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The Indiana Writers Center (IWC) believes that everyone has a unique story to tell. The mission of IWC is to nurture a diverse writing community, to support established and emerging writers, to improve written and verbal communication, and to cultivate an audience for literature in Indiana (About the Indiana Writers Center, 2012, para. 1).

For more than 30 years, the IWC, a nonprofit organization, has worked to foster a vibrant literary writing community in Indiana, providing education and enrichment opportunities for both beginning and accomplished writers. (About the Indiana Writers Center, 2012, para. 1).

Teacher, writer, and community activist Darolyn “Lyn” Jones was asked to join the staff at the IWC in 2005 to meet the new initiative: take writing out of the center and to marginalized writers. Her charge was to help writers both find and share their voice.

The origin of this initiative began with a group of girls, ages 12–22 in a maximum state prison. The girls became the Center’s muse and because of their words, the Center was compelled to build, create, and nurture even more youth writers. The backstory of the IWC work with the girls will be featured in this chapter.

The product of that early work has now evolved into Building a Rainbow, an eight-week long summer writing program designed to teach creative narrative nonfiction writing program to youth using a curriculum that helps them identify meaningful moments, see them in their mind’s eyes, and bring them alive on the page in vivid, compelling scenes.

Currently funded by the Summer Youth Program Fund (SYPF) in Indianapolis, the Building a Rainbow writing program is free to youth participants and held in various locations that serve a diverse student population. This chapter will highlight our work with four different community partners: our first group of youth, girls at a maximum state prison, and our current work with an all African-American youth development summer camp for students ages 6–18 run by the Indianapolis Fire Department, a Latino leadership institute that works with Latino students ages 11–16, and a south side, historic community center that works primarily with Caucasian students living in poverty.

By forging new collaborative relationships with arts organizations, schools and universities, community organizations and social service providers, IWC has worked successfully to

• Create community with our writers and with partnering sites

• Identify, sort, and prioritize program objectives (Caffarella, 2002, p. 21) in designing and delivering curriculum that meets the diverse needs of each site’s student group and meets our mission

• Solicit and train instructors, university student interns, and community volunteers (Caffarella, 2002, p. 21)

• Present, publish, and perform our work for the greater writing community.

Create community with our writers and with partnering sites

Identify, sort, and prioritize program objectives (Caffarella, 2002, p. 21) in designing and delivering curriculum that meets the diverse needs of each site’s student group and meets our mission

Solicit and train instructors, university student interns, and community volunteers (Caffarella, 2002, p. 21)

Present, publish, and perform our work for the greater writing community.

Besides learning about the programming above, readers can also read and hear the words and voices of students at the sites as they share their memoirs of people, places, and events that have shaped them.

The authors, seven women–writers–performers–artists–academics, have been working collectively for a year, storying, de-storying and re-storying the experience of our lives. The authors write to “taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect” (Nin, 1976), to uncover and learn ourselves through writing (Richardson, 1997), to take the “risky” steps of talking to each other about our inner lives (Palmer, 1998). Cognisant of the limitations and masculinities of traditional academic discourses, in form and content, and heavily confined by neoliberal expectations to count and be counted, we write and express the stories of lives the authors did not choose or imagine – lives we are given and live through. Our expression inhabits aesthetic, contemplative and sensory ways of knowing and employs poetry, image, song and story to create a polyvocal account of women’s lives, voices, struggles and learning. The authors share here part of our collective memoir and its development. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper is designed as a collective memoir.

The authors write and express the stories of lives we did not choose or imagine – lives we are given and live through. The expression inhabits aesthetic, contemplative and sensory ways of knowing and employs poetry, image, song and story to create a polyvocal account of women’s lives, voices, struggles and learning. The authors share here part of our collective memoir and its development.

The research focuses on autoethnography and lived experience.

Auto-ethnography/lived experience offers rich insights into the personal and political actions and actors within higher education.

For a matter of 20 years a Mr. C. S. Forester, better‐known, one understands, as a novelist, has been editing and publishing at intervals the memoirs of a British naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars. For some reason known only to himself, Mr Forester has presented these memoirs as fiction, though it is possible that having in mind the known aversion of the public from any form of technical literature, he has thought that the memoirs, assuming as they do a working knowledge of seamanship and naval tactics, might appear more palatable and more commercially profitable in this form.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a theoretical framework of whistleblowing that gives due recognition to the emotional and reflexive processes that underpin it. Modes of anger are integrated into the model based on a reading of Geddes and Callister (2007), and developed by Lindebaum and Geddes (2016) work on moral anger.

The model is derived by interrogation of the extant literature on whistleblowing with due recognition accorded to emotional and reflexive dimensions that have been underrepresented in previous research. The model was tested by a qualitative study that uses memoir analysis to interrogate a board level whistle-blower’s account of the complex, traumatic and like-changing nature of his experience.

The paper identifies key stages in whistle-blower thinking before, during and subsequent to a decision to expose corporate wrongdoing. It demonstrates how emotional and reflexive processes influence a whistle-blower’s mode of anger expression, and how different perspectives by the whistle-blower and the focal organisation may view this expression as moral or deviant anger.

The complexity of the whistleblowing process, together with possible alternative perspectives of it, makes identifying every influencing variable extremely challenging. Also, reliance on a whistle-blower’s own account of his experience means that recall may be partial or self-serving. The model can be used to analyse other whistle-blower accounts of their experience, and further confirm its applicability.

This is the first application of memoir analysis to a whistle-blower’s account of his experience that relates modes of anger expression to stages in the whistleblowing episode. It addresses a significant imbalance in whistleblowing research that hitherto has emphasised rationality in whistle-blower decision making and downplayed the influence of reflexivity and emotion.

As more and more people decide to commit their lives to print, autobiographies constitute a significant resource to explore stories of harm, violence and crime. Published autobiography, however, presents a unique form of storytelling, unavoidably entailing the accumulation and (re)telling of a mass of stories; about oneself, others, contexts and cultures. Relatedly, paratexts – or the elements that surround the central text, such as covers, introductions and prologues – demonstrate how these texts are both individually and collectively shaped. Taking the co-constructed nature of all narratives, including self-narratives, as its starting point, this chapter seeks to demonstrate how terrorists who have authored autobiographies understand the world and their actions within it. In doing so, this chapter provides a practical demonstration of how insight derived from literary criticism can profitably be brought to bear in systematically breaking down and analysing an autobiography – that of a notable American jihadist, Omar Hammami – including its paratextual elements. In particular, I argue that considerations of genre, the inclusion of different types of events and stories collected from others all provide valuable strategies for the ‘doing’ of narrative criminology using autobiographies.