ABSTRACT
Professor Jude Preissle, wearing a red facemask with a wand in hand, emerged from the dissertation defense room in Aderhold Hall, Athens, Georgia, to do her own version of conferring the doctoral degree. Jude said, “The dissertation does not end with the defense”. Indeed, I must admit that excessive nervous energy mixed with excitement and relief might have made me intoxicated and unable to totally make meaning of those words on that day. However, it is a moment I will always remember because of the emotions associated with it! I might have embellished it after so many years but it still is my image of the moment and it is a historical marker for me. As Bochner (2007, p. 197) warned:
When we attempt to fit language to experience, there is always a cleavage between experience and words, between living through and narrating about, between the chaos and fragmentation of living a life and the smoothing orderliness we bring to it when we write, between what we remember now and what we can say took place then.
