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Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss how a deeply personal experience of loss and grief, connected to substance abuse and mental illness, could connect to larger contexts and speak to social issues when using autoethnography and creative writing as tools.

Paper long abstract:

In 2013 and 2015 the author lost two of her childhood friends - Marcus and Noel. They both died for reasons connected to social vulnerability, substance abuse and mental illness. In order to transform this personal experience into an ethnographic research project the author felt a need to explore new strategies for research, both in regards of collecting the material and in the task of depicting the lives of Marcus and Noel and this experience of loss and grief in text. In this, the author turned to autoethnography, as well as various forms of creative academic writing such as poetic inquiry (poetry as method). Non-conventional research seemed to demand non-conventional forms of writing in order to match content and form.

This paper will focus on the knowledge gained from this endeavour. It will discuss how a deeply personal experience of loss and grief could connect to larger contexts and speak to social issues when using autoethnography and creative writing as tools. It will show how we might come a little closer to the goal of social justice and grievability for those who are seldom viewed as grievable by transforming their experiences into texts that people can relate to.