Alive in Me: Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Life Writing, Autotheory, and Autoethnography

In an interview with Sarah Heying on the publication of her collection of poems Magnified in 2021, Minnie Bruce Pratt said, ‘my words and my actions have entered the current of struggle. They are alive in people. That’s all I want’ (2021). Writing beside and across Pratt and her body of work, I explore how life writing is not singular but relational and performative – a reaching across time, difference, and shared struggle that keeps words alive in other lives and moves theory into action. Using life writing in the form of autoethnography, autotheory, and performative writing, I wade into the deep water of lesbian motherhood with Crime Against Nature, ride the rapids of coming together in a lesbian and trans-identified partnership with S/he, and enter the current of loss with Magnified – braiding together Pratt's lyric poetry with my own to show how her words are alive in me, and in us.