“We study the culture of that group and talk to people and ask them various questions. It was a group of community gardeners in Arlington we studied. It was very hot, sweaty work, but it was great because as a home gardner I never really thought about what it would be like to share space with so many strangers, and how that might look, and how people might react to that, and it was very interesting work, and I loved that there was writing attached to that. All of my field notes and the report I did afterwards, and that aspect of writing I think is always going to be fun for me, to review things that I wrote in real time, and then go back later and it’s like, ‘oh, yeah, I completely forgot about X, Y, Z happening,’ and so that’s a lot of fun.”
Tiffany Kajer-Wright is the Oral History Program Coordinator for Mason Libraries and a M.A. student in Professional and Technical Writing.