In Travels with Ernest: Crossing the Literary/Sociological Divide, Laurel Richardson and Ernest Lockridge—accomplished sociologist and published novelist—explore the fascinating interplay between literary and ethnographic writing. The exciting result is an intriguing experimental text that simultaneously delves into, reveals, simplifies, and complicates methodologies of writing and conveying experience. Refusing to force their unique voices into one integrated account, the authors—also spouses—explicate their stories in separate narratives and then discuss in transcribed "free-wheeling" conversations their different constructions of their travels together, travels simultaneously experienced, but recalled and related differently through the filters of distinct professional perceptions, life histories, and interiors. This boundary-crossing text will provide an ideal platform for students and professors interested in understanding and exploring the absorbing complexities and possibilities of ethnographic writing and creative nonfiction.
