R.A.D. Blogger

I'm a professor with a joint position in rhet/comp and women's studies. I work at a large mid-western U in a pretty small town, which seems to welcome a. students and b. people with kids (pwk); I am neither. I research eugenics and policy making; most days I think about the book I need to write about said topic, some days I actually write about it. I live with Z (a "feminist 4th grade teacher"), Spike, and Bodhi. I think too much about breathing, decorating, cooking, and living elsewhere.

17.9.06

Writer's block

I have been away from my blog and well quite frankly away from almost anything that would require me to write except for the occasional email. During a downward facing dog yesterday, while I was concentrating on "settling into the resting juncture" of my breathing in my hopes of calmness, I realize-- ohmigosh, I have writer's block. As I stepped into a lung twist I thought, hmmmm.... why? Despite my hiatus from writing I have been actively surveying several of blogs noting, for example, how to read/research/write when doing interdisciplinary work and the joy of beginning. And yet, my fingers feel uncomfortably clumsy on the keyboard and I begin to panic when I think-- crap, a book, I gotta write this book, come on really it is just revising a first draft, a first big draft that needs about 1/3 more written. Of course then I think, just breathe....

But I am beginning to think my block is larger than the ticking tenure clock or the simple pressure of publishing. What I have realized is that to some extent I am, well, not super intellectually stimulated these days; a feeling that I am not sure I have ever had before. Perhaps it is new professor blues? Last year, my first year, I never quite felt intellectually bored, just overwhelmed. Now that I know how to use the copy machine, who to go to be quickly reimbursed for travel, who to email/call for a quick bite to eat on campus, etc. etc. I am now left to sit with where I am-- and I am not good at sitting still. The fact is, the more busy I am, the more productive I tend to be. And not only in my scholarship but in other parts of my life; for example, exercise is not a chore but a well-deserved break, yoga class is just that: a place where I learn something new about how to be, cooking is an expression of creativity, film going is stimulating yet brainless. I had a long chat with my English chair recently and I expressed to her that I really wanted to be more involved in the department-- especially since we are doing a search in rhetcomp and having this split appointment makes it easy for faculty to forget that I am a full-fledged member of each department-- but yet I came away with that feeling that my job as a junior faculty is simply to produce scholarship for tenure and get decent teaching evals. And I do appreciate this protection but I am afraid it just feeds the vicious cycle of research isolation and a lack of production for me. I think that some of my writer's block comes from feeling like I am writing in a bubble completely disconnected from the vast members of the greater r/c community and coming from a grad program where I pretty much only socialized with rhetcomp-ers (and the occasionally rhetcomp-friendly) this strange for me. Sure, I spent a lot of this week conversing with TCQ through my pen and "writer's notebook" (as Z has come to call it; his 4th graders also keep a "writers notebook," very first year comp-y)-- we had a lovely conversation about the rhetoric of policy making. But as a rhetorician, when I return to the key board, I sometimes find it hard to imagine my audience. Ok, so yeah, I know my project spans the field of rhetoric, women's studies, cultural studies, disability studies, and even prof/tech writing but WHO is that really? And why, oh why, did I decide to bring so many areas together... maybe this why I am blocked?!

In hopes of moving forward: note to self this week's goals--

  1. Reread Advice for New Faculty Members, especially the pages on beginning (which btw, consists of breathing exes adapted from Donna Farhi breathing techniques);
  2. Send emails to grant reviewers;
  3. Rewrite grant (for an audience I do *know,* one member's research applies darwinism to lit crit-- this is difficult given that I am exploring the problematic reiteration of eugenicist discourses in late 20th US-based and internationally-based policies);
  4. Write a page of my book, yes just a page and it does not have to be a good one-- one page is better than no new pages.

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