Acknowledgements

Thank you to my many conversation partners in this project: Erin Burns, for her approach to the everyday practice of hermeneutics; Sam Rocha, for his books on phenomenology and love; Brenda Macdougall, for her generous insight into Indigenous methodologies. Thank you especially to Maryame Ichiba and Zixuan Zhao, for their engagement with early versions of the manuscript and the many ideas on which it draws as part of our doctoral methods seminar in Fall 2020.

Thank you to Ms. Parris, my Grade 12 English teacher, for her encouragement when I got carried away writing about Homeric similes.

Thank you to the Internet Archive (archive.org), the Project Gutenberg (Gutenberg.org), and the University of Ottawa library, for the access they provided to the many e-books I needed while hunkered down in my basement during the first part of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through them, I could engage even more partners in conversation.

Thank you to my mother, for the gift of an e-reader even before I knew I needed it.

Thank you to everyone at Athabasca University Press, especially Pamela Holway, for their enthusiasm and support of the pedagogical project of which this book is the second instalment. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their careful engagement with my argument. Thank you also to Peter Midgley for his thoughtful copyediting.

Finally, thank you, always and forever, to Ellie, Ben, and Kristi.