Dear Doctors Bochner and Ellis,I am writing this email to tell you how reading your book, Evocative Autoethnography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories, has helped my dissertational experiences greatly. As a PhD candidate, I was looking for the best method to narrate my story of English language learning as a process of transnational socialization. I came across your book in the early stages of my methodological readings. I must say, reading it felt like finding water in an oasis of the desert of academic manuscripts. It touched my heart.As you note, your book offers “a straightforward and systematic treatment of the origins, goals, concepts, genres, methods, aesthetics, ethic and truth conditions of evocative ethnography and narrative inquiry.”1 Along with the foundational knowledge of autoethnography it offered, your book had an encouraging role in including my emotions in my story. Although we have never met in person, please see these series of factional emails as a tribute to the emotional and intellectual guidance you have provided me through your book.* * *Dear esteemed professors,I admire your well-crafted book. Its genre, characters, tone, and settings have been very carefully thought through and meticulously organized in a combined academic and literary genre. Set in the scene of an imaginary workshop at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, you hold a conversational tone, which distances your book from conventionally informative (and oftentimes boring) academic texts and locates it somewhere closer to literary works—an “academic novel” in which you present yourself as “characters,” not as omniscient authors. Doing so, you show a vivid example of “blurring the boundaries between social sciences and humanities.”2 After all, as noted in the book, “autoethnography sits in the middle of things—you know, between art and science, between rationality and emotionality, and so on.”3 All of these carefully knit features, in return, make your book an engaging page turner.* * *Dear Dr. Bochner and Dr. Ellis,Reading your book made me feel that I was participating in one of your imagined workshops. Engaging in these workshops dialogically, I have learned so much from your insightful experiences, intimate stories along with the attached handouts and activities. Please allow me to discuss my take from each part of the book separately.In part I, “Origins and History,” where you connect your experiences of “coming to autoethnography” with “the rise of autoethnography,” you underscore “both the ethnographic, outward lens (towards culture) and the autobiographical, inward scrutiny (toward the self), however blurred, of a vulnerable observer.”4 This statement reminds me of the fragility of my growing researcher identity. You see, Dr. Bochner, like you, “at school, I felt different from the other kids—poorer, less at ease with myself. […] I didn’t want to be like the other kids at school, but I didn’t want to be like my parents either.”5 Coming from a lower working-class background, I always felt like a misfit at university as a first-generation college student. Even when I was a doctoral student at a U.S. university, I always felt marked by my “international-ness” via my linguistic, religious, and ethnic identities. In your book, you discuss how autoethnography has risen out of the crisis of representation in social sciences. I had had my own crisis of representation—as I was sure my story would lack the emotional aspects if told by another researcher; I realized that researching on myself would be a good start for my professional research life. That is why I decided to write my dissertation as a critical autoethnography of socialization.Thank you for welcoming me into the fascinating world of autoethnography and making me see that my story mattered and needed to be told in my own voice.In part II, “Composing Evocative Stories,” you discuss how to craft evocative autoethnography with a moving example: “Thinking with ‘Maternal Connections.’” In this part, you mention how you walk around “academic dialect,” that is, “to sound smart in order to gain respect, […] and start talking like an academic.”6 Instead of opting for the “analytic, third person spectator voice of the traditional social science prose [… that] distances the writer from the reader, creating a gap between self and other,” you avoid “this kind of emotional distancing” by using a rather unorthodox yet friendly, dialogical, and emotional tone of voice.7Throughout the book, but especially in this part, you show—rather than tell—aspiring evocative ethnographers how to integrate emotions in academic texts. As you state, “showing evokes, whereas telling tends to inform or analyze. Also, showing arouses the senses. […] Showing moves, draws attention, and speeds the story.”8 This advice has been the most useful yet the most difficult one for me while writing my dissertation. As you remark, my challenge was “to artfully arrange life in ways that enable readers to enter a dialogue” with my life “as well as with their understanding of their own.”9 I tried to overcome this challenge by providing—what you call—“concrete sensory details”10 about myself and other people around me, to whom I approached as characters in my story.Thank you for “showing” me the aesthetic and technical ways of writing an autoethnography and leading the way all through my dissertational process.In part III, “Ethical Dilemmas and Ethnographic Choices,” where you bring into discussion ethical challenges and ethnographic alternatives, you focus on relational ethics of care, which “includes mindful self-reflection about the researcher’s role, motives, and feelings during the research process. This mindfulness extends beyond ourselves as investigators to our participants and the communities in which they live.”11 Being introduced to relational ethics has been the biggest take-away for me from part III. You see, as a novice autoethnographer, I had been so focused on “my own story” and “my own voice” that, I must admit, I paid little attention to the people around me—the people who were (and still are) important characters in my story, and they deserve(d) to maintain their anonymity.Your proposition of relational ethics of care extends beyond autoethnographic research and lands itself on qualitative research in general. As you point out, “Researchers who position themselves in the text or take on the role of an active participants can consider themselves autoethnographers.”12 After all, no research exists where the researcher’s ethico-onto-epistemological beliefs, thoughts, and emotions have no effect on the process itself. This is true, especially in research projects that rely on recall and introspection. Your suggestion for “systematic sociological introspection” makes so much sense for all types of autoethnography because when we introspect, we are “not just listening to one voice in your head,” but often we “access multiple interacting voices, which themselves are products of social forces and roles.”13 It is this systematic sociological introspection that enables us to mindfully construct and narrate our stories in compassionate ways. No matter what type of autoethnography we opt for and how many authors our autoethnographic projects involve, it is our responsibility to make sense of our methodological and literary choices. We can use interviews, stories, poetry, and performance to evoke feelings and analyze our experiences provided that we believe it is the right way to engage in mindful dialogues with our readers.Thank you for introducing me to many different types of autoethnographies in this section. More than that, however, I must thank you for bringing in the ethical aspects of autoethnographic writing.In part IV, “Narrative Truth: Meanings in Motion,” you draw attention to how readers may engage with the autoethnographic stories in meaningful, emotional, and dialogical ways. You say readers “think with a story from within the framework of their own lives.”14 When I read “Thinking with ‘Bird on the Wire,’” Dr. Bochner, I remembered my past—my own relationship with my father, who died when I was ten. I cannot tell you how similar our childhoods were. Like yours, my father also beat me and my siblings. He was the “male authoritative figure” I hated so much. On the other hand, he was my father and I needed his love more than he needed my respect. While reading your story, I felt I was writing my own instantaneously in my mind. Oh Gosh! Why do I now hate patriarchy so much? Is it because I experienced its fierce authority embodied in my father’s muscled arms and strong hands, the force of which I felt on my cheeks every other day when he came home from work? Why do I now try to treat my son with love and patience more than an authority figure? Is it because I made myself a promise that I would not be “that” kind of a father? Does making such promises mature you way earlier than other kids? Memories…elusive memories that I had buried six feet under with my father’s death…. They resurfaced as I read through your childhood story. This happened because you opened up your vulnerabilities to me through memories…. As you say, “autoethnographic text directs attention to meanings rather than facts, readings rather than observations, and interpretations rather than findings.”15 Who cares whether you remember such memories correctly? To be frank, all I cared about was how you felt re-remembering your memories…and more than that…how your story resonated with my own. I cannot tell you how therapeutic this was for me. No traditional academic texts could have made me feel this way.Thank you for sharing your vulnerabilities with me. That encouraged me to bring out my insecurities, depression, challenges, and so on in my autoethnographic dissertation. I had always imagined that dissertationing would be heavy intellectual work. Yet, reading your book showed me that it would be a healing process as well.* * *Dear Professors,When I volunteered to write a review of your book, I had no idea it would be in an email format. Yet there it is. Honestly, you gave me this idea. Before my interest in autoethnography grew, I always thought that a book review had a more or less standard format: read the book, summarize its parts, discuss its contribution to the broader literature, and comment on “what could have been better.” However, I wanted to go beyond that. I needed to write it in a conversational tone; bring in my own experiences of reading it; blur the genres between academic and literary texts. On top of everything, I needed to express my gratitude to you and your scholarly work by “showing” rather than “telling.”Thank you for transforming my academic writing skills through your book. Thank you for encouraging me to read and respond to it in personal and emotional ways. Overall, you maintain an “embracing” style right from the start, when first-time readers hold your book in their hands. Seeing the cover image that depicts two people hugging each other gives the reader a warm feeling of welcome. As you say, “sometimes hugs mean more than words.”16Well, Dear Doctors, I hug you back with all my heart.Best Regards,Ufuk