A Memoir of an Other

I am the literary executor for my late partner, the prolific poet and essayist Reginald Shepherd. Shepherd often spoke of writing a memoir but never had the chance to do so before his death. However, the essays he wrote, his poetry, his correspondences, and other writings contain many, many fragments of memoiristic material in his voice. I am in the process of assembling these fragments into his posthumous memoir, and the project bears a strong relationship to the long tradition of ethnographic biographies, as well as being a strong example of bricolage and mythic thinking. Here, I will reflect on the relationships I am encountering between memoir, myth, and ethnography as I construct/assemble this book