February 2024 - When One Door Ecloses, Another Eclopens
Hello, friends!
Yes, it’s me. I haven’t forgotten you. You might have noticed that things look a little different. Due to Tinyletter’s closure, I’ve switched to hosting my newsletter on Buttondown. Everything’s automatically migrated, so you shouldn’t have to do anything, but let me know if you have any issues—I’ll sort it out.
I’m also planning to play with the structure of this newsletter in the coming year. When I began writing it two years ago (wow!) I wanted to emphasize that I could be a Professional Writer™. But I’ve found my footing a little since then, and it feels like time for a change.
In other words, you’ll probably get the same information as before, but without the headers. If I’ve been emphasizing the news part of newsletter for the past two years, we’re shifting gears: here’s your first letter.
Over the winter, I feel as though I’ve been emerging from a chrysalis. It’s a common enough metaphor, but the real image is often a little gross: crawling out of something you’ve built up around yourself, looking sort of weird and damp and crumpled-up until you shake yourself off, dry out, and flutter away to collect nectar or become bird food.
That, I think, is what finishing grad school feels like. You can’t stay in your gooey chrysalis forever! But a bird might eat you when you leave.
I haven’t been eaten by a bird (yet; some of Glasgow’s gulls have a hungry look in their eyes…) but I have been thinking about what the future looks like, outside of grad school. And, possibly, outside of academia.
It’s often framed as a binary choice, unintentionally or not. I’ve read any number of blog posts and articles proclaiming I’m leaving academia!, and for those writers, it seems final—and a good thing for them! Academia is rife with unfair working conditions and increasing job instability. To quote Tumblr’s Litany Against Sunk Cost:
And yet, when I contemplate the idea of leaving academia myself – capital-L Leaving, no turning back, for good this time!! – I feel a hollow place in my chest. I love walking into a classroom and being surprised by my students. I love attending conferences and seeing tons of interesting presentations. I love dissecting stories of all stripes and going how does this work? What does it say? How does it change in different contexts?
But I don’t know if academia loves me back, I might think to myself, angstily, brooding by a window. (Fortunately, I live in Scotland, so the weather is good for brooding.)
However, I was conflating two different things.
The realisation struck while I was listening to Secret Feminist Agenda, a scholarly podcast by Canadian academic Hannah McGregor (she/they). I’ve been sneaking it into my lunch break and while I wash the dishes. In each episode, McGregor invites a guest to have a conversation about what they do – whether it’s running a tattoo parlour, working as an advocate in queer healthcare, singing in a women’s choir, writing poetry, making documentaries… Her guests are as varied as they are interesting. I love hearing people discuss what they’re passionate about, and this podcast is full of passionate people.
In one episode, McGregor and creative-critical scholar Ames Hawkins (they/them) discuss their experiences in nontraditional academic publishing. Podcasting, as you might imagine, is considered an experimental way of doing academic work. As someone with a nontraditional PhD by US standards (no literature classes! Your writing is your research! It took me 3 years to understand what this meant!), it’s been hugely reassuring to see someone doing nontraditional academic work – work which feels fun, and exciting, and digestible in a way that dense journal articles and monographs rarely are.
McGregor and Hawkins discuss, among other things, the decline in tenure-track positions, and the willingness of higher education teachers to assign their students nontraditional work while refusing to take the risk of producing nontraditional work themselves—or claiming their creative work as scholarship.
This makes it harder for, say, creative academics to prove their scholarly cred through means other than traditional articles and monographs, which often remain inaccessible to the public. But when those are the publications that “count” in the eyes of hiring and tenure committees, those are the ones you’ll feel pressured to produce.
Eventually, McGregor exclaims, “[W]hy remain precious about notions of producing the right kind of stuff in the right kind of way to get the right kind of job when almost nobody’s going to get those jobs anyway? So fuck it. Do the work that you want to do in the ways that you want to do it for the people you want to do it for.” (Episode 3.26, 50:22)
It’s a helpful reminder, I think—external validation of success is never guaranteed, no matter how you measure it. May we all embody a little bit of Parks & Rec’s Ron Swanson:
Have I given up entirely on thoughts of an academic job? No. Do independent scholars face barriers to things like library access and simply having enough time to research? Yes. But boy, has it been a relief to realize that I can keep writing, thinking, learning, and even teaching about the things which I’m passionate about, no matter what happens next.
For now, I’ve finished and delivered the latest draft of the novel I wrote for my PhD. This triggered a small existential crisis, because this might be the draft that we send out on submission, which means that it might be my goodbye to this book and these characters for the foreseeable future. The book is (I think) ready. I’m not sure if I am yet, but I will be.
The upside is that I’ve had the space to think about new projects: new novel(s), assorted nonfiction, potential podcast titles, a dozen other things.
Which is to say that I’m going to be a weird little butterfly, flapping the blood into its wings.
Recommendations:
Hannah Alpert-Abrams’ “Finding Your Purpose” workbook (“for justice-oriented scholars in an unjust world”,) which has been helping me think through some of the differences between scholarship as an activity and academic as a job.
Fleabag (2019). I’m so late to the party. It’s so good.
“Start Again”, Grace Petrie’s new single from her upcoming album Build Something Better, which comes out on March 8th. Petrie’s one of my favourite contemporary folk artists & protest musicians. Her music is an antidote to hopelessness. I’ve pre-ordered the album for myself as a birthday treat.
Other notes:
Apparently, butterfly “blood” is actually called hemolymph, and the verb for a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis is eclose. Once I learned this fact, the title of this particular newsletter was set in stone.
Social Media:
@myhomextheroad on Instagram.
@siobhanmull on Tumblr and Bluesky. (Note: Bluesky’s open access now! No invite code needed.)
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