Persona Studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 1 PERFORMING LIVES, PRODUCING LIFE: WHY PERSONA STUDIES AND LIFE WRITING STUDIES NEED EACH OTHER KATJA LEE U N I V E R S I T Y O F W E S T E R N A U S T R A L I A INTRODUCTION This special issue on life writing and persona marks the 15th issue of Persona Studies and the culmination and end point of my eight years working as one of four Managing Editors of the journal. It is both fitting and very exciting then, to be able to wrap up this journey with an exploration of two fields that have long fascinated me: Life Writing Studies and Persona Studies. Indeed, life writing seems both an obvious and natural home for studying persona. The study of life writing has always involved the analysis of identities put into play and, it has become increasingly clear to me over the years, scholars of persona are equally fascinated by the kinds of persona work that life writing can do. Over the past fourteen issues, every single issue has had at least one contribution (often several) that used or drew upon life-writing texts. Over the years, a fairly substantial body of work has been published in this journal that not only showcases how the study of personas often depends upon or involves life writing, but also suggests that Persona Studies actually needs Life Writing Studies. It needs the vast and rich body of knowledge that this field has generated over the years to help persona scholars make sense of how life-writing texts work, how they can be used, and how there are multiple personas being articulated at any given moment. Rather than treating a life-writing text as a resource to be mined in order to prove an assertion about persona, Life Writing Studies helps us recognise that these texts are performances in their own right. They do not just “contain” evidence of persona work nor offer an expression of a self, but are constructions that are producing a life, self, or identity. They are, as life-writing scholars like Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2001) have long argued, performative. In this issue, we thus have an opportunity to explore how life-writing scholarship not only has much to add to our discussions about persona, but also has, like Persona Studies, been irrevocably shaped by performance theory. Indeed, both fields have grappled with many of the same questions about the truth and authenticity of these performances, and have been working through different ways to account for collaborative, collective, and co-created identity work. In that latter discussion, Persona Studies has had something of an advantage as a field that has long recognised the social conditions that shape and compel the persona performance, and has not had to overcome a century-long obsession with autonomous selves, Romantic notions of authorship, and whose hand held the pen. Life Writing Studies needs Persona Studies to help it make sense of these conditions that shape the “performative utterance” (Poletti 2016, p.364), and not just its form and content but its circulation as well. Regardless of content, life-writing texts circulate and do persona work, making the text an instrument of the life, a performance within and with a life. In the following three sections, I will further stake my claim that these two fields need each other, first, by exploring the kinds of persona work that life writing can do. Drawing upon the three “I”s of auto/biographical life writing – the “I” who is narrated, the “I” who narrates, Lee 2 and the “I” of the extratextual author—we will be able to trace distinct spaces and forms of persona work in life writing that are often conflated in persona-focused approaches. In exploring how these texts are capable of doing persona work regardless of content (or even text!), we can model Life Writing Studies approaches that are less dependent upon content and close reading strategies. To demonstrate how the two fields are, in fact, more siblings than cousins, the second section examines some of their shared theoretical roots, the common questions about truth and authenticity that both have managed to face down, and how each field, in their own particular ways, is making sense of the potential for collective and/or collaborative performance. In the final section, I turn to the eight contributors whose scholarly and creative works put into practice how the two fields compliment and challenge each other to stretch in new directions. It is in their work we can see the rich possibilities for future work in these fields. WHAT KINDS OF PERSONA WORK DOES LIFE WRITING DO? In these pages I use the term “life writing” in the broadest sense to refer to, as Smith and Watson wrote, “a variety of nonfictional modes of writing that claim to engage the shaping of someone’s life” (2001, p. 197). This includes writing about someone else’s life—what is often referred to as various forms of biographical practice—or one’s own life—autobiographical practice—and even one’s own life in relation to others—sometimes called relational life writing or signalled through a slash in auto/biography. But the production of a text about life, subjectivity, people, or experiences has long involved other media forms besides the written text and, in the face of the “increasingly mediated nature of social life” (Poletti 2016, p. 360), there has been a concerted effort to adopt new terminology such as “life narrative” to capture a broader range of written and non-written cultural forms, or to stretch the established terminology of “life writing” to include those forms. Of particular importance has been the ongoing conversation to theoretically reframe the field as one concerned not with genres, but discourses and discursive acts (see, for example, Laura Marcus’s Auto/biographical Discourses [1994] and Smith and Watson’s 2010 edition of Reading Autobiography]. There is merit in all of these approaches, and the usage of “life writing” here falls into the category of “stretched” terminology, that is, accounting for more than written texts (even if all of the contributors here are, indeed, dealing with writing in some form or another). It is an approach that quite consciously does not wish to be constrained to narrative (as not all life writing is narrative-driven), but also acknowledges that what makes these texts life writing is our ability to recognise in them discursive acts of life/subjectivity representation. Marking “life writing” then as an expansive category of texts, one might argue that almost all life writing does persona work and all of it has the potential to do persona work. I say “almost” in order to raise the question of whether private life writing—that is, those texts that do not circulate in public—do persona work. This question seeks to tease out the conditions and limits of ‘private’ in private life writing when persona is recognised as a public interface, a “production of self through identity play and performance by the individual in social settings” (Marshall & Barbour 2015, p. 2). Certainly, private texts have the potential to do persona work should they be discovered, found, published, and/or read. But does the private journal, written for one’s self and secreted away in a bedside table, or the video, captured at a family event and stored away on an old Betamax tape in the attic, fulfill the criteria of acting as a public interface and/or negotiating identity in social settings? I would argue yes (after all, the tree that falls in the forest with no one there to see it, still fell). What life writing offers us that not all persona performances offer us is a text. Life writing is always mediated in some form. In the case of self- life writing, it is not so much a mediation of self (as we shall explore further in next section) Persona Studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 3 because this presumes a self that exists prior to its expression, but a mediated self. That text is performing a life, producing a life even if the intended audience for that text was yourself and you successfully managed to keep it from the gaze of any other human creature. Moreover, that text still has the potential to do further persona work even after you keep it from the gaze of others and destroy it. Even if you never actually produced a text, the idea of a life-writing text can be enough to do persona work. Think, for example, of the impact that a rumour about a secret diary or a secret destroyed diary can work upon one’s public persona particularly if the individual is well known. In August this year the tabloids had a field day with the idea that Meghan Markle may have recently found her daily journal of her time as a working royal. The anticipation that this rumoured text might contain tantalizing insights into the royal circus and that she might air such dirty laundry in public continues to feed into toxic perceptions and representations of Markle as a publicity-seeking threat to the Crown. Late last year, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced she would be writing a political memoir with her long-time aide, Beate Baumann (‘Angela Merkel’ 2021). This memoir, even if it had no material reality at that stage and was only an idea, was (and still is) doing persona work for Merkel: the conditions of its production—"the two women planned to pen the book themselves with no outside help”; the anticipation of what it may or may not include; the very fact that producing such a text seems to run contrary to Merkel’s usual approach to public life are all impacting how Merkel is perceived and how she is playing and performing her identity (‘Angela Merkel’ 2021). Even those of us not cursed/blessed with such profoundly public profiles can effect persona work in declaring “I am writing my memoirs”. We may intend it to lend credibility or gravitas to our image, or leverage it as a threat to family and colleagues, and it may do that work for our personas or, perhaps, simply confirm established perceptions of us as self-important or overly ambitious. We know as well, thanks to previous work done in the pages of this journal, that our digital life-writing activities are also doing persona work. These articles have often looked to digital practices of self-representation in fields like academia (McDonald 2015; see also Ortiz- Vilarelle in this issue) or politics (Usher 2016; Kannasto 2020) or particular media like games (Haggis 2016; Werning 2017) and blogging and vlogs (McRae 2017; Humphrey 2021; also Hall in this issue) where the texts under discussion were, indeed, public. But even in the absence of a publicly circulated text, I would argue, the traces of private, unpublished and even unfinished life writing we perform in digital spaces are relevant to this discussion. Our private, un-updated Facebook pages; our abandoned, half-completed Linked In profiles; that unfinished biographical sketch that languishes on our desktop; and even the ways in which we like, share, or linger on an ad in our feed, are all contributing to a digital footprint that may never be more than a data- driven persona but are, nevertheless, forms of life writing capable of doing persona work. In the life-writing text, then, we have an instrument capable of doing persona work for ourselves (or others) regardless of what the text actually offers by way of content. Whether material reality, rumour, or anticipated project, life writing can be a means to negotiate social settings and/or put identities into play. Recognising this kind of identity work done by life writing invites us to step back from textual analysis and close reading techniques, and to appreciate the text as a discrete cultural object or artifact that has a life of its own. One might even go so far as to argue that, in addition to doing persona work for their authors and/or objects of study, such texts may have personas of their own. In a 2019 issue of Persona Studies, Kirsty Sedgman made a compelling argument that the Bristol Old Vic theatre had a persona (Sedgman 2019). In 2021, Travis Holland looked to the persona of the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, a robot/machine celebrated and mourned when it ceased to function (Holland Lee 4 2021). If an old theatre and space garbage can have personas, it is not a far stretch to suggest that a persona could be cultivated for or perceived through a textual object like a book. The Book of Kells, for instance, has a kind of aura that would suggest there is a persona at work there. Or, more pertinent to our discussions of life writing, would not the reverence with which the original life writings of Benjamin Franklin are treated, be akin to a social situation? Certainly, there is a play of identities at work here that issues from how a broader society and cultural context interact with the object in question. If Persona Studies might remind Life Writing scholars to linger a little longer on the life and identity work of a text as a text, Persona Studies scholars might be also be persuaded to linger a little longer on the content. For what life-writing scholarship has long acknowledged is that there are multiple “I”s at work in the life-writing text and to conflate them or to ignore one for the other is to miss a crucial site of persona work. In an autobiographical text, for example, there is the narrating “I” and the narrated “I”. That which is narrated—whether the past self or, in the case of biographical approaches, the subject of representation—is an identity put into play, a construct of the author who wishes to convey a particular impression of that person, life, experience, or subject. This narrated “I”, particularly when constructed through the past tense, does persona work on multiple levels: it offers up a persona of that past self but, also, importantly, it does persona work for the present self. For example, contemporary women’s celebrity autobiographies often invoke a representation of the past self as ‘just a girl’ from humble, country, or ‘ordinary’ origins, what I have called elsewhere, in Canadian contexts, “a hometown girl” trope (Lee 2020, pp. 246-9). This trope carves out a particular kind of persona for the famed woman’s past self, but also does critical persona work for the present self because it functions as a yardstick to measure her present success (gauged by distance from those humble conditions) and her authenticity (gauged by proximity to the values and identity forged under those conditions). The persona of the narrating “I” is additionally crafted through tone and style. The bemused adult, for example, narrating the puckish behaviour of their youthful self or, in biographical contexts, that same tone for someone else’s exploits still does persona work for the narrator whether they assert an “I” or more omniscient gaze. Life-writing texts that depend more upon images than writing, such as Instagram posts, function similarly: an analysis of what has been selected, cropped, filtered, tagged and even hashtagged reveals something of the persona of the posting “I”, and this might be distinct from the persona work of what is posted, the posted “I”. All these, in turn, do persona work for the extra-textual authorial “I”. In short, there is much to be gained in Persona Studies from a more careful analysis of the various identities in play and from using Life Writing theory to understand their relationships to each other. TIES THAT BIND: SHARED THEORETICAL ROOTS, CONUNDRUMS, AND HORIZONS To speak of the shared theoretical roots of Persona Studies and Life Writing Studies is, perhaps, more accurately a matter of finding common ground and shared influences as both fields have their own internal conflicts, contradictions, and diverse theoretical trajectories. Nevertheless, certain arenas in both fields have been irrevocably shaped by performance theory, and in particular by Judith Butler and (more so in the study of persona) Erving Goffman. It was Goffman who, in 1959, explained performance as the activities that exert influence (1959, p.15) which Butler later articulated in terms of actions that consolidate an impression (1990). Butler in particular sought to contest this notion of a core, inherent, or essential self that was given expression to; rather, they argued that the impression arose from the performance. In Persona Studies this approach has generated a particular interest in the social contexts of these Persona Studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 5 performances and their effects. In Life Writing this theoretical approach to self and identity has shaped an approach to life storying wherein selves are not expressed but performed through texts: they do not pre-exist their articulation. As Poletti has explained, “life narrative is performative in the sense that it is though the utterance of narration that the subjectivity, and the life, are brought into being” (2016, p 364). One of the dangers both fields have thus had to navigate is the concern about the truthfulness of such performances (a concern, no doubt, exacerbated by Goffman’s use of theatrical metaphors and Jungian approaches to persona masks). A self strategically produced for a particular situation—whether a glowing representation of one’s self in a memoir or a performance adapted to suit a specific social situation as in a job interview—has raised the spectre of false fronts, strategic masks, and untruthful representations in both fields. In the study of persona, however, the persona and its constituent performances are framed as quite real: they are not false or fictious (Leppanen 2016, p. 101) and can be strategic, legitimate, and authentic. A preoccupation with representation or referentiality, to some degree, does not make sense because the performance is real and, in a performative theory approach, makes no claim to represent an internal reality. Life writing, on the other hand, makes truth claims and claims to represent reality in some form. (Autofiction and autobiographical novels have long offered playful challenges to the limits of referentiality, the non-fiction/fiction divide, and ongoing discussions about the non- fiction pacts that life writing invokes [Schmitt 2011]). A post-structuralist approach to truth as constructed, relative, and a function of power and knowledge proved useful in destabilizing an approach to life writing that sought out universal truths and verifiable realities but scholarship in trauma and life writing rightly critiqued the impact this has on those who write about genocide, rape, and other atrocities. Seen through the lens of performance theory wherein impressions are created and consolidated, the sincerity of such impressions, Goffman has noted, is fragile and needs to conform to audience expectations (1959, p. 56, 71). In the contexts of autobiography, Leigh Gilmore has also flagged how crucially tied truth-telling practices are to the contexts and discourses in which they are deployed (1994, p. 14). In short, Persona Studies and Life Writing Studies are offering us similar ways to perceive the truth claims of the persona performances of non-fiction texts by focusing on the conditions of impression production and reception, an approach that does not necessarily need to discount the verifiable reality of traumatic experience. Because both life writing and persona performances more broadly are contextually determined (or, at the very least, influenced and shaped by the social situations they anticipate), both fields have explored, in different ways, how this renders the performance/persona/text the work of more than just a singular or autonomous self. As the pages of this journal have modeled over the years, Persona Studies is keenly invested in notions of collective, collaborative, or co-produced personas. A similar conversation has taken place in Life Writing studies albeit under different terminology and approaches, and having undertaken a more circuitous route that included overcoming Romantic constructions of autonomous authorship and implied presumptions that more than one ‘author’ was not the norm and, perhaps, not even legitimate (ie. the ‘ghosted’ text). One such approach has been to acknowledge a slash in auto/biography in order to recognise that the narrative of one life invariably involves narrating other lives. Relational life writing recognises that life writing can assert shared identities through familial, gendered, or other bonds which challenge the notion of fixed boundaries between self and other (Eakin 2004, pp. 8-9). We know as well that life stories respond to and are produced in order to navigate particular contextual demands whether this means such storying has been coaxed or compelled such as in a legal framework (Smith and Watson 2001, Lee 6 pp. 50-3), has been shaped and formatted according to occupational demands (see Ortiz- Vilarelle in this issue) or digital templates (McNeil 2012), or simply to negotiate a social setting that has particular expectations of a public person (see Lee 2020). And while we are not short on frameworks for thinking through the collaborative and contextual conditions of life writing, these are rarely addressed in persona approaches to life writing. Likewise, Life Writing Studies has a tendency to overlook the developments emerging out of Persona Studies in collective and co-produced personas. This issue thus seeks to open up a conversation that recognises shared theoretical roots and common influences and conundrums, but also the opportunities on the horizon to stretch both fields in new directions. IN THIS ISSUE Opening this issue and touching on a topic that is, no doubt, pressing and pertinent to many academics’ lives, Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle explores the impact and effects of digital automedia in the construction of professional academic identities. The constraints of these platforms, programs, and forms through which academics must negotiate their presence in and promotion through the academic institution creates a portrait of academic subjectivity that has been, to a degree, compelled, automated, and collaboratively produced. The effect, however, transforms meaningful lived experience into data in a way that reduces and circumscribes academic personhood. Also concerned with the ways in which digital media affect professional personas, Sini Kaipainen and Kimberly Hall explore how authenticity in different professions is negotiated and, potentially threatened, by different life-writing forms. In “‘It’s What I Do’: A Close Reading of Lynsey Addario’s Instagram Profile as Digital Memoir”, Kaipainen investigates how war photojournalist Lynsey Addario uses her Instagram account as a space to perform both her professional persona and more private moments. The juxtaposition of these posts and even, on occasion, within a post could threaten to compromise her professionalism. Kaipainen suggests, however, that they do not: instead, these intimate and personal performances authenticate Addario as a compassionate journalist and work to affirm her brand. In “Empire of Self: Life Writing and the Professional Person of the Lifestyle Blogger”, Hall unpacks how crucial and, at times, precarious the production of authenticity can be for lifestyle bloggers. The diaristic structure of blogging, on the one hand, lends itself to the kinds of self-reflexive, revelatory discourses that can affirm a blogger’s authenticity. On the other hand, it also inspires the kinds of structures and narratives that are expected by readers and easily produced and consumed, but can also feel formulaic and inauthentic. The first of two creative contributions to this issue, Jane Burn’s lyric essay “How Diary/Memoir/Artist/Poet Jane Compares with Social Media Jane: An Experiment in Person/Persona Via Lyric Essay Fragments” offers us a gorgeously illustrated and poignant exploration/performance of self as experienced across poetry, social media, art, and academia. Self-identifying as an autistic woman, she explores which forms, media, and social settings offer her safety, comfort, and a sense of genuine self-representation. The fragments of self, her work reminds us, need not be pressed into some kind of narrative or cohesive persona to be meaningful or true; rather, fragments enable us to showcase the extraordinary complexity and diversity of our persona performances. H.G. Wells also recognised the plurality and flexibility of persona and the richness of experimenting with autobiographical life writing as Aaron Greenberg argues in his analysis of Wells’ Experiment in Autobiography (1934). Wells cared deeply and wrote extensively about the persona, Greenberg explains, and saw in the concept of the persona the means by which Persona Studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 7 humanity could transcend the limitations of every day, personal lives. In that project, life writing is framed as an essential human right wherein we should not only have the right to tell our stories, but to represent the personas we elect, especially as they change and evolve. The second creative contribution in this issue, Angela Acosta’s “Persona Recovery Through Homage: Poetic Tributes to Spain’s Generation of 1927”, examines homage as a form that once excluded modern Spanish women writers but has rich potential to recuperate their lives and work. The homage can be, Acosta shows us through her research and her poetry, “life- making” and enables both scholars and creative practitioners to imagine and celebrate the sapphic and sororal relationships of these women. Also looking to recuperate and celebrate under-appreciated artists, Marc Röntsch offers us some insights into his biographical work on Zimbabwean-born composer, orchestrator, and pianist, Christopher Langford James. When artists struggle with their mental health, Röntsch explains, it can readily become the dominant frame for life writing about them and how we read life writing by them. Mental illness thus does particular kinds of persona work, forming a central construction of “artistness” and the artist persona. In the final contribution to this issue, James Barker’s “Dolly Parton’s Mythologised Persona, Collective Life Writing, and Building a Home for LGBTQ+ Listeners in Country Music”, we come full circle back to questions about how life writing and personas can be co-produced and collectively constituted. Here, Barker sees in Parton’s persona and her music the opportunity for LGBTQA+ audiences to resonate with the life storying in Parton’s songs. It is not Parton’s persona that occupies centre stage here, but the collective persona of her diverse audiences who can enact queer readings of life-writing texts and, therein, find a “home” in a genre of music that has historically marginalised and erased queer affect and queer experiences. THANK YOUS To Lisa, Kimberly, Sini, Jane, Aaron, Angela, Marc, and James thank you for being a part of this exciting special issue. It has been a tremendous pleasure and honour to work alongside you all and to see how your work changed and developed over the course of the year. I have learned much from your work and I am much inspired by your enthusiasm and keenness to take life writing into new directions. Thank you as well for your patience with all the last minute copy- editing details and for the unforeseen hiccups (damn Covid) that put us behind schedule. Thank you, Jane, for providing the cover image for this issue. It was difficult to choose just one image from the many gorgeous works in your creative piece! To the many scholars and creative practitioners who provided peer reviews, thank you for your time and for sharing your knowledge and insights. The careful and thoughtful feedback reviewers provide is the lifeblood of a good issue and I hope you can see in these pages the effects of your recommendations, influence, and enthusiasm. We are much indebted to all of our reviewers at Persona Studies who continue to provide timely, rigorous, and supportive feedback, and keep this journal at the cutting edge of new developments in the field. And last, but certainly not least, a very heartfelt thank you to my co-editors here at the journal, Kim Barbour, Chris Moore, and David Marshall. This journal began through the combined efforts of Kim and David, who, with the (ongoing) help of a technical support team at Deakin University were able to realise this ambitious project of designing and launching a new journal. Eight years later, Persona Studies remains the journal for the study of persona and we are very proud of what this journal has come to mean to the field and the scholars who work in it. Working with Kim, Chris, and David in the production of our special issues, our guest-edited Lee 8 issues, our regular issues (now redesigned as a “rolling issue” to facilitate speedy publication!), our conferences and conferences issues, and our newest feature, the Video Abstracts, we have been able to create a rich and diverse home for scholars and creative practitioners whether specialists in persona or arriving here by way of other fields. Because the field is, by nature, interdisciplinary we have had extraordinary opportunities to work with scholars in a broad range of fields and this continues to inspire us to push our work and this journal in new, exciting directions. WORKS CITED ‘Angela Merkel to pen political memoir’ 2021, DW.com, December 10th. https://p.dw.com/p/446hj Butler, J 1990, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitutions: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,’ in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. John Hopkins, pp. 270-82. Eakin, P 2004, The Ethics of Life Writing, Cornell University Press. Gilmore, L 1994, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Cornell University Press. Goffman, E 1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday. Haggis, M 2016, ‘Creator’s Discussion of the Growing Focus on, and Potential of Storytelling in Video Game Design,’ Persona Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 20-25. Holland, T 2021, ‘“My battery is low and it’s getting dark”: the Opportunity Rover’s collective persona,’ Persona Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 90-100. Humphrey, M 2021 ‘The Social Oikos: Examining Arendt’s Concept of a Public-Private Divide through the Lens of a YouTube vlog,’ Persona Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 20-32. Kannasto, E 2020, ‘Personal Brand of a Politician in an Election Campaign – Political Personas on Facebook,’ Persona Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 12-4. Lee, K 2020. Limelight: Canadian Women and the Rise of Celebrity Autobiography. WLUP. Leppanen, K 2016. ‘The Politics of Hella Wuolijoki’s Autobiography,’ Scandinavian Journal of History, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 91-109. Marcus, L 1994, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice, Manchester UP. Marshall, PD & Barbour K 2015, ‘Making Intellectual Room for Persona Studies: A New Consciousness and a Shifted Perspective,’ Persona Studies, vol. 1, no .1, pp.1-12. McDonald, S 2015, ‘Responsible Management of online Academic Reputations’, Persona Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, pp.54-63. McNeil, L 2012, ‘There is no “I” in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography,’ Biography, vol. 35, no. 1, pp.65-82. McRae, S 2017, ‘”Get Off My Internets”: How Anti-Fans Deconstruct Lifestyle Bloggers’ Authenticity Work,’ Persona Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 13-27. Poletti, A 2016, ‘Periperformative Life Narratives: Queer Collages,’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 359-379. Schmitt, A 2011, ‘Making the Case for Self-narration Against Autofiction,’ a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, pp 122-37. Sedgman, K 2019, ‘The Institutional Persona: When Theatres Become Personas and the Case of Bristol Old Vic,’ Persona Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 98-110. Smith, S & Wilson, J 2001, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, University of Minnesota Press. —2010, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Second edition, University of Minnesota Press. Usher, B 2016, ‘ME, YOU, and US: Constructing Political Persona on Social Networks During the 2015 UK General Election,’ Persona Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 19-41. Werning, S 2017, ‘The Persona in Autobiographical Game-Making as a Playful Performance of the Self,’ Persona Studies, vol. 3, no.1, pp. 28-42. Katja Lee University of Western Australia Introduction What Kinds of Persona Work Does Life Writing do? Ties That Bind: Shared Theoretical Roots, Conundrums, and Horizons In This Issue Thank Yous Works Cited