In the abstract

After roughly a year of keeping my eyes peeled for conferences into which my subfield could logically be shoehorned and turning up approximately zilch, my supervisor put up her hands and declared that I might as well stop worrying myself and try for publication instead. There aren't loads of journals out there to which my work is especially suited (Religion? Kinda... Education? Also kinda... Censorship? Yes but not the way you're thinking.), but as opposed to calls for conference papers, journals aren't moving targets: I can find one, get my act together, and send them some work without having to freak out about a deadline passing me by.

So I'd gotten comfortably wedged in to spending the next month or two reworking a tiny segment of my proto-thesis into something that might be a good fit for one of the handful of journals that's specifically interested in the interdisciplinary and non-traditional. And then I had coffee with Sara Helen on Monday and found out that there's a call out for papers on (among other things) rewriting and censorship. Which closes at the end of the week.

No, I never find out anything through the formal channels. I'm not sure if this means there's an issue with me, or an issue with the manner in which information on such things is disseminated. Either way, the best things in life are discovered through word of mouth.

Funny thing about paper abstracts - they're short and pithy and, to a great extent, prospective, because they don't really expect anyone to have already written the piece that they're proposing to talk about. But back to short and pithy: the abstract has a limit, in this instance, of 300 words, which is far more difficult than 3,000 words, because there is absolutely no space for fat. So the majority of my processing power over the course of this week has been taken up with shoehorning the most salient aspects of the past two years' worth of work into approximately five very dense sentences. If this bit of writing were a physical object, it would be a brick of gold. A very small brick of gold, but a brick of gold nonetheless. This linguistic alchemy was performed using the guidance of Dr. Karen, whose work is probably going to turn into yet another form of procrastination.

Fingers crossed that something will come of it...

"The greatest joy in life lies in doing those things that you have been told you cannot do."

On Wednesday I skibbled down to London to listen to Nick Harkaway, Anna Smaill, and Helena Coggan converse about writing in general and their latest books in particular. Harkaway's eyebrows stole the show. If they hadn't, his suit would have. Together they almost completely distracted everyone from the fact that Coggan is fifteen years old, a fact which I'm hoping will deflect some of the age-related side-eye I've been getting and will probably continue to get for a while. I don't know where this pressure for precocity comes from, but I do wish a bit that someone would hook up sensors to a pregnant woman, transcribe the fetus' brain waves, and publish the results as the novel written by the youngest author ever so we can all stop worrying about age - until someone figures out how to get electrical readings off a zygote, that is. No one has any control over their age, so it baffles me a bit that we make anything of it. But then, there is still a part of my flinty heart that longs to be the youngest winner of the Booker.

While in London I dropped in to see Jason and Anna and all of the wonderful people that get to work in the lovely book warren that is Random House. They had been expecting a box from the publisher, which the publisher insisted had been sent and the RH post room insisted had not, and at the end of the day it turned out that the box had accidentally been mixed in with some trade paperbacks in the publisher's warehouse.

Which is why I had a packet come in the mail this morning:

I give you: hardback!

I had copies of the proof to throw around, but they only show so much of how the book will look when it's done. For instance, I didn't know it was going to be purple. Ok, technically, it's mulberry. Which makes me happy because I love purple and I spent just gobs of my childhood getting mulberries into my face as quickly as humanly possible.

I have read so many books with that windmill embossed on the front. 

Joyously and surprisingly enough, some of the people to whom the proofs were sent actually read them, and read them in time to have an opinion. And then were kind enough to provide that opinion:

And while they are all very nice quotes, one in particular made me completely and utterly lose all composure:

When I asked them to send a proof to Maureen Duffy, I didn't imagine she would actually read it.

So there was a moment of joy and satisfaction, but as I was paging through - not looking too closely, because I know that if I do I will find a mistake - the thought crept into my head: I was twenty-two when I wrote this book. I bet I could do so much better now... 

Oh dear...

The Joy of Teaching

At the beginning of January I was madly apprehensive about the start of term, because I was wandering into what I thought was terra incognita. It was only when things got rolling that I realized that, not only have I in fact done all this before, but I've been doing it longer than a lot of my colleagues in the degree who I generally think of as Smarter Than Me (and also More Adult Than Me, and Better Equipped to Handle Life than me). It's been nearly a decade since I gave my first lecture, and a little over half that time since I started working in the Writing Lab.

This isn't the first time that I've completely forgotten that I do in fact have this type of experience - the only explanation I can think of is that the trauma of it all has scrubbed the memory from my brain, to be recalled only when it's too late for the flight response to be effectively triggered.

Seminars are both more and less difficult than I anticipated them being. I have to know the material more thoroughly than I would if I were lecturing on it, and there is no comfortable performative groove to get into during the session, since everything's responsive. And no matter how well I prepare, if the students have prepared as well to the degree that they're meant to, one of them will come up with an argument or a challenge that I haven't though of, and while that makes me happy like nothing else, it also leaves me a bit stumped as to how to respond. The alternative, unfortunately, is that they don't prepare to the degree that they're meant to, the seminar never quite makes it to the level I'm aiming for, and I bounce my face against the office wall in utter frustration afterwards.

The one thing I absolutely didn't expect is just how exhausting teaching is. Wednesday mornings are an utter write-off because it takes me until nearly 10 to be able to scrape my carcass off the mattress. And the relief of being finished on Tuesday night has approximately a twelve hour half-life.

I already go far over the hours that I'm supposed to spend each week on prepping and reading over student work - we all do, it seems - but I wish that I had more time to put into the Creative Writing class. Another hour or two a week, the files I left in the States... maybe one day I'll be able to pull off the class I wish I had the time to design. Hopefully at that point I will have learned to read a room better so I won't be eternally on edge and worried that they're going to toss me out the window and set up their own Lord of the Flies type empire.

The first assessed submissions are due in two weeks, and are theoretically being worked on even now - so even though it feels like at the moment I have absolutely no time or brain for my own work, that should be getting worse in a little bit. On the bright side, we're halfway to Easter Break, and I've learned more critical theory than I thought possible.

I bet if Nietzsche were alive today...

...he'd be the kind of bro that wore a fedora and had mastered the bitter, knowing chuckle of the thoroughly disillusioned teenager. I'm actually not sure if I hate his rantings about how nothing is real and nothing is true more or less than the Emerson extract from Nature that we might not have time to fully engage with tomorrow.