ADVICE, PUBLISHING, ETC.

I've spent a good deal of time during the past few weeks reading the advice posts over at Graham Harman's blog Object-Oriented Philosophy.* They are, I think, incredibly helpful, both in terms of offering useful and immediately applicable practical advice about writing, professionalization, publishing, etc., etc. and in terms of keeping up one's morale, finding happiness in one's work, and avoiding the soul-crushing despair of life as a graduate student. Also, it's just nice to read someone who is knowledgeable about writing discuss how to get better at writing: how to write more effectively, how to write with greater speed, how to remove barriers to writing.

I find the constant encouragement Harman offers to simply do work--and to do it as often as possible--a wonderful spur to productivity. However, what I find most useful are his posts on publishing and the ins and outs of academic writing (minus some of the points focused specifically on the discipline of philosophy). I will be the first to admit I know nothing about publishing. In my MA program, the general approach to the issue was don't think about it, don't worry about, and don't try it (this might have been different from the advice given to the MFA students with whom I shared office space and classes. They seemed to be forever in fear of not sending things out for publication often enough). Even as I made my transition into a PhD program, the advice I left my MA program with was "don't even think of publishing anything before you finish coursework." My advisers suggested I focus on conferences and leave publishing to the advanced stages of my PhD (there was a practical consideration here; as one professor put it, a bad article will never go away, but no one knows about a bad conference paper after you give it).

So there I was, happily entering a PhD program with no worries about having nothing on the horizon in terms of publishing. I hoped to get into a few conferences, but I was generally focused on doing well in my coursework. Of course, once I started the program, I discovered something quite different: everyone was obsessed with publishing and having things ready to send out. Several people I met already had publications (and had not followed the no-publications-during-coursework guideline I'd received); others had things under review or were preparing things to be sent out. I was a little bit confused and a lot scared. What was I to do?

Full disclosure as to the extent of my naivety re: the professional aspects of my discipline: I didn't (still don't exactly, to be honest) even know how to send something to a journal. I didn't know how to find a journal to send something to. I didn't know you had to wait for a decision while your article was under review (I assumed you sent it in, someone read it, and you heard a “yay” or “nay” pretty soon after). Now it can be a painful, embarrassing, and quite scary experience to ask a professor you've just met (and whose approval you desperately want to receive considering your own painful self-doubt re: your abilities, the reasons you were accepted into the program, your relative merits w/r/t those of the other students in the program, etc., etc.) about those kinds of things. Mostly, I didn't ask those kinds of questions. Some answers I managed to pick up by piecing together various remarks from colleagues. Some answers I managed to guess by doing a bit of research. The vast majority of my questions are still unanswered, though, and it's difficult to make myself as vulnerable as I know I will feel when I ask those questions to a professor, so I don't ask them. I remain ignorant of these things (not a good policy, clearly). The advice posts at Object-Oriented Philosophy are answering some of those questions, and the answers are written in such a sympathetic (though not condescending or patronizing) style, even when they are dealing with the harsh realities of life in the academic world, that I'm beginning to feel a little better about things.

Anyway, my reading of these posts is quite timely: one of the posts mentions that presenting a paper at a conference and then not at least attempting to transform that paper into a publishable article is a waste of one's mental energies. Considering I've not looked at the last paper I presented since I read it, I guess it's time to dig that out and take a look at it. I'm actually fairly confident that I can turn it into a decent essay in a relatively short amount of time. I have no idea if anything will come of working on this paper, but I have to think that it would be better than leaving it rotting on my hard drive. Besides, if I don't try and do something with it (and, at this point, I've been working on this paper on and off for over a year), what am I left with? Certainly no prospects for scholarly success. It would be nice to go from zero to two pieces of work to send out in one leap. After all, as the advice posts I've been reading keep saying, going from nothing to something is the hardest step.

Well, it looks like I've just talked myself into another project this summer. My father has asked me to pressure wash and stain the deck he's just finished building when I get home, so I will presumably (after some physical labour) have a nice place to sit and work for a month or so. I've also got some concrete goals to work towards and I look forward to a productive (but enjoyably so, productive on my own terms) summer vacation before school and teaching start up again in August.

*I was introduced to this subject this year in Louisville at a presentation I'd decided to attend on a whim. I don't pretened to understand the real heavy-duty philosophy that Harman (and others in the loose constellation of philosophers working on similar themes and issues), but this is a nice example of how chance encounters can sometimes lead to the most productive new areas of information (a point Harman himself makes over and over again in the advice posts).