I was not able to track down any of the three advisors on Julia's committee. Winnie Crates retired in 2005 to a remote island off the coast of Australia. Will McCarthy was on extended sabbatical, and Jared Zeno had moved to Tulane University in Florida before Hurricane Katrina. I realized that the files I had were not the actual dissertation because the letters were unformatted and according to the timeline set out in her dissertation proposal, her first full draft was due soon after she returned from the Illinois Conference. I have left the letters in the same chronological order but for practical purposes, could not print all the letters. I also tried to clarify some points Julia had left in draft form. Last, a few of the letters have been significantly revised for style and content for this publication. The letters theorize conceptions of the teacher/ student relationship, identity, love, desire, belonging, feminist perspectives, canonized myth, and the power of presentation and form to shape learning, understanding, and constitutive cultural knowledge.
This text you are reading, Seeing Red, is thus Julia's selected and edited letters and her dissertation proposal which was intentionally written as the Epilogue. I name this a postmodern fictional memoir because it is not even clear to me what is based on experience, what is invented in Julia's original text, or exactly what I have inferred in my inclusions and deletions. Perhaps I just don't want the text in the letters to sit still. In some strange way, I feel that I will come to understand her mystery if I keep the words in the letters moving—articulating her and carrying on her story. Pinar explains this movement through deconstruction for the sake of construction. Pinar says, “Autobiography takes this task [of deconstruction] seriously, as it is the task of self formation, deformation, learning, and unlearning” (1988, p. 27). He explains that: