Hovering over the SEND key

How all occasions do inform against me, hollers Hamlet in agonizing indecision, but he was merely contemplating violent revenge over his father's murder. He never had to contend with a recalcitrant refrigerator. 

It's not even my refrigerator! It's the fridge in our Center for Teaching Excellence, and it's suddenly not cool. Granted, nowhere around here is cool today--we're immersed in the kind of humid heat wave that wraps us in thick damp layers of sticky insulation and then squeezes hard so that we can hardly breathe, but indoors, everything is cool. 

Except the fridge. It's downright warm inside, even though the lights are on and it's still humming like a functioning refrigerator. All the cakes in the freezer have thawed, and don't even get me started about why we constantly have five to seven sheet cakes in the freezer. Our work/study student has been busy this morning distributing the cakes to other campus departments before they start to rot (the cakes--not the departments), although those grocery-store cakes are pumped so full of preservatives that I doubt that they'll ever rot. This morning I threw away the remains of a cake that had been sitting out on the table for at least two weeks. Not a sign of rot anywhere.

So anyway: I arrived on campus this morning in despair over the state of my summer writing projects but determined to make measurable progress, only to be derailed by a fridge willing to hum but not cool. I have submitted a ticket to the appropriate department, which wonders whether we can make do with a mini-fridge. Given the number of food-related events we host in the Center, no. We need a fridge! But I need to write! And somebody locked the door to the Writing Wednesday classroom! And I don't have the key! And I'm fielding texts and emails related to the difficulty of replacing a 17-year-old fridge on short notice! And I'm not getting anything done!

Well, I'm getting a few things done--mostly the kinds of things that made Hamlet wonder What is a man / if his chief good and market of his time / be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more!

I need to put profound insights into winged words and send them off to journals to enlighten curious minds, but instead I'm haggling over refrigerators. This essay in this to-do folder, the one I've been fiddling with for two or possibly three summers, I've trimmed it down to a reasonable length, tightened the prose, eliminated excessive quotations, researched a journal that might be a good fit, written a cover letter, and attached the file to the email--why can't I go ahead and hit SEND and be done with it? I do not know / why I yet live to say 'This thing's to do', and yet my finger hovers over the mouse, unwilling to take the final step.

If Hamlet can work himself up into a froth of anger that leads to action, then maybe I can too. O, from this time forth, / my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth, hollers Hamlet, but he says this in Act 4 of a five-act play, so he still has to wade through some stuff. 

I'll fetch the key. I'll deal with the fridge. I'll wrestle with a laptop that was allegedly fixed last week, although the fix required deleting all my browsing history, passwords, and settings. I'll send a student forth bearing cakes. And I swear, by all the poison poured into all the ears on all the stages on the planet, that before I leave campus today I'll hit that SEND key and boldly slash that task from my to-do list. 

The rest is silence.

Turn my back for five minutes and everything falls to pieces

I step away from news coverage for a few hours and suddenly we're at war again? Can't I take a little media break without missiles being launched?

I shouldn't have taken a break at all, thanks to a crazy crowded week that ended with a sudden change in the deadline for my massive editing project, which was supposed to be due by March 12 but is instead due on Monday. That would be the day after tomorrow. Ten days earlier than expected. And while I had been on track to deliver the goods by next Friday, March 6, I'm not at all ready to deliver on March 2, especially since the deadline change was announced late on Friday afternoon, February 27, after I'd already gone home. Yes: someone informed me late on FRIDAY that the massive editing project I'd been planning to deliver NEXT FRIDAY is instead due THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW. There aren't enough exclamation marks on the planet to express how I feel about this surprising development.

So yes, I should have dropped all my plans for the weekend and spent the whole day editing institutional prose produced by a writers with various levels of skill, some of whom write quite clearly while others may (may!) have used AI to produce sentences that juggle academic jargon in various combinations without saying much of anything. First thing this morning I ought to have glued my eyeballs to the monitor and my fingers to the keyboard until the work was done, but I didn't.

Instead I got up at 4 a.m. so I could be showered, dressed, and ready to leave by 5, skimping on the morning caffeine quota so I wouldn't have to take a million rest-room breaks during the two-hour trip to Columbus, with my son driving my car because I can't see in the dark so I just sat there trying and failing to get a photograph of the orange moon. 

Dropped him at the airport at 7 a.m. so he can fly to Banff for a ski trip, which makes me happy both because I love to say Banff--Banff Banff Banff--and because my son is getting a chance to have an amazing adventure before he has to face some serious medical tests that could reveal all kinds of scary things that I'm not yet authorized to write about and in fact shouldn't have said anything about even now, so ignore that. A brief hiatus before things get serious--that's something to celebrate (but I've already used up all the exclamation points on the planet, so I'll celebrate more subtly).

Also worth celebration is the fact that yesterday I scheduled the final payment on our mortgage, exactly 22 years after we signed the loan papers. By the end of next week, my house will be paid off. I can't hold a mortgage-burning party because there are no actual papers to burn, but I've been doing a little internal tap-dance ever since I hit "send" on the online payment program.

And I took that tap-dance with me this morning on my excursion to Columbus, because if I'm going to get up at the crack of dawn to take my son to the airport, then by golly I'm going to get some fun out of the deal: first a chatty breakfast with an old friend, and then an hour or so at the orchid show at Franklin Park Conservatory. I kept seeing what I thought was the most gorgeous orchid ever, but then I would turn a corner and see another even more gorgeous. So much more uplifting than institutional prose, and easier on the eyes too.

I used my phone to take photos but kept away from news media all morning, and I didn't even turn on the radio while driving home because the silence felt soothing, so imagine my surprise when I arrived home and discovered that the world has gone to pieces while I wasn't looking--again--but I can't even think about it because all that institutional prose failed to edit itself in my absence so I've got to hunker down and get it done.

Tomorrow's going to be rough: after our (very early) church service I'll go to campus so I can use the big monitor that doesn't fatigue my eyeballs quite so quickly, and I'll just sit there and edit edit edit until there's nothing left to edit. Could take hours, could take the whole day, could leave me a gibbering idiot by the time I'm done, but you know what? It will get done. Because that's how I roll. No matter how annoyed I am at the unexpectedly mobile deadline, and no matter how much the whole rest of the world may try to distract me, I will fulfill my duty to the letter and send the edited files off even if the effort wears out my fingers and reduces my vision to a vague blur. IT WILL GET DONE. Tomorrow. Or else.

Meanwhile, let's look at orchids:

Don't diss the diss

Yesterday I was all smiles after a total stranger came up to me at a meeting and said, "I've read your dissertation." Today I'm trying to figure out whether it might have been a mistake or a little white lie or an elaborate prank. 

I mean, has anyone outside of my dissertation committee ever read my dissertation? Decades ago I presented some bits of it at conferences and I published a piece of one chapter in a journal, but my dissertation exists primarily as a printed document in my house and in a regional university library--only the abstract is available online. It would take a significant effort to read my dissertation.

But the person I bumped into at this meeting had been talking about a stretch of old-growth forest she visits with her classes, and I recalled that I'd visited those woods close to 30 years ago so I could take some photos, one of which ended up in my dissertation. The stranger said she'd cataloged everything that had been written about that stretch of woods and that my dissertation was part of the collection, which at the time sounded plausible, but now I'm not so sure.

So I dug out my copy of my dissertation and took a look, and sure enough there's the photo of the woods in question accompanied by exactly one sentence labeling the photo and naming the woods. That's all. There's maybe one more obscure mention of the woods within the document, but it's not mentioned in the abstract or the title, nor does it play any significant part in the argument. So maybe someone (who?) might have been reading my dissertation (why?) and stumbled upon that brief mention of those woods, and maybe that person passed the reference on to the scholar I met yesterday, but the odds for that scenario seem vanishingly small.

We were in a room full of happy people at the time and it didn't occur to me to give the stranger a quiz to verify that she had done the reading, so I just beamed at the possibility that some total stranger had actually read my dissertation. Except maybe she didn't. Maybe she's confused. Maybe it doesn't even matter. But I appreciate the brief glow her words inspired as well as the excuse to hunt down my dissertation, which I'm sure I haven't looked at in twenty years. (The argument remains sound, but goodness gracious I used a lot of semicolons.)  

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.)

A fine whine

I had no intention of coming to campus at all this week but here I am, two days in a row, clattering away at the computer in my office instead of baking festive holiday cookies at home. And why? Well, I can't say, exactly, because yesterday at our semi-annual the sky is falling meeting outlining new procedures for spending departmental funds (in a nutshell: don't!), those in attendance were reminded of the need to be mindful of the narrative we craft, but my mind is still so befuddled by the convoluted procedures I will now have to follow as a department chair that I'm in no fit state to be mindful of crafty narratives. Instead, I will keep silent on the substance of yesterday's meeting except to wonder when we can move away from the word crisis to describe a situation that has been going on so long that it feels like the way things have always worked. I mean, the first time you get hit over the head with a sledgehammer might feel like an unprecedented outrage, but by the 50th time, it's just another Tuesday.

But I am happy to comment on the other reason I have to be on campus today, which springs from the existence in the world of academics who somehow fail to understand the academic calendar. Raise your hand if you want to be handed an essential task on Dec. 19 and told that you must complete it by January 4! I didn't raise my hand for that but nevertheless here I am wondering why editors at academic journals can sometimes be so clueless about how academics plan their schedules and the existence, for instance, of the winter holidays. 

Yesterday, when I first received the final version of an article due for publication over the winter, I thought I would just run through it and correct any little infelicities that might have crept in over time, but then I noticed that a quote had been mangled and realized that I was going to have to check every quote in the essay for accuracy, which I couldn't do at home because the necessary books are in my office, except for the one that, fortunately, I was able to locate in our library. And then on closer inspection I found that somewhere along the line other errors have been introduced--and I know they're not my errors because they don't exist in the version I submitted to the journal, such as a misspelling of an author's name and the presence of the word oftentimes, which I never use, in writing or speaking, except to ask students to change it to often.

So here I am clicketing away at the keyboard, being mindful of the need to craft narratives while sledgehammers periodically pound on my back. Not too often--but never oftentimes.  

Back to the simulated garden

Standing nearly six feet tall and arranged in neat rows between ziggurat-like office buildings, 109 molded concrete ears of corn guard a busy intersection in the Columbus suburb of Dublin, Ohio.  The art installation, Field of Corn with Osage Orange Trees by sculptor Malcolm Cochran, can baffle unprepared passersby.  Are these stark white erections tiny missile silos?  Tombstones?  Teeth?  Klansmen playing freeze-tag?

Thus begins a cheeky article called "From Mulberries to Machines: Planting the Simulated Garden," published in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 15 years ago. It wasn't my first article in an academic journal, but it drew on a section of my dissertation so I'd been working on the topic for what felt like a very long time. From that field of fake corn grew my entire academic career.

I don't spend much time in Columbus these days but this morning I paid a repeat visit to Field of Corn with Osage Orange Trees. The property once belonged to an agriculturalist studying corn hybridization, but I'm sure he never envisioned an ear of corn six feet tall. Early settlers planted osage orange trees close together to serve as hedges along property lines, but it's unusual to see osage oranges standing in the middle of the city, occasionally dropping a hedge apple to the ground with a thunk.

Even early on a Saturday morning, a steady swish of traffic whizzed past as I wandered among the artificial ears. I could wax poetic about how Field of Corn makes visible the various meanings inscribed on this particular plot of land over the centuries, but mostly the whole experience just makes me smile. A simulated garden in the middle of a city! Someone should write about that.

A little shameless self-promotion

After four years of work with some really fabulous writers and the terrific editing staff at the MLA, I finally got to hold this book in my hands. I'm still impressed by the variety of perspectives and topics on using comedy to teach many kinds of classes--but don't just take my word for it. Check it out for yourself!

 

Forthcoming, finally

Just a little bit excited about seeing this listed among the Forthcoming Titles on the MLA website:

Available for preorder by clicking here. 

Angst, insomnia, and grad-school flashbacks

Lately I've had the feeling that I've accidentally slipped back in time to my grad-school days: working long hours in front of a campus computer, coming back to campus to work all day Saturday, forgetting to eat meals and then filling in with whatever junk I can lay my hands on, all for the sake of meeting artificial academic deadlines. This time, though, it's not a class assignment but a publishing project eating up all my daylight hours, and it's even more complicated because this project requires me to engage in the type of assignment I most hated in grad school: group work.

I've mentioned before that I'm editing a collection of essays on using comedy in various teaching contexts, and in many ways it's been a hurry-up-and-wait situation: long stretches of waiting for the next stage in the process to begin followed by sudden flurries of frantic activity. I have no control over when these demands and deadlines will arise, but fortunately I've been able to complete the bulk of the work during breaks from teaching.

Not this time. Here I am teaching four classes in the busiest part of the semester while also attending ridiculously long Faculty Council meetings, and I suddenly have to juggle the needs of various editors and something like 37 contributors. (I could tell you the exact number but I'm too tired to look it up right now.) 

I find great joy in working with fellow academics on a topic so dear to my heart, but apparently I'm not the only one in this situation struggling to meet demands. While most contributors have done their part of the project quickly and without a fuss, others require more hand-holding (often over tech issues I don't know how to solve), and a few haven't responded at all. Here I sit facing a firm deadline and all I want to do is send an excuse saying the dog ate my contributors.

Given the difficulties I'm facing, I could emulate my students and ask for an extension, but anyone who knows me will find this option laughable. Missing a deadline makes me physically ill, even if it's not my fault. I see before me a week full of work, anguish, and insomnia, and I keep returning to the mantra that kept me going back in grad school: Someday this will all be over. 

But first, I've got some work to do. 

Seeking the password into the secret clubhouse

Bored with being in limbo, I promised myself I'd come up with an idea for my next big writing project by today, and bingo--it happened. Last night I ran across a two-word phrase that sparked an idea that could inspire interesting academic writing for the rest of the summer, if not longer. 

But by this morning, the second-guessing had set in. The problem is simple: I keep finding myself restating things I've said over and over again, each time with more urgency. What makes me think that this time someone will listen?

And this, in a nutshell, is the problem with academic writing: The process is so slow and uncertain that it's nearly impossible to know whether the words are having any impact. I can look back and see that the articles I've written have aided my tenure and promotion cases, but with no more promotions available, nobody on campus really cares whether I keep writing and publishing.

But I care! Last summer I worked very hard to research and write an essay that serves as an analysis of a particular poem but also engages with current discussions about intersections of race, history, and literature, but the pace of academic publishing is so slow that seven months after submission there’s still no word on whether the essay will be accepted for publication. If it ever gets published, the discussion will have moved on.

I look at my Google Scholar account and see that several of that my articles are steadily being cited, two in particular, but the citations tend to be perfunctory, as if the authors are just checking my work off a list to satisfy someone's demand for comprehensiveness. I tell my students that it's important to contribute to the "scholarly conversation" about their research topics, but I don't see much evidence of such a conversation. I wonder whether that thrilling exchange of ideas is happening in some secret clubhouse where all the cool kids gather while I stumble around trying to find the entrance and remember the password.

I know I have more to say about many topics, but the reading public isn’t exactly lining up outside my door begging me to share my thoughts. Lacking external motivations, I will need to rely on the internal kind. Why keep writing when it's impossible to gauge impact and there’s no clear reward?

Because I still have a few more years of teaching to do and I want to model for my students the importance of maintaining a regular writing habit. (As if they cared.)

Because playing with words engages a part of my brain that I fear will atrophy for lack of use. (Already this week I’ve hovered long over the keyboard to try to dig up the word “unwieldy” in a context where it was the only right word but for some reason my brain refused to supply it.)

Because I’ve always imagined my retirement as a time when I can write for pleasure, but it won’t happen if I’ve forsaken the habit of writing.

Because I’ve thought of myself as a writer since I was about eight years old, and a writer writes.

And there it is: If I am a writer, I will write, regardless of whether anyone ever reads my words.

And if I can't think of anything to write about, I'll write about not writing, a topic on which every scholar I've ever known is an occasional expert.

Maybe I should smuggle a bulldozer into my office

This morning I zipped blithely along a stretch of highway admiring the new wall intended to prevent the kind of landslip that closed the highway two years ago. For two years I've spent a great deal of time watching the heavy equipment move piles of debris out of the way and replace it with that massive wall a quarter mile long, an entertaining and educational process that helped me while away the time until the temporary red light turned green and let me proceed on my commute to campus. Early-morning commutes usually resulted in a short wait, but during peak hours I could wait through two or three lights, with no convenient way to get around the blockage (until amphibious vehicles become readily available). Now the heavy equipment is gone, the barriers are down, and the highway is open in both directions--smooth sailing!

Some other long-term projects have not proceeded quite so smoothly. Lots of Covid-related delays have kept contributors from submitting revisions in a timely manner, but finally it appears that I have everything I need to complete the manuscript for the collection on teaching comedy that I've been working on for two years now. I have some work to do on the organization and the introduction, but if I work diligently for a week or two, I should be able to submit the revised manuscript to the publisher before classes start. That will be another barrier cleared off my road.

But a pothole arose in the path of the pedagogy-inflected essay I've been working on all summer. A few weeks ago I celebrated finishing the draft, and now I've revised it in response to readers' comments--but the journal I'd been aiming for is not currently accepting submissions. I need a Plan B--a publication aimed at non-specialists interested in poetry, history, race, and culture, one that also accepts footnotes. (I can delete the two footnotes if I have to, but it would hurt me.) Finding a venue has always been my least favorite part of academic writing, and it's really disappointing to find that the venue I'd had in mind is unavailable. Where do I go next? I'm stuck.

The other big obstacle keeping me from relaxing for the few remaining weeks of summer is the lack of direction about fall classes. My syllabi are in good shape but I can't put the finishing touches on anything until I know what the College will require regarding Covid precautions. Do I still need to set up a Zoom link for each class? Will I be required to offer class online for students who have to quarantine? Will we have a college-wide mask policy or are we on our own? Until the Powers That Be issue their official pronouncements, my whole preparation process is broken down by the side of the road.

But progress is being made. Today I asked the building services people to let me use the vacuum so I can start getting my office ready for fall. Right now an avalanche of books blocks my work space, but let me get the heavy equipment moving and soon I'll have the whole place set to rights. All summer I've been making incremental changes so small that it rarely looks like I've been working at all, but in the end they'll add up to smooth sailing into whatever lies ahead. 

Drop-kicked to the middle of next month

I'm writing this essay inside-out, I tell myself--violating the advice I often give to students. Instead of synthesizing source material as I go, I'm writing the central analysis in full and then going back afterward to squeeze in the scholarship. But I've got time to make it work. I mean, it's not as if I'm writing this for a grade or a deadline. But why am I writing this? Where shall I send it when it's done? I'll worry about that tomorrow.

This is what June does to me: gives me plenty of reason to postpone action until tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Once June is over, I have to get serious and finish things, because August will be right around the bend and at that point everything needs to be done. And here we are at the end of June. No more messing around! Work work work!

But it's too hot to work. I know it's hotter elsewhere; I know others are suffering more that I am; but it's hot enough here to make breathing outdoors uncomfortable and to make brownouts inevitable. But at least the highways aren't melting. Yet.

In other news, I was just talking with an old friend about how much I'm looking forward to teaching African American Lit this fall, and she wanted to know whether students ever resist or resent reading minority voices--Don't you get nervous about teaching Black literature in the current environment?  But who has the energy to worry about such things in the middle of June? Coincidentally, the day after my friend asked the question, I bumped into a former student at a restaurant in town, and he came up to tell me how much he appreciated my class. I couldn't remember his name and I had to ask him which class he'd taken from me, and he said, African American Lit. It totally changed the way I think about things.

That's the kind of comment that can keep me working and thinking and reading and writing even in the laziest days of summer. In fact, that's the kind of comment that drop-kick my lazy butt right into the middle of next month. Watch out! Woman at work! Better get out of the way! (Tomorrow.)

Just what we need for summer writing

So far this morning I've already written a chunk of prose toward an essay I've been thinking about for ages, an essay I could have started writing at any point in the past six months if the creative part of my brain hadn't been crowded out by all the concerns of pandemic teaching. With students gone and fall semester far away, I feel the way I did after finally finishing the PhD: as if a glacier has finally receded, allowing the underlying land to begin to bounce back. It may take a while to bounce back entirely, but in the meantime it feels really good to be writing again.

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so, because we've had a larger than normal number of faculty members attending our weekly Writing Wednesday sessions in the library. Last year Writing Wednesday was cancelled because of social distancing requirements, but this summer we're meeting again face-to-face, seven of us spread around a large classroom, working on our own projects, separate yet together. We write without distractions, phones silenced and email ignored, and afterward we share the exhilaration of making measurable progress toward our writing goals. Last week we even ate lunch together at a picnic table outside the library. We're not entirely back to normal yet, but our spirits rise as the glacier recedes.

Last week I focused on writing down a bunch of ideas about the poem I'm trying to analyze, and I so thoroughly lost track of time that the end of our session arrived as a shock. Writing these initial notes, though, revealed a sticky problem: the next steps of drafting will be largely determined by audience and purpose. Do I want to aim this essay toward an academic journal, or do I envision a more casual, non-academic audience? Do I want to focus on theoretical issues and analysis of the poem or emphasize the implications for pedagogy? I wasn't prepared to make this decision last week so I decided to park the idea and give it some time to develop.

And here's the wonderful thing: if I give the creative part of my brain time and space, it will keep working even when I'm not paying attention. The answer arrived as if unbidden: Much of my experience with the poem arises from my attempts to break through my students' resistance, so the essay will necessarily be informed by pedagogy; however, more than anything I want readers outside academe to comprehend the power of this poem, which provides valuable insight for our present moment. So I guess I'm writing a pedagogy-inflected essay for a non-academic audience, if that makes any sense. At some point I'll have to figure out where to submit such a hybrid beast, but first I need to write it.

Writing Wednesday give me time and space to do that, but the most important thing it gives is permission--to ignore texts and emails, the demands of home maintenance and the needs of family members, students, administrators, and everyone else outside this room. Writing Wednesday stands like a barrier holding back the glacier of responsibility that always threatens to overwhelm the writing life. Some small part of me knows the glacier will inevitably return, but while it's in abeyance, we sit in silence and write.

Some updates and a brief celebration before panicking

My birding-and-botanizing buddy has provided identifications for some wildflowers I didn't recognize last week:

Partridge-pea, or Chamaechrista fasciculata

Heal-all, or Prunella Vulgaris

Hairy Ruellia, or Ruellia Caroliniensis

 

Also, my colleague the dragonfly expert has identified this as a Tiger Spiketail, rarely seen in Ohio (only two confirmed sightings this year):

 

Finally, and here I demonstrate my highly developed ability to bury the lede, this morning I finally submitted the full draft manuscript of the comedy text to the editors, which gets that massive project off my back just in time to allow me to panic over how unready I am to start teaching in a week! Right now I live in this odd environment of mingled panic and pride; I don't know whether to jump for joy or tear out my hair, which would certainly solve the haircut dilemma. But for five minutes I'll allow myself to celebrate: woo-hoo it's done! There will be plenty of time to panic after that. 

Like dropping a rose petal in the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo

Academic publishing is such a protracted and arduous process that by the time the article appears in print, I've forgotten what I was trying to say and why it mattered.

It starts with the merest inkling of an idea that grows and possesses my mind until I'm compelled to do some preliminary research just to see whether anyone else has already covered the topic, and then there's more research and thinking and note-taking and drafting followed by feedback from friends and colleagues and revision and more feedback and more revision, and then, finally, polishing up the essay for submission to an academic journal, in this case the premier journal in my field, and then, months later, one very positive reader's report overwhelmed by two encouraging yet negative reports, and then more revision in response to the readers' reports and more feedback from colleagues and more revision and then, finally, submission of a significantly different essay to a smaller and less prestigious journal, followed months later by an acceptance (hurrah!) and then the whole copy-editing and production process, during which time the essay loses its playful title ("Schrodinger's Trash"! What's not to love?) and some of its more clever lines to become a bit more staid and conventional, and then, finally, more than five years after this whole process began, the essay appears in print in an obscure journal where it will be read by the handful of scholars who care about the topic, all looking for flaws.

But: It's a publication! A line on my vita! Proof that I've accomplished something that may outlast my mortal flesh! And it arrives just in time to contribute to the ongoing conversation about the arbitrary ways by which we determine whose lives matter and whose stories deserve to be told, so that's something.

A friend recently asked me whether there's any money in academic publishing and I said no, we do it ostensibly for the noble goal of contributing to the scholarly conversation on important topics and, more practically, to prove that we're worthy of hiring, tenure, or promotion, so I'm not sure why I'm still doing this but I'll admit that I enjoy the frisson of pleasure that occurs when a new publication appears in the mail--even if very few people will ever read it. Good has been done here! Brief pause to pat myself on the back before I move on to the next project.