I’m Marjorie Elaine.* I’m a professor, ethnographer, essayist, and memoirist. A divorcee, cancer survivor, (once) marathon runner, recovering Catholic, quasi-Buddhist, sometimes-artist, Scrabble player, lapsed flautist, and more. These days I split my time between Los Angeles and a mountain village in Costa Rica, where I’m reinventing myself yet again, as a mosaic artist, in a sustainable “natural build” home, within an intentional ecological community I stumbled upon thanks to my brother and Costa Rican sister-in-law.
I’m a seeker-scholar, puzzler, wonderer, wanderer…As a mosaic artist and a writer, I look for beauty in broken stuff. That’s as true of my research and life reflections as it is of my mosaics.
For over two decades, I’ve studied how immigrant children and youth navigate language, culture, and belonging — work that became the book Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth, Language and Culture. I’ve also written two other academic books (Immigrant Children in Transcultural Spaces: Language, Learning, and Love and Mindful Ethnography: Mind, Heart and Activity for Transformative Social Research), and edited two academic volumes that involved coaching authors on the writing process. Beyond books, I’ve written articles for an interdisciplinary array of journals in Anthropology, Sociology, Education, Psychology, and Linguistics. In all of my academic work, I strive for a vulnerable, authentic, accessible voice, resisting as best I can the constraints of academia.
This newsletter is where I further develop that personal voice, through essays on language, learning, and the stories we tell about our lives, including reflections drawn from a memoir-in-progress about illness, transformation, healing, and reconstruction.
Some weeks that means a personal essay. Some weeks I write about the world: politics, history, the things that keep me up at night. All of my writing circles the same questions: how we make sense of the lives we’re given, and how we tell our Truths about them.
If that sounds like your kind of reading, I’m glad you’re here.
And if you’re a writer, I’m especially happy to be in dialogue with you — I’d love to think together about the craft. (Academics who are seeking to enliven their own voices, and expand their horizons, please connect!)
Why subscribe?
On platforms like this one, paid subscriptions are one of the few signals that tell the algorithm a newsletter is worth showing to new readers. But I hope to find people who want to be in dialogue with this work, not just “consume” it. See my invitation to a seat at my mosaic table, where I name my commitment to pay forward subscription that is paid to me.
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Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox. I know we are all inundated with things to read, but even a skim, a like or comment, letting me know what resonates with you (and what does not?) would be most appreciated, as I see how this new voice lands in the world.
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*Sometimes Marjorie Elaine Faulstich Orellana. Read about my name changes (and more reflections on patriarchy and name practices!) here.
