Five Holiday Letters: A Fiction

Abstract

Moved by a desire to evoke in readers some possibilities for subjective meaning and emotional experiences available in reading personal correspondence, the author offers a set of five fictional holiday letters. The decision to use fiction is justified by recourse to current scholarship on nontraditional narratives in qualitative research. The author further discusses the grounds for this fictional presentation of research results by explaining his ambition to share his understanding of the structural properties of the holiday letters epistolary genre and its situated writers, which he acquired in earlier, more traditional qualitative studies, without minimizing the gains of fiction writing. More central to the purposes of this effort is his desire to create a unique character who gives voice to particular human struggles and values at the juncture of the modern and postmodern experience: Ginny Balfour is inspired by specific women letter writers but is a construction of his imagination.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Angrosino, M. (1998). Opportunity house: Ethnographic stories of mental retardation. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.

Banks, S. P. (1998). The Tioga tapes. In A. Banks & S. P. Banks (Eds.), Fiction and social research: By ice or fire (pp. 255-262). Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.

Banks, S. P. , Louie, E. , & Einerson, M. E. (in press). Constructing personal identity in holiday letters. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

Cortázar, J. (1991). [Interview with Jason Weiss, editor of Writing at risk: Interviews in Paris with uncommon writers, pp. 39-56]. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Denzin, N. K. (1997). Interpretive ethnography: Ethnographic practices for the 21st century. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Diversi, M. (1998). Glimpses of street life: Representing lived experience through short stories. Qualitative Inquiry, 4(2), 131-147.

Ellis, C. , & Flaherty, M. G. (Eds.). (1992). Investigating subjectivity: Research on lived experience. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Federman, R. (1993). Critifiction: Postmodern essays. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Gordimer, N. (1995). Writing and being. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

10.

Highsmith, P. (1993). Thickening my plots. In C. Boylan (Ed.), The agony and the ego: The art and strategy of fiction writing explored (pp. 151-156). New York: Penguin Books.

11.

Iser, C. (1993). The fictive and the imaginary: Charting literary anthropology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

12.

Krieger, S. (1984). Fiction and social science. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 5, 269-286.

13.

Krieger, S. (1991). Social science and the self: Personal essays on an art form. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

14.

Kundera, M. (1988). The art of the novel (L. Asher, Trans.). New York: Penguin Putnam.

15.

Polkinghorne, D. E. (1995). Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis. In J. A. Hatch & R. Wisniewski (Eds.), Life history and narrative (pp. 5-24). London: Falmer.

16.

Riffaterre, M. (1990). Fictional truth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

17.

Strauss, A. , & Corbin, J. (1990). Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. Newbury Park, CA: Sage

18.

Trinh, T.M.-H. (1991). When the moon waxes red: Representation, gender, and cultural politics. New York: Routledge.

19.

Welty, E. (1998). Must the novelist crusade? In E. Welty (Ed.), Eudora Welty: Stories, essays, & memoir (pp. 803-814). New York: Library of America.