Watermelons and Writing Qualitatively: Personal Reflections,Lessons Learned,and Prioritizing Process Alongside Product

Abstract

My grandmother grew watermelons, and a childhood spent helping her taught me a lot about writing, and about writing qualitatively. Neighboring farmers laced soil with fertilizers that accelerated growth but thickened the rind and softened the meat. Others pulled fruit from the vines before ripening, producing soft rinds and bland, mealy fruit. She’d cluck her tongue and say, “Watermelons don’t sweeten off the vine.” Writing and watermelons have a lot in common. When I first started writing academically, I invested significant time and energy in fancy words, convoluted ideas, and a desperate pace to publish, not perish, and what grew was thick, mushy, and sour. In my efforts to hurry and finish one project only to start another, I snatched words and thoughts hurriedly. Writing doesn’t sweeten off the vine, either. When we harvested melons, my grandmother’s careful attention meant rinds thumping with sticky, sugary sweetness. The deep red meat nearly pulsed with the love sown into the soil. Writing qualitatively is like that: daily care, refusal to cut corners, savoring process and product. When writing creates the same satisfaction, purpose, and laughter in my heart and gut that my grandmother’s watermelons always did: that is to write qualitatively.

The puff of diesel exhaust from the tractor puffed into my face. Coughing and fanning the smoke away, I dug my bare toes into the soil, contemplating the crows cawing from the power line, before striding forward in the plowed earth while my uncle began cutting the rows for my grandmother’s watermelon planting. This moment plays in my mind as the cursor moves across the page. Like the moment in the field, I fan away uncertainty and dig into my thoughts, contemplating what it means to write about qualitative inquiry—what it means to write qualitatively—and how I might explain that process. Despite extensive discussions on writing in relation to qualitative research (e.g., Gannon, 2006; Helin, 2018; Tamas, 2014; Ulmer, 2016), there have been few explicit considerations of what it means to “write qualitatively,” to write specifically in relationship with qualitative inquiry and qualitative identity. This paper and others in this issue consider that work.

And because so much of what I understand about work that matters, particularly over the course of my childhood, was informed by helping my grandmother to farm watermelons, those experiences in her field become a framework here for considering qualitatively writing. To bridge the seeming gap between dirt clods in the red Georgia clay and methodological writing, I also incorporate Barad’s discussions of “cutting together-apart” (2013; 2014, p. 168) to emphasize the complexities, alive-ness, and juiciness of watermelons and writing qualitatively.

Re-Turning the Soil

The tractor creaked as the plow eased its way into the soil. Tiny wild violets, which my grandmother called “Creeping Charlies,” dotted the field. My sister and I always picked a few and tucked them behind our ears before they were all plowed under by the tractor. Each springtime was planting time, already warm enough for gnats to swarm around our ankles and for sweat to bead on our necks and foreheads. As the plow clattered and cut through the dirt, my siblings and I followed along, bending and stooping to pull up stubborn weeds and toss away rocks that the tractor’s path pulled up.

After multiple passes by the tractor and our feet and hands, hauling the tiny purple “Charlie” flowers and their vines from the furrows, we would cup the velvety soil into mounds. We spaced the mounds apart to provide growing room for the plants, using our dirty feet for measurement. Once we had heaped the soil into fluffy mounds across the field, we used a crooked index finger to make indentions into the prepared earth, and then walked the field again to drop seeds into the little hills. Exactly six seeds, each time. Because not all of them would grow, after all. Most would not, in fact.

When very young, this part was tedious—the waiting around in the heat, the digging through the soil, the walking back-and-forth through newly cut rows. I was focused on the outcome—the watermelons, not the preparation. At one point early on, I even ventured to leave the field behind and chisel into the hardpacked clay elsewhere in my grandmother’s yard to grow my own watermelons. I would skip the boring part and feast sooner, I had resolved. Unsurprisingly, my rogue watermelon patch did not grow, and after years of weekends, spring breaks, and summer vacations helping in that watermelon field, I learned that the preparation was necessary for there to be growth, for the fields to bear fruit.

Re-Turning and Cutting Together-Apart

Barad wrote that “cutting together-apart” is about “a blending of separate parts or a blurring of boundaries” (2014, p. 176); cutting becomes productive and creative rather than destructive. A key part of this process of cutting together-apart is “re-turning, as in turning it over and over again” (p. 168). Re-turning is “a multiplicity of processes, such as the kinds earthworms revel in while helping […] turning the soil over and over” (p. 168). Barad noted that “it might seem a bit odd to enlist an organic metaphor to talk about” a process, such as writing in this case, “that might seem lifeless,” but such efforts are necessarily a “lively affair” (p. 168). This re-turning is a “means of aerating the soil, allowing oxygen in, opening it up and breathing new life into it” (p. 168). It is one that I learned from my grandmother’s fields and that I have applied to writing qualitatively.

Writing and Qualitative Research

There is an extensive body of literature that writes about qualitative writing, in ranges of journals, across disciplines and decades. In many instances, considerations of writing focus specifically on research methods, and ways that scholars might write about those approaches (e.g., Speedy et al., 2010; Ulichny, 1997; Wegener, 2014). In others, the focus is on how to negotiate the writing process in relation to others, such as collaborative writing efforts (e.g., Douglas & Carless, 2014; Gale et al., 2012; Taylor, 2014). The point in these cases is the process, the how-to. And particularly for novice qualitative researchers, such discussions are invaluable. But efforts to write about qualitative work, to examine procedures that support clear examinations of methodology, are not necessarily to write qualitatively.

There are also efforts to reshape writing, to remake the process in innovative and unconventional ways. Some engage in theoretical explorations (e.g., Bozalek, 2021; Hughes, 2018), such as Phillips and Larson (2012) working to teach and produce writing informed by materialist feminisms, or Shelton and Melchior’s writing hopping through time while theorizing with queer temporalities (2020). Some engagements with writing consider how composition might support or undermine commitments to equity and social justice (e.g., Harris, 2015; Krumer-Nevo & Sidi, 2012). These examples arrive closer at writing qualitatively than process-focused ones, in that the writing is not limited to a tool of communication. Processes and procedures are not the point, but a point—sometimes of entry, of contention, or of departure. Writing becomes a means but not at all the end. These writing efforts, which often invoke personal connections between content and authors, regularly engage in “messy stuff, and often [with] stories that [are…] risky and scary” (Shelton & Melchior, 2020, p. 58). Writing qualitatively requires risking the self—not necessarily in writing about painful topics, but in writing that pushes, that demands, and that moves the writer beyond where they started. Writing qualitatively is a journey through which the writer travels, not a process over which the writer has control.

Writing qualitatively is, then, necessarily visceral. It is not about solely conveying knowledge, but about communicating in ways that both the author(s) and reader(s) feel. A reciprocity of intellectual-emotional investment and connection in the writing and the reading of the writing. With these qualities, writing qualitatively demands taking time, taking care. Benozzo et al. (2013), in describing writing about qualitative research, asserted that those qualitative aspects may act as splinters: as they “wedge into the flesh; they bless us; they provoke pain; but at the same time we continually return to them” (p. 311). Gannon (2006) suggested that “blood and the cuts in the body are closely related to writing” (p. 485), with the pen acting as a “syringe, a suction point” whose flow is based on the personal, flowing lifeblood powering the writer’s heartbeats. Qualitative writing strives to report, to convey; qualitatively writing works to evoke, to quicken the heart, the mind, and even the flesh. Writing qualitatively is, I have realized through my own journey, an organic, living enterprise. And my flesh is bound to the deep, red flesh of my grandmother’s watermelons, and my writing—when it is done qualitatively—unravels from those plants’ green tendrils to reach out to others and to my deep, personal self.

Returning to the Watermelon Field and Writing Qualitatively

I spent countless springs walking behind the sputtering tractor, tossing weeds and rocks out of the furrows. The plow blades sliced up the soil, allowing the soil to breathe and the earthworms to swim through the earth. Years later, when I first began to write about qualitative research, I forgot these moments. I did not cut up and aerate the foundations into which I planted my ideas. I was in too big of a hurry: publish or perish, academic job market, impact factors. I recall early efforts of determinedly chiseling data to fit into documents, forcing ideas into the cracks and fissures that my violence created. I hurriedly shoved my headers—“Literature Review,” “Theoretical Framework,” “Methods,” and “Findings”—together and waited for them to flourish. Much like the rebellious watermelon patch attempted in my youth, they languished. If they did not die, through journal rejections or my own frustrations, they were sickly, anemic attempts with no vibrancy. Though even when I started to allow myself the seeming luxury of taking time to think, to plan—to aerate my ideas before turning to my laptop’s blinking cursor—once the writing process itself began, the rush to produce returned.

Throwing Soda To ‘Em

Across the field from my grandmother’s house, a neighbor also grew watermelons. The soil was good for them, and his own lumbering tractor breaking up the field echoed the one that my siblings and I followed. The preparation from one field to the other was a near-mirror. It was the planting that differed. As we cupped the deep brown soil into little hills for the seeds, the neighboring field looked as if there had been a winter storm. After tilling the earth, the other field got laced with a strong fertilizer that, from a distance, looked like coatings of baking soda. My grandmother always referred to this process as “Throwing soda,” and each spring as planting started, she would cluck her tongue as the neighboring snowfall began. “He’s out there throwin’ soda to ‘em,” she would say, and shake her head in disapproval.

Early on, throwin’ soda seemed a good idea to me. After all, the other field’s watermelons grew much faster and far larger than my grandmother’s. Maybe 6 or 7-years-old, I asked my grandmother, “Why don’t we throw soda, too? We wouldn’t have to wait so long. We could eat and sell them faster.” She chuckled, shook her head, and replied, “I’ll show you why shortly.” She hobbled on her severely arthritic hip to her rotary phone, and I forgot my question in my urgency to play. Weeks later, as the field across the road harvested fruit and we nurtured still-young vines and leaves, a rickety pickup truck lumbered into her yard, laden with watermelons. My siblings and I raced to our grandmother’s side, watching her hand the driver a couple of crumpled dollar bills from an apron pocket. He turned to us, grinning, and said, “Alright, young’ins—pick y’all out a good one!” Surprised, we selected a beautiful, swollen melon from the truck bed, and the moment after the pickup left the yard, we hacked it open in delight.

Then we stopped. We had eaten our grandmother’s ruby-red fruit for years, but this one was a sickly pink. Almost the shade of muscle tissue in our schoolbooks. Or chewed up, discarded bubble gum. And cutting through the rind to get to this horror had been a chore: it was thick and hard, inches thick and crowding out space where the melon’s meat should have been. The rind was unforgivingly hard, while the meat was mealy and soft. I tentatively nibbled a piece and then spit the mushy, bland fruit out, looking at our grandmother in confusion. “This is what soda does to ‘em,” she said. “They grow ‘em big and fast, so that they’re fit to look at but not to eat.” We scooped up the watermelon and tossed it through the fence to her chickens. Then, we returned to her field to coax the young vines into growing stronger in the sunshine and soil.

Writing Without Throwing Soda

Barad (2014) emphasizes the importance of time, and of taking time, in creating. Extending her organic metaphor, she notes the “infinitely rich condensed node in a changing field” that emerges “across spacetime in its ongoing iterative” growth (p. 169). Rather than accelerating or “zooming in on one moment in time” (p. 169), Barad insists that time “is diffracted” (p. 169), not easily controlled or linear. Those farmers whose fertilizers worked to control time and earth assumed an “instant of time […] could be naturally picked out from a presumed whole line of sequential points” (p. 169), with the entirety of the growth process reduced to the instant of harvest.

Ulmer asked, relative to academic writing, “What if—in the escalating pace of academic production—scholars adopted a Slow Ontology?” (2016, p. 201). The point here is not “doing everything at a snail’s pace” (Honoré, 2005, p. 15), but to have “rhythms of inquiry run counter to the systematic beats of the academic metronome” and its “constant churn of articles, chapters, books, and monographs across the academy” (Ulmer, 2016, p. 202). This adjusted pace encourages “more joyful, productive writings […and] scholarship that is more responsive to the landscapes and cityscapes in which we live” (p. 208). After all, as my grandmother’s watermelons emphasized, time “is rooted in nature […and] inspires more natural rhythms” in writing and in qualitative scholarship (p. 208). Time is required for good things to grow.

Like neighboring farmers and some academics, as I wrote, I deigned to provide a modicum of time for preparation beforehand. I aerated my thoughts, tilled through my notes, and plunged my hands into the rich ideas that those efforts offered. But, in the desperate rush of academia, I then resorted to throwing soda to the pages. I rushed from one project to another, and rather than working to parse out my points in meaningful ways, I laced my writing with convoluted concepts and overly complicated terms. Fancy words and a frantic pace to hurry, to publish not perish, poisoned the fields of thought that I had worked so hard to cultivate. After the day that we hacked open the sour melon in my grandmother’s yard, I had wondered in the following years why the other farmers bothered to spend any time preparing their fields if they were only going to produce anemic, sickly fruit in their rush. But I had done the same. My writing was weak, mushy, and bitter.

Writing qualitatively requires recognizing time not as something to be contained, controlled, and rushed; instead, temporalities are “active, responsive, generative, articulate, and alive” (Barad, 2013, p. 17). This form of writing, like my grandmother’s watermelons, recognizes the shortcuts and conventions that pervade qualitative research and academia at-large, and their effects—on people and writing. Qualitatively writing means that the writer intentionally chooses to move, think, believe, and produce differently. To be clear, given the realities of academic contracts and contexts, this approach is not one that suggests inaction or laziness. Indeed, my grandmother’s watermelon field required more work than that one across the road, because we did not throw soda into the soil. Writing qualitatively means that “it is nearly impossible not to feel the tug of other entanglements” in the time taken to write (Barad, 2015, p. 393). Writing cannot be rushed because, like the fledging watermelon vines, writing qualitatively is inextricably bound to the soil from which it emerges, the experiences that nurture it, and the time that strengthens and sweetens it. These connections are not hindrances; they are the point.

Watermelons Don’t Sweeten Off the Vine

One summer I was finally deemed old enough to wield a knife for pruning the watermelon vines. Giddy with my newfound power, I brandished my weapon around the field, slicing fruit loose from the plants. My grandmother, seeing my enthusiastic violence, chastised, “Hey now! Stop that! You got to pay attention to what you cuttin’. You can’t just start cuttin’ ‘em loose, unless they ripe. Watermelons don’t sweeten off the vine. All them that you cut? Them that’s still green gone rot now.” I immediately froze, the glittering knife in one hand, and a severed vine in the other.

I felt tears welling up as I considered all of the poor watermelons that I had doomed to perish in the field. “Tsk-tsk,” she chided, and chuckled. “You just got to make the right cuts. Start paying attention. We not just cuttin’ to cut; we cuttin’ to make everything healthier. Make ‘em grow better.” With her help, I learned to trim away yellowed vines and leaves, to pay attention to too many fruits forming on a single plant, to identify the evidence or presence of insects. My knife no longer slashed wildly but sliced with precision and purpose. I learned to make this cutting not destructive but nurturing, as the plants flourished with their blights and blisters trimmed away. The vibrant green burst forth across the field with the crackled and speckled leaves gone.

Barad (2013; 2014) emphasized the complexity and possibility in cutting, too. “Cutting together-apart” is not a “mere contraction,” but is a “move to a deeper level of meaning-mattering” (2014, p. 176), with the cutting producing not just severances but connections, too. Cutting apart the plants from pests and disease supported healthy vines that nurtured healthier, bigger fruit. The cuts also offered new connections between my grandmother and me. The intentional, attentive cutting required “a different sense of a-count-ability, […] a different calculus of response-ability” (p. 178) to the field and to her. Response-ability is not merely a traditional sense of responsibility but a consideration of the ability and urgency to respond, creating an “iterative (re)opening up to, an enabling of responsiveness” (2010, p. 265). The act of cutting had initially been destructive and individual; conversely, the cutting together-apart was intentional and fostered healthier watermelons and deeper understandings between my grandmother, the field, and me. With the proper cuts, the watermelons could grow sweet; too few or too many cuts, and they rotted in the field.

Writing, Cutting, and Vines

In reflecting on my development as a writer within qualitative research, I initially struggled with cutting. I was always either haphazard or too late. In early efforts, as I rushed forward and crammed my writing full of overblown concepts, I would pluck my writing from its vines before it had ripened. And like watermelons, writing does not sweeten off the vine, either. Untethered from the ideas giving it life, writing cut loose too soon sits and rots. Leaving ideas, like the watermelons, on the vine longer helped them to grow, to develop, to sweeten. Related, writing cannot just sit indefinitely or without inspection. Just as there must be time, there must also be cuts. I had to visit the pages, the lines, the words to determine what needed to be cut apart, so that the overall writing could come together. In the same way that I stood horrified at my unintentional massacre when my grandmother first scolded me about my knife, I felt as if the cuts in my writing were murdering my ideas, severing lifelines to thoughtful discussions and manuscripts. I had been so eager initially to snap the writing loose so that I might submit it, but now I hovered over each document with a painful, hesitant unwillingness to slice that was equally unproductive. Writing qualitatively requires cutting together-apart, with intentional cuts made to nurture new thoughts, clearer discussions. There is a response-ability to trimming words so that they grow sweet on the vine, without blight or neglect sucking the energy and life out of the writing.

It Runs Down Your Elbows When It’s Good

After months of waiting, of watching the tiny mounds sprout green, the tendrils winding through the field, the green balls of fruit becoming large, striped globes, it was time to harvest. My uncle drove his Chevy Silverado, with its extra-large truck bed, to the edge of the field, and we started to haul watermelons. As children, we managed one at a time, grunting and huffing as we tottered to the truck with our melon. We checked each one before loading it. We learned early on the criteria to check off in our heads before lugging the fruit to the truck, making sure that there were no soft spots, no smell of rot, ensuring that the tendril that it had grown on was brown, that the green rind was no longer shiny, and that where it had touched the ground had finally turned yellow. Each fruit that made its way onto the truck was heavy to carry but sounded hollow when thumped.

Knowing that the ones that we carried were ready, were sweet enough that my grandmother often joked that she had sown sugar into the soil, we occasionally, in our youthful teetering, “accidentally” dropped one. The ripe fruit would pop open, the red flesh juicy and vivid in the field. We children would stoop around the fruit and dip our fingers into the meat, eagerly stuffing it into our mouths. The sticky sweetness ran down our chins, mixing with the dirt and sweat, as our mother threatened to hose us off to get us clean again. Our grandmother would only laugh and say, “It runs downs your elbows when it’s good, you know.” We laughed back and would show the rivers of sugary goodness running down our dirty arms.

Barad (2014) notes that response-ability, or responding in meaningful ways, requires acknowledging “the thick tangles of spacetimematterings that are threaded through us, the places and times from which we came but never arrived and never leave” (p. 184). The re-turning of the soil means “opening [the soil] up and breathing new life into it” (p. 168); re-turning of relationships, of connections means “enact[ing] agential cuts which do not produce absolute separations, but rather cut together-apart [….] between here-now and there-then” (p. 168). These moments of harvesting pulled multiple threads of time together—the planting, the refusal to take short cuts, the warning to not cut haphazardly, the lessons of how to identify ripe fruit—all culminated in these harvest days. The fruit was bursting with sweetness because of all that had come before.

Qualitatively Writing, Care, and Sweetness

When we harvested melons, my grandmother’s daily, careful attention—shaped by years of farming—meant rinds thumping with sticky, sugary sweetness. Writing qualitatively, I realized, required the same care, the same connection to all that had gone before. An early part of my academic writing had seen me excising myself from my writing. Awkward, stilted third-person phrasing worked to sanitize myself out of my work and pretend that my scholarship was objective. The effect was the opposite of what I intended—it did not make my writing more scientific, more believable, or even more readable. By cutting myself out of what I wrote, I not only hacked and slashed in a similar fashion to when my grandmother first handed me a knife, but I prevented any project from ever ripening. There would never be sweetness in the writing, because the only care that I took was to erase myself from my efforts. There was no care for how who I was and where I had come from had shaped what I had to say or how I might say it. I had strived for, in Barad’s words, “absolute separations [….] between here-now and there-then” (p. 168).

My memories of cracking open watermelons in my grandmother’s field are among my favorites. Writing about and through them breathes new life into my thinking and writing. Rather than watching a cursor blink for days on end, the words spill in juicy ripeness. Doing so also emphasizes the same savoring that had the sticky juices running down our mouths and elbows—writing qualitatively means relishing both the product and the process of writing. The watermelons were sweet, yes, but I remain convinced that part of their sweetness was in the effort, from the first plowing day until harvest time, that readied them. Qualitatively writing means approaching writing in a way that connects the “here-now and there-then” (p. 168). For so long I had worked to clean scholarly papers of myself, of my experiences. Earlier versions of me could never have imagined my grandmother’s watermelons not just inspiring but shaping writing and writer identity. Writing qualitatively demands a “re-turn to a thicker ‘moment’ of spacetimemattering” (p. 169), when the places, moments, and memories that make us are thick in our memories and thick in our writing.

Save That for the Brine

After we had emptied the field of melons and stuffed ourselves silly with the ruby-red, sticky-sweet fruit, our grandmother would instruct us, “Keep the seeds, and we’ll dry them for next year. Don’t throw that rind away. Save it for the brine.” Dutifully, we would collect the seeds onto paper towels and place them in the cool, dark storage bin in the dining room to dry out for future planting. We then gathered the green-skinned white rinds, some with remnants of red fruit still clinging to it, and took them to her kitchen cutting board. She would imperiously point to the cabinet where she kept her biggest pots, and I would pull out the dented copper pot big enough to take up half of the stovetop. As she trimmed the red and pink fruit away from the white rind, we used her water dipper—made from a large gourd—to fill the massive pot with water for boiling. Over the next few days, we fanned our flushed cheeks in the steamy kitchen as she sterilized jars to pickle the watermelon rind. When the jars were ready, we helped to select what drops of food coloring would go into the batches of pickling brine, delighted with the jewel-toned pickles that we placed in her pantry after the jars cooled.

Barad’s discussion of cutting together-apart emphasizes that the process is iterative and communal, with “no moving beyond, no leaving the ‘old’ behind [….] There is nothing that is new; there is nothing that is not new” (2014, p. 168). We children loved spitting the seeds out as we ate, heaping them together to dry off and dry out for next year’s harvest. We enjoyed watching her make the rind pickles and splashing the rainbows of colors into the brine. Each step was possible because of what had come before, and each step harkened to a future of both new and the same. Saving the seeds and the rind emphasized a constantly in-progress and incessantly intra-connected process and product. Writing qualitatively does the same.

As I have learned to intentionally and productively cut from/with my writing to help it grow and flourish, my grandmother’s watermelons have emphasized for me that those cuts are never an end. Each cut, from the vine, from the rind, from the page, from the file, offers new possibilities, new usages. Writing qualitatively cannot be terminal because the time, the work, and the relationships that make such writing possible are “always already threaded through with anticipation of where it is going but will never simply reach and of a past that has yet to come” (Barad, 2013, p. 18). Certainly there are stopping points, just as in the fields—moments that mark the completion of a step, of an effort. Watermelons get harvested and eaten. Papers get published. Books get sold. But those moments do not demarcate an ending; they are new possibilities. As I cut words and ideas from various projects, I assure them, “I’m saving you for the brine.” I will place them in new documents, sparkling with their own hues and vibrancy, made possible only by cutting them loose from another.

Reflecting on Watermelons and Writing

Barad notes that “the self is itself a multiplicity, a superposition of beings, becomings, here and there’s, now and then’s” (2014, p. 176). As I reflect on what writing qualitatively means, self is a critical aspect. I cannot image writing qualitatively without referencing the ways that multifaceted identity shapes writing process and product. These writings informed by self are “in the thick web of its specificities, what is at issue is its unique historialities and how they come to matter” (p. 176). My grandmother’s watermelons are essential to me working to explain writing qualitatively, not because they are applicable to others, but because of what they help me to say. They are not what qualitatively writing means; instead, my histories come to matter for others as a way to consider how writing qualitatively puts qualitative inquiry into relationship and conversation with qualitative identity. Such a process is, like the watermelons, alive, while requiring care and work.

Writing is something that, if done qualitatively, one can also feel. Just as I could see and taste the differences between the sickly soda-laced watermelon and my grandmother’s, I can feel and hear the difference between writing that is done qualitatively and not. When I have taken the time and care to tend to, prune, and savor my work, it is different from when I have thrown soda to my efforts to rush them along. The cursor does not blink differently, but the vibrancy and authenticity of one is missing from the other. Perhaps one of the reasons that farming resonates as a metaphor in my effort to discuss qualitatively writing is because to write qualitatively is to produce in a way is simultaneously “at work and at play” (Barad, 2014, p. 168), productive and joyful. Where the settling of the writing in my heart and gut creates the same satisfaction, purpose, and laughter that my grandmother’s watermelons always have: that is to write qualitatively.