ABSTRACT
The invitation to write for this volume just might be a critical incident. I’ve never thought of myself as a ‘writer’. Teacher, perhaps, academic, researcher, scholar and public intellectual, but not as a ‘writer’. After many years of learning and practicing the craft of third person, expository social scientific prose – the invitation to tell a story about critical incidents in my writing and about this writing is like a crack in the door. I’m writing this in three sittings over two days, each time going back over bits before I start again to figure out what I’ve done. I made one major block cut/paste move, moving the narrative to the middle. But I’m hoping I can work without the usual staging and rewriting. I say this not as apology or invitation, but as an initial standpoint, as a promissory note for an unplanned writing on writing. Anything could happen. But then, who am I as author to know what you might do with this?
