Reflections on the Diss Handoff (Pt. 1)

So the reason I've been absent from the Internets for so long is pretty predictable: I've been too busy writing and editing to write. The dissertation project was huge and nasty, and it's not entirely done until it's successfully defended, formatted, and deposited.

But yesterday I passed a huge milestone in this pursuit: I turned in a full dissertation draft to my doctoral advisor, a full 4 days ahead of the end of the window we'd talked about.

I've worked tremendously hard in the last couple of months, especially in the last week, to get ahead of schedule so that I could shoo away this little dark cloud that's been following me everywhere for the last year like some sort of cartoon menace. I've given up days off. I've stayed up repeatedly until 5 a.m., giving myself only a few hours of sleep.

But it was worth it, all the pain. The cloud isn't gone, but it's moved over a few feet, allowing for the sun to peek through. And the draft feels good. I won't know whether I truly successfully communicated until my advisor tells me I have (followed by my committee), but this feeling, the feeling that I've discovered new insights and was able to put them on paper in the right sorts of ways--this is my "crack" that keeps me coming back again and again to writing, no matter what kind.

It's interesting, because of course there were huge chunks of time during this process when I absolutely hated it, when I despaired of ever moving the black cloud even an inch, when only having one of my dissertation support group (brilliant invention, by the way--thanks Pamela for starting it!) come over and make me write worked to keep me going. But the payoff is worth it.

Anyway, more thoughts on this soon--there are many churning around in my head about the dissertation writing process that I need to, well, process. For now I'll say farewell, and promise that this blog will become more active again this summer, because now that I'm done with the bulk of my writing I have time to write again.

The Next Step on the Journey

It's official: I'm an author!

That's right--my name now appears on Amazon with that little all-important underline. Previously, sure, I had things that appeared in books, but never before have I enjoyed Amazon-underline-authordom.

But seriously, I loved working on this project writing the script for an iPhone tour for Purdue's Discovery Park. It allowed me to apply my academic dissertation-related knowledge to a creative project, and to use my creative writing skills in an academic project. Can't get much better than that.

Plus, it was great working with Sorin Matei, Robert Yale, and the rest of the team on the project.

Okay, I've enjoyed my moment of joy. Now back to my dissertation-writing.

I Blame the Dissertation

Yes, yes, I know. I've been gone a lot lately. Absent from these pages in much the same way the sun is often seemingly absent from the winter sky.

I blame the dissertation. It's a lot of work.

Well worth doing. And most days I still really get into the topic.

But it's a lot of work.

The kind that will probably keep me from regularly updating this blog much for a couple more months yet, at least.

On the up side, I'm glad to hear that they'll be discussing my "Cooking Chicken Wat" essay in The Spirit of Food (see a couple posts back for the link) over at the book study group at www.thehighcalling.org. Tomorrow. So go check it out.

Or if you're coming from there, welcome. I will start posting here again at some point in the next few months, I promise. And in the meantime would love to respond to comments.

Maybe if you comment enough I might even start posting again sooner.

Correction 1/24/11: Fixed the link (oops!).

Toward Remembering Oneself

Some days the deadlines seem overwhelming. The list of tasks seems endless. The number of licks it will get to the faux-chocolate center of the dissertation lollipop seems to be one of those numbers that go on and on. Like Pi.

On those days, it's easy to forget a few crucial things. That, for instance, one likes to think. One likes to write. One even likes to turn double-hyphens into em dashes. That one chose one's dissertation topic (or...[insert long writing project here]) because one actually likes thinking and writing about it.

And then something-or-other happens (it's not always even easy to pinpoint what), but the waking occurs. One opens the document. It makes a certain amount of sense. Adding a few citations to Zotero no longer seems like a Sisyphean task, but something that's eminently manageable. One re-reads a few pages from, say, Walter Benjamin, and it jumpstarts the thinking and theorizing battery in one's brain. One starts to think about one's dissertation not as the weight of Atlas on one's shoulders, but something one gets to do. And one begins to revise and write. And it is good.

I think it can't be emphasized enough that I'm not simply talking about a change of attitude here, or a simple matter of procrastination and motivation. This is a forgetting and remembering of self. In these off periods, quite frankly, I'm convinced the grad student or writer literally forgets and/or strongly doubts his or her identity as a writer or a scholar. (Perhaps I'm not either of those things after all, the voices might murmur. Not really.)

Sometimes, in the good cases, something triggers an awakening and the demons flee. The students remember with joy who they are and that they enjoy it. That they really are writers and scholars. That it only takes 1500 or so licks to get to the center of the dissertation pop (the rest of those innumerable numbers are after the decimal point, so they don't matter). That they're already a good way in. And that the center is sweet and chewy.

(Now if only we could find a way for this forgetting to stop happening at least once during any major writing project, for both graduate students and writers in general...)

New Publication: Essay in The Spirit of Food

So I promised the URL of the book in which I have an essay and recipe appearing, and there are several of them for The Spirit of Food. I haven't gotten my copy of this fabulous new book yet, but am incredibly honored about the company I'm keeping in this collection of essays with recipes: Wendell Berry, Robert Ferrar Capon, Andre Dubus, Lauren Winner...the list goes on and on.

At any rate, the book's Facebook page can keep you up-to-speed on the great press we've been getting. If you want to order it (which you of course will), it's also at both Amazon and the publisher's page. There's a glowing review at Heart & Minds. And it looks like the lovely blog The Church Cook is cooking a recipe per week and sharing photos, so make sure to follow along!

I can't wait to get my copy and see where this book travels!

Back after a Small Disruption

So after that lovely post last time, in which I talked about how blessedly idyllic and balanced my life had become, my hard drive crashed and everything went wonky for awhile. [Pause given to reflect on the relation between pride and falls.]

Thankfully, my dissertation pages were saved, since I was writing them in the notes function of Zotero. [Pause to say "God bless Zotero" under breath.]

And really, most of the important stuff was saved, and I got a new bigger hard drive out of it for free. [Pause to say "God bless Apple Care."]

It just made it a royal pain to get back up to speed on things. Thankfully, I'm getting close to managing things once again. Life is crazy-busy now, at this point in the semester, but it's feeling a trifle more almost-possible to do this. [Pause after typing words, fearing they betoken another such hard drive crash, but decides honesty is the best policy.]

Drafting Away

So this year reminds me a lot of my MA thesis year. I feel like I'm getting into a rhythm like I did then: teaching certain days, writing others. Training my mind to let the academic thoughts simmer in their polysyllabic stew during spare moments until it's time for them to be served. Feeling the pressure about writing a large document and needing to produce those words on schedule. All the same, enjoying the thinking and the writing.

There's one key difference, however: I'm better at letting those words come out faster. Of course, it helps that the meat of this topic has largely been marinating in my head for 3 years now. But it also helps that I've had lots of coursework semesters and the Big Nasty Exams to force me to write a lot in a short period of time.

Specifically, to force me to be okay with writing first drafts at first. That's important, because that's always been the hardest part for me. Once I've gotten something down on paper, I can do something with it. Of course, I know this draft I'm working on needs a lot of revision. But the fact that it's gradually growing in page count is an important thing. One I'm grateful for.

Back to Blogging

So yeah, I've been away for quite a few months now. There have been very good reasons. Among them:

1. I gave a talk at Calvin's Festival of Faith & Writing in the spring. It was lovely. I talked about connections between the mystery genre and faith. People seemed interested, which was encouraging.
   
2. I took a creative writing class in the spring (for fun). One might think this would contribute toward blogging, but it didn't. Instead it poured the energies I would have put into this blog into new stories and critiques of others' stories. This, too, was an encouraging process.
   
3. I was narrowing in on my main dissertation theory. That was a lot of work.
   
4. I've been reading reading reading for the dissertation. I've done the bulk of that, thankfully--or so I hope. I'm in the midst of plowing out pages now while learning to balance that work with teaching that just started up again this week.
5. I've been teaching a lot, and loving it. I've realized more and more that I really love this profession. I'm particularly fond of coming up with activities based on Food Network and other reality show competitions. The formula is eminently useful for pedagogy.
   

At any rate, I'm back. Oh, and publication update: I have a new academic publication in the delightfully titled tome Interpersonal Relations and Social Patterns in Communication Technologies: Discourse Norms, Language Structures and Cultural Variables. Since I know all of you are going to run out and buy it, just look for chapter 3 by Deborah Leiter and John Dowd: "Textual Expectations, (Dis)Embodiment, and Social Presence in CMC."

In other publication news of the less academic brand, I have an essay appearing in a new book on spirituality and food coming out next month. It doesn't look like the book's listed on the publisher's website yet, but I'll provide a link when I have one.

Oh yeah, and the latter will be the first print-based publication under Deborah Leiter Nyabuti. It's a good name, and I'm excited about the prospect of using it more and more.

A Year of Reading

I wanted to pause in my lessons from my time away from the blogosphere to present to you some lessons a woman learned in her year of reading. My favorite from the post, both as a writer and a reader:

I believe that in my year of reading my brain has become more robust and energized, and life all around me is better. The writer of a great book gives us, the readers, a new tank of oxygen, allowing us to dive again and again into life. Great good comes from reading great books.

May we all be able to write and read good books.

Writing Lessons: Research Results Gymnastics

So this year I presented 4 papers and a poster at 4 academic conferences. This fall alone I presented two. The first one I presented at the Semiotics Society of America conference in Cincinnati in October, the second at the National Communication Association conference in Chicago in November.

Both of these papers started as course papers. The first started as a 30-page conference paper, and thence needed to be turned, Alice-in-Wonderland style, into a short abstract for submission. Then later, after acceptance, it needed to be cut down into 8-9 pages of coherent presentation. After the presentation, it needed to be cleaned up and the style converted to be submitted for the best student paper award.

However gymnastic these efforts sound, the other paper was even more convoluted in its parallel-bars-style revolutions. It started out as a 12-page course paper. Then it was converted into an abstract plus a description of how it contributed to the panel it was a part of (which was all people from our class). After that, it had to be extended to a 24-page paper to send to our eminent reviewer before it was cut to a 4-5 page paper short enough to be fit into the 10 minutes I had to present at the conference.

These gymnastic writing gyrations have at times made my writing muscles a little sore this fall--after all, it's not easy to sum up a 30-page paper in a few hundred words, and even harder to take a complicated French philosopher and express your ideas about his work in a 10-minute presentation.

But these exercises, like those for the physical body, have ultimately strengthened my writing skills. I even think they've helped my fiction-writing skills. For instance, previously writing from a plot outline, which previously felt unnatural, doesn't sound all that untenable after all these practices of research results gymnastics.

So I'm planning to work soon on some plot outlines for the short stories I've been wanting to write, since yes--forgot to mention it previously--I'm taking a short story-writing class in the spring. Since my course work is done, the course is for fun, and I'm definitely looking forward to it. I naturally think more in chapters of a bigger whole than in short stories, but after these gymnastics I've been doing this fall, it feels like my writing muscles might be just strong enough to pack a lot of oomph in those short pages. We'll see how it goes.

Writing Lessons: The Big Nasty Exams

So I'm still not sure whether Blogosphere has fully accepted my apology, but as a show of good faith, I plan to do a series of posts on writing lessons learned during my bloggy absence.

The first--what I learned about writing in general from my Big Nasty PhD Exams (which I passed, by the way--woohoo! I'm ABD officially!).

Okay, so as I think I explained a few months ago, my exams consisted of 20 hours' worth of written exams in the period of a month on a variety of subjects related to courses I'd taken, followed by a 2-hour defense of what I'd written.

As it turned out, most of my exams were 2-hour in-house exams, which meant that on Mondays and Wednesdays, I studied for a particular question during the day, then from 3-5 p.m., came into the department and wrote on a laptop as fast as I could for 2 hours.

From this, I learned that I could create 7 nearly-coherent pages of prose in 2 hours. A valuable lesson, indeed. I'm pretty sure I can repeat this project in other academic and non-fiction writing circumstances, now that I have this skill. In fact, I'm thinking about using a "write a bunch in two hours several times per week" strategy for drafting the early stages of my dissertation.

The only downside? If you have to add citations, it can be a royal pain to go back in and add them afterward, as I learned when I tried the same strategy for my take-home prelim. So if I do this with my dissertation, I'm planning to have all my references pre-loaded into Zotero and clear in my head, ready to pull in clearly, BEFORE my 2-hour sessions begin.

I do like this idea, though--I think it would work better for me than the also-interesting "write a page a day" strategy mentioned by a colleague. See, with research and editing rhythms, it doesn't always work well to write something every single day. If I plan to do two or three 2-hour sessions per week (more if I'm feeling inspired), it will get a lot of pages out there, leaving me lots of research and editing and simmering time between. I think it just might work, both for the upcoming dissertation and in the future for other potential non-fiction drafting.

Woohoo! The Big Nasty Exams have both been successfully completed, AND have given me another writing skill. This is a beautiful thing.

In Which Deborah Tries to Make Nice with Blogosphere

Deborah knocks loudly on Blogosphere's door, box of chocolates in hand.

Door cracks open. "What do YOU want?"

"Come on, Blogosphere, at least be willing to hear my case. I know it's been awhile, but there were prelims, and then those two conferences I had to give papers at, while teaching all the while and taking a class..."

"You didn't seem to have a problem keeping up with Facebook. Clearly you're better friends with her anyway."

"Well, that's true," Deborah replies, angling to insert her toe into the door to display the chocolates. "I did keep up with Facebook during that time, but that doesn't mean you're not important, Blogosphere. I just got so busy..."

"Clearly. Too busy to spend time with me. And now you want to come crying back to me, asking to be friends again."

"Yes. Yes, I do. I'm saying I'm sorry, dang it, and I brought virtual chocolates."

Door opens a bit wider.

[Was Deborah's attempt successful? Stay tuned or contribute your own continuation of the story in the comments...]