Process

March 2, 2016 By: Walt Hunter

The assignment for this column is “process” or, the writing life. How does interesting and inspiring work come to be?

Past Process

July 15, 2021 By: Walt Hunter

This column for Process is about poetry that tries to make sense of sharing time together as it passes. For that I turn to John Ashbery, about whom I have never been willing or able to write, except in a very brief and unsatisfying conclusion to my first book. I live with several of Ashbery’s poems ricocheting around in my consciousness, along with stray lines by Herbert, Dickinson, McKay, and Rich. The idea of writing something about his poetry is particularly daunting because it carries a lot of emotional weight. More than anything else, the name Ashbery calls to mind the people who shaped and continue to shape what I know or feel about poetry. So when I think about Ashbery, the situation in which I think about his poetry is, almost automatically, a social one.

Tropical Harlem

February 23, 2021 By: Akua Banful

Sitting in my apartment, in parks, and on my roof, I have tried to keep track of the ebb and flow of the seasons in the relentless monotony of a socially distanced New York. Keeping track has been made all the more difficult by the seasonal monotony that my research asks of me—working on a dissertation about literary representations of the tropics has me fixated on heat even when I do not feel it.

Miscasting Identity: Context as Cause

January 7, 2021 By: Janani Ambikapathy

One of the frustrating things about academic writing is the categories set by the institution. These categories slice through histories to abstract people, epochs, and bodies of knowledge from their context and settle them deep into the belly of the institution to be studied as phenomena without cause or provenance.

Movement Literacy

August 31, 2020 By: Patty Argyrides

In his latest work, contemporary choreographer William Forsythe tries to create, in his own words, a “short-term literacy” in his audience. The piece begins without music in order to isolate the individual phrases of movement: “it might be perceived that there has been a subtraction, which would be music. But in fact, dancers being the musical engines behind any dance, their breathing alone causes you to understand the phrase.” [1] The intention is to create a more skilled viewer who is focused on the movements that make up the dance without the distraction of the music. When music and movement come together in a more traditional way in the second act, the audience is, or so is the idea, more literate in what is presented to them: “suddenly, you are able to read.”

Poetry from Afar: Distant Reading, Global Poetics, and the Digital Humanities

June 5, 2020 By: Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu

In the spring of 2019, a new and welcome contact of mine in Ghana sent me a PDF of an anthology he had put together with a number of promising, young African poets. Through conversations with those involved with the making of the anthology, I began to note that these writers and editors are part of my intellectual and creative social-network and members of my living archive. In the days following my reading of the anthology, it struck me that the only reason I was able to have access not only to...

The Aura of Autographs

October 9, 2019 By: Hunter Dukes

Always mornings. Early. And there should be coffee. Breakfast will come later, but the best hours are now—when the world is still blanketed, the mind “puddled in dream melt.” [1] There are particular parameters for the page. The margins must be wide. The font Goudy Old Style or Garamond in a squeeze. Carriage returns between paragraphs. No indentation. I once justified my text; now I like the ragged edges. To write The Names (1982), Don DeLillo had to change his method. He began typing single, numbered paragraphs, each on its own leaf: a microclimate that allowed him to “see a given set of sentences more clearly.” This is a logic that makes sense to me. I learned to write from my mother. She taught me to revise a sentence aloud before putting it into print. To move from breath to inscription can be a mystical practice. The look of letters has long astonished, inviting cryptic explanations. The 22 paths connecting Kabbalah’s Sefirot—emanations of the divine Ein Sof—correspond to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The Latin “A” is an abstracted, phonetic descendant from an Ox hieroglyph. Flip it over and you can still see the creature’s horns: ∀. These ideas are important for the writers I study. They reveal a profound longing—the desire to rekindle a relationship between text and the body, at once archaic and arcane, and to locate the origins of writing in the sensual world.

Writing the Senior Thesis: A Conversation

May 28, 2019 By: Jacquelyn Ardam

In this conversation about Process, Jacquelyn Ardam and her undergraduate advisee, Cole Walsh, demystify the senior thesis. Cole’s thesis, “Mak[ing] Bright the Arrows: Recovering the Political Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay,” examines the poetry of the underserved Millay, whose work with the sonnet, Cole argues, deploys its “memorable speech” to intervene within the isolationist politics of the United States. Here the two collaborators talk about the marginalization of poets within modernism...

On Not Knowing How to Dance

February 28, 2019 By: Walt Hunter

It’s rare to read an account of the process of learning about a new artform or medium from the beginning. Maybe because, at least for me, it’s hard to remember the first time I read a poem or a novel or saw a painting or heard a piece of music. Or maybe because that experience merges uncomfortably with a non-critical stance of “appreciation,” a word that doesn’t deserve some of the pejorative associations attached to it.

Opening the Book, Part II

January 8, 2019 By: Sarah Dowling

This second batch of writers on the process of finishing their books ranges from meditations on the situatedness of academic writing to blow-by-blow descriptions of the publication process to a call for more inventive and ethical ways of acknowledging one’s scholarly companions. Here you can find writing on the “hard edge of a colonial language,” in Sarah Dowling’s apt description of her work. Helen Rydstrand narrates the difficulty of accepting any work as good enough. Rebecca Colesworthy calls attention to the “not-writing”: the money, time, and resources that condition the long-term development of a book. And Alix Beeston’s “intervallic bridgework” concludes this installment of the Process cluster by pushing the form of the monograph toward a politics of citation.

Opening the Book, Part 1

December 7, 2018 By: Michaela Bronstein

For this two-part installment of Process, I asked eight scholars who had just finished a book—their first or their fourth—to write informally about their experience. Conferences often feature roundtables about writing and publishing, but I thought it might be a good addition to have some personal anecdotes, stories less attached to the mechanics of the industry and more to the quiddities of the book-writing process. A book might arrive as an artifact, but it begins as a dream or a compulsion or a hunch. No review or reading, however generous, does justice to the messiness of the life that seals itself into the final object of the book, as though in anticipation of the spell that may someday release it. The intent here is not so much to demystify as to re-enchant.

A Dialogue in Process

September 23, 2018 By: Johanna Winant

This summer, the modernist scholar Johanna Winant and I found ourselves working on a number of converging projects, from book chapters to essays on Stanley Cavell’s philosophy and Donald Hall’s poetry. Below we reflect on the process of writing together, sharing work, and discovering the kinds of friendship that collaboration makes possible

Process Against Progress

April 26, 2018 By: Walt Hunter

I’m taking over the Process blog from Lesley Wheeler at the moment when I’m nearly finished the process of writing my first book and am waiting for page proofs from the press.

Eroding Partitions: A Conversation with Jahan Ramazani

February 26, 2018 By: Lesley Wheeler

My farewell post for the “Process” column is a brief conversation with Jahan Ramazani, University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia, and a scholar whose work I admire greatly and follow closely. He gives serious attention to strong poets who aren’t always read with such insight, as well as leveling powerful arguments about how verse frames identity, feeling, and nation. In short, his labors help me think through scholarly problems and build syllabi...

Seeking Anne Spencer

December 10, 2017 By: Lesley Wheeler

Archival research possesses a hushed glamor. To realize that Marianne Moore carried around the very book you’re holding—or that Langston Hughes rolled that exact piece of paper into his typewriter late one night and yanked out a poem with the ink still damp—is like being visited by a character you thought you’d invented. Such knowledge can change how you think about art, and it certainly changes how you read.

Writer’s (Wood)block

September 18, 2017 By: Olivia Badoi

There is always some degree of confusion when I tell people that I am getting my PhD in English by writing a dissertation about wordless novels. While I’m used to giving my “elevator pitch” to fellow academics, describing my project to people outside of academia can be more of a challenge:

How to Do Things with Poetry Criticism, or Scholarship and Justice, Part II

May 24, 2017 By: Lesley Wheeler

Some writing changes worlds, for better and for worse. The second executive order signed by President Trump, for example, speeds up environmental reviews “For High Priority Infrastructure Projects” such as the Dakota Access Pipeline. The effects of this order on the natural universe and on human culture may be profound.

Processing the Writing Process

April 12, 2017 By: Helen Sword

My process of writing this blog post about the writing process was slow, circuitous, and emotionally fraught. I started out with a clear idea of my overall structure—or so I thought—but ended up abandoning it after several hours of drafting, redrafting, and repeated applications of my Delete key. Frustrated, I tried free-writing for twenty minutes: an unstructured word-dump to find out where “writing to think” might get me. Unfortunately, it got me nowhere. By that time I had already spent...

Scholarship and Justice

January 9, 2017 By: Lesley Wheeler

The U.S. presidential election of 2016 made many professors think harder about teaching toward a better world. My colleagues and friends found the immediate aftermath especially challenging. If, on November 9th, your students were shocked, sleepless, weepy, angry, afraid—how could you console them, or help them channel their responses constructively? If they were pleased by the election, ready to report you if you said something partisan—how should you behave then? There’s a Professor Watchlist...

Teaching/Writing Correspondence, Part I

September 21, 2016 By: Lesley Wheeler

If I were Edna St. Vincent Millay, I might begin this letter by describing some bit of local foliage I’d enclosed, its leaves pressed among scrawled endearments. But by the time broadband has advanced enough to transmit an actual crape myrtle blossom, it would be very faded, I’m afraid. So a photograph from my front yard will have to suffice.

Listening to the Noise

March 2, 2016 By: Lesley Wheeler

In 2015, the airwaves crackled with debate about the value—or pointlessness—of academic conferences (see, for starters, “The Conference Manifesto” and “A Conference Manifesto for the Rest of Us”). Yet I love the Modernist Studies Association meeting for reliably reenergizing my research and writing. Come November, I’m generally buried under a drift of student essays, plus the holidays are looming, with their burden of extra work and anxiety. It can be hard to see the point in crafting another labor-intensive scholarly essay for a coterie of readers when there are so many administrative deadlines pressing and weepy students knocking, plus a late-capitalist shopping frenzy to orchestrate.
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On Collaboration (or, She Do the Blog in Different Voices)

July 14, 2016 By: Lesley Wheeler

Volume 1 Cycle 2

Tags:

collaboration

Why would a modernism scholar want to write collaboratively? Aren’t solo ventures hard enough? Below are some rejoinders, meditations, and provocations, the first in dramatic form.

Collabowriting

a kind of play

by Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible

ACT I

Suzanne           Before the MSA formed in 1998, scholarly writing for me was a form of anguished prayer to scowling, white-bearded, tweed-coated apparitions on high. At the first MSA gathering, I encountered in the flesh many of the names I’d read in print and to my delight discovered they were living, breathing human beings. Still, writing to and for them could be fraught with FOMU (fears of measuring up).

Adam              In the twentieth century BC (Before Churchill), I suffered not from FOMU, but from Imagined Solitary Garret Syndrome, a condition that afflicts many students of modernism who imagine their favorite writers as autonomous works of art—isolated in timeless grandeur. I was the very model of the sort of modernist that I now do not believe ever really existed: I toiled alone in my Williamsburg garret, writing my solitary thoughts of "genius" for the tweedy white beards who haunted Suzanne’s anguished prayers.

ACT II

Suzanne           When I began collaborating with Adam, a spirit of camaraderie displaced my former fears. Adam brings energy, humor, compassion, and intellectual daring to the scholarly enterprise, helping me to take risks and have fun. At the same time, we push each other to be rigorous in our research, thinking, and writing. 

Adam              Agreed! By working with Suzanne in the realms of periodical studies, modernism, and the Harlem Renaissance, I have come to understand that writing and publishing have always been acts of collaboration. Our intellectual give-and-take deepens my understanding of how writing originates, evolves, and flourishes and how editorial practices shape sentences, ideas, and reputations.

ACT III

Suzanne           It’s one thing to collaborate with a fellow scholar in an egalitarian partnership. Collaborating with students introduces different kinds of energies and tensions. Students offer fresh, untrained ways of thinking and push me into territories where I have little expertise. Working with students requires me to bring humor and compassion to the table and to relinquish the need to be authoritative—while remaining cognizant of my institutional power and privilege. 

Adam              This is where I am completely jealous of Suzanne. I love her work with students and am now trying to figure out how to develop courses that incorporate collaborative student-professor research projects. Suzanne’s co-authored essay on Fire!! and the Crisis is a model of this kind of work. Now that I have entered into the realm of online and hybrid teaching, I am eager to explore the possibilities afforded at the nexus of computer-assisted learning and collaborative research.

In unison         In our experience, good ideas are sparked between minds, not within them. Scholarship, we’ve come to realize, is collaborative in nature: the term “monograph” actually belies the exchange of ideas that occurred through print and over time to produce the work. Collaboration animates and personalizes the scholarly exchange. Without it, we’d have nothing to say.

 

Churchill and McKible’s doppelgangers, Captain and Tennille

I love the conversation above for so many reasons. The pun on "play" is answer #1 to “why collaborate?”: because it can redefine the hard labor of writing as pleasure. This is especially helpful when you’re stalled. As I suggested in the first installment of this series on process, sometimes you can trick yourself into writing by pursuing intellectual projects that seem, at first, like distraction or misbehavior.

Answer #2: we’re collaborating already, although the institutions publishing and employing us sometimes efface that fact. The authors we study certainly collaborated; a large scholarly literature exists about the complexity of literary authorship. Yet critics are equally influenced by other writers, editors, teachers, and students. Our very ways of posing and analyzing problems are developed via those relationships.

With your head full of other people’s voices, you draft the article. Then your best friend reads it and raises good questions, your writing group suggests substantial reordering and rephrasing, the anonymous reader reports require you to consult unfamiliar sources and rethink a central problem, and the copyeditor challenges everything you ever thought you knew about hyphenation. “Monographs” are myths.   

If you’re interested in experimenting with a more intense kind of collaboration than the ordinary, mostly-invisible variety I just described, how do you get started? The authors below suggest fruitful work can arise out of conversations you may already be having.

 

The BFF Guide to Interdisciplinary Collaboration

by Marsha Bryant  & Mary Ann Eaverly

 

MAE  & MB gallery talk for "Classical Convergences" exhibit. Harn Museum of Art, 2015.

We collaborate as a literary critic and Classical archaeologist, working as team-teachers, co-presenters, and co-authors. We began with H.D. and the ancient Mediterranean world.  Twenty years later, we’re still friends despite deadlines, technical glitches, and airport adventures! We offer these tips:

  1. Tap your teaching. Visit each other’s classes; try team-teaching. We teach courses on women writers and Classical myths.
  2. Collaborate through your local museum or library. We co-curated a museum exhibit and gave a gallery talk on Classically-inspired poetry.
  3. Take it on the road. Extend your collaboration by exploring a new place. We’re just back from a modernist translation conference in Montreal.
  4. Be creative. Try a conference outside each other’s fields. Try a new format. We’ve participated in a creative writing conference, and we like to present antiphonally.
  5. Exchange reading notes before you write. This jump-starts your conversation.
  6. Be ready to revise, move, or cut it.  If your collaborator doesn’t understand something you wrote, fix it. If it doesn’t fit, you must omit!
  7. Trust your collaborator. Accept the fact that we all have off days.

Bonus. Collaboration gives you the freedom to experiment. You'll research new topics and deepen your friendship.

A. E. Stallings, MB & MAE at Poetry by the Sea, 2015

Bryant and Eaverly emphasize adventure, like Churchill and McKible, as well as how co-authorship affects not just writing but teaching—even travel plans. They also get into the nuts and bolts of how it works. Co-authors need to map out their areas of responsibility, usually over several stages of labor, as Chris Gavaler explains:

Figure out your roles and rules early on. As a playwright, I write a play and hand it off to a director. Some directors have conferred with me, some haven’t, but either way, the shaping of the performance is out of my hands. Comics are traditionally staged too: scripter, penciler, inker, colorists. An editor oversees it all, potentially requiring changes at any stage—so editing is one of the most important roles. Figure out whether you are handing off creative control or if you are editors to each other. When I collaborated on an essay about Swamp Thing with a colleague in Philosophy, we passed drafts back and forth, altering each other’s words and our arguments as we went. Ideas may also emerge collaboratively before the writing. I’m working with an artist on a graphic novel, and though I plotted it out scene by scene, the content came from conversations we’d had in advance. For a research project with a cognitive psychologist, my role has been in the conceptual stage. After we discussed a range of issues, he shaped them into an experiment and executed that experiment with subjects. When it’s time to write up the results, I’ll be the drafter. 

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Gavaler works in inherently collaborative fields and genres—drama, comics, social science research—and in areas where co-authorship is rarer, such as humanities scholarship. He is also willing to cede control over details of language, something I have a harder time with. I make this comparison with confidence, being married to him. He and I collaborated years ago on the article “Chameleons and Imposters: Marianne Moore and the Carlisle Indian School” (Paideuma 33.2&3, 2005). Conducting research together was immensely fun. Tussling over commas, less so.

Are most successful collaborators BFFs? Poets Carol Dorf and Athena Kildegaard write that while they couldn’t collaborate with just anybody, gaps in expertise, background, and temperament can be generative. Kildegaard remarks that she values Dorf’s “different poetic sensibility,” and Dorf replies that while there has to be compatibility, “difference does energize the collaboration.” Working together brings home to both of them that, as Dorf puts it, the "self" in poetry is a created self, not necessarily opposition to the confessional impulse, but not taking that impulse at face value.”

Some co-authors arrive harmoniously at what poets Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton call a “third voice” (see their reflections on collaboration).  Their “Ten Commandments” include the directive “Thou shalt eat and tire at the same time,” and metabolic issues are definitely crucial. Gavaler and his most frequent collaborator, philosopher Nathaniel Goldberg, both write fast and at all hours. People who work at dissimilar paces will have trickier negotiations to undertake.

Collaboration is difficult, yet solitary work is, too. Co-authors sacrifice control but shed self-doubt; developing roles and processes can be tough, but a good dynamic can motivate higher productivity. The experience can also be revelatory—a key motivator for me and many others. Ann E. Michael illuminates this vividly in discussing her collaboration with composer Alla Borzova, whose

musical vision often forces me out of my comfort zone and thanks to whom I have learned about opera libretti, choral lyricism, and the sound of the written line as interpreted by the human voice in song rather than in speech. We have especially had to work together on where a syllable is stressed, muted, or elided—because she is Russian, her musical/tonal interpretation of a line in English is sometimes at odds with American English pronunciation. But I have gained more from our collaboration than she has. I consider sound and rhythm more carefully than I once did and have experimented mightily with poetic forms, with punctuation, and with line breaks in an effort to produce the reading-aloud sensation in the reader's mind. And I think I understand the forces behind lyricism better, as well.

As a young scholar I was fascinated by the long-standing collaboration by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Later on, the choral qualities of poetic voice obsessed me: Surrealist-influenced works by Duhamel and Seaton, polyvocality in Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, spirit-voices haunting James Merrill, W. B. Yeats, H.D., and others. If the gods are not dictating your poems and articles, however, I recommend seeking human collaborators. Co-authorship can restore your belief in scholarship’s relevance—and literary play is worthwhile for its own sake.

Collaborators in this blog:

Marsha Bryant & Mary Ann Eaverly

Suzanne W. Churchill & Adam McKible

Carol Dorf & Athena Kildegaard

Chris Gavaler

Ann E. Michael