No More Diaper Changes

Hi all!  I've finished grading my students' final exams, so this is another semester in the books.  The class I taught this semester was great.  My students were interested and engaged, and I will miss this class.  My work on the Katherine Anne Porter project keeps moving right along, and this weekend I'll get to talk about the project in front of Porter scholars and some of her personal friends.  I'll also present on my own Porter research at a conference this weekend, which will be my third conference presentation of the semester, and each one has come from a different (yet unwritten) dissertation chapter.  Is it any wonder I haven't gotten that first chapter yet?  To me, it is not.  I have been working hard.

I have also been waiting for a final decision about the fellowship process that began way back before the semester even began.  As I wrote before, the committee decided against nominating me for a dissertation fellowship since I don't yet have a chapter to use as a writing sample.  Instead, they nominated me for a fairly new award (I didn't know it existed, actually).  It's designed for students who've made large contributions through their teaching, administrative, and research jobs, and although it doesn't include tuition remission, the prize money would have allowed me to work halftime for full pay next year.  I thought I was a good candidate for this award, and so did my grad director-- after all, I have held teaching, administrative, AND research jobs on campus over the past 6 years, and everyone has nice things to say about my work in those capacities.  Unfortunately for me, the award went to other students.

More fortunately, the team members of the Katherine Anne Porter project wanted to keep me on as a worker next year.  They have offered me funding that will give me a break from teaching, which will make my schedule more manageable.  I am optimistic that this arrangement will allow me to continue working on the Porter project, will let me more time with Nora, and will still give me enough work time of my own to continue making reasonable progress on my dissertation.  I had hoped next year would give me a chance to make rapid, focused progress on my dissertation-- but if that was not to be, this feels like a good back-up plan.

It is not lost on me that this opportunity is available because I have diversified my interests and my time.   (This is what Nate tells me, at least-- that all along I was "diversifying."  I always called it "spreading myself too thin."  But he's right, obviously, even if I didn't see it that way until he said it.)  If I had never taken the Porter job, I would likely have a chapter finished by now, so I may have at least had a chance at a dissertation fellowship.  But those are so competitive that my chances of winning one still would have been slim.  As it turns out, spending my time on the Porter project has not only been enjoyable and interesting-- it has turned out to be the most pragmatic choice I could have made.  Moving forward, I've decided to stop asking these types of questions: What will give me the best chance at a fellowship?  What will help me finish the dissertation the quickest?  What will give me the best chances on the academic job market?  These are the types of questions I've been taught to ask myself when establishing my priorities, but they are not working for me anymore.  I am trying to direct my focus more toward questions like these: What will give me the best quality of life while I work toward finishing my degree?  What work is worth sacrificing family time to conduct, and what work is not?  How can I diversify my skills and interests so that if the academic job market doesn't work out, I will have other opportunities available to me?  How can I spend the next few years so that I won't resent putting all my eggs in one basket if that basket doesn't work out as I hope?  I feel more committed to completing the dissertation now than I did a year ago, which may seem ironic.  I just feel less committed to the somewhat narrow life path of doing what might give me the best shot at becoming a college professor.

The first major change I've made in this regard is to start blogging publicly, under my own name.  If you've enjoyed my writing, and especially if you've enjoyed the posts where I've talked about how my work informs my experiences of motherhood, please visit me over at Feminist Mom Studies.  I see this blog as a complement to my academic work-- both in content and in form.  The attention span people have for blog posts is forcing me to develop a precision of thought that has never been a strength for me.  And the content I imagine for the blog gives me a place to talk about everything I've learned as a mom, a student of feminism, and a teacher.  Should a graduate student be spending time on a blog like this?  It depends on who you ask, I guess.  But again-- this is something I enjoy, and it is something that allows me to utilize and improve the skills and knowledge I've been working hard to develop over the past six years, so I'm going to do it.

I have made the conscious choice, though, to be careful how much I disclose about Nora in that very public place.  And for that same reason, I've decided to set this blog to private within the next few weeks.  I don't know how much I'll continue to write here.  I owe my grandmother a few posts once in a while (Hi, Mimi!), and I'd like to keep writing about Nora more personally, but the type of writing I was doing while pregnant and figuring out motherhood no longer feels compelling to me.  So we will see.  If you'd like to continue reading the blog past that point, please leave a comment below or send me a private message via email, facebook, twitter, or text and I'll be happy to add you to the list of readers and/or to the list of people who receive each post automatically in the email inboxes.

In the meantime, thank you very much for reading along with me here.  This blog has been an important way for me to keep in touch with my family members across the country, and it has also been a place where I've sorted out a lot of the issues I faced as a pregnant grad student and new mom. I'm thankful to have it and hope to share these posts with Nora someday.  Even just looking at the list of tags I can choose from in that bar on the right provides me with an interesting snapshot of how I've spent the past several years.  Before I close things down, I did want to share a few more recent pictures of what we've been up to lately!

Nora came to campus twice last week for end-of-semester activities.  I don't know with whom she is more enamored: the Testudo statue or my good friend Katie.

Nora and I went out to dinner before Mother's Day (Dad was at an Orioles game) and she insisted on wearing her bunny ears.  She spoke to everyone who commented on them, and I love when she gets in a mood to show off her talking to strangers.

We saw the extended family for Easter and Mother's Day, which is always fun.  Nora cannot get enough Lily time in her life.  These two are the cutest.

A childhood friend of Billy's got married a few weekends ago, so we had a fun night out with Chuck and Patti while Uncle Brian babysat Nora.  When she woke up the next morning she was very excited to tell me everything she did with Uncle Brian!  She ate "spugbetti"!  She watched Frozen TWICE!

She insisted on taking a picture of our "same same boots and dresses."  I could not refuse this request, obviously.

Spring BREAK

Every Sunday night, I decide which things I have to get done that week, which things I want to get done, and which things I'd like to begin if time permits. Then I map out my schedule to allow me to accomplish as many of these things as possible. With one full week to go before spring break, I was looking at my upcoming schedule and stressing out.  I was due to attend a conference during break, and I hadn't yet finished writing the paper I was planning to present.  (I've heard plenty of stories of people writing papers the night before or as they travel to the conference, but I need to plan ahead.  Procrastination is not really an option when, on any given day, your toddler could start vomiting and change all your plans.)  I also found myself feeling apathetic about teaching, even though we were set to discuss Katherine Anne Porter.  That is when I realized I needed a break. I spent my entire winter break trying to meet an intense deadline, which gave me no time to prepare to teach a new class.  Ever since the semester began, I've felt like I'm scrambling to keep up with the immediate deadlines without making much headway on my dissertation.

So I decided: rather than continuing to scramble, I would set a reasonable goal, reach it, and then give myself a break.  For that week before break, I decided I would prepare and deliver my lessons, work my hours on the Porter project, and write my conference paper.  I made an agreement with myself that whenever those things were finished, I was going to stop working, enjoy the trip to New York, deliver the paper, and then get back to work after the conference was over.

I finished my paper on Friday afternoon, so I kept Nora home for a mother/daughter day on Monday. Then I took her to day care on Tuesday so I could have a day to myself.  A whole day to myself!  It's amazing how much relaxation you can jam pack into a single day when you don't have a two year old following you around.  I took a long nap without setting an alarm.  I did some reading for pleasure.  I worked on a craft project.  I watched an episode of Shameless when Hulu foiled my plans to resume watching Scandal where I left off.  I went shopping-- in a store! And tried things on!  I got the massage that my mom gifted me two Christmases ago (thanks Mom!).  I drank an overpriced smoothie because, on the very few occasions that I skipped class in high school, my friends and I liked to drive to Lake Oswego to get a jamba juice.  On Wednesday, I dropped Nora off at school for a half day while I tried to pick up the house, got things ready for our trip, and continued working on my craft project.  I'm planning to write a separate blog post about the trip itself, but it was a really great weekend.

On Sunday night at the end of break, I realized I had that old familiar Sunday night feeling-- that ugh, I have to get back to work in the morning feeling.  I used to get that feeling every week when I was teaching high school, but I guess it is something I don't often experience as a grad student.  Now, there is always some work task hanging over my head, so I live in a perpetual state of knowing I have more to do tomorrow than I can actually accomplish.  I was hoping that my break would leave me feeling refreshed, recharged, and excited to resume my work.  I am not there yet, but I feel much better than I did before I took the break.  I've spent most of my time this past week preparing lesson plans for the next few weeks.  I'm hoping this will free up my time and my energy-- both emotional and intellectual-- so that I can begin working on the dissertation again in earnest, and with enthusiasm.

Truth be told, I've done a lot of thinking about how I want to move forward since finding out my project was not nominated for a dissertation fellowship.  Within the next month, I should know which funding options are available to me for next year, and some of them are promising.  The way the chips have fallen, though, has made me reflect further on the necessity of charting my own path rather than hoping I can make my work fit into the model the English department proposes is the quickest route to degree completion and the best preparation for the job market.  So I'm trying to be more conscious of deciding for myself how my time is best spent, and then spending my time in those ways.  It's easy to get caught in the trap of trying to figure out what will make me most competitive for fellowships, what will be best for my job prospects, or what will make my dissertation more marketable.  But I'm in graduate school because I want to learn, because I find the work rewarding, and because I think I have something to offer as a member of this profession.  So from here on out I'm going to try even harder to remember that those are my top priorities.

Academic/Life Update

Well, so much for waiting indefinitely to find out if I will be on fellowship next year: I will not.  I submitted my application to my department a few days ahead of the deadline, and I felt like I had done my best.  But the professors in my department who evaluate the applications decided against nominating me for any of the fellowships.  I met with our grad studies director this week, and it seems like the committee realizes that I've gotten a lot of work accomplished, but I cannot be considered competitive with those who have completed a dissertation chapter.  When I met with my advisor, he suggested that because I have been working on the chapters "horizontally" (i.e. researching and thinking through all of them somewhat simultaneously) rather than "vertically" (starting with one chapter and working on it exclusively until it's finished), it's hard to demonstrate to anyone else how far along I am.  I'm disappointed that I overtaxed myself trying to meet a deadline when, ultimately, it sounds like my application was kind of dead on arrival.  I'm disappointed that I won't be able to devote all of my energy to my dissertation next year, because I had hoped to make a considerable amount of progress.

The department did decide to nominate me for a different type of award, which comes with a flat stipend.  It does not include tuition remission, but if I were to win it, I would probably be able to carry a lighter teaching load for next year.  So my plans for next year will depend on that, but since I am not likely to hear about that decision until May, I guess there's nothing to do but try to put it out of mind and keep my nose to the grindstone in the meantime.

So far, I am really enjoying my schedule for the semester.  I teach Tuesdays and Thursdays in the afternoon, which gives me uninterrupted time beforehand for my own work on Tuesdays and my work on the Porter project on Thursdays.  It also allows me to work from home M/W/F, and I feel like I'm getting more done than I did last semester.  I don't have to worry about the foreign language requirement anymore, so that is definitely nice.  If fellowships are granted to students who work "vertically" rather than "horizontally," I may never be able to compete for one.  I already finished the conference paper I'm presenting on Josephine Herbst during the first week of March, so right now I am working on all of the following:
-finishing preparations for the ingest of our KAP metadata into Fedora
-denormalizing the KAP metadata so it can be better used for different purposes
-planning and teaching lessons on 19th Century American women's literature
-researching the history of birth control politics in the U.S., which is relevant to all four of my dissertation chapters
-writing a conference paper on Mary Austin, which I'll present over Spring Break
-revising a paper I wrote four years ago for publications workshop
-reading and commenting on classmates' papers for publications workshop

So, you know, Liz marches on.  In lieu of having better professional news to share, I'll post a few recent pictures of what's been going on in my life outside of academia, where taking a more "horizontal" approach pays more recognizable dividends.

Nora and her (second) cousin and partner-in-crime,  Lily

SNOW! I am so over it.  Nora loves it.

"Baby Julian" turned ONE!  We were excited to celebrate a year of successful parenting with our friends Anne-Marie and Jon and to see Julian host all his little friends. After waiting three days to don her "pretty pretty dress," Nora inquired "Is Julian gon like my dress?" before declaring "I'm adorable!"  She's not wrong.

Pretty pretty dress + cupcakes = Nora's happy place.

Our little Valentine

Delta Rae at the 9:30 Club with AM & Vickie

I feel it all around: I'm surrounded.

I'm Exhausted.

This is the first week of the semester.  I'm exhausted.

We have a five week long winter break, which accommodates an intense winter term for undergrads.  It also means I don't have to teach or come to campus for those five weeks, and I took a hiatus from my job with the libraries, so it was a "break" in that sense.  I took some time off around the holidays and while my mom visited from Oregon, as most people with normal full-time jobs usually do.  But in regards to hours spent working and mental energy expended, it was no break at all.


As a PhD student, I've been fortunate to be fully funded for 3.5 years.  (It was supposed to be 4 years, but I lost a semester of funding when I took maternity leave without pay.)  This means that by teaching 2-3 classes per year, I get complete tuition remission and get paid a small but significant stipend.  Since my funding runs out after this semester, I have two options for next year if I want to maintain fairly comparable benefits.  I can double my teaching load or win a fellowship.  Students who are awarded fellowships are given a semester or two to work exclusively on their dissertations, without having to teach or work on campus.  The stipends are still pretty modest, but they include tuition remission, so they're very highly competitive.  Theoretically, they are awarded to the students whose dissertations show the most promise.

My fellowship application is due February 7.  We have to provide a writing sample, so most people submit a completed chapter of their dissertation... but I don't have one of those.  I only started working on my dissertation after my prospectus was approved in October, and a lot of my time thereafter was spent teaching, preparing for the German translation exam, and working on the KA Porter project.  I have done some really important research for my first chapter, but when the "break" began, I hadn't gotten to the point where I was ready to start writing anything.  The semester I spent on maternity leave technically doesn't "count" against my time-to-degree calculations, but taking a term off means I am competing for fellowships with members of my cohort who have a one semester advantage over me as well as students who are years ahead of me.

It's a really stressful position to be in.  I'm very proud of what I've managed to accomplish since I began the PhD, especially in light of the personal highs and lows those years have included.  I'm not "behind," by any definition, in spite of everything.  But I'm also not ahead, and it feels like the fellowships will go to the students who are the farthest ahead.  And a fellowship would be a life-changer.  I've managed to stay on track despite having a child and two on-campus jobs, so if I could eliminate the jobs from the equation for a year, it feels like I could finish several chapters of the dissertation.

That means the month of January has involved a LOT of staring at the page and staring at the computer
screen, willing myself to become the first person to figure something out and attempting to articulate it clearly in writing.  It's not so much the schedule I've been keeping that exhausts me-- I actually sleep more soundly when I wake up at 6 and stay up to midnight or 1.  But my everyday life requires a lot of juggling to begin with, so trying to muster the mental energy required to spend 8-12 hours of my day deep in thought on my dissertation is... exhausting and hard.  I try to balance it with time I set aside for my family, which does help.  It's good for my spirit to spend evenings and weekends with Billy and Nora, not thinking about work, even though it means I have to get right back at it as soon as she's in bed, and I don't get much time to spend alone with Billy.  But anyone who has been around a precocious 2 year old can probably imagine that "relaxing" is not a term I would use to describe that time.

Tuesday was my first day of teaching, so it was convenient that I managed to complete the draft of my writing sample at 9pm on Monday.  It's been with my advisor since then, and I'll get his feedback in our meeting later today.  That means I'll have another week to make revisions before I send it off and hope for the best while waiting to see if it earns me the fellowship.  I've been trying to give myself a "break" in the meantime, both because I've stressed my body to the point of illness and because it will help to approach the revisions with a somewhat fresh perspective on what I've written.  But that's hard, too.  There are still classes to prepare and teach.  Deadlines to meet for the library job.  Dishes to put in the cupboards and a washing machine to reload.  Laundry to wash and clothes to put away.  Meals to throw together, despite an absence of time to grocery shop.  Long neglected emails to which I should reply.  Bills to pay.  Trips to and from day care and campus to make.  Perpetually runny noses to wipe.  Toys to trip over because I don't have the energy to pick them up.  Stories to listen to, about the vacations my coworkers have taken.  The list goes on.  This is what it means to be a grad school mom, but this is what I chose, and I don't unwish this choice.  I just wish to hang on until February 7 so I can get my life back to a more reasonable balance.  And I wish for a fellowship to make my academic life feel more sustainable. 

When I clicked "send" on the email to my advisor Monday night, I had hoped that I'd feel rested and ready for feedback by the time today's meeting rolled around.  I don't.  I feel like crawling up on my office rug and going to sleep.  But time waits for no woman, so I've decided instead that I will write this blog post and try to prepare for Tuesday's class before I go to get my advisor's revision suggestions.  But I might wait until when Nora goes bed tomorrow night to tackle them.

More Light Moving Forward

My dad used to say the winter solstice was his favorite day of the year.  He hated the days of waning daylight that are especially noticeable in Portland, where I remember it being dark at, like, 4pm.  The solstice was his favorite day because it meant from here on out, every day was going to get a little bit brighter than the last.  I spent my solstice grading final exams.  Billy graciously took Nora up to his parents' so I could make my way through them at home.  I finished them before bedtime, thus bringing to an official close the semester that has felt so heavy.  Oscar's ill health and death have cast a long shadow.  I was due to sit for a translation exam on Dec 13 to satisfy our program's foreign language department, so the need to prepare for that loomed ahead of me all term.  Although these things are minor compared to the other heavy sorrows I've shouldered throughout my graduate career, they had an impact on me, and they have made it hard to see how much progress I've made. In the spirit of optimism about the future that the solstice represents, I wanted to write a post documenting all of the things that I managed to accomplish in this term.  Otherwise, I'll be inclined to forget, and that feeling of "I didn't get anything done!" that often plagues me will start to set in.

So, in no particular order, here goes!

• I finished revising my dissertation prospectus and filed it with our program!  Despite having completely changed my research topic after my comprehensive exam, I managed to get it in just in time to meet the "9 month" guideline our program has encouraged.  
• I made it through another semester working as a TA for a large lecture class.  There are advantages and disadvantages of this arrangement, but I love teaching and often feel handcuffed by being a helper in someone else's course.  I am fortunate to have worked with a professor who has genuine appreciation and respect for me, so that definitely makes a difference.  But next term I get to teach my own course, with my own curriculum, and I can't wait.
• I did my best to work 10 hours per week on the Katherine Anne Porter Correspondence project.  I finished getting all of the 5000+ pages ready for digitization, completed the inventory of them, and did the best I could to correct and complete the metadata records.  My rewards for all this work, so far, are being able to see the letter images together online and being promoted to "content expert" on the project.  This means that moving forward, I'll be doing less metadata work and more work that draws upon my knowledge of KAP.  In other words, I'll get to do the kind of stuff that could make a big positive impact on my dissertation and employment prospects.
• I hosted back to back birthday parties for Nora Jane.  What was I thinking?!  I guess I was thinking I wanted to give her family and friends a chance to celebrate her, and I wanted her to know how special and how well loved she is.  So, mission accomplished.
• I potty trained my not-quite-two year old.  She is now rarely having accidents, even at school.  She still wears a diaper overnight, but I LOVE not having to change diapers. And I love how proud my big girl is of herself every time she goes on the potty.
• I celebrated 10 years together with Billy.  Truly, none of the things on this list would have been possible to accomplish without him.  I hope people read this blog with that fact in the back of their minds at all times.  But sometimes it needs to be stated, explicitly.  My ten years with Billy have been the best years.  They are all helping me become my best self.  Here's a picture of us at Mythbusters Live, celebrating 10 years together while surrounded by a bunch of pre-pubescent boys in sweatpants: 

• I satisfied the foreign language requirement! THANK GOODNESS.  The saga of setbacks I've encountered in trying to get this requirement out of my way is very long, very annoying, and was ultimately very anxiety-inducing.  But it's over now, which means I no longer have to choose between working on my dissertation and studying a language that will not be mentioned in it.  It also means:
• I've advanced to candidacy!  Basically, this means that I have advanced to the status of someone who only has to write the dissertation-- all other degree requirements have been satisfied.  Most people advance to candidacy after passing their comprehensive exam, which I did last year, but the language requirement kept me from reaching this status until now.  
• I completed my first out-of-town research trip to Yale.  This deserves a post of its own, but since I haven't gotten around to that yet, I want to mention it here.  In early November, I drove up to New Haven so I could consult the Josephine Hersbt archive.  It was such a productive trip. I left Monday morning and returned Thursday, which gave me about 26 hours of research time in the Beinecke, which worked out perfectly.  I did a lot of work in advance to figure out what I wanted to see, so in my three days there I found all of the things I was expecting to find AND so much more material pertinent to my dissertation that has never been addressed in Hersbt scholarship.  Meanwhile, Nora and Billy did really well at home together during my 3 night absence.  I can't wait to have a chance over break to start working, in earnest, on the chapter that will incorporate this research!  Here are some pictures of my trip

So while I often felt like I was struggling to keep my head above water this semester, and I have a LOT to do over break if I'm going to have a decent writing sample to submit for my fellowship applications, I am proud of what I managed to accomplish this term.  Maybe next term I'll have a little more time for blogging?

Prospectus Filed!

I am so behind on posting!  But I did want to make sure to mark one accomplishment even before I get caught up: my dissertation prospectus was officially approved and filed with the graduate studies office last week!

I've been working on the prospectus since I passed my comprehensive exam last November, so it has been a long time coming.  One of the reasons it took so long is because I completely changed my research topic.  This meant doing a lot of new research, but it also meant I had to seek out and recruit new committee members to work with me.  Another reason it took so long is because I got the invaluable opportunity to work on the Katherine Anne Porter digitization project.  The actual composition of the prospectus felt like a sisyphean effort because it was the first thing I'd written since the spring of 2011.  Plus, it's a weird type of thing to write.  You have to do enough research to propose your topic as if you know exactly what your dissertation is going to say, but you haven't done the years of research it will take to uncover the actual claims your dissertation will make.

Most people in my program told me I should just get it done and move on.  I took that approach, generally, but I'm still really proud of the document.  I worked hard on it, and I think chances are good that my dissertation will end up looking something like what I've proposed it to be.  We'll see about that, I guess.

The title is "A Womb With a View: The Discourse of Reproductive Modernism in American Women's Fiction."  In short, I've proposed that my dissertation will reveal the shared experiences and repeated patterns across the lives and works of Mary Hunter Austin, H.D., Josephine Herbst, and Katherine Anne Porter.  It will investigate their various ways of grappling with issues related to reproduction and maternity in their work, and it will argue that their work constitutes the previously unrecognized discourse that I've named reproductive modernism.  In so doing, the dissertation will bring together two complementary feminist projects that have run largely parallel to one another-- modernist studies of gender and feminist studies of maternity.

I owe a big thank you to all the people who've encouraged me as I worked toward this milestone.  If you're interested in reading the prospectus, or even the one page abstract, get in touch with me via email.  I'm happy to share it.

Now... onto the next thing!

When the Fish Come

Sometimes in my academic career it feels like I am never going to get to another productive period.  I feel like I am out of ideas and I can't make any progress.  When I emailed my advisor in early June to say I was having trouble getting much done, he reassured me and gave me a pep talk along the lines of the scene I always return to from The Old Man and the Sea: the one where Santiago reminds himself that he'd rather be exact than lucky.  So I went back and read that again.

Then the sun was brighter and the glare came on the water and then, as it rose clear, the flat sea sent it back at his eyes so that it hurt sharply and he rowed without looking into it.  He looked down into the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the dark of the water.  He kept them straighter than anyone did, so that at each level in the darkness of the stream there would be a bait waiting exactly where he wished it to be for any fish that swam there.  Others let them drift with the current and sometimes they were at sixty fathoms when the fishermen thought they were at a hundred.

          But, he thought, I keep them with precision.  Only I have no luck any more.  But who knows?  Maybe today.  Every day is a new day.  It is better to be lucky.  But I would rather be exact.  Then when luck comes you are ready.

         The sun was two hours higher now and it did not hurt his eyes so much to look into the east.    

Okay, I thought.  Set the lines right.  Turn your back to the sun when it hurts your eyes.  Soon it will not hurt your eyes so much.  And then maybe some fish will come.

So Billy and I talked about how we could try to set my lines more precisely.  We rearranged our schedules slightly to help me make the most of the time Nora spends at school.  He took over even more household responsibilities.  I started getting up to work when I woke up at 4am instead of trying to go back to sleep while my mind ran in circles.  I began drinking ice coffee in the afternoons.  And slowly, I started getting some work done.  Once I started getting some work done, it was easier to get more work done.  Although I didn't get done as much as I'd hoped, I have managed to get the most important things done, so I wanted to take a minute to document those things here.  This summer has been a success because I have:

-completed "enough reading and research" for my dissertation prospectus (according to my advisor)
-written and submitted the first draft of my prospectus (my first written assignment since giving birth to Nora!)
-revised the first draft to address my advisor's initial critiques
-submitted the second and much more polished draft of my prospectus
-recruited two new professors to serve on my dissertation committee who are enthusiastic about my project and have backgrounds in feminism, archive research, and modernist women's writers
-came up with a plan for passing the translation exam in order to satisfy the foreign language requirement that is currently preventing me from advancing to candidacy
-worked 10 hours a week on the Katherine Anne Porter project
-set up my syllabus and lesson plans for my fall teaching assignment

Phew.  It's been busy.  I've also managed to enjoy some fun with family and friends along the way.  Here's to hoping I'm getting closer to achieving a sustainable work/life balance!!

Prospectus Draft Submitted

I finished the first draft of my prospectus on time!  I completed my last read-through around 9:30 last night and sent it off to my professor.  I actually felt a bit emotional when I hit "send" on the email because I realized that it was the first time I'd submitted any writing since before Nora was born.  Since she was born, I have been plagued by the "I have no idea how I am going to do this" feeling.  Every new stage of the process feels impossible.  But the thing I try to repeat to myself is "I may not be sure I can do it, but I'll keep trying until I'm sure I can't do it."  Since I took on the Katherine Anne Porter job, it has felt increasingly impossible to get "enough" work done on my prospectus.  So even though I may still need to spend several months revising this draft before it is good enough to be filed, it felt really satisfying to get the first draft under my belt.  And since it has been so long since I wrote anything academic, it felt good to finally be able to sit down and get all my ideas down on the page.  Blogging and paper writing may be very different types of writing, but it made me thankful that I've continued writing here.  Since I have attempted to undertake some more thoughtful posts, I do think it has kept me from getting *too* rusty.

So once I hit send, I gave myself a bit of a break until I get feedback from my advisor tomorrow.  I slept great, got Nora off to school, watched a little Netflix, took a nap, met Vickie at her pool, and then picked Nora up when she woke up from her nap to join us for some pooltime.  It was a lovely day that left me feeling a bit recharged and ready to hear whatever my advisor has to say about the draft.  I also realized that I have a lot of fun activities coming up in the next few weeks: my first Orioles game of the season, a day at the DC tennis tournament with Vickie, a concert with friends on my birthday, and then our trip to Oregon.  I will still have to squeeze plenty of work in around these events, but it is a relief to know I'll be doing them with this first draft behind me instead of looming ominously in the future.

When we got home from the pool this afternoon, Oscar was much worse for wear after what I thought was a minor injury this morning.  He went from refusing to come up the stairs to screaming out in pain, so we thought he had slipped a disk in his back like he did when Nora was born.  The vet informs us, however, that he must have done something to tweak his neck, so he's on a steroid that hopefully gets him feeling better soon.  It sure is tough to see your dog in pain and not be able to do much to help. That has put a bit of a damper on my planned relaxing evening with Billy, but I'm still enjoying a hard cider, a little TV, and blog updating while we watch the Orioles.

I also wanted to say thank you to everyone who has helped and encouraged me over the past few days.  Billy, Patti, and Chuck watched Nora for several hours on Saturday so I could work, and knowing she was happily occupied helped me stay focused.  I also appreciate those of you who checked in on me over the course of the weekend to see how I was doing!

The Silencing of Women's Voices

One of the main focuses of my academic work is the way women's voices from the American Modernist period have been silenced.  There are a lot of ways this happens to female writers: the restraints they're working under prevent them from producing work, they have difficulty finding reputable and/or profitable avenues in which to publish the work they do produce, the work they do publish is evaluated by gender-biased standards and is sometimes given limited printing runs as a result... the list goes on and on.

Perhaps most troubling for me are the examples of women who were widely published and well-respected during their lifetimes but who have largely fallen out of print and out of consideration in the intervening years.  These are the women who somehow managed to overcome all the obstacles I named above, who found ways to speak and to be heard, but who could not prevent their words from being subsequently erased.

I can (and will eventually have to) write a lot of words about this silencing and erasure.  But I thought some of you who read along with me here might be interested in what it looks like, materially, to do this type of work.

Several weeks ago I had to request a copy of Kay Boyle's My Next Bride through interlibrary loan because we do not have it in our own holdings at UMd.  It arrived in a box because the book itself-- a first edition printed in 1934-- was falling apart.  I supported it with a pillow the entire time I read it and still could not keep it from falling apart in my hands.

Today, I went to pick up a copy of Mary Hunter Austin's A Woman of Genius.  It was then that I realized we had exactly two-- TWO-- books on the shelves that are written by or specifically about Austin.  In a library that has four bookcases, with six or seven shelves each, shelves devoted to William Faulkner.

I realize that we may have several more books about Austin in the holdings that have been checked out, but as you can see, there was no big gap on the shelf from their absence.  This is one of the most prolific female American writers of the 20th Century, and she has been all but forgotten for everything she published except for The Land of Little Rain.  For me, seeing these two books alone on this shelf felt like getting punched in the gut.

But perhaps I should accept it, instead, as a kick in the ass.  Due to some changes in my advisor's travel schedule, I have 4 days to write the first draft of my prospectus, start to finish.  In other words, I have until Monday to figure out how to articulate what specific research project my dissertation will undertake, how it relates to the current scholarship in my field, and how it will significantly improve upon that scholarship.  Here goes nothing.

Odds and Ends

I've been so busy with my looming prospectus deadline that I've fallen behind on sharing pictures of Nora.  Here are a whole bunch of them from the past two or so months!

A few weeks ago Nora's school had a "Super Hero Spirit Day" where you they were supposed to wear their favorite superhero tee shirts.  Nora doesn't have one of those, so I used fabric markers to do one better: a whole Wonder Woman costume!  She happened to have red shoes and the perfect shorts, but I knew she was on board with the project when she picked up her Slinky of Truth for the pictures!

 

We got Nora a kiddie pool when the weather got warm, and it is a much bigger hit this year than it was last summer.  She loves sitting in it and splashing all around, and Billy and I like that putting our feet in the chilly water makes sitting out in the yard with her more bearable.  She loves to be outside no matter how hot it is, but sometimes we get quite sweaty playing with her "ousside."

Billy's cousin Jacelyn's family moved from a townhome into a single family home, so they had us all over for a family cookout last month.  Nora is finally old enough to really play with Cash and Lily (rather than just watching them run around and have fun), but I was still surprised by how much she insisted on participating in the slip 'n slide fun!  Jacelyn and Allen's new house is perfect for summer playtime, so we are glad we got to enjoy this day together as a family.

Nora has two teachers in her classroom, and one of them decided to leave the day care center in order to spend the rest of her summer at home with her little boys.  We were happy she has the opportunity to spend more time with her own children, but I know Nora misses her.  We have had such a good experience with the teachers at this location that we are sure Nora will warm up to her replacement quickly.  I already miss Ms. Candice myself-- in part, because now Nora no longer comes home with these beautiful braids!  She does NOT sit still long enough for me to do this with her hair. : )

While they were visiting family in Delaware, our old friends Erin and Brent from my Calvert County days brought their daughter Julia over to visit us for a day.  This was the first time we've seen them since Julia began walking, so it was fun to see her and Nora interact a lot more.  She was a little weary of Nora's rough-and-tumble ways, but I think they will eventually be great friends!

And finally, one of my friends in the PhD program held her annual backyard cookout, so I took a break from what I've been calling "prospectus purgatory" to do some actual socializing.  Since there are plenty of people who criticize the decision to have a child as a grad student, it was extra nice to be surrounded by the classmates who've always been supportive of my decision.  This was the first time those of us who've had babies since we started in the program were able to get them together to play, and it was a delight for me to see them interact. After two year old Cy taught Nora how to pull ice cubes out of the cooler, she spent the rest of the evening trying to find more single cubes in there.  Though you wouldn't know it by their sizes, my friend Maggie's son Xavier was born almost exactly a year after Nora.  I know the nature of our profession will take all these littles to different parts of the country, but I hope I'll get to follow their development online throughout the years.  They have a special place in my heart as Nora's fellow Tiny Terrapins!

Literary Words of Wisdom: Adrienne Rich

Sometimes it's best to just let the genius speak for herself.  From Adrienne Rich's ground breaking 1976 study, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution:

"The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.  For a mother, this means more than contending with the reductive images of females in children's books, movies, television, the schoolroom.  It means that the mother herself is trying to expand the limits of her life.  To refuse to be a victim: and then to go on from there.

Only when we can wish imaginatively and courageously for ourselves can we wish unfetteredly for our daughters.  But finally, a child is not a wish, nor a product of wishing.  Women's lives-- in all levels of society-- have been lived too long in both depression and fantasy, while our active energies have been trained and absorbed into caring for others.  It is essential, now, to begin breaking that cycle.  Anyone who has read the literature in the obstetrician's waiting-room knows the child-care booklets which, at some point, confess that 'you may get a fit of the blues' and suggest 'having your husband take you to dinner in a French restaurant, or going shopping for a new dress.'  (The fiction that most women have both husbands and money is forever with us.)  But the depressive mother who now and then allows herself a 'vacation' or a 'reward' is merely showing her daughters both that the female condition is depressing, and that there is no real way out.

As daughters we need mothers who want their own freedom and ours.  We need not to be the vessels of another woman's self-denial and frustration.  The quality of the mother's life-- however embattled or unprotected-- is her primary bequest to her daughter, because a woman who can believe in herself, who is a fighter, and who continues to struggle to create livable space around her, is demonstrating to her daughter that these possibilities exist."  (246-247)

So next time I write something like this, please remind me: when all else fails, pick up something by Adrienne Rich.

104 down, 0 to go.

I've finished reading all the texts on my exam list!

As you can see, Nora took an interest in the stacks yesterday... but there they all are.  I finished my reading today, as planned, just over a week ahead of my exam on November 27.  This means I can take a bit of a break for the rest of the day before I begin preparing for the exam itself.

I guess this is as good a time as any to explain a little bit more about what the exam is like for those of you who are curious.  One week ahead of the exam, my advisor will send me the "questions" I'm supposed to answer in the exam.  There will probably be four, and they will be worded sort of like elaborate essay questions you might see on a final exam (if the reading material for the class was my exam list).  I'll get those tomorrow, which means I'll have about a week to review my notes, synthesize my ideas, work on my answers to the questions, and figure out other things I want to try to make sure to bring up in the exam.

The exam itself is a two hour oral exam.  It begins with me giving a 20 minute presentation from memory, in which I talk about my project by answering one of the exam questions.  For the remaining 100 minutes, my committee of four professors will ask me questions and I'll have to answer them.  Generally, the idea is that I'm supposed to meet two goals.  First, I'm supposed to prove that my list is comprehensive for my field (in this case, 20th Century American Lit) and that I have a firm understanding of all the texts on my list.  Second, my composure during the exam is supposed to demonstrate that I'm capable of thinking on my feet, taking questions seriously, and speaking authoritatively about my own original ideas (like one would be expected to do in a job interview).  How the exam goes seems to depend a lot on what approach your committee members take.  I expect the questions my professors give me to be difficult but fair.

Some of my classmates have stressed out about forgetting what they read, or having trouble thinking of answers, or feeling like their professors might dismiss their ideas.  I have two main fears.  First, I worry that I will not understand my professors' questions well enough to answer them.  I still struggle a lot with what I consider academic jargon, and especially since it's a high-pressure environment, I worry that I'll just blank out and have to ask them to rephrase their questions so much that it might make me look dumb.  I'm also terrified that I will cry.  I cried in my master's defense, and I have gotten choked up a few times while discussing my ideas with my advisor.  I care about this stuff a lot, I'm very invested in the work I've done, and especially now that it deals with gender oppression and procreation, some of it strikes very close to home.  Plus, this work is intimately tied up with the losses I've experienced since I began graduate school.  A few weeks ago, an envelope fell out of one of my books, on which my dad had been keeping score of the last game of crazy 8s we ever played together.  For me, the personal is definitely political, and vice versa. I absolutely cannot cry this time... but how do you practice "not crying"?

After the two hours are up, they ask you to step out of the room so they can briefly discuss your command of the material and your composure during the exam.  Then they bring you back in and usually tell you you've passed.  It's unusual for anyone to fail; more commonly, your advisor asks you to delay your exam if s/he thinks you're not ready to pass it.  Nobody has suggested that I should postpone my exam, but my committee has had a pretty hands-off approach all the way along, so I'm not sure any of them have a particularly clear idea of what I plan to talk about.  And people do periodically fail, though given the nature of that disappointment, I've never asked one of those people why they think they failed.  So I don't know how exactly that would play out.

My advisor, in particular, loves these exams and has quite a romanticized view of them.  He sees the exam as the moment when a student shows that her research and her ideas prove she is ready to make the transition from being a student to being a colleague.  But part of the reason I've been successful up to this point is that he has always treated my ideas as if they are worthy of serious consideration, so part of me just feels like all I have to do in my exam is prove him right.  In one of our meetings this semester, he told me "You're a mom.  You can do anything."

I am considering getting this printed on a tanktop to wear under my clothes for the exam. : )

A Day in the Life

A few weeks ago, my high school friend Jo did a couple of posts that documented "a day in the life" of her attempts to balance motherhood and with her career.  I was amazed and intrigued by how different our day-to-day lives seem to be, even though we're both professional moms who share similar values on a lot of parenting questions.  People are always saying things to me like "How do you get it all done?", so maybe they care to read about it on a micro level.  Plus, I've done "day in the life" posts before (see here and here), and I enjoy looking back on them.  So whether or not anyone is interested in this level of specificity, I thought I'd keep track of what I was up to on an average work-from-home Monday so that in the future, when this whole semester is a blur, I can remember what putting one foot in front of the other looked like as I prepared for my exams.

10:08pm Sunday night: Billy turns off the TV and we say goodnight.  I'm surely asleep by 10:11.

11ish pm: I wake up to the sound of Nora's coughing fit.  She does this once every night, and we don't know why, but our pediatrician is unconcerned about it.  I try to figure out why she's doing it at this time, since it normally happens around 4 or 5am, while I listen to see if she needs me.  She doesn't.  If the coughing wakes her up, she goes right back to sleep, so her mom does the same.

5:22-6:00am Monday morning: I wake up.  I get up to pack up the lunch for Nora that I prepared the night before.  I fix her bottles, pull clothes and sheets from the laundry, and prepare her school bag.  I make coffee, eat breakfast, feed Oscar, and let him out.  Once Billy is up and in the shower, I go get dressed.

6:00-7:00am Nora's already awake and waiting patiently, so I get her up.  I change her diaper, get her dressed, nurse her, and we say goodbye to Billy, who is leaving for work.  I finish getting her things together and start to get excited about getting out of the door early when I realize that I can't find her left shoe.  I spend at least 15 minutes searching the house and the car for it.  Luckily, she sits patiently in her pack and play and "reads" a book, laughing at me as I get increasingly frustrated.  (How do you lose baby weight?  Lose everything else first, and you'll make so many trips up and down the stairs that you won't need to exercise.)  When I finally give up and sit down to put a different pair of shoes on her, I see the toe of her left school shoe peeking out from behind the boxes I need to mail today.

7:00-8:00am I get Nora in the car and drive her to school.  In the car, we listen to Alice Walker's narration of The Color Purple.  I spend about two hours commuting every day, so audiobooks on my iPhone have allowed me to make use of this time.  I limit my listening to those novels which I've read  before and otherwise wouldn't have time to re-read.  I wonder what others in my program would think if they knew how many pages I've reviewed in this way, but I don't care.  I drop Nora off at school, get her situated, get her teacher up to speed since she was on vacation last week.  I drive back home.

8:00-8:20am: I shower and get dressed (again).  I realize I am starving so I eat a piece of last night's pizza.

8:20-10:00am: I finish reading Morrison's Beloved, review my notes from when I read it in a grad class, and write up my exam notecard on the novel.  I cross it off my list and triumphantly place it on the top of my "finished" pile even though I still have to figure out 4 lesson plans for it in the near future.

10:00-11:25am: I read Amy Kaplan's intro to Cultures of United States Imperialism and take notes on it.  Somewhere in this block I also took a 12 minute power nap.  I do this almost every day, sometimes twice.  Billy thinks the idea of a 12 minute nap is absurd; I think it's the only thing that keeps my brain functioning.

11:25am-12:05pm: I eat another piece of pizza, I check facebook, I work on this blog post, and I talk to Billy briefly on gchat.  I spend about 20 minutes of this window attached to my pump and yield just over 4 ounces.  (So it goes these days.)  I portion this out to Nora's bottles for tomorrow and rinse my pump parts.

12:05-12:55pm: I read Donald Pease's follow-up intro to the Kaplan one from earlier, take notes on it, and put that book in the finished pile.

12:55-2:10pm: I plan our meals for the week and make my grocery list.  I go to the post office to mail a few packages, but the empty parking lot reminds me that it's closed for Veteran's day.  I go to the grocery store, get our groceries, and stop for our mail on the way home even though I should have remembered that there is no mail today.  Facepalm.  I put the groceries away.

2:10-3:00pm: I begin reviewing Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

3:00-4:05pm: I listen to The Color Purple on the way to and from picking Nora up from school.  I chat briefly with her teacher and learn that Nora said "Wow!" while eating her lunch and she had fun playing outside.  She seems to have gotten over her hesitations about walking on the rubberized, padded playground matting.

4:05-5:00pm: Nora and I meet Billy at home to begin the best part of my day!  We play with her together for about a half an hour.  Today, this means watching her run around the living room and playing peek-a-boo by putting a bucket over her head.  Then I prepare asparagus and stuffing to eat with the rotisserie chicken I got at the grocery store.  While I'm waiting on those things, I watch Nora pull all of the food containers out of "her" cabinet and make her lunch for tomorrow.

5:00-5:30pm: Nora, Billy, and I sit down to eat dinner as a family.  She seems to have fallen out of love with vegetables, but she still takes a few bites of asparagus.  She can't get enough rotisserie chicken and she discovers that she likes stuffing.

5:30-6:10pm: After dinner, we play for a little while longer.  Then Billy cleans up the kitchen and washes the dishes and bottles while I get Nora ready for bed.  Bathtime, jammies, brush her teeth, empty her diaper pail when I remember it's trash night.  While I do that she "reads" herself Go, Dog! Go!.  This apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

6:10-6:30pm: I watch Friday Night Lights on my phone during Nora's bedtime nursing session.  I could be listening to my audiobook, but watching good TV while cuddling my baby is my one singular indulgence every day.  When 20 minutes is up, we say goodnight to Dad, set Nora down in her crib, and she's done for the night.

6:30-6:45pm: Billy has funny things he found on the internet to show me.

6:45-8:10pm: I finish reviewing Didion, read my notes from when we read her in one of my graduate classes, write up my notecard, and put Slouching Toward Bethlehem in the "finished" pile.

8:10-8:30pm: While waiting for tech support on audible.com to help me with my audiobook account, I get caught up on jezebel and gawker for the day.  An Elmo scandal? Why!?!

8:30-9:15pm: I begin reading Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.  Oscar helps.  I normally try to work until at least 9:30 but I become convinced that my brain itself is "unstuck in time" and quit a few minutes early.

9:15-10:00pm: I bring my laptop up to the bedroom, where Billy is flipping around between Maryland basketball and Monday Night Football.  I work on this blog post and we relax until bedtime.

All in all, it was a pretty standard but rewardingly productive day.  As it turns out, it was a good thing I got so much done yesterday because today was a complete wash in terms of getting my own work done.  (I spent the whole day teaching and grading.)  Tomorrow, I get to work from home again, which means crossing more texts off my ever shortening list!