How a Bracelet Reminded Me to Value My Writing
(Soundtrack: Christmas songs playing at Jacobsen og Svart in Trondheim, Norway)
Those who know me both as an academic and just a dude know that I love bracelets. I like all kinds of bracelets, but I’m most keen on those made by indigenous people from Colombia (but I’m always open to appreciating crafts from other regions of the world). There’s something so beautiful about the shapes that come out of these bracelets, the stories and narratives behind each of them. I’ve never tried weaving one of them myself, but I value the thought process behind them and the creative process that brings these designs to fruition. Bracelets, in many ways, embrace the spirit of how academics build theory, as my good friend and colleague Dr. Angel Lin showed us at a panel at AERA in Toronto in 2019. I still remember my puzzled face when Angel asked if she could borrow one of my bracelets for her presentation. Of course, I said yes because I was genuinely intrigued about what she’d do with that… and she didn't disappoint, as she used my bracelet to explain to the audience her idea of trans-semiotizing. I had never seen anybody use a bracelet to bring home a theory. That was quite the learning experience for all of us in attendance.
I bring up this anecdote about my bracelets to go back to the blog post's title, as the title revisits a moment from 2021 in Salento (Colombia) and finding yet a similar bracelet I had lost during a trip to Medellín a few days ag. I’ll share the picture and then will elaborate:
The Embera Chamí originary peoples of Colombia call this kind of bracelet “tutti frutti.” The name’s not what matters here, but what this kind of bracelet represents (important: I heard this story straight from an Embera when I purchased my first tutti frutti): Any tutti frutti Embera bracelet you see is the very first bracelet an Embera child weaves. I repeat: This was an Embera child’s very first bracelet. Yes, it is not as ornate in principle as the others said child would craft in her life, but even crafting this apparent randomness took hours of training and weaving. There was a lot of effort behind this, which is why one can also find these in stores. Anybody who would purchase this is purchasing what amounts to a historical moment: someone’s first creation. Someone’s learning experience turned into a fashion accessory. There’s so much beauty in the fact that this bracelet signaled the beginning of someone’s craftsmanship journey and that in purchasing it, I am now part of that journey.
How does this story relate to my writing, you ask? Well, it has to do with how we sometimes conceive academic writing. Academia has this [sometimes terrible] tendency to only value those articles published in so-called “high impact journals” or those that rack up dozens and dozens of citations as the ones that truly matter and are the true measure of one’s writing prowess. As writers, we are always looking for that one article that will raise our h-index to the stratosphere, that one article that everybody cites (and yes, it feels good to get those Google Scholar alerts! ), but such a hunt for the citations sometimes makes one lose track of the journey. It makes us forget how we started and value that “first bracelet,” if you will. That happened somewhere between starting my doctorate and getting tenure: I stopped being grateful for my first publication in 1999. At one point, I was so dissatisfied with what I wrote that I declared, "Had I been a reviewer, I'd have rejected that article" — an unfair statement given that I was reading an article I wrote when I was a school teacher who dared to submit to an academic journal with the standards of who she was after finishing her Ph.D.
I softened my view of this piece as my career advanced, and I started mentoring my students on their journeys as beginning writers. In time, I have become much more appreciative of that “tutti frutti” I first crafted in 1999. It was my first attempt, with no real mentoring about the writing process, both in college (we took composition classes, but they mostly focused on writing five-paragraph essays) or as a teacher (I didn’t have any real mentors in that first stage of my teaching career, to be honest). I just felt I had something interesting in that classroom experience that the world should hear about, which is the reason I have published other papers about what my students and I do in class: Those are stories worth telling, and someone out there may appreciate finding it in a journal or book chapter.
Eventually, I realized that my initial dismissal of that first article was unfair. After all, this first article and my second publication in 2001 helped me get that Fulbright scholarship to do my master’s. Without that “tutti frutti,” it’s anyone’s guess if my career would have gone where it is today. And no, it’s not the one with all the citations or, like the 2001 piece, the one that became a sleeper hit almost two decades later. But it was the first time I dared to weave, to play with the words and the data as those Embera children play with beads and thread. That was the first time I learned there’s joy in writing about one’s experiences as a teacher and the lessons one learns with their students.
When I found those tutti frutti bracelets (both the one I lost and the one I recently bought), I reminded myself that writing is a journey that begins by daring to write and sharing this writing with the world. Sometimes we worry too much about where we will send our writing and not where the writing will send us. We worry too much about the outlet and not the stories we are telling, which undermines the power of our words. The thought of these bracelets and what they represent as a metaphor for our journeys as writers compelled me to write this post. I invite all my fellow writers, especially those mentoring the next generations of scholars, to revisit our journeys and tell our students about that “tutti frutti” buried at the bottom of our CVs. Take some time to tell your students about that one, how it happened, what you felt when it was out, the elation because it was published and it was a beautiful piece, and how that should be the driving force for our writing: the beauty of the journey, of finding our voices and choosing what stories to tell from the confidence we gained from that “tutti frutti.” Maybe that is what we need to bring renewed power to what we write, whom we write for, and whom we write with.
Till the next post…
The Blogger, The Thinker, The Provocateur… The Dr. of Patronomics.
