#13: loosely held political convictions
Dear Readers:
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the thirteenth one.
Boredom. Writing a peer-reviewed academic article is not something I ever thought I’d do. In undergrad, I waded through confusing articles I found on JSTOR to find “evidence” for my English papers, plucking from the morass some sentence or paragraph to quote from and then returning, with relief, to my infinitely more readable “primary source.” When I was getting my MFA, there was a dismissive attitude toward the kind of writing that appeared in academic journals. A feeling like, we can study and be serious and seriously knowledgeable about poetry without using that type of language or thinking in that way. I didn’t want to use that kind of language or think like that, either, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t smart enough to, anyway. When I went to get my Ph.D., I carried this defensive attitude with me—that kind of writing isn’t for me, a creative writer. But one of the reasons I chose to go to the University of Louisiana is that it was the only school I visited where students and professors talked about getting a job after you graduate, as opposed to just rolling their eyes about how terrible the academic job market is. When I arrived, I learned the key: You need to have published two peer-reviewed academic articles when you go on the market. I love it when something—like getting a tenure track job—seems impenetrable, impossible, a huge mess, and then you find out there’s an objective solution. And even better, there was a book that told you how to write these articles (I also learned that people who write peer-reviewed academic articles just call them articles), the not-very-alluringly titled Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks, by Wendy Laura Belcher. In retrospect, I didn’t understand what a peer-reviewed academic article was until I wrote one. And I learned to write one using that book. Belcher says in the introduction that it's been suggested she retitle it an “underground” guide, because lays bare the secrets that academics don’t share; they might not even know they’re secrets.
Glory. To say the book changed my life doesn’t cover it. It made my career—you could say it’s the reason I live in Northeast Ohio; my philosophies and methods of teaching are taken from it, wholesale; and it completely overturned the way I approach all kinds of writing I do, not just academic. The book’s basic idea is that in order for this 12-week plan to be effective, you have to work on your article five days a week, for 15 to 60 minutes each day. The first chapter includes a section titled “Anticipated Writing Obstacles.” It’s a list of 28 reasons people give for not being able to write, each of which Belcher responds to with tough-love solutions. E.g.:
If you really are too busy to fit in fifteen minutes of writing a day, then this workbook really cannot help you
focusing all your energy on writing will not result in more productivity
do your writing and research at the same time
Study after study shows that you do not need big blocks of time to write.
Maybe Belcher’s solutions seem glib the way I’ve presented them, but in the book, each one is long, detailed, and compassionate, and includes information about what you can actually do to address the obstacle.
I use Belcher’s methods for every article I write. The first time I did it, writing and revising and getting the article published took me three years, not 12 weeks. But who cares? Hiring committees don’t ask you how long it took you to write an article; they just see that you've published it. The time it took doesn't matter--it only matters that I did it. One of the many things this book has taught me is that all you have to do is do the work. It’s not about being supersmart. I see that especially well when I’m on the “other side,” as a peer reviewer. Like when I pull out something from my own mind—your discussion of (whatever), especially in a Marxist context, feels incomplete without drawing from (whoever's) scholarship—it feels like it’s someone else doing it, someone who writes peer-reviewed academic articles. But that’s me! I write peer-reviewed academic articles. Just like anyone could, or can.
Horror. Now that I know how to write an article, I feel that my task is to find new ways to express my scholarly ideas. I don’t want them always to be in such rarified language, in such a rarified form. I read articles that have gorgeous ideas in them, or ideas I vehemently disagree with--but these ideas are almost hidden by the language and form of the article. Writers who do rigorous scholarship and theory in their own invented forms loom really large for me, because they’ve broken out of that prison, even though their ideas are complex and discipline-specific: Roland Barthes, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eve Sedgwick, Gloria Anzaldua, Walter Benjamin. And I also love scholars who are less formally inventive but have a kind of flexibility of tone—like serious but also playful—like Jane Thompkins, Barbara Christian, Wai Chee Dimock. I need to learn from these thinkers as writers.
I’m still trying to figure out how to do this. An essay I wrote about the Early American writer Mary Rowlandson, “Genre, Form, Captivity, and Restoration,” was just published in Poetry Northwest, and I try to do it there. My argument is that contemporary poems about Rowlandson use the language of nuance to consider her captivity narrative, but they’re actually a lot less nuanced than Rowlandson's own writing. I thought of writing this as an article, but scholars tend to write about contemporary poets very respectfully—especially when the contemporary poets do any sort of nod to Early American Literature. I didn’t want to be that respectful to contemporary poets. Plus, part of my argument is that Rowlandson is the bold, experimental creative writer that contemporary poets are always claiming to be, so I thought it would be fitting to write it in an experimental form.
But I need to work on sounding more casual. I have all these opinions about scholarship, especially when it comes to Early American literature, but my hold on my own scholarly voice isn’t strong; I can’t sound loose, like Wayne Koestenbaum. He never pontificates; his essays are the opposite of jeremiads—they’re all questions, he’s just looking, casting his brilliant gaze around. Barthes has this list of likes and dislikes: I like “loosely held political convictions," he writes. That’s so much looser and, to me, more effective and interesting, than Yeats’ “The best lack all conviction while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” But that (great, I’m not saying it’s not great) poem itself has the relentless drumbeat of certainty, of conviction. Like, am I in trouble? As much as I adore Wayne Koestenbaum and Roland Barthes, though, I don’t even want to sound loose like either of them; I want to sound loose like me. I haven't found a guidebook for how to do this in 12 weeks—I have to figure that one out on my own.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Recommended: Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks, by Wendy Laura Belcher (a new edition just came out; I have the old one, from 2009); My 1980s, by Wayne Koestenbaum; Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes; Touching Feeling, by Eve Sedgwick; Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua; One Way Street, by Walter Benjamin.
Unrecommended: Nothing! All positive.