Into the Dissertation

Yesterday, I was offered a "medicine bag" from a woman who quickly became a mentor.  Her medicine is social and media networking with a language that is accessible as well as marketable. Inspired by her medicinal work and sacred intention, I've decided to try to blog daily brief thoughts about my dissertation experience. My hope is that this online space will help me translate my academic writing into something more ...exciting? popular? sellable? I guess I already feel like I have a poetic and creative voice that I tend to share on my blog or with friends and I have this academic-y voice reserved for school. The two really have to meet, and my dissertation itself works toward integration too. 

Thus far, I've constructed a proposal that will hopefully be approved in the next two weeks. I've organized the next few months so that I will hopefully finish a draft of my dissertation. June is research and organizing month!

I've been pondering how exactly I would frame my dissertation so that others outside the academy would be interested in reading it.  I've considered something like Clarissa Pinkola Estes' Women Who Run with the Wolves or Aurora Levins Morales' Remedios and Medicine Stories, but I'm not confident that these works would pass as dissertations.  Leny Strobel's A Book of Her Own: Words and Images to Honor the Babaylan has more critical writing dispersed within it.  I'm imagining, a mixture of these three works with creative "riffs" then quotations then critical analysis chapters then ritual/story telling sections.  

Well, this is a good start, no? On to the day....I'm moving today. Sigh, trying to find a home is another story altogether.