Stop me before I get "brilliant" tattooed on my forehead

I had to do a little shameless self-promotion in my American Lit Survey on Wednesday just to show what sorts of rewards may follow when research and teaching go hand-in-hand. I taught Natasha Trethewey's poem "Native Guard" a few years ago and then I read more of her work and did research and wrote an academic essay about why and how I teach the poem--an essay that was published in Pedagogy journal last year at this time--and so this week when I taught the poem again I showed my students the journal and told them how prior students' experiences had informed my writing and current students may inform my future writing, putting a neat little bow on the last week of the semester.

What I couldn't show them (because it wasn't available yet) was the most recent edition of Pedagogy, in which Elizabeth Brockman, who recently retired as editor of the "From the Classroom" section of the journal, devoted her farewell column to praise for the last essay she had ever edited for the journal, one she holds up as an example of what the journal can and should do. "I chose this essay because the author is brilliant, the essay is skillfully written, and the topic is profoundly important," she wrote.

Reader: I am that author. The essay she's praising is mine. 

Academic writing can be such a thankless task: you read, research, write, revise, submit, get rejected, revise some more, submit again, and if all goes well the article gets accepted—and then you go through the long process of responding to suggestions for revision and reading proofs and waiting for the thing to finally get published, by which time you've been fiddling  with the essay for so long that you're utterly sick of the topic, and then you wait in hope that some kind scholar will read the essay and maybe, someday, cite it in a footnote buried at the bottom of an article in an obscure journal no one will ever read--or you go mad waiting for the round of  applause that never arrives.

Which is why Elizabeth Brockman's column in Pedagogy praising my essay makes me feel as if I've won a gold medal in the Academic Olympics. (Stop me before I get brilliant tattooed on my forehead.)