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There are questions I started asking at 19, when the books on my birthday wishlist stopped consisting primarily of novels and started really freaking out my family. Encouraged by a University of Michigan course I'd taken called Memoir and Social Crisis, I pursued autobiographical texts.  I asked for anything written by Primo Levi, scholarly texts on trauma theory and theory of autobiography, Tim O'Brien and other Vietnam War writers, books on prisons and depression and AIDS and slavery and war. 

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The Things They Carried was compelling to me.  I found it well-written, deeply thoughtful,  profoundly moving, and enlightening about the conditions in Vietnam during the war.  But I knew there were things about The Things They Carried that I didn't truly understand, and I felt there must be things about that experience I could never fully understand. 

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I wanted answers: Is it possible to adequately communicate the truth of one's experience? Does how we say stuff matter as much as what we say?  What are the consequences if our words are inadequate, or if we say things the wrong way?

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And the books I asked for for Christmas and birthdays which permanently established my status as the weird one in the family are the books for which the questions I'm asking matter the most.

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This portfolio is intended to produce via a collection of essays an examination of writing and language.  It is a history of my attempts at getting closer to some answers. 

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I hope you will read it. 

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