Norman Lives on Among Us,In Us,With Us,For Us

When I heard Norman Denzin had died, I lost my breath for a long moment.

Dylan Thomas: Do not go gentle into that good night/Old age should burn and rave at close of day/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I wonder if he went gentle into that good night? He was a gentle man, it seemed. He was surely a gentleman. But a big part of me still thinks of him as a rebel, the kind of man who stands up against injustice, who fights the good fight, who leads us all on a sacred quest. Part of me likes to think he didn’t want to go so soon. He still had work to do.

Of course, we knew, in the back of our minds, that it was coming. But most of us did not want to believe it. Some people just aren’t supposed to die.

But death came anyway. It always does. We know that. That knowledge never softens the blow.

Like many of us, I first met Norman on the page. I was a graduate student in the 1990s, and, taking the ethnographic turn, I started reading everything: Goodall, Bochner, Ellis, Trujillo, and so on. And there he was: Norman Denzin, a clarion voice, calling out to us to embrace the moment and dive deeply into the mystery of qualitative inquiry.

In 1997, I saw a call for Cultural Studies: A Research Volume, one of the many projects he was managing. I submitted a piece I had written for a Qualitative Methods course. He liked what he read. With a few minor edits, my first publication, about a ritualized practice known as “shvitzing” (Poulos, 1999). I was ecstatic. But one of the best parts was an email exchange. “Bravo,” he wrote. I would later learn that this prolific author was a master of email brevity. Time and time again: A sentence, or less.

The other best part? A few years later, I got to meet him, at the first International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI). Every year, he invited us in, with an ardent call to champion qualitative inquiry. And so many of us answered the call, and the Congress grew and grew. And every year, when I ran into him in the Pine Lounge, I knew I was home.

On a personal note, Norman was an unflagging, ardent supporter of my work. Every piece I submitted to one of his journals, he published, usually without flinching. When I made my bid for tenure, he was there. When I received a negative vote for having the audacity to be an autoethnographer in a world hostile to qualitative inquiry (Poulos, 2010, 2019), he was there again, writing an impassioned letter of support. And, in typical Norman style, when it was all over, and I had won, he invited me to write about the experience and to convene panels at ICQI to talk about navigating the murky waters of tenure in a hostile world. He invited me to support people who were running into trouble around the world. And he regularly asked me to edit special issues of the International Review of Qualitative Research. Naturally, I always said yes.

Over the years, we came to understand each other, the way kindred writers/teachers/ scholars “get” each other. On many occasions, his words touched me, moved me. I like to think I returned the favor once in a while. Mostly, his actions spoke to the larger world that what we do matters, that what we must do is make a difference in a troubled world. He walked the rocky road, with courage and grace and presence.

Finally, I have a confession. When I write, I always have an audience in mind. Today, it is you, and you, and you: All of you who, like me, came to love him. But first and foremost, it has always been Norman K. Denzin—in the front row, reading/listening intently. Norman’s insightful editorial genius, his generous spirit, his passion for the work, his hospitality, his brilliant mind have somehow become part of me, part of us. And in that way, he will always live on, among us, in us, with us, for us.