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.

Into the breach

Monday tips us squarely into Week 3 of the undergrad academic calendar and my maiden experience of teaching undergrads in a UK university. Strangely enough, it is neither very different from what I imagined nor from what I've done other places, other times, with other students; the biggest surprise was that the Creative Writing students all but refuse to speak, while the critical students appear to have an abject horror of silence.

I've been given two seminars of a lecture/seminar based class called Writing Texts, which turns out to be one of the foundational theoretical modules for the entire Literature degree, and includes reading by Barthes and Bakhtin and Kant and Nietzsche and Auerbach and Aristotle and lots and lots of linguistics and theory and things that one can't simply pretend to have read. Naturally, the students in one of my seminars continuously attempt to pretend that they have done the reading, which leads to lots of silences that they seem to find ravingly uncomfortable. Not being a student any more, I have nothing but love for the awkward silences, and watching them avoid eye contact by any means possible in the hopes that I won't call on them, and I wonder if all of the professors I had in undergrad felt the same way. The best part of it, though, is being faced with material that I've never seen before (linguistics, Bakhtin) or haven't seen in years (Aristotle, Kant) and having to know it well enough to explain it in several different ways in time for the seminar class. The worst part is that the lecture component, which I have to base the seminar discussion on, takes place 25 hours before my first Texts seminar, so I have, at best, half a day to really wrap my head around the material, make a seminar plan, and figure out some exercises for them to do in class that will really be helpful instead of just give me some breathing room. I'm surprised that the challenging part is getting the material cold, rather than having to keep myself composed around human beings for an extended period of time. 

Somehow, I also wound up with an Intro Creative writing class. And someone, some how, screwed up the room bookings for this term, so I have all three classes on Tuesday. Which might not sound like much, but it's the absolute maximum number of classes that the university is allowed to have a PhD candidate take on, and with seminar planning and marking and three hours of office hours a week it means that Friday is the only day I really manage to get any of my own work done. Creative Writing especially takes up quite a bit of time, since I essentially wrote my own syllabus, plan my own assignments, select my own content, write my own exercises, read the material that I make them write, and determine how much lecturing I'm actually going to make them sit through on a given week. So planning for the writing class takes up at least double what planning for Texts does, and I can't do either too far ahead of time or else I forget what I meant when I wrote "Nietzsche's first metaphor and second metaphor - what is third metaphor/relate to Ong on translation." 

But all in all, I'm enjoying teaching. The material is challenging, and the students are interesting, and I get ridiculously happy when the Texts students make a difficult connection or suddenly understand something. The writing students always make me ridiculously happy, as, unlike pretty much everyone else I've ever taught/tutored/lectured to they seem to really want to be there, and they throw themselves fully into the prompts that I give them. 

Besides the teaching, my critical supervisor has said that I should start looking into publishing some thesis content in a peer reviewed journal, since I've already blazed past the length requirement and am only halfway finished. And The Shore comes out in two months. So all in all, life is good. 

A brief interlude (real information to follow when the deadline has been met)

I'm sitting at my (mostly clean) desk at the moment drinking hot toddies and wrangling with the same critical chapter that I've been working on since July. Fortunately, this time there are no elf footprints involved, though I do have the 1973 edition of a fiction textbook open next to me for reference. A fiction textbook, may I say, that manages to consist entirely of extracts from popular children's and young adult fiction (of the time) and yet only contains four female protagonists in nearly six hundred pages and approximately 35 pieces of fiction; they are a whale (of indeterminate type), a dragon, a little girl of the everyday sort, and a princess.

I have read this book at least a dozen times so far; the extracts that I've picked specifically to support my arguments I've been over more frequently. But it's been mostly fun, because quite a few of the pieces in the book are extracted from novels I read as a kid.

Which made me realize something.

Most of the fiction that was available to me as a child and young adult was about boys becoming men and girls becoming their doorprizes; all of the books that stuck with me were about boys struggling to find their places in the world so that they could be recognized as Men. And since there weren't any other fully fleshed out characters around, I identified with those boys; and when I was a confused adolescent I identified with their struggle towards an elusive but noble Manhood. And then after all of that vicarious living, my parents were mystified at my hostility to their insistence that I act like a lady. I knew, by then, exactly what happened to ladies: even if they didn't get killed so that the boy-man could have some personal growth or emotional epiphany, nothing worthwhile really happened to them.

I'm still waiting to be called on my quest, to be given the sword that proves that I am the long-lost son of whomever, and to fight my way to take my place as rightful king of nowhere and rule with a firm but kind ethos. And I still wonder why, when I've been give the option to see myself as the lost prince, the once and future king, the assistant pig keeper, I'm expected to choose instead to be the baby-minder who never gets to go anywhere.

Oh look, it's January again.

This weekend I had a first that I never anticipated: my spouse-thing loaded my stuff into the car and drove me up to school. As opposed to my parents doing it, or me doing it myself, which is how it's always happened. And then he did the unforgivable and left me there. Granted, he took me to get a second bookshelf first, and took me to the really big grocery store that I can't walk to, and carried all my heavy stuff up to the fourth floor. But when we ran out of weekend he left, and I sulked. And then I realized how much I have to get done, and I stopped sulking and started panicking.

I've said before that one of the unfair things about academia is that January is smack dab in the middle of the year for us, as opposed to the new beginning that 'most everyone else gets. It also happens to be, I realize now, a serious crunch time: there are funding deadlines, and coursework deadlines, and submission deadlines, and tax deadlines, and all kinds of other nasty deadlines, and all I want to do is sleep until it starts staying light out for more than six hours of the day.

In the plus column, I now have the module outlines for both of the classes that I start teaching in exactly one week! Teaching is a special source of terror for me, because it highlights all of the cultural differences that I usually get to blissfully ignore. What do I call my superiors? Is the thing I'm teaching technically called a module, a class, a seminar? Am I missing something that a person that was educated in this system would take for granted, and that the system takes my knowing for granted? Luckily, both my course conveners are incredibly sweet, so I'm hoping that the term won't be an unmitigated disaster. And, as terrified as I am of any occasion that involves me interacting in person with anyone that I'm not married to or sibling to, I'm actually kinda excited that I get to teach. It makes me feel like almost a real adult.

Also in the plus column, one of the three modules (classes? sections? pluots?) I'm teaching is Intro Creative Writing, and, as long as I don't change the graded work guidelines, I get to put whatever I want on the syllabus. Funnily enough, 'my future creative writing class' is something that I've thought about before, and I even have a file where I've been stashing favorite exercises and handouts from classes I've taken, just in case I ever get to teach my own. I say 'funnily' because last summer my mother was shocked that I'd never done the same for 'my future wedding.' Diff'rent strokes, Ma.

Speaking of weddings, I've meant for a while now to write something about that, because it was a seriously surreal experience. When we got engaged at the beginning of the year I told Dave that I was worried about all of the traditional trappings, and he told me I was being paranoid; six months later we got one card too many addressed to 'Mr. and Mrs. David W---' and he went off on the most wonderful rant against the patriarchy I have ever heard. But that will have to happen after I've written the syllabus for my (!) creative writing class.

To Hemingway, or not to Hemingway? That is the question.