocative autoethnography1 as they live through the different ways they both grieve and mourn the death of a well-loved friend, colleague, and professor. They share how they navigate the grieving process of death and dying through their cultural traditions.2 Sharing personal stories can be therapeutic to make sense of ourselves and our experiences3 as writing the autoethnography “must always be interventionist, as it gives notice to those who may otherwise not be allowed to tell their story or who are denied a voice to speak.”4 In the end, the authors use autoethnography to live through the grief as it grounds them with a deeper and healthy understanding about the personal and cultural influences shaping bereavement5 as they cope with the death in their own cultural ways.
Prayers for The Poet: An Autoethnography Available to Purchase
Peter Gouzouasis is a lifelong musician and student of guitar and vocal music. A professor in the department of Curriculum & Pedagogy (Music Education) at the University of British Columbia since 1990, his books include Pedagogy in a New Tonality: Teacher Inquiries on Creative Tactics, Strategies, Graphics Organizers and Visual Journals in the K-12 Classroom and Being with A/r/tography (Sense Publishers). Peter has published autoethnographies of music teaching and learning contexts in numerous journals and books since 2000, and is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion of Music, Autoethnography, and Reflexivity (Routledge).
Karen V. Lee, PhD, is lecturer, faculty advisor, area coordinator, and co-founder of the Teaching Initiative for Music Educators cohort (TIME) at the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Her research includes issues of memoir, autoethnography, poetic inquiry, performance ethnography, creative-relational inquiry, women’s life histories, writing practices, 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. In 2020, she received the Killam Teaching Prize.
Peter Gouzouasis, Karen V. Lee; Prayers for The Poet: An Autoethnography. Journal of Autoethnography 1 July 2023; 4 (3): 423–431. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2023.4.3.423
Download citation file:
Sign in
Client Account
Sign in via your Institution
Sign in via your Institution
University of California Press