Edited volume, forthcoming, published by Daraja Press

Edited by Merlyna Lim & Kathy Dobson

The Stories We Carry: AutoethnoGraphics of Self, Scar, and Struggle is a genre-blending collection of narrative non-fiction essays from 22 contributors—including award-winning journalists, immigrant writers, queer voices, artists, and Indigenous storytellers—who share a common thread: they navigate spaces not built for them while carrying the weight of identities, histories, and traumas that dominant institutions often render invisible.

The book’s central argument is that reclaiming our stories is an act of intellectual and political resistance. For those who come from working-class backgrounds, from racialized and Indigenous communities, from queer and trans lives, from experiences of poverty, displacement, and survival, the demand for silence is a form of violence. This collection insists that the stories we carry—of class shame, of racialized bodies, of immigration bureaucracy, of gender transition, of intergenerational trauma—are not obstacles to knowledge but the very foundation of a more honest, more just way of understanding the world.

This volume unfolds in three interwoven movements—Self, Scar, and Struggle—which reflect not only recurring themes but recurring truths.

Self speaks to the shaping of identity, to the ways we come into being—and into conflict—with history, gender, family, and interiority. Scar is both memory and aftermath, both pain and persistence. They tell us what happened. They also tell us that we are still here. Struggle dwells in tension. It captures the difficult work of living—with others, with institutions, with ourselves.

At its heart, this is autoethnography—treating personal experience as a legitimate site of knowledge, refusing the divide between the personal and analytical. AutoethnoGraphics adds a second dimension: each chapter includes a hand-drawn illustration by Merlyna Lim.