Because It Was Never Just Words

Abstract

This poem, written after my writing was plagiarized, heeds Bowers’s (1994) call to use language, rather than silence, to express the emotions associated with the plagiarism of my work. I write how the act of plagiarism cut into my core and created a wound. That wound opened a space to see how, like Bowers (1997), my writing and creative process are deeply personal. They are inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2018). And they matter more than I ever knew. They are a life. A life that is healed with the writing of this poem. The poem and brief methodological note that follow it aim to open conversations about plagiarism in the qualitative inquiry literature.