A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women's Lives
Edited by Betsy Hearne and Roberta Seelinger Trites

Each of us has a narrative compass, one or more stories that have guided our lifework. This project invited women scholars from a variety of disciplines to identify and examine the stories that have motivated them and shaped their research. Telling the "story of her story" leads each of the essayists in the book to insights about her own methods of textual analysis and to a deeper, often surprising, understanding of the connective power of imagination. A scholar of "Beauty and the Beast" can see parallels between the fairy tale and her own journeys of scholarly maturation; an Alcott scholar perceives how Little Women has led to many of the literary and academic decisions she has made; a scholar of Chinese literature discovers at a crucial juncture that her intellectual and physical survival depends on Jottings from the Transcendant's Adobe at Mt. Youtai. This process of storytelling about the stories that have inspired and haunted us brings to the surface the structures, themes, and language that seeded our work.

When we were children, the common retort to name-calling on the playground was, "it takes one to know one." We believe that it takes a story to know one. Authentic, enduring engagement with a story involves getting inside it and letting it get inside you, internalizing as well as analyzing it. You cannot tell or even know a story from the outside.

When people understand the relationship between text and context, they often do so because of their internalized knowledge of storytelling. But when the academy teaches us to silence our voices as storytellers—as women scholars often report has happened to them—the disjuncture that results makes us unable to use narrative itself as an analytical tool. This collection of essays demonstrates how the stories we have appropriated shape our interpretive abilities.

The scholars whose work appears in A Narrative Compass represent a diversity of interests, stages of development, ethnic backgrounds, and disciplines. Their stories range from literary texts to folktales and family narratives in the oral tradition. Their essays vary in length and in tone, but they all communicate the passion of the storyteller whose lifework has been dominated by the epistemology of narrative. The volume also includes an introductory essay that analyzes the ways in which these stories braid the personal and professional as a means of understanding storytelling as methodology.

Are the examples in this book unusual? We don't think so. Story determines much in our lives. In most cases, the invitation to participate in this project was the first time any of the women had a chance to reflect publicly on the connection between their personal stories and their research stories, and yet all of them felt that the experience of doing so expanded their comprehension of both. We invite you, by clicking on "Your Narrative Compass," to respond on this website with your own stories and with comments on the essays in our book.