Making My Narrative Mine: Unconventional Articulations of a Female Soldier

Abstract

I use fragments from my own military service to build a narrative of the self and weave this perspective together with the experiences of other female soldiers in prose poetry. This text addresses the complexity of the interview process and demonstrates that a full articulation of experience may include unconventional moments of sense making. These unconventional articulations generally lack a beginning, middle, and end, resist attempts at simple summary, and often elevate the narrative to an abstract level. I argue that articulations of experience are potentially contrary and intraoppositional and that they should be free of any impositions of order that are not the product of the teller.