Living the Questions

In Living the Questions: Dispatches From a Life Already in Progress, Wade Tillett takes up the question of how to live – not in some abstract sense, but in the urgent present. Tillett realizes that how to live is a question that each of us is already asking – and answering – moment-by-moment. These texts offer surprising discoveries of how we are already inventing solutions to living in multiple and discontinuous worlds through our daily actions. By examining small specific pieces of daily life, Tillett explores how we navigate through tentative, multiple, and often contradictory positions. Among the many situations artistically explored are visiting a church, narrating a family movie, exposing students to a nearby school, re-working a found sculpture, taking a licensure exam, attending a protest, and waiting for the El. By juxtaposing multiple voices and images, he attempts to see how, in both method and content, the texts themselves act on the worlds and lives they describe.

Tillett narrates from many perspectives: teacher, researcher, writer, artist, architect, activist, parent, theorist, and struggling protagonist of his own life. As such, many readers sharing such roles will immediately find connections within the book. For researchers struggling to find workable qualitative methodologies after poststructuralism, the experimental methods employed here may provide welcome inspiration. However, the book seems aimed not so much at particular disciplines but at anyone who, like Tillett, is actively searching for how to live. Anyone involved in such a search will likely find hope and ways forward in his methods that look at life as we are already living it.