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Kearney,  (2002). On stories. London, New York: NY: Routledge.
Kim, J.K. (2016). Understanding narrative inquiry: The crafting and analysis of stories as research. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

Pinar. W. F. (1975). The method of “Currere, Annual meeting of the American Research Association, Washington D.C., April 1975).

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Without writing and reading, I cannot expect to be able to lead others to the scope and depth of my desires. The pen is a mighty oar, propelling me through the “current of ideas” to understand my own journey, thereby helping others to discern their paths (Flaubert, 1980). It is through our collective experiences– explicitly and consciously exposing them – that we will internalize what we believe. By this careful examination, we give others the tools they need to make critical decisions about their work– to struggle with the common educational dilemmas, and to embark on journeys together that allow generations of students after us to explore the mystery and beauty of a well-educated, authentically literate life.
If I'm truly making a difference, then my perspective will change others. Here's what my friend Ande wrote after reflecting on a three week writing institute where I served as a trainer.

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Dr. Kim encouraged me to read her book, Understanding Narrative Inquiry as my dissertation committee believed that Arts Based Narrative Inquiry fit my skill as a writer as well as the research questions I sought to answer. On page 109, Dr. Kim introduced these words from Barthes, and I could read no further.

"I am offered a text. This text bores me. It might be said to prattle...You address yourself to me so that I may read you, but I am nothing to you except this address...It can be said that after all you have written this text quite apart from bliss; and this prattling text is then a frigid text, as any demand is frigid until desire, until neurosis forms in it...The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself)" (Barthes, 1975, pp. 4-6, italics in original).

This excerpt offered the wisdom I sought, phronsesis. The role storytelling provides, the voices it preserves, and the blatant humanity of what it means to write awes me and frames my approach to pedagogy and andragogy and research. Reading - the hydrogen. Writing, the oxygen. Together, they form an inseparable molecule of literacy - percolating through my beliefs about authentic literacy. We have lost the connection with purpose and meaning with an overfocus on texts, checklists, assessments, and instructional strategies. Literacy isn't about any of that: We read and write to understand, to survive, to make meaning, to contribute.

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This release, this catharsis, allowed me to see myself as other: “great stories transcend the particularity of their plots and protagonists, etc. which makes them subjects to thematic analysis and criticism (Kim, 2016, p. 12). Through writing, the pain stopped living in me and came alive in the ink, perhaps even saving my life after the disappointment of divorce. Processing through poetry allowed me to analyze my own literary journey mirrored in my own students and teachers. They too were living realities outside the classroom that impacted their approach to literacy and pedagogy.

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Excited about what this recreation would reveal with its “active remaking of the real world in light of its potential truths, interweaving past, present, and future” (Kim, 2016, p. 10), I continued:

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Encouraged to examine our past educational experiences, understand them in terms of the present, and wrap them in a vision of our future, I began a process to “understand [my] present in a way that [allowed me] to move on, more learned, more evolved than before” and prepared to “grasp again the significance of academic studies and the potential contributions they can make to our lifetime” (Pinar, 1975, p. 15).

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Pinar developed currere as a method to find educational solutions:
"This four step process includes retelling the story of one's educational experiences, imagining future possibilities for self-understanding and educational practice; analysis of the relationships between past, present and future life history and practice; and new ways of thinking about education" (Pinar, 1975).  Kearney, (2002) explained an ancient Platonic structure to help share the impact of this literary journey: Plot (Mythos), Re-creation (Memiesis), Release (Cartharsis), Wisdom (Phronesis), and Ethics (Ethos).