Long Posts on Kimberly Hirsh

The things I was going to do in 2026 and haven't done yet

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:09:42 -0400

In late November and early December last year, I started thinking about the things I would do in the new year.

I was going to journal, using The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad as a guide. I was going to prep more of my own and my child’s food. He and I were going to be less sedentary. I was going to use the craniosacral therapy tool I bought years ago. I was going to hand-code a new version of my website. I was going to blog more. I was going to make something most days. I was going to actually do all the online courses and seminars I have access to.

These weren’t resolutions, I told myself. They were just things I was going to do.

Then, on December 19, I had a cough. The cough turned into a respiratory illness that required me to sleep most of the day. I was better enough to see family on Christmas, but that was a long day and I overdid it. I relapsed. I was well enough by New Year’s Eve to take my kid and his friend to our local museum. I overdid it. I relapsed again. Four and five weeks after this illness started, I was still wiped out even more than usual. I still had a productive cough.

In the next week or two, I got better.

Then we had an ice storm. My kid was out of school for 3 days.

My mom had some medical stuff that seemed resolved.

The pipe in the library burst. (It was the ice storm in the library with the pipe.)

We had a snowstorm. My kid was out of school for 2 days.

My mom’s medical situation got worse again.

I was running myself ragged being an eldest daughter, trying to figure out the library situation, and trying to engage my kid anytime there wasn’t a friend around so he didn’t turn into a screen zombie.

I have not done the things. I’ve done a little of some of the things, but they’ve all fallen off.

I like to let myself celebrate New Year’s multiple times: on January 1. On the spring equinox. On my birthday, in July. At the start of the new school year. At Rosh Hashanah.

And between those, I like to think about the next one coming up, to reflect on what I want to do differently.

Right now, ahead of the spring equinox, still in the middle of the library restoration process, living with chronic illness, I’m thinking I want to learn to be flexible. To hold intentions but be ready to adjust when unexpected things happen.

To learn to cope.

The library where I work had a pipe burst in the ceiling. 📚

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 14:37:53 -0400

A little over a week ago, as I was getting into the car with my kid to drive to his school, where I work as the Lower School librarian (serving grades 1-4), I got a text from the head teacher. (Sort of like a principal.)

Good morning, I’m sorry to be reaching out with bad news, but I’ve just learned that a pipe burst in the lower school library. I’m on my way to school and will assess myself and text you back with updates. I just wanted you to have a heads up so you weren’t surprised when you got to school.

I thought, “Well that won’t be good but I don’t have many materials stored near where most pipes are.”

We arrived at school. I got M settled in his classroom and then the head teacher showed me the library.

The burst pipe had been in the ceiling in the center of the space. The water from it had destroyed the roof in the center of the library and the library bathroom. Couches had been directly under the collapsed ceiling. When I got there, there was an inch or two of water on the floor. The head of our facilities team said when he had arrived, it had been much more, a flood gushing out of the library door when he opened it.

Well, I thought, at least it was in the part of the library with the fewest books.

That was last Wednesday.

We were out for weather on Thursday.

On Friday, a day I don’t normally work, our administrative assistant called and asked if I could come in. The insurance adjuster was coming and the facilities head was asking if I would be available to assess the damage.

I headed in. We met the insurance adjuster, who was just finishing up and told me they’d need an inventory of damaged materials and their cost. In this moment, I had no idea how much damage there had been, but I guessed not too much.

The head teacher and I met with our head of finance and head of facilities. We talked about what documentation we needed, what the insurance process would look like, what kind of repairs the library would need, and now that a remediation team had come in, facilities head was able to tell us which parts of the library had a lot of water damage.

Facilities head estimated we wouldn’t be back in before spring break, but we might be able to get the construction work done by then and be using the space again when we returned from spring break.

Head teacher and I sat down with the information they gave us, spreadsheets from a collection audit and analysis I did using data from December 2024, and a list of purchases I’d made for the library since December 2024.

Based on where the facilities head told us the most damage was, we determined that about half the collection would potentially need to be replaced.

That’s about 3,000 books.

Remediation/dehydration of the space is ongoing. I still need to assess furniture and classroom supply damage and make a plan for assessing damage to books. Once we know what needs to be replaced and have the money from insurance, I’ll need to order the replacements.

Our book vendor does a lot of the processing including cataloging, putting barcodes on, and putting spine labels on. But on-site we do some other processing, like adding genre labels and stamping the book with the school’s name and address. So that will have to be done.

We’ll need to order new furniture. Once the furniture is in place and the books have arrived, we’ll have to get everything up on the shelves.

I won’t have to do all this alone, but it’s daunting. I’m overwhelmed and stressed out. I’m emotionally devastated and feel like between last week and the next couple weeks I will have spoken individually to each of 120+ children about how things are looking in there and what we know about the timeline for re-opening (not much).

Overnight, my job responsibilities have changed. I thought I would be spending the next several months supporting instruction with materials and providing research instruction, helping kids figure out what to read next, and leading students through the process of voting in the North Carolina Children’s Book Awards.

Instead, there’s a lot of recovery work to do.

At the moment, I need to wait for the remediation and construction team to finish drying out the library, so I’m turning my attention to what library programming looks like when you don’t have access to the physical space or materials.

This has all been a lot.

📚 Book Review: Love in 280 Characters or Less by Ravynn K. Stringfield

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 12:20:44 -0400

Full Disclosure: I am online friends with the author of this book. We met when she taught a workshop I took on creative nonfiction writing for academics.

Here’s the publisher’s description:

Sydney Ciara Warren is excited as she starts her first year of college, but also nervous. Despite her interests in writing and fashion, she has no idea what path will ultimately be right for her. As she tries to figure out her place on campus and in the world, she finds solace in blogging about her life, putting together outfits with meaning, *and spending time online.

It’s within the digital space that she connects with someone who goes by YoungPrinceX. She may not know “X” in real life, but that doesn’t stop her from developing a crush on him. Except she’s also navigating her first romantic relationship, with a sweet boy on campus named Xavier (who maybe could be X???).

Can Sydney Ciara not only make it through her first semester, but thrive in real life, as much as she seems to be thriving online?*

It’s an oft-repeated piece of writing advice that you should write the book that only you can write, and with Love in 280 Characters or Less, Dr. Ravynn K. Stringfield has done exactly that. This is an epistolary novel for the digital age, made up of blog posts, tweets, text exchanges, and emails. Our main character, Sydney Ciara Warren, is a freshman at Coastal Virginia University, a fictionalized public university near Virginia Beach. Syd has been writing online for an age and is keenly aware of how digitally mediated her experiences and relationships are.

Dr. Stringfield herself blogged her way through grad school and lived for years on Twitter (that’s where most of our getting to know each other happened). Her scholarship is deeply entwined with Black girlhood, girl culture in media, fantasy, and comics. All of that comes through in Sydney Ciara’s experiences in a way that makes Syd’s understanding of her writing, both public and private, and her navigation of relationships richly textured. There are authors who would write something like this and it would feel hollow, like a person who never wrote a blog post or tweet trying to do what they think would appeal to readers who had a digital adolescence. Dr. Stringfield instead has given us an incredibly rich portrait of a young woman navigating life and love in the digital age. While the specifics of the technology Syd uses are linked to a particular moment in time, this tightrope walk of IRL-or-not is something all of us, but especially people coming of age, will be living for the foreseeable future.

Like Dr. Stringfield’s debut, Love Requires Chocolate, this is marketed as a romance but is more about one young woman’s transition to adulthood than it is about one particular romantic relationship. Most of the book involves Syd connecting with people on campus including a girl with incredible style and perfect baby hairs, a boy with a killer smile and ambitions of being a diplomat, and a PhD candidate teaching assistant who acts as a mentor and supports Syd through some of her most difficult moments. Through all of this relationship-building, she writes about her life, texts her best friend who is at a college a three-hour drive away, and navigates her mom’s ambitions for her to be pre-law when she’s not sure that’s what she wants at all.

Syd is thrust into the online spotlight when she writes about an incident where her best friend’s roommate is followed home from a party and arrested for breaking and entering when he accidentally uses the wrong card to try to swipe into the dorm. In sharing the information she heard from witnesses and the young man’s fellow students, she receives messages of gratitude and solidarity from other Black college students and messages of hate from people who refuse to believe that the young man could possibly be anything other than a criminal.

Syd has to ask herself, is she an activist writer? Is it possible to divorce the political from her writing? In the face of the realities she and her fellow Black college students experience, can she write only about fashion without bringing politics into it? All of this figuring herself out is entangled with her relationships with her best friend Malcolm, her boyfriend Xavier, her sister Janaya, her friend Angie, and her mentor Zion.

I love this book. I’d recommend it to anybody who enjoys coming-of-age stories and especially anybody who is interested in how our online and offline identities intersect. The publisher says it’s perfect for fans of The Neighbor Favor by Kristina Forest and I think that’s a good comp. I could see Sydney growing up into someone like Lily, the main character in that book, and they both tackle that online-IRL spectrum of experience.

Book: Love in 280 Characters or Less
Author: Ravynn K. Stringfield
Publisher: Macmillan
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Pages: 320
Age Range: Young Adult
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley, Public library

📚 Quick Book Review: Call the Bee Doctor! How Science Is Saving Honey Bees by Sandra Markle

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 18:53:44 -0400

One of the units the first and second grade classes teach at our school is about pollinators, so last year I started keeping an eye out for books to support this unit. Call the Bee Doctor. How Science Is Saving Honey Bees caught my eye and I requested a review copy on NetGalley.

This is a short non-fiction book appropriate for middle grade readers. At school, I would recommend this as something for teachers to read aloud to students over multiple sittings in first or second grade.

Sandra Markle wrote The Case of the Vanishing Honeybees, published in 2013. After the book’s publication, she learned about the efforts of some scientists to help honeybee populations recover. She researched a variety of approaches apiologists were taking and shares what she learned in this book.

Markle discusses multiple reasons for the depletion of bee populations: pesticides, poor nutrition, parasites, and pathogens. She then explains approaches to managing these causes including vaccinated queen bees, providing food supplements to improve nutrition, and genetic modification. She concludes by discussing the impact of climate change on honeybees and providing recommendations for actions readers can take for helping honeybees.

Vibrant photos and clear diagrams illustrate the book. Markle provides a glossary, a list of her research sources, and books and websites readers can explore to learn more.

I would recommend this book as a purchase for elementary and middle school libraries as well as public libraries.

Book: Call the Bee Doctor! How Science Is Saving Honey Bees Author: Sandra Markle Publisher: Millbrook Press Publication Date: October 1, 2024 Pages: 48 Age Range: Middle Grade Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley, Public library

Year in books for 2025

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 18:17:13 -0400

Here are the books I finished reading in 2025.

📚 Looking Back on My 2025 Reading Year and Ahead to 2026

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 09:48:19 -0400

Hello, friends! It’s time to talk about my favorite thing to talk about: books! There are some glitchy issues with the way Micro.blog is tracking which books I read which year, so the numbers on my list are probably inflated, but I definitely read over 100 books this year. Fewer than 10 of those were children’s books. 86 were romance or romance-adjacent (like Sarah MacLean’s These Summer Storms). I track my romance reading at Pagebound as well as at Micro.blog.

2025 Reading Goals

My main reading goal for the year was to always be reading one more book than I’ve already read. I love this target because it’s achievable right up until December 31st. At some point I decide that’s it, I’ve met the goal and I’m not increasing it by one. I’m currently reading Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s Match Me If You Can and I’ll probably call the reading year done after that.

I had some stretch goals for the year, too. Let’s see how I did!

Read one nonfiction book a month.

I read six or seven adult nonfiction books this year, so I missed this target. But I have a couple nonfiction books on the go. I did shift my habits so my default while taking my meds and eating breakfast is to read nonfiction. The books I’m in the middle of are Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal by Mark Bittman and The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. I look forward to continuing reading these in the new year.

Stop requesting books from NetGalley that I don’t know anything about except what is on NetGalley.

I did this one!

Stop requesting books from NetGalley based on marketing emails they send me.

I did this one, too!

And as a bonus, I even have reviewed some of my older NetGalley requests. I’m trying to improve my feedback ratio and the easiest way to do that is to give feedback on books I’ve requested in the past.

Keep up with new releases from authors I love.

I’m going to say I did this. Here are some new releases from authors I love that I read this year:

All of Us Murderers by KJ Charles
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One by Kristen Arnett
A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke by Adriana Herrera
These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean
A Curse Carved in Bone by Danielle L. Jensen
After Hours at Dooryard Books by Cat Sebastian

Any time I’m in a city with a romance-only bookstore, visit it.

CloseI I visited Peach Basket Books, which opened up in my city, and Friends to Lovers in Alexandria, Virginia. I didn’t make it to Bright Side Books and Wine, which is in a city near mine.

Looking Ahead to 2026

So, what do I want my reading to look like in 2026? I’m not even calling these goals. They’re just things I’m thinking about.

More memoirs and diaries
More children’s books
More of my old NetGalley requests

How has your reading year been?

📚 Quick Book Review: Golemcrafters by Emi Watanabe Cohen

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 14:15:10 -0400

Faye and her brother Shiloh are half-Japanese and half-Jewish. At their school in Boston, other kids bully them. Over their spring break, their estranged grandfather visits, determines that it’s time to teach them how to build golems, and invites them back to his apartment in New York for training.

While there, Faye and Shiloh start having shared dreams where they are living the lives of other people with the same Hebrew names as them. Faye has the makings of a powerful golemcrafter, but she’s afraid of her power.

Emi Watanabe Cohen has meticulously researched the history of the Jewish diaspora and incorporated the history of Japanese people and Japanese Americans along with that history. Cohen provides an extensive bibliography.

This book is hard to read because it so clearly reflects the struggles Jewish people have faced and continue to face and explicitly connects the antisemitism of the past with the antisemitism of the present. Cohen presents this challenging story beautifully.

Structurally, the story wasn’t quite what I expected. I expected something with a sort of classic fantasy structure, but instead there is a lot of time spent in the dreams and a conclusion that felt to me like it should really be the beginning of the next part of the story rather than the end of the whole thing.

Readers looking for an exploration of Jewish history and why it’s important for Jewish people to hold onto who they are will find that here, from the perspective of modern kids.

I myself am three generations out from the Jewish people in my family who assimilated and intermarried so successfully that nobody was really around to pass on Jewish culture directly in our family. I’ve had to seek it out through other sources. As assimilated as my family has been, I still felt a deep connection to the story of these two kids and their ancestors.

Recommended for kids with interest in Jewish heritage and the commonalities between Jewish people and other oppressed peoples throughout history.

Book: Golemcrafters
Author: Emi Watanabe Cohen
Publisher: Levine Querido
Publication Date: November 12, 2024
Pages: 264
Age Range: Middle Grade
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley, Public library

📚 Thank goodness someone is thinking of the men (novelists). 🙄

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:36:22 -0400

The Guardian seems grateful that this year’s Booker winner puts masculinity back at the center of literary fiction, claiming that for a decade women have dominated litfic.

Novelist Caro Claire Burke looked at the numbers: men have ⁷won 60 - 80% of major book awards in the past decade. Seems like “female interiority” is sharing the stage.

Let’s imagine for a minute that litfic was dominated by women for a decade, contrary to fact.

Literary fiction as a term seems to have been popularized around 1980. That’s 35 years before women dominated. Take it back to modernists in the 1920s. Men dominated for 90 years, then. Or go back to the beginning of printing: 500+ years.

Even if women were winning 70 - 80% of literary prizes (and we aren’t), there’s a long way to go before anyone needs to worry that men are being pushed to the margins of literature.

Whoops I forgot what it means to be an educator in August. #Blaugust

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 08:42:44 -0400

I had grand dreams for Blaugust. I was going to not only write blog posts, but also read blog posts. I set up Feedly again! And the month isn’t over, so I may yet do some stuff.

But I need to recognize that as an educator working on a traditional schedule in the US, August is a month where anything that’s not for work is going to lose priority. And I only feel like doing fun things that don’t require my creativity.

So. I will only prioritize writing my own posts and they will happen when they happen.

This is a Blaugust intro post!

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 10:42:23 -0400

Hello friends. I’ve signed up for Blaugust. As you might guess from the name, it’s a challenge that takes place in August, where you blog. The original challenge was to blog every day in August. Challenges that require daily activity don’t work with my life, so I’ve set the bar quite low. According to Krikket, who is one of the people leading the charge on Blaugust this year, you get a Bronze award if you post 5 times in the month of August. So that’s my goal. 5 times, which I’m mapping to about one post a week, with an extra post squeezed in there somewhere. According to the official Blaugust blogroll, I am not a first-time participant this year. Hmm. Let me do a quick search of my blog… I can’t find anything, but who can say? Who can remember what I’ve blogged? It’s been a long time blogging. Belghast, the founder of Blaugust, wrote an intro post as his first post for Blaugust so I thought I would do likewise. Maybe lots of new people are stopping by? So hello! Welcome! I’m Kimberly. I have also sometimes been known on the Internet as Kiba Rika or Kiba. I’ve had lots of various other handles over the years, but those are the main two ways people know me. I am not Kim. Please don’t call me Kim because I will think you are talking to someone else. I’m not sure why it bothers me to be called Kim, it just does. Like Belghast, I was born in that Xennial Oregon Trail generation sweet spot. We had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood. Or at least, I did. Really a digital adolescence for me, but my dad is an early adopter so I’m a bit unlike my age-group peers. Also like Belghast, I started this blog in/around 2009. Archives older than that are imported from elsewhere, because I have had more blogs than I can remember. For a while I had topical ones. My first blog was a personal blog, hand-coded in HTML and CSS, hosted on some old free webhost like envy.nu or something. I had a Xanga dedicated to movie and other reviews and one for my poetry. I had a LiveJournal. (Technically still do.) I’ve had blogs about crochet, theater, video games, and I don’t know what all else. But eventually I decided to just put all the things here. I’ve been extremely online for at least a quarter-century, which is why I identify as an escribitionist. This blog has had shifts in focus as my life has, so its archives reflect that. I’ve spent A LOT of time in school, so often it will be about that, especially getting my MS and PhD in Library Science. I also have been book blogging since 2007, so you’ll find a lot of book reviews in the archives, for books released as recently as this spring, and even a few interviews with authors if you go back far enough. I’m an elementary school librarian and my students are big fans of the graphic novel Amulet. It’s really fun to be able to tell them that I interviewed Kazu Kibuishi when Amulet was first published. I blog a lot about dealing with chronic illness, too. I’ve got a pile of diagnoses and they make me variably disabled, so sometimes I have a lot of energy and almost no pain, but other times I am in very bad pain and it’s a lot of work just to get out of bed. I write about how that feels and dealing with doctors. For work, as I mentioned, I am an elementary school librarian. I work with the first through fourth graders at an independent, secular Quaker school. I don’t write about that a lot lately, but I’m not sure why. Maybe because I’m just too tired? It’s a half-time job but it eats up full-time energy. In the spring I told my supervisor that my long-term goal/wish is to actually use the other half of what would be a normal person’s week for something other than recovering from the energy expenditure at work. I’m going into my second year in this job, which I love. I do help kids choose what books to read and help them find more books like books they’ve already loved, but I also collaborate with teachers to provide them rich resources to support student learning. One of my hopes is to do more instruction moving forward, maybe embed some research instruction into the work the teachers are doing so students see the skills in context rather than isolated. Last year I pulled together resources for fourth grade classes on several different forms of government, including finding examples of each form, and I learned a ton that way. Being a librarian is a great gig if you love to learn, because anytime you help someone else you’re learning something yourself, too. In addition to this job, I’ve also been a middle school librarian, academic researcher, university outreach public communications specialist/managing editor, and Latin teacher. In my time when I don’t work, I love to read and play both video and tabletop games. I’ve been a theater person and an improv comedy cult member (only kind of joking, read Bossypants) but haven’t done either of those in almost 10 years. I live with my almost-9-year-old son M, who attends the school where I work (and did even before I got the job there), and his dad/my spouse, W. W and I met doing theater when we were very young (I was in high school and he was in college) and have been together ever since. If you find someone awesome that young, you’re super lucky, and I am. The three of us have a cat named Midnight, who is a smol boy (under 6 lbs full-grown, the vet’s not worried about it) and very fluffy. We live in an area with multiple universities and a thriving local food scene, where farms that were once focused on producing tobacco now grow incredibly delicious produce. We live near our parents and siblings. Big sister/eldest daughter is my longest-standing identity and I’m not gonna lie, it’s exhausting. But I do love my people. So that’s me. What else would you like to know?

Swatching my little fabric stash

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 11:43:19 -0400

In her Intro to Fabrics lesson, Brooks Ann links to an article she wrote for Threads Magazine called How and Why to Swatch Fabrics. She includes swatch cards in this article, so I printed some up and went to work swatching my little fabric stash.

None of these are fabrics I’ll be using during the class, but it’s good to have a complete catalog and to get some practice ahead of the swatches I’ll be looking at for the class.

First up, a couple of quilting fabrics I used for my first sewing projects with my new machine (I think I got it in 2020):

The these are both woven cotton, one with a blue moth print and one with a seafoam green background with white manatees on it. I used the first to make napkins and the second to make a pillow.

The next two fabrics I bought for making pillows, too, but so far I’ve only made one. These are also quilting cottons. One is a black background with Pokémon in white circles, which I used for the pillow I posted about earlier. The other has dragons and white stars on a navy background. I’m planning to make a pillow for my sister with this one.

The last couple of swatches are a celestial Jack Skellington quilting cotton I’m planning to use to make my sister a pillow and an interlock knit tarot card print I’m planning to use to make myself a maxi skirt based on the Brit + Co Sewing 101 class instructions.

📚 Book Review: Once Upon You & Me by Timothy Janovsky

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 10:37:37 -0400

Once Upon You and Me by Timothy Janovsky is a contemporary romance. On the closed door/open door/in the room/in the bed heat scale, this book puts you in the bed with the main characters. Here’s the publisher’s description of the book:

When Taylor Frost’s boss, Amy, flies him across the country to prep for her daughter’s sweet sixteen at the Storybook Endings Resort in the Catskills, the solo mission is well within his wheelhouse. Taylor is excellent at his job—except, he’s probably not supposed to flirt with the resort’s mountain man of a manager, Ethan Golding. Because the rugged older man is also the birthday girl’s father, aka Amy’s ex-husband. Oops.

For Ethan, his divorce seemed like the bad ending to his romantic story. And now, making his daughter’s sweet sixteen dreams come true is the closest he’ll get to the kind of magic happiness in fairy tales. Until adorable Taylor has him wondering if maybe this is just the beginning of a more erotic kind of bedtime story…

The only problem is Amy. And how very not okay she’d be with the chemistry between her assistant and her ex.

If only forbidden flings ever led to happily-ever-afters…

What I loved

I always love Timothy Janovsky’s characters, and Taylor and Ethan are two more delightful guys I loved watching fall in love. Ethan has ADHD that’s only recently been diagnosed. He’s spent a lot of his life feeling like his challenges with executive function are moral failings, and especially like his ex-wife Amy saw them that way. He’s a dad who lives on the opposite coast from his daughter, which breaks his heart a little all the time. He’s bi which sets him up for frustrations when he tries to date, as the men he meets are always surprised by this and often aren’t comfortable dating someone who is also attracted to women. He is deeply lonely.

Taylor is the second oldest kid in a family with many siblings. His older brother took off young and his parents are inattentive and flakey, which leaves him as the primary caretaker for all his sibs. He’s very good at taking care of people. He’s been working as Amy’s assistant for three years, waiting for a promotion, and quietly making sure she has everything she needs to keep her business running smoothly. But it seems like no one ever takes care of him.

In my favorite romances, the people in the relationship each are able to be exactly what the other person needs. Taylor is able to meet Ethan’s ways of coping with ADHD with compassion. Ethan shows Taylor that he deserves to be cared for as much as he cares for others. I love how these two are like puzzle pieces specifically carved to fit together.

I also love the way fairy tales suffuse the story. The resort where it’s set is inspired by fairy tales. Taylor and Ethan read fairy tales together. Taylor starts out their time together staying in the Snow White Cottage. I’m sure Timothy Janovsky chose this fairy tale to highlight her specifically. I’m choosing to imagine it’s because he is a Disney fan and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first Disney fairy tale feature adaptation.

What I wanted more of

There’s nothing Timothy Janovsky left out. I would just be happy to spend more time with these guys.

What I need to warn you about.

Timothy Janovsky includes warnings at the beginning of the book, so check those out. There is biphobia and some judgmental responses to Ethan’s ADHD. There’s also discussion of Ethan’s father living with MS that has progressed so far as to limit his mobility.

Who should read this book

People looking for a low-conflict, high heat contemporary where two charming men connect and complete each other’s lives.

Book: Once Upon You and Me Author: Timothy Janovsky Publisher: Afterglow Books by Harlequin Publication Date: April 29, 2025 Pages: 288 Age Range: Adult Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley, Library

📚 Book Review: A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke by Adriana Herrera

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 12:21:21 -0400

A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke by Adriana Herrera is a historical romance set mostly in Paris during the 1889 Exposition Universelle, about a Dominican-Mexican doctor and the duke who falls for her. On the closed door/open door/in the room/in the bed heat scale, this book puts you in the bed with the main characters. Here’s the publisher’s description of the book:

Physician Aurora Montalban Wright takes risks in her career, but never with her heart. Running an underground women’s clinic exposes her to certain dangers, but help arrives in the unexpected form of the infuriating Duke of Annan. Aurora begrudgingly accepts his protection, then promptly finds herself in his bed. New to his role as a duke, Apollo César Sinclair Robles struggles to embrace his position. With half of society waiting for him to misstep and the other half looking to discredit him, Apollo never imagined that his enthralling bedmate would become his most trusted adviser. Soon, he realizes the rebellious doctor could be the perfect duchess. But Aurora won’t give up her independence, and her secrets make her unsuitable for the aristocracy. When a dangerous figure from their past returns to threaten them, Apollo whisks Aurora away to his villa in the French Riviera. Far from the reproachful eye of Parisian society, can Apollo convince Aurora that their bond is stronger than the forces keeping them apart?

What I loved

This is the third book in Adriana Herrera’s Las Léonas trilogy, and I have loved every book in the series. Herrera gives us three best friends, each having her own adventure. By the time it’s Aurora’s turn to be the heroine, her friends Luz Alana and Manuela have found their own partners and the circle of the three friends has expanded to include Luz Alana’s husband, Evan, and Manuela’s partner, Cora. Evan and Cora often serve as a Greek chorus for the hero, Apollo, and it’s delightful.

Apollo himself is an incredibly dreamy hero. Aurora has been running herself ragged tending to patients both night and day. She has neglected her own needs. Apollo notices her taking care of others and not taking care of herself, and takes it upon himself to take care of her.

Aurora is a fierce doctor, the first woman licensed to practice medicine in Mexico, collaborating with colleagues in Paris to establish a network of women’s clinics. She dedicates herself to her work. Her growing attraction to Apollo gets her out of her head and into her body.

Adriana Herrera always gives us a delightful cast of supporting characters and here she gives us Brazilian boxing club owner Gilberto and his Vietnamese partner Minh, whose mother farms lavender in the French countryside. Apollo’s body man, Jean-Louis, is a giant who Apollo appoints to escort Aurora on dangerous night patient visits but whom Aurora quickly wins over to doing what she asks more than what Apollo does.

I feel like I’m not doing the book justice here.

Adriana Herrera writes love scenes that tie the emotional and physical relationships of the main characters to each other in a way that both titillates and tugs at heartstrings. The more Aurora and Apollo get to know each other, the more each of them impresses the other with their commitment to helping the people they serve: patients in Aurora’s case, and tenants in the duchy in Apollo’s case.

Romance readers love a broken character, and I especially love the way Aurora is broken, the way she is constantly fighting to prove her worth while also caring deeply for her patients.

What I wanted more of

I found myself lingering over this text rather than devouring it, I think because I didn’t want Las Léonas to end. There’s nothing I wish Adriana Herrera would have included in this book that she didn’t. I just hope she keeps writing historicals.

What I need to warn you about.

The clinics where Aurora works offer services that were perfectly legal in Paris in 1889, but also those that were not, especially contraceptive services and abortions. Abortions and abortion aftercare are discussed in the book. Herrera has a note about this at the beginning of the book, so definitely look at an ebook preview or the first few pages of a physical copy to read that. Aurora is put in physical danger and there is reference to poor treatment at the hands of a peer in her past as well as reference to the same peer continuing this behavior in the book’s present.

Who should read this book

Lovers of historical romance. People who want a historical romance that isn’t set in England or during the Regency. Readers who want to see fierce Afro-Latina women defying the limitations society tries to put on them and finding love. Readers who love found family.

Book: A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke Author: Adriana Herrera Publisher: Canary Street Press Publication Date: February 4, 2025 Pages: 432 Age Range: Adult Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley, Purchase

There is no room of one's own. So what do we do?

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 08:51:39 -0400

Everybody writes about being the mother of a baby. But what about being the mother of a big kid? You are this new version of yourself, integrated with the old, out of the early fog, free of the strange combination of portentousness and tedium. But you are still postpartum, you are eternally postpartum. You matresced, you are no longer becoming a mother but you are a mother. What is unique at this stage? Are you still annihilated? Is your life still kintsugi? Do you live in fragments? I think yes, but the fragments are bigger now. You have more time for yourself but you remain available, vulnerable, to interruption at any moment. You still steal your moments for self from sleep. The quiet of the sleeping house is still a precious time.

Crucial Track for June 3, 2025

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 06:35:49 -0400

"The Book of Love" by The Magnetic Fields

Listen on Apple Music

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What song would you use to describe your current relationship?

The first song that came to mind was Riki Lindhome's "Middle Age Love," because we've been together for almost 27 years and still find each other super attractive. But I wanted a less explicit choice so I picked "The Book of Love." It's long and boring, like our relationship might look to people outside of it, but I love so much of what my husband does.

View Kimberly Hirsh's Crucial Tracks profile

Crucial Track for June 4, 2025

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 06:23:53 -0400

"I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" by The Proclaimers

Listen on Apple Music

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Describe the perfect song for a road trip and why it works.

This song starts every road trip our family takes, as an homage to its use in How I Met Your Mother. The driving beat is perfect for that early road trip energy.

View Kimberly Hirsh's Crucial Tracks profile

Sat, 03 May 2025 09:09:46 -0400

Please enjoy this extremely Kimberly blackout poem by Austin Kleon.

On the value of the backlist and its relationship to "scenius"

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 09:37:04 -0400

I had two newsletters in my inbox today that talked about the value of diving into an author’s complete works or backlist, A Love Letter to the Single Author Course by Ravynn K. Stringfield and Your next best friend by Austin Kleon.

Stringfield says,

To follow an author across the trajectory of their life, see how their styles and ideals changed over time, watch them venture into different forms and genres, was captivating. It was like the most immersive psychology class you could imagine. Under the guidance of the right professor and with appropriate supplementary materials—not just secondary sources, but writing by others that perhaps the author in question may have been inspired by or inspired with their own work—important cultural moments could be rendered in sharp relief. Literary disputes made as lively as any reality TV beef. Portraits of artistic communities shone. So much could be gleaned from taking an intentional walk through just one person’s corpus.

Kleon says,

We spend a lot of our lives as readers on the search for new books. But how many great books are already waiting for us on our shelves? How many favorite authors would we form deep relationships with if we simply read or re-read a few more of their books?

In the Discord community for the Fated Mates podcast, I’ve seen several of us do this with a particular author. Especially rewarding for me has been reading Sarah MacLean’s adult (as opposed to young adult) novels, watching her grow from writing the Regency ballrooms that populate so much of historical romance into creating a Victorian-era girl gang dealing out justice to people who are extra misogynistic as a backlist to Queen Victoria’s ascension to the throne. I love tracking features MacLean returns to and evolves. For example, her books usually include a high-emotion scene tied to some incredible location—an underwater ballroom, a bench where if you whisper on one end another person sitting on the other hand can hear you perfectly as if you were right next to them. But then she evolves this, so in a book where characters are on the road for much of the book, she deploys a gorgeous puzzle box in exactly the same way she deploys these magical locations and it’s a joy to behold.

I think it would be fascinating to take a romance author’s work—Stringfield suggests that Beverly Jenkins is ripe for this treatment—and dig into not just the texts themselves, but the texts the author might have been reading, the world events happening while they were writing.

I listened to the Fifty Shades of Grey episode of Fated Mates yesterday and in that, Sarah MacLean talks about how romance writers are all reading each other’s works and having a conversation in their books. Her casino series, The Rules of Scoundrels, was a response to J. R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood. I suspect MacLean’s series influenced Joanna Shupe’s casino book, The Prince of Broadway.

This makes me think of the concept of scenius, which Brian Eno coined but I learned of through Kleon’s work. What can we learn about the creative network present in an author’s life by doing a single author study either individually or as part of a group or class?

What authors’ backlists have you explored? Whose would you like to?

Fight for libraries and our right to read

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 14:02:21 -0400

This week is National Library Week in the US and today is Right to Read Day. @cygnoir@social.lol wrote a great post about how you can show up for libraries. United Against Book Bans has a page on actions to take for Right to Read Day.

Here in North Carolina, I’m tracking House Bill 595, the latest parental rights bill filed. As soon as it’s moved far enough to go to a vote, I’ll be contacting my state legislators and urging then to vote NO on it.

Here are some of its chilling library-related provisions:

placing responsibility for the selection of materials in the hands of superintendents and boards, instead of in the hands of library professionals with training and professional expertise in selecting materials
requiring that all library books selected are “integral to the instructional program,” which will likely limit the purchasing of materials for students’ free choice of reading
the creation of a “content access designation” (read: rating) system, flattening complex evaluation of books for a given community’s needs
requiring that all materials selected be available for a 30 day review period by parents, which will place an immense administrative burden on library staff (I have a relatively small library budget and I order about 100 books at a time)
the use of a broadly defined designation of “harmful to minors” as a test of whether materials should be included in a collection, which is likely to target books about growth, development, and anatomy as well as disproportionately target books with LGBTQ+ topics
the establishment of standing “community library advisory committees” with as-yet-undefined requirements for membership, as opposed to ad hoc committees carefully curated to evaluate each materials challenge
the requirement that every book made available in a book fair be reviewed by “appropriate school personnel,” which will generate a large administrative burden for library staff and, I anticipate, result in the reduction of book fairs and the resulting budget they provide for libraries without any alternate method of funding provided
the criminalization of library staff who provide items deemed harmful to minors
the ability for parents to demand access to a record of their child’s library borrowing
the creation of restricted sections in public libraries, effectively requiring library staff to spend time reclassifying every work in a collection
the creation of a special category of library cards for minors (another immense administrative burden)
the revocation of library cards obtained by minors without their parents’ permission

Taken together, these provisions are likely to lead to librarian’s self-censorship in purchasing, administrative burdens grinding library services to a halt, library staff leaving the profession, school libraries losing funds, and most importantly, kids not having the materials they need to learn and grow as readers and people.

If you live in NC, please keep an eye on this bill and get ready to contact your state legislators about it. If you live elsewhere in the US, check EveryLibrary’s Legislation of Concern tracker to see what’s going on in your area.

Please join me in fighting for libraries. These are existential threats for libraries and library staff.

From more to enough: My word(s) for 2025

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 15:40:49 -0400

In November or December, I choose a word for the next year. Then for the first quarter of the new year, I try it out and see if it actually fits. If it doesn’t, I pick a new word to coincide with the spring equinox, the start of the western astrological year.

At the end of 2024, frustrated by the fact that all I did was work, sleep, read, and play video games, I chose the word “More” for 2025. I wanted to do more, connect more, pursue more.

But that’s not the word I’m finding myself living.

My new word for 2025 is “Enough.” Enough is the spirit of harm reduction. It’s enough to feed myself, even if what I feed myself is not what I have in the moments of my richest nutritional profile. It’s enough to do my job and keep myself and my child going.

Two books are really helping me feel into enough, even though I haven’t finished either of them yet:

How to Keep House While Drowning by K. C. Davis
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

And in the spirit of enough, I’ve decided this blog post is long enough.

A big pile of meh

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 09:52:01 -0400

I haven’t been writing much lately, something that has special irony since on Sunday I took Sarah MacLean’s Start Your Romance Novel Today class. (Reader, I did not start my romance novel that day. Or rather, I started playing with several ideas for romance novels. But did not get any words down.)

I haven’t been writing for REASONS and reasons, but I think it would be good for me to blog a bit.

It’s just a hard time right now, you know? I subscribed to too many newsletters with action alerts. I think I need to scale back to just Bull City Indivisible. It’s just that they recommended all these other ones. But now I get overwhelmed and don’t read any of them, and that’s no way to be active in my community.

I hadn’t really thought of migraines as a condition where I have flares, but I’m beginning to, because I get these status migraines that go on and on. I’m seeking better treatment for them than I ever have before, and that’s promising, but still not enough.

I’m going to go put away laundry soon. That’s a thing I can do that will make my and my family’s world a little better.

I’m a big pile of meh today.

When to call me Dr.

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 08:24:17 -0400

In her week notes, cygnoir links to my post, Political action guidance for the overwhelmed, and credits me as Dr. Kimberly Hirsh.

I appreciate the recognition of my title. I want to say though that I wouldn’t be grouchy to have been credited as Kimberly Hirsh.

I work at a Quaker school. All of us go by our first names, in keeping with the Quaker practice of plain speech and the testimony of equality. This does not make me grouchy.

When I get grouchy is when people insist on using a title and then call me Miss, Mrs., or Ms. Because I have a title and those aren’t it. If I haven’t told you my title is Dr., then I don’t mind you not using it. But if I have and you ignore it, that makes me grouchy.

So. If you want to avoid making me grouchy, here are ways I would like you to refer to me:

Kimberly
Kimberly Hirsh
Dr. Kimberly Hirsh
Dr. Hirsh

Any of those are fine. Feel like calling a person Dr. is elitist? Okay! Use my first name or full name.

(There is a whole deal I’m not even getting into here about untitling, mistitling, gender, race, and ethnicity. Explore it if you’re interested.)

Political action guidance for the overwhelmed

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 11:21:17 -0400

Information is my love language and how I like to learn about the world, but I also can start to drown in too much of it and need to scale back. So if you are like me, especially right now when there is A Lot Going On, you might like to do what I’m doing.

For calls to action, I have picked one main issue to focus on (library advocacy) and follow a few organizations dedicated to that work (Every Library, For the People, ALA). For broader concerns, I am reading my local Indivisible group’s newsletter.

I am focused on taking one action daily, ideally one that doesn’t activate my nervous system extra. So today I emailed my senators and told them to vote NO on Vought’s confirmation. (Please don’t at me about the effectiveness of email vs. phone. Or how I should really show up in person. Please trust me to know my own availability and capability.) I also emailed my representative and asked her to demand accountability re: an unelected private person’s access to the treasury.

I am also trying to remember to do other things that keep me grounded, like crocheting and reading romance. I’m trying to find joy where I can.

I hope this has been helpful for you.

Coding Project: Mystery Shack Survey Form

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 09:50:50 -0400

Today’s Progress: Completed the freeCodeCamp certification project, “Learn CSS Colors by Building a Set of Colored Markers.”

Thoughts: This was fun to do and after doing some reading, I’ve realized that for my purposes, I don’t actually need to know how to draw with CSS unless I decide to try and make some wacky layouts with shapes or something. In which case, I’ll review. But in the meantime, CSS is for styling HTML that structures content, just as I feel it should be. This project is not hard but I definitely had to use references sometimes. Which is fine! But slows things down a bit. For this project, the use of a checkbox gave me the idea to make this a Mystery Shack feedback form so I could use Mabel’s rigged “Do you like me?” form.

Link(s) to work: Mystery Shack Feedback survey

What does my body need right now?

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 09:34:22 -0400

In Austin Kleon’s newsletter today, he writes about 7 questions he asks himself when he doesn’t know what to do next. (The newsletter has free editions on Fridays and paid ones on Tuesdays.)

At the end of the newsletter he asked his subscribers, “Do you have a question that helps you?”

My response got so big and I liked it so much, I decided to turn it into a blog post, so here you go!

I feel like I have stolen this like an artist in the best way, in that I’ve taken from multiple sources that get at this idea and combined them into something new:

“What does my body need right now?”

I manage multiple chronic illnesses, and the answer to that question can change from moment to moment. I often feel like a brain floating around in a meat cage. So I drop in to my body and see what it needs: water? A nap? A shower? A hug? Stillness? Motion?

Because I can’t do everything I need or want to do, I have to prioritize, and asking this question helps me choose what to do first, what to expend my energy on in a way that gives me hope of sustaining or even increasing my energy for the rest of the day.

Tell Congress to Show Up for Libraries

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 15:52:52 -0400

In the coming days, I’ll be sharing resources for defending libraries in the United States. Today, I wanted to share the American Library Association’s form to tell Congress to show up for libraries.

According to ALA, personalizing messages increases the likelihood that congress members will respond to and act on them. Sometimes, I don’t have the brain power to do a good job of this, so I thought I’d share what I did today.

First, in the first paragraph I made sure to refer to myself as a supporter of the Durham County Library, rather than just saying “my local library.”

Then, I added a paragraph about specific library programs DCL offers that I think will resonate with my congresspeople. I focused on business and Maker/STEAM services.

In the last paragraph, I change “libraries” to “libraries in general and the Durham County Library specifically.”

I hope this is helpful. Maybe the institution you’re going to defend is something other than libraries. If so, see if organizations related to it have similar ways to help you take action.

Take care and stay safe, y’all.

📚 Reading notes on ON TYRANNY: TWENTY LESSONS FROM THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Timothy Snyder

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 09:52:13 -0400

Do not obey in advance.
Defend institutions.

choose an institution you care about and take its side.

Mine is libraries. I’ll be posting resources on defending libraries soon.

Beware the one party state.

Any future elections will be a test of American traditions.

I fear we’ve lost this already. What can we do? In the face of the challenge to the NC State Supreme Court election especially?

Take responsibility for the face of the world.
Remember professional ethics.

For me, this is about protecting library patrons’ privacy.

Be wary of paramilitaries.
Be reflective if you must be armed.
Stand out.
Be kind to our language.

Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.

The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli.

Believe in truth.

Post-truth is pre-fascism.

Investigate.

The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds.

Once we subliminally accept that we are watching a reality show rather than thinking about real life, no image can actually hurt the president politically.

Make eye contact and small talk.

You might not be sure today or tomorrow, who feels threatened in the United States. But if you affirm everyone, you can be sure that certain people will feel better.

Having old friends is the politics of last resort. And making new ones is the first step toward change.

Practice corporeal politics.
Establish a private life.
Contribute to good causes.

…one element of freedom is the choice of associates, and one defense of freedom is the activity of groups to sustain their members.

Learn from peers in other countries.
Listen for dangerous words.

People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both.

The feeling of submission to authority might be comforting, but it is not the same thing as actual safety.

It is the government’s job to increase both freedom and security.

Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.

For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission.

Be a patriot.

The point is not that Russia and America must be enemies. The point is that patriotism involves serving your own country.

nationalist ≠ patriot

A patriot… wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves.

A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.

Be as courageous as you can.

EPILOGUE

We will have to repair our own sense of time if we wish to renew our commitment to liberty.

The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: it assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up. But there are no adults. We own this mess.

In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythological past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction.

The danger we now face is of a passage from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity, from a naive and flawed sort of democratic republic to a confused and cynical sort of fascist oligarchy.

To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the cocreator of another. History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something.

History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.

I’ll say that those of us who are neurodivergent and disabled may need to modify #s 12 and 13. But the sense of them is to interact in meat-space with other people. Get to know your community. Show up in more ways than posting online. And even if we struggle to make eye contact or can’t move our bodies in ways that facilitate protest, we can find ways to meet people and show up for them.

📚 2025 Book Releases I'm Excited About

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 18:30:59 -0400

FEBRUARY

4 A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke by Adriana Herrera

MARCH

4 Shadow’s Heart by Kresley Cole, Oathbound by Tracy Deonn

APRIL

15 Love in 280 Characters or Less by Ravynn K. Stringfield
29 Once Upon You & Me by Timothy Janovsky

MAY

13 A Curse Carved in Bone by Danielle L. Jensen

JULY

8 These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean
15 A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna

SEPTEMBER

2 By the Horns by Ruby Dixon
30 A Mannequin for Christmas by Timothy Janovsky

📚 Anticipating My Reading Year 2025

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 11:10:09 -0400

In anticipation of my reading this year, I want to articulate one main goal and a few stretch goals.

My main reading goal is to read one more book than I already have. This means the total for the year is a moving target

Here are some stretch goals, meaning I want to remember to do them but I want them to be low pressure:

Read one nonfiction book a month.
Stop requesting books from NetGalley that I don’t know anything about except what is on NetGalley.
Stop requesting books from NetGalley based on marketing emails they send me.
Keep up with new releases from authors I love.
Any time I’m in a city with a romance-only bookstore, visit it.

What I want to try to do in 2025

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 08:07:53 -0400

I didn’t want to write this blog post in 2024. For reasons I cannot remotely explain, my gut/intuition/heart wanted to write this in the new year.

So here we are. I’m very sleepy.

I don’t make resolutions. Instead, I choose a word of the year (MORE) and I make a list of things I want to try. Here’s this year’s list:

To make something daily.
To write something daily.
To cook more.
To dig deep into my personal spiritual practices.

Those are the main ones. I’m sure others will pop up. I’ll document them when they do.

📚 My Reading Year, 2024

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 11:40:12 -0400

Like last year, I’m going to share some notes on my reading before popping the full list of all the books I read this year in here.

I read 106 books this year, including 4 picture books/easy readers. As with last year, I overwhelmingly read romance. This is about twice as much as I normally read, which can be attributed to two things: how propulsive so many romance books are, and the fact that I was freelancing and only doing that minimally from January through July. This left a LOT of time for reading. I read two or three books a week in that period. I’ve slowed down to my usual one a week since beginning my part-time school librarian job in August.

I did deep dives into the backlist of Kresley Cole and Sarah MacLean, thanks to the podcast Fated Mates. This podcast has been the greatest influence on my choice of what to read this year. I read a lot of old X-Men comics reading along with the book The Best There Is at What He Does: Examining Chris Claremont’s X-Men. I’m still in the middle of that project, which I started after watching X-Men ‘97. I think I’m going to pick it back up soon.

In just the past couple of months, I have really found my way into fantasy romance. My favorite and the series that really got me here is Milla Vane’s barbarian fantasy romance series, A Gathering of Dragons. It answers the question, “What if grimdark, but romance?” which is not something I thought I would want when I first started this tear of romance reading but actually is exactly the thing I want right now.

Here are all the books I read this year:

🍿 Watched Autumn at Apple Hill.

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 08:07:49 -0400

🍿 Watched Autumn at Apple Hill.

I wanted made-for-TV Christmas movie vibes without succumbing to the early Christmas fervor, because I adore autumn and Halloween. So I hunted around and found Autumn at Apple Hill, which checks so many boxes for this kind of movie:

✅ adorable small family business
✅ event planning
✅ charming small hometown
✅ workaholic Suit Man
✅ save the place!
✅ neighborhood ~~holiday~~ Halloween party
✅ ~~developers~~ hotel chain
✅ charming hotel
✅ guy she went to high school with

via GIPHY

Is it fine art? Nope. Does it get the job done? It sure does.

Fortnight notes, 9/30/24 - 10/13/24

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 23:12:29 -0400

Trying fortnight notes today.

I finally got W’s fancy watch back to him, with a nice new battery and glass that isn’t cracked. A belated anniversary present but handled all the same.

I had grand dreams of embracing my Jew-ishness (the hyphen is there because while I’m ethnically ⅜ Jewish, my family assimilated so thoroughly that I am completely disconnected from the plurality of my heritage) by making a Cheerwine brisket for Rosh Hashanah but was thwarted by migraines.

On October 5, W and I built our 12 foot skeleton with the help of our neighbor and in the evening, I went to see & Juliet with our friend who has gotten tickets from some friends of hers who couldn’t use them. I wasn’t sure I would like it because jukebox musicals rarely work for me, but it was a lot of fun. The second act has more ballads in a row than I would have liked but overall it was a great time.

One of M’s friends was born the exact same day as him. We went to her birthday party which was Taylor Swift-themed with karaoke. Many of the other guests were students I work with and their families. I was the first grown up to actually do karaoke. I sang “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart” and while I didn’t do as well as I wanted to, people said nice things. Kid reactions ranged from saying to a parent with pride, “I KNOW HER!” to a confused, “Why is the school librarian singing?” A couple parents said I was so brave to get up there and I told them that I’m a karaoke hustler (not actually, I’m a ringer if a DJ knows me and needs somebody to jump in with an upbeat song but I’ve never participated in a contest) who’s spent lots of money on voice lessons, so that made it easier.

On the way home from the party, I took M to Fresh Market and he picked out a delicious vanilla cake from their bakery to have as we celebrated with W’s mom. When we got home, we finished building a big trampoline which was M’s main birthday present.

The next day was M’s actual birthday and we gave him quite a few books, a LEGO Friends cat playground set, and the Pokemon Battle Academy box that teaches you how to play the trading card game.

It was a mostly normal work week. Friday was a staff development day so M got to stay home with W while I went in and caught up on some work and learned about the development of our campus safety plan.

Then I ran errands! I picked up library holds and a new belt and returned a nightgown I didn’t love. This was big as I’d been sitting on these errands a little while.

Saturday we went as a family to a local farm that does a corn maze and hayrides, has a spooky nature trail, and lets you pick your own pumpkins. It was a gorgeous day and we were outside for about 4 hours.

Today, W and I went to the local theater’s horror series and saw The Thing and They Live. I ate way too much popcorn and have felt pretty gross tonight. Next time, no popcorn or a smaller order of popcorn.

How have the past couple of weeks been for you?

Epistolary RPGs have me writing fiction again. 📝

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 14:58:22 -0400

I mentioned in my month notes for September that I’ve been playing epistolary RPGs with my friend K.

K lives three states away from me and is a trailing spouse; his husband got a tenure-track professor job and as one does, K moved with him to the area where the university is. Unfortunately, the gaming scene there was… not what K was looking for. So in the hopes of combatting some of K’s trailing spouse isolation, we started a D&D game that we play over Zoom with a couple of our other friends who are local to me and thus also far from K.

But getting 4 busy people together at the same time is hard and that group will often go 9 months or more without playing.

I buy charity bundles on itch.io sometimes and I noticed that some of the games there are for only two people and are easy to play asynchronously, so I asked K if he wanted to try some of those and he did, so here we are.

The obvious benefits of this kind of game are that you can play it whenever one of you has time and the other can then catch up at their convenience. There are a lot of different ways of doing it, but we play in a shared Google Doc we create for each game.

So far the games we’ve played have used a deck of cards, either standard playing cards or Tarot, to randomly select prompts for you to address in writing as you play.

I anticipated the gaming benefits of this style of play, but what’s been a delightful surprise is the effect it’s had on my writing and my writerly identity.

I thrive as a writer of fiction when I know there is an audience of at least one. In fifth grade, we had to write stories using vocabulary words and I wrote a series featuring characters based on my classmates. They eagerly awaited each new installment. In ninth grade, I wrote a story called The Hog Prince and shared it with friends.

I prefer writing fanfiction to writing original fiction partly because I know where to publish it and know that someone will read it.

An epistolary RPG means that the other player(s) are going to read what you wrote, so that audience I crave is built in, with no delays for publication.

Like fanfiction, when you’re writing in these games you kind of get to play with someone else’s toys. And when the players know each other well, you can give each other gifts in the text. You can make something appear that you don’t have a plan for but that you know another player will do something great with. Which is even nicer, I think, than just picking up and playing with toys that weren’t built for you.

A third piece of these games that makes them really work well for me is that they inherently require you to be creative within constraints. Kate Bingaman Burt gave a great TEDx talk about the value of these kind of constraints. I’m the kind of person who gets paralyzed by the number of choices available when doing something creative. I could write anything, so I don’t know how to begin, so I write nothing. The prompts in these games and the contributions of other players mean that I don’t have to choose a starting point, and that’s huge. And if I get stuck, well, soon I’ll have a new prompt to work with.

If you’ve been struggling to do creative writing, maybe find a way to make it a game. There are solo RPGs you can play this way, too, and maybe I’ll try one of those soon.

Monthnotes: September 2024

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 10:20:44 -0400

If you asked me what happened in September 2024 and I answered without looking at my calendar, I’d say nothing much. My mom was hospitalized for pretty much the whole month (with any luck she’ll go home tomorrow) with idiopathic colitis that seems to have gotten better but was never explained.

But if I look at my calendar, I see that it was actually a full month with a lot of fun stuff going on. So here we go!

Fun

Our local Bricks & Minifigs had their grand opening. W. and I took M. and his best friend. My brother joined us, too. The line was long and it was sunny, but eventually we got in and I got what I had come for: Kermit and Miss Piggy minifigures. W. won the raffle grand prize, which is a Back to the Future Time Machine set signed by the Broadway cast of Back to the Future. I’m torn because this is a set I really want to build but I know building it will ruin any collector value it has, so. I don’t know. I guess maybe I’ll buy the set separately sometime? I also got a couple of the D&D Minifig surprise bags.

W. and I went to see [Clue Live On Stage](https://clueliveonstage.com/, which was incredibly fun. It’s got all your favorite stuff from the movie, and lots of other jokes that you can only do in live theater.

A family we’ve known for a while since their kid and M. have been in school together hosted a Chilean Independence Day party, which was very fun to go to. And I remembered that I don’t need to try Pisco Sour again because it is way too strong for me.

W.’s mom wanted to take M. to Paperhand Puppet’s annual show, so we all went along with M.’s best friend and his dad. The artistry of these giant puppets is incredible and I loved seeing how clever they were doing things like having bubbles come out of fishes’ mouths. The scale of those puppets is not to M.’s liking so I don’t think we’ll go next year, but I do hope to see them at a fairy festival or something sometime because they’re very cool to look at.

My friend K. and I have been playing epistolary RPGs, which are great because he lives in another state. We just have a shared Google Doc to play in. First we played The Only Amenity in This Endless Dungeon is a Daemonic Postal Service and then we started Tether.

Work

We had Back to School Night, where caregivers come and learn a bit about how their kids’ days go and what to expect over the course of the school year. My role was to hang out in the library and chat with the grown-ups who wanted to learn more about the library. It was really great to meet everyone and talk with them about their kids’ use of the library. One parent expressed interest in volunteering in the library, so I’m in the process of getting that set up.

Another parent who has been volunteering in the library for years really started working in earnest once I finally figured out what would be most helpful for her to do, and that has melted away tons of stress I had about not being able to get everything done in 20 hours a week. Is it still enough work for a full-time position? Of course it is, but at least now I can focus my attention on the things only I can do, like instructional support, collaboration, and collection development.

Speaking of instructional support, I put together both print and digital resources for the 1st & 2nd year (equivalent of 1st & 2nd grade) classes about North American animals. This is a fun way for me to learn about what’s already in our collection. I also pulled together statistics about things kids were interested in for a 4th year rounding lesson, which it sounds like the kids really enjoyed.

Stress

There’s been one big source of stress, which is that in August I took my and W.’s watches to get their batteries replaced, as a little anniversary gift left over from our anniversary in July (15 years modern gift is watches but we both already had great watches, hence watch batteries) and the glass on W.’s limited edition Mr. Jones Sun and Moon Miyamoto watch got broken. The store employee told me they’d send it to a jeweler and have it ready in a few days. I didn’t hear from them and after a month, I finally went back and asked about it. The store employee took my name down and said he’d look into it and call me. Two more weeks went by and I had no word, so Monday I went down there and was ready to just ask them to give me the watch and I’d take it to a jeweler. But they tracked it down, I laid eyes on it, they corrected my phone number because the original person had written it down wrong, and then they called me later to confirm it was at the jeweler. So here’s hoping that gets resolved soon.

Media

I read 6 books, a bit of a slow down from earlier in the year but what can you do? When you go from unemployed to employed, your reading is going to slow down a bit.

W. and I have been watching the new season of Only Murders in the Building. We watched the latest season of Hilda as a family and finished up a Gravity Falls family watch, too.

My brother and I saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in the theater. Beetlejuice is such a critically formative piece of media for me. There was no way its sequel could hold a candle to it in terms of having a place in my heart. But I think they did a great job. It’s super fun and I think has exactly the vibes that a 35-years-later sequel to Beetlejuice should. Also I love our Baby Goth Queen Jenna Ortega.

I played a little bit of Dragon Age: Origins but once my mom was super extra sick, I didn’t want something that intense, so I’ve been playing Disney Dreamlight Valley, which pleases me greatly.
Whew. That’s enough that I think maybe it’s time for me to start doing weeknotes instead of monthnotes.

How was your September?

📚 Book Review: When We Flew Away by Alice Hoffman

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 10:48:28 -0400

When We Flew Away by Alice Hoffman is a middle grade novel that imagines what Anne Frank’s life might have been like before she had to move to the attic of her father’s office building. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Bestselling author Alice Hoffman delivers a stunning novel about one of contemporary history’s most acclaimed figures, exploring the little-known details of Anne Frank’s life before she went into hiding.

Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl has captivated and inspired readers for decades. Published posthumously by her bereaved father, Anne’s journal, written while she and her family were in hiding during World War II, has become one of the central texts of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, as well as a work of literary genius.

With the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the Frank family’s life is turned inside out, blow by blow, restriction by restriction. Prejudice, loss, and terror run rampant, and Anne is forced to bear witness as ordinary people become monsters, and children and families are caught up in the inescapable tide of violence.

In the midst of impossible danger, Anne, audacious and creative and fearless, discovers who she truly is. With a wisdom far beyond her years, she will become a writer who will go on to change the world as we know it.

Critically acclaimed author Alice Hoffman weaves a lyrical and heart-wrenching story of the way the world closes in on the Frank family from the moment the Nazis invade the Netherlands until they are forced into hiding, bringing Anne to bold, vivid life.

Based on extensive research and published in cooperation with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, When We Flew Away is an extraordinary and moving tour de force

.I’m going to diverge from my usual review format for this book and be a bit more stream of consciousness. But I hope you’ll still get a sense of the book and whether it might be for you, someone you love, or someone you work with.

I’ve never read anything by Alice Hoffmann before, and many other reviews talk about her using lyrical language and that being a struggle for them. For me, the early chapters of the book read like a middle grade nonfiction book, describing Anne’s experiences, with little dialogue or direct action portrayed. I think that’s a bit tricky, especially for a book like this that isn’t nonfiction but draws heavily on research and might be hard to distinguish from nonfiction.

The lack of action and dialogue made it hard for me to read this at first, but eventually I really got into imagining Anne’s life in the city of Amsterdam, and that’s what really brought the book to life for me. I think many of us only imagine Anne in hiding during the Holocaust, rarely thinking about the many years of her life before this event that both defined her literary voice and led to her death.

That’s the great joy in When We Flew Away for me: thinking about her daily life before going into hiding. Anne went to bookstores. She ate ice cream. She flirted with boys. She ice skated. And all of these activities and more are things she does in this book.

Like many women, I imagine, Anne Frank’s diary was very important to me as a young person. I first read it in sixth or seventh grade. I read it again before auditioning for the play adaption of it when I was in ninth grade, and I think I’ve probably read it again as an adult. One of the things that’s so remarkable about Anne Frank’s diary is how true to the developmental experiences of a wide variety of Western teenagers across time and place it is. I think many young people reading it can see their own dreams and anxieties, family relationships and hopes for romance, in Anne’s writing.

Because Anne’s writing has been so important to me, I made it a priority to visit the Anne Frank House while I was in Amsterdam. Before you go into the attic, you walk through rooms with video and audio about the time Anne was living in and the expansion of Nazi occupation into the Netherlands. Then you walk through the bookcase hiding a secret door and up a very narrow staircase (typical of staircases in Amsterdam) and find yourself in the attic.

Wandering through the rooms, I was disheartened by how hard it was to feel connected to that time long ago and the people who lived there, even though I was in their space. I was surprised by the things that really made me feel closer to their experience: the pencil lines on the wall tracking Anne and Margot’s heights. The view of a tree through the one place Anne could see the sky.

The wall where the Franks kept track of Anne and Margot’s growth. Over two years, Margot grew only 1 centimeter, but Anne grew over 13 centimeters. This photo is from the Anne Frank House’s digital collection.

And of course, seeing the diary itself. That was the most powerful thing of all.

The view out the window of the cafe at the Anne Frank House. Anne Frank would have seen this canal and these houses when she went to visit her father at her office, and as she entered the building when she was moving into the attic.

In the same way that seeing these things helped me understand Anne’s experiences, reading this book and thinking about the things I experienced in Amsterdam beyond the Anne Frank House added a whole new dimension to my understanding of her life. Anne walked the same streets I did. She looked at the same houses I did. She went to the same parks.

A tree in the Vondelpark, a park Anne visited.

Readers who need action and dialogue to stay engaged with a book will struggle with this book, but readers who want details that help them imagine other people’s lives more fully will find so much here.

A bronze statue of Anne Frank is around the corner from the house itself.

Book: When We Flew Away
Author: Alice Hoffman
Publisher: Scholastic
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Pages: 304
Age Range: Middle Grade
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley

What I've learned after a month on the job as a part-time school librarian

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 08:50:57 -0400

It’s been a full month since the official first day at my new job, and we’ve had the kids at school for three weeks. And, as you might expect, in that time I’ve learned some things.

There’s a 40-minute recess period before lunch and I have the library open during that time. Kids are welcome to come in, check out books, sit and read, or draw. In the first two weeks, I felt slammed during that time. There will often be a LOT of kids in the library. Maybe eventually I’ll actually count but all I know is it feels like maybe as many as 30 at a time. And inevitably 8 - 10 of these kids will require my help at once: to find a book, to check out a book, to suggest a book that we purchase. I am so glad they’re there, so happy that so many kids (there are about 130 at the school and I would guess at least a third of them come through at some point in lunch recess) are excited about reading. Of course I want to help them all! But it was overwhelming and exhausting.

So I started thinking about how we can make it so that the help I’m giving has the most impact.

The most obvious place to start was to teach even the youngest kids (1st graders) how to check out books themselves. Many of them have learned, and there are usually at least a few other kids who already know how that are happy to help. This frees me up a lot more to help with finding and choosing books.

We were having super long lines at checkout, and kids were getting back to lunch late, so I ended up dedicating two computers to checkout. In the early days, hardly anyone was using the catalog. Now we’re getting long lines at the catalog computer, so I may need to reconsider this set up. It is possible for me to have them set up for kids to do both, but that will require slightly more training.

Next, I realized that kids didn’t know how to use the catalog to find the physical location of the library, because the initial screen that pops up gives a call number but because our library is genrefied, the kids need to know both the call number and the location. So once I learned how to find that information in the catalog, I developed a brief lesson to share what I learned. That seems to be working well; kids are now able to find locate most things in the catalog on their own.

My goal is to make these sort of administrative tasks as independent of me as possible. Because the real joy in my job happens when a kid says, as one did this week, “I really like books like Guts, Drama, Ghosts, and El Deafo. Do you know any others like that?” Things are so busy at lunch recess I had to say, “Give me a day to work on it.” But the next day I had a big stack of other books for her to try. This is called readers’ advisory, and it’s one of my favorite parts of library work.

Another of my favorite parts is supporting instruction, which I did for the first time this week. Our younger students will be learning about North America this week including animals, people, and maps/land features. The teachers working on the animals lessons asked me to pull some resources together for them. So I spent a couple hours on that, getting a big stack of books together and building them a collection of ebooks on the ebook service we use, as well as recommending iNaturalist for photos of the animals out in the world.

I could only do that, though, because the teachers happened to catch me on a day when I didn’t have any students in for circulation.

The key thing to note is that I work 50% time. And the way that 50% is scheduled, about 2 of the 5 hours I work on a given day are dedicated to front-facing, direct student support. Another hour or two are dedicated to administrative tasks like getting books checked back in.

This only leaves an hour or two a day for the deep work of readers’ advisory, instructional support and collaboration, and collection management. (I haven’t even really gotten started with collection management yet; I’ve been thinking about it, but not doing it.)

I do have high school TAs who can help with shelving and checking in, but when they’re available and when I need to have books ready to go back out to kids or free up space (they’re allowed a maximum of 10 books checked out at a time) aren’t always the same.

So. I’m trying to create systems to help me make more time for the deep work.

You will not be surprised to discover I was a weird teen.

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 06:20:00 -0400

I think I had a different high school experience than a lot of my peers. When the reunion committee asks, “What was your favorite after school hangout?” mostly people mention fast food restaurants or the mall. I’m all, “My house? No, wait, play rehearsal.”

First, I didn’t have a car.

Second, I genuinely can’t imagine being able to just go and hang out somewhere after school. As I remember it, I would (in 9th & 10th grade) ride the bus or (in 11th & 12th grade) be dropped off by a friend, always at home. I might watch Animaniacs and Batman: the Animated Series, but then I’d get right to homework. And then I’d have dinner and head to rehearsal.

I have no regrets about living in theaters in high school.

The other thing though as I think about it is that if I wasn’t home, who was going to hang out with my siblings? My mom was so sick with pernicious anemia and hypothyroidism, she barely had the energy to get out of bed. (I have worked very hard to make sure this isn’t my adult life. She didn’t have the access to information that I do.)

My brother was ages 1 - 4 when I was in high school and childcare was prohibitively expensive. Was I going to make my 9 - 13-year-old sister care for him? No. Was I going to consign her to a fate of waiting in after school care until my dad could pick her up? Definitely not; we’d lived that life when I was in elementary school and our school’s after care felt very sad.

So I didn’t go hang out anywhere until my dad got home from work, and then I went to rehearsal. Usually he drove me, but sometimes a friend did.

I had such a bad experience in driver’s ed and driving with my permit that I didn’t get my license until I was 20. So there’s a real sense of freedom that my peers had at 16 that I just didn’t.

But even if I’d had my license: we had one car. If I’d gotten a job to buy a car, the childcare question would come up again. (I just realized that of course my mom had to care for my baby brother during the day, so now I’m thinking that’s where all her spoons went. She had to save her energy for that.)

Anyway, yeah. My favorite after school hangout was our futon I guess until my dad got home and could take me to the theater, my actual favorite after school hangout.

But my favorite weekend hangout?

That was the library.

📚 Book Review: Hers for the Weekend by Helena Greer

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 16:09:40 -0400

This is a romance. I would say on the romance.io steam rating scale, this is 🔥🔥: behind closed doors.

Helena Greer’s romances set at Carrigan’s Christmasland, a magical lodge/Christmas tree farm in the Adirondacks owned by a Jewish family, come to a close with Hers for the Weekend. Carrigan’s is a place as real to me as many of the actual magical-feeling places I’ve been in my life and the Carrigan’s Crew are all immensely lovable people with supremely relatable flaws.

Here’s the publisher’s description:

No-nonsense Tara Sloane Chadwick is practically perfect. An impeccably mannered Southern belle, she’s the youngest to make partner at her law firm and still friends with all her exes. However, when the woman behind her most humiliating breakup invites Tara to her wedding, Tara panics at the thought of showing up alone and impulsively declares she’s bringing her very serious girlfriend.

One issue: Tara is seriously single.

Waitress and wild child Holly Siobhan Delaney may be lusting over Tara—but Tara only dates women she can marry, and Holly’s sworn off relationships. So when Tara needs a fake girlfriend, Holly’s eager to propose a no-strings, temporary fling. Only sharing secrets and steamy kisses show Holly the caring woman beneath Tara’s picture-perfect exterior, tempting Holly to break her own rules. Can these two opposites trust their feelings enough to try for forever—or will their relationship go down in flames?

What I loved

Helena Greer’s whole deal is taking beloved Hallmark tropes and queering them. In this one, the frosty blonde fiancée gets the girl. And I adore this frosty blonde fiancée. Tara Sloane Chadwick is a Southern belle with a wild past using her degree from Duke law (where my Dad probably would have been working when Tara was in law school, if she were real!) to subvert the inequitable justice system from whose bias she benefited as a young person.

Tara is less ice queen than snow queen: she just needs someone to help her melt. And a propos of a snow queen (of which I am one, which is to say, I melt easily), her favorite Disney movie is Frozen II. This comes up in the book A Lot. If you don’t know the movie, you’ll be fine, but if it spoke to your heart (it did to me, even more than Frozen), you are going to appreciate a lot of bits of this book even more than you would otherwise. So I love this, I love Tara feeling like she’s Elsa.

I love that Tara struggles to believe she is loved by her friends, especially her platonic twin-flame, Cole. But she is. And this is a romance novel so part of the happy ending is her accepting that love, eventually. But the journey, whew. It left me weeping.

Holly doesn’t speak to my heart as directly as Tara does. But she is still a great character, who has sanitized her punk rock self into a more socially-acceptable rockabilly quirky girl. Like Tara, she is haunted by a mistake she made in her youth and doesn’t trust herself because of it.

Both of these women mask themselves from the world and both of them, over the course of the book, will learn that it is not just okay, but actually great, for them to be themselves.

There are lots of fun Christmas wedding hijinks here, and if you’ve read the first two Carrigan’s books, all the Carrigan’s interactions will feel extra rich and make everything more fun. (And if you haven’t, you should. They’re great.) All of the secondary characters feel full and whole.

What I wanted more of

Listen, I have no notes, I’m just sad not to have new Carrigan’s stories.

What I need to warn you about

There are some really awful parents in here. Helena Greer writes great warnings at the start of her books, so be sure to check those out.

Who should read this

Anyone who likes to cry during their rom-coms. Anyone who wants the ice queen blonde fiancée to get a happy ending after her quirky partner leaves her. Anyone who wants to spend time in an idyllic mountain area with a festive destination and a delightfully queer-friendly and racially-diverse small town. People who like Courtney Kae’s books.

Book: Hers for the Weekend
Author: Helena Greer
Publisher: Forever
Publication Date: August 27, 2024.
Pages: 368
Age Range: Adult
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley

📚 Book Review: Love Requires Chocolate by Ravynn K. Stringfield

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

If the Paris 2024 Olympic Opening Ceremony has you dreaming of reads with Parisian vibes, I’ve got a new release for you. Love Requires Chocolate, by Ravynn K. Stringfield, is a coming-of-age story with a soupçon of romance (it has a happy ending but the romance takes a back seat to the coming-of-age). It releases on August 20 and I loved it.

(Full disclosure: Dr. Stringfield was my instructor for a workshop on creative non-fiction writing for academics. We have since bonded over our shared loves of comics and YA fiction, as well as our shared experiences navigating PhD programs and life after them. We’re Internet friends.)

Here’s the publisher’s description:

Whitney Curry is primed to have an epic semester abroad. She’s created the perfect itinerary and many, many to-do lists after collecting every detail possible about Paris, France. Thus, she anticipates a grand adventure filled with vintage boutiques, her idol Josephine Baker’s old stomping grounds, and endless plays sure to inspire the ones she writes and—ahem—directs!

But all is not as she imagined when she’s dropped off at her prestigious new Parisian lycée. A fish out of water, Whitney struggles to juggle schoolwork, homesickness, and mastering the French language. Luckily, she lives for the drama. Literally.

Cue French tutor Thierry Magnon, a grumpy yet très handsome soccer star, who’s determined to show Whitney the real Paris. Is this type-A theater nerd ready to see how lessons on the City of Lights can turn into lessons on love?

What I Loved

I mean, everything? But specifically? Whitney is a list girlie. I love a list girlie. She has Plans. Her fashion is always on point. (Check out Ravynn’s WhitneyCurryCore reel on Instagram.) Her love of theater is palpable. Her knowledge about Josephine Baker is impressive but her commitment to learning more is even more impressive. Whitney’s mixture of confidence and insecurity resonates so hard for this type A- former theater teen.

Whitney herself is enough to make this book awesome. But Stringfield layers in an incredible sense of place. Yes, she gives you plenty of looks at tourist destinations, but it’s the more quotidian Parisian moments that make this feel lived-in. Whitney gets lost in Montmartre. She has a dinner party at Thierry’s family’s home. She explores the streets of Paris. She sings “J’ai deux amours” swinging from a street lamp. (And have you seen a Parisian street lamp? They’re gorgeous.) Oh look, here I am trying to talk about Paris and ending up still telling you how much I love Whitney Curry. Whoops. Well, just trust that this book is full of awesome Parisian places, because Stringfield was a flâneuse herself when she studied abroad.

I love Whitney’s growth, her passion, and her outlook.

I love the romantic elements here, too. Thierry is wonderful. I mean a grouchy footballer whose family owns a chocolate shop? Come on. I mean. (This brought to you partly by my new obsession with retired footballer Zizou and partly by my old obsession with Roy Kent.)

Something that I think is worth pointing out is that Whitney is a Black American looking for the history and culture of Black Americans in Paris as well as Black Parisians of any descent. The importance of this piece of Whitney’s identity adds another layer to the Bildungsroman vibes. As a white woman I don’t feel equipped to discuss all the work Stringfield has done here at length, but I really appreciate her highlighting how important this is to Whitney, the conflicting feelings Whitney experiences about Josephine Baker’s recognition as an artist of Paris coming about after her death, and the contrast between Whitney’s image of how Black people experience Paris and the reality Thierry, whose grandmother came to Paris from Mali to escape trouble caused by French colonialism, shares with her.

What I wanted more of

The adventures of Whitney Curry? This is the first in a series but it’s an anthology series, so the other books will be by other authors and about other characters. Guess I better start writing some Love Requires Chocolate fanfiction.

What I need to warn you about

Not much. There is, as you might have guessed from what I said earlier, discussion of racism.

Who should read this

People who love Paris or think they might love Paris. Theater nerds. Football (i.e., soccer) fans. People who enjoy YA romance. People who like chocolate.

Book: Love Requires Chocolate
Author: Ravynn K. Stringfield
Publisher: Joy Revolution
Publication Date: August 20, 2024
Pages: 288
Age Range: Young Adult
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley (but I loved it so much I pre-ordered it too)

7 Links People Shared with Me

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 14:27:02 -0400

Sod shared 7 links people shared with him. I really liked the idea that we can learn something about ourselves by looking at that, so here are 7 people shared with me.

Before the first days checklist - My friend Casey sent this to me. Teacher Chanea Bond created it. It’s hugely helpful, especially as I’m launching into a very intense time starting my new job tomorrow.
My husband Will sent me a news piece from Playbill about Keanu Reaves and Alex Winter starring in Waiting for Godot. This is a sweet spot for our 90s theater nerd hearts.
The mother of one of my son’s friends shared this summer camp with me, because my son wants to try a Minecraft summer camp next year.
My friend Sean wanted our group chat that’s him, me, and our friend Kit to know about the Haunted Mansion Bar on the Disney Cruise Line ship, the Disney Treasure.
Speaking of Kit, he sent me this video about having hobbies. It validated both of our large hobby supply collections.
Will let me know that he pre-ordered this special Hyrule Edition of the Switch Lite for me. He likes special editions and I don’t tend to play with the Switch docked, so he’s going to give me this and I’m going to give him my Switch so he can stop having to share one with our kid. Will is the best, by the way.
Kit sent me this xkcd comic. I don’t know if that says more about his headspace or what he thinks mine is, but either one works.

Mostly what I learned hunting these down was that I send way more links than I receive, and that’s probably as it should be, because information is my love language.

So here’s a link I sent Will today: Harris campaign launches GOP outreach effort, led by former NC Justice Bob Orr. Will worked as an intern for Justice Orr when Will was in law school 18 years ago. Justice Orr’s politics often are not my fave, but I find this very heartening.

🎉🎂 Celebrate my birthday, Bastille Day, with me by engaging with French stuff! 🇫🇷🗼

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 10:41:24 -0400

It’s my birthday on Sunday! As my birthday is Bastille Day and this is the second birthday I’ve had since going to France and confirming that I do love it as much as I thought I would, I’m celebrating with French stuff, like crêpes. If you want to party in my honor, here are some options:

wear a marinière
have a French breakfast
listen to a musical based on a French novel, such as The Phantom of the Opera or Les Miserables
form a leftist coalition and save your national government

Thanks for celebrating with me!

How do I decide what to feature in the Discover tab on Micro.blog?

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 11:38:59 -0400

Disclaimer: This is not an official Micro.blog communication. Just me explaining my process. And it’s all rather stream-of-consciousness.

Hey! I thought some increased transparency about what goes in the Discover tab might be helpful. There is some info in the help forum but as Discover is curated by humans, there are some idiosyncrasies beyond what you’ll see there, depending on who’s doing the curation.

Here are the things you’re likely to notice an uptick in when I’m curating:

Pet photos
Parenting stuff
Jokes

I try to rarely highlight my own posts because doing so feels icky to me. I do try to feature announcements from Manton about the service.

On the screen I use for curation in the backend, I can see how many times someone’s posts have been featured in the past week, how many times they’ve been featured ever, how many replies a post has received, and how many posts a user has ever made. As I understand it, Jean, Manton, and Vincent worked together to create this interface.

I try not to feature anyone who has already been featured 4 or more times in a week. I try to feature people who have rarely been featured or are new to Micro.blog.

I feature things I think are funny, photos I think look extra cool, questions that might start a conversation, and posts that explicitly are from a new user saying they’re new.

I try to prioritize inclusion, highlighting women of any race or ethnicity, BIPOC of any gender, posts about queer experiences including trans experiences, and posts about disability experiences.

Micro.blog skews the way a lot of tech spaces skew: cis, het, white, male, able-bodied. Inclusion has been a growing edge for Micro.blog for a long time. I do what I can to promote it within the scope of my role, but the work is bigger than me. I know members of the community have been talking about this for a long time. I can advocate for it but I am not the inflection point for it. I hope it will be a priority for the service going forward but that’s a Manton decision, not a Kimberly decision.

While I’m not here for toxic positivity, I do try to focus on joy and information on the Discover timeline, rather than partisanship or criticism. If I feature a political post, it’ll be about a specific issue that crosses partisan divides, such as the importance of voting. On Juneteenth, I highlighted posts that wished people a happy Juneteenth and also information about the history of the day. Likewise for Pride month. When I feature something related to religion, it’s usually a big theological question or textual analysis, not evangelical.

As is policy, I rarely feature photos that don’t have alt text. Please use alt text! So many of you share cool photos without it and it makes me sad.

All of this stuff is specifically about how I curate. Manton and Vincent aren’t me, so they naturally curate differently than I do.

I hope this has been helpful to hear about.

Here’s a final disclaimer that this post is an explainer from Kimberly, not an official Micro.blog communication.

🍿I'm so glad I watched Jim Henson: Idea Man.

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 12:37:42 -0400

I watched the documentary, Jim Henson: Idea Man yesterday. I found it incredibly moving. I re-read Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist frequently and just before watching the documentary, I was listening to the audiobook. One of the sections in the book urges you to “climb your own family tree,” picking a creative whose work you admire and learning about the work that influenced them. I often struggle with this part of things, with choosing who has influenced me.

But watching the documentary, I distinctly saw the influence of Henson and his collaborators, especially writer Jerry Juhl and performer/director Frank Oz, on my own artistic and comedic sensibilities. Here’s an example:

This structure, wherein Fozzie gives Kermit instructions that Kermit then follows far too literally, with Kermit increasing in his manic energy and Fozzie increasing in his frustration, is the bedrock of at least 50% or maybe more of my bits as an improv performer. A parallel structure:

Both of these are Henson and Oz, both with Oz as the straight man and Henson as the manic player. I adore this dynamic. So. Jim Henson. That’s the creative tree branch I’ll climb first.

The documentary itself is lovely. If you’re a Henson nerd (as I am), you’ll be delighted that there’s Sam and Friends and advertising footage that I don’t think you can find anywhere else. The narrative thrust is that Henson was a figure not unlike Lin Manuel Miranda’s interpretation of Alexander Hamilton, an artist with incredible drive and the sense that there would never be enough time to do everything he wanted to do, so he had to be doing work all the time. It does a good job honoring the importance of Henson’s work while honestly portraying the cost this had to his family. His son Brian Henson talks about the very different experience of being his son at home versus being his colleague working on Labyrinth.

A lot of the time narratives about Henson talk about the critical failure of Labyrinth destroying his confidence, but this documentary did a great job emphasizing that even in the face of that failure, his work continued: in the years after Labyrinth he created Fraggle Rock, The Storyteller, and The Jim Henson Hour.

Overall, I think the documentary does a good job of showing that Henson was an ambitious artist with an incredible legacy and was, at the same time, just a human. I found it incredibly moving.

Here are a couple of fun links about Henson’s Kermit Car:

Personal Publishing and The Coney Island Problem

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 08:50:43 -0400

Here are a pair of blog posts that ended up in conversation with each other in my brain because I read them both this morning in quick succession.

CJ Chilvers asks, “What’s with the hostility towards personal publishing?

And it’s almost as if Seth Godin answers, “The Coney Island problem.”

Chilvers says:

our innate trust in individuals over brands will determine the winners of both attention and revenue. Everyone in media should be racing to become a trusted individual right now.

and Godin points out:

We’d like to believe that we prefer to walk down the picturesque street, visiting one merchant after another, buying directly from the creator or her gallery. We’d like to think that the centralized antiseptic option isn’t for us… And yet, when the supermarche opens in rural France, it does very well. It turns out that we respond well to large entities that pretend that they’re simply a conglomeration of independent voices and visions, but when masses of people are given a choice, they’re drawn to the big guy, not the real thing.

Where does this leave personal publishing and blogging? I’m not sure. But I think it’s an interesting question and an interesting thing to think about. I suppose a lot of it comes back to that old question, why blog? Are we doing it for ourselves or for our readers? I find that even when I don’t mean to, I tend to blog for my future self. And future me would rather hear what past me has to say from me, rather than an LLM trained to sound like me and everyone else. That said, I am intrigued by the idea of training an LLM on my own diary and journal entries and blog posts and then having a conversation with my younger self, like Michelle Huang did. In fact, I think I’ll try it now.

edited to add: I tried it, but because I don’t have a payment method in OpenAI it didn’t let me do it. Ah well. I guess I’ll just have to extrapolate from old blog posts and LiveJournal entries what a younger me would have said.

Solstice tarot/oracle reading and baby shower planning

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 16:54:25 -0400

I’m typing this blog post in Google Docs, because of its autosave feature. There’s probably a better way, but oh well. I kind of want to just type it in the Micro.blog compose box but I’m so afraid of losing it.

Why am I so afraid of losing it? If I have to re-write a blog post, isn’t that kind of a feature rather than a bug? I don’t know. Maybe another day I’ll try typing directly into Micro.blog.

I thought about writing my blog posts over at 750words but some days I might want to write fewer than 750 words and I shouldn’t let the desire or need to write less get in the way of writing at all.

I look a three hour nap today. I lay down, set an alarm for when I needed to be awake to drive safely to pick the kid up from camp, and then told myself if I got up earlier, great, and surely I would get up earlier.

I did not get up earlier.

Lindsay Mack sent out a special email about Solstice Medicine with a Tarot spread for the solstice for artists, and I think I’ll do that spread in a little bit. I think I’ll use both the Moonchild Tarot AND the Ocean Dreams oracle deck maybe? I’m not sure.

I might just do it with Ocean Dreams, even though it’s not a Tarot deck. Maybe I’ll try that and then see if I also want to pull out the Moonchild Tarot.

I’ve decided that today is the day to handle All the Things related to my sister’s baby shower, which will be a week from tomorrow. I did a tour of the venue (which I’ve been to before both for a party and because it’s part of the site where M did preschool & kindergarten). I’m talking to my co-host and hopefully we’ll settle activities and food. I’ve got an Amazon cart full of decorations and tableware. The theme is Baby Dragons. The decor is adorable. I won’t be sad when it’s over. Party planning for more than 12 guests is apparently more than I feel good about these days.

Rambling thoughts shared on the day of the solstice

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 18:10:59 -0400

It’s the summer solstice and tomorrow we’ll have a Strawberry Moon.

Here are some rambling thoughts on things that have captured my attention lately.

I was saddened to hear of the death of Dr. Wallace J. Nichols, whose book Blue Mind I purchased as an impulse buy in the South Carolina Aquarium gift shop. The book is great and I look forward to reading the tenth anniversary edition when it’s released. I can’t figure out where I put my copy of it.

Back in May I put a hold on the library copy of Adam Higginbotham’s book, Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space. I picked it up today.

I’ll write a longer post about the book later, but I watched the failed Challenger launch out of my bedroom window. I was four years old. I remember the visual. I was in the habit of watching shuttle launches out of that window, and there were a lot of launches in the early and mid-80s. I lived about 34 miles away from Cape Canaveral as the crow flies. I don’t remember any other launch, of course.

That launch has shaped my psyche in ways I’m still unpacking almost 40 years later, and when I saw that this book had been published and was well-reviewed, I wanted to read it because I wanted answers, answers beyond the technical, about what contributed to this event that has so shaped my thinking. Spiritual answers, even.

About 30 pages into the book, I am seeing the beginnings of those answers, which tend to be the answers when we ask these kinds of questions about any human-made disaster: greed and hubris. Greed and hubris are the forces that bring about these kinds of disasters.

More on this and my memories of Challenger after I’ve read more of the book or finished it if I decide to finish it. (It’s a doorstop and my attention span for non-fiction is limited lately.)

I really like chocolate. I’m waiting to hear from some headache specialists that my doctor faxed a referral form to but it’s been many weeks, maybe even a couple months, so I might start looking for other options to discuss with her the next time we talk.

I love my kid, my heart is so full, and seven-year-olds have big, big feelings,

I feel like I’m only talking about stuff that isn’t the most fun here, but I am still loving reading romance, deriving great joy from the Fated Mates podcast and its Discord server, and I’m enjoying playing Harvest Moon for the SNES.

📚 Book Review: You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian

Mon, 13 May 2024 10:02:50 -0400

Austin Kleon introduced me to a newsletter issue in which director and writer Mark Slutsky talks about the feeling of being in good hands:

I’ve come to trust a certain feeling that comes over me when I first make contact with a piece of art. The opening lines of a book; the first 30 seconds or so of a movie; bars of a song, etc. It is a feeling of being in good hands, an intuitive sense that the author knows what they are doing and that the experience will be worth my time.

I felt this way as soon as I read the first sentence of Cat Sebastian’s We Could Be So Good:

Nick Russo could fill the Sunday paper with reasons why he shouldn’t be able to stand Andy Fleming.

I loved that book so much, so I was thoroughly psyched to get the chance to read an advanced reading copy for You Should Be So Lucky, a novel set in the same mid-20th-century America narrative world, about a grouchy, grieving arts reporter and the golden retriever/foulmouthed jerk baseball player whose slump the editor of Mark’s newspaper has tasked him with writing about. As often happens in a romance, these two knuckleheads learn, grow, and fall in love, not necessarily in that order.

What I loved: So much. Woof. Hard to even think of how to explain it all. I’ll start by saying that mostly, I love these two characters, and most especially I love Mark, who is a snarky reporter with a squishy heart, who simultaneously so appreciates the way his deceased partner William made him feel worthwhile and loathes the way William’s political ambitions meant that they could never seem even at all possibly queer. I just love him so much. I imagine him as a young Trent Crimm (from Ted Lasso, in case you’re not familiar).

I love Eddie, too, his inability to hide his feelings just ever. His willingness to throw caution to the wind and let his blossoming friendship with Mark just exist in the world without constantly looking over his shoulder about it. His beautiful relationship with his mother and his own bruised heart in the face of learning he was about to be traded to a team that would take him far from his home and everything he knew.

What I wanted more of: Let’s be clear. There is nothing that I’m like, “Cat Sebastian didn’t do enough of that,” because Cat Sebastian is awesome. But let’s also be clear. I will read more of whatever Cat Sebastian wants to write, and if she wrote a lovely Christmas novella about Nick and Andy (from We Could Be So Good) and Mark and Eddie all being at a Christmas party together, I would read it so hard.

What I need to warn you about: This book is about two dudes falling in love, so if you don’t want to read about that, skip it. There is some spice but the language isn’t very explicit. I’d say, medium-ish, maybe slightly less than medium spice? There are some of the kind of things that people usually want content warnings about: death of a partner before the book starts, period-appropriate homophobia, parents kicking a son out due to their own homophobia.

Who should read this: People who want a romance with a lot of interiority, minimal conflict between the two main characters, people who like baseball mixed in with their love.

My Sister's Baby Is Not My Baby and My Sister Is Also Not My Baby

Thu, 09 May 2024 20:04:12 -0400

My little sister M.E. is expecting a baby. Her due date is July 20. She’s 4 and a half years (and 4 days and 30 minutes) younger than me. She hasn’t had a baby before.

I’ve never been an aunt before.

When my mom was pregnant with M.E., I called my mom’s belly my belly. When the two of us lived with my dad for 6 months while he was working in North Carolina and my mom was finishing her undergrad at Florida State University, a lot of M.E.’s care became my responsibility by default. When our dad stayed in NC and the two of us returned to Florida to be with my mom while she did her Master’s coursework, I was still heavily contributing to M.E.’s care. During those years I was 8 and 9. She was 3, 4, and 5.

If she has her baby on her due date, I will be 43 and she will be 38. She is very grown.

I asked W. to help me remember that being a big sister and an aunt does not mean being a volunteer postpartum doula. I don’t trust that I won’t sacrifice my own health and my time with my own child in order to show up for her and her baby.

Postpartum time is one of the most isolating times of life and I forget that when she is postpartum, I won’t also be immediately postpartum. (Because once you’re postpartum at all you are always postpartum, but being immediately postpartum is different.) I have ingrained anxiety that I will have to relive that time alongside her.

The first few months postpartum were one of the most isolating times of my life and I don’t think I can take that away from her. Even if it were possible, I think it would be detrimental to my health to do so.

I hate this distrust I have of myself, of my ability to hold boundaries. I hate that I feel like holding my boundaries will mean hurting her.

It would be good for me to remember that I am not remotely the only person in her life who can show up for her. It would be good to remember that while I kind of was when we were kids, except for the things our parents did for her, I’m not now.

My friend Josh died last week.

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 06:55:07 -0400

My friend Josh died last week. He was only 32 and had already given the world so much. I’m angry on the world’s behalf at all the decades of Josh it should have had and won’t.

We weren’t close but I love(d) him. When I announced to our improv team that I was pregnant, Josh started walking in front of me with his arms out whenever we were at the theater together, pretending to speak into an earpiece like he was my bodyguard.

One time when I was working at UNC, I bumped into Josh running the campus cypher. I told him I’d just come from a conversation where I told someone my flow (as in, rapping) was passable. Josh, himself an incredible hip hop artist, scolded me. So I revised my self-conception: my flow is good enough for comedy.

I sometimes fantasized about running across Josh at the city cypher after a night out at the movie theater around the corner from where the cypher happens. I wanted to introduce him to W.

Josh was an educator and whenever I came across research on hip-hop pedagogy I would send it to him and he always made me feel like each time I did it I’d given him an exquisite gift.

When he was 25 and I was 35, Josh asked me what advice I would give my 25-year-old self. I have no idea what I told him. I do remember being floored by the wisdom he showed in asking the question.

I don’t have a conclusion to this.

🗒️ Month Notes: March 2024

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 10:14:35 -0400

March was a full month!

Our local historic cinema shows retro films. W & I went to This Is Spinal Tap together. It turns out it’s still hilarious.

We went as a family to My Neighbor Totoro. Totoro is M’s favorite movie. It was very special to see it on a big screen. I noticed some little things I had never noticed before, like how Mei echoes everything Satsuke says. ♥️ Little Sisters ♥️

I often focus on the part of a movie that resonates with me, sometimes to the point of having seen a different movie than everyone else. Some time ago I read a blog post or article that I now can’t find about how My Neighbor Totoro can be read as a story about an eldest daughter’s responsibilities. With Satsuke and Mei’s mom being sick and their dad being at work a lot, this really resonated with my experience growing up and now all I see is a movie about a big sister who is parentalized and cares for her little sister. It’s a beautiful movie and if you read it this way, one of the sweetest bits is how Mei shares Totoro’s magic with Satsuke.

We saw Adam Gidwitz speak at a local indie bookstore. I had a catch up call with a colleague from when I did my postdoc. That was lovely and if I’m smart, I’ll schedule more catch up calls and coffee dates.

I had a preliminary Zoom interview for the school librarian job at M’s school. I felt good about it and it went well enough that I was invited for an on-campus interview.

W and I saw Murder on the Orient Express at Playmakers Repertory Company. The set was a gorgeous art deco thing and the way they created the train was with these metal frames on wheels that the cast and crew could move around to indicate individual compartments or larger areas. The play itself was super fun. It’s a Ken Ludwig adaptation of the Agatha Christie story and definitely had a few moments where Ludwig’s voice popped up to remind you that this was by the same guy who wrote Lend Me a Tenor.

From March 21 to 29, we were traveling. We flew to London, where we stayed in a flat near the Portobello Road Market, ate delicious buns, saw Matilda the Musical in the West End, and played at St. James’s Park. Then we went to Cork, where we saw the beautiful rolling hills of Ireland on our way from the airport to the city center and explored the very cute city center including a toy store, an old-fashioned Irish sweet shop, and the English Market. It wasn’t very long to have gone so far, and because of how we did the travel, four of our nine days were travel days. I did learn a lot about travel, mainly that it’s worth the extra money for direct flights if you have it.

While we were gone, I developed a nasty productive cough, so when we got home I skipped our usual extended family Easter festivities.

And that was March!

📚 Baby’s First Author Event

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 16:33:44 -0400

Let me be clear, when I say “baby,” I mean “big kid.” We took M to his first author event a couple weeks ago. It was awesome. Adam Gidwitz has a new book out. It’s called Max in the House of Spies. It’s about a German Jewish kid whose parents send him to London in 1939 and he falls in with British spies while he’s there. Also a dybbuk lives on one of his shoulders and a kobold lives on the other.

We first encountered Adam Gidwitz because of his amazing podcast, Grim, Grimmer, Grimmest. (M’s favorite episode is Hans, My Hedgehog.) Gidwitz is a former teacher who now works as a storyteller and author. He’s written the A Tale Dark and Grimm series and the book The Inquisitor’s Tale, and he is the co-author of the Unicorn Rescue Society series. In that series, kids travel around the world saving different cryptids. For each book, Gidwitz teams up with an author who is a member of the culture that the kids are visiting. They’re super fun and a great way to learn about folklore around the world.

Gidwitz talked about a family friend who had been one of the children sent away from Germany ahead of World War II and how the story of that friend inspired him to write this book. He said he felt it was an important book to write now because he thinks it’s an important time to look at Germany before the Nazis came to power and ask, what is it that makes the people of a country vote for leadership they know is wrong? What makes them willing to sacrifice justice for the promise of security? I think he’s absolutely right that these are key questions for our time.

Gidwitz shared the story of how he became a writer: he wanted to teach his students about ancient Egypt and couldn’t find a book to go with the lessons, so he started to write one. He’d write a chapter, share it with his students, and then they’d say, “Then what happened?” He’d tell them, “I don’t know!” and go home to write the next chapter. With a lot of positive reinforcement from his students, Gidwitz decided to quit teaching and write full-time. He didn’t get an agent with the Egyptian book. (He called it a “burner book,” explaining that many authors have at least one book they write and learn a lot from but don’t get to publish.) But he did when he started digging into Grimm’s fairytales.

Gidwitz is super entertaining and a great storyteller and doesn’t look anything like I imagined him. (I imagined him looking like Joshua Malina’s character, Jeremy, from Sports Night. I have no idea why.)

After he talked about his books and answered questions for an hour, there was a signing. When we got up there, he told M., “You’re a lot younger than most of the kids here and I wasn’t sure how you would do while I was talking, but you did great.” (M. is average height but tiny with giant eyes so it’s easy to mistake him for younger than he is.)

📚 Why am I obsessed with romance fiction right now?

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 08:45:45 -0400

Last May, I read Mr. and Mrs. Witch by Gwenda Bond, and it made me so happy that I decided to try exclusively reading romance for a while. From May to October, I read 16 romance novels. In October I took a break to read some gothic but quickly came back to romance, finishing out the year having read 22 romance novels and one romance anthology. This year, I continued the pattern. So far, I’ve read 17 romance novels this year. I talk about romance and think about romance a lot of the time. So why?

First, social factors:

Last June, The Good Trade published an article called What Romance Novels Taught Me About Taking Pleasure More Seriously and then in December a follow-up, How to Get Started Reading Romance Novels. This led me to the podcast Fated Mates and I joined their Patreon and Discord because I needed people to talk to about romance besides two of my friends and W.

But that was after I’d already started to read romance more heavily. So why? Why romance?

The obvious reason is that it’s an optimistic genre. Even in dark romance, the author or publisher has, by virtue of calling the book or story romance, promised that the characters who fall in love will end the book either living happily ever after or happy for now. Any problems on the horizon at the end are problems you know they will solve together. (And if you read something that the author or publisher has called romance that doesn’t have this feature, please let everyone know, so they won’t pick that book up expecting a HEA or HFN.) The world is big and scary and full of bad, and it can be comforting to know that you are going into a story where the people will end up with someone(s) who will support them.

Another reason is that romance contains an immense variety of subgenres, which means if you’re a mood reader that you can probably find something you’re in the mood for. You’ve got contemporary, paranormal, historical (with its own subsubgenres based on period and geography), dark romance, fantasy romance, sci-fi romance, romantic suspense, romantic mystery, and many more. Likewise, romance is full of tropes that give books a flavor that make it easy to know if you’re likely to find it interesting: friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, billionaire, forced proximity, sibling’s best friend or best friend’s sibling, second chance, fated mates, fake dating, and again, many more.

It’s also because, like sci-fi and fantasy, romance lets you tackle difficult topics in a way where you know that characters will be supported in working through these. Here is an incomplete list of difficult topics the romance I’ve read since last year has touched on:

anxiety
depression
gang conflict
family illness
chronic illness
homophobia
truly awful parenting
arranged marriage
transphobia
top surgery (difficult because of medical processes described in detail)
war
anti-Muslim harassment
well-meaning people being casually super prejudiced
the cost of a bad reputation

And I tend to read stuff on the lighter side.

And then there are things that are unique about romance: its focus on interiority and emotion, on women’s and non-binary people’s pleasure, the way it places relationships at the heart of stories.

I’m sure there are more reasons, too. Do you read romance? Why?

🗒️ Month Notes, February 2024

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 07:23:41 -0400

Lars-Christian noted that month notes work better than week notes for him due to the cadence of his life, and I think this will be true for me, too. So! I’ll be trying month notes for a little while and reevaluate if they start to feel off.

Early this month was rough, as both M and W had pinkeye. I had respiratory symptoms and felt quite miserable but managed to dodge the accompanying eye infection.

We booked a beach condo for a week vacation this year. For almost 20 years, W and I, and then M when he came along, have spent a week at a beach condo owned by W’s bonus mom Cindy and her sister. When Cindy died, W’s dad inherited her part of the condo. But he hates the beach and Cindy’s sister didn’t go down there much, and the property taxes, bills, and maintenance for the space were very expensive. So they decided to sell it, which meant we needed to find a new place to stay for our beach week.

We had hoped to go with another family and get a big house but that didn’t work out, so we found a condo at a beach a little closer to our home than the old one and have a contract to rent it for a week in June. We’ll see how it goes.

I started doing Leonie Dawson’s 40 Days to a Finished Book course. (If you buy the course through that link, I will receive a commission.) I’m writing a little booklet about how to be a better player in tabletop role-playing games, because there’s a lot of advice out there for game masters but only a little for players. I set a target of 10,000 words total. This means I have a very manageable daily goal of 250 words, which so far I’ve been able to for 20 days. When I hit 5000 words early, I worried I didn’t have anything left to say on the topic. I decided to just freewrite the other 5000 words and try to make it all make sense when I’m done. I can write 250 words in 5 or 10 minutes, so this is a really doable practice that I hope to keep up even after the 40 days are over.

On Valentine’s Day, W and I had an early dinner and coffee together. We began answering The Good Trade’s 99 Questions To Ask Your Partner To Get To Know Them Better. The questions are clearly written for young couples who haven’t been together very long, not couples who have been married for 15 years and together for 25. But they were still fun to answer.

One of M’s school mates from kindergarten and preschool had a maritime-themed birthday party at a local park and that was super fun as well as being an opportunity to catch up with some of those kids’ parents whom I haven’t seen in a while.

W and I saw Fat Ham at Playmakers Repertory Company. It was super fun with a stellar cast. We also went to Clue the Movie at the [Retro Film Series[(https://carolinatheatre.org/series/retro-film-series/), which is always a delight.

I had an eye exam. I learned that my eyesight has only gotten a little worse over the past year. I ordered new glasses that look almost exactly like my old ones except they have a narrower frame width so they should fit better, plus some fun prescription sunglasses.

I played Super Mario Bros 1 through 3 and started Ocarina of Time. W and I have been watching Home Economics and it’s a delight, but it makes me wonder how much TV writers know about how publishing works. I’ve been tearing my way through the Immortals After Dark series at a pace of two books a week and listening to the accompanying episodes of the [Fated Mates[(https://fatedmates.net/) podcast, plus hanging out in the Fated Mates Discord a lot.

I’m almost done organizing our pantry. I’m planning to eat down what we’ve got in the pantry, fridge, and freezer, and then try eating from the Real Easy Weekdays plan.

I think that’s about it for me for February. What have you been up to?

Taking a break from academia

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 10:45:09 -0400

I’m taking a deliberate break from all things academia and academia-adjacent.

I spent the past 2 years working on a big project as the key academic personnel on the project. It’s not done; when my contract ended, I had to hand it off to my colleagues. (We couldn’t extend the contract for administrative reasons.)

I’m sitting on a couple of freelance academic opportunities but as I think about pursuing them, I know it’s just not time yet. I can feel internal resistance and it’s telling me that after being in an academic headspace for more than 8 years, it’s time to do something different for a while.

Do I plan to come back to these freelance gigs and be available for academic contract work in the future? Yes. Do I plan to return to FanLIS and fan studies more broadly after I fill my well? Absolutely! But right now, that’s not where I’m at.

It’s kind of like taking a sabbatical.

🗒️ Week Notes, 2024, Weeks 3 through 5: A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening Are Super Fun

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 12:06:12 -0400

It’s three weeks’ worth of week notes at once!

My son M’s school has a “Day On” on Martin Luther King, Jr. day. They choose a theme for the day and hold a celebration where the whole school community, including parents, is welcome, and then spend the second half of the day on service projects. Our family only did the celebration part of the day this year, but next year I plan for us to help with the part of the day where you sort book donations to Book Harvest. I’m also planning to join the celebration for the choir next year.

The theme for this year was “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” The choir sang 3 songs I love: “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” “Heal the World,” and “Stand By Me.” Middle and high school students read poems they had written. Pauli Murray’s niece and biographer Rosita Stevens-Holsey was the keynote speaker and shared wonderful insight into Rev. Dr. Murray’s life and work. I was so happy to have attended.

At the end of that week, I took a quick overnight trip to Baltimore to present at the American Library Association LibLearnX conference. In the end, my session was less a presentation or workshop and more a conversation, as we only had about 5 people attending. We were able to really customize the conversation to the participants’ interest. My BFF lives near Baltimore, so I got to have dinner with her the night before the presentation and hang out with her after, when we went to the Edgar Allan Poe house and wandered around a cute shopping area.

After I got home from that trip, I was exhausted and then a little bit sick, too. So I rested a lot and had a pretty quiet week.

Then this past week was more quiet time at home and handling administrative stuff like having my car inspected and renewing the registration, rescheduling a dental appointment I canceled due to a migraine, and completing the job application to be the half-time school librarian at M’s school.

It was a good time for consuming culture. I’ve been reading romance novels, The Age of Cage, and How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are. I watched Emily in Paris. I played A Link to the Past, which is phenomenal and deserves its status as a classic, and the Switch remake of Link’s Awakening, which is super fun.

Saturday M developed a nasty case of pinkeye. He’s on his second day home from school and on antibiotics for it and seems to be improving.

That’s it for this post!

📚 Reading Notes: A Quaker Book of Wisdom by Robert Lawrence Smith, Chapter 9, “Education”

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 11:57:17 -0400

…a good school is one that is constantly engaged in self-examination, in improving itself, in becoming wiser in its ability to both teach and inspire.

Smith returns to this idea many times in this chapter. Every school I’ve worked at had some sort of process for this, but Smith says that in a Quaker school, everyone in the school is involved in this process. In the public schools where I’ve worked, there was always a School Improvement Team (PDF). This is basically a committee and it consists entirely of adults. Students aren’t on the SIT. Further, as you might expect in a public school, the success of the School Improvement Team and the School Improvement Plan is evaluated based almost entirely on students’ scores on standardized tests, which to my mind is an incomplete measure of learning.

It’s a school that is intent on turning out good people who will help make a better world.

At the beginning of every school year, M’s teachers have us complete a survey and one of the questions is always about our hopes for the school year. We always answer that we want him to grow into himself and to continue to learn how to be a caring member of our community. I love this idea. While I suspect most teachers in most schools have this in mind as their intention, the systems and structures of compulsory public education, at least in North Carolina when I was working in public schools, tended to focus on performance in a few academic subject areas and compliance with school policies. I like the idea of a whole school taking this approach, rather than only individual teachers.

It’s the soul of a school—its intangible persona, its character, its principles, its daily life over time, the impressions it makes, the efforts it inspires, and the moral authority it possesses—that helps mold a child into an educated, assured, humane, and caring adult.

Yes! Especially the daily life over time: how we spend our moments is how we spend our days is how we spend our years is how we spend our life. The life of a school is in the day-to-day.

At a good school teachers and students are jointly engaged in a search for truth…

This jibes well with a school librarian’s focus on inquiry-driven learning.

Teachers… work to provide a climate of sensitivity to the human condition.

This is so critical. When I was a student teacher and first set foot in my mentor teacher’s classroom, I was appalled by what seemed to me to be an out-of-control class with absolutely no attention paid to Latin, the class’s subject matter. (I was 22 and I like to think I’m less judgy now.) By the end of my four months in student teaching, my perspective had totally transformed: I saw that my mentor teacher was more concerned with supporting her students than with a laser focus on their academic achievement, and that her love and support was a critical foundation before they could have academic success.

Without input from people of differing life experiences and cultures, a school quickly becomes insular and intellectually stagnant.

It seems obvious but it’s absolutely necessary to say.

…moments of silence help students center themselves amidst the hubbub of the school day.

To quote the Carolina Friends School website:

Settling In and Out
We use this Quaker practice of shared silence as a meaningful way to make oneself present in the moment, focus or redirect attention, and create a shared energy and sense of intention with a community.

Back to the book…

Another characteristic of Quaker schools is that they have involved students in community service at all grade levels.

Experimental education is the name of the game in Quaker schools, and they are constantly cooking up new ways of doing things.

And what’s probably my favorite quote from the chapter:

There is no formula for imparting love of learning. Despite new methodologies, there must always be reliance on the old virtues of skills, care, love, patience, and time.

Care, love, patience, and time are all things that the structures of public schools make it hard for teachers to prioritize, though I bet most teachers would love to be able to prioritize them.

🗒️ Week Notes, 2024 Week 2: Zelda II is skippable

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 20:21:03 -0400

It’s time for another round of Week Notes!

Monday morning I had my usual coffee work date with my friend C. I worked on my session for LibLearnX, which is the last bit of work related to my postdoc besides reviewing document drafts as my colleagues finish them.

Tuesday I took M to the dentist for a cleaning. It was a super rainy day, with high winds, so I ended up picking him up early. But we came through the storm okay.

Wednesday, I planned with my LibLearnX co-presenters and as so often happens, we came up with something way better together than anything I could’ve created on my own.

M had musical theater dance class on Thursday and I went to a nearby cafe and puttered in Scrivener with a romance novel spark sheet. Just sitting down and typing really moved me forward, so now I have two characters, each with their own self-doubt, to put in a situation where they can fall in love, build each other up, and help each other grow.

Friday and Saturday we’re very chill days at home, and on Sunday W and I went for lunch at an old favorite diner and ambled around one of our many local independent bookstores before picking up a cookbook I’d ordered online and returning home.

I read two forthcoming releases last week, The Frame-Up by Gwenda Bond and Love Requires Chocolate by Ravynn K. Stringfield. I actually Internet-know both of these authors, Gwenda Bond from way back in our kidlitosphere days circa 2007 and Ravynn because she taught a workshop I took on creative nonfiction for academics. Both books made me happy and I’m reading at a pace of 2 books a week, which is twice as fast as a typical fast reading pace for me. We’ll see how my reading pace changes throughout the year.

By myself I watched It’s Complicated, The Intern, and Heartburn. This is because the main character in Timothy Janovsky’s Never Been Kissed is a film guy who wore a G is for Gerwig shirt from Super Yaki. I decided I wanted to know film better and that just going through the oeuvres of auteurs featured on Super Yaki would be a great way to do it, so I’m starting with Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron.

W and I have been watching Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty together. It’s his third time watching and my first. It’s a lot of fun. John C. Reilly is incredibly winning.

I tried playing Zelda II: The Adventure of Link but I didn’t find it fun. After reading this article in Escapist Magazine, which said

If you’re anything like me, you’re going to die in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. A lot. And chances are you won’t have a great time doing it.

And

If you’re intent on trying it out in 2023, I recommend either playing the SP version on Nintendo Switch that starts you off fully powered up, watching a playthrough on YouTube, or just skipping it…

I decided first to try the SP version, then when that still wasn’t fun, to watch someone else play on YouTube. Even that wasn’t fun, so I skipped ahead and just watched the last couple of fights.

Having done that, I started playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and I’m having a blast with that.

That’s it for this Week Note!

Book Review: The Frame-Up by Gwenda Bond

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 14:32:22 -0400

The thing about Gwenda Bond is that she’ll take your favorite microgenre or trope, mix some magic in, and give you a whole new story to enjoy. Which is exactly what she does with The Frame-Up. She takes an art heist story and adds in magic powers that make people good at their roles: mastermind, hacker, and more.

But Gwenda’s website tagline for a while was “High Concept with Heart,” and even more than the magic, the heart is what really makes The Frame-Up shine. This is a story about a daughter dealing with the fallout of betraying her mother and learning how to be right with herself whether or not her mother ever forgives her.

Here’s the publisher’s description:

A magically gifted con artist must gather her estranged mother’s old crew for a once-in-a-lifetime heist, from the author of Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds.

Dani Poissant is the daughter and former accomplice of the world’s most famous art thief, as well as being an expert forger in her own right. The secret to their success? A little thing called magic, kept rigorously secret from the non-magical world. Dani’s mother possesses the power of persuasion, able to bend people to her will, whereas Dani has the ability to make any forgery she undertakes feel like the genuine article.

At seventeen, concerned about the corrupting influence of her mother’s shadowy partner, Archer, Dani impulsively sold her mother out to the FBI—an act she has always regretted. Ten years later, Archer seeks her out, asking her to steal a particular painting for him, since her mother’s still in jail. In return, he will reconcile her with her mother and reunite her with her mother’s old gang—including her former best friend, Mia, and Elliott, the love of her life.

The problem is, it’s a nearly impossible job—even with the magical talents of the people she once considered family backing her up. The painting is in the never-before-viewed private collection of deceased billionaire William Hackworth—otherwise known as the Fortress of Art. It’s a job that needs a year to plan, and Dani has just over one week. Worse, she’s not exactly gotten a warm welcome from her former colleagues—especially not from Elliott, who has grown from a weedy teen to a smoking-hot adult. And then there is the biggest puzzle of all: why Archer wants her to steal a portrait of himself, which clearly dates from the 1890s, instead of the much more valuable works by Vermeer or Rothko. Who is her mother’s partner, really, and what does he want?

What I loved

The art, honestly. Great descriptions of art and art periods. Dani is a character with a clear love and respect for the art she forges. The heist crew vibes: everybody’s got their role and while Dani is working with her mom’s estranged team, there is still love there between herself and Mia and Elliott, the two other members of the team close to her age. The intense interiority: always seeing inside Dani’s heart, her desire for her mother’s approval, her regret about her past actions. Most of all, Dani’s sweet dog Sunflower.

What I need to warn you about

Not much here, except there are some really garbage parents and their adult kids are dealing with the repercussions of having been raised by such rotten people.

What I wanted more of

I mean, I would read a lot more heists with this crew, so… Sequels?

Who should read this

People who like fantasy set in our world. People who like heists and secrets. People who like paintings. People who like reading about fancy rich folks. People who like reading about Kentucky. People who like border collies.

Book: The Frame-Up
Author: Gwenda Bond
Publisher: Del Rey
Publication Date: February 13, 2024
Pages: 352
Age Range: Adult
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley

And, the answer is ...

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 17:11:21 -0400

Following Alex’s lead, I’m answering some questions.

Best sandwich? I don’t like having to choose but I really like a good roast beef with provolone on a roll. But there are many other excellent sandwiches.

What’s one thing you own that you really should throw out? .

What is the scariest animal? Aside from humans, grizzly bears.

Apples or oranges? Apples, preferably honeycrisp.

Have you ever asked someone for their autograph? I have but I think only at the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Posting Board Parties.

What do you think happens when we die? I like to believe that whatever we each imagine will happen to us is what will happen, that we create our own afterlives. I’m personally planning to be a ghost and haunt my kid and descendants, lovingly.

Favourite action movie? Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Favourite smell? Baking.

Least favourite smell? Rotting flesh.

Exercise: worth it? Yes but it can be hard with chronic illness, if you have chronic pain or post exertional malaise. If you have those, you have to be choosy with how you do it.

Flat or sparkling? Sparkling.

Most used app on your phone? Firefox.

You get one song to listen to for the rest of your life: what is it? A random track from Brian Eno’s Music for Airports.

What number am I thinking of? I don’t know, but I’m thinking of 7.

Describe the rest of your life in 5 words? Underslept reading heart-full mom.

Now, give us your answers.

🗒️ Week Notes, 2024 Week 1: Beautiful dragons in crystal forests

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 10:30:30 -0400

I do so like when other people, like @cygnoir, write week notes, so I thought I’d give it a try.

On New Year’s Day, my little household made our way over to my parents’ house for chili and board games. We played Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, a cute party game. We also played Chutes & Ladders: Marvel Super Hero Squad, because that is the one game M will play by the actual rules.

We watched Beware the Groove, a documentary my brother made about the making of The Emperor’s New Groove. It’s super cool and I’m proud of him. If you like The Emperor’s New Groove, animation, or movies in general, you should try it out.

M was back on campus Tuesday for a day camp before school officially started on Wednesday. Tuesday evening, I attended a webinar about Quaker education. M attends a Quaker school and I really hope to work there, so this was a very valuable session for me to attend.

Wednesday, I had the last team meeting for my postdoc. The report we’ve been working on for a long time is still in progress. My colleagues will be finishing it. (This is a useful example of the impact of funding: the people who wrote the grant had originally written my postdoc as a 3 year postdoc, but when the program officer told them they needed to cut costs in their proposal, they cut the third year. And now there’s no one whose job it is to work on the project full-time anymore, so it has to take a back seat to other projects.)

I’ll be first author on the report whenever it’s actually published, so that’s nice.

Thursday was a quiet day. M resumed his musical theater dance class, which he started only because a friend was doing it but now says he really enjoys.

Friday was another quiet day. Which is good, because Saturday was a big day!

We went to the NC Chinese Lantern Festival. It’s always beautiful, but this year was extra magical because in honor of the Year of the Dragon, there were many beautiful dragons hanging out in crystal forests.

There were also a lot of Monkey King-themed lanterns.

To get a sense of the whole experience, take a look at the online program.

Sunday was another quiet day which was literally sorely needed, as my body didn’t like me asking it to do so much walking around at the festival, so Sunday was a high pain day. (It’s also possible there was some unexpected corn flour in something I ate.)

And that’s week 1 of 2024!

My Reading Year 2023

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 13:26:50 -0400

Some notes on my reading year 2023. I read 47 books. I overwhelmingly read romance, much more than any other genre. I have no regrets about that. There wasn’t a single book this year that stood out as more of a favorite than the rest.

We Could Be So Good is the one that grabbed me from the first sentence.

Mr. & Mrs. Witch is the one that set me on my path of reading mostly romance.

Dept. of Speculation is probably the one I read fastest.

I don’t finish books I wouldn’t recommend, so try whatever on this list looks good to you!

How I talk about books online 📚

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 11:19:16 -0400

In today’s issue of Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders writes about how to fix GoodReads to avoid people review-bombing books to lower their ratings.

I haven’t used GoodReads in a long time but Anders brings up a point that has me wanting to share how I write about books online. Anders shares an anecdote about losing a bunch of star ratings on songs in iTunes and then switching to a simple love/don’t love system, then says:

And I feel like with books, it’s pretty similar. Did you like this book or not? Would you recommend it to your friends? Would you look out for more books by this author in future? The important questions are all yes or no.

And this is how I tend to share books when I’m writing about them quickly.

If I loved a book, I’ll end my short post with “Highly recommend.” If I like it, I’ll just share that I finished it and maybe a brief description. If I don’t like it, I probably didn’t finish it, and I probably won’t post about it at all.

When I write a full review, I share a summary, what I loved, what I wanted more of, what I need to warn you about, and who should read the book. I only write this kind of review about books I would recommend.

Since 2007 I’ve had a policy of only publishing positive reviews on my website and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

📝 Planning Writing Goals with Kate McKean

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 14:50:45 -0400

Kate McKean’s Agents and Books newsletter yesterday includes a flowchart to help you plan writing goals for next year.

I’m in the “I need a new idea” bubble, or rather, I have lots of ideas fragments but I’m not psyched enough to write any of them yet so I want to hoard even more ideas. So my goals are to:

Read more. Sure, I’ve read 41 books this year but I know I can read more. Let’s have a loose, gentle goal of 50, counting audiobooks, comics, kids’ books, everything.
Journal and blog. I’m going to do at least some of Esmé Weijun Wang’s Rawness of Remembering: Restorative Journaling Through Difficult Times. I’ve also got Austin Kleon’s The Steal Like an Artist Journal and Leigh Bardugo’s The Severed Moon. So I’ll look to those for help, and of course I’ll blog, too. I’m not setting a specific blogging goal but let’s say I’m shooting for some form of long-form journaling at least once a week.
Have fun. If I’m doing 1 & 2 and it’s not fun, I’ll figure out how to make it fun.

❤️ The loss of a loved one 🦋

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 11:38:55 -0400

CW: Parental Death

My husband, W., has been blessed to have two mothers: the one who gave birth to him and the one who has been a constant presence since his birth as a friend of his parents and who married his dad after his dad and mom divorced. This bonus mom, as I call her, is named Cindy, and she died last Wednesday after a lengthy and unidentified illness.

Her sister wrote a beautiful obituary for her that does a great job capturing her beautiful spirit. It’s especially hard to lose Cindy right around the holidays, as so much of their magic has been fueled by her beautiful energy and hard work.

I know that I’m in the midst of grieving my dead when they come to me in dreams. I had a dream on Thursday night that my little household was traveling with Cindy (a thing we actually did sometimes, whether in Scotland or South Carolina). It was a super normal travel experience and a super normal dream and I woke happy to have had such a boring dream about her.

I’ve been thinking through little moments that make Cindy who she is (and as she lives on in our hearts it’ll be a while before I use past tense to talk about her), and I might write about it later.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking through all the little holiday things I can learn from her to make this time special.

A timeline of my dissertation inspiration📓📝

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 11:53:17 -0400

For AcWriMoments Day 8, Margy Thomas and Helen Sword encouraged us to trace a lineage of the ideas we work on. I decided to do this with my dissertation because I knew it would be fun, but I didn’t realize how fun.

1984 Kimberly’s mom makes a gorgeous Blue Fairy (from Pinocchio) costume for Kimberly, launching a lifelong delight in dressing up in exquisite costumes (as opposed to whatever’s lying around) and admiring the exquisite costumes of others. Around the same time, Kimberly’s parents take her to the library often.

1988 Kimberly’s dad starts library school. Kimberly hangs out at the library school, a lot. She loves it there.

1994 A guidance counselor who is completely at a loss for what extracurriculars to recommend when she asks Kimberly what she’s into and Kimberly answers, “Reading,” suggests volunteering at the library, so Kimberly does.

1999 W. (then-boyfriend, now-husband) introduces Kimberly to Final Fantasy, a lovely video game series with gorgeous music. O., the then-boyfriend now-husband of one of W.’s housemates, says to Kimberly while they’re in the middle of playing some board game, “You should be a librarian.”

2007 Completely stressed out by being an early career high school teacher, Kimberly starts researching library schools.

2008 W. comes home from work and tells Kimberly that his current boss has inspired him to go to library school so they’re going to library school together.

2009 Kimberly and W. start library school. Kimberly’s advisor is Sandra. Kimberly loves Sandra. Kimberly gets a job as an RA in an outreach program of the School of Education, providing resources and professional development to K-12 educators. (Resources from this department saved her bacon many times when she was a teacher.)

2011 Kimberly gets a job as a school librarian split between two middle schools.

2012 Kimberly’s supervisor from her RA job tells Kimberly, “I’m taking a different job so they’ll be posting this one eventually if you want it.” Kimberly does. The school librarian situation she’s found herself in isn’t what she dreamed of. Eventually Kimberly gets that job and starts working for that outreach program full-time.

2013 Kimberly starts working on projects where she gets to interview teachers about their work. Her office is down the hall from where the School of Ed hosts all of their brown bags and she goes to a lot of them. She decides she wants to pursue a PhD so she can understand what they’re talking about better and maybe publish research about educators’, including school librarians’, good work. She figures she’ll do it part time with the tuition remission she gets as a benefit of her job.

2014 The executive director of the outreach program is fired. (Without cause as far as Kimberly knows.) Kimberly decides that instead of doing the PhD part-time, she’d like to do it full-time, since her program is probably going to be dismantled. She talks to Sandra about the PhD program where she got her master’s in library science and says she wants to work on the library as a place for writing and pop culture engagement. Sandra says there’s a model for this and it’s called Connected Learning. Kimberly applies to the PhD.

2015 Sandra invites Crystle Martin, a scholar of connected learning and leader in the Young Adult Library Services Association, to talk to students at the library school and invites Kimberly to come to the talk and then join them for lunch. Kimberly and Crystle talk about spending way too much time playing video games.

2016 - 2017 Kimberly messes around with different dissertation possibilities. She includes a chapter on gaming and libraries in her comps plan.

2017 Kimberly decides to go to Cosplay America, a costuming convention.

2018 Kimberly starts work on the gaming comps chapter. She attends a Final Fantasy orchestral concert. People have dressed up in gorgeous costumes as characters from the games. They’re so great it kind of makes her want to cry. The next day, she reads Crystle’s dissertation about the information literacy practices of World of Warcraft players. In the conclusion, Crystle suggests that people could replicate her methods to help validate her information literacy model. Kimberly thinks, “I could do that, but with cosplayers!” She bangs out a dissertation prospectus in 2 hours after literal years of hemming and hawing.

2019 Kimberly writes her comps, now with a changed set of chapters. She assembles her committee, including Crystle. She writes a blog post about the process and uses a Final Fantasy screenshot in it. She writes and defends her comps. She writes her proposal in November for AcWriMo. She attends a local con and introduces herself to the cosplay guests, telling them she may contact them to participate in her dissertation.

2020 Kimberly defends her proposal. In freaking February. She has this whole plan that involves going to conventions to talk to cosplayers. AHAHAHAHA. There are no conventions. But she interviews the cosplayers over Zoom.

2020-2021 Kimberly conducts research, scales her design way back, conducts more research, writes, defends, and graduates. She applies for a postdoc at the Connected Learning Lab, where Crystle worked when they first met. She gets the job.

2022-present Kimberly hasn’t touched the cosplay work in a long time but has worked on connected learning in libraries for the whole postdoc.

📝 Revising is hard work, and other thoughts on writing

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 09:59:55 -0400

I’m participating this year in AcWriMo, which is a month of focused academic writing work inspired by NaNoWriMo.

I’m doing this work with support from coach Katy Peplin at Thrive PhD and the AcWriMoments series stewarded by Margy Thomas and Helen Sword.

My current project is something I’m calling The Report: a culminating document sharing what we’ve learned over the course of the grant I’ve been working on with the Connected Learning Lab for the past couple of years.

My first draft was just a very straightforward recitation of the challenges library staff face when they try to implement connected learning and the strategies library staff experienced with connected learning have used to address those challenges.

After I shared that draft with my colleagues, we determined that the challenges and strategies should be integrated.

In trying to write the next draft, I found that all the pieces of the earlier draft were connected in ways that made it hard for me to parse out a linear way to write about them.

So I made a concept map and shared that with my colleagues, asking for their help in creating a structure for the next draft. One of my colleagues reorganized the concepts, creating a clear structure that I thought would work well for the next draft.

So I started the next draft. But as I was writing that, I found that the structure we’d determined for one section didn’t really make sense for that section. So I met with the colleague who has the strongest understanding of the work to talk through the idea of changing the structure of that one section.

After talking with her, I was able to get back to writing.

But all of this revision has been the opposite of flow. Every word felt like I was having to pull up a tree by the roots.

I tend to be a two-draft writer, one draft to get ideas out and then one to make it make sense. I love the feeling of breezily generating new text, something that usually happens after I’ve dug deep into a topic and created a solid and super-detailed outline.

I don’t like revising but if I want my work published anywhere besides my blog, I need to get okay with it.

This whole process has reminded me of the last time I had to revise like this. I banged out a draft of the discussion chapter of my dissertation over the course of one week in a dissertation bootcamp so intense that I couldn’t do much writing for the next two weeks because my brain was fried.

I sent that chapter off to my advisor and one other member of my committee and they came back with a gently worded statement that basically came to, there’s really not much here.

They weren’t wrong, and I wonder if I’d written on my own timeline if that chapter draft would have been better.

But I got through the hard work of revising and ended with a discussion chapter that makes me really proud.

I suppose the best way to get okay with something is to do it a lot, so… I should probably do a lot more revising.

📚 Reading Notes—Collection Management for Youth: Equity, Inclusion, and Learning)—Chapter 1: Why a focus on equity?

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 09:44:23 -0400

Collection Management for Youth: Equity, Inclusion, and Learning

Here’s the publisher’s summary of this book:

With a renewed emphasis on facilitating learning, supporting multiple literacies, and advancing equity and inclusion, the thoroughly updated and revised second edition of this trusted text provides models and tools that will enable library staff who serve youth to create and maintain collections that provide equitable access to all youth. And as Hughes-Hassell demonstrates, the only way to do this is for collection managers to be learner-centered, confidently acting as information guides, change agents, and leaders.

I’m reading an ebook so quotes won’t have page numbers.

⭐ systemic inequalities ⭐

“Advancing equity must be our goal.”

⭐ “Equity means that everyone gets what they need to thrive no matter their identity or zip code. When we focus on equity, our ultimate goal becomes justice.” ⭐ GREAT DEFINITION OF EQUITY

demographic data = useful for trends, not getting to know individual youth & communities

opportunity gap: marginalized youth disproportionately experience it

EVEN IN HIGH-RESOURCE ENVIRONMENTS:

special ed
discipline
school climate

“Libraries are not immune to perpetuating inequities.”

disconnection & exclusion

outsider in the library

behavior control → denied access

LIBRARY MAY BE ONLY SOURCE OF INTERNET ACCESS

< ½ LGBT YOUTH CAN FIND INFO @ SCHOOL

in/accessibility

chilling effect of book challenges

LIBRARY STAFF MUST FACE SYSTEMIC INEQUITIES

GORSKI equity literacy framework

“BE A THREAT TO THE EXISTENCE OF INEQUITY”

RECOGNIZE
RESPOND → immediate term
REDRESS → long-term
CREATE & SUSTAIN bias-free & equitable environments & cultures

STRUCTURAL IDEOLOGY MODEL

it challenges:

deficit view → asset
paradigm → abundance

DEVELOP COLLECTION POLICIES THAT DON’T REPRODUCE INEQUITIES

Focus on what you CAN DO

MOVE BEYOND MAKING SPACE → YOUTH MUST BE ACTIVE PARTICIPANTS & LEADERS

Other reading notes for this book: Introduction

Reading Notes—Collection Management for Youth: Equity, Inclusion, and Learning—Introduction

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 10:43:29 -0400

Collection Management for Youth: Equity, Inclusion, and Learning by Sandra Hughes-Hassell

Here’s the publisher’s summary of this book:

With a renewed emphasis on facilitating learning, supporting multiple literacies, and advancing equity and inclusion, the thoroughly updated and revised second edition of this trusted text provides models and tools that will enable library staff who serve youth to create and maintain collections that provide equitable access to all youth. And as Hughes-Hassell demonstrates, the only way to do this is for collection managers to be learner-centered, confidently acting as information guides, change agents, and leaders.

Roles held by the manager of a learner-centered collection:

change agent
leader
learner
resource guide

Goals of the learner-centered collection manager:

Ground collection development decisions and practices in an equity framework.
Adopt a learner-centered model of collection management that guides collection decisions and demonstrates accountability in the learning process.
Redefine the role of collection manager to support the concert of library staff serving as a teacher and information guide who actively centers equity in their collection development practices.
Apply appropriate strategies and tools for working in the learner-centered, equity-based paradigm that demonstrates knowledge of the learner, recognition of equity issues, familiarity with educational theories, awareness of resources, and attentiveness to the uniqueness of the community the library serves.
Form a community of practice that shares responsibility for defining, developing, and evaluating the development and delivery of library resources to facilitate youth learning and advance equity.

The equity framework:

learner-centered
library staff as teacher
library staff as information guide
educational theories
unique community
community of practice

An equitable access environment reflects:

learner characteristics
best practices in pedagogy
changes in resource knowledge base
partnerships with the broader learning community
commitment to equitable access

📚 It's cozy fantasy season!

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 10:38:54 -0400

I think between reading a few Gothics (The Fall of the House of Usher, The Turn of the Screw, The Haunting of Hill House, The Hacienda) and watching Mike Flanagan shows, I’ve scratched my Gothic itch and it’s now time for me to turn to cozy reading. And because I’m me, that means cozy fantasy.

I first learned about Cozy Fantasy when I heard about Wyngraf Magazine, which I think I learned about in the Signal Boost section of Alasdair Stuart’s The Full Lid, which I learned about because it was a Hugo nominee for best fanzine. And I was looking at the Hugo nominees because those are the awards from the World Science Fiction Convention aka Worldcon, which is mentioned on Wikipedia’s page on fandom as an early and ongoing convention. (Yes, this is an example of how my web wanderings work and how much I love to live the dream of the 1990s.)

The note about Wyngraf talked about fantasy in the vein of The Hobbit and Redwall and I thought it sounded good and like exactly what I needed in a world that has been both personally and globally terrifying for years.

Cozy fantasy is exactly what it sounds like: a cozy mystery with magic instead of murder. (Some cozy fantasy is also cozy mystery.)

Here are some cozy fantasy titles I’ve read in the past few years:

Redwall
The Hobbit (audiobook version narrated by Andy Serkis, highly recommend)
Howl’s Moving Castle
Smith of Wootton Major
Farmer Giles of Ham
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries (this is included on a lot of cozy fantasy lists but it’s a bit high-stakes for me to think it’s super cozy)
The House in the Cerulean Sea

I’ve read the first issue of Wyngraf and am a little ways into the second. I believe I’ve read all the flash fiction on their website. I have the other issues, as well as their book of cozy poetry and a book compiling their flash fiction. I own the ebook of Bard City Blues. I’m currently debating whether to also buy the paperback. (Leaning toward yes.)

Cozy is a vibe: good food, good friends, low stakes. Things like opening a coffee shop or hunting for the tavern cat who’s gone missing (he’s fine, just stuck somewhere). It’s the fantasy version of a Hallmark holiday movie.

Want to join me in reading some?

Photo by Pavan Trikutam on Unsplash

On visiting Paris 🇫🇷

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 08:59:32 -0400

I’ve been obsessed with Paris as long as I can remember. Maybe it’s because I was born on Bastille Day. Maybe I read Madeline at an early age. Maybe it didn’t get into full swing until I saw a kid perform Music of the Night from The Phantom of the Opera in full costume at a school concert in fourth grade.

Whatever the origin of this obsession, I feared when I finally got to travel to Paris this past spring as I accompanied my husband on his Fulbright Award travel, I would discover that Paris wasn’t for me. After a long day of travel on the Eurostar from London, carrying full suitcases on escalators and stairs, and going the wrong way on the RER, while my 6 year old complained most of the trip, I was exhausted, sweaty, and cranky.

But when I stepped onto the street out of the RER station, all of that faded into the background. Paris immediately took my breath away. The Hausmann architecture. The lights. The Art Nouveau vibes of the Printemps department store building. I felt like I had found my heart’s true home.

We stayed in a nearby garden city, Le Vésinet, for two weeks. Every day, when we walked home from the train station after going into the city, we stopped in at a boulangerie that was on our way home and picked up fresh baguettes and pain de campagne. We went to the Jardin du Luxembourg and my son sailed a boat on their big pond. We toured the Palais Garnier, where The Phantom of the Opera is set.

The whole place exceeded my every expectation and I eagerly look forward to going back.

Sparking and Sustaining Connected Learning through Libraries: Insights and Questions at the Connected Learning Summit

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 12:40:51 -0400

I’ll be leading and participating in a roundtable at the Connected Learning Summit at the end of October. Here’s the description of my session:

Over the past several years, the Institute of Museum and Library Services has funded multiple projects aimed at promoting connected learning through libraries and building staff capacity to integrate CL into library teen services. In this session, leaders from four of these projects (Transforming Teen Services for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion; Transforming Teen Services: Train the Trainer; Future Ready with the Library: Connecting with Communities for College and Career Readiness Services; and ConnectedLib) will share insights from their work and discuss what the next steps are for sparking and sustaining connected learning through libraries. Roundtable participants will discuss the importance of relationships in and beyond the library for building connected learning-based library services, the role of library administration in creating the conditions in which connected learning services thrive, and how communities of practice can support library staff in collective knowledge-building. Roundtable participants will share their insights, discuss key questions about the future of connected learning through libraries, and have a facilitated conversation with attendees.

My fellow roundtablers include Linda Braun of The LEO Group, Mega Subramaniam of the University of Maryland College of Information Studies, Katie Davis of the University of Washington Information School, and Leah Larson of the University of Minnesota Extension. Amanda Wortman, Research and Evaluation Manager at Digital Promise, contributed to this work, too, though she has a conflict for the roundtable time.

Here are more details about the summit:

Registration is open for the 2023 Connected Learning Summit, happening virtually October 26-28! Join a gathering of innovators harnessing emerging technology to expand access to participatory, playful, and creative learning.

With a unique focus on cross-sector connections and progressive and catalytic innovation, our summit brings together leading researchers, educators, and developers. Our mission is to fuel a growing movement of innovators harnessing the power of emerging technology to expand access to participatory, playful, and creative learning. We offer a variety of sponsorship opportunities for organizations to demonstrate their commitment to connected learning while aligning with their goals and initiatives.

Our program will start on October 26 with a pre-conference day for conversation around topics of shared interest, including affinity group meetings, as well as meetups for Research Paper and Showcase contributors. The Main Conference, on October 27-28, will include keynote talks from Dr. Luci Pangrazio and Diana Nucera AKA Mother Cyborg, plenary sessions, and workshops and roundtables organized by CLA partners. The majority of the event will be programmed during work hours in North America, but will also include some programming in the morning hours of Asia and Australia.

CLS2023 will be entirely online, using the Whova platform. Don’t miss out on early access to our platform starting in early October, with showcase and research paper presentations available for viewing prior to the summit and session sign-ups starting in mid-October!

For more information, please visit our website and sign up for updates about the Connected Learning Summit.

About the Connected Learning Summit

CLS was first convened in 2018 with the mission to fuel a growing movement of innovators harnessing the power of emerging technology to expand access to participatory, playful, and creative learning. It was launched as a merger between three community events with this shared vision and values: the Digital Media and Learning Conference, the Games+Learning+Society Conference, and Sandbox Summit. With a unique focus on cross-sector connections and progressive and catalytic innovation, the event brings together leading researchers, educators, and developers. The hosting and stewardship of the event has continued to evolve in tandem with the changing conditions of the global pandemic. The UC Irvine’s Connected Learning Lab, MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education Program and Education Arcade were the founding hosts of the event. As we have moved online and have become a more international event, we are expanding our roster of partners and hosts.

📚 Books about Freelance Writing

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 09:50:50 -0400

Originally posted on LinkedIn:

One of the tools in my toolbox for carrying me through times between big projects is freelance writing. As I expect to ramp this piece of my work up when my current contract (which is full-time work) ends, I’ve been revisiting my resources to help me with this.

Here are 3 books I use for this:

📕 The Freelance Academic by Katie Rose Guest Pryal
📗 How to Get Started in Freelance Science Writing by Sheeva Azma
📘 Win at Freelance Writing by Gertrude Nonterah, Ph.D.

What are your favorite resources?

LinkedIn introduction

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 07:02:55 -0400

I’ve been experimenting with posting on LinkedIn more frequently and while some of my posts there are posted at my domain first, others are specific to LinkedIn. But in the interest of owning my data (unlike Starfleet, who does not own Data), I thought I’d repost those here at my site.

Originally posted on LinkedIn:

Hi there!

I have a lot of new followers, so I thought it’d be a good time for an introduction post.

👋🏻True things about my life that shape my work: I’m a mom of an almost-7-year-old. I live with multiple chronic illnesses. I’m the daughter of parents who have multiple chronic illnesses between them.

💗 Work that lights me up: facilitating learning, either for young people or adults who work with them, and fostering creativity (for anybody).

📆 My perpetual 5 year plan: do work that’s interesting and important. Right now, that’s research to help library staff leverage youth interests for relationship-building and creating academic, civic, and professional opportunities for youth.

◀️ Previously, on Kimberly’s work: blogging about qualitative research methods, researching how cosplayers interact with information, making university makerspaces more inclusive, training librarians and educators on racial equity, leading university outreach to K-12 educators, being librarian for middle schoolers, teaching Latin.

❓ What’s next? Hoping to be lower school librarian at my kid’s school, so I’m refreshing my knowledge on collection management and ed tech. Continuing to freelance for businesses interested in qual research, K-12 outreach, and making the Internet better.

🛝 For fun: Always reading (on a romance tear since May), playing video games, especially couch co-op with my kid & spouse. In pre-kid & pre-pandemic times, community theater and improv.

🫵🏻 Your turn! What should I know about you?

I might not eat this whole baguette today.

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 09:48:50 -0400

When we stayed in Le Vésinet, a suburb of Paris, there was a boulangerie on our walk home from the train station. Every time we went into the city, we would stop there and grab a baguette (and usually some other things, too) to have back at the house. I recently got homesick for Paris and found Sophie Nadeau’s blog post, Here’s How to Recreate the Paris Experience in Your Home.

This morning, in order to follow her recommendation to eat a typical French breakfast, I went to Guglhupf, which makes excellent baguettes (but is technically a German bakery) and bought 2.

I don’t know if I’ll polish one off today or not.

Farewell, Wednesday. 🐈‍⬛💔

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 08:17:57 -0400

CW: Pet death

When we brought our kitties home last week, Wednesday had a little nasal discharge. The person at the front desk was all, “Yeah, that’s an upper respiratory infection, they’re super common in shelters, just get her to the vet and they’ll give you some antibiotics.”

I couldn’t get her into the vet until Monday. By Monday, she had lost a third of her bodyweight. She was severely dehydrated. She was constipated. The vets gave me a bunch of (not inexpensive) meds and gave her subcutaneous fluids. Later in the day, I got the discharge notes and they said I should bring her back the next day for more fluids if she didn’t improve in the night.

I took her back, they gave her fluids, and I asked if we could give her fluids at home. They said yes, told me what to do to feed her from a syringe (it’s called trickle feeding), and told me they didn’t know if she was going to make it.

Yesterday, W’s mom came over and we gave her fluids twice. I fed her with a syringe every two or three hours. I gave her all her meds.

This morning, M went in to check on the kittens and when I went in, I saw that she had died in the night.

This is, of course, very sad. But it’s also something I’ve been prepared for for a few days. I know I did everything I could for her. I also know, especially after consulting with the vet when I took her for fluids a couple day ago, that the shelter did wrong by her by not only not treating the respiratory infection but also by going ahead and giving her a bunch of vaccines and spaying her while she was sick.

I know the shelter is struggling, too, so I’m not angry.

But damn. What a set of events to conspire against a little kitten.

I only knew her a little and her personality faded as she got sicker, but she was a fierce, adventurous girl.

On the other hand, her brother Midnight, who also came home with an upper respiratory infection but much less severe, is thriving. We’ll be giving him lots of love and attention.

On twenty-five years of being together

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 06:36:23 -0400

Twenty-five years ago tonight, W. and I went on our first date. (Yes, we were young.) We went to see a cross-cast production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Afterward, we went to Ben and Jerry’s.

W. and myself after my senior prom, 1999

I was going to catalog a bunch of memories of those early days together here, but I think I want to keep them in my heart. And, of course, as heady as that first rush of falling in love is, it’s the time after it that builds to an anniversary this big.

It feels like and is a long time, 25 years. It’s wild because it doesn’t seem to me that we’ve been together that long because how could I still find someone so incredibly delightful after all that time? How is it that every pun he makes still cracks me up? That the way he moves through the world, like literally physically carries himself, can still bring a flush to my cheeks? What miracle is this, to get to spend this much time with someone so great?

It’s a choice every day to wake up and keep loving each other. To show up, to have patience when we’re not on the same page. To know that even when we’re not on the same page, we’re on the same team. And it’s a blessing, a gift from whomever gives us cosmic gifts, to have the chance to make that daily choice.

We’re celebrating a quarter century by taking M. to the animal shelter to pick out two kittens to add to our family.

Bookstore Romance Day Recommendations 📚♥️

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 20:10:42 -0400

We’re just a few days out from Bookstore Romance Day!

A couple things to know about romance novels:

First, they always end with the love interests having either a happily ever after or a happy for now.

Second, they range in smuttiness from super sweet with hardly any physical intimacy, to quite explicit. But the emotions are always the core of the story, not the smut.

Here are some of my favorite romance reads. Pick some up at your favorite indie bookstore!

Mr. and Mrs. Witch by Gwenda Bond. Like Mr. & Mrs. Smith but with a lady witch and her dude witch hunter fiance. World travel, intrigue, blisteringly hot.

The Widow of Rose House by Diana Biller. Gilded Age, haunted house, widow unfairly subjected to scandal, cute inventor man, fairly steamy.

Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin. Pride & Prejudice but everyone lives in Toronto, is Muslim, and is Indian or Indian-Canadian. Sweet, not even kisses until close to the end.

Hana Khan Carries On by Uzma Jalaluddin. You’ve Got Mail but with halal restaurants instead of bookstores. Everyone lives in Toronto, is Muslim, and is Indian or Indian-Canadian. Sweet, not even kisses until close to the end.

Red, White, & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. Transatlantic shenanigans where the son of the president of the US hates and then loves the spare prince of England. Very hot, a little explicit but not much, super witty, unputdownable. Read if you watched the movie but wanted more. (Skip the movie if you read it and will be disappointed that they had to combine or change characters and drop a lot of detail to make it work for the screen.)

The Neighbor Favor by Kristina Forrest. A publishing assistant corresponds with her favorite author, who stopped writing fiction after his book about black elves didn’t sell much and his publisher closed. He ends up being her neighbor and they fall in love. Pretty steamy.

If you’re more of an audiobook person, see if you can support your local indie bookstore via Libro.fm.

📚 Research methods in Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 05:18:49 -0400

📚 I am a very specific kind of nerd. In this book, set in 1909, a scholar studying faeries says she’s going to use naturalistic observation and ethnographic interviews as her research methods. I immediately thought this was anachronistic, because I knew Naturalistic Inquiry wasn’t published until 1985.

I was wrong. It’s not anachronistic, but it does show that Dr. Wilde is using cutting edge methods. While ethnography was first developed as a science in the 18th century, naturalistic observation wasn’t formalized until the turn of the 20th century.

So. Who cares? Well, me, because I’m a qual nerd. But I’m also a book nerd, so I feel like Wilde’s choice of methods reveals something about her as a character.

The way she writes about her research shows that she thinks of herself as a natural scientist, observing faerie behavior much as one would observe animal behavior. At the same time, the questions she’s asking and the way she treats her research “subjects” (a term that isn’t cool to use now but is absolutely what you’d use in 1909) shows that she can’t help but treat her research as social research, because surprise! in her world, faeries are people, not animals.

(What distinguishes people from animals? I’d say for Wilde’s purposes, speech and self-awareness.)

And now that I’ve written 200+ words about an imaginary scientist’s research methods, I should probably get back to bed.

📚 Finding my throughline: Library enthusiast 💻

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 14:07:01 -0400

I recently listened to Katie Rose Guest Pryal on Camille Pagán’s podcast, You Should Write a Book, talking about how she found the throughline in her work and life. (Just listen to her articulate it on the podcast. I am afraid if I try to sum it up, I’ll get it wrong.)

At the time I listened to it, I was like, “I don’t know what mine is. Maybe I’ll never find it. Waaaah!”

But as I sat and let the idea marinate for a while, and I think I’ve figured it out.

I recently bought the above sticker and several other library-themed stickers, as well as a Read Free or Die t-shirt, from its creator.

One of the possibilities I was considering for after my postdoc was going back to being a school librarian. I don’t think that one’s going to pan out, but it did sort of launch me in the direction of identifying my throughline.

In May, several folks working on different grants funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services, including myself, met and talked about what we’d learned from our work and what our capacity was for working on connected learning in libraries moving forward. All of the other academics indicated that they had to move on to other work, which might incorporate connected learning, but would not focus on it.

I found myself heartbroken.

This is what I want to work on. And nobody else, nobody with an institutional affiliation, was going to be able to work on it anymore?

Well.

Over the course of many weeks, I decided that I would still work on it. That I would find institutional partners who were willing to do a little bit of the work, so that I don’t have to have an institutional affiliation myself to get the work funded, but that I would be happy to do the bulk of the work so long as I could get a consultant’s fee for doing it. Enough to pay my student loans, mostly.

I’m in the process of refining this vision.

But the throughline, I’ve got that now.

Fine, it needs refinement, too, but here’s the basic idea:

My work builds libraries’ capacity to facilitate learning and connect with their communities. The two modes I use to do this are research and professional development.

This describes so much of what I’ve done for the past 8 years. And more than that, it describes what I want to do going forward. It’s expansive enough for me to take on a variety of projects, and narrow enough that I can continue to establish my areas of expertise and grow my network.

What’s your throughline?

C'est mon anniversaire!

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 06:11:25 -0400

It’s my birthday!

As I’m 42, I understand that according to Douglas Adams, I myself am the answer to life, the universe, and everything. (I am the one I’ve been waiting for all of my life.)

The person I wanted to be at 40 is the person I wanted to be at 41 is the person I want to be at 42:

I want to be a loving and mostly gentle mother.
I want to take care of my own body, including making clothes built to fit it.
I want to keep trying new things and growing as a self-employed person.
I want to be aware of my impact on the earth and do what I can to make it gentle.

Belated Travel Blog: Into Amsterdam for the First Time

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 13:54:59 -0400

Our first foray into Amsterdam besides going to the airport was heading to the International Newcomers office at the World Trade Center (right by the Amsterdam Zuid train station) for our immigration documents. We didn’t really see much of the city that day BUT!

We did decide to first go to Van Stapele Koekmakerij and pick up some of their cookies, which are so good and so famous that they have a line waiting every day and when they run out of cookies, they close. (Think Magnolia Bakery circa 2009.) We ordered ours in advance. You go to their shop which is in between Singel and Spui, ring a doorbell, and a very kind person squeezes out past the crowd waiting in the shop and through the doorway and asks for your order number. Then they bring out your order, packaged in either a cute box or beautiful tin and slipped in a lovely bag. It’s best to eat the cookies right away, as they’re filled with a cream that is best eaten warm and gooey. (Big thanks to Jonathan Stephens, who gave us this recommendation when my friend Whitney asked him for suggestions of things to do with a kid in Amsterdam.)

Going to Van Stapele allows you to get a lovely glimpse of the Amsterdam you think of Amsterdam as being, if you have any expectations of Amsterdam at all. You climb up the stairs from the Rokin metro station and spread before you are rows of 5 story, narrow houses all smushed together along a canal’s edge, curving toward the horizon. It’s not the most touristy part of Amsterdam, but it’s touristy-adjacent. There are plenty of “coffee shops” (like if you had to consume the marijuana you get at a dispensary before you actually leave) and the smell of Amsterdam, i.e., a scent that will give you a contact high, greets you wafting out from at least a couple of doors on every block. (It was almost weird to not smell this anymore once we left Amsterdam.)

Then we did head to IN Amsterdam and that was… not the most interesting process.

Did we do all that on the same day? Now I’m not even sure. We were planning to. I think that’s what happened.

Our next time in the city was when my sister M.E. and I took M. to Nemo Science Museum, also recommended by Jonathan Stephens and every list of kids’ activities in Amsterdam ever. This was fun, with giant gorgeous rainbow twirlers hanging down from the ceiling and an incredible chain reaction demonstration that was like a giant Rube Goldberg machine. The person running this demonstration took a quick poll of the audience to determine how many English speakers were there. As there weren’t many of us, he conducted most of his demonstration in Dutch, which gave us a chance to practice the little bit of Dutch we managed to learn in the months before we traveled. M. loved this. The museum had other interesting exhibits, including a makerspace and an area dedicated to human sexuality.

There were a lot of transit strikes while we were in the area, and we could never be sure if the bus running from Aalsmeer to Amsterdam would be running at a particular time during the strikes, so on those days we tended to just stick to places that were walkable from the house.

Next time: a Valentine’s Day date in Amsterdam!

Belated Travel Blog: Aalsmeer

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 17:02:09 -0400

I loved Amsterdam almost immediately, at first because of how the major roads are laid out. Buses have their own two lanes, totally separate from the car lanes, and then bikes have their own lanes, too. This isn’t true on the smaller roads, but it is on the big major arteries. We got off the plane and managed to figure out the trains eventually (at first I didn’t understand how tapping in and out worked, so I had to work that out but I got it eventually) and while having the luggage on the bus was stressful, it was otherwise a perfectly pleasant bus ride. The house was not as close to the bus stop as I expected, I think because when the bus route changed, they probably changed which stop they used. But that was still fine, and a cat greeted us as we turned down Seringenstraat. (Van Cleeffkade was the big road nearby where the bus stop was.)

The cat walked us all the way home to Weteringstraat 6, and we also saw a lot of adorably painted bricks on the sidewalk. It seems that these were painted by students at the primary school nearby. (Education attendance law is super different in Amsterdam than the US. I think it’s compulsory from age 4+, and we got a scary letter just a couple of weeks before we were planning to leave Amsterdam asking us to share the information about where we had enrolled Michael at school. But we hadn’t. But based on my poking around it seemed that if he was enrolled in a school in the US, which he was, then it wouldn’t be a problem. So we told them that he was, and we didn’t hear from them anymore.)

We were one block from a canal. The canals are the other thing that made me fall in love with Amsterdam. So much water! It’s funny to think that I was positively indifferent toward Amsterdam when Will decided that’s the school he was going to ask to sponsor him for the Fulbright, versus how much I came to love it once we were there. (And funnier still that as much as I loved it, I loved almost each place we came to after it more.)

The house at Weteringstraat 6 is a townhouse with a narrow staircase, 3 bedrooms (one teeny tiny and not unlike a walk-in closet), a lovely patio, a big kitchen with eating area, and a nice living room. The living room fireplace was plugged up and the TV sat in front of it.

One of the big things about visiting lots of different houses in the course of a few months (I believe we stayed in 7 total, including our short trip to Cologne) is that you have to re-learn how to use the appliances everywhere, and of course if you’re in a country where English isn’t the official language, you better hope the Google Translate on your phone can help you figure out what the text on the appliance says. (What a blessing Google Translate is, though!)

Weteringstraat 6 is two blocks away from an Albert Heijn grocery store, likewise to a drug store (Kruidvat) and a department store (HEMA), also near a discount store called Action that felt sort of like a Dollar Tree or Big Lots without the furniture, a little farther from LIDL, around the corner from an Indonesian/Indian restaurant, and about half a block away from a chocolate shop. There were a lot of other businesses and shops nearby, but those are the ones we tended to frequent.

We were also a short walk away from a working windmill, which we toured. We went all the way to the top and got to see the mill working and the windmill’s wings or sails outside.

The nearest playground was clearly for toddlers and Michael found it disappointing. There were a couple of better playgrounds for him, but they were a 20+ minute walk away. One was in a little neighborhood and the other was on the shore of the Westeindeplassen, a lake, at a little spot called Surfeiland. There was also a cute little greenway nearby and we could stand on a bridge there and watch ducks swim along the canal. There’s a watertoren (Water tower) on the Westeindeplassen that was really cool, but we never went inside. There’s an escape room inside it but you have to climb the 200ish stairs to play. The top wasn’t even open because of some birds that lay their eggs there. Peregrine falcons, that’s what it was.

Every time we went for a walk in Aalsmeer, we seemed to run into at least three cats. I made a zine about the cats of Aalsmeer.

More about Amsterdam itself soon!

Where have I been?

Sun, 28 May 2023 13:35:54 -0400

I like Manton’s Where have I been post and have had a pretty significant change in where I’ve visited since the start of the year, so I thought I’d make my own list.

As for what counts:

If I simply passed through in a car, train, or bus, it doesn’t count. If I was only there at an airport for a layover, it doesn’t count.

Everything else counts.

7 Countries:

United States
The Netherlands
Germany
Scotland
Ireland
England
France

14 States:

Arizona
California
Florida
Georgia
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maryland
New York
North Carolina
Ohio
Pennsylvania
South Carolina
Tennessee
Virginia

Quand même

Sat, 20 May 2023 11:10:32 -0400

A while back I said I was going to get obsessed with Sarah Bernhardt (I seem to have said it somewhere other than my own website ☹️) but never followed through. But today I went to the Sarah Bernhardt exhibition at the Petit Palais and now I’m recommitting myself to this plan.

If you want to read about the exhibition, here are a couple articles:

Did you know Sarah Bernhardt was a goth multipotentialite? She acted, directed, sculpted, painted, wrote, ran a theatre, and led charity work. She had herself photographed in a coffin and was super into bats. And she was friends with Oscar Wilde. And she kept acting even after having her leg amputated and began her film career at age 56. I love her.

Content Warning: Suicide

Wed, 10 May 2023 15:48:24 -0400

There’s an AP news piece confirming what I suspected when I first saw Manton’s post about Heather Armstrong’s death.

Heather Armstrong, also known as dooce, was a prolific personal blogger, called “queen of the mommy bloggers,” a writer of books, a person who lived with depression and alcoholism. She was an early and high-profile example of someone who lost her job because of her blog. Her episode of The Hilarious World of Depression is one of my favorites. I didn’t read her blog consistently at all but I definitely read it both in some of its earliest days and in the past couple of years. She has been an influence on me without me even realizing it.

Armstrong leaves behind two children.

A little over sixteen years ago, my friend Sherrie died by suicide. It sent me into a big anxious spiral. Sherrie left behind a four-year-old son.

When my brother was a baby or toddler and I was fourteen or fifteen (and my sister was eight or nine), my mom had untreated hypothyroidism, pernicious anemia, and depression. She had suicidal ideations. She later told me that she didn’t act on them because my brother needed her. She believed my sister and I would have been fine.

We would not have been fine.

Even though I know that she was listening to the lies depression tells, I felt angry hearing that we were not enough to stay alive for.

Depression makes me so angry. Suicide makes me so angry.

I, too, live with depression. It’s usually in remission.

Every day, I choose to live. Most of all for my son, but also for myself, for the rest of the family. I think about how angry I am when I hear someone has died by suicide. I think about how I don’t want the people I love to feel that anger. I think about how I don’t want them to be angry at me.

I don’t have a strong conclusion for this post. Depression is bullshit and I wish nobody ever had to deal with it.

Response to Charlie Jane Anders's "What the Universal Translator Tells Us About Exploring Other Cultures"

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 04:11:55 -0400

🔖📝📚📺🍿 Read What the Universal Translator Tells Us About Exploring Other Cultures by Charlie Jane Anders (Happy Dancing newsletter).

Anders talks about the way a universal translator gives us shortcuts to understanding other cultures that don’t really show how hard it is to actually understand another culture.

She offers a lot of examples of this and asks,

How is it that Han Solo understands Chewbacca, but doesn’t speak Wookiee himself? And vice versa?

It’s been a long time since I was getting my Master of Arts in teaching and had to take a course on how Language Acquisition happens (almost 20 years), but I recall that we tend to understand much more of a language than we can speak, and I’ve certainly found that to be true recently.

For W’s Fulbright, we spent two months in the Netherlands, and had learned some very basic Dutch using Duolingo before heading over there. I often didn’t understand what people were saying, but I always understood more of what they were saying than I could ever speak myself.

Our first week there, some young people overheard my son saying his favorite Dutch word, “kat,” on the bus. They asked us about our being Americans and then one of them wanted to know if we were full of “kattenkwaad.” We didn’t know this word, and the person who asked didn’t know English well enough to explain it, but his friend tried.

I asked if it meant behaving like a cat, and he indicated not exactly. He tried to explain by example: pushing the stop button on the bus, then not getting off when the bus stopped.

“Oh, like, pranks!” I said.

“Yes, like pranks.”

“Mischievous,” my sister suggested. He wasn’t sure about that one.

Weeks later, I found this book in the shop a short walk from our house:

Google translates this title as “First Aid for Mischief: The Survival Guide for Cat Parents.”

I don’t think it captures the sense entirely, based on our bus conversation, but it’s hard to be sure.

It's over now, the music of the night.

Sun, 16 Apr 2023 11:15:01 -0400

I first encountered music from The Phantom of the Opera when I was 9 years old. I had taken a lip syncing class, because the Leon County, FL gifted program in 1990-91 was awesome, and at the performance where the most effective lip syncers gave a performance, a boy lip synced “Music of the Night,” complete with tux, cape, mask, and hat. (I was not selected for this performance, because the teacher said my performance of “Material Girl” showed that I cared more about the look than about lip syncing well, and she wasn’t wrong.)

I was immediately in love - with the song, with the costume, in my imagination with the lip syncing boy (who had been in a different class from me and who I hadn’t met nor would ever meet).

My mom promptly added the original cast recording to her next Columbia House order.

And the whole show was much bigger than that one song, endearing itself to me more than “Music of the Night” ever could have to me alone.

I stayed obsessed with the Phantom of the Opera. I read Gaston Leroux’s original novel. I read Susan Kay’s Phantom (highly recommend). I read The Phantom of Manhattan (fun but I recommend it not as highly). I went to see it when it came to Raleigh on tour. (1993, I think.) I played the computer game, Return of the Phantom.

When I met W in 1998, our mutual love of Phantom of the Opera was one of the things we first bonded over. That October, I hosted a costumed sing-along of it at my house. He was the Phantom and I was Christine. We did the same thing the following year.

We saw the show together when it came on tour. We saw it when they did a movie theater cast of the show in 2011.

Our son, M, has listened to the first act with me. We looked at The Complete Phantom of the Opera book together as we listened. He was very interested.

Next month, I hope to visit the Palais Garnier and see the places and things that I have only seen in pictures and my imagination so far: the grand staircase, the chandelier, box five.

The Phantom of the Opera has its last Broadway performance today. It’s been hugely important to me, even though I’ve never seen it there. I’m so glad it ran for so long. I know we haven’t seen the last of it in the US.

Turning My Dissertation into a Book in the Open

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 05:52:31 -0400

It’s been almost two years since I defended my doctoral dissertation. Before it was written, an editor had expressed interest in it. After it was written, I was very tired. I just couldn’t touch it. But we are in a critical moment for information literacy, and I think my research has some good contributions to make, so I’m going to start writing a book proposal.

For this project, I will be opening up my process and my reflections but not the content of the book proposal (and, if I get a contract, the book) itself. I’m starting by reading (like I always so). I’m going to read about how to turn a dissertation into a book and I’m also going to get myself up to speed on the FanLIS literature.

Won’t you join me?

Blogging as letters to our future selves

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 01:55:56 -0400

I blog for a lot of reasons. One of them is because blogging is a little like writing letters to your future self.

My current research contract (technically a postdoc) ends in early January. I constantly agonize over what to do next.

But it turns out past me knows what I want to do next. What both past and present me want to do is something I’m still figuring out how to turn into an income.

High Pain Day: Oh yeah, I'm disabled! I had forgotten.

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 22:51:29 -0400

I had my first high-pain day since we came to Europe yesterday (or today, if you’re in the US when I’m writing this).

I think I must have eaten something with cornmeal in it, because my joints and muscles were (and still are, though less so) sore from the moment I woke up.

It was a rough time to walk around Cologne in the cold and rain. I know I complained about the pain often, and I really appreciate my sister, her husband, and my friend Kessie having such patience with me.

We’re in Cologne for another day and I hope if I rest now, I’ll have a better time.

This is such a classic variable disability/chronic illness scenario. Sometimes you’re walking around Aalsmeer in 40 degree weather with no problems, and sometimes you ache with every step and even if you’re lying down. It’s easy to forget you’re disabled at all, until it isn’t.

The tricky thing is that you need rest, but if you’re in pain, it’s hard to sleep.

I'm a piler-filer. Who are you?

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 10:20:19 -0400

Austin Kleon blogs about pilers and filers, a dichotomy/spectrum he learned about reading Temple Grandin’s book, _Visual Thinking _, in which Grandin discusses Linda Silverman’s work:

In a presentation about the differences in learning styles, Silverman flashes a slide showing a person with a tidy file cabinet and a person surrounded by messy piles of paper. The “filer” and the “pilers,” to use her terms. You probably know which one you are. What does it say about the way you think?

Kleon says:

All of these “versus” type situations can be rethought as spectrums and/or creative tensions. There are times when I want to access that sequential part of my brain and bring order to things, and filing does that, but there are other times I want to access my visual brain, and piles help.

I am my father’s daughter, which means I’m a piler-filer.

Both my dad and I often have stacks that look like a mess to other people. But when I was a teacher, my colleagues marveled at my ability to run exactly what I needed from one of these piles within seconds.

I also had immaculate file cabinets full of things like student paperwork. I love a label maker.

For me and for my dad, piles are for current projects and files are for reference materials and archives. If something goes into a file before we’re done with it, it ceases to exist until an external event prompts us to track it down, by which point it may be too late for us to have done what we needed to do with it.

.
This is a panorama of my desk when I was managing editor at LEARN NC. The stacks on the desk and in the standing file were projects in-progress. I filed finished projects in the drawers in the file cabinet/snack station on the left side of the desk.

So. We’re piler-filers. Are you one, the other, or a combination?

How a post ends up on my blog

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 17:46:00 -0400

Hi friends.

I wanted to take a moment to share my blogging “process,” which I put in scare quotes because it’s not very refined.

First, I have a thought or encounter something to which I have a response and decide I want to share that thought/response.

Then, I open up Google Docs and type what I want to share into a file called “Current Blog Post Draft.” I mainly do this to avoid losing a post because of a browser or app crash.

I sometimes read over it before posting. Sometimes I post right away.

My posts aren’t reviewed by an editor or even a beta reader. They go out fresh, raw, and often flawed in either form or content. The ideas are sometimes half-baked. I’m sometimes writing in the heat of emotion. I’m going to be wrong sometimes. Perhaps often.

Blogs are tools for thinking. As such, the thoughts expressed in them will not always be our most polished.

This is a personal blog, not a professional publication. I don’t mean for it to be anything but a personal blog and portfolio.

Thanks for reading it.

Quiet Time in Aalsmeer

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 12:23:02 -0400

Our second week in the Netherlands has been quiet so far. Exactly a week after we got here, I came down with a cough that has developed into a pretty standard respiratory virus. The COVID self-test was negative. This wasn’t a surprise because the rate of infection here is vanishingly small. Aalsmeer has about 32,000 inhabitants. One of them has tested positive this week.

Meanwhile in Amsterdam, 13 out of about 903,000 people reported positive tests last week.

For the purposes of comparison, that’s 1.2 cases per 100,000 people over 7 days. At home, there were 153 new cases per 100,000 people last week.

I know ground water numbers are more reliable but I struggle to interpret them, so this is what I use to determine risk.

So, it’s probably not COVID given the low incidence of COVID here and the negative test.

I’ve still felt pretty crappy, so I’ve been sleeping a ton. ME, M, and I ventured out to the Grote Poel (the large pool) of the Westeindeplassen. The humidity outside really helps my breathing but I have to be careful not to overexert myself.

Today both ME & M are feeling poorly.

In the meantime, W has been into the city a couple times and loved exploring. I’m looking forward to getting the whole family there next week once we’re all back on our feet. It always takes at least an hour to get there from the village.

(When we booked the house, there was a bus that went directly to the airport train station but they changed the routes right before we came so it doesn’t run anymore. This adds one or two transfers to every trip.)

I guess people really want to know about what food you get when you travel. We mostly buy groceries and prepare our own food, so we haven’t tried anything extra Dutch besides stroopwaffels. Those are delicious.

The eggs here are super fresh and excellent. They have all the produce you might expect. They have a mix of Dutch brands and other brands. Froot Loops are Unicorn Froot Loops. We eat a lot of Nature Valley granola bars. There is, of course, immense variety in the cheese available.

That’s the latest here. I hope to be more adventurous soon!

Our first 60 hours in Europe

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 17:22:55 -0400

In case you missed it: my husband, W, received a Fulbright award to study European & transatlantic copyright harmonization, especially with respect to fair use/fair dealing. M and I are accompanying him. My sister ME is here as well serving as a mother’s helper for the first couple of months so I can actually do my job. (After she leaves, W and I will trade off childcare time.)

We’re currently based in Aalsmeer, a town closer to Amsterdam than Chapel Hill is to Durham. (That distance means more to people from our hometown than it will to other people but I thought it might be a useful comparison.) The University of Amsterdam is Will’s Fulbright host. He’ll interview scholars there as well as in Maastricht.

Because his award is specifically a Fulbright-Schuman award, his research is international, so we’ll also be visiting Helsinki and Rovaniemi in Finland, Bonn in Germany, and Brussels in Belgium.

In March, we’ll leave Aalsmeer and travel the UK and Ireland so he can interview scholars there. We’ll finish up in Paris and head home before Memorial Day.

…….

We left the US Monday evening and arrived in Amsterdam Tuesday morning, then road a train and a bus and walked about 600 meters to the house where we’re staying.

…….

I already love it here. Harbor cities always make me happy. I’m delighted by all the canals.

Also, the roads: buses have a completely separate set of lanes divided from the car lanes and so do bikes. Aalsmeer is a very walkable town.

…….

Yesterday we briefly went into Amsterdam proper for our appointment with immigration. UvA is used to international scholars sticking around, so they’re following all their normal processes with us including getting us set up with Dutch identification numbers and everything.

…….

Because we are using public transportation, it takes us about an hour to get into town. I already feel disappointed that we haven’t explored more but I have to remind myself that we haven’t even been here for 72 hours yet and I was in immense pain after the flights here.

…….

More to come. For now, have a picture from the chocolate shop near our house.

How I Begin

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 10:34:42 -0400

In Austin Kleon’s paid newsletter post today, he asked his readers, to share how we begin.

I opened by saying, “I don’t know how I begin.” Then I proceeded to describe how I begin.

Because the biggest projects in my life have been scholarly writing projects, I thought about those. I thought about the most recent one, my dissertation, and the oldest one, my Master’s paper.

I realized that for both of these, I had a sunshine-soaked AHA! moment when I knew: this was the topic I was going to write about, this was the research I was going to do.

But then I thought about it, and that wasn’t the beginning for the dissertation. (It may have been for the Master’s paper. I don’t remember.)

In my PhD program, writing a comprehensive literature review that demonstrated our familiarity with the state of our research area was a major milestone. I went into this process with no clear research question or idea, just a set of topics that interested me. I don’t remember all of them, but they included makerspaces in libraries, gaming in libraries, and connected learning, among other things. I wrote two or three chapters of this lit review (one for each topic), flailing about, no research plan in mind, just getting familiar with the literature.

But this flailing was part of my process! I arrived at my dissertation topic by reading someone else’s dissertation and deciding to answer one of the questions she posed as a possibility for future research!

And yet, I had read her dissertation before that sun-soaked day.

What was different upon this reading?

What was different was that I had been living the night before, not working. (Work is a part of life but you know how it’s easy to forget to do all the parts of life that aren’t work? Or at least to berate yourself for not focusing on work all the time? If you’ve ever been a grad student, you know what I’m talking about.)

The night before my sun-soaked AHA!, I had gone to a concert. A video game concert. Where I saw cosplayers who inspired me. And it was putting together the dissertation I read with the inspiration I felt at that concert that led me to my dissertation topic: how cosplayers find, evaluate, use, and share information.

So these are the ingredients in my process:

Read what other people have written, especially keeping an eye out for interesting questions that I might want to anwer. What do I read? Whatever seems interesting.
Do interesting things that aren’t work.
Sit in the sun and think.

If I skip any of these three steps, I struggle to begin.

Tarot: My Year Ahead

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 06:16:11 -0400

I’m taking Lindsay Mack’s tarot class called The Threshold. Here’s my reading for the year ahead. Four major arcana - huge!

This whole spread fits with what’s going on with me. We leave for W’s Fulbright on Monday and hoping to do a lot of internal work while we’re away, vibing with the Hermit.

One of the things I’m struggling with is feeling a sense of purpose. I feel like Judgment combined with the Hermit gives me big “Show Yourself” (from Frozen 2) vibes - “You are the one you’ve been waiting for all of your life.” I have to look to myself for purpose. All the career quizzes and analysis of my 10th house in the world isn’t going to get me where listening to the quiet voice in myself will.

In being invited to give up the Sun, I see myself letting go of the need for bright, external, paternal clarity. It’s time to dwell in shadow for a while, to live in the murky and liminal.

With Temperance, I’m moving towards integration, integrity, my whole self being welcome in every part of my life. I think this will be key for the work I’m doing with the Hermit and Judgment.

And finally, the Ten of Pentacles: a reminder that I already have an abundant life, and that this abundance can carry me through the quiet and seeking.

Deck is the Wayhome Tarot.

A Dispatch from the Threshold of 2023 🚪🎇

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 14:24:26 -0400

I don’t know if I’ll get to do all the year-end/new year transition things I’d hoped to do today: tarot stuff, bullet journal migration. I need a nap and my right wrist is hurting and I think my left will soon follow. But guess what? Listening to my body is a great way to mark this transition.

Instead of one word for 2023, I have two:

ADVENTURE + REST

Tomorrow I’ll share more about my intentions for the year with Leigh Bardugo’s Begin As You Mean to Go On and Kim Werker’s Year of Making. But I have three intentions for the new year:

Read for pleasure.
Make things.
Take walks.

My Reading Year 2022, Part Deux

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 20:10:38 -0400

I’m calling it for the year. I’m not going to try to squeeze one more in before the end of the day tomorrow. When I wrote my year in reading post on December 2, I’d read 46 books this year. I’ve read 5 more since. I’ve also got a nifty new Micro.blog plug-in that will show you the covers of all the books I read.

Not a lot has changed in terms of my favorites since that original post. Hildafolk and The Bloody Chamber continue to be standouts. I’m very happy to be caught up on Leigh Bardugo just in time to get behind again when my preorder for Hell Bent comes in.

Season of Love is a recent favorite. Raybearer was super compelling and as I’ve started the sequel, that’ll probably be my next finished read.

I’ve got Bloodmarked on hold but it’s a wait of about 14 weeks. (I’m going to buy the paperback when it comes out so it’ll match my copy of Legendborn.)

Here’s all the books I read this year:

Moderating my own smartphone use (but still not belonging in the Luddite club)

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 15:50:51 -0400

I thought, given my heavy criticism of the potential perspective that we should all join the Luddite club, it might be useful to discuss my own smartphone use and the steps I take to moderate it.

Let me start by saying that I know in the case of addictive behavior, moderation is sometimes not an option. I have no objection to people recognizing that they are in this situation and opting out of smartphone use, or potentially any Internet use at all. You’ve got to do what’s right for you.

My objection is to people who might suggest that what’s right for the Luddite club is right for everyone with a smartphone.

Don’t want a smartphone? Cool! Get rid of yours if you have one! Never get one if you don’t!

I myself vacillate wildly between intense use to the point of it disturbing my sleep (not good, obvs) and more instrumental use that is less disruptive to the rest of my life.

When I start to notice intense use - or when something like the Luddite club article prompts me to consider my own use - there are a few techniques I rely on to curb my use and help me moderate.

For a long time, my default was to work my way through this Better Humans article, Configure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You. It links an Android version at the end, but the principles work for any smartphone, regardless of OS. This is a time consuming process and actually in the name of habit change and productivity involves adding apps I almost never use, so I have stopped going through the full process. I’ll sometimes Google around for other ideas about turning smartphones into tools (as opposed to toys or distraction), and use what I learn in those, too.

Here are the things I do, divided into almost always and sometimes categories.

Almost always

Turn off almost all notifications. I get notifications for calls, texts, and maps. That’s it. Corollary: I almost always have my phone on vibrate or silent, so even those notifications don’t disturb me.

Avoid social media apps. As much as possible, if I’m going to use social media, I do it through the browser. Occasionally I’ll need a feature like putting up a story on Instagram when I was on the UC Irvine Strike Solidarity Team’s Social Media Team and was contributing to that Instagram account. But I usually uninstall pretty rapidly after that.

Turn on Do Not Disturb. I’m in Do Not Disturb mode, with only starred contacts allowed through, unless I’m expecting a call from someone who isn’t a starred contact (like my doctor or a contractor who’s coming to work on the house). Starred contacts include family members and my kid’s school. That’s it.

Use no wallpaper + a black background OR Austin Kleon’s Read a Book Instead wallpaper. Pretty self-explanatory.

Turn off Raise to Wake. I have to push a button to turn my phone on and put in a code to see anything on it. (I just switched from a swipe to a numerical code in order to add a little more friction.)

Use bedtime mode at night. Most of the time, I have the phone in black and white with even more notifications blocked than usual, between 7:30 pm and 7:30 am. If I’m up in the night and want to watch something or play something on my phone, I try to leave bedtime mode on and do it in black and white. This only helps some, though.

Sometimes

Use Firefox Focus as my browser. When I’m getting way too deep into Internet rabbit holes, which I usually do in Chrome, I disable Chrome and switch to Firefox Focus. It doesn’t remember my log-ins, so I have to log in to each site I visit every time I visit it. It doesn’t keep a history, so I have to either search for or manually type in URLs. Sometimes, I need the affordances of Chrome, and I switch it back on. I haven’t figured out how to copy and paste in Focus yet.

Remove everything from my home screen. I usually have a pretty sparse home screen, but sometimes I remove everything from it. I’m not sure this is very effective though because then I tend to pull up the app drawer and scroll through all the apps, including some distracting ones like the browser, to get to the thing I want. So sometimes I’m more strategic and drop my most frequently used useful apps, like Google Keep and anything related to books or podcasts, on my home screen.

Use bedtime mode all day. Having the phone be in black and white makes it less appealing.

In the future

I still am in the bad habit of checking my phone first thing in the morning, last thing before bed, and any time I get up in the night. So I’ll be working on that.

Maybe we don't all need to join the Luddite club.

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 21:29:03 -0400

I have some thoughts about the Luddite club.

First, I don’t have a problem with people switching to flip phones. I do have a problem with the implication it makes them morally superior to people who use smartphones.

I think one of my biggest problems with the article is the feel of the writing: a sense of awe, a focus on fashion, a vibe that reads to me like “Ooh isn’t it amazing that these kids wear Doc Martens and read books?”

I fully support the desire to break free of slot machine dopamine hit features of social media. But here are activities that, in the article, read as though they require giving up your smartphone but that I, a person with a smartphone, sometimes do:

Draw
Paint
Close my eyes outside
Read books
Sew
Borrow books from the library
Go to parks
Fall asleep away from the glow of my phone
Read in hammocks

I’m glad teens do these things. And if they can only do them without smartphones, okay. But let’s not act like these activities are inaccessible to people with smartphones.

One of the most concerning things is the veneration these kids seem to feel for Chris McCandless. One of them says, “…that guy was experiencing life. Real life.” But actually, what he experienced was death. This dude might have been sympathetic but I know I don’t want my kid holding him up as a role model. If you’re going to go off the grid, learn how to take care of yourself BEFORE you get there.

I’m also not convinced that this is the beginning of a social movement. The founder of the club was discouraged when people suggested it was classist, but she says, “[my advisor] told me most revolutions actually start with people from industrious backgrounds, like Che Guevara.” I think the word we might be looking for here rather than “industrious” is “privileged,” “middle class,” “bourgeois,” or “capitalist.” But also, Che Guevara was motivated by witnessing other people’s misery and took action directed at alleviating it. I hope Luddite club kids use some of their screen-free time to benefit others. The article doesn’t make it clear whether they do, so I don’t know how apt the comparison to Guevara is.

Meg Pillow pointed out that for some of us, social media has been a great way to expand our awareness beyond our own experiences, to escape a filter bubble. One of the kids quoted in the article said, “Being in this club reminds me we’re all living on a floating rock and that it’s all going to be OK.” But when I read this, it made me think that without some other way of learning about the world, this is simple escapism. Are the Luddite club kids listening to the radio? Reading independent newspapers? Watching public television? How do they learn about the world beyond their schools and club, about the world that’s not printed about in classic or mainstream printed texts?

The most honest part of the article seemed to me to be when the founder of the club said that she likes that her parents are addicted to their smartphones, “because I get to feel a little superior to them.” This is developmentally right on track for a high school senior. I’m pretty sure these kids in the Luddite club will be fine. But I think we adults need to look a little deeper at what’s going on before deciding we should model our own lives on theirs or pressure our kids to do likewise.

'Wednesday' is full of "Whoa." 📺

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 10:37:46 -0400

I just finished the first episode of Wednesday. I have so many thoughts and feelings.

First, I’ve seen criticism that the Addams Family works best when you have the whole family. (Sadly, I can’t find the link to where I read this right now.) I completely agree but the decision to rely on the trope of a teen rebelling against their parents means any family time here is very tense. So I don’t want the whole family together because they’re not as loving as I’m used to.

As Emmet Asher-Perrin points out, the Addams Family movies are all about family as a safe haven, on the unconditional not just love, but positive regard they have for their children. That vibe isn’t present here.

(I’ll mention at this point that I haven’t seen the recent animated Addams Family movies, and that I shunned the musical because a huge part of the premise was Wednesday wanting to be normal for a boy and that’s just… not very Wednesday.)

But.

Jenna Ortega is brilliant. She perfectly revives My Generation’s Wednesday (what’s my generation? Xennials I guess?). Her delivery is beautiful. Her physicality is on point (🤺).

I really appreciate the Christina Ricci cameo. She’s adorable.

I love how this feels like a goth Veronica Mars. I’ve seen comparisons to Riverdale, but at least in the first season, Jughead’s narration is reportage, not reflection. He is wryly commenting on the corruption in his town. In contrast, Veronica and Wednesday give us interiority that isn’t self-indulgent.

It has me thinking about what bell hooks has to say about confessional writing, how perception of it is gendered. I’ve been reading remembered rapture lately.

I can’t deal with the family tension and all of the school bits are sort of… just being the cliche rather than commenting on it?

We’ve seen this roommate dynamic in Wicked (I may have started singing “Loathing” to myself when Wednesday and Enid met). There doesn’t seem to be a new take on it here.

Also: the embrace of the supernatural beyond the Addams’s immediate circle feels a little off to me here. In Charles Addams’s comics and in the 90s movies, the world was pretty normal. To suddenly have a school full of vampires, werewolves, gorgons, and sirens feels not exactly random, but out of place.

On this note: Thing. Thing has scars, Frankenstein’s creature style, and I don’t love it. I think because a disembodied hand is enough weird. It requires no additional weird.

The costumes are wonderful. The exterior view of the school makes me super happy.

I’ll give it a few more episodes but giving the Addams Family the Riverdale treatment with a Harry Potter setting, Doyle/Cordelia-on-Angel visions, and a more-Veronica Mars-than-Jughead voiceover feels mostly like trying to do too many things at one time.

(Also, I’ve seen comparisons to Nancy Drew, Buffy, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch but none to VMars, which feels super weird to me.)

On being an escribitionist

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 10:37:55 -0400

In November, when I realized there was no way I was going to be able to get 50,000 words of writing done, I decided to try writing 750 words a day using the website 750words.com. I enjoyed doing morning pages this way. The traditional writing-in-a-notebook way tends to give me hand or wrist pain. But I was using the new site, and after a streak hiccup, I realized that it wasn’t quite the write tool for me. I actually do better without streak tracking, because if I mess up (and I didn’t, their system didn’t save my 750 words even though I’d written them), my perfectionism has me go NEVER MIND!

So I decided to use a combo of my Google Calendar to send me an email reminder like 750 words does and Scrivener to set up a journal where each entry had a 750 word target. That went well, for a while, until I hit a day when I just didn’t feel like it. And I gave myself permission not to. And that was fine, too.

I got back into it but overtime it just felt like… not quite what I was looking for. I would write things in there, and then I would think I had said those things to someone, but I hadn’t. And I realized that private journaling is great and valuable, but if I’m looking to be motivated to keep up a regular practice, I want an audience. (Can you tell I’m an obliger?)

I’m not a journaler. I’m not a diarist. I am an escribitionist. I have been for over 20 years. So if I want to keep up a writing process, blogging is the best way to do it.

I also really appreciate blogging as a mode of thinking, as a way of finding out what I think. When I write for no audience, words come out, but they don’t have sticking power in my mind. I do best when my ideas are things I can talk out with another person, even if that other person is a silent reader. I love having my blog as a tool I can refer to when I need help, a place where advice from my past self bubbles up for me.

So hi. I’m trying out daily blogging, again. I’m not setting a word target. I’m not going to stress if I miss a day. But this is my plan, to get something a little more deliberate than a quick note written every day.

How to feel like myself

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 07:42:00 -0400

My kid’s best friend’s mom got a new job and isn’t starting it until January, but has already left her old job. She has all of December to just be, with her kid in school for the first two weeks.

I told her that sounded amazing.

She said, “I feel like… I feel like myself. I was going to say I feel like a whole new person, but really I feel like myself.”

I said, “I want to feel like myself. I’ve gotta figure out how to do that.”

2022 feels like a year that was stolen from my whole family of origin, thanks to my mom’s leukemia and paraplegia. My mom has obviously had an incredibly hard year. My dad is learning what it is to be a primary caregiver at almost 70 years old and it’s a very different life than he’s ever known before. My brother has gone from being cared for to needing to give care to. My sister and I have both experienced frequent chronic illness flares.

In the spring, I resented the flowers for blooming. Didn’t they know my mom had leukemia? I didn’t do any of my normal springtime stuff.

In the summer, I made a whole plan to achieve summer vibes, but I only really did it halfheartedly.

In the fall, my mom was in the ER about once a week, with an extended hospital stay due to the cognitive effects of a medication reaction. Halloween was fun but I didn’t appreciate the gorgeous weather nearly enough.

And now Winter Is Coming 🐺, and I am realizing for the first time that I have always been A Christmas Person, but when we were decorating our tree I suddenly got very grouchy. Because of how different this year is and will be.

This is not just me sharing the bad — it’s me elucidating the things that have made me feel Not Me.

In a very Me move, to figure out what feels like me I went to my blog archives to see how I was coping in year 2 of the pandemic, before my mom got leukemia.

How to Feel Like Myself

Books & Reading

Share quotes from what I’m reading.
Read lots of books in a variety of formats & genres, but come back home to fantasy frequently.
Talk to other people about what we’re reading & what else we might want to read.
Read & write fanfic, especially for sitcoms and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Read a lot of interesting articles.
Re-read Austin Kleon’s books.

Health & Wellness

Blog about my experiences with chronic illness.

Work

Blog about my research.

Crafting

Gather references for a cosplay but don’t make it yet.

TV & Movies

Watch holiday rom-coms.
Watch Star Trek.
Introduce my kid to older kids TV.
Blog about what I’m watching.

The Internet

Think about cool possibilities for the web, mostly late at night.
Take occasional breaks from social stuff.

Uh oh, I’m doing me things and I still don’t feel like myself

I’m reading, especially fantasy. I’m watching holiday rom-coms and Star Trek. I introduced my kid to Wishbone 🐶. Why don’t I feel like myself?

The Missing Piece

I’m not reflecting, blogging, and talking to people. Metacognition is key to Kimberlying and I have let it get away from me. Time to get back to it.

My Reading Year, 2022 📚

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 05:31:00 -0400

Everybody is doing their year-end stuff, so I thought I’d do mine.

I read 46 books this year including comics/graphic novels and poetry. About 12 of those were graphic novels or poetry and another 2 or 3 were short story or novella collections. This puts me right about where my usual average for longer works is, around 30 books. I don’t set quantitative reading goals anymore besides reading one more book than I’ve read so far in a given year.

My reading this year was heavily influenced by the microgenres/aesthetics of cozy fantasy, adventurecore, and woodland goth.

I sought out cozy fantasy and adventurecore in particular because I wanted my reading to comfort me.

I joined the Atlas Obscura book club on Literati, because Austin Kleon stopped running his book club. I only finished two of the 5 books I got, but I look forward to finishing the ones I didn’t. I love the curation but the monthly format doesn’t really work for me and I wasn’t making the kinds of connections to other readers that I’d hoped to.

I started to list my favorite books I’ve read this year but the list got too long. I loved the Hildafolk series and The Bloody Chamber.

I began the year with the intention to get caught up on Leigh Bardugo’s backlist, and I only have one book to go, The Rule of Wolves. I started that this week, so I hope to finish before the year is out and be caught up just in time for the release of the new Alex Stern book.

I think that’s all I have to share about my reading this year. How did your reading year go?

The lyrics from Disney's Disenchanted that make me sob. 🎵

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 13:02:43 -0400

Spoilers for lyrics from Disenchanted follow. Without context they only mean a little but if you’re avoiding spoilers, just move along…

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Are you ready to be spoiled?

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It’s how I’d make a world for you
That never breaks your heart
Where you can grow and thrive
And your every wish can flower
I will always love you, Morgan
I’m so proud of how I know you’ll carry on
I’ve known a lot of magic in my life
But never anything as strong
Love power
My love for you has power
And you’ll have it there inside you
When I’m gone

These lyrics make me sob as a mother AND as a daughter because of course this is what I want for my kid but the “When I’m gone” part hits extra hard when your mom has leukemia and chemo/TKI complications you know?

This is a big cry I’ve been saving up since January as I kept it together for everybody else.

Okay, time for me to go strike now.

A letter to my past self circa 1997

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 07:18:00 -0400

Dear Kimberly,

I’m just going to jump right in.

Remember E’s cute boyfriend and how you noticed she seems to not be dating him anymore and you think that’s kinda sad? Don’t be sad. YOU’RE MARRIED TO HIM NOW. I mean, you’ll marry him in 2009.

You’ll have a beautiful kid with him in 2016. The kid has long eyelashes and says delightful things. You had him later than you expected but he’s worth the wait, I promise.

Hey guess what neighborhood you live in starting in 2011? W! That’s where rich people live, you say? Well, two things: 1. It’s actually where a broad range of middle class people live and 2. you definitely would think of the household you live in by 2022 as rich. Y’all could eat Lunchables and Fruit Roll-ups and drink Capri Sun Every Day if you wanted to. (But you won’t, it would create way too much trash.)

You have a PhD (2021) and your job is to read, write, and talk to librarians. ON THE INTERNET. I know, right? Pretty sweet gig.

There’s a lot of scary stuff going on in the world right now (2022) - global health stuff, political stuff, war stuff, climate change stuff (that’s what we call global warming right now because it’s more accurate). Also, some family illness stuff. I know that doesn’t feel new, and it’s not, but it’s still a lot.

And yet in spite of those difficulties, on the micro level, your life is AMAZING.

Just wanted to let you know.

Love, Kimberly

What feels like your people?

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 10:10:00 -0400

I have a lot of friends, but the circle of friends I think of as my people is much smaller. If I make a list, it’s probably maybe 10 or so people right now, though the circle has porous boundaries.

This morning I sent something Austin Kleon wrote to a friend with the note “This seems like something you’d appreciate.” Sometimes my friends send me things that remind them of me.

Sometimes there’s an obvious reason, like when anyone sends my sister red panda stuff or me mermaid things.

But my favorite times are when it’s about a vibe. That feels to me like accessing the ineffable core of a relationship that I always imagine you can only get at after a very intense initial period of friendship, unless you happen to be friends with a literal horse, in which case it happens instantly because horses just understand you.

There’s a sort of distance that I think makes this kind of thing easier. My dearest friends all live far away. I think it facilitates finding this kind of thing. I want to be in the lookout for more opportunities to do it for my most inner circle, my innest circle? My spouse, my child, my household of origin.

Do your people have vibes that give you shortcuts to letting them know you’re thinking of them?

Maybe not 50K words of literally anything...

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 15:51:35 -0400

It turns out giving yourself credit for everything you write is actually really challenging because you have to pull it all together somewhere, and sometimes you lose track of the last thing you counted.

It’s far too early to give up on NaNoWriMo.

But have y’all noticed that November is a really hard time to write in the Northern hemisphere? There’s the time change. The lack of light because of it. If you’re in the US, Thanksgiving eats up fully 5 days it feels like. (That’s 17% of your writing time!) At least it does in my family.

It’s just a brutal time!

This is why I like Camp NaNoWriMo. Especially July. July, if you work in education and can afford to send your kid to camp, is a great time to write.

Anyway. I’m not giving up on NaNo but I’m also not trying to do word counts on all my texts.

The only time I won NaNo, I wrote 25K words on November 30.

I’ve won Camp NaNo a few times with smaller goals.

I do want to write. I don’t know what a good writing goal, process, or practice looks like for me. Maybe I’ll take the rest of this month to figure it out.

NaNoWriMo pivot: Back to 50,000 words of literally anything at all

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 08:34:00 -0400

Hello friends!

It’s been slow-going working on my TNG fanfic. Early in October, I toyed with the idea of being a NaNo Rebel with the goal of writing 50,000 words of literally anything at all. At the time, I meant fanfic, original fic, and academic writing.

But at 4 AM this morning, I decided to return to that, with a much more expansive definition of “literally anything at all.”

Here are the things I’ve added to my word count so far:

Blog posts (including short notes)
Emails
Texts
Slack messages
Meeting agendas
Comments on other people’s documents
Forum posts

And once I log back into social media tomorrow (I’m posting this via micropub), I’m going to add replies and quote tweets.

Why am I being so generous to myself with this definition?

A lot of the time, I use a goal like NaNoWriMo to prove to myself that I “can* write.

But lately, I’ve felt not that I have writer’s block, exactly, but that I’m just at a moment in life when writing is beyond my current capacity, that I just don’t have the bandwidth to write at present.

So I’m using this expansive definition to prove to myself that I do write, that I an writing, even when I feel like I can’t.

How’s NaNo going for you? Can you find a way to be more generous with yourself this month?

📚🍳Marinated Beans with Crunchy Veggies from I Dream of Dinner (So You Don't Have To)

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 16:56:39 -0400

Cooking is really hard with chronic illness, because both pain and fatigue reduce your options for homemade food that won’t eat up all your energy for the day.

When Suzanne Scott mentioned the cookbook I Dream of Dinner (So You Don’t Have To) at the Fan Cultures/Food Cultures session at FSN North America, citing the ease of prepping its recipes when you’re exhausted, I immediately put it on hold at the library.

I picked it up over the weekend. Today I made my first recipe in it: Marinated Beans with Crunchy Veggies. TL; DR: It’s tasty and I still had energy left after making it.

Right away the book delighted me by including all prep work in the written instructions rather than ingredients. Author Ali Slagle doesn’t say “Fresh shallot, finely chopped” in the ingredients list. Instead, it’s the first step in the recipe. Slagle also encourages substitutions.

I modified the recipe a bit to make it even friendlier for my chronically-ill self. Here are some photos with explanations.

The first change is that I subbed garlic powder in for chopped shallot. Target didn’t have shallots and I didn’t want to go to another store. Plus, I already had garlic powder on hand.

The second change is that I used canned diced green chiles instead of chopped fresh chile. I’m a spice wimp and once again Target had limited selection.

I then followed the recipe as written, using canned black beans, salt and pepper, red wine vinegar, and olive oil.

Slagle suggests chopping and adding veggies right before serving but I wanted to do that in advance, so I sliced celery and cucumber and stored them in a Mason jar to keep them crisp until serving time. They’ll only keep in the fridge for 3 or 4 days, but so will the beans.

When it was time for lunch, I spooned a quarter of the beans into a bowl, then pulled some celery and cucumber out of the jar and stirred it all together. It was a lovely, easy lunch.

(The real star of this photo is my beautiful new kitchen counter.)

How to Scholar(?)

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 10:33:53 -0400

In my doctoral program, there was a class that we colloquially referred to as “babydocs.” As it was taught the year I took it, the purpose of babydocs was two-fold: 1. to introduce us to the field of library and information science and the variety of potential research areas and 2. to introduce us to the skills a person needs to be a scholar.

It’s been over seven years since I started babydocs and I’m still trying to get that “how to be a scholar” part down. Here are the topics and skills babydocs covered in this vein:

Theory and methods
Literature reviews
- searching for literature
- reading other people’s literature reviews
- managing literature
- writing literature reviews
Peer review
Project management
Research ethics
Diversity, equity, and inclusion
Presenting orally
Empirical research methods
Collaborative & interdisciplinary work
Creating posters
Writing research proposals
Grants and funding
Data management
Writing referred papers
Metrics

This was a two-semester course and that was only HALF of what we covered, with the other half being specific to our discipline.

I know how to do all of the things on this list, but I still haven’t created a cohesive framework or workflow that lets me do them in any but the most just-in-time manner. But a just-in-time scholar isn’t really the kind of scholar I want to be.

(And I do want to be a scholar, even though I’m not interested in tenure-track work.)

I share all of this because I’m going to try, all these years later, to create such a framework. Something that wasn’t part of babydocs.

I plan to blog about it and I thought y’all might like to follow along.

#FSNNA 22 Roundtable: Materiality & Liveness

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 10:18:56 -0400

Paul_Lucas:

Welcoming everyone to the session "Materiality & Liveness"
Talking about WWE and the impact of it being termed an "essential business" during COVID shutdowns
Professional wrestling bridges the gap between sports & entertainment
When both entertainment & sports were shut down, WWE was still available with both athletics and storytelling and thus the potential to appeal to fans of both sports and media.
Lucas's argument: WWE didn't have live audiences during shutdown like they usually do. They had to have a national audience to stay open for working, but only at facilities closed to the public.
WWE met both criteria when most other sports couldn't.
WWE moved toward "cinematic matches" - "like an extended version of a video game cutscene" - wrestlers in story-specific environment with editing, effects, and supernatural elements.

Matt Griffin:

Playful Nostalgia: (Re)creating Video Game Spaces as Mods
Nostalgia for 3D platformer video games from the late 90s/early 00s like Super Mario 64, Sonic Adventure. Newer games are emulating (but not, y'know, ~emulating~) the older games.
Marketing and branding include a pitch toward nostalgia: "It's just like N64" "It's just like the Gamecube"
How do players take up this nostalgia themselves? For example, players create environments from old games in newer video games - e.g. creating an area from Super Mario Sunshine in A Hat in Time
We aren't limited to a single mod, so you could play in A Hat in Time, a Sonic Adventure level, with Sora from Kingdom Hearts as your player, riding a Kart from Mario Kart Double Dash.
Factors that influence textual meaning: paratexts, plays, fan-made histories, "mods as simulacra"
"Player-made mods construct nostalgia through remediation and play"

Emma ✨:

Talking about authorship in TRPGs (!!! calling @theroguesenna & @friede)
Looking at changes in D&D and other TRPGs related to race.
Summer 2021 was the #SummerofAabria when Abria Iyengar was guest DM on multiple actual play shows
AP has often been associated with the creation of a single DM but when Iyengar's work raised the question: how does authorship change when you have a guest DM? Who has authority?
Now notions of canonicity are taking root in actual play. How do TRPGs exist as both a transformative and an original work?
DMs like Iyengar can use their work to critique traditional depictions in fantasy.

Dylan McGee:

The cultural afterlife of plastic toys and how they're curated and collected online now
Fans have to make consequential decisions about material objects (collectable toys) based on digital images
"attachments and affects can be complicated when realizing that what arrived in your mailbox was not exactly what you bought online"
Buyers read the materiality through images: What quality is the plastic? How much has it been damaged? Is it authentic? Is the blister packaging still attached?
During COVID, there's been a boom in the fan economy of vintage collecting.
A lot of collectors have liquidated their collections because they didn't have enough income during COVID.
The Japanese Yen to the dollar is at a 32 year low, so lots of Japanese collectors are liquidating them and selling to buyers overseas (mostly in America).
These collectors then only have immaterial access to their collections - images and memories.

Matt Griffin:

There are important distinctions between player-made mods and official re-releases. There's more freedom to mix-and-match. Legality is an interesting question. Mods aren't strict emulations (in the code sense).
Court case in 2016 found you can't copyright ALL of a game. For example, you can't copyright game mechanics. Player-made mods do give players a sense of ownership.
People get introduced to older "texts" (video games) through these mods - e.g. you play an area in A Hat in Time, and decide to then go explore the game it's originally from.
Reproducing a cartridge like Limited Run games does introduces a new materiality that's different from mods. The gatekeepers are different: purchase vs. download from fansite.

Emma ✨:

Players of D&D often have a strong intertextual awareness before they even sit down at the table, usually have engaged deeply with fantasy through literature, film, video games.
There's often either a dissatisfaction with or true love of fantasy media that the player brings to the table and uses as inspiration for their character.
If the rules are dissatisfying/frustrating (e.g. I want to play as a dark elf and it's wrong of the rules to penalize me for that), this is where homebrew comes in. This leads to players & DMs bring worldview to the game.
based on personal experience, "play seems to become more valued as you have less recreational time." When work happens at home during lockdown, it can feel like all of life is work so
Additionally, the interpersonal aspect adds extra value. For example, RPing just hanging out in a pub became a fantasy it was valuable to play out.
Rules can give real-world obstacles a clear stat block and make it possible to fight these things in a really satisfying way.

Dylan McGee:

Unlicensed toys also became part of the market and are often more highly valued by collectors than official, licensed ones.

#FSNNA22 Keynote: Turn On, Tune In, Get Out: Rethinking Escapism and Domestic Spectatorship

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 08:00:19 -0400

Caetlin Benson-Allott:

Beginning Turn On, Tune In, Get Out: Rethinking Escapism and Domestic Spectatorship
articulates the need for a theory of escapism, specifically as respite
has never felt the need to get out more than the past few years but where is there to go?
Theory: escapism as a spectatorial mode, one way viewers interpolate cultural objects
"Escapism is a desire that viewers bring to media irrespective of its genre, spectacle, exhibition context, or reception culture"
Viewers bring escapism, not vice versa.
Critics call things "escapist" when they think media's artistic merit doesn't align with its popularity
Escapism is frequently deployed in reference to media that has large fan communities
Historicizing the term "escapist," which was coined in the 1930s. (Benson-Allott is including a lot of detail so look out for her book on this topic later.)
"Escapism" is used both to argue that art should uphold morals AND that art doesn't need to engage with contemporary issues.
"Escapist" is used by critics to indicate a disconnect between a piece of art and themselves.
Previous work (by only 2 scholars) looks at escapism and whose pleasure is marginalized.
Others have focused on genre but not looked at how or why viewers engage in escapism.
As a viewer's sensibility changes, the viewer needs different escape.
If different types of movies can provide escape in a shared geocultural moment, then escapism can't be located in a particular piece of media or genre.
Escape from what? Not necessarily about a change of locale. "If it were, all fantasy films would supply escape to all viewers."
"Escape may be hard to achieve, but it is not site-specific."

Dr. Kimberly Hirsh at #FSNNA22:

Lots of talk here about how what we're escaping is being ourselves, which makes me think about the Daniel Tiger song: "You can change your hair or what you wear but no matter what you do, you're still you."

Caetlin Benson-Allott:

"Because pleasure is a process, it represents an escap-ing, rather than an escape."
"It cannot be an end, because it ends."
We can find escapism in media that acknowledges inequity and injustice.
"Desiring escape is not the same as desiring oblivion or obliviousness..."

Dr. Kimberly Hirsh at #FSNNA22:

Seriously this work is super rich and I can't possibly capture it all in a Twitter thread.

Caetlin Benson-Allott:

Escape as ex-cendance: getting out so you can go back

#FSNNA22 Live Blog: Fandom During/After Covid

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 10:17:10 -0400

Olivia Johnston-Riley:

Next session: Fandom During/After COVID

Norbert Nyari:

“Reaching Fans Through Deeper Interaction: The Case of Concerts Through Games and Interactive Spaces”
4 cases of concerts in games and interactive spaces: Fortnite is mostly a business approach.

Norbert Nyari:

Case 2: Adventure Quest 3D: Fan connection through gameplay
Porter Robinson: Secret Spy more about connecting fans through virtual spaces, chat, avatars, VR
Case 4: Concerts organized by Wave. Real-time motion capture. Trying to create interaction between artist and fans.
Key takeaways: new ways for fans to connect, artists found new ways to interact. "What is the impact of the fan persona?"

Eva Liu:

Talking about how stage musicals in China are thriving while Broadway is not - uses the closing of Phantom of the Opera on Broadway as an example.
First key to success is the introduction of the immersive theater genre. Special environments and audience participation.
Immersive theater's smaller audience size is good during pandemic
2nd key: Embracing idol fandom. Free drawing for idol performer cards. Exploiting fan labor for marketing.
Fan-made souvenirs, fan photography.
Key #3: Let's queer the theatres. All-male cast, cross-dressing, queer-baiting. These all appeal to female gaze. ([@KimberlyHirsh](https://micro.blog/KimberlyHirsh): How is Takarazuka doing? Could be a cool transnational study.)
"the pleasure obtained from face-to-face interaction is irreplaceable"
All previous Eva Liu tweets are from @EvaLiu1996

Olivia Johnston-Riley:

“Podficcing in the Pandemic” Key terms: Accessibility, Identity, Experience, Creating, Consuming, Socializing
Podfic is fanfiction recorded aloud and shared as audiopods online. Some people never thought of it as accessible while other people, esp with print disability, used it. ([@KimberlyHirsh](https://micro.blog/KimberlyHirsh): like fanfiction audiobooks)
Some fans used time they would otherwise have gone out to socialize to record podfic. Others experienced trauma and/or just felt pandemic didn't give them more time to create.
Listening to human voices made people feel less alone, but people who lost their commute or had more other people at home listened to less podfic.
Podfic community was an important social activity for some participants.

Qing Xiao:

“‘Are We Friends or Opponents?’ Fans’ Relationship Changes from Online To Offline” with Yuhang Zheng
In idol fans pre-COVID there was a hierarchy where offline fans were considered "core fans" and online fans were more peripheral, but as idols moved activities online during COVID-19, this dynamic changed.
More affordable to attend signings, don't have to navigate physical distance
Change of fan space made it more equitable, less hierarchical. Will the old patterns resurface? How do these patterns work in fandoms surrounding fictional works/characters?

Julian Hofmann:

with Dina Rasolofoarison: “Where Is roundtables Fandom Acted Out in 2022? An Update on Places of Fan Practices”
inclusive definition of fandom - not just cult media, but specific nations/cultures, cooking, and more
2 dimensions of places: 1. places have functions, 2. places of substitute consumption - driven by restrictions of time, money, or place

Dr. Kimberly Hirsh at #FSNNA22:

There's lots of great conversation happening in this session but I got distracted and am a little overwhelmed, sorry.

Eva Liu:

Eva talked about my question about Takarazuka, pointing out that while Takarazuka (Japanese all-women musical theater) has a strict division between otokoyaku (performers who always play men) and musumeyaku (performers who always play women) 1/2
...Chinese and South Korean immersive theaters that feature all-male casts might have a performer play a man in one production and a woman in another.

#FSNNA2022 Live Blog: The New Bedroom Cultures

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 08:26:37 -0400

Dr. Nicola Welsh-Burke:

introducing the panel "The New Bedroom Cultures"

Elise Sandbach:

“The Growth of Fangirls and Fanfiction During the COVID-19 Lockdown” "A bit of an accidental autoethnographic activity"
Dissertation focused on Harley Quinn and her relationship with her fangirls. Argued that Harley moved from sexualized object of the male gaze to reclaimed character, and credits fanfiction with this move.
Interested in the transition of fans from producers to consumers.
Fell down a fanfiction rabbithole on TikTok.
Sociology theory about bedroom culture highlights bedroom as a sacred space for adolescent girls, originally considered bedroom as consumer space but more recent scholarship argues that bedroom culture includes production
The transition from consumer to producer was pressurized during lockdown, which led to a boom of fan engagement.

Léa Andolfi:

Discusses fannish bedroom cultures during the lockdown, fanfiction as a bedroom ritual. Presentation draws on interviews conducted during Master's.
Title of talk is “A Fandom of One’s Own: Fanfiction as a Bedroom Ritual During COVID-19”
Fanfiction is defined by intimacy, both in its topics and in the spaces it exists in.
Participants could personalize emotion via tags: hurt/comfort, enemies-to-loves, fluff...
"reception on a loop" You experience the original media, seek out fan-created media, engage in fan practices regularly, which drives you to seek out the next piece of new media.
Reading fanfiction is a personal ritual, "alone time"
Socialization in digital spaces allowed fans to maintain kinship and community.

Dr. Nicola Welsh-Burke:

notes that @andolfi_lea mentioned parasocial relationships which probably all of them have something to say about
Dr. Welsh-Burke's talk is “‘I Am on My KNEES’: TikTok as a New Site of Adolescent Sexual Desire”
looking at experience of female fans as producers and fans
Noticed enthusiastic display of sexual desire in caption of fan vid on TikTok, liked it and started to get more recs for things where people have "extreme affective responses"
This content on TikTok was a positive reclamation of the stereotype of fangirls as only interested in certain topics (e.g. sexy topics)
TikTok is an especially bedroom-y media space in terms of both creation and consumption.

DeanLeetal:

presenting “Bedroom Cultures but Make It Enby Cottage Core: Reading Shakespeare as a Disabled Trans Fan”
warning: going to discuss bigotry, esp. transphobia, and safety
Discussing reading Shakespeare's "As You Like It" as a trans text. Rosalind & Celia live a queer-utopian cottagecore life in the Forest of Arden.
IRL when marginalized people meet each other it's not always self. There's bigotry related to different combos of marginalization.
In The Forest of Arden, it feels as if everyone is safe.
"If all those queer people running around in the forest are the monsters, then we have nothing to fear. Everyone is safe."
In the Forest of Arden, "everyone is always possibly polyamorous." It's bittersweet to contrast this with spaces in real life.
This contrast is more pronounced when the person doing the looking/reading is trans & disabled.
Anecdote about harassment at a coffee shop that ended with Dean feeling the owners of the shop would blame Dean for being a magnet for harassment if a similar incident happened again.
The "depressing, gray" bedroom experience is attractive because there aren't a lot of people that can harass you there.
There's an interesting relationship between trans' people's experience of being expected not to even exist outside and these fantasies of the cottagecore forest (and other safe spaces) inside.

Elise Sandbach:

In some fandoms, e.g. superhero and Star Wars, other people in fandoms perceive the source material as "serious" and were worried fangirls would "drag it down" because fangirls are interested in "silly things"

Dr. Kimberly Hirsh at #FSNNA22:

The discussion is getting really good but I'm struggling to keep up with tweets, sorry!

Dr. Nicola Welsh-Burke:

Saw Twitter thread about how there used to be no women in nerdy spaces and, of course, there were and many people argued against OP but sadly lots of people were also agreeing.

DeanLeetal:

There's a similar phenomenon where people claim there weren't trans people in fan spaces in the past, which is patently untrue.

Dr. Nicola Welsh-Burke:

"It's interesting to think about the multiplicities of bedroom cultures that are getting made" - referring to a statement @DeanLeetal made about how different people need different forms of escape.
We need art of everyone in their own bedrooms engaging with their own bedroom cultures.
Creator of that original video on TikTok shut down their account. This leads to loss of a lot of born-digital stuff that it would be good to capture for methodology. (Come to our #FanLIS session and talk to us about born-digital preservation!)

Léa Andolfi:

As fans we have to do that work of archiving. ([@KimberlyHirsh](https://micro.blog/KimberlyHirsh): shout-out to @De_Kosnik's book Rogue Archives)
It's also an ethical question - if we've preserved something, do we keep studying it even after the creator has taken it down?

Elise Sandbach:

When fanfiction is brought up to creators/actors, it's often in a degrading way.

Dr. Nicola Welsh-Burke:

There's also an issue of consent with actors, who might not want to hear about what their characters get up to in fanfiction.
In chat, Erin Lee Mock points out "For many people, COVID lockdown was not an experience of isolation, but of greater carework obligations, etc. Is there space within discussion of "bedroom cultures" for these individuals, especially as relates to fan production?"

Léa Andolfi:

Talking about how even as teens, girls often have more caregiving responsibilities so in that sense bedroom cultures still works.

DeanLeetal:

Points out that home is not always a safe space, especially for multiply marginalized people.

Dr. Nicola Welsh-Burke:

Luisa de Mesquita asks "I was wondering if there are any significant differences in engagement with fandom and fannish practices between those who were already 'established' fans and those who became fans during the pandemic?"

Elise Sandbach:

speculating that it will vary - some people will have come to fandom during the pandemic and stay in it for life, but others as they are less isolated will engage with fandom less
Kirsten Crowe asks "I wonder about the experience of college aged people returning to their childhood bedrooms and how that shaped fannish experiences in terms of bedroom culture during the pandemic"

Dr. Nicola Welsh-Burke:

Yes, thanks to pandemic I finished my MSc in my childhood bedroom, will finish my PhD in childhood bedroom, doing this from childhood bedroom 😄

Elise Sandbach:

That last tweet should've been from @SandbachElise.

Dr. Nicola Welsh-Burke:

It's really interesting to return to your childhood bedroom and engage with fandom on a new platform when you engaged with fandom there years ago.

Elise Sandbach:

It's interesting to note that we're in our bedrooms studying other people in their bedrooms.

A hike at Eno River State Park

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 10:17:33 -0400

Yesterday, W, M, my sister ME, and I went for a little hike at the Eno River State Park. I’d planned a little flat loop, but we didn’t know which access to use to get to it. We ended up at the Few’s Ford access and just walked the closest trail to where we parked, which turned out to be the Buckquarter Creek Trail.

We happened upon some folks from the Eno River Association, who had set up a tent, nets and water shoes, and little bins with water in them so people could catch little water animals and learn about them. It was a beautiful serendipitous occurrence and we had nowhere to be, so we stopped to join in. M found some water striders and a snail.

After they packed up, we continued down the trail, then stopped for a break so M could play on the rocks and fallen logs. While he was doing that, a great blue heron landed a ways from us. We watched it stretch its neck down to the water, then pull its neck upright. It was huge. Eventually it flew from one side of us to the other. Its wingspan was incredible. It’s a majestic bird.

Eventually, a tree wobbled under M and he fell in the water. We didn’t have a change of clothes, so we ended our break and started walking again. We made our way to the pedestrian bridge. It was a suspension bridge, and walking across it gave me a bit of vertigo. We continued on the other side of the river, then crossed the river on rocks when I heard a family ahead of us talking about an animal on the ground. I thought it might be a snake and W hates snakes, so we went ahead and crossed.

We finished up the trail and came home for a late lunch from Domino’s.

This was a super successful adventure, so I think we’ll try a hike every weekend while the weather is favorable.

When my brain won't read 📚

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 09:25:39 -0400

I hate when my brain won’t read, which it won’t today. Reading is my core way of interfacing with the world. The tools we use shape our thought processes, and writing and reading have been my primary tools since I was a small child. Reading heals me, distracts me from pain, comforts me when I’m lonely, and gives me new ways of thinking.

I know this inability to turn other people’s words into things that cohere for me will pass. And I can do audiobooks some. But there’s also something about the physicality of reading that I miss when I do that. So it is a great companion to reading text, especially for times it’s not smart to focus on texts like when I’m driving or trying to fall asleep.

Maybe I’ll try reading something middle grade instead of YA or adult and see if that helps.

Day 3, #TheSealeyChallenge, Rose, Li-Young Lee 📚

Thu, 04 Aug 2022 11:29:00 -0400

This is a gorgeous book, full of grief and beauty.

Selected quotes:

Water

In water
my sister is no longer
lonely. Her right leg is crooked and smaller
than her left, but she swims straight.
Her whole body is a glimmering fish.

Eating Alone

White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas > fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness.
What more could I, a young man, want.

Visions and Interpretations

Truth is, I’ve not seen my father
since he died, and, no, the dead
do not walk arm in arm with me.

Day 2 #TheSealeyChallenge, Leaves of Grass Book I: Inscriptions, Walt Whitman 📚

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 18:04:00 -0400

Selected quotes:

Eidolons

We seeming solid wealth, strength, beauty build,
But really build eidolons.

To the States

…Resist much, obey little

Thou Reader

Thou reader throbbest life and pride and love the same as I,
Therefore for thee the following chants.

Day 1 #TheSealeyChallenge, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love, Keith S. Wilson 📚

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 19:34:00 -0400

Selected quotes:

6:45 pm

…God, it’s pretty.

But what does any of it mean?

A Unified Theory

You think, what if I am stuck like this? What if

I never change? So what.

Never change.

Moments are not for revision—

if they are lived honestly, they are open to one interpretation.
only. They make you like a child.

Of course that’s what they make.

#CLS2022: Creating Equitable and Inclusive Library Spaces in the Face of Obstacles

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 16:55:11 -0400

I didn’t get to liveblog/tweet this session because I was co-facilitating it, but I’m jotting down a few takeaways and a list of resources/links in hopes they will be of use to folks.

Our panelists were:

Julie Stivers, middle school librarian at Mt. Vernon Middle School in Raleigh, NC
Miles, a rising high school junior and former student of Julie’s
Kym Powe, Children and YA Consultant, Connecticut State Library
Juan Rubio, Digital Media and Learning Program Manager, Seattle Public Library
Sandra Hughes-Hassell, Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science

We opened by asking the panelists to share their broad perspectives on creating equitable and inclusive library perspectives.

Connected Learning Lab Senior Research Manager Amanda Wortman took awesome notes on these. Here are some big ideas:

Hold onto why you do the work.
Recognize structural aspects of fostering equity and inclusion and simultaneously equip library staff to take individual action.
Center the voices and experiences of youth themselves.

We then launched into some questions based on our work in the Transforming Teen Services for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion project. I basically acted as a clueless, well-intentioned librarian asking for help.

How do I know if I’m actually creating an inclusive space?

You might not be able to tell, but if your love for the work shines through, you’re moving in the right direction. When your space starts to feel like a living room and a community hub, keep doing what you’re doing and grow more in the same vein. Look at yourself and your colleagues; what unstated or invisible expectations are you communicating? They might be making the space less inclusive.

I think I’m creating inclusive spaces but people aren’t actually coming into them. What should I do?

LEAVE THE BUILDING. There are a lot of reasons people might not come. Go to where they already are. Consider not just your own actions, but those of your colleagues. Are other people in the space making it less equitable and inclusive? Build authentic relationships, in or out of the library. The relationship with the person is more important than the presence of the physical space. Change the power structures in the space; design with youth rather than for them.

I know I need to leave the building but I’m overwhelmed. How do I start?

You start by starting. Team up with a friend. Build on the work of a colleague near or far who has already gone out; learn from their experiences. Don’t stop going out after one attempt doesn’t work. Move on to the next potential place or partner. Keep trying. You’ll eventually find the right fit.

Okay I’m ready! But I talked to my supervisor and they said I can’t leave the building. What’s my next step?

Relationships are important here, too. Build a relationship with your supervisor. Help them understand the value of the work you’re doing and why it’s important to go into the community. Write a formal proposal for the supervisor. Include outcomes and impact. Make it clear it won’t take you out of the building for a whole day at a time.

How can school and public librarians think beyond just going into each others’ spaces? How can we get to places that don’t have library or school vibes?

Go to where they spend time outside of school. If you’re partnering with a school, think about going to extracurricular events that don’t feel so formal and school-y. Recognize that what matters most is that youth get what they need, not who provides it or where.

I want to learn more! What should I do next?

Attend events like the Connected Learning Summit.
Look for free professional development like Project READY.
Talk to your state library.

My Notes from #CLS2022: OPENING PLENARY - Staying Connected, Fueling Innovation, Affirming Core Values: Three Learning Organizations Carrying Lessons Forward from the Twin Pandemics

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 13:02:55 -0400

Scot Osterweil:

Getting today's plenary started - Staying Connected, Fueling Innovation, Affirming Core Values: Three Learning Organizations Carrying Lessons Forward from the Twin Pandemics

Jal Mehta:

is moderator, beginning the panel. Talking about carrying forward lessons from pandemic crisis into "neverending pandemic."
invites attendees to share something good that came out of the pandemic for them. There are too many to share all here! But big themes are family time, taking breaks, conversations about accessibility.
Jessica, let's start with you. We think of a library as a physical space where people go. What happened with your library during the pandemic? What can other people, in a library or otherwise, learn from your experiences?

Jessica R. Chaney:

works with Cloud901, a teen learning lab in Memphis Public Libraries, work with STEM/STEAM, project-based learning, and connected learning.
Closed for about a month, partnered with other city divisions & community organizations. Metropolitan Interfaith Association - library staff boxed food, were drivers, were able to get into community with access to library materials, worked with p
Worked with Parks & Rec and other divisions to disseminate information about social services. A great opportunity to get out and reach out to communities who were underserved or couldn't readily come to the library.
Previously divisions were siloed but now they can connect to serve the community.
Shifted to online programming. With that program, they touched people in communities across the country, not just Memphis.
Able to work with people who wouldn't normally come to the library for a myriad of reasons - anxiety in social settings, other reasons - able to access library programming at a comfort level that worked best for them.
A lot more families at online programming. A lot of parents working alongside kids during camps. Opportunity for family to get together & bond and parents became library advocates.
Understanding & seeing that library staff need to recognize in every aspect where barriers are, even when we don't readily see them.
Online programming was wonderful, but what about people without home internet? What about requiring supplies for a program?
What barriers are out there? How can we break those down? Wifi hot spots, takeaway supplies. Producing programs that only use things readily available at home or brick & mortar store.
With population 30-40% below the poverty line, people have to choose - do they send their kids to an enrichment opportunity, or do they feed them?

Jal Mehta:

Really promising: holistic vision of youth & families & what they need. Intersection of innovation and equity. "We can't do this for everybody, so we're not going to do it at all." So iterate to make it accessible for more people.

WILLIAM Izabal:

runs a clubhouse that had to move online. It was a challenge. Hearing some commonalities between ListoAmerica, an afterschool program that serves primarily Mexican community, and library already.
ListoAmerica is part of The Computer Clubhouse, a network. Had to shut down physical space, but within about 2 - 3 weeks, UCI PhDs were able to support creating the clubhouse online for the same hours online.
Tried to replicate as much as possible the pre-pandemic experience but had to be innovative. Started member-to-member meetups because new members would be isolated.
Members are youth. Usually middle school & high school. Connected new members with mentors.
Created hybrid programs. Created pick-up point for materials to pick up at one time and conduct sessions later on.
People would make themselves available in online community at specific time so other people could come discuss with them.
Temptation is to just learn the technology and gain skills, but goal of ListoAmerica is to support creation, not just skill building. Connect people with interests - for example music-interested youth and video-interested youth collaborate on music video.
Mexican culture is important. Mentors were almost all Mexican. Mexican American members often had parents who were undocumented and thus didn't want to come in. Mentor created entire Discord channel in Spanish and invite family members in.

Adam Kulaas:

works in Tacoma school district in Washington State. Fortunate to have a school board and superintendent who embraced pandemic as a community with grace and empathy.
In March 2020 decided to be as pro-active as possible. Set up design around an online school that they expected to have about 400 kids, ended up with about 5000 out of 30000 who wanted an online experience.
over 250 staff members, community eager to keep students safe in the online world. Quickly shifted gears into evolving into high quality. It was difficult because staff hadn't been trained in online teaching.
Grace for staff and students formed a community. While other districts are sprinting back to "normal," Tacoma has moved toward redefining and reimagining new normal.
Online school is now a fully-functional school with about 2000 students. Tacoma is also introducing a flex program to allow students to experience both face-to-face and online learning, which allows flexibility in their schedules.

Hearing vision and leadership from Tacoma superintendent and board.

Adam Kulaas:

Tacoma's been working on a whole student initiative and this moved them toward a whole community perspective.

Jal Mehta:

When is an online environment better than an in-person environment? When is it a weak facsimile of a personal environment?

WILLIAM Izabal:

Didn't think online clubhouse would work, for example "creative collision" in small space where people would bump into each other and notice each others' work and ask about it.
Somehow, with the hybrid model, it worked. Occasionally, we would get together in very careful (socially distanced, masked) groups, and were able to go global. Connected with clubhouse in Mexico City. Never were able to do that before.
That enhanced the cultural background, that it's okay to be Mexican in the United States, it's something to be proud of. Opened Mexican American citizens' eyes to what it's like to be in Mexico and what technology is like there.

Jessica R. Chaney:

Able to connect online with people from all over. Were able to ask colleges to send virtual tours for them to share with people who couldn't travel to visit.
This summer, they started back in person with summer camp. Every camp this year people have come back with people they met in camp and they've continued to work together. This didn't happen before.

Adam Kulaas:

It's a "Yes, and." Redefined understanding of connected. Multitiered opportunities to connect with adult learners, assessing online experiences combined with occasional face-to-face meetings led to some simple tech innovation.
Kindergarteners took a field trip to the zoo, some in person, but many remotely who were working in teams and engaging during chat because the schools had taught that school. Recorded the session and now it can be reused with different groups.
Online learning is not the best path for every kid, but it very well could be for some.
Teachers were not only livecasting, but were interacting with students online. Students could see their own teacher.

Jal Mehta:

Was the number of participants the same, larger, smaller, different people in online programs versus face to face?

WILLIAM Izabal:

Old members already had established connections. New members would introduce themselves and old members would connect with them.
Scale expanded going remotely. The question now is should we go back to some form of physical?

Jessica R. Chaney:

It depended on the program. Camps were larger than we anticipated. Some other programs like college virtual tours were huge numbers. Some programs just had 2 to 3 people in them. We counted it as a win whatever it was.

Adam Kulaas:

Club and extended learning opportunities tended to grow online.

Jessica R. Chaney:

Transitioning to online was already a struggle, so any number of kids we counted as a win.
We've gone back to in-person but there will always be some kind of hybrid component to a good bit of our programs.
We didn't have multiple-hour programs. They were very short, intensive. We would talk, but the staff made a lot of video work that youth could not only watch, but reference.
Having videos to reference helped kids who fell behind or missed sessions. We shared it with other library systems in Tennessee.

Jal Mehta:

Have there been opportunities to connect and collaborate with parents and other community organizations?

Adam Kulaas:

We had existing partnerships and it was exciting to see those partners pivot with us.

WILLIAM Izabal:

One thing that's worked for us is other non-profit engagement. We got a call from an organization in another county that wants to open up a clubhouse and a remote clubhouse working with us.

Jal Mehta:

Final thoughts?

Jessica R. Chaney:

What we have found is that for us, there's no "getting back to normal." There's working to address the shift in our youth. We've seen a number of youth ask for programming and services around mental health, being engaged with social & economic issues.
We're shifting and rebuilding in some areas with how we continue to service our youth. What we did before for branding & strategic planning can stay in place but we recognize that the way we were doing it needs to shift.

WILLIAM Izabal:

A young lady who started with us in middle school and is now at Cal State University Fullerton, whose world was a 2-mile radius when she started with us, now has a global perspective and spent a semester in South Korea.

Adam Kulaas:

It's a vulnerable celebration of acknowledging that we don't know what we don't know. Adam Grant: "We live in a rapidly changing world where we need to spend as much time rethinking as we do thinking."

Deciding when to drop a paper: Rethinking my lit review about tabletop RPGs and identity development

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 11:11:09 -0400

I’ve been sitting on a paper that was “accepted with revisions” for more than 3 years. I have poked at it sometimes and worked hard on it others, sometimes hated the revision process and sometimes enjoyed it.

The purpose of submitting this paper was not actually to get it published. It was to get it submitted so I met the requirement of having submitted 2 items for peer review before my comps. Also, it’s not original research. It’s a literature review.

My assistantships in my first 4 years of the PhD put me in a situation where my colleagues and I weren’t publishing much in scholarly journals. The first year, I helped with a lit review that I think was for a popular publication. The next three years, I worked on an immense professional development project. I’m very proud of the curriculum we created and did get some trade publication out of that but again, not scholarly publication.

So it wasn’t until my last 2 years of my PhD that I was working with other scholars on papers, most of which are currently in submission or revision. All my work for scholarly publication before that had to be solo-authored and, quite frankly, what I wrote was Not Good. It wasn’t BAD but it needed so much revision.

By the time this accepted-with-revisions lit review came back to me from the journal (it had gone to a third reviewer because one reviewer was like “Accept! Minimal revisions!” and one was like “R&R… Maybe.” Reviewer 3 basically said “Accept but with heavy revision”), I was 3 years out from the original class paper it was based on. I had barely rewritten it from that for submission because, again, I just needed to move past a PhD milestone.

I was very excited when it came back accepted with revisions, but I was also in the middle of a very stressful house-buying process, writing my comps, and only had half-time childcare, so I couldn’t make it a priority.

Also I was, understandably, hurt by some of Reviewer 2’s pointed and accurate statements, so I set it aside for a while.

I picked it back up and made a revision plan, drawing on Wendy Belcher and Raul Pacheco-Vega’s advice on how to deal with revisions but as I sorted through these changes, I began to realize that NONE of them were small. They were all large changes. Here’s the kind of thing I mean:

Elaborate on places where I cited multiple sources and be more explicit about what they say and how they’re in conversation with one another. (This is a very reasonable suggestion, and the one I’ve been working on this whole time.)
Completely re-organize the literature review based on insights hinted at in the conclusion.
VAGUELY CONTRADICTORY SUGGESTIONS FROM THE SAME REVIEWER: broaden the scope to include more scholarly research; narrow the scope to focus on only one of three areas addressed in the lit review.
Find criticism that contrasted with the positive sources cited and described in the paper. (There wasn’t enough literature for that to really be a thing.)
Completely restructure the paper based on one of the developmental frameworks I drew on.

This is daunting as all get out, especially alone, especially when dissertating AND working (because I didn’t have a dissertation fellowship, I was also conducting research and writing as part of an assistantship my final year), and there’s a pandemic on (that wasn’t until a year after the paper was “accepted” but still) and you’re a parent of a young child and you have limited childcare.

But y’all, the shame I placed on myself for not revising this paper.

I’m absolutely still excited by the central ideas of this paper:

Teen library programming should support teens’ identity development.
Teen library programming around TRPGs should go beyond the idea of engagement and actually reach a level of impact where teens get to try on new personas, take imaginary risks, and figure out their own moral beliefs through pretending to be other people.

But oh my goodness I do not want to work on this paper anymore. This iteration of this set of ideas does not bring me joy.

And after yesterday’s Connected Learning Summit panel on post-pandemic burnout with multiple panelists talking about the importance of centering work that feeds and serves you, I am ready to let go of tinkering with this six-year-old literature review for publication in a journal that honestly deserves a more insightful set of arguments around these ideas.

On the other hand, I’ve worked hard on this thing for a few years and don’t want it to sit in my Google Drive collecting dust and being of no use to other people. And my colleague Maria Alberto said it was “absolutely interesting and useful.”

So I’m going to read through it one more time and make sure it makes sense, and then I’m going to publish it effectively as a pre-print/author paper here on my website and in a couple of pre-print archives as well, so it can get out there as it is.

THEN I’m going to do two more things with it:

Use it as the foundation for some public writing. If you know of an outlet where a paper about how TRPGs support identity development would be a good fit, please let me know.
I’m going to pocket it to support some original research, if I end up in a situation to actually collect data on the relationship between TRPGs and identity development.

Huge thanks to Sandra Hughes-Hassell for her feedback on this, the folks at JRLYA who gave me feedback, and Maria for validating me. Also to Katy Rose Guest Pryal for her advice on how to deal with research in The Freelance Academic, and yesterday’s panelists for talking about doing research that resonates with your soul.

My Notes from #CLS2022: Rising Scholars - Post-Pandemic Life: Recovering From Burnout and Finding Motivation

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 17:02:07 -0400

Khalia Braswell:

Introducing the next Rising Scholars session: Post-Pandemic Life: Recovering From Burnout and Finding Motivation

Naomi Thompson:

About to start as Asst Prof of learning sciences @ Univ of Buffalo, working on the ways crafting/art-making/design activities can interact with & enhance learning equity in both formal & informal spaces.
Spending a few weeks with family moving into the new position has been a good boost at this point in the pandemic.

Janiece Mackey:

Dr. Mackey is a postdoc scholar w/Equitable Futures Innovation Network @ Rutgers but is based in Colorado (hello fellow remote postdoc), co-founder & ED of Young Aspiring Americans for Social and Political Action. Mother & partner.
Whatever I'm engaging in & whoever I'm engaging with must honor that my soul has to be connected to the work.
My wellness matters, especially for me to be a mom, which is my legacy, my most important work. (Dr. Mackey is speaking to my heart.) Putting transition time in between meetings. Doing phone calls instead of Zoom in order to b
Doing phone calls instead of Zoom in order to move away from the desk. Quoting Toni Morrison: "The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work." Dr. Mackey is refuting whiteness and focusing on Black fine

Tiera Tanksley:

Dr. Tanksley is an Asst Prof at UC Boulder & also faculty fellow at UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, working on critical race in education, sociotechnical infrastructure impacting youth.
Dr. Tanksley lives in LA and works digitally, always working with Youth of Color in urban settings.
Dr. Tanksley builds a schedule based on healing: sleeping in, daily getting an "overpriced, decadent-ass coffee" at a BIPOC, queer coffee shop and writing there. Nap, administrative work in the evening.
This is how Dr. Tanksley deals with the multiple pandemics and "the constant fuckery of the US." Asks: what can I do to make my life joyful?
Working with Black youth laughing and cutting up is healing, too.

Dr. Kimberly Hirsh (she/her):

BTW if you're near me in Durham, NC check out Rofhiwa Book Café for your own decadent-ass BIPOC queer coffee shop coffee. (I have bought books from them but haven't been in yet.)

Khalia Braswell:

What are some other things the panelists are doing like Dr. Tanksley talked about?

Naomi Thompson:

Reading for pleasure.

Janiece Mackey:

Being careful about who I work with, what contracts I take.

Naomi Thompson:

Eased into reading for pleasure with audiobooks.
Returning to things I loved.

Khalia Braswell:

It doesn't seem like there's an end in sight but we'll make it.
Mentor said "You're not going to be able to read for pleasure in grad school" but I do it just to prove her wrong. Peloton has gotten me through a lot of this.
How have you maintained community during the pandemic?

Naomi Thompson:

My group chats flourished.
Virtual game nights didn't work for me - we were using the same platform I was using for work. Some of my friends have developed a really helpful way of saying what we need in a moment. "I need to vent. I'm not looking for solutions."

Janiece Mackey:

I have so many chats. Also Netflix. We were watching shows together and would pause and reflect on certain episodes, epiphanies, hot messes that happened. Collaborative healing sessions. Created in a digital space for youth after the killing of George Floy
Collaborative healing sessions. Created in a digital space for youth after the killing of George Floyd. Not for consumption; anyone in the space, including adults, had to be there for healing, not observing.
Building community for the purpose of connecting and healing.

Tiera Tanksley:

It sounds like we're engaging in a lot of the same healing practices and communal practices.
Extraverted friends adopt me. These two colleagues with me at Boulder, we FaceTime almost every night. We'll call because something devastating happened and within ten minutes we'll be cracking up.
There's the healing you do in therapy, the healing you do on your own, and the healing you do with your friends. Sharing memes, talking shit.
Re: a paper that grew out of racism: "We're here because of sisterhood."

Khalia Braswell:

Laughing is a strategy we can use to get us centered.
I joined a virtual writing group specifically for Black women and that has been my saving grace.
How do you maintain motivation to push through your work during the pandemic?

Tiera Tanksley:

I'm on leave right now. It's my second year on the tenure track. There was a lot of talk like "You don't need to take a break right now. You just started." In order for me to continue this abolitionist project, because it is a lifelong project, I
In order for me to continue this abolitionist project, because it is a lifelong project, I needed to take a break from the institution.
It's actually very common for people to take breaks in those first six years before tenure. They won't tell you that, but you're well within your rights to do that.
My work is soul work. It is tied to my community. It is tied to my deep-set dreams for emancipation. There's always motivation to do the work. It's about finding time to do the different pieces of the work. Every day is not. writing day.
Sometimes I read Twitter threads and that's my contribution for the day. There are pieces that we don't consider the work that are very important.
You have to think through "What am I motivated to do today?" even if it's taking a nap. That's part of the work, too. We're already talking about rest is resistance.

Naomi Thompson:

The faculty & institution are often going to make you feel like you don't have time for breaks, it's not possible, but it's important to stand firm in what you need.
It's okay to reconsider, make sure you see a path forward. Sometimes it's finish this dissertation and then figure out what's after that. Sometimes it's take a break from this dissertation.
I defended on March 12, 2020. I was anxious about the world and I had revisions. I took a break. I took a couple months.
The feeling is valid and whatever ways you need to manage that are also valid.

Khalia Braswell:

When I came into grad school, it was already a lot of unhealthy hustle culture. I'm going into tech. I don't have to hustle during a pandemic to write all these papers. I don't have the energy to think beyond this coursework and my research.
My energy tanks at certain parts, have some things that are research tasks, even if they're small, where I'm moving this thing forward even if it doesn't feel like a huge chunk of work.
If any of the panelists want to share how therapy have helped them manage anxiety, stress, all the things that have come up during the pandemic.

Janiece Mackey:

I have a life coach. He is always like, "What is going to make Janiece well?"
My life coach walks me through the saboteur voice, because I have assumptions. I'll say, "So and so might think this," and he'll say, "Okay, well even if they think that, why do YOU think that?" Being able to identify, name, & pivot away from that voice.
Also to delegate, because I tend to hold on to things that I shouldn't.

Khalia Braswell:

Mindfulness and yoga have helped me be mindful of what I'm holding onto physically.

Naomi Thompson:

I have been to therapy and I thought that it was helpful. In all kinds of communities, we don't talk about mental health.
Sometimes we get these messages that something has to be terribly wrong to go to therapy, and that might be true, but it also might not be.
Sometimes it takes time to find the right kind of therapy or the right kind of therapist.

Khalia Braswell:

There are resources online for folks who have had trouble finding a therapist. Finding a good therapist is hard.

Tiera Tanksley:

If you feel at the end of the day you didn't do enough writing, rethink what writing looks like.

Khalia Braswell:

How do you all deal with pushback when taking breaks and doing things to help with burnout?
I tell people I can't pour from an empty cup. Either way the work isn't gonna get done, so I might as well pour into myself.

Tiera Tanksley:

I go to therapy. I'm the caretaker of my family. I financially support multiple people, I caretake for my father who has a mental disability, I'm constantly the Strong Black Woman and I feel very uncomfortable unloading onto other folks who I caretake for s
I'm constantly the Strong Black Woman and I feel very uncomfortable unloading onto other folks who I caretake for because then I end up caretaking again. It's good to have somebody who it's low risk for me to give everything to.
I check my therapist sometimes because sometimes she'll say stuff and I'll say "What you're saying is wild and here's how you need to be caretaking for me."
When I say I need a break, I'm telling you. I'm not asking for a break. "You can tell me all the reasons it's not poppin', and I'm gonna say that sounds like a personal problem. Respectfully, I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna take this motherfuckin' break."
It's not a common practice for them to just fire you because you want to take a break.

Khalia Braswell:

If I don't break, I'm going to break.
Any last thoughts or pieces of advice you have for people who are trying to recover from and/or manage their pandemic burnout?

Janiece Mackey:

Where is pushback coming from? Make sure it's not yourself. Find spaces and sources that replenish you. For me it was the water. I play my cello. Just to replenish my soul.

Tiera Tanksley:

Say no a lot.
Not "No, because x, y, and z" but "No. Because I said so." We hear it all the time, but then it's really hard to do.
I haven't had repercussions for saying no beyond the awkwardness of saying no.
If you want to say yes but you don't have the capacity, find another way or delegate to someone who does. Be unapologetic. You know your limitations.

Naomi Thompson:

A helpful podcast for sleep: https://www.nothingmuchhappens.com/

Khalia Braswell:

Self-care has been commercialized, but I really Dr. Tanksley's approach around finding little moments of joy. I want to echo that. My last apartment had a beautiful tub and I started taking baths, I was like, "This is a mood."
We have to rethink these norms that we've put around things around taking care of ourselves and finding joy.
Don't overthink self-care.

Tiera Tanksley:

Not feeling pressured to answer a text or a message if you're up and on your phone.

My Notes from #CLS2022: Rising Scholars - Exploring Pathways: Finding Your Place of Impact

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 15:12:00 -0400

Wendy Roldan:

introducing the panel Exploring Pathways: Finding Your Place of Impact
is a UX researcher at Google, place of impact with users in studies at work

Kiley Sobel:

UX researcher at Duolingo with ABC app focused on kids' reading in their native language, impact is with learners, kids, families, parents, teachers, and the product itself

Deborah Fields:

works for Utah State University but lives in Long Beach, CA, does curriculum design, teacher education, and research, always exploring new pathways for impact

Andres Lombana-Bermudez:

based in Bogota, Colombia, Associate Professor at Universidad Javeriana, research center in Colombia, and Berkman at Harvard. Impact follows a winding and networked pathway. Part of the Digital Media & Learning Initiative since the beginning.
I (Kimberly) love hearing how varied Andres's pathway has been! Focuses on projects & collaborations as much as positions/institutions. <3!

Jennifer Pierre:

UX Researcher at YouTube working on fan-funding, also instructor and affiliated researcher at universities

Wendy Roldan:

What strategies/values/criteria did you use to navigate your own process of finding your place of impact? What helped ground you? What did you prioritize?

Deborah Fields:

Find the heart of who you are and what you want to do and keep it at the center as you try a bunch of different things.
is knitting right now. I'm (Kimberly) crocheting right now!
goal was to support youth across their lives & now does so through curriculum design, teacher education, research.
Be open to relationships and opportunities. Sometimes you feel like you're pushing against a wall. Take a break from pushing against the wall and look for what's already open.
Making connections across spaces (eg families & institutions, communities & workspace) is the heart of Debbie's work. Allowing parts of life outside research to come through in research life.

Andres Lombana-Bermudez:

Impact is a moving target in the face of change. Be attuned to your context. Grasp opportunities as they appear.
Pay attention to communities and mentors who give you space to join your interests.
It takes energy to keep finding projects, grow, connect, build communities.

Jennifer Pierre:

Searching for the intersections where your impact will be takes time and work. Think about the types of impact you want your work to have, what outcomes do you want your work to have? Who do you want to be affected? In what ways?
YouTube team leveraged specific work from Jen's dissertation to impact product development and that was really exciting.

Kiley Sobel:

tried a lot of things out in grad school. Academic research, contributing to academic community & body of knowledge, direct impact on kids in classrooms, volunteered at conferences, TAed, volunteered in early childhood classroom, internships.
Applied to lots of different jobs, teaching postdocs at liberal arts, faculty at R1, UX at big tech company, research scientist at non-profit. Paid attention to what held a draw.
Started @ Joan Ganz Cooney Center impacting policy from 30,000 feet view, wanted next to get experience working on a specific project. Important to recognize that whatever you're trying now isn't something your locked into forever.

Wendy Roldan:

Any standout moments that led to the work you're doing now?

Kiley Sobel:

The interview process gave specific signal into whether community was energizing.

Deborah Fields:

Unsuccessful job search led to postdoc with mentor Yasmin Kafai on e-textiles grants. Didn't get job at Cooney Center that Kiley did but DID get work from them doing a lit review with a colleague from a different grad school.

Wendy Roldan:

Sometimes saying NO is what leads you to your impact.

Jennifer Pierre:

Echoes Wendy's point. Saying no clarifies priorities: I want to live in a particular place, I don't want to live away from my partner. Also echoes Kiley's point about gut checks.

Wendy Roldan:

How would you suggest going about finding opportunities to explore places of potential impact?

Andres Lombana-Bermudez:

Try & apply to different things. Doing an internship during PhD program in a crisis led to connecting with a community of mentors and peers encouraging a networked, omnivorous mindset.
You need a lot of luck. The more that you try, the more opportunities you'll be able to grasp.

Deborah Fields:

Sometimes the closed doors are powerful in opening up new opportunities.

Jennifer Pierre:

Apply to jobs in places you might not have thought you would end up.
You might need to be more assertive than you would normally be, introduce yourself to people whose work you admire.

Kiley Sobel:

Relationships are important even if you have to foster them yourself.

Deborah Fields:

Academic mentors are good at academia but you might have to look outside academia for people who can mentor you in other areas.
If you're following up on a connection, you may need to remind them how you connected before. You don't know where relationships will lead.

Kiley Sobel:

It might not be someone who is already in a position more advanced than yours. Might be another student or someone you met when you were both students.

Wendy Roldan:

How important were relationships to finding your opportunities? How did you navigate the awkwardness of asking for referrals or help finding positions? How did someone else extend an opportunity for you in a way that felt graceful?

Kiley Sobel:

Make connections BEFORE the exact opportunity is available. Don't wait until you see a particular job. Build relationships with people who are making the kind of impact you want. That feels more genuine.

Deborah Fields:

Relationships start early and you don't know where they will lead.
Maintain connections with people mentors introduce you to.
Sometimes you connect over hobbies - people just approach me because I knit publicly.
Approach people with deep respect.

Andres Lombana-Bermudez:

For Andres: How do you make an impact in the diverse Colombian context? How do you meet the expectations of your boss and your own expectations?
There is a shortage of resources in Colombia. It can be difficult to find research funding. At universities you need to start negotiating your agenda as a researcher and balance it with the teaching aspects. The emphasis here is more on teaching.
If you can create your own non-profit/institution, you will have more control over your own priorities because there's not a boss to tell you no.

Wendy Roldan:

What last thoughts or pieces of advice do you have for people wanting to find their place of impact?

Jennifer Pierre:

Be open to new opportunities. Find ways to blend and combine your multiple interests. Carve out space to have more exploratory or informational conversations with people.
Reaching out early sets you up for having relationships and networks later.

Deborah Fields:

Find the heart that keeps you going. You will have to do things that aren't part of your passion. You will find places where your passion stretches out beyond your job. You can't predict where things will happen.
Protect that heart. Find ways that feel authentic to you. Be open to places that will connect with it that you didn't expect.

Andres Lombana-Bermudez:

Find communities whose interests and heart resonate with yours. As you join them and exchange ideas, you may find the pathway that connects your personal interests with the places that you can have an impact.

Kiley Sobel:

Be open to learning through the experience. Through the experience of getting somewhere you might find what fulfills you in an unexpected way.
Things will change and that's okay.

Wendy Roldan:

What's one thing you're looking forward to continuing or trying new as you navigate your path?

Deborah Fields:

Supporting and studying K-12 computer science teachers without having prior experience in K-12. Advocating for them through publications and academia. Find ways to support them, their creativity & impact on students.

My Notes from #CLS2022: Rising Scholars - Sharing Work Beyond Academic Publishing

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 13:54:00 -0400

Alexis Hope:

Alexis worked on hackathons including the Make the Breast Pump Not Suck hackathon (love it!) and others to bring people together to hack policy, services, & norms related to postpartum experience.

Jean Ryoo:

loves Alexis's work. Breast pumps are awful! Jean is director of CompSci equity project at UCLA. Jean taught high school & middle school English and social studies and got excited about critical pedagogy & addressing systemic issues.
Jean's research focuses on equity issues in computer science education.
Jean's recent research tries to elevate the voices of youth who have been pushed out of the world of computing and are experiencing their first computing class in high school.
How can we push the tech industry to recognize that they are responsible for the ethical implications of what they create? How can we get involved in changing this? Jean wrote a graphic novel called Power On about teens + CS & CS heroes addressing inequity.

Clifford Lee:

Cliff works in teacher education and the same project as Jean, also with YR Media where youth produce and create media.

Cliff's work is at the intersection of computational thinking, critical pedagogy, and creative arts expression.

Marisa Morán Jahn:

Marisa shares about porous authorship structures as opposed to the black box model of academic publishing.
Co-design process is reciprocal, traditional publishing is extractive.
Takeaways: Who are you trying to reach? Why now? Who is the right person to distribute the info? What kind of media does your audience consume? When?

Santiago Ojeda-Ramirez:

Santiago asks what resources were helpful to panelists in beginning sharing beyond academia.

Clifford Lee:

All the work from YR media is meant to be shared with the public. Research focuses on pedagogy, curriculum, and process.
Cliff makes it a point to present to educators, publish op eds, trade pubs.
It's important to consider the writing style in trade publishing & for non-academic audiences to make it readable, break the mold grad school may have pushed you into.
Have conversations about your work with people outside of your work and relationships and partnerships can develop. "Academia's not necessarily meant to get you to be a public intellectual." Read more journalistic writing, academics who write trade books
"Academia's not necessarily meant to get you to be a public intellectual." Read more journalistic writing, academics who write trade books.

Jean Ryoo:

Think about who surrounds you. Are you only talking to other academics? Don't drop your non-academic friends & family. Meet people outside academia.
Jean was an avid reader of graphic novels & manga but hadn't written one before and had to learn to write a comic script instead of description.
"Graphic Novel Writing for Dummies"-type resources can be helpful to learn how experts in the medium work (like Neil Gaiman or Superman writers).

Marisa Morán Jahn:

Academic publishers often do a small run like 400 copies. Other outlets have wider reach.
Popular media is a lot of eyes if the people who you're trying to reach consume that outlet. "Where are people's eyeballs?"
There's value in directly impacting fewer people, too.
There's the question of impact and the question of scale and how you should negotiate that depends on the project and your goals.

Alexis Hope:

For the Breast Pump hackathon, the goal was to change the narrative of breastfeeding from personal choice to structural one (importance of employment policies, healthcare) and prepped for communicating with the media.
https://makethebreastpumpnotsuck.com/research
Another goal was to change the culture of the media lab because the breastpump project wasn't future-focused enough or was too weird; deliberately targeted academic publishing as well to push back against that perception.

Santiago Ojeda-Ramirez:

How do you balance the output demands & needs of academia/academic publishing with these non-traditional forms of sharing your work? How do you communicate the impact and value of this work within the academic context? How do we move past the h-index?

Marisa Morán Jahn:

Why should I spend so much time on the peer review process? How deep is that impact? It can feel hard to justify but toggling or balancing and using academic vocabulary with peers can sharpen our thinking about those issues.
You can increase citations to underrepresented scholars and include voices from outside academia when you author academic work.

Jean Ryoo:

"Balance doesn't exist in my life right now... COVID has made things work."
Jean has an academic position as a researcher but steps of advancement aren't tied to tenure because the work is grant-based. Getting academic AND non-academic audiences excited about a graphic novel because it's based on research & translating research is important.
Getting academic AND non-academic audiences excited about a graphic novel because it's based on research & translating research is important.
I'm excited that my first, maybe only book, is a graphic novel because the kids in my family are reading it.
It's a graphic novel published by an academic publisher (MIT press).

Clifford Lee:

We need to speak to academic audiences AND other audiences. Be intentional and strategic.
Being at a liberal arts institution is different than being at an R1. What department, school, or college you're in will affect what kind of output is considered as impact.
Some institutions will value podcasts and other media.

Alexis Hope:

published an academic paper about the breastpump hackathon and followed that with a toolkit for people who want to host hackathons. It can be helpful to think through things as you write academic work and then leverage that thought process when writing popular work.
It can be helpful to think through things as you write academic work and then leverage that thought process when writing popular work.

Santiago Ojeda-Ramirez:

What advice would you give to early career scholars who want to pursue academic careers and also sharpen their skills for creating art/writing outside academia?
You panelists are inspiring. Who inspired you?

Clifford Lee:

Mike Rose from UCLA. Both Cliff & Jean had him as a professor. He translated academic knowledge to a mainstream audience. Cliff learned about the writing process from him.
How do I convey through storytelling the same message as research, but in a powerful, motivating, engaging way?

Jean Ryoo:

Mike was always practicing the art of beautiful writing. Every day he was writing on a yellow notepad with a pencil. It wasn't an egotistical, egocentric practice. He was thinking deeply about the people he had met & trying to convey their stories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Rose_(educator)
Artists we enjoy like David Bowie, Yayoi Kusama. Re-read books like you want to write - Jean re-read the March trilogy. Be inspired by the different ways a story can be told.

Alexis Hope:

Catherine D'Ignazio (<3 Data Feminism)
Mitch Resnick & Natalie Rusk

Marisa Morán Jahn:

Get in the habit of doing primary ethnography, engage with real people in real life that you're accountable to, transcribe your conversations with them, it's transformative for you as a speaker & them as a listener.
The Shakers thought about rendering their own religious views through arts, which is close to the practice of making public scholarship.

Alexis Hope:

Ethan Zuckerman had students practice non-academic writing

Marisa Morán Jahn:

Sarah Pink's Sensory Ethnography

Dealing with SDCC envy

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 12:36:08 -0400

About 7 years ago, Geek and Sundry (RIP) published a post titled HOW TO HAVE A GREAT, GEEKY WEEKEND WHEN YOU’RE NOT GOING TO SDCC.

As a chronically ill person with an immunocompromised mom, I have no idea when I’ll feel safe going to cons again. G&S’s advice was for a PRE-COVID world. Here’s my updated set of tips, inspired by their original article.

Get into some trivia with the Dorky, Geeky, Nerdy Podcast. This podcast shares their trivia questions as playable text pages online and on YouTube if you want to share with friends and play together over Zoom or something. They cover tons of different topics and have three difficulty levels. They even have rules and scoring advice. I enjoyed the Star Trek: The Next Generation trivia, of course.

Catch up on comics with your local comic shop, library, or favorite online service. I’ve got some unread books left over from Free Comic Book Day. My local shop does online ordering and curbside pickup. My library offers comics both in physical form and digitally via Hoopla and Libby. And of course there are your bigger operations like Marvel Unlimited and DC Universe Infinite. I’m going to try some of the Eisner Award nominees in the Early Readers category to share with my kid.

Work on a cosplay project. I’m putting together a vaguely genderbent (in that I’m a woman and won’t be making any effort to crossplay) Eddie Munson (BEWARE OF SPOILERS AT THAT LINK!) from Stranger Things 4. I’ve got a jacket and vest. I’m waiting for my Hellfire Club shirt to arrive. Next, I want to dig out my black jeans and try distressing them.

Do some gaming. I’ll probably play some Metroid: Zero Mission myself, but I’m also going to go prep the first Magical Kitties Save the Day adventure to play with my family as soon as I’m done writing this post.

Watch something geeky. For me, it’ll probably be Star Trek: The Next Generation, but I might also rock the 1976 Carrie. If you want to stay home but not watch alone, you can try a virtual watch party tool. I like Scener.

I hope you have some fun this weekend, wherever you are!

It's my birthday! Here's who I want to be and how we should celebrate.

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 05:07:00 -0400

I’m 41 today and it’s a big deal because every day that I live is a day I chose to be in the world and a whole year of sticking around is huge.

40 has been by turns amazing and rough. But mostly I’ve loved how it feels like the perfect age to really go all in on unapologetically being myself and to completely bail on caring about any superficial opinion anyone has of me. It’s also a great age to realize mostly people aren’t silently criticizing me, because they’re too focused on themselves to pay attention to me.

Who I wanted to be at 40 is also who I want to be at 41. I’m doing a good job on all of those. 41 will be a year of maintaining that and having new adventures.

If you want to be part of the virtual celebration of Kimbertide, I offered some good suggestions in 2020 and 2021. I’ll probably do some of those.

Thanks for hanging out with me on the Internet this year, y’all. You bring a lot of love and connection into my life.

Thinking through disability on Star Trek 🖖🏻📺

Wed, 22 Jun 2022 01:02:57 -0400

I wrote this a week ago to sort through my thoughts on disability on Star Trek. It is essentially a freewrite, not a carefully structured essay.

Some context: I write this as my mom has recently changed from being a person with variable and invisible disabilities to someone with consistent and visible disabilities. She has lost the use of her legs and must ride a wheelchair if she wants to move around independently. But for years, she has had problems with sometimes falling down, for decades she has had chronic illness with debilitating fatigue as a symptom. Disability is not new to her but her recently developed disability is quite different from her disability in the past.

I myself have lived with chronic illness as my primary disability for a long time, though I did not conceive of myself as disabled until the COVID-19 pandemic. My disabilities are variable and invisible, like my mom’s earlier ones. I sometimes have debilitating fatigue or brain fog. I struggle with activities of daily living due to challenges of executive function, rather than physical limitation.

And on top of all of this is my experience as an autism sibling - while this hasn’t impacted me much because Micah’s diagnosis came when I was away at college, I’m still keenly aware of it. I also am perpetually working on foregrounding the voices of autistic people themselves rather than trumpeting my thoughts on it. But it is work, not something that comes to me naturally. I’m too keen on talking about my own thoughts and ideas for that to be my default state.

With all of this in mind, I’m thinking lately about two depictions of disability on Star Trek: Christopher Pike’s experience as a quadriplegic who can communicate only using assistive technology and, for whatever reason, that assistive technology is limited. (Maybe in the 60s it was the best they could imagine? Maybe his cognitive damage is so strong that he can only formulate yes or no as thoughts?) And Geordi Laforge, whose disability is mitigated by assistive technology that not only gives him sight, but allows him to use his sight in ways that people who are born sighted cannot do.

And then there are others as well who I would love more details about. On Discovery in particular, Airiam and Detmer. What about on Lower Decks? Is the character with an implant there using it as assistive technology? Or is it an augmentation? I should look at these characters more closely and look for others as well.

What about Sarek as he nears the end of his life?

There are plenty of possible examples for me to look at.

Today, though, I’ll focus on Pike and Laforge.

Pike’s plight is presented as a kind of death or “the death of the man I am now,” as Pike tells Spock in SNW 1x01. In TOS (I’ll admit I have yet to watch this episode and have only read about it on Wikipedia), Spock kidnaps Pike and takes him to Talos IV where he can live with the illusion of his body as it was before his disabling event. What does this mean about disability in Star Trek? How does the illusion on Talos IV work? Is he actually lying in a bed somewhere? Rolling around in his chair? He gets to live out his days with Veena and that’s nice but what is the nature of this “solution”? And what does it tell us about disability in the world of Star Trek? I need to watch “The Cage” before I can know at all. And also perhaps to revisit Pike’s experience of the future on Discovery and take notes on his mentions of it in SNW.

(Also who else is writing about Star Trek and disability?)

Now Laforge. This is someone whose assistive technology effectively eliminates his disability but who 1. is once again disabled if his VISOR falls off and 2. if I’m remembering correctly, is always in pain and that’s the tradeoff for using the visor.

(I feel like there is somebody else on Trek who’s always in pain but I wonder if I’m actually thinking of Miriam from Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.)

Geordi Laforge’s disability isn’t a thing until it is. I’ve been falling asleep to the TNG episode, “The Masterpiece Society,” in which a colony has systematically bred its citizens for optimum living, including eliminating disability. Laforge reads this (and I do too) as a suggestion that as a disabled person, he has no contribution to make to a society. And then there’s delicious irony that the technology from his VISOR is just the technology they need to save the colony from being essentially doomed by tectonic activity responsive to a star core fragment. (Still not sure what that is, though I can guess from the words. Maybe I’ll look it up.)

I talked to W about this last night, and he suggested that it’s not that Geordi wouldn’t have been born, but that he would have been born sighted. I think this is a set of hypotheticals that it’s hard to think through. To what extent do our disabilities make us who we are? Are we the same person if we’re born without them? This is something that we’ve thought about a lot in our family with my brother and whether being able to isolate an autism gene would change his life. We wouldn’t have wanted to terminate Mommy’s pregnancy with him but it might have allowed us to prepare better. But if it were possible to manipulate the autism out of him, would he then be himself? I know he doesn’t think so.

Neurodivergence is a different sort of disability, I think, than physical limitation. (I’m keenly aware of this deficit-based language and know that I need to change it before I write anything for wider publication on it.) We want autism acceptance, neurodivergent acceptance.

But there is a real tension between the social model of disability and the medical model of disability. Is the world what disables you, or your body? I think it’s both. Star Trek sort of shows us with Geordi that it can be both. The Enterprise is a pretty accessible place, as long as the turbolifts are working, and Geordi has technology he needs to live and work. By the social model of disability, as long as he’s wearing his VISOR, he’s not disabled.

But he is sometimes in circumstances where he’s not wearing the VISOR, especially in environments that are NOT DESIGNED. And that limits his potential activity, and so in those cases, it is his body that disables him.

I need to be careful not to feel like I have to do a complete literature review on critical disability studies before writing about this any further.

This Is How I Do It (TL;DR: Piecemeal and Flexibly)

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 10:27:10 -0400

Katy Peplin has a great Twitter thread on the difference between sharing your process with “This is how I do it” and “This is how you should do it.”

one thing i think about a lot as a coach and person:

there's a BIG difference between "this is how i did it" and "this is how it works best / this is how you should do it"
— Katy Peplin (@ThrivePhD) June 15, 2022

I try to write with the former attitude. Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega does this and it’s one of the things I most appreciate his writing.

I thought today I’d share one thing that address how I do it, wherein it = almost anything in life at all.

Piecemeal. In teeny, tiny fragments. I’ve written before about parenthood and kintsugi.

Yesterday, I was thinking about how I want to write more, and I had a thought about writing that was so good, I wanted to capture it. This happened in literally the one minute before M’s swim lesson started, so there I was on a deck chair by the pool with M basically in my lap (and he’s big, y’all, I love having him in my lap but it’s very different now), and took out my phone and typed out these words:

There will never be time to write. This is my life now. Prismatic. Fragmented. The bits inside a kaleidoscope. They make beautiful patterns and they can be arranged in new ways but they aren’t large. So how do I write in the fragments?

“How do I _______ in the fragments?” is the guiding question of my life. There is perpetually a giant pile of laundry at the foot of my bed. I do put the laundry away, but I put it away one item at a time, while I’m getting dressed and in between finding the things I want to wear on a given day.

I’m working on binding a little pamphlet-bound notebook for M. I fold a page here and there when I can.

This is how I get things done. It’s necessitated by two things: parenthood, which carries with it the eternal threat of interruption, and chronic illness, which means that while my mind loves and craves routine, my body disrupts my ability to stick to it.

So I live by this mantra: what I can, when I can.

And that’s how I get stuff done.

On sweetweird and hopepunk 🎙️ 📚📺🍿

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 12:13:00 -0400

Transcript:

Hello friends. I wanted to write a blog post about sweetweird and its relationship to hopepunk and other narrative aesthetics, we’ll call them, because they’re not exactly genres. But I am having some peripheral neuropathy today. And so I’m giving my wrists a break, and I’m gonna just record a podcast and then I’m going to upload the transcript with it so it’ll be effectively a blog post.

So sweetweird. Sweetweird, in case you are not constantly on the science fiction and fantasy internet as some of us are, is a term coined by Charlie Jane Anders. She first coined it in her book. I think it’s called Never Say You Can’t Survive and it’s like half-memoir, half-writing craft book, and she proposed it as an alternative to grimdark. So in case you’re not familiar with grimdark, it is fantasy or science fiction that’s set in a really hopeless, gritty world, and the most commonly thrown around examples are the are the Game of Thrones TV series/the Song of Ice and Fire books, or what I think is an even better example, The Blade Itself. So there’s really no one redeemable in those stories.They are fantasy stories without real heroes. When there are people who seem to be heroic like Jon Snow, things go badly for them. The general sense is that the world is terrible, and it’s just gonna stay terrible, but let’s read about some interesting happenings. Grimdark was fine.

Until 2016, when a lot of people started to feel that things went very badly, myself included. And so from 2016 to 2019, there was a bit of a shift that author Alexandra Rowland noticed and they called this shift hopepunk. Hopepunk is stories, especially fantasy and science fiction, but a lot of people have offered other examples, where the world is terrible, and it’s not going to ever be fixed 100% but it is worth fighting to do what we can to improve it anyway.

So in addition to being opposed to grimdark, this is also opposed to the idea of noblebright, which is where you get things like Lord of the Rings, where you have some foreordained hero who is guaranteed to save us all and they have a birthright. My easiest go-to example of noblebright is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Some people would say it’s something else. But Buffy has a destiny. There is an evil. She’s the one girl in all the world chosen to fight it and she consistently defeats it. New evil springs up, but it’s not the sort of ongoing, miserable world that she’s in. It’s that sometimes new evil pops up and that’s just when we happen to be watching her show because it’s probably not as fascinating to some people to watch she and her friends hang out. I would watch that, but not everyone would. And so Buffy is a great example of noblebright.

Angel, which is technically a spin off of Buffy, is a great example of hopepunk and it’s one of the examples Alexandra Rowland gave and it’s one of my favorite examples not just because I love it very much, but also because it sort of is quintessentially about this. In season two of Angel there’s an episode called “Epiphany.” And there’s a great quote from it, written by Tim Minear who is one of my favorite writers and himself, I would argue, a pretty hopepunk kind of guy, based on what we know about him from his writing, which is all we can know really. He also wrote the show Terriers, which I would argue is also hopepunk. So check that out. But the quote is,

“I guess if there’s no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.”

That is as mission statementy for Angel as you can get. And it is the most hopepunk arrangement of words I think you can have and you see it going on through season two of Angel all the way up to the very last moments of season five when it’s very clear that these heroes are fighting a war that they cannot win. And they do it anyway. And there’s a great moment and a great quote there that I don’t want to spoil in case you’re a person who hasn’t watched Angel, but the world around them is horrid. It’s never going to get 100% better. The forces they face are not readily defeated. They keep coming back. They’re not like Buffy where new evil comes. It’s the same old thing coming back over and over again. And so that’s hopepunk, in a nutshell basically, I think is Angel.

So sweetweird. Charlie Jane Anders offers as a different response to grimdark and alternative to noblebright and a lot of people myself included at first were like, “Wait, don’t we already have hopepunk for this?” but then as I learned more about it, I saw that they are related, sweetweird and hopepunk. I call them cousins, but they’re not identical. And the quick way I like to say this is that hopepunk is global. And sweetweird is local. So in hopepun,k you live in a hellscape and every day you muster your energy and you go out and you fight the bad of the world. And you just keep doing it because it’s worth doing. And I think from 2016 to 2019, that was a storytelling mode that we really needed. Because it felt like all right, we can do this. We’re going to have to fight it every step of the way. And it will keep coming back. But we can do that we can improve the world at least a little bit by doing that. And even into 2020 hopepunk was really something that seemed good.

But now it’s 2022 and I would say I don’t know about y’all, but I do know about y’all. We’re all exhausted. We live in the hellscape and it’s hard and it doesn’t always feel like we can make a difference. It feels like the places where we can make a difference are small. Sweetweird is an alternate way of approaching the hellscape. So the little phrase that I’m very pleased with myself for coming up with in the comments on Gwenda Bond’s newsletter about sweetweird, is that sweetweird is about the idea that even within a hellscape you can create a haven.

I think the best example of this is The Owl House and I’m gonna go to that in a minute. But just a quick shout out to The Book of Mormon which posited this in its big finale way back in 2011 with the idea that we can make this our paradise planet. And you know, that does sound bigger than sweetweird, but the idea I think is still there. So The Owl House is not the only example Charlie Jane Anders offers. She suggests many trends, especially in animation. I haven’t seen all of them. I am a little familiar with Steven Universe and Adventure Time and I’ve watched all of the Netflix She-Ra and I think those are sort of stepping stones on the path but that The Owl House, which I also have not seen all of but have seen enough of to have a sense of its vibe, is sort of the perfected sweetweird.

So in The Owl House, Luz, a middle-school-aged, I believe, girl longs to live in a fantasy world and just so happens to find herself in one instead of ending up at summer camp like her mom had planned for her. And immediately she’s very excited because she’s met a real witch and there’s this great moment in the pilot where they leave the witch’s house and Luz sees this fantasy world she’s ended up in for the first time and the place is called the Boiling Isles. And it is miserable. It is a literal visual hellscape. It looks like a terrible place to be. There are a lot of bad things happening there all the time. It’s a harsh and unfriendly world. But Luz and Eda the Owl Lady, the witch that she works with, and King the tiny, adorable — it’s not actually cat but a lot of ways feels like a cat to me — creature bent on world dominatio,n and then Luz’s school friends, and then over time Luz’s frenemy/love interest Amity, all build this sort of cocoon of love together. I would say that sounds more lurid than I meant it, but they create this group of people who all love and care for each other in the middle of the hellscape and they’re not trying to turn the Boiling Isles into not-a-hellscape. The Boiling Isles are a hellscape. It’s where they’re at. And so they are creating their own place here.

And so for me, the thing that makes the most sense with sweetweird in our current moment is that sweetweird is the story we need when we’re too exhausted for hopepunk. When we need time to recover and to remember that we are people who can do things. But we’re not ready to go out and be the people doing those things in the face of the horrible world we live in. Then we can retreat to these spaces of love that we have built for ourselves. And so that’s sort of the purpose in my mind of sweetweird and the distinction between sweetweird and hopepunk as a visual aesthetic.

A lot of the examples of sweetweird are a very specific vibe that is not one that resonates with me though I’m very happy so many people have found them resonant — specifically, Adventure Time and Steven Universe and The Owl House. But I have lately been into woodland goth which is a whole other blog post but I think can be related. Except there’s you know ominous fairies and stuff. But but still this idea at least in the book I just read, War for the Oaks, which is basically one of the first books to ever be an urban fantasy, even in the face of a giant fairy war, the main character Eddi builds a little band of people who all play together, and their music is related to fairy and to magic, but it also is its own thing and the connections they build with one another stand independent of that big fairy war. So it’s a similar idea, though the book itself is not sweetweird.

All right. That was a lot more than I realized I had to say and I’m super glad I said it out loud instead of typing it. I will post the raw transcript with this with maybe a few corrections because it seems Otter.ai does really not understand hopepunk as a word but yeah, that’s that. I hope you have enjoyed listening to and/or reading this and I hope if sweetweird sounds like the story aesthetic for you that you go out and enjoy a lot of it. Bye

This transcript was generated by otter.ai

How to Make a Star Wars Reference

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 10:00:32 -0400

Hello, friends. I want to talk about something from Stranger Things 4 that is brilliantly done. And that’s a Star Wars reference.

There are a lot of iconic quotes from Star Wars (and I mean the whole shebang, not just A New Hope). “Use the force, Luke.” “Luke, I am your father.” “I love you.” “I know.” “Do or do not. There is no try.”

People use these to varying effect, with varying degrees of acknowledgement. Sometimes it’s hackneyed, though I can’t think of any examples right now.

Sometimes it’s brilliantly used to reveal character, like in 30 Rock:

Liz says, “I love you,” Criss says, “I know,” Liz says, “You Solo’d me,” and then you’re certain that this is a love that will last.

But in this case, not only is this a Star Wars reference, it is a Star Wars reference that is then diegetically marked as a Star Wars reference.

Star Wars is 45 years old. It’s hard to make a Star Wars reference feel fresh. But Stranger Things 4 does, and here’s how (spoilers!):

This beautifully mimics this scene from The Empire Strikes Back:

The 20-to-1 odds of rolling a 20 on a 20-sided die make it line up extra beautifully with Han Solo’s odds of 3,720-to-1.

“Never tell me the odds” is something that most Star Wars fans will recognize as a reference, but in Star Wars it isn’t said with the gravity of so many of those other commonly known phrases. It’s something that people who like Star Wars okay, or are dimly aware of it, aren’t super likely to recognize. And it’s something that doesn’t take you out of the flow of the scene in Stranger Things. We’re not stopping the action to make a Star Wars reference: we’re making a Star Wars reference in much the way actual D&D players do, in the context of the actions surrounding the game.

I think this is probably now my favorite use of a Star Wars reference. Sorry, 30 Rock.

Responses to the chat during my #FanLIS2022 presentation

Fri, 20 May 2022 12:15:44 -0400

The chat runs by much too quickly to scroll with it while presenting but I love the vibrance of #FanLIS2022 chat so I wanted to go through and respond to people’s comments from my presentation, in addition to answering direct questions. So here we go!

procrastination and indecision then instantaneous dissertation topic is such an adhd mood

I’m not diagnosed, but you’re not wrong.

embodied fannishness

YES. More studies on how fans express their fandom with their bodies, please.

I’m kind of curious to see how many Cosplayers base their information process on others'.

This is a great question. I only got at individual practices and how others’ shared resources are an influence, not shared process, but I did have 2 participants collaborating on an epic Yuri On Ice wedding cosplay who used similar curation methods. I wonder if groups that frequently collaborate have more commonalities in their information practices.

I feel there is some modesty that comes with cosplayers and that would refrain them to define as creators

I think that’s right. They don’t necessarily identify as creators, though I did have 2 participants refer to themselves as “makers.” But whether they’d use the term or not, the position they put themselves in with both trial-and-error and documentation of their construction processes is information creators.

Some of my tweets from #FanLIS2022 Day 1

Fri, 20 May 2022 08:40:09 -0400

I was able to recover my Noter Live log, yay! I’ll go back and collect the tweets from after my reboot later.

has been joined by a cat. This is the most important thing to know about the FanLIS Symposium.
Every technology/platform seems to impose a taxonomy because you have to for organization.

sharing about visual/material design of fan-bound texts. I'm ([@KimberlyHirsh](https://micro.blog/KimberlyHirsh)) obsessed with the desire to make them look like books from a particular era (pulp, 80s or 90s mass market) and even distress them so they look used.

Fanbinders learn so many different skills related to design and craft.

🔖🖖📺 In reply to Star Trek: Discovery Has Problems (& How They Can Be Fixed)(Trek News) by Bill Smith

Wed, 18 May 2022 11:54:54 -0400

In reply to Star Trek: Discovery Has Problems (& How They Can Be Fixed) (Trek News) by Bill Smith:

I agree with Smith’s assessment of Discovery. Each season, the stakes are bigger. In Season 4, they were literally extragalactic. Once you’ve broken the galactic barrier and made first contact with a species living beyond it, where else is there to go?

The race to solve the puzzle box is exhausting. The hyperfocus on serialization leads to a lot of intriguing threads being introduced and tied off more quickly than I would like. For example, in Seasons 3 and 4 we saw what looked like they were going to be mental health crises for Detmer (PTSD from the jump into the future), Tilly (depression related to existential crisis), and Culber (burnout). In Detmer’s case, I don’t recall being shown the road to recovery at all. Tilly seemed to have two episodes of feeling bad that were magically fixed by deciding to become an instructor. And Culber I guess just really needed a vacation?

I really enjoy Discovery. In fact, I enjoy it so much that I wish there were more of it so we would have time to devote a whole episode to each of these characters.

I love Michael Burnham. But I also love so much of the rest of her crew. TNG started with a focus on the bridge crew and especially Picard, but opened up to give us time to get to know O’Brien, Barclay, and more. I wish Discovery had the breathing room to do the same.

I especially agree with Smith’s point here:

One of the things that Star Trek: Discovery did exceedingly well in Season 4 was First Contact with Species 10-C, the originators of the Dark Matter Anomaly.

It was its own challenge in unlocking the mystery of the DMA and I thought that aspect was something that the show did really well. It took this concept of seeking out new life and new civilizations and put a 32nd-century spin on it.

Discovery really leaned into that first contact situation hard and it worked. For 56 years, Star Trek has taught us that the unknown isn’t always something to be feared, but we should always strive to understand. There isn’t always a “big bad villain” when the puzzle is assembled or, sometimes, we find out that we are the villain however unintentionally.

These are the types of stories that have always found their way into Star Trek—from Gene Roddenberry’s first script right up to today’s iterations of the franchise. These are Trek’s roots and when Discovery revisits them, it works brilliantly.

Watching everyone work together to make first contact with the 10-C was exhilarating. It had all the delight of Picard figuring out the speech patterns in “Darmok” with an added bonus of getting to see a bunch of different people work together, leveraging each of their specialties to shine. This is foundational Trek stuff and I love when Discovery puts a spin on it.

I hope the writers will go a little softer in Discovery Season 5, giving it room to breathe. I look forward to seeing what they do.

🔖 Read How I Build My Common Place Book

Wed, 18 May 2022 04:01:00 -0400

🔖 Read How I Build My Common Place Book (Greg McVerry)

McVerry generously summarizes his workflow:

Document impetus of thought (often after the fact)

Collect initial bookmarks
Ask in networks, bookmark your queries
Collect research, and block quotes or use social annotations
Begin to formulate thoughts in random blog posts
Start to draft the long form thought
Publish an article on my Domain.

How to remove timestamps and extra lines from a Zoom transcript using Notepad++ or BBEdit

Thu, 12 May 2022 16:29:20 -0400

In case it would help other people, here’s how I did it. I would have something that looked like this:

9
00:00:36.900 –> 00:00:40.560
Kimberly Hirsh (she/her): Do you agree to participate in the study and to have the interview audio recorded?

With the help of this guide from Drexel and replies to this Stack Overflow post I now can remove the number, the timestamp, and the two extra lines created when I remove those. Here’s how I do it.

Open the VTT file in my advanced text editor.
Use the find and replace feature.
For the thing to be replaced I use the regular expression ^[(\d|\n)].*$. You don’t need to know what a regular expression is. Just copy and paste that little code bit into the “Find” box.
Make sure either “Regular expression” or “GREP” is selected.
Click “Replace” to test it once and be sure if it works.
If it works, click “Replace all.”

For BBEdit:

Paste ^\s*?\r in the “Find” box.
Make sure the replace box is empty.
Repeat steps 5 and 6.

For Notepad++: 7. Then switch so that “Extended” is selected instead of “Regular expression” or “GREP.” 8. Paste \r\n\r\n in the “Find” box. 9. Put a single space in the replace box. 10. Repeat steps 5 and 6.

I hope this is helpful!

🔖 You should read Josh Radnor's Museletter.

Wed, 11 May 2022 09:23:04 -0400

Josh Radnor writes a beautiful newsletter. It always feels like a gift. Here are some gems from the latest issue - italics are emphasis from the original, bold are mine.

There are no unwounded people. Wounding and trauma are features and facts of being a human being.

Why is it that I’m convinced my life should be linear and predictable, devoid of obstacle, conflict, and challenge, the very elements that make a story engaging and worth telling? Don’t I want to live a great story?

Nothing is the heaven or hell I want to make it out to be.

On my first year as a doctor (of philosophy)

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 10:23:13 -0400

As I mentioned earlier, I defended my dissertation a year and a week ago. It was a joyous defense, with my committee cosplaying and my friends and family able to attend via Zoom. My BFFs were there, plus lots of people I’ve met online. It was amazing and fun and at the end of it I was WIPED OUT.

Exactly one year ago today, I spent about 10 hours formatting my dissertation so I could graduate. That was not my favorite part.

Some people leave their PhD with a job in hand, whether in academia or industry. Other people, people like me, have no idea what comes next.

What came next for me involved a lot of sleep.

But there was other stuff, too!

A lot of the past year has been focused on parenting stuff, as my kid switched from remote preschool to F2F preschool. A lot of it has involved managing my health, trying different interventions and seeing what felt doable.

I’ve done some work for Quirkos, including writing two blog posts. I really enjoyed that work. I like figuring out what to say, how to say it, and how to make it meet a client’s needs. Content writing/marketing is on the table as a bigger potential stream of income for me in the future, and I like that.

I’ve done a bit of sewing: I made napkins, a blanket, and a pillow. I have fabric ready for making a maxi skirt. I love sewing, but it always feels like a bit of a production to set up. It’s not! It’s actually fast and easy! But it feels like it is, which means I don’t do it as often as I’d like.

I completed W’s application for Public Service Loan Forgiveness and consolidated my loans so I can start that process, too.

I applied for some jobs, not a ton, but maybe close to 10? I wasn’t scattershot: I picked out particular organizations I wanted to work for (like NoveList) or industries I wanted to work in (ed tech, libraries). I had meetings about three potential freelancing gigs but none of them panned out and that was fine.

I spent all of last summer as a Pool Mom, which was amazing: I would take M to the pool first thing in the morning for swim lessons and then he and I would just hang in the water for an hour or two. I loved it.

I presented at MIRA, ALISE, World View, Micro Camp, and FSN NA.

I got caught up on Star Trek: Lower Decks and Discovery. (That reminds me, new Picard today, yay!)

I participated in Micro.blog writer and reader groups sometimes, as well as continuing my participation with the Creative Adventurers community via Discord video chats (something else to look forward to today!).

I got vaccinated.

I got consultations about our broken driveway and eventually went with the choice suggested by our arborist: having Will use a sledgehammer to smash up the parts that were sticking up. This saved us thousands of dollars in driveway refinishing. I had consultations and scheduled work with the arborist and the electrician.

I had lunch with friends.

I let a lot of things go in all different areas of my life.

And I got my dream postdoc, which is huge and made me feel that the not-having-a-plan thing was worth it because I wouldn’t have been available to apply to this postdoc otherwise.

I know that’s just a chronicling of what I did, but I needed that before I could really reflect.

Life isn’t super different aside from the not-working-on-a-dissertation part. I don’t feel different. I do get confused whenever someone calls me Dr. Hirsh.

My postdoc is for one year with the possibility (dare I say expectation?) of a one-year renewal. I have no idea what I’ll be up to come January 2024. I’m privileged to be able to say that that’s okay.

So what’s life like, having been a doctor for a year? The biggest difference is that because I hadn’t been immersed in research from last April through December, I have to go back now and review my notes on earlier processes more when I need to do a technique I’ve done before.

Dr Horrible Phd In Horribleness GIFfrom Dr Horrible GIFs

📚 Book Review: NOT YOUR AVERAGE HOT GUY and THE DATE FROM HELL by Gwenda Bond

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 10:35:00 -0400

If you make a purchase through a link in this post, I may earn a commission.

Do you wish Dan Brown books were sexy and full of pop culture references? Do you like your religious artifact stories with comedy and kissing? Have I got the books for you!

Gwenda Bond’s books are always The Most Fun and her madcap fantasy romance duology is no exception.

First up, NOT YOUR AVERAGE HOT GUY:

Callie is a recentish college grad with no particular direction in life but a great love of books, learning, and creepy religious lore. She also works at her mom’s escape room. When Callie designs an immersive culty room and puts a book in it that is ACTUALLY an arcane artifact, cultists come to claim it and try to use it to release a demon on earth to bring about the end times. But instead they summon Luke, the super sexy prince of Hell. Wackiness ensues as Callie and Luke must team up to find the Holy Lance (that’s the Spear of Destiny for you The Librarian fans) and keep it from the cultists (who don’t actually know that Luke isn’t the demon they were trying to summon). To do so, they travel through painful demon magic, bopping around the world in a way that would make an Indiana Jones map look like Charlie Kelly’s conspiracy board:

Because you know how romance works, you know that they figure it out and get a Happy For Now. It’s important that it’s a HFN because a Happily Ever After wouldn’t leave room for the sequel:

THE DATE FROM HELL

Callie and Luke are happily dating now and they have an amazing date planned. But they also have a bit of a revolution planned: Callie wants to petition Lucifer to reconsider the damnation of people like Agnes, a 12-year-old girl who really probably should not have been sent to hell and certainly isn’t an adult by modern standards. Lucifer agrees to a meeting — on the day Callie and Luke are scheduled to have their big date. Which also happens to be the same day Callie is supposed to be helping her mom with a big escape room event to raise the money to make repairs after the mess she and Luke got into in NOT YOUR AVERAGE HOT GUY. Lucifer says that Callie and Luke have 72 hours to prove that they can redeem someone who deserves to be released from hell. The person he chooses is Sean, a lost-Hemsworth-brother-type/international art thief who oh, by the way, is a Grail seeker. More wacky hijinks ensue, more traveling by map, and more Arthuriana than you can shake Excalibur at. (Excalibur isn’t in the book to my recollection, by the way.) I briefly found myself thinking for a moment, “How wild is all this Arthuriana just happening in Callie’s real life?” before remembering that OH YEAH HER BOYFRIEND IS THE PRINCE OF HELL.

Because it’s a romance, it ends with a tidy Happily Ever After (leaving Gwenda free to work on other romances like MR. & MRS. WITCH). Callie figures a lot of stuff out, so does Luke, and they get to be together, yay. (And if you consider that a spoiler, romance probably isn’t the genre for you.)

What I loved

So many things! But here’s a partial list:

The meticulous attention to detail with respect to all the mystical artifacts
Callie’s supreme nerdiness
Detailed Escape Room stuff
Pop culture references aplenty (Wondering if you share Callie’s opinion on Season 4 of Veronica Mars? Read THE DATE FROM HELL to find out!)
The love that radiates from Luke whenever Callie Callies all over the place - seriously, I haven’t read this much warmth in a romance novel since I don’t know when (because warmth is different than heat)
Lilith. I just love her, okay?
Porsoth, a polite Owl Pig Demon who is a bit stuffy but can get scary when necessary
The affection Callie has from her mom, her brother Jared, and her bff Mag (who uses they/them pronouns and nobody ever makes it a thing)
What Gwenda does with Arthur and Guinevere, can’t say more or it’ll spoil you but big ONCE AND FUTURE graphic novel vibes

I can’t think of them all. If this isn’t a ringing endorsement, I don’t know what is: My whole family is going through a rough time right now and it makes it hard for me to immerse myself in a book. I would often read a chunk of THE DATE FROM HELL and then step away from it for a few days, but I ALWAYS CAME BACK. There are a lot of non-mandatory things I’m abandoning in life right now, but this book kept me returning.

What I need to warn you about

I really can’t think of much. I guess if you don’t like people being playful in stories about holy artifacts maybe skip these?

What I wanted more of

I can’t think of anything here either. Everything was exactly what it needed to be.

Who should read this

People who like Indiana Jones AND Sabrina (the Harrison Ford version). People who don’t know what to do with themselves and want to see somebody who also doesn’t know what to do with themself succeed at stuff. People who want a romance that is hot but not explicit. People who wished their were more badasses who were badass for reasons other than their ability to engage in combat (Callie is a badass and no one will convince me otherwise). People who need more fun in their lives.

Highly recommend.

Book: Not Your Average Hot Guy
Author: Gwenda Bond
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication Date: October 5, 2021
Pages: 320
Age Range: Adult
Source of Book: Library Book

Book: The Date from Hell
Author: Gwenda Bond
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication Date: April 5, 2022
Pages: 336
Age Range: Adult
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley

Notes from the LX2017 magazine

Sat, 09 Apr 2022 20:16:00 -0400

As you may have noticed, I’m reading up on Learning Experience Design. LXCON 2017 resulted in a beautiful magazine. I highlighted this bit:

To reach a desired learning outcome you want to focus on four different types of learning objectives: insight, knowledge, skill and behavior. These learning objectives are about who you are, what your views are, what you know and what you choose to do.

My Current Productivity Stack (including scholarly tools)

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 11:18:00 -0400

I am a productivity hobbyist and have a bad habit of chucking my whole system every once in a while to try and adopt somebody else’s from scratch. This never works, though, and I inevitably end up rebuilding my own Frankenstein’s monster of tools. I started feeling this itch again recently, and after briefly flirting with Tiago Forte’s PARA method, decided to go back to basics and look at what I already know works for me before spending a lot of time switching things up.

Personal Productivity

Here’s what I’m using right now. I based the list on what kind of things are in a productivity stack on this Pleexy blog post.

Personal Task Management

I don’t like using software for this. There’s something about the feeling of pen on paper that makes me prefer it intensely. It does mean that my tasks are not linked to relevant email messages, as Tiago Forte suggests they should be, but I can use email labels to hold things for later in a sort of David Alleny method with folders like Waiting For, Read/Review, and Reference.

So because I prefer to do task management on paper, I use the Bullet Journal method and its companion app. I do a pretty vanilla implementation of the core collections and add custom collections as appropriate.

The notebook I prefer is a large hardcover squared Moleskine/. I’m experimenting right now with the expanded edition, since I usually go through a couple notebooks a year. At first I didn’t like the added weight or feeling of it in my hand, but now I’m used to it and it doesn’t seem that different from the regular one.

The pen I prefer is the Pilot G2 07 in black.

I also use tabs with my notebook: 1” ones across the top to mark the future log, this month, this week, and today, and 2” ones down the side for collections.

Calendar

The Bullet Journal Method includes a way to calendar, and I do use it some. But I mostly use Google Calendar for this. It’s useful for collaboration - my colleagues and my husband all use Google Calendar, so it’s easy to schedule things with/for them this way. I also schedule a lot of recurring tasks and appreciate being able to search to see when something happened in the past.

Note taking

The Bullet Journal is great for note-taking, too, but I have a tendency to ignore notes once I get them on paper. For short notes that I want to be easily accessible, I use Google Keep. I use recurring reminders with these. For example, I have a list of all my meds and a recurring reminder to fill my cases with them, and a list that pops up every day of stuff M. needs to be ready to go to school.

Longer notes end up in my blog, which I host on Micro.blog, or in Google Docs. This is an area where I could grow. If I decide to really get into personal knowledge management, I’ll probably experiment with some other tools. I’ve tried Evernote and Notion in the past and neither of them is quite right for what I’d imagine doing.

Focus

I use Forest, but I use it pretty inconsistently. When I’m in flow, I don’t really need this kind of app. As I do more writing, though, I might use it more.

Time management

I could use Forest for this, too, and I might. So far I don’t do a lot of time tracking.

Habit tracker

These never work for me, so I don’t bother with one.

Automation

I don’t do this much, either. I like a bit of friction in my workflow. As I keep refining it, I may discover areas that could benefit from automation, though.

Scholarly Productivity

Scholarly productivity requires its own specialized set of tools. Here’s what I use.

Citation management and reading

I use Paperpile for both citation management and scholarly reading. It integrates seamlessly with Google Docs for writing. It has its own built-in reader interface available on web or mobile. It costs about $30/year and I love it. It has completely eliminated lots of document-syncing headaches I had in the past when I used Zotero.

Literature tracking and notes

I use the labels and folders in Paperpile, along with Raul Pacheco-Vega’s Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump method for this. I track a given body of literature using a Notion spreadsheet I created. You can get it (pay-what-you-can starting at $0) here.

Keeping up with literature

I use a combination of Google Scholar alerts and journal alerts for this.

Mind-mapping

I use bubbl.us.

Writing pipeline

I track my writing pipeline in Notion, with a database that lets me view it as a list or as a kanban-board according to stage in the publication process. I have a pay-what-you-can (again, starting at $0) template you can download for that.

Revisions

I have a revisions database in Notion for each paper, as well. I haven’t made this available as a template yet, but I plan to soon. Sign up for my Newsletter if you want to find out when it goes live. It will be pay-what-you-can like the others.

Permissions

If you are using images from others’ work in scholarly publishing, you will need to obtain and track permission to use that work. I do that in a Notion database. You can get my template. (As always, pay-what-you-can, $0.)

Areas for growth

There are two big gaps in my productivity stack right now. One is the difficulty in serendipitously serving up notes to myself. The kinds of connections that build creativity aren’t readily available using Google Docs or Keep. I started to build a personal wiki for this purpose but I think the amount of labor required to keep it up was too high. I’ll probably play with Notion for this some more, but I might just keep putting stuff on my website and occasionally scrolling through categories there to find connections.

The other big gap is REVIEW. I don’t have a solid review process. I’ve tried timers and time blocking and so far they haven’t worked for me. But I know all of this would work much better for me if I dedicated the time to review it, so I will keep working on figuring that out.

I hope it’s been helpful for you to read about my productivity stack. What’s in yours?

7 Things to Do Before You Start Your PhD

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 10:38:00 -0400

It’s the time of year when people are announcing their PhD acceptances. If you are psyched to be doing a PhD, yay you! I have some advice for things you can do to make it easier. If you are already into your program or even graduated and haven’t done these yet, it’s never too late to do them. But I wish I’d done all of them before beginning my PhD, so if you can do them ahead of time, I think it will go better for you.

1. Choose a citation manager.

You’re going to be reading a LOT of scholarship: articles, book chapters, conference proceedings. You’ll read some assigned by your professors and some you find for your own work. If you start out capturing all of them, it’ll be easier to find them later when you reference them in your own work.

You have two options here: something that will grab references for you and build citations and reference lists, or doing it manually.

Software that will do it for you

There are a lot of options for the former. I personally use Paperpile. It integrates with Google Docs, which is where I do most of my writing. It has mobile apps and includes a reader that will save your highlights and annotations. It costs about $30 a year.

I’ve also tried Refworks, Zotero, and Mendeley. I recommend looking at the features for each option and choosing the one that looks like it will match best with your anticipated workflow. Paperpile is good for me because I like to read on a tablet and it requires no extra steps to set that up. Think about your plans for reading and your plans for writing.

Know that this is a pretty low stakes choice, as most of these have an export option that will let you move all of your references to a different manager easily.

Doing it manually

You can do this manually if you like, though it can get unwieldy if you start to build up a large collection of resources. (I currently have over 3500 in my Paperpile library.) To do it this way, I recommend setting up a spreadsheet according to Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega’s Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump method. (If you’re a Notion user, I’ve got a pay-what-you-can template for doing this.)

To create the references to include in your bibliography, you can either build them manually or find them in Google Scholar and click “Cite” to get a list of formatted citations.

If you go this route, you should be meticulous about keeping track of which references you use. I would recommend building your reference list as you write rather than waiting until you’re done writing.

2. Choose a way of storing readings.

With Paperpile, Zotero, and Mendeley, this is handled for you. If you use Notion, you can use their web clipper to gather readings. You can also just download readings into a folder you manage yourself. If you do this, I recommend backing them up to the cloud using Dropbox or Google Drive and backing up to an external hard drive for extra security.

3. Figure out how you prefer to read.

Knowing this preference will save you time later and help you build a reading-writing-citation environment. You might like to print things on paper, read them on your computer screen, or read them on a tablet or phone. Try all of the options available to you to figure out what you like best.

4. Look for information on your university library’s website about help with research.

Is there a specific librarian assigned to your department? Learn about them. Maybe even get to know them. You are not bothering the librarian. The librarian’s job is to help scholars with research. You are a scholar. The librarian will work with you.

Does the library provide instruction in how to use databases? Sign up for a session. Do they offer topic guides? See if there’s one close to your research interest and get familiar with the resources included in it.

5. Learn to read and take notes.

This is the most important one. Don’t be like me and spend hours of your PhD reading every paper in excruciating detail. If you are in the social, natural, or applied sciences, check out Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega’s Abstract-Introduction-Conclusion method as a starting point, then dig deeper into readings that feel especially important for your own work.

Track everything you read, keep notes on it, and later you won’t have to work as hard to hunt it down. Again, I recommend setting up a spreadsheet according to Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega’s Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump method. (If you’re a Notion user, I’ve got a pay-what-you-can template for doing this.) Dr. Pacheco-Vega also has a lot of wisdom to share on note-taking techniques, so look at those and see what might work for you.

6. Develop an elevator pitch for your research interests.

You’re going to have to introduce yourself and your research interests to people, a lot. Try to get down a quick explanation of your research interests. This will change over time.

For example, in my application, I said I was interested in researching how connected learning could fit in school libraries. Then, I said I was interested in interest-driven learning in libraries. Now, I am interested in how connected learning as manifested through fan activity contributes to information literacy and practices. (Would I need to define some of those terms? You betcha. In that case, I could say I’m interested in how fans engaging in activities like cosplay and fanfiction learn through those activities, as well as how they find, evaluate, use, create, and share information.)

7. Get a hobby or two.

A hobby gives you something to do that’s not school, and that’s important. Ideally, it’s something you will have begun learning before school starts so that you’re not, say, simultaneously trying to understand Marxist geography and the sociology of space while also learning to knit. If you can get more than one hobby, even better. I like having a solitary one and one that will lead you to interact with non-school people. In my MSLS days, my principal hobbies were baking cupcakes and being in the Durham Savoyards. During the PhD, they were tinkering on the IndieWeb and doing improv comedy.

There are a lot of other things you might do to make your experience go smoothly, but if you’ve got these seven down, you’re going in with a strong foundation.

Fostering Information Literacy Through Autonomy and Guidance in the Inquiry and Maker Learning Environments - Koh et al, 2020

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 10:52:34 -0400

Koh, K., Ge, X., Lee, L., Lewis, K. R., Simmons, S., & Nelson, L. (2020). Fostering Information Literacy Through Autonomy and Guidance in the Inquiry and Maker Learning Environments. In J. H. Kalir & D. Filipiak (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2019 Connected Learning Summit (pp. 94–101). ETC Press.

This is a quick note that I’m really excited about this conference paper I found that builds a bridge between connected learning (my broad research interest) and information literacy (my specific disciplinary interest). I’m going to explore it more and dig into the connection later, but I’m psyched to find a new paper on this.

Why I like St. Patrick's Day ☘️

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 22:55:19 -0400

I originally posted this on Facebook on March 17, 2016.

I’m only 9% Irish, but I sure love Saint Patrick’s Day. I think most of my affection for it comes from St. Patrick’s Day 1991, when my sister, our mom, and I arrived at our Tallahassee church for the last round of the church’s progressive dinner, and my dad, who had been living in Durham for more than a year, surprised us by showing up. Will and I have a picture from that Saint Patrick’s Day hanging on the wall of our parlor.

Wordle Walkthrough - 03/14/2022

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 09:56:00 -0400

As promised, here’s a walkthrough of my thought process for playing Wordle. This is the game for 03/14/2022.

I begin most games with the word ATONE. This uses 5 of the 6 most frequent letters used in English (etaoin).

After this, I know that the word will have T and E in it. I have eliminated one possible position for each of those letters.

My next goal is to do two things:

Systematically eliminate other location possibilities for T and E.
Include as many of the remaining letters from the 12 most frequently uses letters as possible (i shrdlu).

So I try TIERS, which moves T to the beginning and brings in I, R, and S.

This locks E in the middle position, tells me that I chose the wrong position for T, and lets me know that S will be in there somewhere, but not in its current position.

I actually get a bit less strategic now. I only have two more possibilities for where T could go, so I figure I’ll try it at the end, as that seems more likely than the next-to-last place. That leaves me with 3 possibilities for S, so I start with the first of those. Now I’ve got to fill in two letters. So far I’ve got S_E_T. I try not to repeat letters this early on, which eliminates a lot of possibilities. I look at what’s remaining from letter frequency (HDLU). I consider and reject words with repeats like SHEET and SLEET. I think through other possibilities and settle on SLEPT.

Now I’ve got 4 out of 5 letters and know their positions, since L is in the word by not where I put it first. I’m looking to fill in the blank for S_ELT.

This is when I just start looking at the keyboard and plugging letters in. Swelt? Shelt? Skelt? Sbelt? Those aren’t words. What about SMELT?

At first I think that can’t be right, it’s just a joke word as in “He who smelt it dealt it.” But then I remember no, you can smelt iron, because smelt means “to melt or fuse (a substance, such as ore) often with an accompanying chemical change usually to separate the metal” (Merriam-Webster. (Also it’s a legitimate past participle of “smell” so " He who smelt it dealt it" is perfectly good English .)

So I try it.

Boom.

I hope this is helpful as you build your own Wordle workflow. Take care!

How I win at Wordle (when I win at Wordle)

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 08:59:09 -0400

I don’t share my daily Wordle result, but I do play it most days. I get it in 5 or fewer tries 94% of the time, 3 or fewer 32% of the time. I wanted to share what I do in case it spares anyone else some frustration.

The first key is to memorize this combination of nonsense words that will help you remember English letter frequency: etaoin shrdlu.

I try to start with a word that uses five of those letters.

Next there are two tricks I rely on most of the time:

Familiarity with common letter combinations/placements
Systematic movement of yellow letters

The first one involves things like knowing that H is often part of a two-letter combo like SH, TH, or CH, and that these combos usually occur at the beginning or end of words. Likewise thinking about how there are vowels in most words, different things that often come before E at the end of a word (like ATE, ACE, ALE), or how two letters often appear together (like UI).

As for the second: once I get a yellow letter, I try words that use that letter in different positions so I can eliminate places where it doesn’t belong.

The last thing I do before random guessing is look at the unused letters on the keyboard and try to build words combining them with the pieces I already know.

I hope this has been helpful. I’ll try to post a sort of “play-aloud” with screenshots and my thought processes soon.

Life stuff, health stuff, and the Wheel of Fortune (tarot card, not game show)

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 11:46:56 -0400

My sense of routine and timing and goal-setting has been completely exploded over the past month or so. The routines I put in place to help me cope in the face of my mom’s illness weren’t really doable last week because M was home from school Wednesday through Friday for a teacher workday and conferences. Just today am I beginning to claw some of that structure back.

Today I did morning pages. I did a tarot reading for Pisces season. (The overall gist was one of recognizing abundance, not worrying where it would come from, and letting go of the need to try to create a perfect balance.) I had a smoothie. I filled one of my three medicine cases. (Two more to go!)

I cleared several small items off my to-do list. Soon, I will get down to work-work, continuing to analyze the documentation that’s going to help us develop a typology of the challenges library staff face when implementing connected learning.

I’ve had headaches almost continuously for a few weeks, partly due to hormone shifts, but maybe also partly due to stress. I had two cycles where I thought my body had sorted out my PCOS a little bit but here we are on Day 44, no new cycle in sight (a normal menstrual cycle is 40 or fewer days long from the beginning of one period to the beginning of the next). This is fine, or rather, not catastrophic. But disappointing.

I spoke with my doctor the other day. My Hemoglobin A1C is high - that’s the number that says how my blood sugar has been over the course of the past few months, as opposed to the glucose measurement that really only tells you about the past 24 hours or so. (That one was high-normal.) My LDL cholesterol was high, too - but total and triglycerides were good, so let’s celebrate that!

My doctor recommended two new supplements and I asked about a third. One of the ones she recommended was corn silk for kidney function. When I eat things with whole corn, corn flour, or corn meal in them, I get joint pain. I’m going to try the corn silk and see how it goes, but am prepared to stop it quickly if it causes pain and ask her for other possibilities.

She also recommended berberine for cholesterol and blood sugar, and agreed with me that it would be good to try GABA to improve the quality of my sleep. And she said it was smart of me to up my l-tyrosine when I noticed clinical signs of declining thyroid function (increased fatigue and decreased body temperature).

I write about these things because my life is a constant set of calculations relating to how to handle different conditions and the fact that my health will never be “fixed.” Chronic illness is not a problem to be solved; it is a condition to be managed.

I bought this Art Oracles card deck at the North Carolina Museum of Art when we were there to see the Mucha exhibit in December and I keep the Frida Kahlo card pinned on my corkboard because it says, “Convalescence lasts a lifetime” and that is something I need to keep in mind.

I don’t expect I’ll ever get a tattoo, but inspired by both my own experiences with chronic illness and having recently read Ninth House, if I ever did, I think it would be the tarot Wheel of Fortune, and probably the Wayhome Tarot version.

(That picture is from the Everyday Magic website.)

The thing is, wherever you are on the Wheel, three things are true:

At some point, things will be better than they are now.
At some point, things will be worse than they are now.
You will be back here again.

It would be good for me to keep these truths in mind at all times.

The middle-school-Kimberly-to-grown-up-Kimberly pipeline

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 17:39:33 -0400

I’ve been reading the Future Ready with the Library posts at the YALSA blog and it’s got me thinking about the skills I was building in middle school and how they have persisted and how I’ve leveraged them throughout my career.

In middle school, I spent my out-of-school time practicing theater, reading books, and coding in BASIC. I volunteered one summer at the library. (My memory of this is that somebody at school decided I needed more to occupy me and sent me to the counselor and when she asked my interests, “reading” was the only one she could figure out how to match with a volunteer opportunity.)

In my career, I’ve been an educator and public speaker (both use my theater training), a librarian, and a web editor (HTML is pretty easy if you’ve got a handle on BASIC). I use knowledge and skills from all of these domains as a researcher, too.

It’s fun and cool to think about the connections between that me and this me.

I will never not be a caregiver.

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 03:49:06 -0400

I realized as I was helping my family in the face of my mom’s return to the hospital that there will never be a time when I’m not a caregiver and that given my family’s medical woes, I am much more likely to need to drop everything to caregive than many other people. It would be wise to design my life to accommodate this fact, rather than hoping for some imagined time with minimal caregiving responsibilities. Even if I get my own conditions well-managed, even as M. grows and becomes more independent, I will still benefit from the flexibility I need as a parent of a young child and a chronically ill worker.

This is a radical shift in my thinking about the future. I’ll write more about it as I tease out what it means for my planning practices and daily life.

Write Source 2000: The book that started my obsession with writing craft books 📚📝

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 12:47:57 -0400

I own a lot of writing craft books. There’s the obvious, like Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, but I also have more obscure ones like Richard Toscan’s Playwriting Seminars 2.0. I have books about how to write romance, like Gwen Hayes’s book Romancing the Beat and books about how to write science fiction and fantasy, like Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing. I have books about writing for different audiences, like children, and in different formats, like screenwriting. I have purchased many more of these books than I have read. In a sense, I have a whole little antilibrary devoted to writing craft.

As I was doing my morning pages this morning, I thought about my affection for freewriting and realized that it first started in seventh grade, when our teacher assigned us the textbook Write Source 2000. This was 1993, so adding 2000 to the end of things made them seem very futuristic. The cover of the book, which can still be purchased used, was very shiny. It’s got a pencil-shaped space craft on the cover and kids looking up at it through a telescope. The third edition is available via the Open Library. I had the first edition, but I suspect they’re very similar. The cover design is the same.

A lot of my initial affection for this book was because of its quality as a material object. The shininess of the cover. The fact that it was a trade paperback, unlike most of our textbooks. The page layouts inside were attractive. And the authorial voice was conspiratiorial:

We’re in this together. You and I. We’re members of an important club - maybe the most important club ever.

The book focuses on learning across settings, writing as a tool for learning, and metacognition (though it just calls it “learning to learn”). I did not realize that this had been my jam for almost 30 years, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

I’m pretty sure I still have my copy somewhere. If not, I definitely carried it around with me at least through college. I thought about buying it again but now that I know I can read it on Open Library, I feel okay holding off.

This book was the first book I read that talked about how to write, and I loved it for that. I’m pretty sure I was the only kid excited by this textbook. (It also had new-book-smell, which for my money is equal in joy to old-book-smell. Really, if it’s a book in pretty good condition, I probably like how it smells.)

I can’t find the source right now because I’ve read so much of her stuff, but sometime Kelly J. Baker wrote about the idea of writing as a career never occurring to her. It didn’t occur to me, either, though I did it constantly: in my diary, in journals, at school. In fifth grade I wrote a series of stories using the vocabulary list words, and it was all extremely thinly veiled autofiction where the characters names were just my classmates’ names backward. They ate it up.

I started and left unfinished tens of science fiction stories about my own anxieties as a middle schooler, and in high school I wrote a silly children’s book (I think it was called The Hog Prince), Sailor Moon and Star Wars fanfic, and short plays (the plays were in Latin). In college, I wrote more fanfic, all of the school writing assignments, and blog posts.

As a teacher I wrote lesson plans and assessments. As a librarian I participated alongside my students in NaNoWriMo. Working in higher ed K-12 outreach, I wrote blog posts and newsletters.

Writing is, it turns out, a potential career, but it’s also just part of life.

During the next couple of years as I work as a Postdoctoral Scholar, I’m thinking about what I’d like to work on next. I’m pretty sure it will involve reading and writing, because those activities are almost autonomic for me. I don’t know beyond that.

But maybe it’ll involve actually reading more of those craft books.

Theory to practice: Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 10:00:00 -0400

As we work on the Transforming Teen Services for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion project, one thing I have to be reminded frequently is that creating Connected Learning programming does not require providing for all three spheres: interests, relationships, and opportunities. Frameworks like Connected Learning begin as more descriptive than prescriptive: they say, “This is what’s been happening,” not “This is the only way to make it happen.” People like myself latch onto the aspirational qualities of this description and feel that if they can’t create a Connected Learning experience that encompasses the whole model, we shouldn’t even bother trying.

WE ARE WRONG.

Interests are the sine qua non of Connected Learning, so if librarians or educators start there by genuinely figuring out what youth are interested in and building their programming around that, they’ve gotten started in that direction. When CL happens spontaneously, the relationships and opportunities often come about through the course of the activity. When I started doing community theater as a teenager, I built relationships with peers and adult mentors and I had opportunities to learn things about theater production, to serve on non-profit boards, to act as a stage manager and a publicist. These aspects were not built into the environment explicitly for my benefit; they were natural byproducts of me participating in my interest.

So if you’re a librarian or educator considering implementing Connected Learning, please don’t be overwhelmed by the multiple spheres and various possibilities. If you’re building from youth interests, you can bring in the other components over time.

The creators of Project READY had the same problem: we shared frameworks that it’s easy to feel you must implement perfectly or not at all. We discussed Dr. James A. Banks’s framework for multicultural education, which has four levels of integration, ranging from the contributions approach (what we sometimes call the “heroes and holidays” approach to culture) all the way to the social action approach, in which students actually work to solve social issues. It can be easy to see models where youth contact government officials and make social change and think, “Well, I don’t have what I need to do that, so this model has nothing for me.” But there are two other levels in the model, the additive approach incorporating new multicultural content without changing curricular structure and the transformation approach which involves reshaping curriculum to center multiculturalism rather than adding it on. If your current approach is at the contributions level, moving to the additive approach is preferable to giving up on the whole framework.

As with improving the nutritional quality of your diet, adding more movement into your day, or any habit change, moving in the right direction is preferable to not moving at all. For example, if you learn you have some youth at your library interested in cosplay, maybe you start by hosting some simple no-sew project events. Then over time you can find out if there is a cosplay charity organization in your area and find out if any of those cosplayers would be interested in sharing their expertise, and the youth might build relationships with them as well as each other. And those cosplayers might then introduce the youth to opportunities like participating in contests or engaging in charitable cosplay themselves. You didn’t start with all three parts, but you moved in the direction of Connected Learning at each stage.

Essays on essays on essays

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 10:00:00 -0400

I’m still thinking about essays after reading Jackson Arn’s “Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot | Against the Contemporary American Essay. Arn references other people’s writing about the essay without actually linking to that writing, but I have managed to track them down.

The essay, James Wood wrote in The New Yorker, “has for some time now been gaining energy as an escape from, or rival to, the perceived conservatism of much mainstream fiction.”

This refers to James Wood’s Reality Effects, which discusses John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essays.

For Brian Dillon, such an authority on the essay that he authored a book called Essayism, it’s “unbounded and mobile, a form with ambitions to be unformed.”

The full title of Dillon’s book is Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction.

Mary Cappello, one of the most respected essayists around, claims the essay is actually a “non-genre,” mutating too fast for diagnosis.

This is a reference to Mary Cappello’s book Lecture. You can read the relevant excerpt at Literary Hub. I prefer Cappello’s full description:

Midway between a sermon and a bedtime story, the lecture is knowledge’s dramatic form. Nonfiction’s lost performative: the lecture. Cousin to the essay, or its precursor: that non-genre that allows for untoward movement, apposition, and assemblage, that is one part conundrum, one part accident, and that fosters a taste for discontinuity.

Assemblage and discontinuity seem key to the essays I enjoy reading, so I appreciate Cappello pointing them out here.

Arn turns to the personal essay boom of the 2000s, especially the 2010s, and mentions other writers’ explanations for the personal essay’s popularity.

Vivian Gornick, writing in The Yale Review, traces it all the way back to her youth, via the waning of modernism and the rise of the Holocaust memoir; Jia Tolentino, writing in The New Yorker, suspects the feminism-inflected internet economies that helped make her a star.

Arn refers to Gornick’s The Power of Testimony and Tolentino’s The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over. Tolentino then cites Laura Bennett’s Slate piece, The First-Person Industrial Complex.

Bennett mentions “personal essay habitats” like “Gawker, Jezebel, xoJane, Salon, BuzzFeed Ideas.” Bennett says

First-person essays have become the easiest way for editors to stake out some small corner of a news story and assert an on-the-ground primacy without paying for reporting.

Arn also mentions this, that the lack of money for publishing outlets to spend on funding writers’ experiences as fuel for writing makes the personal essay more appealing because everyone is an expert on their own experiences. Bennett goes on to discuss publications’ and editors’ potential exploitation of new writers who think they’re ready for a sensational personal essay to go public and only learn after the fact that they were not. These point to a more structural concern than much of Arn’s discussion of The Contemporary American Essay, which tends to focus on the ways individual writers engage in navel-gazing, write disconnected from broad sociopolitical issues like climate change and the impact of the Internet, and work so hard to be likable.

Bennett points to a gendered element to the personal essay boom, as well:

On its face, the personal-essay economy prizes inclusivity and openness; it often privileges the kinds of voices that don’t get mainstream attention. But it can be a dangerous force for the people who participate in it. And though the risks and exploitations of the first-person Internet are not gender-specific, many of these problems feel more acute for women. The reason—aside from the fact that the “confessional” essay as a form has historically attracted more women than men—is that so many of the outlets that are most hungry for quick freelancer copy, and have the lowest barriers to entry for publication, are still women’s interest sites.

While Tolentino asserted that the personal essay boom was over in 2017, Arn points out that most of the essays in The Contemporary American Essay are personal, constantly making “I” statements. They are also ambivalent, not just about the form of the essay itself, but about whatever they’re writing about. Arn catalogs several times the essayists use “perhaps” or “maybe,” seeming to hedge their bets in fear of upsetting anyone with a firm, declarative statement.

Reading all of the examples Arn pulls out from The Contemporary American Essay, I got the distinct feeling that these essayists were all just reading each others’ writing, going “AHA so THAT’s what an editor wants,” and then putting their own spin on it. It feels like they read the first few pages of Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist but never got to the remixing part. The frequent use of etymology as an in-road to an essay, the perhapses and maybes - I haven’t read the book, but based on Arn’s description there is a sameness to the essays in it.

In the middle of the piece, Arn says

The Contemporary American Essay (let’s call it TCAE) is not the contemporary American essay. I hope not, anyway.

As I was sharing some of the most hilarious-to-me essay quotes with W., I realized that I read essays and most of them don’t make these moves. Yes, there are a fair number of Steven Hotdog essays in my reading, but each of them seems to make the Steven Hotdog format fresh. Why am I getting essays that don’t read this way?

I realized that it’s probably about my genre of choice. TCAE is all about literary nonfiction. This can be treated as a synonym for creative nonfiction, but I prefer to think of it as a subgenre, or a mode of writing. The writers are deliberately Writing Literature. The essays I read tend to be cultural criticism, usually about pop culture, or deft at connecting personal experience with shared experience. They are published in venues that have a specific focus rather than in general interest publications like Harper’s or The New Yorker. Instead, they’re in Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Catapult, Tor.com, StarTrek.com. My favorites are often public writing by PhDs. These are the kind of things I want to write, too.

As often happens, I’ve come to the end of this blog post and am a bit deflated and lacking in a conclusion, so I’ll just point you to one of my favorite essays:

You’ve Reached the Winter of Our Discontent by Rebecca Schuman

In which Dr. Schuman ruminates on the cool Gen X guy as he enters middle age, and how cool isn’t even a thing anymore.

What even is my writing voice, anyway?

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 10:00:00 -0400

That critique of the essay piece I read and linked yesterday has sent me down a rabbit hole of other writing about essays. I’ll put together a list of links soon; for reasons I don’t know the original piece at The Drift didn’t contain links or citations for the other pieces it references, but I have used my librarian skills to track them down.

This has me thinking about my own writing voice and what it is. I think it varies. Of course I have a standard academic writing voice, but I’m thinking for more personal writing. Mostly blogging.

I think I have two voices.

One is my Big Sister voice. This is vaguely didactic but not moralizing. It’s an attempt to be helpful. This is the voice I use when I write about my experiences as a doctoral student and tips for doing research.

The other voice is more lyrical, vaguely witchy even, and also fragmented. This is the stream-of-consciousness voice, the more vulnerable voice. This is the voice I use when I’m writing about my feelings.

These two voices add up to a fairly accurate representation of my headspace. Big Sister is when my mind is sharp, I’m feeling good about myself, and I believe I’ve got help to give. Fragmented dream voice is when I’ve got brain fog, when I’m feeling weak, or when I’m feeling woo woo.

I think they’re both valuable, though Big Sister voice is probably preferable for more audience-focused writing and fragmented dream voice for when I’m writing primarily for myself. For a while, I thought I should pick one and go all in on it, but now I’m happy to have these two different voices. They are both me, both verbal representations of my vibe.

What about you? Or your favorite writers? What kind of voices do they have?

Right now, I’m in awe of writers who can write something that feels scholarly and beautiful at the same time. Sarah Kendzior is great at this. Hiding in Plain Sight is a terrifying book, an important book, and a gorgeously written book. I don’t think I knew those could all line up before reading that. I think that’s the kind of voice I would like to develop. Maybe if I can get my two voices to play together I’ll be able to make it happen.

How to write an essay (buyer beware, I don’t have the answer)

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 12:07:08 -0400

How does a person write an essay? I’ve been trying to figure out. The thing is, it’s a versatile form. So versatile, I can’t pin it down.

There are the essays they teach in grade school.

My eighth grade Language Arts teacher called the five paragraph essay a cheeseburger essay. I think she really liked Jimmy Buffett. This pop culture reference was not as hot in 1994 as you might imagine.

So there’s a basic format, cool cool cool. The cheeseburger essay is best for persuasive or argumentative writing, I think. In tenth grade, we had to write narrative essays. I wrote mine about the day I almost had to go on stage as Fern in a production of Charlotte’s Web where I had originally been cast as an Owl. I was really proud of this piece of writing. I included a ton of sensory detail. I probably have a copy of it in one of my juvenilia boxes. (Yes, of course I have juvenilia boxes, plural, for when I donate my papers somewhere. If you know me, you are not surprised by this at all. I am exactly the kind of person who would label the boxes full of her childhood writing “juvenilia” and move them from house to house rather than throwing them away.)

My tenth grade English teacher praised my essay but gave it something less than a perfect grade. When I asked her what was wrong with it, she said, “I just would have written it differently.”

I was incensed. She couldn’t have written it at all. She didn’t have the personal experience. This was, to my mind, extremely unhelpful feedback. How could I improve my writing if the problem was simply that I wrote it like myself?

In college, we wrote papers. These were mostly persuasive/argumentative or research-based. (Pssst, all great research-based writing has an argument. Wendy Laura Belcher’s book _Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks can help you figure out yours.)

I wrote about Furor and Pietas in the Aeneid. I wrote about the extended wine metaphor in Horace’s Ode 1.11, the source of the aphorism “Seize the day.” (The actual translation is “pluck the day.” Plucking the grapes is the first step in winemaking, but Horace uses it at the end of the poem. He begins the metaphor by saying we should strain the wine of life, arguably the end of the process, and works backward from there. I was really proud of this paper. It’s the result of my only all-nighter.) I wrote about the validity or lack thereof of AP testing. I wrote about the Takarazuka Revue.

Most of these papers got good grades but when I read them now, I cringe. Their arguments are weak. Their evidence is thin. But they were good enough for class.

But good enough for class isn’t the kind of essay I want to write anymore. I want to write essays that mean things. Preferably that connect pop culture with life in significant ways. Like my essay about the Star Trek episode “Peak Performance” and impostor syndrome.

The thing is, I really thrive with a model. So I’m looking at models for essays. And I’m reading excellent essays, by Sarah Ruhl, by Kelly J. Baker, by Jess Zimmerman. (Jess Zimmerman’s Women and Other Monsters is probably the closest to the kind of writing I want to do.) By tons of other authors on Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and Catapult.

They’re all different, which is fine. It means, though, that I have to build my own model by combining these, rather than just following one.

I need to Steal Like an Artist.

Six month check-in: Who am I at 40?

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 05:50:00 -0400

It was my half birthday almost 2 weeks ago, so it seems like a good time to check in on whether I’m being the person I want to be at 40. Here are the intentions I set:

I think I want to be a little less ambitious about 40, to set fewer goals.
I want to be a loving and mostly gentle mother.
I want to take care of my own body, including making clothes built to fit it.
I want to keep trying new things and growing as a self-employed person.

So how am I doing?

For #1, pretty well. There are a lot of maybes right now. Maybe I’ll submit a paper for that conference. Maybe I’ll go to that webinar. Maybe maybe maybe. This fits in with the need to be super flexible as a caregiver and a person with chronic illness.

For #2, awesome if I do say so myself. My kid definitely knows I love him - and making sure my loved ones feel loved is my highest ambition, if that imagine-your-own-funeral exercise is any indication. I’m also doing pretty well with being mostly gentle. I step away if I’m too frustrated to be kind, saying out loud, “I’m frustrated.” A+, me.

I am slowly taking care of my body, though not making any clothes yet. I’ve made having a cup of warm lemon water in the morning a habit and have gotten into a routine of eating nutritious breakfasts that don’t have a ton of sugar in them and meet my target dietary restrictions (eliminate gluten and corn, limit dairy and nightshades).
This is another one where progress is happening, but it’s slow. My consulting work for Quirkos is the main way I’ve been doing this. This is on the back burner a bit while I’m doing the postdoc.

Pretty pleased with myself, actually. I’m doing okay.

When is a gap not a gap? Doing research that hasn't already been done

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 15:32:36 -0400

An undergrad sent me a message thanking me for my post A Start-to-Finish Literature Review Workflow and asked the question:

Is there an exhaustive way of making sure that the literature gap you have identified is genuinely a gap?

The short answer is, no. There isn’t. But there are ways to get close.

In my experience, the best way to begin is with a specific research topic in mind, but before you have fully developed a question. You get familiar with the literature using the tips from step 4 in my workflow: Identify potential literature.

Consult with a trusted colleague.
Search databases.
Search Google Scholar.
Follow citations backwards.
Follow citations forwards.

After you look at the abstracts for these and eliminate the ones that are outside the scope of your topic, pay close attention when you’re doing your Abstract-Introduction-Conclusion extraction reading to suggestions for future research. In my experience, this is the most fruitful way to find gaps. Both my Master’s paper and dissertation research questions were suggested in the future research section of other scholars’ work.

As H. L. Goodall says in Writing the New Ethnography,

To locate a gap in any scholarly literature requires that you read a lot. (emphasis original)

Goodall offers some more specific advice as well:

Start with the most recent literature.
Notice which things are referenced repeatedly - the references all the most recent work has in common.
Make a chart of names, relationships to institutions, and arguments.
Look for patterns of citations, themes, and topics.

I don’t think I can give better advice than that. I’ll close out with more from Goodall:

You are reading for the storyline. You may not be sure what you are using it for, at least not yet. But that is all right. Be patient. Ideas, and uses for them, often take time.

You are also reading to find out what is collectively written about an idea, what individual voices have to say about that collective idea, and for an opening that you can address.

There’s no shortcut, I’m afraid. You have to jump into the literature before you know what the gap is. When everything you’ve read is referencing everything else, it’s safe to trust you’ve got a good sense of the topic and know where the gaps are.

I love my job and some yammering about writing

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 13:16:29 -0400

How are you doing, Internet? I’m obviously Not Okay, with my mom having leukemia and all, but I’m trying to do things besides worry about her anyway. I’m doing pretty well at that.

Have we talked about how much I love working for the Connected Learning Lab? Maybe we have. I’ll say a little more about it anyway. I styled myself for this type of position throughout my PhD program, in spite of having no expectation that such a position would be available. I always live a better life when I just do whatever is interesting or exciting to me and let professional opportunities arise as they may. (Woo-woo types would say this is because my Human Design type is Projector and I would not argue with them.)

My job is to read about what’s making it hard for teen librarians to support connected learning in their libraries, interview them about it, analyze a bunch of data from my reading and interviews, and work with a team to develop tools to help teen librarians with this. It is dreamy as can be. Teen librarians (and librarians who serve teens and others as well) tend to be pretty awesome, based on my encounters with them. On their best days, they want to make space for what lights teens up. (On their worst days, I would guess they probably just want to go home. Being a school or public librarian is really hard as well as being rewarding.)

I do feel a need to figure out what’s next, which is why I’m doing Jen Polk’s PhD Career Clarity program. I wouldn’t have been able to pay for this as a student, but my consulting/content development work with Quirkos paid enough that I could actually afford it. Yay!

My previous explorations with ImaginePhD have indicated that writing, publishing, and editing is a good career family given my skills and interests, and I don’t disagree. I still find myself attracted to the idea of being a freelancer, so I’m doing some thinking and planning and learning about what that would look like. The ideal situation for me would either be enough consulting to cover the bills paired with writing as a creative outlet, or some sort of dream job instead of the consulting. I don’t think I want to depend on freelance writing for my income, but I do think I want to get words out of me and in front of human people.

Blogging even on days when I don’t have A Topic in mind is a gesture toward that. So is doing Morning Pages, and the Artist’s Way more broadly. (I’m still doing that at my very glacial pace.)

I’m reading through Joanna Penn’s Author 2.0 Blueprint and the posts and books she mentions in it. I’ll probably pick Bird by Bird up soon. I thought I’d read it before, but it’s not on my list of books I’ve read. I know I have a paperback copy somewhere but I think it’s lost in a pile of stuff in the attic, so I’m going to buy the ebook for my Kobo, too.

I definitely idealize writing as an art form. I don’t know a way around that, and I’m not sure I want to. I don’t have this idea of a person who spends all their time sitting in a garret writing, because as I learned when I was doing improv, you have to go experience life if you want to make art about it. (You could make art about sitting in a garret, I suppose.) When I watched Hamilton, the thing that stood out for me that for some reason had eluded me in listening was writing as a throughline in the whole story. The lyrics “I wrote my way out” and “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” had made an impression, of course, but something about seeing it brought it out as bigger than a leitmotif. What’s bigger than a leitmotif? I don’t know. Something really big.

There was some other art that I was thinking about that has contributed to this idealization, but I don’t know what it is. Definitely the story of Donna Tartt spending so much time on her writing at Bennington College was part of it.

Anyway. I am unapologetically romantic about writing as art and craft, but very realistic about the ways in which it can be a career.

How are things going for you?

On indefinite hiatus from most social media

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 15:07:46 -0400

I’m taking an indefinite hiatus from checking or cross-posting to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and most other social media services, with the exception of Micro.blog. I’m doing this right now because I don’t like when stuff pops up in front of me without me choosing to see it, and that’s most of what social media is. In particular, when my mute filters aren’t working because they apply to timelines but not other parts of an interface and ads are proliferating so it’s hard to find content from the people I actually followed, I just end up grouchy and I don’t need extra reasons to be grouchy.

If you want to get in touch with me, you can email me at hello@kimberlyhirsh.com or text my Google Voice number at +1 ‪(919) 794-7602‬. If you want to know what’s up with me, you can subscribe to my newsletter or RSS feed. If you want to respond to something I post, you can reply by email, join the conversation on Micro.blog, or send a webmention from your own site.

I’m not deactivating or deleting accounts, just logging off.

Testing my commitment to embracing radical uncertainty

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 18:55:40 -0400

This week is really asking me to live my commitment to embracing radical uncertainty. I’ve had a hypothyroidism flare due to the cold weather, which has impacted my sleep habits and energy levels. We had a big winter storm and while it hasn’t been a huge problem, it shifted some childcare plans away from what we usually have. The kid is home today for a school holiday, which is expected but different than normal, and due to the winter storm he’ll have a two-hour delay tomorrow. (Guess who won’t? His dad. Which means I’m in charge of all the dealing with the delay, I think.)

This has been a test, too, of my ability to do my job while living the life I live. Last week, I was able to get a lot done, even in the face of brain fog. I have hopes that I’ll be able to do likewise this week, and it’s nice that my next real deadline isn’t until next week or the week after anyway.

It’s hard to be a person who craves system and consistency and also live with the built-in uncertainty of chronic illness and parenting, and of course a pandemic adds another layer. I think it would serve me well to build some resilient, flexible systems. Sort of like menus as Dr. Katy Peplin and Dr. Katie Linder have written about, maybe. I’m going to keep thinking about this. I’ll let you know where I land.

My reading life 📚

Sat, 15 Jan 2022 13:44:00 -0400

Since the Micro.blog community is starting a reading group in the near future, I thought it would be a good time to talk about my reading habits and tastes.

My favorite books I’ve read in recent years are Tamsyn Muir’s GIDEON THE NINTH, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s MEXICAN GOTHIC, and Tracy Deonn’s LEGENDBORN. My favorite book of all time is Piers Anthony’s ON A PALE HORSE. (I’m aware my fave is problematic. I love his books anyway.) I first read it in seventh grade. It was the first urban fantasy book I had ever read and I loved that it combined an interesting world, cool philosophical and metaphysical ideas, and characters I loved.

I read widely and enjoy many popular genres. My default fiction genre of choice is fantasy. I also really enjoy soft science fiction, cozy mystery, and Regency romance. I rarely like realistic or literary fiction, but sometimes an author or book in those categories will catch my interest. I read a lot of nonfiction, too, usually focused on my latest obsession or professional needs.

Right now I’m reading Leigh Bardugo’s THE LANGUAGE OF THORNS, Caitlin Doughty’s SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES AND OTHER LESSONS FROM THE CREMATORY, and Kelly J. Baker’s SEXISM ED.

I read physical books, ebooks, audiobooks, and sequential art (comics/graphic novels).

I tend to read books marketed as young adult or adult books that crossover well to a teen audience. This is partly because of my professional history as a high school teacher and middle school librarian and partly because I love a good bildungsroman. I love the possibility and promise of the teen years. Also, I think reading should be fun.

I’m really impressed by authors who can create an evocative sense of place, like Erin Morgenstern or Alicia Jasinka.

I love to chat books and recommend reads, so please feel free to get in touch if you’d like to talk about books!

How I’m Getting Through a Brain Fog Day

Thu, 13 Jan 2022 17:16:57 -0400

In October, I learned that for the first time since my diagnosis in 2011, I had actually gotten my thyroid hormone levels to what I consider optimal. Exciting, right? Then I went over three months without brain fog, and it was incredible.

Sunday, my throat started to hurt a bit - a classic hypothyroidism symptom (I know it’s also a COVID symptom, but this sore throat comes and goes in a matter of hours; I’ve taken care all week to be masked and outdoors whenever I’m away from home as I couldn’t book a test before my isolation period would be up anyway) - and I took my temperature to see if I had a fever and my temperature was the lowest it had been since October - I had been hovering around 98.2 which is actually warm for me, approaching a normal person’s body temperature - and I was getting 97.7 (classic mediocre thyroid for me) and even 97.5 (bad sign, y’all). I was feeling a little more fatigued than before and then I realized that the weather has turned pretty cold for here, and remembered that cold weather can impact thyroid function.

Then this morning, I woke up with brain fog.

I have a dream job right now, and one of the things that makes it a dream job is that it involves reading and synthesizing a lot of information.

But these are really hard tasks with brain fog.

So I decided rather than to try to push through the brain fog, I would work with it, largely due to a timely newsletter from Katy Peplin about “dressing” for the brain weather you have.

Here are the things I did today to try and work with this brain fog:

Gave the day a soft reset. After breakfast and a cup of coffee, I went to bed and closed my eyes and listened to an episode of 30 Rock. This gave me a bit of clarity.

Blogged through it. So then I got up and to get my head in the game for work, I wrote the last blog post of my Connected Learning series. But then I was worn out.

Had a snack and read some fiction. Specifically, The Language of Thorns.

Went back to bed, again. I set an alarm to make sure I wouldn’t be down for more than 40 minutes (20 minutes to fall asleep + 20 minutes to actually sleep). This time, I got up and actually felt like I could do stuff.

Had lunch. I always am energized after a meal.

Figured out what work I could actually accomplish in this haze. At first, I thought I didn’t have anything I could get done without intense mental effort. Then I realized that in some notes I made yesterday, I had said, “We might want to make a checklist…” Making a checklist and populating it is definitely something I could do, so that’s what I focused on.

What’s next? Well, because I didn’t want to be indoors around strangers when I had a sore throat, I rescheduled some appointments I had this week for 2 weeks from now, which means I won’t be able to talk to my doctor about this feeling for a couple weeks. But I also don’t want to live through the next two weeks in a fog. So I’m going to up the amount of l-tyrosine I’m taking. I wouldn’t do this except that it is the thing I did most recently that got my thyroid hormone levels to that optimal place and it’s easy to go back down. This is an amino acid that a person with hypothyroidism should definitely talk to their doctor about using. If I start to get palpitations, I’ll go back down. But my hope is this will clear the fog.

Future Directions for Connected Learning in Libraries

Thu, 13 Jan 2022 12:27:00 -0400

This is the fourth post in a series contextualizing my position as a researcher of connected learning.

Here are all the posts published so far:

There are a number of opportunities for connected learning to grow in libraries. Here I’ll discuss some of them, beginning with the one most relevant to my current work.

Research-Practice Partnerships Research-Practice Partnerships allow library professionals to develop connected learning environments and programs in collaboration with researchers of learning and information sciences. The project I’m working on, Transforming and Scaling Teen Services for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (TS4EDI) is one such partnership. Myself and other researchers at the Connected Learning Lab, including PI Vera Michalchik and Research Manager Amanda Wortman, are working with state librarians in Rhode Island and Washington first to identify barriers and challenges to libraries creating CL environments and programs and then to develop resources to help library professionals overcome those barriers and challenges. The state librarians will recruit local public librarians in their state to be part of this partnership, and those public librarians will recruit youth to participate, as well. Other examples include the ConnectedLib project and the Capturing Connected Learning in Libraries project.

Brokering Youth Opportunities in Libraries Connected learning research over the past 10 years has highlighted the importance of caring adults or peers as brokers or sponsors for youth as they build their networks surrounding an interest. These brokers/sponsors can connect youth with other people and resources to help them expand their network and identify opportunities for learning and achievement related to their interest. Current research literature doesn’t explicitly offer guidance on brokering as a distinct activity, investigate the extent to which librarians currently act as brokers, or illuminate how youth may serve as peer brokers in the library setting. Research-practice partnerships and library professional-led professional development could address these questions.

Bringing Connected Learning to School and Academic Libraries So far, connected learning has been documented mostly in informal settings. A few studies have looked at connected learning in formal settings, but those tend to be individual classrooms rather than school or academic libraries. One area that offers potential for CL in these settings is the connection between interests and information literacy. This was the focus of my dissertation, in which I examined the information literacy practices of cosplayers. Cosplayers engage in connected learning as they learn about their interest, build relationships with each other, and find opportunities to contribute to the cosplay community or even become professional cosplayers. Throughout these elements of connected learning, cosplayers engage in information literacy, identifying resources, evaluating them, and even creating new resources. Because school and academic libraries are the primary center for information literacy education in their institutions and because they are not tied to a specific academic discipline, they have the potential to create opportunities for connected learning as learners build their information literacy practices.

That’s all for this series of blog posts, but I expect to write a lot more about connected learning through the course of my work at the Connected Learning Lab, so if you find this interesting, stay tuned!

Connected Learning in Libraries: Changes and Challenges

Fri, 07 Jan 2022 10:58:00 -0400

This is the third post in a series contextualizing my position as a researcher of connected learning. Here are all the posts published so far:

What Is Connected Learning?
How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries
Connected Learning in Libraries: Changes and Challenges

While libraries are poised to be environments conducive to connected learning, they may need to undergo further shifts to expand their support for connected learning. This involves a number of considerations:

Resources. Library professionals must consider not only physical and digital resources, but human resources as well - using “resource” to describe a person the same way we might use it to describe a book or a website. Library professionals can serve as a point of connection between learners, mentors, and other people in the environment beyond the specific context of the connected learning activities.

Technology and space. Current library policies may need to be updated to enable learners to engage in shared practices, socializing, collaborating, and publishing their work online.

Evaluation. Libraries have traditionally focused on quantitative measures of impact, such as how many people attended a particular program. These measures may not be sufficient to capture the impact of connected learning. Measures of connected learning need to capture the way learners move with their learning across settings beyond spaces controlled by the library; identifying specific desired outcomes can facilitate capturing evidence of and communicating the impact of a program. Qualitative data such as interviews or open-ended survey questions may capture this impact better than or alongside quantitative measures.

Role of library professionals. Library professionals must learn to consider themselves as sponsors and brokers of youth learning rather than mentors or authority figures. This means helping youth find other people and communities to support their learning and focusing on enhancing learning rather than enforcing behavior-based policies.

Program design. To create programming that fosters connected learning, library professionals may need to co-design with youth rather than deciding programming in advance and offering it to youth without their early input.

Competencies. The creators of the ConnectedLib project identified the following necessary competencies for library professionals to support youth’s connected learning:

…they must be ready and willing to transition from expert to facilitator…
…[they] need to apply interdisciplinary approaches to establish equal partnership and learning opportunities that facilitate discovery and use of digital media…
…they should be able to develop dynamic partnerships and collaborations that reach beyond the library into their communities…
…they should be able to evaluate connected learning programs and utilize the evaluation results to strengthen learning in libraries… (Hoffman et al., 2016, p. 19)

Professional development. Library professionals often will not have been trained in these competencies during their education, so they may need to continue their own learning via in-house professional development, programs provided by professional organizations, open online learning resources, and formal educational experiences. The ConnectedLib toolkit is one example of an open online learning resource directed at meeting this need, while the University of Maryland’s Youth Experience In-Service Training is an example of a formal educational experience designed to build these competencies.

I identified these potential shifts to library practices in response to a number of challenges libraries face in developing and implementing connected learning programming, including:

Attracting teens to skill-building programming. For some advanced interest-based experiences, youth need a foundational set of knowledge. For example, to create a sophisticated video game, a teen would first need a foundational understanding of game design and computer programming. It is a challenge to attract novice learners to this kind of programming.

Working with technology. Library professionals may lack the digital tools they need due to library policy, may know how to design or facilitate technology-focused or -infused programming, or may not feel comfortable acting as effective digital media mentors.

Unfamiliarity with the Connected Learning model. Library professionals may struggle with integrating all the different spheres and elements of the model. They may not have the knowledge, skills, or training they need to successfully implement the model.

Culture clashes. Teen culture may sometimes clash with library culture, requiring library professionals to negotiate these conflicting cultures to create programming that has a strong impact in teens’ lives.

The next and, I think, final post in this series will address future directions for connected learning in libraries.

How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 11:17:53 -0400

This is the second post in a series contextualizing my position as a researcher of connected learning. Here are all the posts published so far:

What Is Connected Learning?
How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries

The first element of connected learning is interest. Libraries explicitly support the exploration of personal interests in both their collections and their programming. The second element is relationships. Libraries are intergenerational spaces that can be (but aren’t always) inclusive of people from nondominant groups. Libraries can serve as a bridge that connects formal and informal learning. Libraries are increasingly spaces where youth can have shared experiences creating new knowledge. They are third places, neither school nor home, where youth can gather, connect around their shared interests, and meet adult mentors and sponsors who can help them leverage a variety of resources in pursuing those interests.

A note about third places in the time of COVID-19: For many of us (the luckiest among us, I would argue), there is only one place: home, which is also work, which is sometimes also school, which is also where we do whatever social activity we do. This is certainly true for me. That said, online library programming can act as a virtual third space, a place to go for something that isn’t all about home or work responsibilities. I’ll be interested to see how scholarship around this shift evolves. A quick search for “‘third places’ COVID” on Google Scholar demonstrates that scholars are already thinking about this, including in the specific context of public libraries. I am exercising extreme restraint to not jump down a rabbit hole of exploring that research right now.

There are some examples of connected learning happening in both public and school library spaces. If you’d like to explore them, here are some links:

The next post in this series will discuss some of the challenges of creating connected learning experiences in libraries and some shifts libraries may need to undergo to provide more connected learning experiences.

My time is vampire time: The critical disability studies concept of "crip time" 📚♿

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 06:45:00 -0400

I’ve seen and heard a lot of people in the Micro.blog community discuss the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. The hold list on this at my library is inordinately long; if I put a hold on it now I might get to read it in 3 - 5 months. So I decided to read the sample of it, to help me decide I’d like to buy it.

As I was reading the introduction, I kept thinking about how my 4000 weeks have a different shape than many other people’s 4000 weeks, different than healthy people’s 4000 weeks. I kept thinking of the concept of “crip time,” which I’d heard but didn’t really understand beyond the concept that time seems to move differently when you’re disabled. This thinking was distracting me from actually reading the book, so I turned to the web to help me get a firmer understanding of “crip time.”

It led me to Ellen Samuels’s essay, Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time, which was exactly what I needed. Samuels quotes Alison Kafer, who says

rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.

I have been trying to bend my body and mind to meet the clock in preparation for starting my postdoc, but I think everyone will be happier if instead I bend the clock to me. My body sometimes needs to be awake at night and asleep during the day. Instead of lying awake in pain trying to fall back asleep while listening to an episode of Star Trek because this is the time when people sleep, I can give myself permission to rearrange my time so the parts of my work that can be done asynchronously (basically everything but meetings, I think) can be done in brief chunks of time in the middle of the night.

This is a positive effect of coming to recognize crip time. (This felt like the right time to stop using quotation marks. I don’t know why.) But Samuels points out the negative elements, which will impact more people than ever before in the wake of COVID. Samuels does this so well that I’m reluctant to attempt to summarize. If you’re interested, I highly recommend reading the essay. For now, I’ll pull out just the bit that inspired this post’s title:

…crip time is vampire time. It’s the time of late nights and unconscious days, of life schedules lived out of sync with the waking, quotidian world. It means that sometimes the body confines us like a coffin, the boundary between life and death blurred with no end in sight. Like Buffy’s Angel and True Blood’s Bill, we live out of time, watching others’ lives continue like clockwork while we lurk in the shadows. And like them, we can look deceptively, painfully young even while we age, weary to our bones.

What is Connected Learning?

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 17:42:00 -0400

I start working remotely for the Connected Learning Lab tomorrow and while a lot of people are excited for me, most of them don’t actually understand what I’m going to be doing. So I’m writing a blog series that I hope will explain that somewhat, and this is the first post. If you’ve read my comps chapter on Connected Learning or seen my Connected Learning and the IndieWeb talk, some of this will be familiar.

Connected learning can be conceived of in three ways: as a type of learning experience that occurs spontaneously, as an empirically-derived framework for describing that type of experience, and as a research and design agenda aimed at expanding access to that type of learning experience. My brother-in-law, P., is actually a phenomenal example of a Connected Learner.

In high school and college, P. was interested in playing guitar. He started hanging out at a local guitar shop, connecting with a community there of peers and mentors. Through the connections he made, he was offered the opportunity to be lead guitarist for a tribute band, and that job took him all over the world. He has since embarked on a different but related career, working in media law. This area of law might not have been of interest to him if he hadn’t had experience working in the music industry.

That’s an example of a spontaneously occurring connected learning experience. From experiences like this, scholars have created a model to describe connected learning. This model includes three elements of connected learning: interests, relationships, and opportunities. P. was interested in music, built relationships at the guitar shop, and it led him to opportunities to perform as part of a working band and become a lawyer.

Image Source: The Connected Learning Alliance

This type of experience is easier to access with more financial and temporal support; the research and design agenda surrounding connected learning is an equity agenda that aims to broaden the availability of this kind of experience, making it possible for nondominant youth who might require additional support to access connected learning. One way to do that is to bring this kind of experience into public spaces serving nondominant youth - public spaces like libraries.

The work I’m doing with the Connected Learning Lab is part of a grant funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services examining key needs for teen services in libraries:

(1) the challenges library staff face in designing and implementing CL programming for underserved teens and the means for overcoming these challenges, (2) ways library staff can use evaluative approaches to understand youth needs in CL programming, and (3) the means of demonstrating the value of CL programs and building stakeholder support for increasing their scope and scale, particularly to serve equity goals.

The products of this research will include

training modules, guidebooks, mentoring supports, case studies, videos, practice briefs, topical papers, and blogs.

These are some of my favorite kinds of things to create, so I’m extra excited.

My next post in this series will talk about how Connected Learning is already happening in libraries, with some examples from actual libraries.

Quick Thoughts on TRULY DEVIOUS 📚

Sun, 02 Jan 2022 09:48:00 -0400

I don’t want to write a full review of Truly Devious but I want to share a couple things.

First: it goes back and forth between details of a cold case from 1936 and the present. I love the way it weaves these two related stories together.

Second: it ends on a cliffhanger, which left me wanting to scream “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” and also simultaneously flail with delight, so well done Maureen Johnson, I guess.

Recommended if you like mysteries, especially dark academia.

The Extreme Unknown: 2021 Year-in-Review & Thoughts for 2022

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 04:12:00 -0400

Here are a couple of earlier year-in-review posts:

This one’s going to be a little different. I will write up my catalogue of great stuff that happened but I want to give some space to the hard stuff first.

My family has definitely been playing the pandemic on easy mode, as it were, but I have hit a wall of not hopelessness exactly, but grim resignation. Resignation specifically to the fact that things will keep shifting, that it will probably get worse before it gets better, that making plans based on timing of perceived lowered risk (for example, When-My-Kid-Is-Vaccinated) is more likely to lead to disappointment than not. Resignation to the extreme unknown.

Anticipating a year of shifts, the only goal I set was for the first quarter off 2021: to complete and defend my dissertation. I did it! Goal achieved! Setting such a straightforward goal means I can feel good about how I spent my time this year.

I only set a word for the first quarter, which was PLAY and I have no idea how I did with that.

I did some great stuff in addition to defending my dissertation this year:

I made extensive use of the public library. My kid actually bumped up against the checkout limit.
I got vaccinated and boosted.
I got my thyroid managed and hit my target lab results for the first time in the 10 years since my Hashimoto’s diagnosis.
I consulted for Quirkos and developed content for their blog.
I organized a FanLIS panel for the Fan Studies Network North America conference.
I got and swam in a mermaid tail.
I had a pool party for my 40th birthday.
I presented at MIRA, Micro Camp, ALISE, and World View.
I took M to swim lessons.
I embraced my Trekkie nature.
I applied for, was offered, and accepted my dream postdoc.

I couldn’t have done these things without immense help:

from my advisor & committee.
from W’s mom, who provided me with time for both work and rest.
from W, who provided for my basic material needs, kept the house clean, continued to be an awesome dad, and made me feel good about myself.

If there was a theme for this year, it was Star Trek. The Next Generation was a balm in the weeks after my grandmother’s death. Lower Decks, Discovery, and Prodigy revitalized my love of Trek. Discovery, in particular, helped me remain hopeful and trust in my values as a guide for living.

(My core values, by the way, are curiosity, creativity, and care.)

I’m doing a New Year New Moon retreat with Katy Peplin on January 2nd, so I will probably dig into my dreams and plans for 2022 then.

For now, I’ll say my word of the year for 2022 is MEND. My goal is to keep going.

My Reading Year 2021 📚

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 21:29:00 -0400

I may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

This was a slow reading year for me. I read a lot more fiction than last year, a little less nonfiction, many fewer comics, and no poetry.

I only read 28 full-length books for myself (as opposed to for my kid). I range widely each year, usually coming in the 30 - 50 book range, so this is a little less than even a normal slow year would be.

But of course, year 2 of a pandemic, especially when finishing a PhD, is not a normal year.

All of the fiction I read this year was good, because I don’t keep reading things that aren’t. But my favorite was Gideon the Ninth . It took me a little while to get into, but once I was into it, it blew me away. It also helped me realize, along with the Star Trek: Discovery episode “Su’Kal,” that space gothic is a subgenre I love.

I’m still into Dark Academia, which explains the presence of The Historian , If We Were Villains , Bunny , and Ace of Spades on my finished books list.

My other fiction reading decisions were driven primarily by media tie-ins. I read the Shadow and Bone trilogy and Six of Crows duology in anticipation of Shadow and Bone on Netflix, then decided to stick with Leigh Bardugo and read her Wonder Woman book . I also read The Last Wish , the first book in the Witcher series. It will probably be a while before I get around to that show but I enjoyed the book.

None of my nonfiction reading blew me away, but it was all good.

I definitely read some fanfiction, but I couldn’t tell you what. And I read a lot of articles, most of which you can find in my Links category.

I hope to read for pleasure a lot more next year.

What did you read in 2021? If you had a hard time reading, what did you do instead?

Upon the death of bell hooks 🎙️

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 14:05:00 -0400

Transcript:

Hello internet friends. I’m experimenting today with doing a micro cast. I have this capability on my website and I thought I would go ahead and try it.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to talk about. But I just looked at Twitter and my timeline is full of people grieving for the loss of bell hooks. I have read a lot of a little of the work of bell hooks and I have not read as much as I would like to have read of the work of bell hooks.

The part I have probably read the most of would be - Oh, now I can’t remember the title of the book but it’s about writing - Remembered Rapture. And I started reading that because Kelly J. Baker mentioned it in an essay she wrote about writing. And I had to return it to the library before I was done with it. I haven’t picked it back up.

I am planning to purchase it from Rofhiwa Books and Cafe here in Durham, North Carolina, which is a bookstore you should check out. It is a Black-owned bookstore that focuses on the work of Black authors. It’s where I picked up my copy of Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s book The Dark Fantastic and I will probably get Remembered Rapture and maybe Feminism Is for Everybody. And All about Love I think is the title of another one that I will - that I will probably pick up.

Anyway Remembered Rapture is the one I’ve read the most of. And not only is the language hooks uses just, you know, incredibly beautiful in it. But the way she talks about her identity as a writer and about the ways that she has integrated being different kinds of writer - being an academic writer, and being a poet, writing essays, all of the different kinds of writing she has done - and how it has been not hard for her to do but hard for other people to accept from her, especially as a Black woman, is just really moving and inspiring to me.

I apologize for any background noises you may hear. There’s always someone doing yard work by my house so I probably will never be able to record anything without that being a risk. But I wanted to go ahead and get this down now. Before I forgot.

I don’t have a lot more to say on this topic. I look forward to reading more of her work. I’m sorry that what we have now is all that we will have of her work. And I send so much love to people who are grieving her more deeply than I ever could. Thank you for listening.

My first Artist Date!

Fri, 03 Dec 2021 15:23:00 -0400

I don’t think I’m going to write up my annotations for the first chapter/week of The Artist’s Way, “Recovering a Sense of Safety,” for perosnal reasons but I thought I would share the outcome of my first artist date! I searched Google for “junk shop,” found this eBay seller, and created a Pinterest board where I stuck a bunch of items they’re selling that I thought were interesting.

It’s got some big grandma energy, doesn’t it? That’s 50% what junkshops are about and 50% where my head is at. The sweaters are more 10-year-old Kimberly energy. (It was 1991-1992, okay?)

What does this board make you think of?

The luxury of time and space to grieve (CW: Suicide)

Thu, 02 Dec 2021 17:33:13 -0400

CW: Suicide

Sherrie was my friend.

Sherrie and I never met in person. We talked on the phone once ever for a few seconds. But we interacted a lot via text - on a posting board, over LiveJournal, via email, via snail mail. I crocheted Sherrie a hat that I never got around to sending her. When I was in my first year of teaching, Sherrie sent me letters and stickers and a magnet. The stickers were glittery kittens and autumnal leaves. Sherrie loved glitter.

I was in my second year of full-time teaching when Sherrie died by suicide. I didn’t find out about it until five days after it happened. When I found out, I was devastated. My heart was broken. I knew Sherrie lived with bipolar type II. I knew she had gotten a lot of help and it had never been enough.

Sherrie wrote beautifully. Sherrie would dress up in fun ways. Sherrie was a glamazon. Sherrie made some of her friends angry. Sherrie was a lot.

Sherrie was a mom. (I can’t say more than that because this is the part that makes me cry the most.)

Two days after I found out about Sherrie, I had a meeting with an assistant principal to discuss a classroom observation she had conducted in my class a few days earlier. It was the Ides of March. As a Latin teacher, I carried on a tradition my teacher had of having “toga day” on March 15; students got extra credit for coming to school draped in a toga, and as a teacher, I participated too.

So there I was, sitting in this AP’s office, KNOWING I was about to hear about a terrible observation because the day she had observed was Not Good. The class she had observed was my most challenging class ever. While I’m pleased to report that the students who challenged me the most in that class turned into lovely adults who I sometimes ran into because one of them was in undergrad at the same university where I was working and then getting my PhD, at the time, they had their own stuff going on at home and I was Not Equipped to support them through it. The school had failed to implement a key piece of their IEPs and it left them and me high and dry and none of us had what we needed to turn that into a positive experience.

So the AP observed me teaching that class, a class I never did a good job in and where most of my students learned a lot more about Roman civilization and culture via documentary video than they ever learned about language, because it was the only way I could manage for us to all get along and we were all, together, in survival mode.

Like I said - I knew this was going to be a bad review. I hoped the AP would have some suggestions for how to handle it.

My eyes were red and puffy because I had been crying for days. She had stood me up for this same appointment earlier without warning, and we had rescheduled. The only time she had available was during my 25 minute lunch period.

I sat at her desk and opened by telling her that I had lost a friend to suicide and only learned about it a couple days earlier and was still raw from grieving, so if I was especially emotional, that was why.

I don’t remember response, but I remember it was somewhere between awkward and cold. I got the sense that grieving my friend’s suicide was a Me Problem, something I should have left at the door when I entered the building at 6:55 am that morning.

There were a lot of things about my life that were Me Problems, because teachers aren’t supposed to do anything besides be teachers, apparently. Or at least they weren’t in 2007. I don’t suppose it’s much better now.

The AP genuinely opened by just saying, “That was bad.”

I said, “I know.” I told her I was looking forward to this meeting and her feedback on how I could be better.

She told me she didn’t know.

She told me to go ask Barbara. Barbara was the head of the initially licensed teachers program. Barbara would not be available for days.

Somehow this exchange took up my whole 25 minute lunch period. I arranged for a colleague to cover my class for just a few minutes so I could tend to human needs like going to the bathroom and, you know, EATING.

But when I got to the classroom, there was the principal, waiting to conduct my third and final observation for the year.

THAT’S RIGHT: the amount of time I had to improve between “feedback” and my next observation was THE WALK BETWEEN THE AP’S OFFICE AND THE CLASSROOM. On my own. With no suggestions or advice from the AP who had just told me I had done a bad job.

That day I was giving a test, which should have made the coverage easy for my colleague, but instead, it meant I had to get these students settled and make it through the 45 minutes of observation before a colleague could bail me out so I could eat.

Grieving, with low blood sugar, having been at work since 6:55 and it now being 1 pm with me not having eaten much between those two times, probably woefully underslept due to a relapse of anxiety and depression brought on by Sherrie’s death, and immensely frustrated because of this ridiculous observation setup, I broke.

I had been too permissive during my last observation, so I swung the pendulum and I swung it hard.

My students were engaging in antics that I usually “managed” through warmth, joking, and being resigned, but this day, I snapped at them:

“THIS CLASS IS NOT A JOKE. I AM NOT A JOKE. THIS TEST IS NOT A JOKE. SIT DOWN AND GET READY TO TAKE THE TEST.”

This was very un-me, not my usual teaching style, and my students for once obeyed.

Guess what? That wasn’t a good observation either.

I was in an operetta that week. It was tech week. The night after this observation was our final dress, if I recall correctly. The director had explicitly told us in a notes email to leave our personal stuff outside the theater door. We were here to make magic and do art and focus.

Normally I love leaving my stuff at the theater door.

That day I Could Not.

I showed up wearing Rainbow Brite pajamas. I sobbed on my way into the dressing room. My mom was working on the show and I got a hug from her.

I made it through the rehearsal. After rehearsal we were discussing makeup and what some people whose makeup wasn’t strong enough could do to fix it. Somebody suggested replacing drugstore makeup with MAC.

Sherrie loved MAC.

I was done.

I made it home. I made it through the weekend of shows. We might have been doing two weekends that year. I think we probably were. I don’t remember.

I didn’t have the time or space to grieve Sherrie: not at work, not in my happy space of the theater, not in my social environment or hobbies. LiveJournal was the only grieving space I had. (Don’t ask why I didn’t try to take sick leave from work. I was teacher. Taking sick leave as a teacher is at best a hassle and at worst literally impossible because there are no subs.)

That was almost fifteen years ago.

Eleven months ago today, my grandmother died. I knew my grandmother much better than I knew Sherrie. She was my last living grandparent. I grieved her more intensely than the others, because she was the one I was closest to. Because her house was the closest thing I had to a childhood home.

And most of all, because I had a visit scheduled with her for April 2020, of which the pandemic robbed me.

Blessedly, I had plenty of time and space to grieve my grandmother.

For three weeks after she died, I did nothing besides parent, eat, sleep, crochet, and watch Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was what I needed. It was what I could handle. And I’m so grateful for that space.

In spite of it, I’m still grieving. It feels a bit like when a wound heals slowly. Or reopens and weeps a bit. Only in the past few weeks have I actually started crying about her death. I have dreams where she is sick and dying but not dead, and my dead grandfather is tasked with caring for her, and I keep protesting that someone who is already dead is not the best caretaker if we’re trying to keep someone alive because how can a dead person possibly do a good job?

I don’t have a conclusion to this. It was brought on by Kelly J. Baker’s piece for Women in Higher Education, No Space to Grieve.

Photo by Vidsplay on StockSnap

🖖🏻📺 Depression doesn't need a reason. (Star Trek Discovery 4x02 spoilers)

Sat, 27 Nov 2021 04:32:00 -0400

This post contains minor spoilers for Star Trek Discovery Season 4 Episode 2, “Anomaly.”

Near the end of the latest episode of Discovery, Lt. Tilly tells Dr. Culbert that something feels off about herself, and that she’d like to talk to him about it in a professional context sometime.

This feels to me like a clear indication that Tilly is dealing with depression, anxiety, or both, and I’m very interested in following where this goes, especially as I read Tilly as my own sort of Discovery-avatar.

Over at Keith R. A. DeCandido’s recap for Tor.com, a commenter says,

The best thread for later is Tilly. Does she miss her mother? Is it about all the stress and loss and responsibility they’ve had? Mental health is an all too often ignored issue, so I hope they do it justice.

I, too, hope they do it justice, but what I don’t need is for there to be something Tilly’s depression is “about.” There certainly are things that can trigger depression, but the depression itself isn’t always a response to trauma. Sometimes it just happens because your body isn’t producing the chemicals it needs to.

I would love to see Tilly work through identifying how she’s feeling, struggling to decide between treatment options (or whether to go beyond talk therapy at all), and dealing with the consequences of whatever treatment she chooses. I’d also just love to see what mental health care looks like in the 32nd century.

But I don’t need there to be a reason she’s depressed.

Because depression doesn’t require a reason to appear.

Join me for a super low-key Artist’s Way Creative Cluster.

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 11:17:00 -0400

I mentioned in September that I was going through the Artist’s Way. I got about three weeks in when I realized I was only doing morning pages and reading, but not doing artist dates or any of the exercises. My motivational tendency is obliger, so I thought maybe if I were doing it in community, I’d do better.

But then I thought about organizing a whole community and I got weary immediately. I looked over Julia Cameron’s Guide for Starting Creative Clusters and registered a big old NOPE.

So I’m planning to do it MY way.

My life mantra is WHAT I CAN, WHEN I CAN.

I’m inviting you to participate. Here’s how it’s going to work.

I’m going to do morning pages as often as I can, but I’ll be keeping them to myself. I might occasionally blog about what I’m learning from doing them.
I’m going to do Artist Dates as often as I can. I’ll blog about them, with what I did, and my response to it.
I will end both morning pages and Artist Dates posts with a question about how they’re going for you, what you did, and what you’re getting out of them. You will be able to reply in one of a few ways:
- through a Micro.blog reply
- through an IndieWeb webmention
- through Disqus comments
- through Twitter replies
- through Facebook replies (yes, I’m even going to try this on Facebook)
I’ll essentially do the same process for exercises, writing about my response to them and maybe even my answers, then asking if you did the exercise and how it worked out for you. You can reply in the same ways mentioned above.

I’m not in a place where I feel good about confining myself to a 12-week schedule, and I know if I try to turn it into 12 months or something I’ll lose steam around the 8 month mark, so instead, I’m just going to do it WHEN I CAN. Here’s what that will look like:

I will make a short post when I start a chapter/week.
I will make a short post when I finish a chapter/week.
And all the exercises and stuff above, I’ll make a note of what chapter/week it’s from.

Here are the rules to participate:

Do what you can, when you can.
Avoid trying to fix people’s problems or offer advice; “listen” to understand. I encourage you to respond, but try not to have it be advice-focused.

That’s it. I really hope you’ll join me.

“Peak Performance,” Impostor Syndrome, and PhD Life, brought to you by Star Trek: The Next Generation 📺🖖🏻

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 12:48:00 -0400

I’ve been in the middle of a Star Trek: The Next Generation rewatch for months, maybe even more than a year. Maybe since before the pandemic started, I don’t remember. I often will fall asleep to a TNG episode. I do this with the same episode over and over until I actually watch it all the way through while I’m awake.

Back in May, just over a month out from my dissertation defense and with no plan for the future, the episode I slept through over and over again was “Peak Performance.” It’s one of my favorite episodes, for many reasons, and one reason is a B story focusing on Data. (Surprise!)

The A story is that a strategist named Kolrami has come aboard the Enterprise to evaluate the crew’s performance in a combat exercise. Kolrami is a jerk and has real problems with Commander Riker, suggesting that Riker’s jovial attitude is not compatible with strong leadership.

Kolrami is also super arrogant. He comes from a species called the Zakdorn, well known for producing the galaxy’s best strategists. He prides himself on his strategy and uses it for games as well as combat exercises; he is a grandmaster of a game called Stratagema. Riker challenges Kolrami to a game of Stratagema and loses after only a few moves. Thinking that with his fancy positronic brain Data might actually be able to beat Kolrami, Dr. Pulaski eggs Data on to play and eventually misleads Kolrami into believing Data has challenged him. Data agrees to the challenge, in spite of not initiating it.

Kolrami and Data play Stratagema and it lasts longer than the game with Riker did, but Data still loses. Then this exchange happens:

Pulaski: How can you lose? You’re supposed to be infallible.

Data: Obviously, I am not.

It seems like a simple and innocuous response, but Data goes on to remove himself from bridge duty, believing that his loss at stratagema indicates a defect in himself:

I have proven to be vulnerable. At the present time, my deduction should be treated with skepticism.

I am concerned about giving the captain unsound advice.

This has indicated that I am damaged in some fashion. I must find the malfunction.

I heard the exchange above and these lines from Data and felt a deep resonance in my heart. Isn’t this how so many people feel, all the time? Isn’t this especially how scholars feel? Especially if you are an overachiever, you may make it all the way to a PhD program and only know what it is to excel in everything, and then meet a challenge that you can’t surmount.

You might be pursuing a tenure-track job, have done all the things you’re supposed to do, and still not get hired. Maybe you have tons of publications, brilliant teaching evaluations, a robust record of service, and did important dissertation research. And it doesn’t matter.

Data explains to Picard why he has removed himself from the bridge and what prompted him to do so. Picard replies:

…it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.

Um, excuse me Captain, just a moment, I got something in each eye and it has caused them to water profusely and also has made sobs wrack my body, hold on…

In the end, Data challenges Kolrami to a rematch. We see them play, Kolrami moving more quickly and becoming more agitated by the moment, as Data plays slowly and maintains a calm expression. Kolrami suspends the game, yells “This is not a rematch. You have made a mockery of me!” and storms out of the room.

As Data’s colleagues come to congratulate Data on his victory, he points out that he didn’t win, though no game of Strategema has ever gone to as high a score as this one has. Data explains that Kolrami was playing for a win and assumed that was Data’s goal as well, but Data had in fact chosen his own goal: a draw. He let many opportunities that would have supported a win pass him by in order to maintain a balance that would let him challenge Kolrami indefinitely.

Is this a perspective that can be useful for anyone dealing with impostor syndrome, and especially PhDs moving away from the tenure track? I think so. The “victory condition” for a PhD is assumed to be a tenure track job, but I went in with the intention of learning about qualitative methods. Now, I write about qualitative research and am pursuing other writing and consulting opportunities. It’s not success by the usual metric, but it’s a path with which I am happy. And it’s a path where no one tells me to wait for tenure before I have a kid (whoops did it during the PhD!), do public scholarship, or have opinions. And thank goodness, because that’s a long wait for a train don’t come.

Great news, bad attitude

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 22:02:00 -0400

Hi web friends.

I’m having a weird day, with some great news but also me not feeling like doing anything, where I can swing from ecstatic about great news to extremely irritable with my kid. I’m not always the most gracious or graceful parent.

The great news is medical stuff: after only a week of modifying my diet to be more PCOS-friendly, my blood sugar has moved from high to high-normal. My liver indicators were looking rough a month ago, presumably because I was taking a LOT of Tylenol for headaches, but after a month of supplementing with milk thistle, it’s back to normal. My doctor prescribed a new migraine medication for me and if I take it REALLY at the first sign, it actually works.

This is all wonderful! Really exciting stuff!

But I also spent all day kind of blah, not really feeling like doing much. So I focused on really basic self-care: a little yoga, dental hygiene, outside time. I hope I’ll feel less Bartlebyish tomorrow.

The parenting stuff is no big deal, just being annoyed when my kid does stuff like hate every food he used to love or use my head as a footrest when I’m trying to fill his essential oil diffuser. Nornal kid stuff and of course he’s still my favorite person.

I’ve been reading the Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO and geeking out about it. I had in my head that SEO was gross and pushy, but it’s actually about getting resources to the right people, which makes it a good skill for librarians.

Now I’m quite tired, so I’ll watch a bit of Star Trek Discovery and nod off.

🔖Quotes from Lorraine Boissoneault's "Drafting a Personal Essay Is Like Stumbling Through a Dance"

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 08:05:00 -0400

I really needed to read “Drafting a Personal Essay Is Like Stumbling Through a Dance” today. Here are some bits that hit me hard:

It’s not enough to see a successful dance or personal essay—you can study all you want, but it’s only in the act of doing that you learn what’s right and what isn’t.

The bad news about first drafts is that they are necessary. The good news is that they’re only a starting point.

There are many ways to get better at writing—take classes, join critique groups, read voraciously—but nothing gets you around the fact that you must also write and revise.

…take comfort in the fact that your words are still on the page. You’ve done the hard part and unleashed your awkward vulnerability.

🔖"Nobody cares if you're a writer except you." Kate Baer on being a writer who mothers. 📝

Sun, 07 Nov 2021 20:49:00 -0400

I highly recommend Sara Fredman’s Write Like A Mother newsletter, in which Sara interviews writers who are also mothers. Some bits from the recent issue with Kate Baer resonated especially with me, so I thought I’d share them here.

Mothers were so punished in this pandemic.

This. I’m playing the pandemic on easy mode - working part-time from home - and I still feel this. The social costs and lack of a village are what’s hurting me most. For the first time since the start of the pandemic, I hung out for a long time with other parents while our kids were at the park and it was huge. Pre-pandemic, M & I spent every weekday morning at a co-working space with a Montessori school on-site. My co-workers were almost exclusively fellow parents of young children, mostly moms and non-binary primary caregivers, and at the time I didn’t really appreciate how special it was.

…nobody cares if you’re a writer. Nobody, nobody cares if you’re a writer, except you. If you want to be a writer, then you have to take control of the situation. You have to think of yourself as a writer, you have to treat yourself as a writer. You have to treat this like this is a job… I have to be the one who cares so much about being a writer. And so I think part of that is just filtering out that noise and just taking yourself super seriously, taking the work super seriously.

I have only recently claimed the title of writer for myself, despite having written all my life and having my first paid byline 10 years ago, and I feel this so hard. I’m still working on taking myself and the work seriously.

#FSNNA21 livetweet log:

Sat, 23 Oct 2021 16:45:00 -0400

Dr. Lesley Willard:

Introducing topic. How do scholars in fan & media studies articulate their discipline? How do these disciplines interact? When don't they?
Shares current book project: discussing labor & affordances on Steam. Last Nov Steam launched Steam Playtest, a way for indie developers to test games early. How does this impact the labor market for games?
Steam Playtest has been called "Beta testing for beta testing." Steam also has Early Access, which lets indie developers charge for in-development games.
All of this involves relying on Steam users to perform labor, to do QA work for free or pay for the opportunity to participate in the development process.
These features displace pro playtesters & QA reps.
This reliance on fan affective labor isn't unique to games, but Steam playtest/Early Access provides a rich area for case study.

Nick Bestor:

How do we define the type of interaction at play in licensed tabletop (esp card) games? Are the people best understood as fans or players?
Describing experience of going to tournament for the Game of Thrones Living Card Game.
Now talking about writing tournament report to post to Fantasy Flight (game publisher) forums.
Licensed games matter and in many ways. Bestor describes needing another outlet for GoT fandom beyond books & shows.
Story worlds vs/as game worlds.
Do Bestor's experiences make him a fan? A player?

ShiraChess:

Who/what counts as a gamer? A game?
How does a fan identity get drawn out differently in fan-created product places like Etsy for example, Stardew Valley blanket yes, but it's hard to find fiber crafts for FPSs like Call of Duty.
When we consider game fandom, we should "remember the cozy fandoms and that digital leisure is not one-size-fits-all."

Latina Vidolova:

Discussing "Netflix Anime Festival" & how Netflix often creates "anime" that doesn't even have an anime studio/creative team.
Netflix is redefining what "anime fan" means by describing anyone who has watched any "anime" on Netflix as a fan, when Vidolova sees this as a tension between defining fan & user.
Gamers come into play considering "Netflix Geeked," a subbrand that includes sci fi, fantasy, superheroes, & more (with video games & anime as part of that "more")
Generalizing what anime means - animated adaptation of video game property = "anime"
Netflix branding defines fan according to engaging with these at all rather than a coherent community.
Netflix & Crunchyroll have both created animated Youtubers do promote anime & video games.
e-girls on TikTok create a mise-en-scene of playing video games; identity of player or fan is secondary to creating aesthetic image.
Fan studies "is attuned to affective attachment to particular story worlds and relationships" while the TikTok egirls are more about putting together pieces and fragments.
Game studies looks at these kinds of "fan fragments" and how they come together in a different way than fan studies does. e.g. how do people choose an avatar?

Amanda Cote:

Discussing crunch time in the game industry and the relationship players have with it. Industry pros sometimes try to rally fans around crunch practices.
Method - analyzing player reactions to articles about crunch practices; study is ongoing, but so far more fans seem to support crunch practices.
Gamer identity is forefronted both among supporters & critics.
Consumer identity and fan identity are also present. Value judgments justified by identity all around: if you're a fan, wouldn't you object to crunch time bc you care about the people making the game?
Gamer/consumer/fan identites have been examined more in fan studies than in game studies.

#FSNNA21 livetweet log:

Sat, 23 Oct 2021 13:35:00 -0400

Adriana Amaral:

First, the state of fan studies in Brazil: research focused on digital settings but still working on integrating digital methods with other methods. Transcultural fan studies scholarship does focus on music fandom.
8 themes identified in lit review of Brazilian fan studies research - 1) The fan condition and identities; 2) Fandom consumption practices; 3) Digital Media fan practices and dynamics; 4) Fandom as community;
5) Fan activism; 6) Politics and Fandom; 7) Nostalgia and fans; 8) Fan production and works
Currently building Brazilian fan studies digital archive at https://www.estudosdefas.com.br/ and next step is interviewing authors.

Dr Lies Lanckman 🏳️‍🌈:

Dr. Lies Lanckman is looking at Yiddish-language Hollywood fan magazines, esp. from the 30s & analyzing fan letters in the magazines.

Allegra Rosenberg:

"Affordances & Paradigms in Platformed Fandom"
Fandom has moved from self-contained/self-managed spaces to platforms controlled by others/corporations.
Examples of commercial + cultural tension in fandom use of platforms: Tumblr’s porn ban • YA NFT scandal • TikTok Omegaverse LARP • Hannibal Twitter Wars • Censorship of AO3 in China
Considerations: Algorithmic fandom, boundary-enforcing norms, encounters with the fourth wall, platform-native emergent fan practices, AO3 as anti-platform
Important to keep in mind that while platform affordances shape fan behavior, "fans find a way"
Future RQs: Where can resistance & creativity be found in platformed fan practices? How does digital literacy/understanding of the nature of a given platform affect norms and values of the fan communities that use it?
How does the “first fandom experiences” of teenagers materially differ when it occurs via algorithm, and how does it continue to affect their journey through fandom?

Christina Reichts:

"From tool to lens - A case study of applying digital methods in fan studies"
Research project - "Marveling at Darcy Lewis"
Scraped information & texts from AO3 and ended up with about 2,419 fics
Using a tool called tag refinery alongside the process of topic model analysis for text selection
Are we using digital methods as tools or as lenses for engaging with theoretical frameworks: queer studies, feminist studies, intersectional feminism?

Another Alex:

"Mushroom for improvement: Theorizing a new model for the circulation of fan objects"
Mycelium model focuses on movement of fan objects, agency of fans, flexible & agile model that is based off the radiating organism of fungi with genre as scaffolding
Multimodal methodology: autoethnography, desk research using thursdaysfallenangel's survey on fanfiction consumption & sharing habits, case studies
Mad at Your Dad/Craiglist Thanksgiving trope. Based off Craigslist ad where poster offered self as deliberately bad Thanksgiving date
Used manual data collection to look at post with 562K+ notes at time of writing, and then GEPHI as network visualization tool
Alex is sharing super cool visualization with posts indicated by dots, reblogs by lines, and fandom by color of dot & line
Multifandom blogs provided most notes, then small clusters of particular fandom blogs

Adriana Amaral:

asks @alexanthoudakis about using a mushroom model which reflects a broader trend in cultural studies of using biological metaphors. What are the implications for theoretical considerations?

Another Alex:

Considered metaphors for things that happened organically, references other scholars who use virality as a metaphor. Important not to forget the PEOPLE in the process.
Originally started with the idea of tentacles, but they only radiate out from one point, don't capture horizontal circulation of fan objects. Same text that suggested tentacles also discussed mushrooms, so began researching mushrooms
Found philosophy paper that used mycelium as metaphor, cemented the idea that Alex was looking for.

#FSNNA21 livetweet log:

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 11:08:00 -0400

This doesn’t include the discussion/Q&A because things started to go so fast I couldn’t keep up.

Stacy Lantagne:

introducing other panelists in "The Money Question"
Copyright law is designed to incentivize creativity, "to reward authors for being creative."
Lawyers think about financial repercussions of creativity/copyright, but fans tend to not focus on finances as reason for engaging in fanac, esp. fic.
Copyright law suggests that people require the financial incentive to be creative, but fans demonstrate there are many other motivations.
If we know people will be creative with motivations other than financial, then what is copyright law accomplishing if the incentive assumption is flawed?
Is copyright blocking creativity because it is too restrictive?
If $ enters a space where previously it wasn't part of the motivation/incentive structure, how do copyright considerations change once $ is introduced to the space?
When fans demand compensation, it gets stickier because they are creating within the world of somebody else's creation. Fanworks, however, are protected by fair use, "a really messy doctrine," with market harm as one of the explicit factors evaluated to determine if it's fair use.
We want to protect public good with copyright, not private gain. If you're making $, you can presumably afford to license intellectual property.
Copyright exceptions for news reporting & education, for example, promote the public good.
Fair use doctrine doesn't provide ability to exploit EVERYTHING, some things are reserved for creator.
If you aren't making $, copyright holder has a harder time arguing you're affecting their market/bottom line, but if you are charging, now it looks like you're siphoning $ from copyright holder.
THIS DOES NOT MEAN EVERYTHING DONE FOR FREE IS OKAY UNDER FAIR USE DOCTRINE. Some free stuff is still copyright infringement! eg music & video piracy
But also NOT EVERYTHING DONE FOR $ IS NOT FAIR USE.
"Keeping things noncommercial is the safest way that lawyers can see for protecting fan activities." & this is why AO3 has lots of rules about noncommercial use.
$ attracts attention, so copyright holders are more likely to sue if $ is involved.
We are seeing more ways that fans monetize their creations & Stacey is curious about non-lawyers' thoughts.
[quick disclaimer, Kimberly Hirsh is not A lawyer and Stacey Lantagne is not YOUR lawyer.]
What about when copyright holders claim that they own rights to fan work? Platforms that are monetizing fan labor?

Daria Romanova:

Let's talk about LARPS! Daria came from fashion & media studies & is new to fan studies in the past ~6 mos.
LARP = Live-Action Role Playing.
LARPing is an event and a game, often based on/inspired by media products, appeals to fans, utilizes physical assets like props, costumes, food, accommodation. Can't be 100% free.
Is LARP a commercial endeavor or not?
LARPs aren't always medieval/fantasy themed. Other examples: wizarding, Downton Abbey/Upstairs-Downstairs "Fairweather Manor," Star Wars, Westworld.
You can't participate in a LARP without spending $ on accommodations, tickets, costumes, props.
LARPs also have merchandise.
College of Wizardry LARP originally used Harry Potter terms, but received contact from legal (at WB? JKR estate?) & subsequently changed names.
Case study - Star Wars Saberfighting - you can pay to take lightsaber fighting classes, which resulted in a market for unlicensed light sabers.
There is a relationship between embodied fanac like LARPing & $, which creates tension btwn fan creations & licensed merch.

Julie Escurignan:

Studying Game of Thrones fan experiences, analyzed brand, good brand due to fan loyalty & HBO branding work, with particular visual identity & brand image.
Distinction between official merchandise, licensed (like Monopoly), and unlicensed (like fan-created). Some fan creators do it just for fan love, some for career/biz, and some creators of unlicensed merch aren't fans.
3 types of GoT on Etsy: reuse/distory/mock HBO features, inspired by GoT, GoT for SEO purposes (not actually GoT related)
Fan-made items tend to cost 2-3x less than similar official items.
While reappropriation items often are similar to official/licensed items, "inspired by" items - for example cosplay items - are filling a gap, as this kind of thing isn't usually offered through official/licensed channels.
Fans in places where official places don't ship (eg HBO doesn't ship outside of USA) must choose either to purchase resold items that will ship to them or fan-created items that will ship to them.
Surveyed fans in English, French, & Spanish. About 1/5 of fans purchase exclusively fan creation, 70-80% prefer official, 50% or so buy both.
Fan tourists & cosplayers purchase more items than other fans. Fans mention Etsy as place to purchase
Fan consumers often like to purchase fan-created artifacts in order to support other fans.
Conflict btwn fans' stated support of fan creators and actual purchasing habits which when possible they prefer to buy official products.

Response to "Where’s the ‘Video Off’ Button in Face-to-Face Instruction?"

Thu, 30 Sep 2021 12:20:51 -0400

Dr. Maggie Melo writes for Inside Higher Ed today about the value of video-off time in a virtual classroom and how we might learn from the ease generated by virtual time together-but-apart and apply it in a face-to-face setting.

Dr. Melo concludes:

I want us to question why we have such a persistent desire to “see learning” in a makerspace or classroom. I want us to figuratively and literally turn off the gaze when it’s not needed. As we opt for classrooms and makerspaces that are more inclusive, we should create ways for students to choose how they want to be seen in the classroom.

My son attends a preschool that uses the Reggio Emilia approach. There are a lot of different components to this approach. One of them is documentation. The teachers at his school are constantly photographing the children as they work, posting those photographs around the classroom for the children to see, and writing captions to remind the children of what they were doing. This is not exclusively for assessment purposes. It’s process-focused. The children also take photos, which the teachers share and describe.

Dr. Melo’s piece made me wonder if something like this could be applied in a higher education setting, but placing the choice of how and what is documented on the students. Could you have a shorter class meeting time, giving students the extra solo time to work and document their own process? What if you explicitly asked them to talk about the mistakes they made and what they learned from them, like I do in my blog post about sewing napkins? Does placing this documentation power in the hands of the students allow them to choose how they are seen?

I don’t know.

I just wonder.

Just a note: Dr. Melo was my assistantship supervisor for the final 2 years of my PhD.

What was going on in my life when I got sick

Fri, 24 Sep 2021 08:02:00 -0400

It’s hard to figure out exactly which of the many symptoms I have should determine when I got sick but based on the impact of treatment, I’m going to say it was the onset of anxiety and depression. These really ramped up in October 1999.

I was 18 and settling in at college. I had a roommate who was not a good fit. My anxiety and depression seemed to kick off when that roommate suggested at dinner that I had a crush on a dude in our building. I didn’t but I liked talking to him. I thought he was fun. I already had a boyfriend (spoiler alert, 10 years later I married that boyfriend) and I thought that, based on what my roommate said, thinking this kid was fun was basically cheating. (I was wrong. It’s okay to have friends.)

This one conversation launched a spiral of negative self-talk that persisted for months. It was exacerbated by my being at a big university, struggling to make friends, and feeling disconnected from my family even though I was only 12 miles from home.

At the same time, my brother was sick and in the hospital. He was only 5. I don’t remember, but I imagine I felt that going to my parents with my problems felt like adding a burden they didn’t need, in light of my brother being ill

I don’t think I got help until Spring of 2000.

In the following few years I gained a lot of weight, was so sleepy that I would fall asleep in the student union and miss class plus slept through service learning obligations, and started having irregular periods. My primary care doctor sent me to an endocrinologist who ran a lot of thyroid tests but not the one that would lead to my diagnosis 11 years later.

In time, a lot of these symptoms went away, but they recurred with a vengeance the summer after I finished library school in 3011. Again, it started with depression and anxiety - in spite of my being on an antidepressant - and by the time I did a direct-to-consumer test and took the results to my doctor, all I could do was go to work, come home, and sleep, without energy even for laundry or food prep.

Wentz conducted a survey of over 2000 of her readers to investigate what was going on when they got sick. Stress was the most frequent response. I think both of the times I’ve had big flare-ups have been in the face of the stress of a major life transition.

This connection between transitions and flares is why I’m being especially vigilant right now as I continue to live in the liminal space of post-PhD.

How Hashimoto's makes me feel

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 10:02:00 -0400

Hashimoto’s makes me feel like the opposite of myself. At various points in my life, if you asked friends about me they’d tell you that I have infectious enthusiasm, that I am an excellent writer, that I am a badass who gets shit done. (These are things friends have actually told me about myself.)

When I’m having a flare, I don’t seem to care about anything. I can’t find the right words or structure my thoughts into a logical flow. I don’t seem to be able to get anything done at all.

I’ve seen my mom go through this, too. She’s super smart, loves learning, and is amazing at making stuff. But on her worst days, it’s all she can do to get out of bed.

It’s hard for me to reconcile these two versions of myself. On bad days, I find it hard to believe I was ever enthusiastic, sharp, eloquent, or effective.

I don’t like feeling this way.

My health goals

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 09:59:09 -0400

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One of the things I’m focusing on right now is feeling better. Today, that means reading Izabella Wentz’s Hashimoto’s Protocol: A 90-Day Plan for Reversing Thyroid Symptoms and Getting Your Life Back. We’re coming up on the 10th anniversary of my Hashimoto’s diagnosis (driven by my own research, in partnership with a doctor I had to push to recognize it) and guess what? I still feel crappy. Not nearly as bad as 10 years ago, but still bad. And part of chronic illness is that there will be flare ups. But I know I’m capable of feeling better because I did, in the 9 months before I got pregnant. But the things that helped me then aren’t enough to help me now, it seems. So, Wentz’s book.

Wentz suggests keeping a health journal using “a method you are likely to stick to.” For me, that’s blogging. I’ll probably keep some private notes, but maybe this can even be helpful to somebody else to follow along. So to the extent I feel okay doing it, I’ll be keeping my journal here, in the Health category.

Wentz suggests beginning by identifying health goals. Here are mine:

I want to have more energy. I am tired, all the time. My kid will tell you. I’ve been the kid with the tired mom and I’d love to spare my kid that. So this is my highest priority. Right now, if I go on an outing with my kid, I have to take the rest of the day and potentially the next day to recover. So my energy goal is to be able to go on a family outing and stay in the swing of things the next day.

I want to feel better about my looks. Mostly I think I’m pretty cute, but sometimes I feel dull and puffy. I’d like to look in the mirror and be not dull and not puffy. I’m not going to worry about weight or even girth because those are tricky targets and easy to disappoint me. But I’d like to look in the mirror and see someone with normal bags under her eyes, not extreme ones, with pink and cheery skin rather than wan white skin, with more hair than I have now and with an appropriate amount of white hair for her age. (There is a clear distinction between the amount of white hair I have when I’m well and when I’m ill. I don’t want to eliminate it, just to have what seems like a reasonable amount of it. And then maybe dye it green.)

I want to have endurance when swimming. One pool length wears me out right now and I can’t at present exercise myself into improving that due to the relationship between thyroid hormone levels and respiratory function. But I want to be able to swim in a mermaid tail for long distances. My ultimate goal is 300 yards but I’ll set an intermediate one for now. By next July, I’d like to be able to do 2 full laps with only 12 breath rests.

Those seem big enough for now.

On preferring learning to doing

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 13:50:01 -0400

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I love to read about writing. I’m the kind of person who finds Strunk and White fun. I keep buying books about writing: Stephen King’s On Writing, Ursula K. LeGuin’s conversations, and many more. And I do write: mostly blog posts and email messages these days, but I have written just about every format there is. I have not shared or attempted to publish much of that writing, though.

What keeps me from doing it? What has me loving reading about craft but rarely implementing what I read? It’s not that I never write but rather that I enjoy reading about writing perhaps more than writing itself. (No, that’s not quite right. I actually enjoy writing, even genres/formats I think I don’t enjoy, like book reviews. I loved writing last week’s book review of Brent Spiner’s Fan Fiction, despite constantly telling myself I don’t like writing book reviews.)

I think one of the things that keeps me hoarding and absorbing resources but leveraging them less frequently than I acquire and engage with them is my love of learning. I was working on a blog post about qualitative research for a client today and my head started swimming with how much I love learning about different methods of qual research. And I love doing it, too! I love creating a research design. I love finding the meaning in the data. But I think I love learning about new techniques for it even more. I was talking with W. about how readily I forget that I actually love doing this thing I spent six years learning to do - I went into the PhD explicitly because I wanted to devote time to understanding research methods. My PhD is in qualitative methods as much as or more than it’s in my discipline. (Except I love my discipline, too, which I also sometimes forget!)

Back to the point, here: W. suggested that perhaps UX careers would be a good fit, a place where a person could do qualitative research. I told him yes, that or market research. And then I told him that I don’t want to just do it in service of whatever business would want to hire me for it as much as I want to learn about it and share what I learn with other people so THEY can do it.

And then I said, “But what I REALLY need to remember is that I already have a client paying me to do exactly that.”

So I’m actually getting paid to do the learning I love. In a very real sense, I am at present, living the dream. It would serve me well to remember that.

Book Review: FAN FICTION by Brent Spiner 📚📺🖖‍‍

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 11:19:00 -0400

If you make a purchase through a link in this post, I may earn a commission.

Quick head’s up: In this review, I use “Brent” to refer to the character and “Spiner” to refer to the author.

Publisher’s Summary:

Brent Spiner’s explosive and hilarious novel is a personal look at the slightly askew relationship between a celebrity and his fans. If the Coen Brothers were to make a Star Trek movie, involving the complexity of fan obsession and sci-fi, this noir comedy might just be the one.

Set in 1991, just as Star Trek: The Next Generation has rocketed the cast to global fame, the young and impressionable actor Brent Spiner receives a mysterious package and a series of disturbing letters, that take him on a terrifying and bizarre journey that enlists Paramount Security, the LAPD, and even the FBI in putting a stop to the danger that has his life and career hanging in the balance.

Featuring a cast of characters from Patrick Stewart to Levar Burton to Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, to some completely imagined, this is the fictional autobiography that takes readers into the life of Brent Spiner, and tells an amazing tale about the trappings of celebrity and the fear he has carried with him his entire life.

Fan Fiction is a zany love letter to a world in which we all participate, the phenomenon of “Fandom.”

Let’s get the fanfiction discussion out of the way.

If you are into fanfiction, you probably know that, despite anything the OED may tell you, fans (or fen, as we’re sometimes pluralized) write it as all one word: fanfiction. Spiner’s book is titled Fan Fiction. But there’s a reason, I promise! In spite of Spiner not writing this the same way as fans do, I can fanwank the title! The novel itself, you see, is mostly Fiction, and it’s about not only Brent dealing with the attentions of a scary Fan, but the ways in which Brent is a Fan himself.

There is a point at which Brent tells Patrick Stewart that he feels as if he is a character in a work of fanfiction. At first, I thought, “Whoa, an actor aware of fanfiction in 1991?” but then I remembered that this is Star Trek, one of the first media fandoms and the first fanzine-based media fandom, and that the first issue of a newsletter devoted to Data and Spiner was released in the fall of 1987, well before this book takes place. That newsletter (adorable titled Data Entries) published its first piece of fiction in issue 3, which was published in spring of 1988, again well before this novel takes place. It’s worth noting that the first issue of the newsletter discusses establishing a fan club for Spiner and later issues report that Spiner requested that fans not do this and that the newsletter not include photos of him out of makeup. While the driving force in the novel is a fan who is creepy as can be, there were a lot of active fans of Spiner’s who were careful to respect his privacy. All of this to say, of course by 1991 Brent would be aware of fanfiction, though whether he would have actually read any for Star Trek or anything else is something I don’t know.

What I loved:

This book is a lot of fun. Brent Spiner makes it impossible to know what draws on real life and what’s totally made up, though there are interviews where he clarifies it a bit.

I can’t include exact quotes because I only have an Advanced Reader’s Copy and not a final version, but I can share some of my own notes with you. I think that will illuminate what I love about the book better than a summary can.

There’s a point at which Brent goes to see a detective at the LAPD. This detective offers a lot of assistance regarding Brent’s stalker, but of course he finishes their meeting by telling Brent he has a TNG spec script that involves Data traveling back in time to the 20th century to team up with a character who is clearly a self-insert for the detective. But really, who among us doesn’t have a TNG spec script that features Data collaborating with a self-insert character? When I was in middle school, my best friend and I plotted out the beats of an episode where Data teams up with a middle school-aged flautist to communicate with the Crystalline Entity through music. The middle school-aged flautist was a self-insert for my best friend; Data was guaranteed to be a Data Sue for me if we had actually finished the script.

Spiner portrays himself as a nebbishy, anxious wreck, which completely contradicts the image I have of him in my head as a confident, charismatic, and hilarious performer. It made me feel more aligned with the character Brent, which is nice because as someone who sees myself in Data, there was the risk I would find Brent to be so different from his character as to be not relatable. I too am an apparently confident and charismatic person who is actually an anxious wreck. (Can women be nebbishy? If we can, I am on the inside but not externally.) Because of this, I found Brent super relatable.

We get a glimpse into the glamor of a Hollywood life here when Brent puts in a CD in his car in 1991. How fancy is he? My family didn’t get a car with a CD player in it until probably 2000 or later. We bought one with a tape deck in 1993.

Spiner references his comedy influences in the book frequently; at first, I didn’t think of him as a comedic performer, in spite fo thinking of him as a funny person, but remembering that he was part of a panel on humor in Star Trek as part of First Contact Day 2021 reminded me that this is, in fact, a huge part of his work. Spiner’s comedy chops shine through in the book, when he has Brent drop jokes in a classic comedic structure. Again, I can’t tell you the exact quotes, but there are a lot of places where my annotations say things like “Fucking hilarious” and “Brent Spiner is a goddamn delight.”

Spiner confirms what I already knew (and used for my Data cosplay at my dissertation defense): Data is not white. He is gold. I liked that he confirmed this and mentioned it pretty frequently.

Spiner portrays Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett-Roddenberry as freaking adorable. I don’t know what they were really like, and I know that Majel wasn’t the alpha and omega of Gene’s attractions and romantic/sexual relationships, but DAMN, so cute.

Spiner’s portrayal of his TNG classmates is, according to his SyFy interview, exaggerated; it’s also delightful. Levar Burton is the most enlightened hippie in hippietown and Patrick Stewart is 100% So Very RSC.

What I wanted more of:

There is a lot going on in this book, in spite of it focusing strongly on one storyline: Brent dealing with the mysterious fan who is stalking him and seems to believe she is his daughter from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Offspring” (almost there in my rewatch!), Lal. I wish we’d gotten to spend a little bit more time with any of it. It’s a fast and fun read but it wouldn’t have been hurt by I having more time on set, more time dealing with the mystery, more time with Brent handling his complicated relationship with FBI Agent Cindy Lou and her twin, private security guard Candy Lou.

What I need to warn you about:

Spiner’s writing voice here is sparse. I think this is because Spiner is putting on a Chandleresque voice; reading the Google Books preview for The Big Sleep confirmed this for me. I rarely read hard-boiled detective fiction or noir; I’m more of a Victorian/cozy kind of gal. Because of this, the voice took me by surprise. If you’re used to that kind of writing, I think you’ll go, “Yep.” If not, know that it’s an intentional style.

While Spiner imitates the voice of a hard-boiled detective here and “mem-noir” is a delightful neologism to describe what he’s written, this has a more optimistic vibe than is typical of noir or hard-boiled detective stories. There’s a mystery, the book is set in LA, and Cindy Lou and Candy Lou could be credibly called dames, but that’s where the similarities end.

There are a couple of anachronisms that I wonder if they’ll be in the finished book. There’s a point at which Spiner uses the word “besties,” which seems to have first appeared in 1991. So it’s possible it would be used in the context of this story, but it would be very cutting edge. There’s also a character described in the epilogue as having been taking online classes for years, and I can’t tell if the epilogue is supposed to be from the perspective of Spiner-now, as the prologue clearly is, or Brent-then. So that might be an anachronism or it might not, I can’t tell.

Some people have criticized Spiner’s portrayal of women in the book, especially the twins Cindy Lou and Candy Lou, as being too limited and focused on them as sexual objecsts. It’s a fair critique, but it didn’t bother me.

Final word: Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation should definitely check this out. Noir readers might enjoy it too; Spiner does a good job of explaining things about the show that non-fans might otherwise confusing.

Book: Fan Fiction
Author: Brent Spiner
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication Date: October 5, 2021
Pages: 256
Age Range: Adult
Source of Book: Digital ARC from NetGalley

My 20th Domainiversary

Thu, 09 Sep 2021 17:05:00 -0400

Today is the 20th anniversary of the first time the Internet Archive captured my first personal domain. The 20th anniversary of my first blog post was in March. That first post was in hand-rolled html, written in Notepad and FTPed to my host at envy.nu. It used fixed scrolling over a background image of Death from the Sandman comics.

My early blog posts were typical of a personal blog: what was going on with my classes, what I thought of video games I played and movies I saw, political opinions that thoroughly embarrass me now. My current blog posts aren’t that different now than they were then, but it’s much harder to find other personal bloggers now that blogs are a ubiquitous marketing tool.

I’ve liked blogging all this time. I plan to keep doing it.

🥳🎈🎉🎊🎂

In defense of not living up to your potential

Tue, 07 Sep 2021 09:23:00 -0400

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Betsy Greer shared some pages from Carol Dweck’s book Mindset on Twitter this morning. I was reading along, thinking, “YEAH!” and being proud of myself for moving from the fixed mindset of my youth to the mostly growth mindset of my adulthood, when I bumped up against the end of the second quote she had highlighted:

[In a growth mindset, failure] means you’re not fulfilling your potential.

Not. Fulfilling. Your. Potential.

This set of words and its variant, “not living up to your potential,” make me grouchy. It’s not right to say they’re triggering, but they are an echo of educators from my past who made me feel I had a responsibility to live up to their assessment of my potential.

I don’t.

My potential is mine to fulfill or to waste.

This might not seem like a big deal to many people. But for a person with anxiety, this phraseology feels like a confirmation of all the unkind things I say to myself.

I have a PhD. That’s something only 1.2% of the US population can accurately say about themselves.

But I also was not very productive in the academic sense: my publications are all in either revision or preparation even after I graduated, I didn’t get any awards or grants on my own, etc etc. So it’s easy to scold myself for not having been productive enough during my PhD. For not having lived up to my potential.

I have to remind myself that the PhD was instrumental: I wanted time to read and write and understand qualitative methodology better, and I got all of those things. I didn’t go in caring about publications so why should I start now?

My potential is mine to fulfill or to waste.

The list of things I haven’t done is long. The list of things I have done is also long. I tend to be guided by my intuition and while my big life decisions may be based on logic and in consultation with important people in my life, my day-to-day is generally led by what feels possible and what feels good. (Hat-tip to Katy Peplin for “what feels possible.”) There are more things I will do. There are many things I won’t do. All of that is okay.

I have no obligation to live up to someone else’s perception of my potential. And neither do you.

Your potential is yours to fulfill or to waste.

My post-PhD identity crisis, #motherscholar edition

Tue, 31 Aug 2021 14:13:30 -0400

I am making a few notes here now that I hope to turn into a longer post later. As I scrolled Twitter and read there what some colleagues have been working on, I started to feel my current post-PhD existential crisis take a new and unexpected shape: the shape of wishing I knew a way to stay in academia.

Here are the things that have kept me from pursuing an academic career after graduation:

watching tenure-track colleagues be miserable
lack of mobility (it would be very challenging to find a position, even tenure-track, that would be worth uprooting my family for, and I refuse to live apart from my family)
being a mother (I also refuse to prioritize career over family)
being chronically ill/variably disabled (I also refuse to prioritize career over health)

Here are the things that today appeal to me about academia:

pursuing a research agenda that I design

That’s actually about it, and as a freelance academic/independent researcher, I can probably work out a way to do that but today it feels like it’s in conflict with everything else I’ve got going on.

Which is why I’m going to dive into the #motherscholar literature.

Dr. Kimberly's Comedy School: Pairing the absurd with the mundane

Tue, 31 Aug 2021 09:38:00 -0400

If you have access to it, watch The Simpsons, Season 1, episode 3, “Homer’s Odyssey.” This bit happens at around 12:50: Depressed due to losing his job, Homer decides to throw himself off a bridge. He ties a rope around a huge boulder, then ties the other end of the rope to his waist. When he goes to open the gate in the fence around the yard, struggling to carry the boulder, he finds the hinges squeak. He then interrupts his suicide attempt to get a can of oil and oil the gate’s hinges. This cracks me up because in the middle of a devastating act that he is carrying out in a ridiculous way, he stops to take care of this mundane problem.

Is he doing it because he doesn’t want to wake his family with the squeaking? Could be. The rationale is irrelevant. It’s the juxtaposition of the extreme and absurd with the quotidian that makes this moment work for me.

Advice for new parents and parents-to-be

Sun, 22 Aug 2021 13:54:00 -0400

I have a friend who is due to have a baby in January. I offered to write up a bunch of notes for her and realized it would make a pretty good blog post, so here we are.

Make a list ahead of time of ways to help. You won’t want to think about it once the baby’s born. Share the list with people who you think will want to help. (I just put out a call on Facebook asking for who wanted this information.) If someone offers to make a meal train or whatever for you, take them up on it, but you don’t have to wait for an offer. You can do it for yourself.

If you’ve got the money and a place nearby that makes prepared meals, do this for the first couple weeks. It’s amazing.

Stock up on easy snacks. If you’re nursing, you will need to eat all the time. Get a giant straw cup to drink water from. My doulas recommend a giant Bubba Bottle.

Populate your streaming services with queues of everything you’ve been meaning to watch. Again, if you’re nursing, there will be cluster feeding nights when streaming this stuff will save your sanity, and you don’t want to pick which thing to watch in the moment.

Read these books:

Before baby is born - The Happiest Baby on the Block
When baby is born - The Wonder Weeks (also has an excellent companion app)

Get the latest edition of Baby Bargains and use it as reference material.

If swaddling seems like a real challenge, try a Miracle Blanket. They don’t work for everybody but if they work for you, they are the best thing ever.

If you’re nursing, get a My Brest Friend pillow. So much better than a Boppy or whatever.

If you have the energy, try to assert your needs to family that wants to hang out with the baby. You might find it a huge relief to have the baby taken away for a while but you might find it really upsetting. Communicate with people about what you’re feeling. I was not good about this. I wish I had been. The first few weeks would have been happier if I had.

Remember that Boppy that isn’t super helpful for breastfeeding? It’s actually a great pillow for keeping your genitals and butt from having to touch real furniture. If you have a vaginal delivery, those parts of you will hurt. Not putting them on real furniture and instead having them propped up with a pillow with a hole in the middle will spare you a lot of crying in pain. Sit on the Boppy.

Learn to use a baby carrier ASAP. YouTube is your friend for this. In fact, YouTube is now your co-parent. Go to it whenever you can’t figure out what instructions are telling you to do. Including for the Miracle Blanket.

Don’t go to YouTube for hand expressing milk advice, though, because it will show you things that are more designed to turn people on than to educate them, and that’s not helpful. (Unless that’s what you’re into, in which case it might be helpful. But I found medical information about this much more helpful.)

Seriously, though, learn to use that carrier because then you will be able to use your hands for things like feeding yourself.

Your baby will hate tummy time. (Learn what tummy time is if you don’t know yet.) If your baby cannot handle it without misery, try rolling up a little receiving blanket and propping it under baby’s armpits. This turned tummy time from hated time to happy time in our house.

Try to remember that this is a temporary time. You are becoming a new version of yourself. You don’t know what this version of yourself will like or care about. You will probably have an identity crisis. Becoming a parent is a lifestage not unlike adolescence, especially if you’re the birthing parent with all the hormones that come with that. (People use the term “matrescence” to refer to becoming a mother. I don’t think there is a similar gender-neutral or non-binary term, and I suppose maybe somebody uses “patrescence” to refer to becoming a father, but I haven’t heard it.) It’s okay if you don’t know who you are right now but I promise you are other things as well as a caregiver. Caregiver is just taking priority right now.

When you feel like you’re doing it all wrong and you’re the worst parent ever, get quiet and check in with your intuition. If you’re like me, it will tell you what to do.

Many thanks to my friend Monica, everybody at Emerald Doulas, and Victoria Facelli for all the things they taught me that contributed to my ability to write this post.

The questions driving me right now

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 14:27:15 -0400

I read Ravynn K. Stringfield’s How I Became a Scholar of Black Girl Fantasy and felt energized. I felt energized specifically by how she found role models who were doing the work she wanted to do, how she came to terms with being able to be a scholar AND a writer of other genres.

I attended her class The Scholar’s Guide to Writing & Publishing Creative Nonfiction and she talked about pursuing questions. She talked about that in her essay, too.

And I thought, what questions motivate me?

I went back to my PhD personal statement. The question motivating me there was broad. It was basically “How do Connected Learning in school libraries?” Meme style.

I drafted it in 2014. I have changed a lot in the last 7 years. Connected Learning has changed a lot in the last 7 years.

And I’m still delighted by people loving things and all the amazing learning that comes from that, but… I don’t know. I don’t feel like I’m interested in that set of questions right now.

I love reading about affinity spaces.

I really loved my dissertation topic.

But now? What now? I wrote my proposal before COVID-19 was well-known.

I defended my dissertation when there seemed to be hope on the horizon: I was freshly fully vaccinated and things were looking up.

I’m despairing about a lot now.

I’m also jazzed about the possibility of taking some time to be a writer.

But a writer of what?

I don’t know.

I’ve been banging my head against WHAT NOW?! as if it’s a puzzle I can solve if I just look at or play with it long enough but I think I’m not there. Doing all the parachute-color-style exercises isn’t what I need right now; it just leads to frustration and exhaustion.

I did a couple Self-Employed PhD sessions with Jennifer Polk back when I was still working on the dissertation. I knew that I could go a lot of possible directions with either traditional or self-employment. I said so. People said “So what’s the problem?” I said “Well I have limited time and energy so I need to pick one to try first.” People said “Well what do you want to do?”

I said:

I WANT TO REST.

I want. To. Rest.

My dissertation has been fully submitted since mid-May. I officially graduated on May 16, I think.

I have been “resting” for 3 months.

But “resting” has meant caring for my son and drumming up client work. It’s meant applying for jobs. It’s meant presenting for both professional and personal endeavors. It’s meant figuring out how to safely get my kid into preschool so I can work. It’s meant agonizing over the fact that while I am incredibly lucky and privileged to be in a position to take time to figure out what’s next, I hate the idea of my husband paying my student loans. Partly because I fear his resentment.

Partly because like… what do I have all these degrees for if all I do is sleep?

Some of what I’ve been doing has been home ownership management. Lots of logistics.

I do not feel rested.

A lot of things happened over the course of my PhD in my family and personal life, in addition to the world being what it has been since 2015. Listing it really bums me out so just trust me that it’s been A LOT and it has taken a toll. And when I look at it all written out, as I did privately for myself last night, I think:

NO WONDER I AM SO TIRED.

So the questions that are driving me, for the foreseeable future, honestly, are:

What do I HAVE to do to care for myself, my family, and my home?
What feels good?
What heals me?
What energizes me?

Those are all the questions I can handle right now.

What I Learned from Recording My Micro Camp Talk

Sat, 14 Aug 2021 21:05:00 -0400

I learned a lot from recording my Micro Camp 2021 talk. If you watch it, you’ll notice a pretty big sync problem starting a bit before the 6-minute mark.

Most of the stuff I learned is related to that.

I recorded the video last minute, which I will try not to do in the future. It doesn’t leave time for fixing problems.

I was trying out new recording software, Loom. I don’t know if it was because my computer is old, my wifi was slow during recording, or a combination of the two, but as I understand it, Loom records to the cloud and the lag getting the recording from my computer to their server is probably responsible for the sync error. From now on, I’ll do my recordings locally and back up to the cloud after the recording is done. I don’t think I’ll use Loom with my current computer anymore.

I didn’t watch the video to make sure it worked. I was tired of my own voice (this almost never happens!). If I’d watched it, I’d have noticed the sync problem right away and could have re-recorded with different software. I’ll watch right away next time.

I thought I had submitted the video correctly. I had not. I don’t know if I didn’t click a button, if I closed a window too soon, or what. Next time I’ll watch carefully for confirmation.

I don’t have any very good video editing software on my computer so if I wanted to fix the sync error without re-recording, I couldn’t have. I’ll investigate different recording options before I make another video.

Also, as soon as I can, I’ll get a new laptop because a six-year-old low-end Acer isn’t going to cut it for creating much besides words.

What have you learned recently?

Some notes on my Time's 100 Best 📚 Plan

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 06:28:00 -0400

Because fantasy is the genre I read the most and YA is the market segment I read the most, I’ve already read a lot of the books on these lists.

If I come to a book I’ve already read, I will ask myself if I want to re-read it. If the answer is yes, boom, I’ll re-read away.

If the answer is maybe but not right now, I’ll keep moving down the list and ask myself again later.

If the answer is no, I’ll write a quick blog post about what I remember about the book and how I felt when I read it and move on to the next.

Another thing: a lot of these books are in series. If the book is the first book in a series and I enjoy it, I’ll do a check-in with myself to see if I want to take a detour from the list and read more of the series. If I do, I will.

If the book is a later book in a series, I will attempt to read the books that come before it. I like to read books in (publication) order, even if I don’t have to. If I decide not to finish the first book in the series, then I will move on with the list and try the listed book on its own later.

These plans are intended to prevent me getting bored and giving up on the project and to make sure I try as many new-to-me books as possible.

What I Learned from Sewing Napkins

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 08:23:00 -0400

And some stuff I already knew but needed the reminder sewing napkins gave me.

1. If you want things to be the same size, cut them at the same time. Corollary: This is easier if you have a rotary cutter and cutting mat.

I made 4 napkins. Three of them are slightly different sizes and one is much smaller than the rest. This is fine. But my next project is a pillow, and I’d really like the two pieces of fabric I need to be nearly identical in size.

I knew this already because as I watched my mom sew garments I would see her cut both sleeves at once. The way you do this is fold the fabric in half with the side you don’t want to show in the finished item out. You pin or draw your pattern on, and then cut around it.

The easiest way to do this is with a rotary cutter, which has a round blade and a handle and you can essentially trace the pattern with it and it will cut through multiple layers of fabric. I don’t have one right now but I’m probably going to bump the one on my wishlist up in priority. But I think for only doing two layers, my fabric shears will do just fine.

(Do not use fabric shears to cut anything else ever.)

You need a mat to put under the project if you’re using a rotary cutter so it doesn’t cut into the surface you’re using to hold your fabric as you cut.

2. I really need help to sew a straight seam.

At first I thought I needed to practice this but my friend Casey gave me some magnetic seam guides for my birthday. I had forgotten those existed. These are little magnetic bits of metal you attach to a piece of the sewing machine called the throat plate. The throat plate is the thing the fabric scoots across as you’re sewing. Keep the fabric right up against the seam guide and you don’t have to remember where it should be. Which was my problem, I couldn’t remember how much fabric I wanted to the right of the seam.

3. If your pressing doesn’t get the fabric flat enough, you can help it with your fingers.

Most of this project involved sewing through three layers of fabric. The fabric was folded under itself to hide the edge because people can see both sides of a napkin (as opposed to a garment, where people can’t see the edge unless you pull the garment up or take it off). Sewing the edge of the fabric so it’s folded and doesn’t have a raw edge is called hemming the fabric.

On the corners, though, I had two sides’ worth of folds to sew through, so I was sewing through six layers and I hadn’t been able to press it with my iron fully flat.

But guess what? I have fingers! And I could just barely put a little pressure on the fabric to get it flat enough, so that’s what I did.

4. Sewing is super satisfying.

I crocheted myself a cardigan last fall and it took months. I could probably sew a cardigan in an afternoon. It’s really nice to see the results of your work so quickly.

What have you learned lately?

Putting yourself back together

Tue, 27 Jul 2021 12:01:00 -0400

I’ve written before about how matrescence is like kintsugi: having a baby shatters you and the living you do after you have the baby puts you back together with shiny gold holding you together. But I haven’t articulated how putting yourself together is a long process.

Meg at Sew Liberated writes today about the twelve year project of making a skirt that she started when she was a new mom and only finished recently. Her oldest is 12.

Part of the kintsugi of matrescence is finding the pieces. I misplaced a lot of mine in the time after my son was born. He’ll be 5 in October. I’m gathering the pieces but a lot of them are still in a pile waiting to be stuck to the me that’s here now.

I find them in moments when I’m doing something and suddenly feel more me than I have in a very long time. When I stay up late coding. When I watched the Stephen Sondheim 90th birthday concert. When I talk through a research design with colleagues.

Putting yourself together is an ongoing project; we’re each a big Katamari ball of experiences and interests. (How’s that for a dated reference? Have I mentioned I’m 40?) In my case, at least, that ball got blown apart. It’s encouraging to find all its bits are still within reach.

What a beautiful day! We're not scared. 🐻

Thu, 22 Jul 2021 13:22:00 -0400

Are you familiar with the poem/book/animated short film WE’RE GOING ON A BEAR HUNT?

I highly recommend it. Kids wander through all types of terrain trying to find a bear. They come across many obstacles: long, wavy grass; thick, oozy mud; and others. The refrain is this:

We can’t go over it, we can’t go over it, oh no, we have to go through it.

Katy Peplin’s recent newsletter about being in the middle and getting discouraged made me think of the bear hunt.

Everything in life is a bear hunt, isn’t it?

But of course, while the kids are in the middle of each obstacle, they’re having fun. The mud goes squelch squorch. The grass goes swishy swashy.

It’s just another variation on the journey being more important than the destination.

What are we rushing toward? Can we find joy in the hard parts?

My personal history with sewing 🧵

Tue, 20 Jul 2021 18:02:00 -0400

I promise I’m going to write about what I learned from sewing napkins soon. But first: my personal history with sewing!

I’ve known how to machine sew for a long time (and how to hand sew for even longer). My mom is an accomplished sewist and made a lot of clothes and costumes for my siblings and I as we were growing up. She even made my prom dress. I didn’t sew with her, but I learned a lot of techniques just from being around while she sewed. Mainly how to be a perfectionist about your sewing, which has both benefits and drawbacks. (She never presses seams open or leaves a pinked edge. All her seams are French seams. Gorgeous, but intimidating to a less experienced sewist.)

I didn’t actually use any of what I’d learned from watching her until I took a required tech class as part of my dramatic art major; I chose costuming (this is where W. shakes his fist because in his day you had to do both cost shop AND set but by the time I got there 3 years later, you got to choose). One of the assignments was to design and construct a garment. I made a dress to fit me, lightly inspired by this Drusilla costume from Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

The process involved making a paper pattern on a dressmaker’s dummy (heavily padded in my case), then a muslin, and then finally the real thing. I finished the edges with a zig-zag stitch and pressed the seams open, because that was what I had time for. I wished I’d been up to French seams but it just wasn’t going to happen.

The dress had darts out the wazoo: bust darts at both the sides and bottom of the bodice, back darts, darts at the back of the waist. I made sure it fit me just right and I wouldn’t settle for anything baggy or saggy. (Maybe that’s why I didn’t have time left for French seams.) The director of the costume shop saw it and said I could do haute couture with that level of fitting.

I loved making it. I was very proud of it. I also learned that you really need to include a slit in the skirt if you’re going to make a long sheath dress, or your stride will be limited to teeny tiny steps. (I did not include a slit. In spite of it’s excellent fit, the dress didn’t get a lot of wear because of this.)

I wanted to sew more but I was saving all my money for traveling to *BtVS* fan parties (that’s an account written by a journalist of the first Posting Board Party I went to) so I didn’t grab a machine until my mom noticed one at a yard sale down the street from her. The machine and its cabinet were going for around $70, so I bought them.

I sewed exactly one thing on that machine, a costume for me to wear to go to the movie Troy. (Remember when Legolas and The Hulk were brothers?) It was actually a costume that, if historically accurate, would have been no-sew, but I was afraid a no-sew version would fall off. So I made myself a chiton with some success.

And the next time I used that sewing machine, the needle got stuck in the bobbin. And so I did not use it. I kept moving around with it; I think that machine moved with me five times.

At the North Carolina Maker Faire in, I don’t know, maybe 2014? I sewed a quilt square for a big communal quilt somebody was building there. I loved it. It reminded me that I actually loved sewing, and I wanted to do more. So I promised myself I would.

But I didn’t.

When I finally got the machine out for the first time recently to try again, after great success winding the bobbin and threading the needle, the same thing happened. I tried cleaning and oiling the machine, but that didn’t fix the problem. I decided to give up on that machine, for which I could not find a manual online and which was lacking many features of modern machines, such as numbering on the thread guides to tell you what order to thread it in.

So I asked for a new machine for my birthday, and I got one!

And I decided to use Craftsy’s Sewing 101 class to help me get back into it, since I hadn’t really sewed in 17 years.

Which is how I ended up making those napkins.

And I’ll tell you what I learned from making them soon, I promise!

Random stream-of-consciousness life updates

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 17:18:03 -0400

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Hello, everyone! How are you doing?

Over here, I’m on Day 6 of being In My 40s and it’s going just fine. I had an amazing birthday party: I rented a big gazebo area at the neighborhood pool (which is a fancy pool with an expensive membership fee but that membership fee is cheaper than a summer’s worth of camp, so…). I invited a lot of people and some of them came. I got to see some friends for the first time since before the pandemic, as well as invite family out to a place they hadn’t been before (i.e. the pool). We weren’t worried too much about COVID because of being outdoors and it was just really delightful. And it also felt a little like a celebration of me finishing the PhD, too. Also, I swam for a while in my mermaid tail and got to talk to some kids who really liked it and wanted me to go underwater so they could go down and watch what my swimming looked like under there. 🧜‍‍♀️

I also sewed those napkins! Remember? And for my birthday my friend Casey introduced me to pre-filled bobbins, which I’m very excited about. Next up, I’m going to sew a pillow to put on my desk chair. The fabric is MANATEE fabric and I’m psyched.

I did some important businesslady things today. Most importantly, though, I made a to-do list for the businesslady things I need to do tomorrow. Here’s where I stand right now:

I’m doing consulting for Quirkos, a company that provides qualitative data analysis software. I have had a bit of a crush on qual since Day 1 of my Field Techniques in Educational Research class and it’s the primary kind of research I’ve done, so I’m excited to work with an organization that is dedicated to supporting it.
I’m developing The Quiet Space, a project to provide structure for scholars and other knowledge creators so that they are free to focus on creative work.

In September, once my kid is settled into preschool, I hope to get in touch with some other potential consulting clients.

I talked with my doctor on Friday. My thyroid numbers are moving in the right direction, but still not where I want them to be. I worried that a change in my prescription dosage would be too extreme, so we agreed that I would up my intake of l-tyrosine. My glucose and hemoglobin A1C are high, meaning I’m pre-diabetic. I also have a lot of intense PCOS symptoms like acne, hirsutism, and oligoovulation. My primary focus right now, aside from caring for my kid, is working on healing this so that my PCOS is well-managed. I’m using Amy Medling’s book Healing PCOS to help me with that.

Aside from that, I’m reading Harrow the Ninth, which is super fun.

What’s new with you?

Austin Kleon's pirate-gardener

Sun, 18 Jul 2021 17:34:00 -0400

Austin Kleon writes about his desire to be a pirate-gardener,

I’d like to stay happily at home, in the studio, planting my seeds and cultivating my garden, and when I get bored, like Ishmael, and “I find myself growing grim about the mouth,” then it’s time to take to the seas and do some pirating, steal a few seeds from foreign lands to bring back to my own garden, where I’ll stay happily until I get bored again.

I think the gardening affords you the opportunity to pirate.

Who will I be at 40?

Wed, 14 Jul 2021 07:21:00 -0400

Three makes a pattern, so this is the year that blogging about who I want to be in this year of my life becomes a tradition. Shout out to my friend Little Willow, who inspired the idea by making her New Year’s resolutions on her birthday.

Part of the tradition is looking at who I wanted to be last year and seeing how close I got. The big one, being a Doctor of Philosophy, happened in April/May. The rest were, fittingly, not so much in focus.

But the microbusiness. The microbusiness! I’ve been taking strong steps in that direction, lining up my first consulting client, creating a little trickle of passive income with my Notion templates, and dreaming big about what the future holds for The Quiet Space.

Hard as it was with the pandemic and my grandmother’s death, 39 was still on the balance a good year. (This is the moment where I acknowledge that the year I was age 39 was actually the 40th year of my life, since we live a full year before our birthday. Yes, Daddy, I know we use zero-based indexing for ages.)

So what’s next?

I think I want to be a little less ambitious about 40, to set fewer goals.

I want to be a loving and mostly gentle mother.

I want to take care of my own body, including making clothes built to fit it.

I want to keep trying new things and growing as a self-employed person.

I want to be aware of my impact on the earth and do what I can to make it gentler. I recognize, however, that this is a systemic problem that requires more than individual action, which is why I joined the Alliance for Climate Education mailing list and will start donating to them monthly as soon as I have something resembling a steady income.

I think four is a good number, so I’ll stop there.

Who will you be this year?

Stream-of-Consciousness Quick Review: Kristen Arnett's MOSTLY DEAD THINGS 📚🦩 (or, Kristen Arnett Please Be My New Best Friend)

Tue, 13 Jul 2021 18:03:00 -0400

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Kristen Arnett is Florida’s and the Internet’s Lesbian dad. Her puns are a delight and her “The existence of ___ implies ___” joke structure cracks me up every time she uses it. I have no idea when or why I followed her on Twitter but I’m glad I did. I love her Twitter presence so much that I thought I would probably love her books, too.

I didn’t have a lot of expectations going into MOSTLY DEAD THINGS but I feel like I’d seen the phrase “darkly funny” tossed around in reviews.

I was surprised when every part that I bet other people found funny made me sad.

MOSTLY DEAD THINGS is a great book and humans who read should try reading it.

It operated on a very visceral level for me for a few reasons.

It’s set in Central Florida. I lived on the east coast of Center Florida (mostly on the Space Coast) for the first 7 years of my life, years that loom large in how I think of myself and what feels like home. I lived in Tallahassee for another couple of years. Even though I’ve spent almost 80% of my life living in North Carolina, I still consider myself a Floridian. The feel of Florida - swampy and magical at the same time, hot and sticky but in a way that works with nostalgia, full of things that can kill you but are also kind of cool - resonates with my heart and is all over this book.
The characters in it are mostly in a very specific lower middle class Florida-version-of-Southern (probably white) culture. This is the kind of culture I was familiar with for most of my life, despite my family being genteel poor (and only kind of poor but like sometimes living on federal assistance so definitely not wealthy). The main character Jessa-Lyn has deep nostalgia for her youth spent burning Christmas trees by the swamp, hanging out by the lake, drinking water out of a hose at her best friend/only love Brynn’s trailer home. I think this is what my summers might have looked like, had I stayed in Florida. For special occasions you have homemade pie on pretty paper plates.
It is so infused with nostalgia and I am a sucker for that kind of thing. Arnett and I are very close in age so our referents for the things people wore and the way they did their hair as tweens and teens are basically the same.
The dynamic of a mother who is capable of lots of cool stuff but doesn’t feel like she’s had the opportunity to do it resonates with my family history across multiple generations.
My last real connection to Central Florida is dissolving last week as my mother and uncle close the sale of my late grandmother’s Melbourne house.

This is just a sampling. Basically this book squeezed my heart and pushed on bruises. It eventually patched it up but, you know, mostly in the final act.

Highly recommend.

🦩🐊

The water and the moon are my teachers. 🌊🌕

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 14:13:00 -0400

Tonight is the New Moon in Cancer. Next Wednesday is my birthday. My Sun, Ascendant, and Mercury are all in Cancer. I don’t believe the stars determine our destiny but as with all magical tools, I do believe they can help us set and live up to our intentions.

Cancer, the Crab, is a watery sign and ruled by the moon. I’ve always felt a connection to water, from when I was a tiny toddler fighting the undertow on Florida beaches, still now as I bob about with my kid in the pool after his swim lessons most days.

The moon is connected to water through the tides.

At Weeki Wachee Springs in Florida, they do mermaid shows, in which performers wearing fabric mermaid tails do water ballet. They also have a mermaid camp for grown-ups led by retired performers. Going is one of my dreams.

In one of the earliest episodes of The Mermaid Podcast, host Laura von Holt attends mermaid camp and interviews the retired perforners. One of them tells her, “The water is a teacher.” I have held this idea in my heart since I first heard it a couple years ago.

The water is my teacher. It can take the shape of any container. It can grow hard and expand when it’s cold. It can boil and evaporate when it’s hot. With persistence, it shapes land over time. It can be still. It can move rapidly. It can nurture life. It can reflect light. It can provide shade. The water teaches me to be flexible and persistent, to move how I need to.

The moon is my teacher. It never truly disappears. Sometimes it is in Earth’s shadow. Sometimes it shines the sun’s light down on us. It appears to change in cycles; it is both never the same and always the same. The moon teaches me to accept change as a constant and to retreat and shine as the time is right.

The water and the moon are my teachers.

Introducing The Quiet Space: A set of offerings for scholars and knowledge creators

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 07:22:24 -0400

Good morning, friends.

I have a new-ish morning ritual. I creep downstairs so as not to wake my kid. I get out a glass. I go to the fridge. I get out a can of sparkling water. I get my thyroid meds. I count out my morning thyroid meds and supplements: one levothyroxine, three liothyronine, two l-tyrosine. I open the sparkling water and pour it into the glass. I open my bottle of liquid kelp (which I obviously need because I am a manatee) and squeeze four drops of it into the glass of water: one. two. three. four. And I sip the water and take my pills. Sometimes I play a game on my phone, sometimes I read. But today, I thought.

I sat in that sleepy barely-awake feeling, in my quiet kitchen, with the sky grey outside and the house cold because I keep it that way for sleep, and stared into space.

And three words came to me.

THE QUIET SPACE.

I’ve had an idea for a week or so and was trying to find a name for it. It’s a project/offering I want to put into the world, building on the Notion templates I’ve created. It’s something that takes my skills for organizing and my understanding of doctoral student life and academia and blends them to create a gift for the world.

And that gift is quiet space.

I wanted to do this as a video rather than a blog post but my kid is still sleeping.

The Quiet Space is a set of offerings that will create structure and space for scholars of all descriptions to focus on creating knowledge instead of managing it. The first offerings will continue to be Notion templates; I have a few more to put together. (I may also experiment with Google Sheets or ClickUp but for now I’m focused on Notion.)

Here’s the idea:

You, a knowledge creator, have a lot going on in your head. And administrative work, such as organizing your readings, tracking your revisions, managing copyright permissions - this stuff eats up space in your brain. It fills your brain with chatter about the best way to do these things. How should you create the structures to deal with them?

But what if the space that stuff ate up was open? And quiet? What if it was space you could use to move your ideas around and play with them? What if you took the time you’ve been spending banging your head against a metaphorical wall to figure this out and instead spent it outside looking at the clouds?

My offerings will be designed to open up that space for you, Scholar. I’ll see you in The Quiet Space soon.

❤️,

Kimberly

[Image caption: White clouds move across a blue sky over a silhouetted group of trees and some orange grass. In the bottom right corner, a stone path curves away into the distance.]

I'm having a tantrum about how hard it is to live with chronic illness.

Thu, 08 Jul 2021 19:31:00 -0400

Back in May, I had some bloodwork done. I discovered that my thyroid hormone levels were in the normal reference range but were, in my opinion, suboptimal. Combining those numbers with a slew of symptoms that had snuck up on me a little at a time (as they always do), I talked with my doctor about upping my thyroid support supplement dosages (iodine & l-tyrosine). We agreed that I would increase those and we would follow up in July. If I was still symptomatic and my numbers were suboptimal, we would talk about increasing my thyroid prescription dosages.

My bloodwork appointment for that is next Tuesday. The doctor sent in the lab order today and emailed me a copy. It didn’t have the thyroid tests on it. I asked her to please add them. She did, but warned me that when people have normal results on these tests, insurance plans often only cover them once or twice a year, so I might have to pay out of pocket.

I’m lucky and privileged to be able to take that risk without worrying it will cause my family hardship.

But I’m also angry on principle. Because if I already felt so terrible when my levels were normal-but-suboptimal, how miserable would I feel if we waited to modify my treatment until my levels were below normal? How sick does a person have to be to “deserve” treatment?

Wikipedia tells me:

In case of medical tests whose results are of continuous values, reference ranges can be used in the interpretation of an individual test result. This is primarily used for diagnostic tests and screening tests, while monitoring tests may optimally be interpreted from previous tests of the same individual instead

I wish that had a citation, but I’m going to take the point anyway. I’ve been diagnosed with this condition for 10 years. We always use these ranges for monitoring because I’m already diagnosed. I’ve noticed a correlation between symptoms and the test results but because it’s easy to swing too wide in a dosage switch I like to pair symptoms and results to help determine my next move. I am frustrated and exhausted by the fact that being chronically ill is a constant fight, that so many things can stand between me and wellness no matter what actions I take.

I’m glad my doctor will order the test; I’ve had doctors who wouldn’t. I’m glad my family can afford to pay out of pocket; we haven’t always been able to. But I am livid for myself and others that we have to work so hard to get what we need to merely function, never mind thrive.

(I’m aware that there are many different things that prevent people from thriving. This is the one I’m feeling hardest today.)

Habits from UNF*CK YOUR HABITAT

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 18:32:00 -0400

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I’m re-reading Unf*ck Your Habitat and wanted to keep some notes in a place I’d be able to find them later. I decided my website was that place. So here we go!

UfYH author Rachel Hoffman points out that small habit changes will be more effective at keeping your home pleasant than a big life overhaul. Here are some of the habits she mentions:

Do a little bit every day.
Use your leisure time wisely.
Use your waiting time efficiently.
Put it away, not down.
Make your bed.
Keep your flat surfaces clear.
Unf*ck tomorrow morning.
Trash goes in the trash can.
Do the dishes every day.
Wash, dry, and put it away, gddmit.
Deal with your invisible corners.

Welcome to Camp NaNoWriMo with me!

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 14:19:00 -0400

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It’s July 1 which means it’s the start of Camp NaNoWriMo! I’ve created a new blog at write.as using my romance writing pseudonym which isn’t a secret; it’s just separate so that if I ever publish anything, my academic writing and fiction writing don’t cross-pollinate. (I know some people use the same name for everything and that’s cool but I want to try this.)

The plan is to write a 12,000 word novella in July, edit and polish it, and self-publish it at a $2.99 price point. But the draft versions will always be available for free on that blog, and the final version will probably be there in a split-up format, too. And there’s a non-zero chance it’ll end up on Wattpad as well.

I’m using Gwen Hayes’s book Romancing the Beat to inspire my structure. I’m 99% pantsing. I have an idea about the main characters and the premise and that’s about it. So here’s where we’re at, which is slightly different from where the idea started already…

My original idea was that a “working actor” (we’ll call her H1) in NYC would come home to NC to help her mom recover from surgery and learn that the director of the children’s theater where she “got her start” was retiring and if they couldn’t find a proper replacement, they’d have to shut the theater down. She would run into her high school sweetheart (we’ll call him H2) who she met at the theater but with whom she hadn’t been able to maintain a relationship with him because they both were super career-focused and for reasons I hadn’t figured out yet, he wasn’t geographically mobile.

But in the middle of the night last night, I decided to bring it so it’s closer to home. So now H1 has a DFA in dramaturgy from Yale but has been a freeway flier for years because she can’t secure an adjuncting job, and the rest of the external circumstances are pretty much the same.

The thing that inspired me to write this publicly was Kristopher Jansma’s article for Electric Literature, What We Can—and Can’t—Learn About Louisa May Alcott from Her Teenage Fiction. I’m a sucker for juvenilia. I bought Alcott’s first novel, The Inheritance, when it was published in 1997 and it has a place of pride on my bookcase mostly because the cover is very pretty. I was playing Beth in a production of Little Women at the time. I have multiple boxes of my own creative output in my house that I’ve labeled “juvenilia.” You know, for when I end up donating my papers. I guess to Wilson Library? Anyway. Let’s all laugh about the idea of someone wanting my papers donated.

I’m also a sucker for author commentary. Piers Anthony writes these sprawling author’s notes and every time I read one of his books, I read the author’s note with great eagerness. The same for Leigh Bardugo, who blessedly actually names the titles of the works she used for her research.

I also love seeing works in early stages, works in progress, and hearing what people think of their own early work. So when Jansma mentioned Thomas Pynchon’s book, Slow Learner, , in which Pynchon offers and introduction to and commentary on some of his early stories, I decided to do something similar in real-time. The writing process, especially revision, feels so opague to me. I’m excited to open it up and make it public.

I know that I won’t be able to write every day this month, so I’m shooting for 20 writing days with a word count goal of 600 words each day. Buffer days will be for getting set up, writing commentary, or just taking a day off.

Today I’m writing this post and setting up Scrivener. Look out for those first 600 words in the next couple of days!

Response to "Knitting’s resurgence reflects women’s desire to confront inequality": things that have been things for a while, affinity space research, and punk rock new domesticity

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 14:13:03 -0400

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I’m writing up a response to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Nebraska Today article, Knitting’s resurgence reflects women’s desire to confront inequality. This is a super off-the-cuff response that I hope to shape in the future into a proper essay but I need to get ideas out now or I may never bother.

I’m probably going to do this as sort of a list of thoughts.

Please note: I have not read the study referenced here, which according to its abstract looks like it focuses on consumers’ use of space (hence the focus on yarn shops, stitch & pitch, etc) to “contest… cultural devaluation.” What the abstract describes and what the news piece talks about overlap, but certainly don’t appear to be identical. I hope to read the article soon.

Re: the framing of knitting as “an activity often dismissed as dull busywork for elderly women.” Maciel first noticed the phenomenon of Tucson knitters (which, due to Tucson’s climate, seemed like a counterintuitive phenomenon - and I grant him that) in 2011. This was 8 years after the publication of Debbie Stoller’s book Stitch ‘N Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook and 6 years after the publication of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter. Kim Werker founded the online magazine Crochet Me in 2004 because the world was full of cool stuff for knitters and not for crocheters. The website Craftster was founded in 2000. The Internet Archive has snapshots of the forum get crafty dating back to 1999. CROQzine began publication in 2005. Faythe Levine’s companion book and documentary, both titled Handmade Nation, came out in 2008 and 2009, respectively. Researcher Andre F. Maciel “learned that millions of women have taken up the hobby during the past two decades,” but a lot of this news piece frames it as if he’s discovered something wildly new. (The fact that part of his data collection included reviewing “640 articles about knitting found in large-circulation newspapers and magazines such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and the New Yorker” makes it clear that this was not a novel phenomenon in 2011 and still is not in 2021.) Again, I haven’t read the journal article; perhaps it does not treat the new domesticity as a hidden secret that only he and his colleague discovered in the past 10 years.
“Martha Stewart and others led a New Cult of Domesticity that embraced household endeavors such as cooking, baking, fiber crafts and home decorating.” This is the first time I’ve heard of the new domesticity referred to as the New Cult of Domesticity. Also, while Martha Stewart definitely was a big part of the most mainstream stuff happening here, she doesn’t exhibit the punk rock ethos that I associate with the new domesticity.
“They are contesting this cultural inequality, the stereotypes of knitting. It’s not in a radical way — they are not joining social movements as hard-core activists; they are not breaking social ties. They are not radical feminists; they are not abandoning their traditional roles. They want to reclaim the value of women’s culture.” I expect this kind of generalization is the natural outcome of a newsy piece as opposed to a scholarly piece; presumably Maciel and Wallendorf address the limitations of their study in the journal article. For example, their survey found that “Of the 110 knitters who responded to Maciel’s survey, 87% held a college degree and two-thirds lived in households with earnings of about $90,000. Most of them were white, most held conventional middle-class jobs, and most lived in committed relationships. About half had children living at home.” But it’s worth noting that when it comes to surveys " …women are more likely to participate than men (Curtin et al., 2000; Moore & Tarnai, 2002; Singer et al., 2000), younger people are more likely to participate than older people (Goyder, 1986; Moore & Tarnai, 2002), and white people are more likely to participate than non-white people (Curtin et al., 2000; Groves et al., 2000; Voigt et al., 2003).” (G. Smith, 2008) (PDF) So there may be a disparity between who knits and who responded to the survey. There is work out there specifically on craftivists. While perhaps the participants and respondents in this study were not radical, that’s not to say that crafters in general aren’t. (Don’t even get me started on the terminology of “make” vs. “craft,” that’s a conversation for another post.)
This is clearly affinity space research. When conducting research on an affinity space, there are plenty of potential challenges to doing ethical research. Taking this sort of traditional anthropological outsider view is out-of-step with the best affinity space research I’ve seen. This study is billed as an ethnography and I’m curious to see how the journal article frames it and how it addresses research ethics.

As I said, this is a gut response. This piece and especially the journal article it references deserve more attention.

Returning to Dissertating in the Open

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 08:18:00 -0400

Back when I started the dissertation process, I had this whole plan to dissertate in the open. I did this successfully up through the proposal process. I shared some process memos and wrote a little after that about things like reconsidering my research design in light of COVID and my data collection workflow. As the pandemic went on, I focused all my writing energy and time on the dissertation itself and didn’t get to do the writing I’d hoped about data analysis or writing.

Obviously I’m not in the process anymore so I can’t provide that in-the-moment reflection I’d hoped to, but I can provide some retrospective thoughts on it. I’m going to do that soon.

What does after even mean?

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 16:27:52 -0400

Lately some of the things that have been lifelines for me during the pandemic have started to feel less lifeliney. The crafting group I meet with on Thursdays is always full of lovely people but I keep feeling too tired to attend even though attending consists of sitting on my butt in front of my computer. (I’m attending in 7 minutes. Today I’m attending even though I don’t feel like it, to see if it pushes me through the blergh.)

I don’t know what after is for me. We’ve started taking my kid to the local children’s museum and that’s been HUGE. We only go in the outdoor portions, we stay away from other families, and we’re masked any time we’re within 6 feet of anybody else. But having a different place to take him from the few parks we ventured to for the past year and a half has made a real difference.

And I actually let my sister in my house last week, which was great.

But I haven’t hung out with friends really aside from a little bit of post-defense celebration. W and I haven’t gone out just us yet. I’m still really worn out from this thing and I don’t think that’s going away anytime soon.

We’re in the yellow here on the Global Epidemics risk map. I probably won’t feel like doing a lot of that stuff until we’re in the green.

We’re all so tired, aren’t we?

Text adventure nostalgia

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 12:57:00 -0400

I hope your Wednesday’s going well! (Or Thursday if you’re farther east enough than me that that’s what day it is!)

I’ve been reading and loving Aaron A. Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games. Each week in 2021 he’s featuring a different text game, writing an essay about one from each year from 1971 to 2021. I played a few text games as a kid and this series is really fueling my nostalgia even though I’m only on 1973 in my reading and I didn’t do anything with a computer until probably 1986 or so.

My first computer (well, the family’s computer) was a Sanyo, maybe in the MBC-550 series (the image certainly looks right). Our monitor was monochrome, black with green text, until that monitor died and we switched to one that was black with gold text. I wrote all my school assignments in WordStar and printed them out on a dot matrix printer.

We had some big floppy disks and they had lots of games on them, mostly written in BASIC. I also subscribed to 3-2-1 Contact Magazine which would print BASIC games that you could code into your own computer. A couple of my friends and I really latched onto a couple of specific text adventures when we were in middle school (I’d guess around 1993), probably because they were ones we both happened to have. C and I were very into Wishbringer and L and I were very into Madame Fifi’s… which I’ll let you investigate further yourself but was a very interesting game for two twelve-year-olds, one of whom (me) was perplexed as to why her parents had such a titillating game just lying around. L and I were so inspired by Madame Fifi’s that we began writing our own BASIC text adventure, School Daze, entirely based on our experiences as seventh graders. It stayed on paper - I don’t why I never got it into the computer, but sixth or seventh grade is about when I stopped programming for a couple reasons: 1. afterschool chorus and theater rehearsals ate up my free time 2. computer class was full of programming in Logo which, to me, seemed like it was for babies. I didn’t want to draw circles. I wanted to create elaborate adventures with branching logic. But instead I just stopped programming, and didn’t pick code up again until I learned HTML. Then I went full mark-up/styling and have only done a little bit of true programming since, but this series is definitely tugging at my nostalgia and making me think maybe I’ll try my hand at interactive fiction.

In the introduction to the series, Reed mentions The Freshman, a 2016 interactive fiction (I am not sure about the distinction between an IF with images and a visual novel but I think it has to do with the level of interactivity; I welcome any suggested reading on the subject) that I have played a lot. I’m looking forward to later this year to see what he writes up about that and how things have changed. Certainly the more recent interactive fiction I have played relies more on talking, relationships, and big story actions, and less on things like mapping, manipulating inventory, and moving from room to room. (I recently tried Zork and got totally lost.)

I’ve never actually completed a text adventure; I wonder if as an adult I’ll be better at understanding their tropes. I remember in Madame Fifi’s there’s at one point a “dirty magazine” in the bathroom. As a naive 12yo I thought it was literally a magazine with dirt on it. Only now does it occur to me that “dirty” is describing the magazine’s content rather than its condition.

It’s possible my midlife crisis will involve a lot of computer programming. That would be good, right?

What’s been tweaking your nostalgia recently?

On pain

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 14:39:08 -0400

Hello again!

My right hip has been hurting the past couple of days. Or almost a week, I guess - it started last Wednesday and has been off-and-on since then. This isn’t super unusual for me. I have sacralization on that side - my fifth lumbar vertebra is fused to my pelvis (specifically, the ilium, and now the Classicist in me is trying to come up with a bunch of Trojan war jokes related to this congenital deformity). This can be painless but it can also cause lower back pain and bursitis, which is what this probably is. If it doesn’t go away in the next week, I’ll check in with my doctor about it. I’m of an age where these things might need to be resolved by injected steroids rather than careful application of over-the-counter pain relievers.

This pain is constant and so far no motion or position has really alleviated it. Distraction helps some, as I discussed yesterday, but only for a little while. The pain returns and I really don’t know how to work/live through it. I’ve gotten to the point where as long as a migraine isn’t demanding I go to bed and ensconce myself in darkness, I can kind of work through it, but this kind of musculoskeletal/joint pain is newer to me than migraines (I had my first one of those at 7) and I just don’t know how to get around it yet. It’s not the kind of pain that I can breathe through and I guess I could try some gate theory and hold ice in my bare hand or something but that’s not really conducive to tidying, writing, or applying for jobs.

I might need to get a new chair to work in. It’s possible these little folding dining chair things aren’t doing me any favors.

It surprises me how much pain can be a constant, how even if I think I’m not in pain, if anyone asks me about it I notice I am. But this pain, this I notice no matter what.

The goal for treatment of hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (which I may or may not have) is not to eliminate pain, but to reduce pain to a tolerable level. I don’t think the amount of pain I’m in right now could be reasonably described as tolerable.

This looks like a big pile of whining to me but I’m going to post it anyway. I don’t think people talk about pain enough.

Now I’m going to eat and have some of those OTC pain relievers I mentioned.

Welcome to a week of daily blogging: stream-of-consciousness flavor!

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 14:59:40 -0400

I’m working to get into the flow of daily blogging, so this post will be rather stream of consciousness.

I work best in two-hour chunks. Today, I helped W. revise a project statement for a fellowship application and applied to two jobs. I’m right around the two-hour mark and can feel myself flagging. It’s also time for that 3 pm snack most people need, so I’ll have that when I’m done blogging this.

I’m in the middle of a bit of a grace period for myself, not unlike Kelly J. Baker’s. I’m figuring out how I want to spend my time and what people will pay me for. Yes, I have plans for consulting, but I would also love a little bit of stability and to not pay out of pocket for health insurance. (Blessedly I’m on W’s but it increased his insurance cost by about $400/mo to add me. This was more expensive than any plan I could get on the market, I checked.) So I’m applying for jobs that look especially good, but not applying scattershot. I’m focusing on research and editorial jobs. Today’s jobs were editorial. I’ve got a couple research lined up to apply for tomorrow.

I’m physically very tired much of the time, which is partly because my thyroid levels are off. I don’t know if I’ve written about this recently, but I’ll doubt it. So a refresher in case you’re new here: I have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, which manifests primarily as hypothyroidism. That means my body attacks my thyroid gland, which then doesn’t work well. I take two synthetic hormone medications to help, plus a couple of supplements to boost the natural production and conversion of thyroid hormones. The thyroid controls metabolism, literally how your body has energy, and my primary symptom is intense fatigue. I also expereince brain fog and joint pain. (I also have polycystic ovary syndrome so basically my whole endocrine system doesn’t know what it’s doing.)

Flares of hypothyroidism sneak up on me because it’s so easy to explain away the symptoms - I’m tired because I go to bed too late, I’m sore because I ate something that probably had corn in it (corn makes me achey), the brain fog is from the tiredness… But when I get lab tests, it’s easier to see the pattern: my thyroid levels, while “normal,” are suboptimal, which is why I feel low-grade misery rather than abject despair.

So in May, I found out those levels were suboptimal and increased the dosage on my supplements to see if, if I provide it with extra building blocks, my thyroid will produce more hormones. And if that’s not enough, we’ll increase the prescription synthetic hormone dosages. We’ll check on that in July.

I’m trying to take care of my body but honestly I don’t really know how to BE embodied. I’m a floating head, a cyborg lady who lives mostly on the web. Being attentive to my body usually means attending to pain and in my experience, distraction is more helpful than mindfulness. But I want to do better by my body, to feed it well and clean it enough and get it moving. But I think I have to do it very gently until this thyroid thing gets sorted out.

What is super weird is that sometimes even when my body is completely worn out, my mind is really active. This leads to a few different things happening. First, I notice all the things I’m not doing because my body is too tired: cleaning out the fridge, putting away the laundry, helping my kid pick up his room, etc. I notice these things and then, because it’s my default, I berate myself for not doing them. But I’m conserving all my energy for mothering so house stuff just has to wait until I have more energy. Sorry, house. Sorry, brain.

The other thing is that my brain wants something to chew on. At first, it was nice being done with my dissertation. But then recently W. was talking about how he was having to think through and write this appication and I thought, “Oh wow, it must be so nice to have something to have to think about and work on.”

But I also feel deeply unready for client work.

Which is part of why I’m here blogging. I’m going to spend at least a week blogging daily to get some activity in for my restless brain without wearing out my body or take on new stress.

So that’s where I’m at. I’m off to have a snack and rest more. How are things with you?

💬🔖📚 Kate Zambreno on her new book "To Write as if Already Dead" - Los Angeles Times

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 15:04:00 -0400

The postpartum experience isn’t just expensive; it can also be one of psychic trauma and creative crisis. Someone who was a person becomes a mother. “You’re not a person. You don’t have a name,” says Zambreno. This feeling of erasure is a current that runs through her work, reaching peak intensity in “To Write as if Already Dead.” “I need to restore myself after being made into a ghost,” Zambreno says. “I always feel like writing the most when I’m being made invisible.”

Kate Zambreno on her new book "To Write as if Already Dead" - Los Angeles Times latimes.com
latimes.com https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2021-06-02/the-fierce-author-who-writes-like-shes-running-out-of-time

Quick Review: The City We Became 📚

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 21:28:00 -0400

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I love the way N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became captures the spirit of the five boroughs of New York here in a way that is legible to non-New Yorkers. This book recasts Lovecraftian horror as a fight for the city’s soul. It features street artists, grad students, an MC-turned-lawyer-turned-councilwoman, a PhD director of an art non-profit, and a sheltered girl who’s never left Staten Island. If you’re looking for representation for Black, Latino, and queer characters, Jemisin’s got you. This book is a fast, fun read that imagines some of the daily horror in our world as being caused by eldritch forces from beyond our universe. Borrowed this one from @durhamcountylibrary. Highly recommend.

What’s a fantasy or sci-fi book you’ve read that helped you think through recent events?

Personal reflections after (but not really on) #FanLIS

Thu, 20 May 2021 13:51:18 -0400

My head is swimming after attending the #FanLIS symposium today. At this moment when I’m taking a few weeks off before launching consulting, occasionally doing job interviews, and mostly resting, I’m in the middle of an existential crisis about what I want to do and who I want to be.

I’m in a position where, if I can bring in a fair amount of freelance work, I could use some of my time as an independent scholar and I think that’s what I want to do. I’m not interested in academia-as-institutionalized-in-higher-ed but I love scholarship. I don’t want to not be a scholar.

I’ve been reviewing my notes from Katie Rose Guest Pryal’s Book The Freelance Academic and this quote is standing out to me today:

Our tracks are, by necessity, only limited by our own creativity. They literally are what we make them. (p. 49 in the Kindle edition)

So this is my track today. Freelance academic/independent scholar-librarian.

Tomorrow: Digging into Raul Pacheco-Vega’s blog for help setting up my workflows moving forward.

Most of my tweets from #FanLIS

Thu, 20 May 2021 13:45:40 -0400

I’m planning to return and clean up formatting and add links to videos once they’re online, but for now, here’s a collection of everything I tweeted from the presentations at #FanLIS, handily compiled and tweeted for me by Noter Live.

Ludi Price 柏詠璇:

introducing #FanLIS - fans are information workers par excellence
Leisure interests are important to study because they are what we choose to do and are no less important than any other aspect of our lives: work, health, etc.
Fan information work is a subset of fun information work.
How can we harness the passion fans have for solving the problems of LIS? Can we?
#FanLIS seeks to explore the liminal space where fandom, fan studies, and LIS interact and can hopefully learn from each other. What do we know? Where should we go next as a field of research?

Colin Porlezza:

They examined methods reported in Journal of Fandom Studies & Transformative Works and Cultures. Used computational analysis to scrape all keywords for both journals & inductively analyzed sample of 50 abstracts. Compared with a similar study in journalism.

Eleonora Benecchi, PhD:

20 most often occurring keywords tended to focus on research setting, media or media type, phenomenon investigated
Top theory keywords include gender, ethics, participatory culture, cultural theories, feminism, CRT, queer theory, and more. Significant overlap between theory keywords in fan studies & journalism but not in overall keywords.
Wide variety of methods employed in fan studies. Of those named specifically, ethnography is most frequent, then terms referring to specific methodological techniques (interviews, content analysis, etc). Only methodological perspective present aside from ethnography & its subtypes is case study

Colin Porlezza:

Dominant perspectives are sociology, culture, economics, language, history, technology
Most studies don't cite a specific theoretical perspective but many theories are used in the ones that do.
Abstract often lacked reference to specific research methodological approach. Ethnography & case studies. Discourse analysis & textual analysis dominant as well.

Eleonora Benecchi, PhD:

Conclusion: explicitly naming theoretical & methodological approaches in keywords & abstracts makes fan studies more visible to other disciplines. We should tag our research as carefully as we tag our fanfic.
Using IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) format for abstract increases likelihood of paper being read.

Magnus Pfeffer:

discussing project to explore possiblity of taking data generated by enthusiast communities and creating knowledge graph for researchers to use
Examples of visual media enthusiast data repositories include Visual Novel Database, AnimeClick, Anime Characters Database
Enthusiasts had positive response to project, wanted to cooperate to make data available with an intermediary who can bridge expertise between enthusiasts and researchers.
Used RDF format of Entity - Property - Value.
Each community has its own data model. Goal is to examine all of these, which vary according to domain (manga vs anime vs visual novel, etc) and create data model that can be used across domains.
Custom web front end allows researcher to retrieve data. Human-readable labels appear instead of actual data which makes exploration easy.
Can identify identical entities mentioned in multiple enthusiast data sources. Goal is to combine them into single entity.
All data is linked to original enthusiast source, enabling researchers to verify info and even interact with enthusiasts.
Want to maintain specific source ontologies rather than trying to impose a particular perspective on enthusiast data.
Share Alike requirement in CC licenses present a challenge. (I'd love to hear more about this. Would applying a CC license to the knowledge graph handle this?)
Project website: https://jvmg.iuk.hdm-stuttgart.de/

Aris Emmanouloudis:

Using lenses from fan studies and platform studies to look at the rise and fall? and preservation of Twitch Plays Pokemon.
Twitch Plays Pokemon is a crowd-sourced set of commands being sent to control Pokemon Red. Fans created a narrative/meta-text around the game on other platforms.
Twitch Plays Pokemon moved on to other games after Pokemon Red and inspired Twitch Plays Street Fighter and Twitch Plays Dark Souls. Big decrease in participation for Twitch Plays Pokemon over time.
RQs: What are the affordances that allowed the TPP community to emerge? How did the fans act as archivists?
Qual research including looking at user-generated content, observation of stream and chat, and interview with anonymous streamer who established TPP.
Brum's affordances of produser communities present in TPP: open participation, unfinished, meritocracy & heterarchy, communal property. (Did I miss one? Regardless, this reminds me a LOT of Gee's affinity spaces.)
argues that lack of holding to accepted Twitch standards and choosing to improvise contributed to decrease of participation.
Fans served as volunteer curators, while official channel administrators mostly focus on technical content and don't engage much with metanarrative.
Conclusions - this is a hungry culture, not originally designed for expansion, small passionate group of fans remains, visiting past gameplay & nostalgia factor brings community together/revitalizes.

Dr. Nele Noppe/ネラ・ノッパ🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈:

What if we used fannish platforms to publish scholarship?
Brainstorming doc at https://docs.google.com/document/d/19PbNM8WwUVR8J4PDkm2w0Y9cLHa6sVoRt02ivgGdj9A/edit#heading=h.ihz2vfxozzxq
The open access workflow and results are v. similar to for-profit workflow and results. "We recreate a mirror image of for-profit scholarly publishing."
We're constantly trying to prove that open access can be high quality. (What if we actually reimagine scholarly publishing? What if we make something so different it doesn't invite comparison?)
Fan publishing and academic publishing have enough in common that fan publishing can help us reimagine scholarly publishing.

Dr Alice M. Kelly (she/her):

Talking about affect and its centrality to fanfiction. (Making me think of my #NSFEITM work with @marijel_melo and @theartofmarch and I'm wondering how widely affect is present in LIS research in general.)

J Nicole Miller 💜🤍🖤:

talking about fanfiction and info seeking behaviors of young adult readers
suggests that methods for fanfiction info seeking can illuminate creation of library services & support
RQs: How do YA find fanfic to read? How do they find fiction to read? How do those methods differ between each other? Are there differences between experienced fanfic readers and new fanfic readers?
Pilot study with YA ages 18 - 23. Semistructured interviews. 90% of participants began engaging with fanfic & online fandom in high school.
50% found fanfic via serendipity (Tumblr, Google, etc) and 40% via friends. (This connects with the importance of friends in my research on cosplay information literacy.)
AO3 is clear winner for fanfic reading among participants. Apparently podfic has migrated to YouTube?
None of participants went to librarians for book recs. (Oh my heart is breaking!)

Paul Thomas 🦇:

On Adventure Time: "As you can see, the show makes total sense." AHAHAHAHAHAHA
Using analytic autoethnography. Sometimes gets flack from others who perceive autoethnography as not being rigorous.
importance of roles and hierarchies in determining how to include/cite sources in wiki articles; how to

Abigail De Kosnik:

Talking about individual as library & librarian and individual as archive & archivist
In a time of collapse (like now), we need to think about how people will preserve media and visual culture. The people doing this work are more likely to be pirates than institutional actors.

Critics & legal opponents of archives are not framed as individuals, but are instead described as communities, collectives, and corporations.
Oof the rhetoric of using libraries as stealing if you're not too poor to buy books. Yikes.

Individuals feel responsibility for cultural preservation and distrust institutions to do it; systematic disinvestment in public preservation institutions fuels this.
Academic libraries should learn from pirates' and fans' examples. Reject exploitative pricing models.
Fans should take their fandom and love really seriously and think about whether they can be archivists or want to be archivists.

📚 Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé's ACE OF SPADES: Gossip Girl meets Get Out in a gripping debut thriller

Wed, 19 May 2021 15:45:00 -0400

ACE OF SPADES by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

Chiamaka and Devon are both students at the prestigious Niveus Academy and total opposites. Devon is a nobody, a scholarship kid who spends all his time working on music composition, only noticed by his friend Jack. Chiamaka is the definition of Queen Bee, working hard to be noticed and celebrated. She is a brilliant science student with designs on Yale.

Chiamaka and Devon have three things in common, though: they are both prefects at their school this year, they are the only Black students at Niveus, and they are both victims of an anonymous texter calling themselves “Aces” and sharing Chi and Von’s secrets with the whole school.

⚠️: Author Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé provided an extensive list of content warnings for the book on her website. Chief among them are racism and homophobia but this thriller is full of potential triggers so I definitely recommend reviewing the list before reading.

The promotional materials call this book “Gossip Girl meets Get Out” and that description is spot-on. If I get too specific I’ll spoil more than I’d like, but it has the anonymous gossip and deep secrets, especially around personal relationships, of Gossip Girl and the “Oh no seriously get out of there” of Get Out. Multiple times revelations made me gasp and think “OHHHH!” There is some exposition at the beginning to introduce you to the characters and the setting, but as soon as Aces’s first message comes out, the pacing picks up and things get and stay intense.

The book also reminds me of Veronica Mars, with its focus on intrigue, detailed depiction of class differences, and teenagers managing their own affairs without much adult interference.

I definitely recommend this to readers who love gossip, mystery, or thrillers. Author Àbíké-Íyímídé says she has “has dreamt of writing books about black kids saving (or destroying) the world all her life” (lack of capitalization in the bio on her website). She has succeeded beautifully here.

Pre-order ACE OF SPADES now, out June 1 in the US and June 10 in the UK. Àbíké-Íyímídé offers some pre-order incentives on her website, so be sure to check those out!

Thank you to Netgalley and Macmillan for the e-ARC of this book!

♠️❤️♣️♦️

[A phone displaying the US cover of ACE OF SPADES sits on top of scattered playing cards.]

Prepping to launch my consulting career 👩‍‍💼

Fri, 07 May 2021 14:30:00 -0400

Hello again, internet. I just finished writing the last thing I had to write for my assistantship. I’m taking a break and not hustling hustling for the next month or so. But I am planning to launch as an independent researcher and consultant in mid-June, and in case anyone else is interested in what that life is like, I thought I’d share some of my prospective work.

I really appreciate transparency such as when Dr. Katie Linder and Dr. Sara Langworthy talk about their income streams on the Make Your Way podcast, Dr. Katie Rose Guest Pryal talks about hers in her book The Freelance Academic, and Dr. Kelly J. Baker talks about hers on her blog. Because I haven’t launched yet, I can’t tell you how much money I’m making. But I can tell you what kind of clients I’m courting.

Here are some possibilities I have in the works:

doing some curatorial work for my blogging host platform
working with a small start-up to promote qualitative research and qualitative data analysis software
editing theses and dissertations either through my own networking or as part of another organization’s network (both, if I can swing it)
writing curriculum materials for Open Educational Resources
working as an independent researcher again through both my own networking and as an affiliate of a consulting company

In addition to whatever paid work I get, I have a dream of also continuing to do my own research and maybe doing some creative writing (either creative non-fiction or YA fantasy), but we’ll see how much time and energy I have.

CS101: Week One

Thu, 29 Apr 2021 15:57:17 -0400

I’m auditing Stanford’s CS101 on EdX because while I love Harvard’s CS50x I think I need some back to basics stuff. (All of this recommended by the great FreeCodeCamp article, How to Hack Together Your Own CS Degree Online for Free.)

I’ll be jotting down some notes and reminders to myself here, adding future posts for this course as replies to this one.

If you’re a developer you’re going to be like “Wow, I know that already.” Yeah. It’s a 101 class, y’all.

Data Types

numbers
strings - text between quotation marks, e.g., “Dr. Kimberly Hirsh”

Some Javascript stuff

// comes before a comment; a comment is not run

Spoiler font on my website

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 17:26:55 -0400

I’m playing with CSS to get spoiler-text hidden unless selected on my website. Let’s see if it works! I’m putting double pipes around it so people browsing in dark mode know where to highlight.

|| This is a spoiler. ||

Could I create a more elaborate solution to this problem? YES! But I’m not really interested in doing so.

On languishing, being dormant, and lying in wait.

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 16:02:35 -0400

Adam Grant’s article There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing has been floating around different places I spend time online and Austin Kleon wrote a great response, I’m not languishing, I’m dormant.

On Kleon’s Instagram post about this, a commenter quoted Aaron Burr’s line in the Hamilton song “Wait for It”: “I am not standing still, I am lying in wait.” This was my first thought on seeing Kleon’s post about this, as well.

The definition Kleon shares of “languish” and the more clinical/sociological definition Grant cites focus on ill-feeling. Kleon says that because languishing is antithetical to flourishing and he’s not attempting to flourish, he’s not languishing.

I’m definitely in a downtime stage of life, having just pushed through what I call a “Chariot moment,” based on the Tarot card The Chariot, which is my fave and also all about the hustle. I’m in more of a Hermit place right now. I even just had a conversation with W. about possibly spending most of the month of May in PhD recovery, only applying for jobs that are AWESOME, waiting to pursue freelance gigs until I start to feel a bit better.

To me, languishing implies unused potential. I have a bunch of art supplies languishing in a closet in my house. Grant sort of hints at this meaning, but the dictionary definition and Kleon’s response certainly don’t consider it.

So I’m not languishing.

Another commenter on Kleon’s Instagram post suggested that the book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times is a good read for thinking through this. I just borrowed the eBook from my local library and if I enjoy it, I’ll probably buy a hardcover copy. (One of the biggest changes in my life since the start of the pandemic is that I buy way more new hardcover books and I almost always buy them from one of my local bookstores.)

I’m lying in wait. If a great opportunity comes along, I’ll pounce on it. But like a cat, I’m conserving my energy.

And like a plant, I’m not ready to come up yet.

Feel free to apply other metaphors to the same ideas.

Notes and highlights from Katie Rose Guest Pryal's THE FREELANCE ACADEMIC 📚

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 13:12:00 -0400

I’ve read Katie Rose Guest Pryal’s The Freelance Academic twice now. It’s a great book. I’ve taken notes on it and highlighted all over the place but I feel like I haven’t internalized the notes. So I thought I’d blog some notes, highlights, and marginalia. This blog post is no substitute for reading the book, so if this information seems useful, be sure to check it out!

The Freelance Academic Manifesto

Originally posted on Dr. Pryal’s blog.

Get paid for your work.
Live in a place you love with people you love.
When you find yourself being lured back to your department for a temporary gig, remember: They’re never going to let you in the club.
Stop applying to academic jobs.
Remember that you are not alone.

Things to Do

Read books “about how higher education has changed and how how people have dealt with these changing conditions.” p. 13
“…read everything you can about how to start making money for the hard work you do.” p. 14
“Take a course on how to pitch ideas to writer’s markets that pay, either through online courses or by hiring a successful freelancer friend to teach you.” p.18
“…hire an academic career coach, who specializes in helping people transition out of the academy.” p. 18
Finish outstanding academic commitments such as papers.
Write your goodbye letter.
Figure out what you’re good at by making a list of your superpowers.
Make a list of things you’re an expert in.
- Add topics you might want to write about.
- “…figure out who would be interested in reading what you have to say in these areas.” p. 138
- Some ideas: trade magazines, in-house blogging or copywriting.
- Make a list of at least 10 story ideas so you can choose 1 to pitch.
- After you’ve pitched and written one article, pitch a series.
Learn about running a business.
- “Find out what the going rates are in the private sector for what you do. Think about the rates that you should be charging, and start charging those rates. And remember, when you set your rates, you have to add 30%.” p. 123
- Pay yourself a steady paycheck.
- Standardize the services you offer.
- Technology
  - email
  - data storage (hard drive/cloud)
  - laptop
  - email signature
- Library access
  - Find out if you can use your university library with something like a community membership.
- Online presence
  - Update social media profiles
  - Get a Facebook business page.
  - Get testimonials from clients and put them on your website and social media profiles.
- Business cards
- Business structure
  - Consider incorporating.
“Hire an academic career coach.” p. 18
Professionalize yourself as a non-academic.
“Get your research out there, just as it is.” (p. 42)
- Make your research publicly accessible on your own website and on “open-access repositories that are indexed on Google.” p. 39
“Create an internet presence.” (p. 43)
- Learn “about website design, coding, and hosting.” p. 24
- Change your website from a CV to an online portfolio.
  - “Buy the URL (web address) that is your name.” (p. 43)
  - Create one page for your education and experience.
  - Create another page for your publications.
    - Link your publications to your repository page.
  - Add a blog.
    - Share your blog posts on social media.
    - Blog about important things.
    - Establish your areas of expertise on your blog.
    - When blogging, “Be honest and always link it to the larger trends and structural issues.” p. 32 (quoting Lee Skallerup Bessette)
  - “Put a bullet point on your website about your experience with grant writing or professional writing.” p. 117
- Make connections on Twitter and Instagram. Network and share your scholarship.
“Share your ideas – widely.” p. 44
- “…put yourself in a position to engage publicly with your research.” p. 39
- Figure out which publishing venues “are interested in which genres.” p. 44
- “Take a course on how to pitch ideas to writer’s markets that pay, either through online courses or by hiring a successful freelancer friend to teach you.” p. 18
- “Read the magazines you want to write for. Learn who the editors are by reading their work.” p. 45
- “Start pitching articles in your area of expertise that are ‘pegged’ (tied) to current events.” p. 45
- “Reach out to your freelance academic colleagues and ask for help” coming up with creative solutions to problems. Also ask your coach. p. 51
“Build a community, whether online or off, of others who are trying to do work similar to yours.” p. 80
“…always have a clean, up-to-date résumé ready as a safety net.” p. 174

Things to Read

To Write or Not to Write, Kelly J. Baker
Should Academics Write for Free?, Sarah Kendzior
Hanging Up on a Calling, Rebecca Schuman
Love and Other Secondhand Emotions, Jacqui Shine
On Graduate School and “Love,” William Pannapacker
The No Baby Penalty, Elizabeth Keenan
The Responsibility of Adjunct Intellectuals, Corey Robin
What’s the Point of Academic Publishing?, Sarah Kendzior
Thesis Hatement, Rebecca Schuman
Sexism Ed, Kelly J. Baker
Why Everybody Loses When Someone Leaves Academe, Erin Bartram
Instead of Gaslighting Adjuncts, We Could Help Them, Annemarie Pérez
Don’t Fear the Résumé, Rachel Leventhal-Weiner
The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy Norman Mailer, James Baldwin
Student Arrested after Crawling into a Duct to Steal an Exam, Christopher Mele
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, Roger Fisher and William Ury
What is BATNA? How to Find Your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement, Guhan Subramanian
Academic Waste, Kelly J. Baker
How the University Works, Marc Bousquet
Build a Career Worth Having, Nathaniel Koloc
Why Freelancers Need a Nonpayment Law, Sara Horowitz
How to Craft a Pitch, Kelly J. Baker
Recommended Reading and Resources starting on p. 175

People, organizations, and resources to look up

Kelly J. Baker
Jennifer Polk
Beyond the Professoriate
Rebecca Schuman
Sarah Kendzior
Elizabeth Keenan
Erin Bartram
Rachel Leventhal-Weiner
Editorial Freelance Association (publishes The Freelancer newsletter)
The Freelancer’s Union
Who Pays Writers?

Highlights

Highlight (pink) - Page 15

As Sarah Kendzior wrote in 2013 for Chronicle Vitae, “Should academics ever write for free? Maybe. Should academics write for free for a publisher that can afford to pay them? Never.”

Highlight (yellow) - Page 16

Mostly, you should never be shy about talking about money, and a publication shouldn’t be shy about it either.

Highlight (yellow) - Page 16

Living away from the people we love is the opposite of living as a human being.

Highlight (yellow) - Page 17

You no longer have only one path to success— the path through traditional academic streams. Now you have a universe of paths.

Highlight (yellow) - Page 18

use the time and money you will save by not applying for jobs to start freelancing.

Highlight (pink) - 1. What Does It Mean to Be a Freelance Academic? > Page 25

As Rebecca Schuman has accurately put it (many times), academia suffers from a “cult mentality” that is hard to see until you step away from it.

Highlight (yellow) - 1. What Does It Mean to Be a Freelance Academic? > Page 27

the biggest change required to become a freelance academic is to recognize that, in the words of a dear friend from grad school, They’re never going to let you in the club.

Highlight (yellow) - 3. On Writing > Page 43

Whichever repository you choose, know that you have the right to share your work with the world, and you don’t have to rely on institutional access to do it.

Highlight (yellow) - 3. On Writing > Page 46

when you orient your scholarship toward its obvious yet overlooked purpose— furthering human knowledge— its value does not need to be determined by others, because the value lies in the work itself.

Highlight (yellow) - 4. Epiphany > Page 49

Our tracks are, by necessity, only limited by our own creativity. They literally (there’s that word again) are what we make them.

Highlight (yellow) - 4. Epiphany > Page 49

When we’re confronted with a job offer or a gig that isn’t quite right for us, instead of turning it down outright (like I did when I received that job offer), we have an opportunity to make the job right— through negotiation or other tactics.

Highlight (yellow) - 10. The University Is Just Another Client > Page 75

Contingency has turned higher education into just another part of the gig economy.

Highlight (yellow) - 10. The University Is Just Another Client > Page 77

giving administrators your work for free does not inspire them to reward you.

Highlight (yellow) - 10. The University Is Just Another Client > Page 78

As a freelancer, your institution is just one of your many clients. That means you need to spend your extra time and energy on projects that earn you both money and respect outside of one particular institution.

Highlight (yellow) - 10. The University Is Just Another Client > Page 78

Freelancers don’t make a living hoping one client will keep hiring them over and over. They form relationships; they find other clients.

Highlight (yellow) - 10. The University Is Just Another Client > Page 79

you can only be loyal to a company that is loyal to you.

Highlight (pink) - 11. The Ugly Side of Academia > Page 81

I came across some words by James Baldwin recently: “The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.” Now, Baldwin was talking about race, and masculinity, and his relationship with Norman Mailer. The entire essay (published in the May 1961 issue of Esquire magazine) is breathtaking, and you should read it.

Highlight (blue) - 15. Leaving a Legacy Off the Tenure Track > Page 103

Sit down and figure out what you want to leave behind in this world. Then figure out what kind of freedom— agency— you need in order to gain the skills— mastery— to be able to produce that kind of legacy.

Highlight (pink) - 16. Why Attend Conferences as a Freelance Academic? > Page 107

bring your freelancer skills back into the academy via a scholarly conference.

Highlight (blue) - 18. Launch Your Career Like James Bond > Page 117

when you create your freelance writer website, take into account all of the things that you are.

Highlight (blue) - 18. Launch Your Career Like James Bond > Page 117

the most important thing is to launch your website as though it were a website that had always been there, professional in appearance, representing you, the professional.

Highlight (blue) - 18. Launch Your Career Like James Bond > Page 118

The same goes for your social media profiles— all of them.

Highlight (yellow) - 18. Launch Your Career Like James Bond > Page 118

Look like a professional, until one day, you are a professional.

Highlight (yellow) - 19. How to Start Working for Yourself > Page 120

Your academic training has definitely prepared you to make a living outside of academia.

Highlight (yellow) - 19. How to Start Working for Yourself > Page 120

Your academic training has likely not prepared you to work for yourself. It has not prepared you to run a business.

Highlight (yellow) - 19. How to Start Working for Yourself > Page 120

if you want to leave academia and work for yourself, you’re going to have to learn how to work as a freelancer and likely also as a small business owner.

Highlight (yellow) - 19. How to Start Working for Yourself > Page 124

If you want to avoid being exploited and make sure you earn enough money to live on, you have to research, quote your work accurately, and bluff a little bit when you feel like maybe you aren’t worth the rate you are quoting.

Highlight (blue) - 19. How to Start Working for Yourself > Page 125

Figure out what you’re worth. Quote accurately. Invoice. And get paid for your work. 1

Highlight (blue) - 20. How Can You Earn Money? > Page 127

Highlight (blue) - 20. How Can You Earn Money? > Page 128

become the expert that people want turn to.

Highlight (blue) - 20. How Can You Earn Money? > Page 129

Take the extra money you earn and pay off debt— student loans, car loans, credit card loans, all of it. Once the debt is paid off, save an emergency fund. Once your emergency fund is created, start saving for retirement. Eventually, once your debt is paid off and you have an emergency fund, you might be able to quit your main job.

Highlight (yellow) - 20. How Can You Earn Money? > Page 130

The multiple income streams with your new main gig— blogging, consulting, speaking, ebook sales, literally anything people will pay you to do— all centered around your superpower, are ways to express yourself creatively. That’s how you work as a freelance academic.

Highlight (yellow) - 21. So You Want to Be a Freelance Writer > Page 136

If you’re lucky, you have more than one area of expertise. And if you’re even luckier, you have a hobby, too, that you know a lot about. These areas are about to become your beats.

Highlight (yellow) - 21. So You Want to Be a Freelance Writer > Page 137

What are you an expert in? What do you do for fun? What could you write about as an expert with little extra work on your part?

Highlight (yellow) - 21. So You Want to Be a Freelance Writer > Page 138

When you were working as an academic, what venues did you like to read? (Please, don’t say The New Yorker.) I’m talking about magazines that are online, niche, interesting— and where you found stories that seemed like stories you thought you might be able to write. That’s where you should be pitching.

Highlight (yellow) - 21. So You Want to Be a Freelance Writer > Page 139

you need a website, and you need to pitch stories.

Highlight (yellow) - 21. So You Want to Be a Freelance Writer > Page 139

As a freelance writer, your job is to find new things to say about your areas of expertise and to pitch those things as stories to editors.

Highlight (blue) - 22. Run Your Business Like a Business > Page 150

Take one job. Create a spreadsheet to track earnings. Get a Tax ID. Do one thing a week, just one thing. Before you know it, you’ll have a career on your hands, one that you love.

Highlight (blue) - 25. Three Stories from Freelance Academics > Page 168

Find your community. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Figure out what you’re good at and what you love, and then do it. Believe in yourself.

Highlight (yellow) - 26. Finding Stability as a Freelance Academic > Page 170

Stability is not just about bringing in a consistent income. It’s also about generating consistent work and creating a community I can count on. Those three things— consistent money, work, and community— are the three legs of the table I’m building my freelance career on now.

Highlight (blue) - 26. Finding Stability as a Freelance Academic > Page 174

While I found my community of freelancer colleagues by accident, maintaining those relationships is something I do very deliberately.

My Dissertation Acknowledgments

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 16:19:06 -0400

It’s probably going to be a little while before I get my full dissertation up online, so I thought I’d go ahead and post my acknowledgments here.

Immediately after the graduation ceremony at which I received my MSLS in 2011, I told my advisor that I would probably be back for the PhD sometime. Six years ago, I made good on that promise. Since I started the Master’s program in 2009, Sandra has been a constant mentor, colleague, and friend. Thank you so much, for more than I have the words to say.

I would like to thank my committee for their guidance and reflections from our first meeting to discuss the topics for my comprehensive examination package until today. Your support, especially as I navigated completing a dissertation during a global pandemic, has been invaluable. Casey, your advice and friendship has made this road so much easier than it would have been otherwise. Crystle, your work quite literally inspired this work and I’m grateful to have had you on my committee offering the unique insights from your own research. Heather and Brian, your ideas and questions have strengthened this work significantly. Thank you all. Thank you to my participants for sharing your experiences and insight with me. I can’t wait to see what you’re wearing when we can all go to cons again! Thank you also to the cosplayers who attended the November 2018 Final Fantasy: Distant Worlds concert at the DPAC. You sparked the idea that led to this dissertation.

I am grateful to the UNC Graduate School, SILS, IMLS, and the NSF for supporting me financially for six years and enabling me to work on incredible research with amazing colleagues like Dr. Maggie Melo and Laura March.

I’m thankful for my improv friends, who made sure I had fun during the first year and a half of this thing and served as guinea pigs for some of my earliest research.

I am so grateful for the families and teachers I met at Nido Coworking + Childcare. You are still my village. I want to thank my parents for instilling a love of learning in me and my siblings for enduring my pedanticism. I am grateful to all of them, as well as to my in-laws, for staying with Michael so I could attend class and write. Thank you extra to Laurie, who cared for Michael during the writing stage. Without your help, I would not be graduating in 2021.

Thank you to Michael, my big kid miraculous earth angel, for making me smile, filling my heart with so much joy I often think it will explode, and for being a living reason and reminder to do things besides school. And thank you to Will, who not only made sure I had shelter and food during this whole process, but also introduced me to the world of Final Fantasy and the beautiful music of Nobuo Uematsu, without which we never would have attended the concert that inspired me to choose this dissertation topic. I was able to do this whole PhD thing because I had you to catch all the balls I dropped, to remind me that we would get through it together when I was sure I couldn’t do it, and to make me laugh.

Stocking the flow of my garden in the stream 💻

Fri, 23 Apr 2021 15:24:00 -0400

I’ve been wanting to clean up my blog at least since I migrated from WordPress to Micro.blog, maybe longer. But at over 1000 entries and more all the time, it felt too daunting. Then I read John Johnston’s post, Gardening in the Stream, in which he described using an “On This Day” feature to surface old posts and then go back to the posts from a given day in previous years and clean those up. I love this idea. It’s manageable and if I miss a day, it’ll be only a year before I have another chance to look at it. I’m using Jonathan LaCour’s On This Day snippet for Micro.blog to get this going.

It reminds of me of Austin Kleon’s writing about stock and flow, referencing Robin Sloan’s writing about stock and flow. My hope is that by circulating old flow back into new flow, I’ll discover some things I can turn into stock, clean up, and link in places that make them easier to discover.

THE NEVERS as Disability Metaphor ♿ 📺

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 17:03:00 -0400

This post contains slight spoilers for The Nevers.

I just watched the first episode of The Nevers. Yes, it was created, written, and directed by Joss Whedon. Yes, I am appalled and heartbroken by the way he treated his colleagues on Buffy, Angel, and Justice League. That’s about all I have the heart to say about it. I’d like to talk about The Nevers now which, of course, can’t be completely separated from him, but also kind of is its own thing. As Austin Kleon says, “Art Monsters are not necessary or glamorous and they are not to be condoned, pardoned, or emulated” (Keep Going, p. 124) but also “bad people can make good art.” I haven’t decided if The Nevers seems like good art to me, but I can’t deny that a lot of JW’s other art has been central to my life for the past almost 22 years. So. I want to talk about this art, acknowledging the bad behavior of its creator.

I’m going to talk about The Nevers now, like I said.

Over at The Ringer, Alison Herman describes the protagonists of The Nevers as “Victorian Lady X-Men,” and this is not wrong.

Specifically, you’ve got a bunch of persecuted superpowered people living in a facility sponsored by a rich person who used a wheelchair.

Let’s talk for a minute about Lavinia Bidlow (played by “I am very British. I don’t say Hard Rs” Olivia Williams). Lavinia Bidlow uses a wheelchair. As far as I can tell, she herself is not one of The Touched (aka superpowered people) and has no turn (aka superpower). But she is extremely devoted to making sure that The Touched have a home and are safe and thus she sponsors the “orphanage” where many of them live and work. (There are rogue Touched and unaffiliated Touched, too. Like… Like mutants. In X-Men.)

So. Lavinia Bidlow, using a wheelchair presumably due to a disability, feels a great deal of sympathy and/or empathy for The Touched.

People often refer to The Touched as “afflicted.”

Mrs. Amalia True, head rounder-upper of Touched-who-need-protection, precog lady (not to be confused with Doyle/Cordelia’s power on Angel, which IIRC was more clairvoyance than precognition but usually conveniently early clairvoyance that often allowed time to save the person they saw) and skilled fighter, responds to Ominous Fancyman Lord Massen in this conversation:

Massen: I take it then that you are yourselves among the afflicted.

True: Touched, yes. We don’t consider ourselves afflicted.

Massen: Perhaps some women are more fortunate in the nature of their ailment than others.

True: That’s true, but more suffer from society’s perception than their own debilitation.

This set off little bells in my head, as it sounds very much to me like a TV superhero’s quick explanation of the social model of disability. From that moment I started watching this as if it were a supremely unsubtle metaphor for disability. I’m not sure if it works, but I do find it an interesting lens.

There’s also Maladie, who is the most prominent rogue Touched, is a serial killer, and certainly appears to live with a mental illness. (It is a perfectly valid criticism when Natalie Zutter at Tor.com says her dialogue “feels like it was collected from Drusilla’s cutting-room-floor musings.”) We see Maladie about to be carted off to an asylum in the flashbacks to the day when the Touched got their powers. And of course, “touched” has been used as a rather unkind euphemism for having mental illness.

I have invisible disabilities including autoimmune disease that is sometimes debilitating, migraines, depression, and anxiety. Lord Massen would call me more fortunate and there are certainly many forms of ableism I don’t face. But when I struggle to work through a migraine or have trouble going downstairs to the kitchen from my bedroom because all of my joints hurt, I wonder if there is a place in this world for me. So near the end of the episode, when strawberry-blonde Irish science nerd Penance Adair (your Willow/Kaylee stand-in and thus my fave) describes a feeling “that I’m here. I belong here… all of us that’s Touched, we’re woven into the fabric of the world and we’re meant to be as we are,” my heart swells and I think, “YES, I want to feel that way!” (I do, sometimes, but I want to feel it more.)

Does this all add up to a solid disability metaphor? Not yet, and it’s very possible what we’ll see here is a kind of “fantastic ableism” akin to the fantastic racism X-Men and other stories are critiqued for. But I’m watching with this lens now and I’m interested to see what I find.

I haven’t found anybody else approaching The Nevers this way, but if you have, I’d love to hear about it! I’d especially love a perspective from someone with more visible disabilities.

It's spring and my dissertation is submitted! Let's do all the things!

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 14:34:03 -0400

It feels like submitting my dissertation has freed up an immense amount of space in my head and heart to start thinking about other things. I’m so excited about so many possibilities right now. I bought a bunch of sewing supplies, but my sewing machine thwarted me. It needs a thorough cleaning and oiling, and then I can try sewing again.

I’m back on the Artist’s Way train, doing “morning” pages that are really afternoon pages because the only quiet I can get is during childcare time, and that’s in the afternoon. (I could switch this to morning but it would disrupt some standing meetings I have, so I’m leaving it as-is for now.)

I’m reading John Scalzi’s You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop and it has me feeling energized about writing.

I’m reading Jess Zimmerman’s Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology and it’s phenomenal. I only annotate textbooks, so all my notes from this are commonplace-book style in my Bullet Journal and there are so many of them. Pages and pages.

I’ve got a stack of books about mending on hold at the library. I’m really thrilled at the thought of mending things. My kid’s favorite clothes get holes in them. I’ve got some leggings and pajama pants that could use a good mend. But mostly I love how this feels like a personal step toward sustainable living. Of course we should hold institutions and businesses accountable for their role in promoting sustainability, but that’s not a good reason to not even think about it myself. One day I’ll be able to go in thrift stores again without worrying and I really hope that by then I can start to see the things I find for their possibilities rather than just what they already are. I can dye things! Cut them up! Refashion them! Woohoo! Psyched to get this stack on Saturday and I expect I’ll write more about these things as I read them. (I’ve got a few web links about this, too; maybe I’ll put together a little guide.)

I’m thinking about writing a post or page that is essentially a digital care package for new parents: my favorite books, online resources, and tips related to parenting. You learn so much in the first few years (and more later I trust, but I’m only half way through year 5 so I can only talk about the first 4 and a half years or so). It seems a shame to just sit on that knowledge, or to only pass it on to people in little bits and pieces. Wouldn’t it be cool to just point people to a webpage? I think it would.

Come to think of it, I know little bits about all kinds of stuff. Maybe I should write a BUNCH of guides. One about cupcakery. One about producing community theater or local comedy. What else?

Helping people is kind of my favorite thing.

I’ve now taken an hour and a half of childcare time as runway time, so I suppose I should get down to work.

Anyway, welcome spring! LET’S DO ALL THE THINGS!

Trusting my (book blogging) intuition

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 04:13:00 -0400

Fourteen years ago, I started a book blog - or, as I called it at the time, a reading journal. I jumped in and started writing without any worries about doing it “right.” (For one thing, 2007 was early days with respect to book blogging.) Over time I became part of the kidlit book blogging community.

I slowed down on book blogging long ago, but now I want to ramp up the bookishness of my personal blog. So I did what you do, I googled “book blog.” For months I’ve been reading book blogging introductory articles and posts.

Most of the advice hasn’t sat with me quite right.

I don’t want to book blog like anybody else.

I want to book blog like me.

It turns out 2007 Kimberly has a lot of wisdom when it comes to book blogging. I’ve started looking at my old posts to see how they might be models for how I write about books in the future.

I’m already feeling better about book blogging. I’m excited to get back into it.

The pandemic is making my brain not.

Thu, 04 Feb 2021 15:31:13 -0400

Dissertating during a pandemic is not easy. Maintaining concentration is a real challenge. Before the pandemic, my chronic illness allowed me about 2 good hours a day to do creative work, and any other work time I allotted to more rote/administrative tasks.

Now I have the capacity for 1 task, regardless of whether it’s creative or administrative, and 1 meeting. That’s it. If I do those things, my brain insists it is time for sleep, Star Trek, or fiction reading. And often it can’t even handle fiction reading, so I then do this Star Trek/sleep combo.

I don’t sleep well at night. Even on nights when I don’t do a 3 am doomscroll and instead get a good chunk of sleep, I still wake up feeling like I could sleep for the rest of time if only my body would actually, you know, sleep. (I took Benadryl and slept until 10 am one weekend in recent memory and that was amazing but the rested feeling was 100% gone by the next day.)

I rarely have the energy to be “on” for my kid. We read, I remind him of all the possibilities he has (Clay! Legos! Blocks! Sandpaper letters! Pretend cooking! Real cooking! Coloring! Painting! Magnatiles! Action figures! A bunch of tiny animals!), he chooses one of those and plays independently while I crochet or try to read about either unschooling or Reader’s Advisory. We watch Sesame Street and Wild Kratts. Sometimes we play Animal Moves, in which I call out the names of random animals and he moves like them. (I use a random animal generator because I can’t even think of the names of more than probably 7 animals.)

I’m a person who likes to appear cheerful. I’m a person whose nature it is to care about things.

Right now, I want my dissertation to be done, I want to sleep, and I want to read fiction and then talk to people about what I’m reading and what they’re reading. I want to crochet but not to knit because knitting requires brain power since I keep having to re-learn it and my fingers are always slipping.

Sometimes I put on Bob Ross, if I have a migraine.

And I often have a migraine, waxing and waning in intensity.

I am living this pandemic on the absolute easiest setting, with a flexible schedule, two incomes even though mine is right at the cost of living for 1 person, the ability to pick food up curbside and do none of my own shopping, deeply discounted childcare from my mother-in-law, and the ability to communicate with friends and sometimes even visit outdoors with local family.

And I am exhausted.

I can’t imagine how hard this must be for people in worse circumstances than mine.

How are you holding up? Here's what's up with me.

Wed, 27 Jan 2021 13:25:28 -0400

How are you holding up? Are you holding up? I have a headache today. I really want to write about ideas: craft as healing, being a parent and being other things too, what we mean when we talk about information literacy. My brain though can’t gather all the floaty fragmentary bits of thoughts about these ideas that are whirring through my mind, so I guess I’ll write about them later.

I got my car inspected and its 60K maintenance done. It feels nice to have a car that should be in good shape for another 30K miles. The guy who helped me was the same guy who helped me the last time I took my car in, a year ago, and he recognized me, even with my mask on. He said he remembered my eyes.

So now I think I have memorable eyes.

Last night I had a desire to listen to Michael Crawford sing some distinctly un-Phantom of the Opera songs. I don’t know why. He always sounds ghostly to me, so it’s really funny to hear him do brassy songs in a ghost voice. It makes me happy. The most hilarious is probably The Power of Love, but that’s not on Spotify so last night I went with Any Dream Will Do. Hilarious! They should rename the show Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor DreamGHOST when Michael Crawford sings it.

Have you ever noticed that Michael Crawford doesn’t do a lot of Sondheim? He plays Hero in the movie of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum but on his solo albums there’s not much Sondheim. Maybe a little. (Only vaguely related, another role Crawford had in his early career was Cornelius in Hello, Dolly! and the story of how he got that job is hilarious.)

I’ve been thinking lately about how to be a theater person again, because I miss it and it was a huge part of my identity until the college theater scene kind of beat it out of me. (I made the mistake of aligning myself with the far too serious drama department kids instead of the more fun non-majors putting up their own shows.)

There’s a Theater & Drama Crash Course and it was nice looking through the titles of the videos to realize how much I remember from my BA in dramatic art. I might watch some of those videos and revisit that stuff.

Now is, of course, a terrible time to get back into theater; there’s not much live stuff going on and I’m not really in a position to do virtual shows because my kid could walk in at any minute.

But there are other angles I can approach it from; play reading, playwriting, watching recorded productions, theater history… We’ll see where I go with it.

Anyway, back to my first question.

How are you holding up?

Putting the person back in my personal website

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 15:24:29 -0400

I kind of want to put the person back in my personal website. Not that it isn’t personal - especially my short little notes. But I’ve been thinking about this like it was A Blog, not My Blog, and it’s not a great feeling. So I do have this sort of voice in my head for Important Blog PostsTM with titles like

“My kid isn’t going to be at my dissertation defense and that makes me sad”

“Transformations and transitions: How my thinking is changing.”

And these are interesting things that I do want to talk about, but I don’t need to use an authoritative voice to talk about them.

Back in December I set out to get back to a freer form of blogging and then December exploded on my face in a mess that is only now really beginning to be cleaned up.

I’m hoping to change that now.

What are you up to today? I went to a SILS virtual craft circle, which was great; I’m going to have two of those a week in my life now, on Thursdays and Fridays, and I think it’s very good.

I showed my kid the first ever episode of Sesame Street. (It’s on HBO Max.) Bob was so young in 1969, y’all! Of course, many people were - my parents were teens. It’s a really solid pilot; there are some good gags. I think it’s easy to forget how funny Sesame Street can be if you haven’t watched it in a while, but it’s really good. I’ve blogged before about how it makes a great comedy school, and that was true even in the pilot.

I’ve had a migraine that waxes and wanes for over a week now. It’s not good. I think it’s a hormonal thing.

There are too many books to read.

I think that’s enough stream of consciousness for now.

And now to finish, a GIF that features two of my imaginary friends: Kermit the Frog and Levar Burton.

via GIPHY

I'm still grieving my grandmother and I don't feel like doing anything.

Sun, 17 Jan 2021 13:45:28 -0400

It’s been two weeks and a day since my grandmother died, and I don’t feel like doing anything.

When I posted about her death, I didn’t mention the three weeks of emotional trauma leading up to it. She was rushed to the hospital with symptoms of internal bleeding on 12/12, beginning a rollercoaster of her being unresponsive, showing small signs of consciousness, being taken off a ventilator and able to breathe on her own, being able to talk, showing signs of significant memory loss, and being moved to hospice. Throughout all of that, I played the role of the emotional support eldest daughter, with my mom calling me almost every day, sometimes twice a day, to update my sister and myself (on a three-way call) and talk through her feelings. She was unable to go to Florida to help; her brother had to manage the whole thing alone, and for a while was her only point of communication about my grandmother’s condition. She was often confused about my grandmother’s state. It was weeks of misery capped off by losing her mother.

And, I have to remind myself when I wonder why I feel so glum, losing my grandmother, who was very important to me even if I didn’t see or talk to her often.

I’d had big plans for the first couple of weeks of January, and I found myself unable to actually do any of them. I was finally beginning to feel like maybe next week (this week now? depends on if your week starts on Sunday or Monday) I could dig myself out of this funk enough to get some work done.

And then on Friday, my mom asked my sister and myself to look over her eulogy. It was beautiful, it needed no changes, and I hope that at the graveside service this afternoon, she gets to deliver it.

Ah, yes. The graveside service, taking place in Kodak, TN, where the coronavirus metrics show community transmission is about 4 times worse there than here. So I didn’t go.

I’ve been to three other funerals at that cemetery.

I hate that I’m not at this one, but I would hate getting sick more.

Communicating about my decision not to go was its own source of trauma.

So I probably shouldn’t be mystified by the fact that I don’t feel like doing anything.

I don’t want to write about research or pop culture or even books. I don’t really want to read. I don’t want to watch new things (though I did watch WandaVision).

All I want to do is watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and crochet. That’s it. One stitch at a time, building a beautiful lace shawl, as I sit with these friends who have been with me since I was six years old and watch them behave in all the ways I know they will.

I’ve been tormenting myself for at least a year with the thought of what comes next after I graduate. I was chugging along really nicely on my dissertation. I suspect I’ll be stalled out on it for another week or so. I hope it won’t impact my timeline too much.

I’ve been thinking that what comes next is probably creating my own consulting business. But I realized that as long as my child is home from school, I probably can’t drum up enough work to cover the cost of paying for extra care for him. So the most economically sound thing to do, then, is to set aside consulting work for later, and double down on momming now.

I talked to W. about this and he said,

“I would expect you to just think of yourself as an educator, then.”

This was a good identity perspective for a few reasons. One, it freed me from the idea that I would need to be a full-on homemaker, which I certainly won’t have the energy to do if I’m also educating M. (My mother-in-law has been caring for him in the afternoons at a rate that is beyond a bargain, but even that rate isn’t cheap enough if I’m bring in no income.)

His school has gone fully remote, so that he’s not the only kid or one of two who is remote, which is nice, but it actually requires more hands-on time for me than just letting him putter about the playroom all morning. It’s really good, though.

So. Fine. I’ll be a consultant without contracts. I’ll squeeze my me-time in around his schedule, crocheting while he unschools or reading after he goes to sleep.

And maybe in a week or two, I’ll feel like writing again. I hope so. But I think right now I need to give myself permission to be in this spot of doing nothing, because grief deserves time. And it’s okay to still be grieving my grandmother, who has been in my life for almost 40 years, after two weeks.

2020 Year-in-Review & 2021 Word of the First Quarter

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 15:23:32 -0400

I just re-read my 2019 Year-in-Review & 2020 Word of the Year blog post, published a little over a year ago. When I look at all the stuff I got done in 2019, all the places I went, all the people I spent time with, I am struck by how different 2020 has been. We all know it, but I’ve actually become inured to it. And then I read something like this. Cons. Travel. Flotation therapy. All things I haven’t done in 2020.

Because, you know, global pandemic.

But I still did some stuff in 2020!

Pre-pandemic, I defended my dissertation proposal.
I revised that proposal and submitted it for IRB review.
I then changed my dissertation scope twice.
I collected all the data for my dissertation.
I analyzed all the data for my dissertation.
I drafted my dissertation. (All of that was accomplished in 10 months, which is pretty impressive.)
I conducted 3 interviews for my research assistantship.
I analyzed 14 interview transcripts for my research assistantship.
I managed having the house painted.
I had plumbers out at least 3 times. (Probably need to get on a service plan.)
I presented a virtual poster at Fan Studies Network North America.
I learned about and tried different methods of stress relief.
I planned a special private birthday video chat storytime for M’s birthday with his favorite storier, Mr. Jim.
I managed virtual preschool/unschooling from mid-March to mid-December. (Cutting the kid & myself a break during his school’s break time.)
I kept going.

My word of the year for 2020 was FULL, specifically filling my well and being my full self. I think I’ve succeeded brilliantly, so yay for that. I also wanted to read for pleasure, play video games, and pursue my core desired feelings of ease, creativity, and connection. I’ve done all that stuff, too! So even though 2020 changed a LOT of my plans, I still did what I hoped to do. That’s pretty cool.

One of the things I realized this year was that daily projects don’t suit me, for a variety of reasons. I need a little more flexibility. So I’m giving myself permission to do daily projects my way - which is to say, to focus on increasing how much I do the thing, rather than being sure I do it daily. So I read more poetry this year than ever before, but I didn’t read a poetry book a day every day in August. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

I’m also realizing that natural cycles are the best way for me, personally, to measure time. So I’m setting goals and planning in quarters instead, specifically Wheel-of-the-Year-style quarters. So from December 21 to March 21, my goal is to get my dissertation done and, ideally, defended. (The defense may be closer to the end of March, and that’s fine.) I don’t know what comes next after that, and that’s okay.

And I’m selecting a word of the quarter, which may turn into a word of the year but I often find that by mid-March, a new word has revealed itself. My word for the first quarter of 2020 is PLAY, which I’m using in its broadest possible sense. So I’m going to try learning to play some of the musical instruments I have around the house, playing more games, trying new art forms, and deliberately engaging in purposeless activity.

I hope you find a way to have fun, regardless of what 2021 brings.

Image Caption: This is what the best days at pandemic preschool look like for us: different kids on screen together, all pursuing work that lights them up. (M. is in the foreground and his classmates are actually hidden behind their work.)

🔖Humans Used to Sleep in Two Shifts, And Maybe We Should Start It Again

Sat, 26 Dec 2020 20:18:00 -0400

via @Miraz

Humans Used to Sleep in Two Shifts, And Maybe We Should Start It Again sciencealert.com
Archiving...
sciencealert.com https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-used-to-sleep-in-two-shifts-and-maybe-we-should-start-it-again

🔖 How Literary Female Friendships Shaped the Fiction Market

Sat, 26 Dec 2020 16:13:00 -0400

This piece by Sarah Lonsdale describes the kind of literary friendship I fantasize about having. Who wants to be my literary bff?

How Literary Female Friendships Shaped the Fiction Market ‹ Literary Hub lithub.com
Read: lithub.com
lithub.com https://lithub.com/how-literary-female-friendships-shaped-the-fiction-market/

Highlights & Notes

Naomi Royde-Smith was an astute literary editor of the Saturday Westminster and brought Macaulay, an awkward “innocent from the Cam” as she described herself, into her circle of friends, who seemed to Macaulay “to be more sparklingly alive than any in my home world.”

Please. Bring me into your literary circle.

Macaulay would often stay in her friend’s Knightsbridge home where they held soirées for authors and journalists to bolster each other’s standing and forge mutually supportive networks.

We can host soirées. I’ll set up the video chat.

Tell me about your favorite literary friendships and relationships! I’m especially fond of the Shelleys, who wrote collaborative diaries. ♥️

My Reading Year 2020

Mon, 21 Dec 2020 16:14:55 -0400

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, which has nothing to do with any gift-giving related holidays and everything to do with end-of-year media lists, especially end-of-year book lists. My favorite is the NPR Book Concierge, though I’m meaning to check out some others, too.

I thought I’d review my year in reading. I felt like I read a lot this year, but it turned out to be really different than I remembered. You can always check out my reading stuff in the Books category or on my Reading page, but here’s what I thought was worth highlighting.

I finished 10 fiction books this year, all of them novels. I got really into Dark Academia, so of course I read The Secret History. If We Were Villains, Bunny, and Ninth House are all in my TBR pile (literally, I have all three of them in the house right now). I also joined an Instagram reading group via my Dark Academia Insta (DAinsta?Dinsta?) and that led me to read or re-read some classics: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. I’m currently partway through The Historian, but it’s ambitious to think I’ll finish it this year.

Here are my favorite fiction books I read this year:

The Starless Sea: Erin Morganstern always creates the most immersive settings for her books. I kind of want to live in this one.

The Power: Naomi Alderman’s near-and-distant-future novel of women who can literally electrify other people blew my mind.

Legendborn: This one is a good read for anybody, but has special meaning if you’re familiar with UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus. It makes campus feel magic and reckons with the University’s history at the same time.

But my very favorite, thought about re-reading immediately, crow-it-to-everybody book that I read this year is Mexican Gothic. I love it so much but I can’t really bring myself to write a good review or synopsis. It is a classic Gothic novel, but moves the setting from Victorian England to 1950s Mexico. It still has an old English manse, mind you. It’s just an English house built in Mexico. It scratches every Gothic itch I have ever had, adds a new criticism of colonialism (refreshing in the world of Jane Eyre and The Secret Garden), and the revealed secret is fascinating and horrifying. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I read 12 non-fiction books this year. Of these, two really stood out for me: Kelly J. Baker’s Grace Period, which I’ve written about before, and Sarah Kendzior’s Hiding in Plain Sight, which is such an important read. I knew it would be important; I didn’t know it would also be beautiful.

I participated in The Sealey Challenge and managed to read a poetry book or chapbook a day for the first couple of weeks in August. This was a great reminder that I actually quite like poetry. I read 16 poetry books; my favorites of these were Electric Arches, Wolf Daughter, and _[re]construction of the Necromancer_.

I’ve read about 25 comic book single issues this year (18 of those in the past couple of days!) and expect to read several more over the next 10 days. Most of these have been X-Men books, a combination of some classic Claremont stuff with my fave Kitty Pryde’s early appearances, and the recent Dawn of X interrelated series. I can’t pick a favorite.

Lastly, I’ve read a lot of picture books, chapter books, and comics for young readers with my kid. I haven’t been tracking this kind of reading much this year, though I hope to more next year. That said, I do have a couple of favorites to recommend: Interstellar Cinderella and the Narwhal and Jelly series. Interstellar Cinderella is basically about what it would be like if Cinderella were really Kaylee from Firefly with a really cute twist on happily ever after, and Narwhal and Jelly is basically a more oceanic and less pastoral Frog and Toad: Narwhal is THE UNICORN OF THE SEA! and Jelly is worried a lot.

I did read some fanfic this year, but not a lot. My favorites were both X-Men: First Class fics: Everything About It Is a Love Song and table for three. What can I say? I love Prof. X and Magneto, who are not unlike Frog and Toad in their own way.

And speaking of Frog and Toad, the best thing I read online this year was probably Jenny Egerdie’s Frog and Toad Are Self-Quarantined Friends. But you can see a lot more of what I read online (but not everything) in the Links category, if you’re interested.

What did you read this year? If it was a hard year for reading for you, what did you do instead?

My Most Memorable Christmas Presents from Childhood

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 09:09:00 -0400

I’m really on a break now - had my last business-ish meeting yesterday, no Zoom calls scheduled through the new year. So I’m going to write some holiday/end-of-year blog posts.

First up, inspired by this tweet, a list of my most memorable Christmas presents from childhood.

A tape recorder. When I was around 5, Santa left a beautiful red tape recorder under the tree for me. I hadn’t asked for it; I’m not sure I even knew such a thing existed. But it rapidly became my favorite thing. I took it to church for the Christmas morning to show off; I told people that it was just what I wanted even though I didn’t know I wanted it. For years I used that tape recorder to record imaginary radio shows or, as we would call them now, podcasts. I also used it to record my baby sister singing “La Bamba,” which was priceless.
A globe. I loved that globe. I can’t tell you why. I just remember spinning it and touching the raised mountain ranges and feeling like some new knowledge had suddenly become accessible to me. I was 7 or 8 for this one.
A telescope. I never quite got it working right, but this was like an exponential increase in the feeling I felt when I got the globe. I have been interested in astronomy ever since. Probably got this one when I was 9.

So there you have it, my most memorable Christmas gifts from childhood. Or, if you prefer, evidence that I have always been this nerdy and into learning.

Have a good weekend! I’ll be back next week with thoughts on some holiday movies and my year in books.

Dissertation Draft Finished + Pandemic Parenting and My Body

Thu, 10 Dec 2020 15:21:52 -0400

I sent off the introduction chapter for my dissertation to my advisor a few minutes ago. I also decided to do a total page and word count for the whole thing. And while I was doing that I made the mistake of reading the comments on the methods chapter. Which are good and helpful comments and not that dramatic, but IMPOSTOR SYNDROME, am I right?

Mostly what I’m dealing with is that both of the committee members who have looked at that chapter were like “This theoretical framework part needs it’s own chapter.” It won’t actually be creating a whole chapter from scratch, but it does feel a little like it will. And so my jerk brain is like, “Why didn’t you write that? Why haven’t you done that already? Why didn’t that occur to you? UGH. Your dissertation is frivolous, thin, unimportant, has nothing to contribute, and is basically just you dicking around. You’ll graduate probably because you have a kind committee but what subpar work.”

My brain doesn’t seem to know we’re in a pandemic.

Before I go on, here are the stats: in its current iteration, my dissertation is 155 pages and 31,084 words. I started data collection in April. I went from initiating data collection to a finished draft in 6 months, working on it for half-days, while caring for my child in the morning and writing in the afternoons.

This is no small achievement, regardless of the contribution my research makes to the field.

And I simultaneously worked on my assistantship, which involved designing a semistructured interview protocol, conducting 3 interviews, and coding 14 interviews.

I had planned to start my data collection earlier. I had planned to be writing close to full-time hours, because I had expected to get a dissertation fellowship, making this a non-service year. Things have gone very differently than I planned, and I have a first draft of my dissertation to show anyway.

I may kick off my revisions with a dissertation bootcamp Jan 11 - 15. We’ll see.

–

Something that only occurred to me yesterday, although of course it’s been going on the whole time I’ve been a mother, is that I hold my child’s emotions in my body. So when my kid sobs three or four times in one morning and throws a couple of tantrums, I can’t just hand him off to my mother-in-law and then sit down to work. My body just won’t allow it.

Giving myself permission to recognize the impact my kid’s emotions have on my body is something I sorely needed, and I really hope it will help me moving forward.

Okay. Gonna have lunch and then maybe go to Bean Traders to get some curbside pickup “I did it!” treats.

The Imagined Academia and How I Still Love It

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 16:27:56 -0400

I may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

I’ve spent my whole life on campus. Before I even entered elementary school, my mother was enrolled at community college working on her associate’s degree and I would sometimes go to campus with her. (This is how I had my first taste of Raisin Nut Bran: it was in an orientation package she got.)

When I was 7, my parents enrolled at Florida State University, my mom to get a BA in Religion and my dad to get his MLIS. My dad got a job at Duke Law after graduation and my mom stayed at FSU working on a Master’s in Theology and my sister and I alternated living with them; when she finished her coursework, we all moved to NC, where my mom started a Master’s in Divinity at Duke. My dad was still working at Duke when I graduated from high school and moved to college; I did a one year MAT after college and then worked as an educator for 5 years before returning to get my MSLS, then worked another year as an educator and three years in higher ed outreach before returning to get my PhD.

I have a deep working knowledge of what education is really like.

And yet I still romanticize it.

As part of my foray into the aesthetic that is dark academia (which involves many fewer contingent laborers than you might expect), I have joined a readalong taking place on Instagram and Discord. We’re on our last book now, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Early in the book, a father narrates to his daughter his time as a grad student, spending hours locked in a university carrel writing about 17th century merchants in Amsterdam, sneaking in to hear the end of his advisor’s lectures to undergraduates, sitting in his advisor’s office…

And I swooned.

I wonder if it’s because only the first year of my PhD was really spent writing in carrels on campus? Because the rest of it has been in public libraries, cafes, and co-working spaces, places I could briefly slip away without a long bus ride while someone else was with my kid. (Commute to UNC: minimum 40 minutes. Commute to closest public library branch: 10 minutes. It only takes 10 minutes to drive to UNC, but it’s cost-prohibitive to park there more than once a week or so.)

I had this same wistfulness when I read A Discovery of Witches. What is it that I love so much about this life? And is it my love of this imagined academia and my understanding of how very imaginary it is part of what keeps me from pursuing the tenure track?

I wonder all of this, but really, what it comes down to, is this:

I love this imagined academia, and regardless of what academia really is, I love this imagined version anyway, and it brings me joy. So I will keep reading books and watching movies about tweed-clad scholars in their gothic architecture reading rooms, debating the finer points of Latin grammar (an activity I actually hated as an undergrad, an attitude that won me scorn from my Latin professors), spending time in cozy offices, and secretly learning that imaginary monsters are real. (The Sunnydale High School library is 100% Dark Academia; don’t @ me.)

I'm Jew-ish, but not Jewish.

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 14:45:41 -0400

I know Hanukkah is not a major religious holiday. But my connection with Jewish heritage and culture has never really been religiously driven. I am, according to the most recent AncestryDNA update, probably 43% of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. I believe it’s been 3 generations since anyone in my family was strongly connected to this heritage, but I’ve felt Jew-ish as long as I can remember.

And I want all the foods, y’all. All the Hanukkah foods.

I looked for other people with a similar experience to mine, and found this helpful blog post called “So You’ve Just Found Out You’re Jewish. What’s Next?”. I’ve always known about my Jewish heritage, but felt a bit stymied about connecting with it, so I appreciate this especially for its links to a lot of resources.

Including and especially The Nosher.

I think there will be some russet potatoes in an upcoming grocery order for me.

Also probably the ingredients for easy sufganiyot.

Making stuff is a vulnerable act.

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 16:41:05 -0400

The end of a PhD is a weird time, especially if you don’t have your eyes set on the tenure-track. (I recently decided that I probably won’t apply for what will likely be the only tenure-track job remotely related to my expertise for the foreseeable future, because my gut said no.)

For more than a year I’ve felt a desperate need to figure out what’s next. In January, I gave myself permission to wait until August to even think about it, but of course that’s not how brains work. In April, I realized that whatever expectations I have would likely be exploded by the pandemic. More and more, I started to feel like I wanted to set out and do my own thing, because I don’t believe that job security is a thing anymore.

So I want to do my own thing, though I’ll still look at jobs in the library and publishing fields. And research comms - both communicating to researchers and communicating about research.

When I try to figure out what my own thing is, there are many possible directions to go in, and I think I’m just going to try some of them.

In a Self-Employed PhD strategy session, one of my fellow participants asked me what I want.

I said I just want to rest.

But more and more what I want to do is read books and make stuff.

In our lab meeting today, I talked about how making stuff is a vulnerable act. I can’t remember exactly what I said. Maggie (or Dr. Melo if you don’t know her) was taking notes and I sure hope she captured some of it. But I’m going to keep thinking about that idea for a while, I think.

I am not a piece of 💩 and neither are you.

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 14:32:28 -0400

Austin Kleon says to write the book you want to read. If I were to write a book in this moment - more that I need, than I want - I would title it, “You Are Not a Piece of 💩.” I need this book because whenever my anxiety gets stronger, this is the mantra it says to me. “You are a piece of shit.” Now, this is untrue in both a literal and figurative fashion.

This morning it was because of, what else, pandemic parenting. My kid has decided that he doesn’t like his preschool Zoom calls. He doesn’t like that his new friends aren’t his old friends. I think there’s something else going on here, but I haven’t gotten it out of him yet.

He woke up late this morning, so we took the Zoom call in his room. All three of us, W, M, and myself. And then at the end of the call W asked, “So what’s the plan?” because he needed to get to work and we needed to transition. But I didn’t have a plan and I hadn’t eaten breakfast. So I said I was going to invite M. to listen to an audiobook while I ate breakfast, and W. pointed out that in the future, I can grab breakfast while he and M. are on the call.

This is when the anxiety spiral started.

He said, “That would be a good time for you to grab breakfast.”

My brain replied, “THINK OF EVERYTHING THAT IS WRONG AND YOUR FAULT RIGHT NOW, KIMBERLY! The toilet is broken with a music wire auger sticking out of it. You only put up half the Christmas decorations and the rest are kind of all over the place. Your bedroom is a walk-in floordrobe. You and your child don’t eat right. You already contributed hardly anything to the household and now you don’t even cook and you certainly are not overburdened by parenting responsibilities. YOU ARE, CLEARLY, A PIECE OF SHIT.”

Anyway, I suggested reading, and M. and I watched a video of his teacher reading a book. W. snuck out, and when M. realized W. had gone to work, he cried for probably less than a minute before saying, “Why does the water coming from my face feel like rain falling?” Then we did a bit of clay work, read and got dressed (a huge achievement these days), and then he suggested going downstairs to play Legos.

I was so overwhelmed and so sad. I began to feel like I had right before starting anxiety meds last fall: that each new challenge was a heavy brick laid on top of my already-about-to-break back. I said to myself, “SELF. Let’s break out of this.”

But first I let myself cry.

And then I couldn’t make the anxiety go away, but I could look at my task list and see if there was anything a person could accomplish while her child was playing with Legos. Because if there was, and I did it, that’d be fewer bricks, anyway.

So he played Legos and I scheduled the plumber and the exterminator. Then I went in our basement storage room and got a bin full of juvenilia and empty notebooks and started clearing that out. And in the middle of doing that I talked with him as he threw stuffed cat toys around, and then he told me he was ready to watch TV. I checked the time and it was well past my time when I try to wait until to start TV-watching, so I said yes.

And now I feel like a person who can do some things.

I’ll feel like I’m a piece of shit again. After all, this is the most resonant song from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend for me:

But maybe I’ll remember to look at my list and see if I can knock something off of it.

Here’s hoping.

I'm pressing publish every day with Leonie.

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 14:36:26 -0400

I woke up this morning to an email in my inbox from Leonie Dawson’s newsletter, sharing that Leonie is going to be pressing publish every day in December: writing a long-form blog post every weekday, at least until Christmas. A lot of the things Leonie says she’s been feeling, I’ve been feeling too:

I’m out of practice with writing. And sharing. And formulating thoughts into words, string them into sentences and patch them into prose.

I’m obviously writing writing writing, but that academic writing has so consumed me and I really miss the more easygoing flow of blogging.

I like this. This part where the page expands before you, and you have no idea where it will go.

I don’t need a clear plan of what to say, I can find it as I go.

And it can take as long as it likes. And I can intersperse it with pictures. And I can keep it forever.

In a word, it’s… MINE.

Attempting to write on social media feels much more complicated. It’s in their space. In their tiny windows. With their tiny limit. It’s not my place for my best work.

Leonie’s embracing the spirit of the IndieWeb, as she has done for ages.

Just like Leonie, I’ve got a way for you to receive these daily posts if you like. Just get on my email updates list if you aren’t already. They’ll also be available by following me on Micro.blog or Twitter. I’m not sure how reliable Twitter will be about surfacing them in your feed, so you may want to go to my timeline directly or add me to a list of everyone whose stuff you want to be sure to see.

That’s all for today. I’ll see you back here tomorrow.

I'm having trouble with my dissertation discussion.

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 16:21:00 -0400

My goal for November’s #AcWriMo was to write the discussion chapter for my dissertation. After finishing that chapter, all that would be left would be a couple of pieces of my introduction that should go quickly.

I’m revising my plan, in light of Pat Thomson’s post about rebooting #AcWriMo2020 goals.

This chapter has been a beast. I had no idea where to begin. I looked at advice. I looked at other people’s discussion sections. I pondered while putting my kid to bed and came up with good ideas. I’ve been snatching odd moments here and there to jot down notes when something occurs to me. But figuring out how to put it all together? That has been a beast.

Today I Googled “dissertation discussion chapter stuck.” This brought me the gift of a couple of posts from The Thesis Whisperer. “The Difficult Discussion Chapter” helped me understand that my problem is common, that it is likely attributable to exactly what I thought it was (the difficulty in turning my data, which is easy to describe, into a set of knowledge claims, which requires more creativity).

“How do I start my discussion chapter?” gave me permission to reconsider my dissertation structure. In it, Dr. Mewburn says,

Before you worry about the discussion chapter too much, consider whether you need to treat the discussion as a separate section at all.

This confirmed a gut feeling I started having yesterday as I was plugging away at the five pages I did manage to get written. It felt so weird trying to talk about my data’s meaning pages and pages away from where I represented the data itself. The similar studies I looked at had integrated their discussion sections with their findings sections. I felt like I needed to do the same thing. So trying that is my next step.

I emailed my advisor to let her know that I would be integrating the discussion into the findings chapter, and that the conclusion chapter would be shorter and focus on implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research and practice. I also told her that this change, plus the fact that I lost two weeks of November to election anxiety and a multiday migraine, meant that I was pushing my self-imposed deadline out from November 30 to December 4. (It will probably be December 6, now that I think about it. I get a good chunk of quiet writing time on Sundays.) I then plan to take one week to finish the introduction, and then will take from December 14 - January 18 off before launching into a month of revisions before sending the dissertation to my committee to review ahead of my defense.

I don’t know if this is going to make things easier. I hope it will. I’ll let you know how it goes. (I also totally will write up my data analysis process eventually, I promise.)

I did what I wanted during my PhD and I regret nothing.

Fri, 13 Nov 2020 15:00:13 -0400

Six months ago today, Inger Mewburn published the post, Where I call bullshit on the way we do the PhD. From where I sit, things are not better or different six months later. In the post, Mewburn encourages PhD researchers to shift their focus from traditional markers of academic success such as publishing in peer-reviewed journals to other activities that might be more helpful in a career beyond academia. I thought I’d write about how I’ve done this over the course of my PhD and the kinds of things I learned.

Performance Production

In my first year and a half of the PhD program, I produced improv comedy. I produced an independent improv team as well as a monthly show that invited other independent teams to play. I got no publications out of this (though I did build relationships that supported four class assignments during that time). I did, however, learn about managing groups of people’s schedules, keeping in contact with performers, and keeping people motivated when stuff was not going well. These are skills that I could use in any event management capacity, especially one that involves speakers or performers.

Podcasting

I started a podcast about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This podcast is not at all about my research or my data. It does, however, require the technical skills of recording and editing, the social skills of recruiting and managing guests, and the analytical skills of viewing the episode and determining topics of conversation. I created what is essentially a theoretical framework of BtVS that rests on three pillars:

the literalization of the saying “high school is hell”
the deliberate disruption of horror film tropes
the manifestation of what I call “Spiderman moments,” when Buffy faces and must resolve a conflict between her responsibilities and desires as a teenager and her responsibilities and desires as a Vampire Slayer

This will work for Seasons 1 - 3. If I keep the podcast going, the framework will probably need revision from Season 4 on.

Blogging and Web Development

In the spring of my second year, I first learned about the IndieWeb and have since then been working to build my website as a true home for me on the web and expand my blogging practice. It led to my first keynote invitation and allowed me to share my experiences with dissertating and PhD work. My blog post, “A Start-to-Finish Literature Review Workflow,” is by far my most viewed post. I don’t know where I would publish something like this but it’s definitely not my disciplinary journals. It helped so many more people than I would have helped publishing an article about school library leadership or something in a journal that school librarians don’t even have access to.

Developing Self-Employment Ideas

I’ve been engaging with resources like Katie Linder and Sara Langworthy’s podcast, Make Your Way, and Jen Polk’s Self-Employed PhD strategy sessions. These have helped me learn so much and make connections that have led to potential freelance gigs.

Going to Conferences that Sound Interesting

If I were looking to be really tenure-track ready in my field, I would be going to ALISE or ASIS&T, and I may go to those someday. But left to my own devices, I recently chose to present at the Fan Studies Network North America conference. Not only did I have an awesome time and meet great people, I also connected with an editor at an academic press who expressed interest in receiving a book proposal from me based on my dissertation research. If I focused on disciplinary expertise, I wouldn’t have attended this conference.

Identifying Models of the Kind of Scholarship I’d Like to Do

Dr. Mewburn discusses the importance of current scholars modeling behavior for future scholars. I’ve been following the work of Casey Fiesler since encountering her via the Fansplaining podcast. Dr. Fiesler does a great job modeling a variety of ways to engage as a scholar, including public writing and experimenting with TikTok.

The Moral of the Story

Get to PhDone, but as much as possible, spend time doing the things you want to do, because they will give you marketable skills, build your network, and lead you to more of what you want to be doing. If you focus on what people steeped in the old ways of academia tell you, not only will you still have a hard time finding a job, you also won’t have any fun.

The burnout is real.

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 18:31:27 -0400

From September 8 to October 2, I attended a virtual dissertation writing boot camp.

I have childcare each day from 1 pm to 6 pm. I have standing meetings on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 2. The Bootcamp ran from 2 - 5 each day that week, so my Tuesday and Wednesday meetings were moved back to 1. I had no time between my mother-in-law’s arrival and my meetings to do any getting set up. On the other days, I spent that first hour transitioning my kid and getting everything I needed together for the boot camp.

Every day that week at 5 I was too exhausted to take advantage of that last hour of childcare for anything but rest.

I wrote an entire chapter of my dissertation that week; it was probably about 25 pages by the time I was done.

At the end of the boot camp, we talked about what we were going to do to carry our momentum forward. I blathered about my little routines to help me settle in at the beginning of my workday.

I took a week off from dissertating after the boot camp. I did none of my routines.

The following week, I spent most of the week at the Fan Studies Network North America conference, which was amazing. But the schedule was such that, again, I didn’t really do any of my routines.

The week after that, I filled in the remaining gaps in the three dissertation chapters I had written. This was not heavy work, and it’s a good thing.

I told myself I was going to write my discussion chapter as part of NaNoWriMo, but as we all know, the US election was on November 3 (not just presidential; I was concerned about down-ballot races too, esp. NC senate). And then there were days of waiting. Who could get work done during that time?

Not me. Not on my dissertation, anyway. (Throughout all of this I have continued doing work for my assistantship.)

Over the weekend I thought to myself, “Monday will be the day. Monday will be the day that I get back into my routines.”

Reader, I did not get back into my routines Monday.

I didn’t on Tuesday, either.

Only today did I move in that direction: I meditated for 3 minutes with Headspace. I wrote a couple of “morning” pages (but not a full 3). I did a Tarot card pull.

I got The Star. It was the right card for today.

I started generating ideas for a process for creating my discussion chapter.

It feels silly to say. But that’s where I am.

Image is a detail of the 10 of Wands from the product image for the Wayhome Tarot at the Everyday Magic website. It’s a great deck. I highly recommend it.

Kimberly Hirsh Presents: Things of Bronze Episode 3 - Teacher's Pet

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 04:50:00 -0400

It’s here! The long-awaited all-librarian episode of my Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast! Transcript & show notes forthcoming.

I went to #FSNNA20 and it was awesome.

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 14:26:13 -0400

I “went” to the Fan Studies Network North America conference last week. It was awesome. It was invigorating. I feel energized coming out of it.

I am not going to do a round-up of relevant content right now. I’ll be unpacking that over the next week or so, trying to consolidate some notes and ideas. I “met” a bunch of cool people. But for now, I want to talk about the structure and process.

The conference used five tools: Discord for conference-only chat and posters, Conline as a general conference platform, Zoom for live sessions, Vimeo for archived sessions, and Twitter for sharing ideas with the public.

The Discord space and the Zoom chat were the highlights of the event for me, and I want to write briefly about them and some possibilities I think they offer for future conferences.

Ideas for the layout of the Discord space were borrowed from CON.TXT 2020. I love physical spatial metaphors for digital spaces, so this was a delight to me. Here’s what the structure looks like:

FAN STUDIES NETWORK NORTH AMERICA
- Start Here
- Check-in Desk
- Announcements
- Help Desk
- Self-introductions
IMPORTANT
- Code of conduct
- Safety
- Meeting etiquette
- Twitter policy
- Tech resources and info
- Schedule of events
MAIN
- The lobby
- The hallway
- Coffee tea and sad cookies
- The bar
- Safer spaces
  - There were a number of spaces for people to go based on their own identity to decompress. For example, I was in a space for people with mental illness. You signed up for these spaces by clicking a specific emoji, then the organizers would add you to the relevant channel. You could not see any of the channels that you had not been admitted to.
POSTERS
- Each poster had its own channel. Posters were uploaded as the first message in the channel.
SPECIAL EVENTS
- Each event had its own channel.
WORKSHOPS
- Each workshop had its own channel.
SALONS
- Each salon had its own channel.
RECORDINGS
- There was a channel here for each session of any type with a link to the recording on Vimeo.
PARTICIPATING PUBLISHERS
- Each publisher had their own channel where they could share discounts and answer questions.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- In this section, the organizers offered thanks to a bunch of people and organizations.

The MAIN section was especially valuable because it made me feel like I was at an actual conference. And because it was a chat and not real life, I could jump in on conversations without feeling too awkward and share resources whenever I saw a place where one might be valuable. The posters, events, workshops, and salons sections were vital, too, because they allowed conversation to continue after the session. You know how you want to talk to the presenter but you have to clear the room for the next session? No worries here! Just take it to Discord!

The chat channels in Zoom were where a ton of awesome activity took place. There was a lot of backchanneling with varying degrees of on-topicness, but also lots of sharing of ideas and asking of questions.

One of the things Discord made possible was the creation of new channels on the fly, so the organizers were able to be responsive to topics that came up in Zoom chats and create new channels for things like fan tattoos, people sharing animal photos, job-listings, a space just for graduate students, ethics and resource methods, sharing syllabi, and sharing fanfiction recommendations. This was a brilliant way to keep conversation going and make the whole conference extra congenial.

I hope other virtual conferences can learn from the wonderful organization of this one, but more than that, I think this provides an opportunity for both conferences and conventions to leverage virtual tools to enrich the experience of attending.

I’ve been big into backchanneling since I started library school in 2009. If implemented wisely, it has the potential to add vibrancy to an event. It works best with someone to moderate or observe the chat, an enforcable code of conduct, and time for processing the chat. #FSNNA20 had all of this.

I see no reason why face-to-face conferences couldn’t have it as well. Obviously, the difficulty of the task depends on the size of the conference. But for smaller conferences especially, I hope people will continue using these sorts of tools once they go face-to-face again.

I also hope over time to find ways to incorporate wikifying into the process, because so many resources are shared and fly by so quickly. I kind of would love to be an official conference librarian, grabbing all the resources everyone mentions, capturing and organizing them, and putting them in a place where other people could add their impressions and ideas. This is basically how the IndieWeb wiki works - chat in IRC, documentation in a wiki - and more and more I like it as a way of operating. (The IndieWeb wiki can be overwhelming. I don’t know if a conference wiki would be or not.)

I’m so impressed with the work the organizers put in, the way that attendees used the space and tools, and the promise this has for the future.

Kimberly Hirsh Presents: Things of Bronze - Witch

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 17:15:00 -0400

I’m experimenting with podcasting about whatever I want. Here’s episode 2 of my Buffy podcast, Things of Bronze. This is episode 2, “Witch.” Or is it episode 3? IS IT TWO OR THREE? I know what Wikipedia says, but what do you think?

My kid is 4 and I might almost be ready to share my birthing story but not yet.

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 15:07:04 -0400

It’s my kid’s birthday today, and thus my birthing day. It’s interesting that the author of the linked post wrote it as her kid was turning 4, since that’s how old my kid is today. I haven’t shared my birth story with very many people, because it is private and traumatic. I’m wondering if I’ll be ready to, soon. I feel like I might.

Before I gave birth, I made a cute comic about my brother’s birth 22 years earlier and said “I wonder what my hilarious birth story will be!”

Friends, very little of my birth story is funny.

It felt like a Campbellian journey.

My sweet mother-in-law texted me today to say she honors me on this day, too. It’s so appreciated.

Next time you celebrate a kid’s birthday, try to be mindful of how it might be impacting the kid’s grownups, too. If the one who gave birth is around, it’s almost certainly a time of complex feelings. BUT PRIDE AND JOY OF COURSE! But also lots of other complex feelings. Other grownups might be having big feelings at that time, too.

Until I feel comfortable writing my birth story, just watch this SNL digital short and know that I cry every time I watch it, because it’s funny because it’s true.

Kimberly Hirsh Presents: Things of Bronze - Welcome to the Hellmouth and The Harvest

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 17:35:00 -0400

I’m experimenting with podcasting about whatever I want. I’ve got 3 finished episodes of a planned Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast called Things of Bronze, so I thought I’d go on and upload the pilot for it and see how it goes. Show notes and transcript coming soon!

📚 A morbid longing for the picturesque: Donna Tartt's THE SECRET HISTORY

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 14:19:00 -0400

Has a book ever broken you? By that I mean, all books after it suffered in comparison for some indefinite period of time, regardless of their quality. It hasn’t happened often for me. It happened a bit with Patrick Rothfuss’s THE NAME OF THE WIND. Well, more than a bit. Even the next book in the series didn’t scratch my NotW itch.

Now I’ve discovered a new thing - not when a book breaks you, but when a book sticks to you like a heavy meal, when a book leaves you too full to try anything else for a little while. I finished Donna Tartt’s THE SECRET HISTORY a few days ago. It is still sitting with me, and I think I’ll probably need to take a break from fiction for a while, while I continue to digest this book.

I found it immensely compelling and stayed up way too many nights reading it. It was a ton of fun and then maybe the last 10 - 25% wasn’t as fun but was still compelling.

This is the book that is at the heart of the Dark Academia aesthetic. It’s about a bunch of beautifully pretentious early-20-something college students living in the early-mid 1980s, attending a college that is a very thinly veiled version of Bennington College, a small, private liberal arts college located in North Bennington, Vermont. (Last year, Esquire published an amazing oral history of the school during this time period). We know from the start of the book that one of the friends in the clique has been killed by the others, but not why. We learn why through a narrative of the months leading up to the murder.

One of the things Tartt does so beautifully in this book is describe the physical environment: the sounds of leaves crunching under feet, the quality of sunlight streaming through trees, the luxuriousness of a professor’s artfully appointed office. I think that it’s really this, and the characters’ intense obsession with classical Western literature, especially Greek and Latin, that attracts people to the aesthetic it inspired.

The pacing of the book contributes to its power, too. It begins quickly, with the narrator Richard getting out of his mundane California existence to go to this beautiful New England school, where he at first is not permitted to register for Greek because the only professor of it hand-selects his students. Richard begins to carefully observe the students who are in the class, and endears himself to them somewhat by assisting with their Greek homework. Eventually, the professor accepts him into the class and he comes into the inner circle of a group that seems elegant and mysterious to him but, as I read it, strikes the rest of the school as mostly… weird. The pacing once he’s in the group becomes languorous, with descriptions of visits to a countryside mansion, gentle boat rides across a lake, days spent lounging around reading. This is the stuff of dreams, my friends. But then, as we approach the murder mentioned at the beginning, the pace picks up, becoming more frantic, and by the end of the part describing Richard’s college life, it is frenzied. This is the part where I had less fun - but again, it was still compelling to read.

Someone who has been acquainted with the book longer than I have has probably done an analysis of the ways in which its structure mirrors Greek tragedy.

It’s a literary thriller, technically historical though almost contemporary with when it was written. If it sounds like you’ll like it from what I’ve already said, you should definitely check it out.

Visualization to help us choose our next steps

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 14:43:03 -0400

I was reading some of Jen Polk’s blog archives a while back and came across a post about a career coach giving her this visualization exercise:

She asked us to picture a skier on top of a peak, unsure of what lay ahead. After taking three deep breaths, I imagined myself as the skier and was soon stretching out my arms. I started to fly off the mountain top, and when I looked down, nothing was clear. I realized that flying, looking around, and exploring are what I need to do right now. That is the next step for me.

I found myself trying to imagine this, and I kept getting hung up on the fact that I don’t even know what a skier might see going down a slope, except what I’ve seen in movies. Trees? Bears? I don’t know. So instead, I pivoted the exercise to think of some more familiar experiences.

I asked myself: What if I were diving in the ocean? (I haven’t been diving but I have a lot more of an idea about what might appear if I were.) What if I were ambling in the forest without a plan? What would I do?

I realized that in both cases, I would trust my intuition and focus my attention on whatever seemed interesting. In the ocean, I would trust that whatever I find will have its own beauty and magic, even if it’s dangerous or scary, and I have ways of coping if it is dangerous and scary. Walking in the forest, I would amble about cheerfully, relying on my intuition to guide me to where I want to be, enjoying the filtered quality of the light, the greenery, noticing interesting plants and animals and either noting them to use later or if I had the technology, using a nature app to learn about them.

Just as this exercise led Jen to realize that she needed to spend her time in exploration, my responses to my altered versions of this exercise reinforce what I kind of always know to be true about myself: things go best for me when I follow my intuition and pursue whatever seems interesting.

What if you do some variation of this exercise? What will you learn about yourself?

Image by PublicDomainImages from Pixabay

Three flavors of learning

Fri, 11 Sep 2020 13:58:58 -0400

I’ve flirted on and off with #100DaysOfCode over the past few years, and always quit when I get to Javascript (which may never change, really), but I have learned some about the learning process itself by playing in that sandbox. In particular, reading about how other people have engaged with the challenge, I realized that one possible way to categorize learning experiences is to think of them as coming in three flavors: passive learning, active learning, and social learning.

Passive learning is essentially consuming content: reading books or articles, watching videos or lectures, listening to lectures or podcasts. This is a great way to get a lot of information in your head fast, but in my opinion is best paired with one or both of the other types of learning. You can make this more active by note-taking, summarizing, or teaching it to someone else, but the learning itself is still pretty passive.

Active learning is when you’re actually doing a thing: actually coding, actually writing, actually cooking, actually flying a plane, whatever it is you’re learning to do. This might involve activities structured by an expert to gradually increase your mastery, or it might involve jumping right in wherever you feel like it. Either way, the practice is taken on either independently or with a more knowledgeable other.

Social learning is when you’re learning in community with others. As with active learning (or passive learning, for that matter), the social aspect can be organized by a more knowledgeable other, an expert. It can, however, be 100% peer-driven. This might involve reading groups that take on a text together, hobbyists who engage in serious leisure in a social context, or individuals studying who answer questions for each other, for example.

I have an intuitive sense that the fastest and most effective learning will incorporate all three flavors, like a Neapolitan ice cream of learning, but any combination of more than one will be more effective than just one.

Image from blackillustrations.com

A quick note on MEXICAN GOTHIC 📚

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 17:45:00 -0400

This book is SO GOOD, but I don’t feel I can write a review that does it justice. It is a pitch-perfect gothic novel and also super gross. After reading all the secrets revealed, I want to go back and re-read, looking for signs. Every layer of gross and spooky in this book has an even grosser and spookier layer underneath it.

I need to re-write my dissertation proposal, for myself.

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 17:45:00 -0400

I’ve been a bit stuck with my dissertation, and only partly due to parenting and chronic illness. I wasn’t quite sure what had me stuck before. I thought it was a need to develop a solid workflow. John Martin told me about a really cool writing tool called Gingko. It overwhelmed me at first because I could stand to see all those columns on screens at once, but once I found the keyboard shortcut for writing in fullscreen, I decided I would try using it to write my dissertation.

I started to get a new “tree” ready, and looked at another dissertation to help me model my structure.

But as I did that I realized…

Usually, a person’s dissertation proposal can become a significant chunk of the dissertation itself, with some expansion.

My dissertation proposal as originally written does not represent my dissertation as executed anymore.

I need to re-write my proposal, but for me.

In which I have a mid-life crisis and freak out about schooling as a societal... thing. Woo Dead Poets Society! 📽️

Mon, 07 Sep 2020 13:33:11 -0400

I’ve been pulled deep into Dark Academia’s orbit, because it is the aesthetic I’ve been unknowingly building my whole life, and because of this I watched DEAD POETS SOCIETY for the first time in a very long time last night.

Sometimes I’ll watch a movie that I haven’t watched in a long time and realize that it is one of the threads woven into the fabric of my very being. It’s true of LABYRINTH. It’s true of Tim Burton’s BATMAN. And it’s true of DEAD POETS SOCIETY.

I don’t know when I first saw this movie, only that in the ten years between its release and my high school graduation, it came to hold a special place in my heart. It was a constant cultural presence.

On the day our textbooks were issued in AP English, our teacher pointed out that there was an essay introduction not unlike that written by the apocryphal J. Evans Pritchard, PhD. He said that we would not be ripping it out of the book, but that we should ignore it.

To keep from having the dull inflected practice of the Latin teacher’s declension lesson in the movie, my Latin teacher had us stand on the desks as we shouted verb endings. When I became a Latin teacher, I did the same thing. In my first year of teaching, my students O Captain My Captained me after I assigned DPS for them to watch on a day that I was out sick. I thought, “Well, I have achieved a teacher’s dream in my first year, guess it’s time to retire.”

When I started this viewing, I thought, “Surely it won’t be as amazing as years of distance have made it seem,” but it is. (Is it without flaw? Of course not. And yet, still stunning.)

No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.

Mr. Keating said this and I held my breath. Here he had articulated something that lives at the very core of who I am.

I don’t want to spoil too much, though I feel like a 31 year old movie should be past the statute of limitations, but I’ll say this: a student dies in the film. And when the prep school administrator is speaking to the other students about this death in an assembly, here is what he says:

“He was a fine student. One of our best. He will be greatly missed.”

I got a little ragey. A fine student? I got a little horrified, as that’s kind of been my identity for much of my life. I got a little…

WHAT IS IT ALL FOR?

Why are people fine students, and why is THAT the thing you would remark on? This same character was kind, joyful, welcoming, compassionate. Isn’t that more important than being a fine student?

Looking at it from a realistic perspective, the administrator probably didn’t know the student well enough to know anything about him except that he was a fine student.

But in the moment, that’s not what mattered to me. I looked at myself and I asked myself, “Why? What was I a fine student for?” This character, I think he was a fine student out of duty, a sense of obligation to his family. When I talked to W. about it, he pointed out that I enjoy learning more broadly, and that there is value in learning. But I tossed back, “But you can learn a lot without being a fine student.”

I guess this is what it took for me to crack after devoting almost my entirely life to education in one way or another, especially my professional life. Here I am approaching the end of a PhD, and asking myself WHY DO WE EVEN SCHOOL?

There are reasons, and I’ve also been reading about unschooling, and I’m not going to break with school.

I just want to be sure it’s not the only remarkable thing in my or my family’s life.

📓 Redefining my professional identity: From research assistant to doctoral researcher

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 15:40:42 -0400

For the first few years of my doctoral program, I defined myself as a “doctoral student” and “research assistant.” This seemed like an appropriate designation, despite my experience as an education and information professional, because I was taking classes. I kept calling myself that as I was working on my comprehensive literature review, because there didn’t seem to be anything better to call myself than that. It was very exciting when I got to change my email signature to “Doctoral Candidate” in December, because now I was someone who had met all the requirements for a doctoral degree except for the dissertation. But I kept the designation of “research assistant.”

This summer, though, I started thinking about how that designation doesn’t really communicate much to anyone not steeped in academia. And also that it doesn’t say anything about what I do. So as of this school year, I started referring to myself as a “doctoral researcher.” This fits much better. I am doing what researchers do: I am running my own study as PI (my dissertation study) and I work in a lab with two other researchers, designing interview protocols, collecting and analyzing data, and writing reports based on the data. There is no part of my work that is really the work of a student. While I am technically assisting the PI of a research lab, the work I do is not so much assistive as collaborative. So.

I am a doctoral researcher.

For more thoughts on the distinction between a doctoral student and a doctoral researcher, see Pat Thomson’s blog post, “what’s with the name doctoral student?”

Image by Dariusz Sankowski from Pixabay.

📓 Semi-structured interviews: Stick to only a few big questions, but leave room for follow-ups

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 13:43:00 -0400

One of my responsibilities in the Equity in the Making lab is to create an interview guide that will help us learn what makerspace leaders in the UNC system consider to be defining features of a makerspace. I originally thought this was going to be a survey, so I came up with a list of about ten questions and then in conversation with my colleagues on the project, added four more. I realized in that conversation, however, that it was an interview guide for a semi-structured interview, not a survey. I told my colleagues I’d take our list of questions and hone it so that it was “more interviewy, less survey-y.” What did that look like?

Each question was getting at a larger issue of the spatial arrangement of a makerspace, especially as it would relate to one of the five senses. The next phase of the project involves using VR to build an imagined “definitive” makerspace, so we want to capture the kinds of things that should be included in that VR environment; this is why I focused on sensory input specifically. The questions were designed to draw out specifics that participants might not think of as falling into these categories; for example, we might be hoping they’d talk about equipment and they would instead talk about the mood or vibe of a space.

I learned from Dr. George Noblit, who taught my advanced qualitative methods class, that if you’re doing an interview for about an hour, you probably should stick with a few big questions. He once gave us an assignment to interview another grad student using only these three questions:

Before grad school?
During grad school?
After grad school?

I interviewed a friend and indeed, just those three questions took an hour for us to talk through. For my dissertation, I had 6 major questions, and that usually took 30 minutes to an hour depending on the participant. Dr. Melo said she wanted these interviews to run about 45 minutes, so I stuck with five questions.

I collapsed the original 14 questions into 5, but I then detailed potential follow up questions. This is, in my experience, the best way to be sure you get the kind of detail your hoping for if you’ve got a reticent participant. You start with the big question and see what they say. Then you can dig deeper if something they say is really promising, or bring in one of the prepared follow-up questions if they answer you quickly and you need more detail.

To see what this looks like, you can look at the interview guide for my dissertation. I’m setting up the EITM questions in a similar format.

In addition to the five questions I developed for this interview guide, I also added two more that I learned about in my qual classes, though I can’t remember if it was with Dr. Noblit or with Dr. Sherick Hughes:

Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn’t?
Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?

These are some of the richest questions you can ask, so I highly recommend including them as the last two questions before the demographics questions in any semistructured interview. In the case of my dissertation interviews, my second participant answered that first one by asking if I’d like to know the specifics of which resources she uses, and of course I wanted to know that and then I incorporated that into every interview afterward. When I was doing a coursework project and interviewing someone about a project they were working on, they answered these questions with “Don’t you want to know why I’m doing this?” and “Wouldn’t you like to hear my plans for [the term of the project]?” and of course the answer to both was yes, and that probably added another 30 minutes to an hour to our interview. (This won’t always be the case. Some participants are more forthcoming than others.)

I hope this has been helpful. If you’re working on a semistructured interview project, how is it going?

Tracy Deonn's LEGENDBORN: Black Girl Magic, Dark Academia, and Arthuriana ON MY CAMPUS! 📚

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 22:14:00 -0400

Publisher’s Summary:

After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on campus.

A flying demon feeding on human energies.

A secret society of so called “Legendborn” students that hunt the creatures down.

And a mysterious teenage mage who calls himself a “Merlin” and who attempts—and fails—to wipe Bree’s memory of everything she saw.

The mage’s failure unlocks Bree’s own unique magic and a buried memory with a hidden connection: the night her mother died, another Merlin was at the hospital. Now that Bree knows there’s more to her mother’s death than what’s on the police report, she’ll do whatever it takes to find out the truth, even if that means infiltrating the Legendborn as one of their initiates.

She recruits Nick, a self-exiled Legendborn with his own grudge against the group, and their reluctant partnership pulls them deeper into the society’s secrets—and closer to each other. But when the Legendborn reveal themselves as the descendants of King Arthur’s knights and explain that a magical war is coming, Bree has to decide how far she’ll go for the truth and whether she should use her magic to take the society down—or join the fight.

What I Love:

Um, everything? Seriously, I’m so thrilled to share this book with the world. Everyone should preorder it, right now. It’s full of Black Girl Magic and Arthuriana. If you’re looking for a Dark Academia vibe, it brings that with its Secret Societies, but it gives it a distinctly Southern flavor that is missing from most DA media I’ve seen. It’s got a LOT of representation: a Black young scholar, a Black botanist, a Taiwanese-American young scholar, a Black father insisting his Black daughter take care of her mental health, a Black psychologist, men loving men, women loving women, men loving men and women (thus far only sequentially, no polyamory here), women loving men and women (same), nonbinary people, archers, swordfighters, staff users, African heritage magic, European heritage magic, and kiiiind of something that I personally anyway interpreted as a magical metaphor for chronic illness. Also, mostly the representation is nonchalant and/or joyful, rather than focusing on misery.

And that’s before you get into its unique relationship with its setting, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This book leverages the most interesting things about the school (i.e., its proliferation of societies, both public and secret) and reckons with the university’s cruel history and less-than-stellar attempts to address it. In May, I will finish my fourth degree at UNC, and between my two most recent degrees, I worked on campus for three years. Before I began my undergrad career there, it seemed like a fairly magical place; once I started, it turned fairly mundane and stayed that way until I picked up this book, which reminded me of the magic and mystery it held for me in the past and added new layers to it.

I’m trying to work out how to address this next bit without getting it wrong, but I don’t know how, so I’m just going to risk being called in/called out because it’s worth the risk. This book is an excellent example of the power of an Own Voices text, because it lets readers in on some of the daily considerations, slights, and trauma that a young Black woman has to deal with. Deonn handles these bits of narrative so matter-of-factly; they are everyday realities in Bree’s life and as a white woman, I understood better how persistent these experiences are than I ever have before. It’s not that I didn’t know, intellectually, that this is the constant weight a Black woman must carry; it’s just that it hits differently when it’s narration from inside a Black woman’s head, rather than explanation directed at me as someone who is privileged to not have the same experiences.

Also there are hot boys and swoonworthy romance but that stuff doesn’t take centerstage and that is as it should be.

I really can’t praise it enough.

What I Want More Of:

There is nothing missing from this book. There was one climactic part that was a little confusing for me, but a later part explained it. (And I understood what was going on in the climax, I just thought maybe I was wrong.)

Deonn is working on the second book now, so here’s a quick wishlist for what I’d like to see in it:

the Lady of the Lake
the Forest Theater
lots more of Sel

What I Need to Warn You About:

There’s nothing about taste that I need to warn you about - this book is fast-paced, simultaneously lyrical and plainly written, and I really believe it would be a rare reader who wouldn’t enjoy it. If you’re not into fantasy, I guess, then it’s not for you.

I will provide a content warning, though: LEGENDBORN contains instances of both covert and overt racism, slavery, and rape.

Bonus Links:

If you read this and are interested in the history behind it, check out these resources:

Old East This is Bree’s dorm.

Wilson Library This is the library where Bree has to hide behind a column and calm down.

The Order of Gimghoul (definitely totally not the Order of the Round Table, NOPE, just a secret society at UNC with a castle in Battle Park and customs based on the ideals of Arthurian knighthood and chivalry)

Unsung Founders Memorial Deonn relocates this from McCorkle Place to the Arboretum, but otherwise it is exactly as described in the book. More here.

Davis Library This is the other library mentioned in the book.

The Old Chapel Hill Cemetery Deonn adds a mausoleum section that isn’t really there, but otherwise her description of the cemetery is accurate.

Confederate Memorial and Julian S. Carr The tragic parts of this book draw on real Carolina history just as much as the fun parts do.

Davie Poplar I’m not saying I’m just saying that maybe possibly this might be a tree with a hidden door in it, if UNC’s campus had such things.

Final Word:

Go preorder this right now. What are you waiting for?

Book: Legendborn
Author: Tracy Deonn
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Publication Date: 2020
Pages: 512
Age Range: Young Adult
Source of Book: Digital ARC from NetGalley

I'm done with exfoliants and goals. #TeamLowBar

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 16:43:19 -0400

Recently, I squeezed some of my Shea Moisture African Black Soap Soothing Body Wash on a washcloth while I was in the shower, and then rubbed it across my upper arm, as one does when washing one’s arm. It felt like it was scratching me. It’s got oats in it, which act as a gentle exfoliant. It felt like scratching, though. I think my nerves are just done, you know? I think it’s probably a fibromyalgia thing, and now my body is just immensely sensitive to the tiniest stuff. My kid pokes me with his elbow in a way that I wouldn’t even notice in the past, and now his elbow is just the sharpest thing and OW. So my skin was like “No, oats are not gentle, actually, please stop using this.”

So I thought about it. I said to my skin, “Okay skin. You know what skin? We are done with exfoliants.” What are exfoliants for, anyway? I’ve never had a good experience with them, and I’ve been using them since I was in middle or high school. All they do is feel like scratching to a greater or lesser degree. And why would I do that to myself?

For the same reason we do all kinds of things: self-improvement. But you know what?

I’m already pretty great.

I’m letting go, for the length of this pandemic if not longer, of the idea that I need to be improved upon in any way: that I need to acquire some skill I don’t have that will suddenly make me employable, that I need to scratch my skin to make it healthy, that I need to eat cleaner than my doctor suggests or my medical conditions require.

Anyone who has worked with me will tell you that my talk about not being a perfectionist and working up only to my own standards, not perfectionism, is some kind of nonsense and that my standards are too high to be reasonable during a global crisis.

“I’m going to set the bar low,” I said to myself. “All I’m going to do is completely fix my kid’s eating and sleep patterns so they don’t make me crazier than I naturally am, enforce a school-like schedule for him, meditate, do yoga, read a lot about possible next steps in my career, and start embodying my middle-aged-version-of-dark-academia aesthetic more fully. It’s basically doing nothing.”

AHAHAHA.

Kimberly: that is not nothing.

Yesterday, I told W. that I didn’t really do anything with my time during M., just let him watch TV and play games and just kind of play. He said, “You built him a Thor hammer.” (There may have been an intensifying expetive between “a” and “Thor,” and he might have said “Mjolnir” instead of “Thor hammer.” I don’t remember.) And I said, “Oh yeah, I did, didn’t I?”

Apparently turning a box, tape, construction paper, and aluminum foil into a cosplay prop is doing a thing.

I have some cognitive distortions, is what I’m getting at here.

So. I took that metaphorical bar and I put it ON THE FLOOR.

This happens once in a while: I decide to just not be so harsh on myself anymore. Let’s do it together.

In that light, I’m getting rid of all goals that aren’t basic living needs or dissertating and graduating. I said I was doing that already, but I hadn’t really done it. But now, maybe I am? I’m declaring that I am. Hold me to it, will you?

Now I’m going to go lie in a hammock.

What I'm excited about today: public scholarship and #SocSciComm 📓

Tue, 11 Aug 2020 10:23:00 -0400

Today, I’m excited about:

The Oxford Handbook of Methods for Public Scholarship
the first meeting of our Equity in the Making team. The scope document for this phase of the project includes “Project newsletters, social media, website updates”

Feeling bad, feeling better, and making it work with illness

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 14:10:00 -0400

“Have you ever felt pain in literally all of your joints at once?” I asked W. last night.

“No,” he said. “No, I never have.”

“Oh. That’s how I feel right now,” I told him.

On fibro pain days, the pain is most noticeable in my fingers and toes. (On thyroid/autoimmune pain days, it’s in my knees and ankles.) There are 30 joints in each of my feet. There are 27 in each of my hands. (If you have more or fewer than 10 fingers or toes, you have a different number of joints.) I can feel each one a little bit as I move. As I type. As I walk. As I wiggle my toes. The pain isn’t intense, but it is pretty much constant. It disrupts my day.

I often don’t tell people how I’m feeling, physically, because I’ve gotten to the point where it’s a baseline of not great (but, like, kind of okay? tolerable, we’ll say) and I just assume they’re tired of hearing me enumerate the ways I feel not good. But I thought it might be useful to get specific, today.

So today, yes. I feel all the joints in my fingers and toes creaking. My knees, elbows, shoulders, same thing to a lesser extent. I can feel all of my cervical vertebrae stacking on top of each other. I have a headache mostly concentrated over my left eye. It’s like a migraine, but I think it might not be a migraine. All of this is, I believe, because my muscles just sit in a constant state of tension, without my having much control over it.

Please don’t suggest your favorite remedy: I have a plan of action and am working on it. My doctor gave me some advice and I’m working through The FibroManual: A Complete Fibromyalgia Treatment Guide for You-and Your Doctor.

In other news and kind of related, I got some really good work done on my dissertation yesterday, tackling a problem that I’ve been struggling with for about two months. I think a couple of shifts in my working process are responsible for this:

I’ve given myself permission to work in bed. All the sleep hygiene people will tell you that you should only use your bed for sleeping and sex. That’s all well and good, but I think that advice is for people who aren’t dealing with chronic pain. Esmé Weijun Wang has a bed in her home office, which is brilliant, but I’m not about to buy an extra bed. (The home office doesn’t have room for it anyway.) Leonie Dawson was put on bedrest because of hypermobility problems and stayed productive in bed:

View this post on Instagram

Anyone else love working from bed?⁣ 🛌 ⁣ I just had a wildly productive work session in bed.⁣ ⁣ 🧠 Brainstormed a brand new course 💡 Networked with my mastermind 🗯 Told my accountability partner the HUGE new business and money insights I'm getting ✏️ Did some illustration work ⁣ Did you Get Shit Done today too?⁣ ⁣ #getshitdone #money #moneymaker #mastermind #ecourse #illustration #productivity #goals

A post shared by Leonie Dawson (@leonie_dawson) on Jul 21, 2020 at 4:46pm PDT

I did some reading of journal articles in bed the other day and it was brilliant.

I’m doing my thinking in a different space than I do my research and writing. I’ve been thinking while lying on a hammock, looking up at green leaves and blue sky. If you can get into nature for your thinking, I highly recommend it. But even if it’s just that you move from one chair to a different chair, I think that might work. Having my laptop in front of me, I feel like I need to be producing. But thinking time requires a different mindset. Lying on the hammock was more productive than many of the hours in front of my computer have been.

Next steps: So my next step is to embrace this mindset. I’m going to keep a backrest pillow and a lapdesk under my bed. At the end of my work time, I’m going to shut down my laptop, put it in my backpack, and carry it up to my bedroom so that if I’m struck with inspiration at 3 in the morning I don’t have to go downstairs to get to work. I asked for The Book Seat and got it for my birthday, so even when my arms are weak or achey, I can read.

I’m feeling really optimistic about the effect this set up will have on my productivity. We’ll see.

via GIPHY

From Parul Sehgal: In a Raft of New Books, Motherhood From (Almost) Every Angle

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 10:37:00 -0400

In this piece that is mostly a review of Jacqueline Rose’s book Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, Parul Sehgal offers more titles to add to the motherhood reading list.

“Mothers “are not in flight from the anguish of what it means to be human,” Rose writes. She quotes Julia Kristeva: “To be a mother, to give birth, is to welcome a foreigner, which makes mothering simply ‘the most intense form of contact with the strangeness of the one close to us and of ourselves.’”

Isn’t it pretty to think so? Recent books on motherhood, however, frequently and sometimes unwittingly, illustrate a different phenomenon: how motherhood dissolves the border of the self but shores up, often violently, the walls between classes of women.

Sehgal names some of these walls: pay gaps and maternal health outcomes, both hinging on race. She points out:

…so many of these books (almost all of them are by white, middle-class women) seem wary of, if not outright disinterested in, more deeply engaging with how race and class inflect the experience of motherhood.

The books listed in this article and in Elkin’s are a beginning. As a canon, the list has glaring gaps, most noticeably around race and queerness. The following articles seek to fill those gaps, and I’ll be discussing them in depth in the coming days:

Why Are We Only Talking About ‘Mom Books’ by White Women? by Angela Garbes for The Cut
We Need to Talk About Whiteness in Motherhood Memoirs by Nancy Reddy for Electric Literature
As A Queer Woman, I Can’t Afford To Be Ambivalent About Motherhood by Katie Heaney for Buzzfeed

From Lauren Elkin: "Why All the Books About Motherhood?"

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 15:08:27 -0400

I’ve been sitting on Lauren Elkin’s article asking “Why all the books about motherhood? for a year and a half and only read it fully for the first time today. It offers an immense reading list of books related to motherhood. Many of them are written by mothers, and so I think by default curating their writing counts as curating stories of creative mothers.

Elkin quotes Jenny Offill in an interview with Vogue:

“Early on, I took my colicky baby to one of those new-mothers’ groups. I wasn’t sure how to connect with them, but I desperately wanted to. But the affect seemed odd. The new mothers seemed to be talking in these falsely bright voices; all the anecdotes were mild ones of “the time she lost her pacifier on the bus” variety. No one seemed to feel like a bomb had gone off in their lives, and this made me feel very, very alone. Gaslighted, almost. Why weren’t we talking more about the complexity of this new experience?”

This resonates immensely with my new mom group experience. I would go. I would not know what to talk about. Our babies would be cute. I would feel awkward. I would leave knowing it was good that I got out of the house, but only feeling a little less lonely. I didn’t know how to reach out. Maybe the moms in these books will reach me.

Elkin says:

The new books on motherhood are a countercanon. They read against the literary canon with its lack of interest in the interior lives of mothers, against the shelves of “this is how you do it” books, and against the creeping hegemony of social-media motherhood.

I welcome this countercanon.

From Hillary Frank: The Special Misogyny Reserved for Mothers

Sun, 02 Aug 2020 20:59:00 -0400

Despite receiving multiple rejections from radio station editors, journalist and author Hillary Frank kept her podcast about parenting, “The Longest Shortest Time,” going for three years before it was picked up by WNYC and then Stitcher.

She learned a lot making the show:

That parents can be civil with one another on the internet. That naming an episode “Boobs” will make it your most popular one ever. And that there is a special kind of misogyny reserved for mothers.

Her success with the show didn’t halt the misogyny, but it does show that moms can create success in their creative endeavors. Not only did she keep the podcast going without outside funding for three years, she continued to host it for four more years before transitioning to the role of executive producer. She also wrote Weird Parenting Wins, " a collection of personal essays about parenting, as well as crowdsourced parenting strategies from the worldwide LST community" (source).

From Austin Kleon: Books on art and motherhood

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 16:01:29 -0400

During my son’s first few weeks, I spent most of his naps reading about matrescence (the process of becoming a mother) and identity crises. What did I even care about anymore, besides keeping him alive? Writing? Performing? I’d spent the past three years developing an identity as an improv comedian. Where had that identity gone? Would I ever get it back? Did I even want it back? What about all the other creative identities I’d had before? I’d been a writer, singer, actor, dancer, cross-stitcher, crocheter… Were those people still inside me? At some point in all of my browsing, I ran across Austin Kleon’s recommendations for books on art and motherhood. I’m still on the first book on his list, but the fact that he could make a list gave me some hope that I could figure this out.

#TheSealeyChallenge Link Roundup 📚

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 22:46:00 -0400

I’ve been looking for ways to read more books and talk to more people about them, so when the Book Riot piece, Will You Join The Sealey Challenge? came across my radar, it made sense to answer YES.

During the month of August, participants read a poetry chapbook or full-length collection a day for 31 days while sharing their reads on social media using the hashtag #TheSealeyChallenge, named after poet Nicole Sealey and coined by Dante Micheaux during its first year.

Here are several links where you can learn more about the challenge and find suggestions of what to read:

Nicole Sealey: Why I Read a Poetry Book Every Day For a Month (Bookmarks)
The Sealey Challenge: An Expansive Way of Reading Poetry (Lithub)
31 Poets Recommend 31 Poetry Books to Read Every Day in August (Electric Literature)
Every Poem Is a Love Poem to Something: An Interview with Nicole Sealey (The Paris Review)
On the value of reading poetry together—and apart—in the current moment. (Lithub)

I myself will be reading a combination of library ebooks selected from recommendations linked in the Book Riot piece, e-chaps from Sundress Publications, and whatever I’ve got lying around the house. So you can expect that in addition to modern new-to-me poets, there will be some children’s collections of e. e. cummings and Emily Dickinson, one day of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and maybe even a YA verse novel or two.

Let me know if you decide to join in!

Welcome to Genetrix: Curating Stories of Creative Mothers

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 13:57:00 -0400

Yesterday, I talked about my project, Genetrix: Curating Stories of Creative Mothers and how I would be incorporating it here into my personal site rather than keeping it in its own place anymore. Today I’m posting the introduction to the project that I wrote a year and a half ago, with some notes afterward on things that have changed in the past year and a half.

How did we get here? I’d been collecting articles and books about motherhood and art for months when Electric Literature published Grace Elliott’s “Why Do I Have to Choose Between Being a Writer and a Mother?” in which she writes:

I am having such trouble finding narratives of women who are mothers and artists, or mothers and musicians, or mothers and writers — stories in which women are both, without their struggle to be more than a mother overwhelming them… [I am] looking for a narrative in which creative women do not have to choose between abandoning their work or their children. I hope to find a story of women who live as men do: loving and ambitious, child-raisers and artists.

As a mother and a writer, this spoke to me on a soul level. Reading this immediately followed my participation in Kim Werker’s Daily Making Jumpstart Live, two weeks of attempting to make something daily. In the course of that process, two weeks during which sometimes my two year old son didn’t nap, I found my relationship with creativity and making changing. At first, I had ambitions of crocheting rows and rows a day, preparing elaborate meals, maybe taking up woodworking. In the middle, I started to count mixing some chai concentrate with almond milk as my making for the day. But by the end, I was, in fact, chugging along with crochet, knocking out a giant doily shawl over the course of a week. Some days I could be a mother and a creative person, and other days I couldn’t.

Elliott’s writing and this experience confirmed for me that I needed to seek out the stories of other creative mothers. And my natural inclination is to share the stories I find.

What are we doing here? Like motherhood itself, creating and curating this project will be a process of trial and error. I’ll be sharing links to blog posts and articles that inspire me and can serve as a launching point into our journey at the intersection of creativity and motherhood. I’m hoping to include reviews of relevant books and media, and conversational interviews with actual creative mothers. But please tell me what you would like to see in this space. I’m especially interested in ideas for how we can build a community of people interested in stories of creative mothers.

Who am I? I’m Kimberly Hirsh, and I’m a mother, performer, writer, and crafter. Most of my creativity these days is used to produce academic writing as part of my doctoral work toward a PhD in information and library science. If you want to get to know me better, you can check out my website.

I’m a white, American, raised Christian but currently agnostic and a little witchy, chronically ill but without other disabilities, vaguely straight, monogamously heterosexually partnered, legally married, postgraduate educated, middle class cis woman. I’m a full-time graduate student with a part-time assistantship.

My son was conceived after three years of PCOS-driven anovulatory infertility via intercourse with no medical assistance other than metformin, born of my body, delivered vaginally, and while the labor, birth, and aftermath definitely came with some trauma, it was relatively uncomplicated.

I’m blessed/lucky/privileged to have my parents, my partner’s parents, and our siblings all living close by and able to help with our son. He and I spend five mornings a week at a coworking space/Montessori School, but I am his primary caregiver. We live in a suburban neighborhood in a medium-sized city with many organizations and activities designed to support young children and their families.

A note on inclusion… All those characteristics and experiences mentioned above obviously affect my lens on creativity and motherhood. I’m going to deliberately seek out perspectives different than my own, but I’m also going to mess up. Please feel free to let me know when I do and to share stories and perspectives I miss.

Who counts as a creative mother? For our purposes, a mother is anyone who identifies as a mother. As for a definition of creativity, well, I’m thinking here of writers, artists, performers, designers, architects, crafters… But that definition is a floor, not a ceiling.

What has changed since January 2019? My son is three, almost four now, rather than two. Our Montessori/co-working space closed at the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic and will not re-open in the time we had left to spend there. We are socially distanced from most of our family members, though my husband’s mother does come over most days to help with our son so I can get literally any work done on my dissertation at all. The many wonderful organizations and opportunities for families with young children in our city are not currently available to us, either because they are closed or because we are continuing mostly to stay at home, as I may be at higher risk of complications from COVID-19 if I should contract it.

Thank you for joining me. If you’re interested in receiving a weekly email that includes all of my Genetrix posts, please sign up here.

Curating stories of motherhood and creativity, esp. writing

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 17:48:00 -0400

Exactly a year and a half ago, I started a newsletter called Genetrix after reading Grace Elliott’s article, “Why Do I Have to Choose Between Being a Writer and Being a Mother?” for Electric Literature. It lasted exactly 2 issues before I got overwhelmed by my own perfectionism and stopped sending it out.

In March of this year, I planned to resurrect it, as an automatically generated newsletter with a feed from a tumblr. Then the pandemic happened.

But today, as I was reading Avni Doshi and Sophie Mackintosh in conversation about writing about motherhood, I realized that I need these stories. I crave them. And I know other people do, too. So I’m going to use the lowest-friction way to share them.

And that way is a category here at kimberlyhirsh.com devoted to them, with its own RSS feed that goes out to an automatically-generated newsletter. More and more, I think everything of mine is going to come from this one space, and I think it’s for the best.

Anyway, more on this project tomorrow.

A post-ac/alt-ac reading list

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 12:52:00 -0400

Posting this list of books here in case others might find it useful. It will probably grow with time.

‘Making it’ as a contract researcher : a pragmatic look at precarious work - Nerida Spina, Jess Harris, Simon Bailey, Mhorag Goff
Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers - Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly and Thomas J. Tobin
The Freelance Academic: Transform Your Creative Life and Career - Katie Rose Guest Pryal
Succeeding Outside The Academy: Career Paths beyond the Humanities, Social Sciences, and STEM - Edited by Joseph Fruscione and Kelly J. Baker

Last updated: August 1, 2020.

Advanced Literature Review Tips

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 12:21:00 -0400

By far, my most visited blog post ever is my Start-to-Finish Literature Review Workflow and honestly, I return to it myself fairly often. I sent it to my EdCamp friend Allison Rae Redden when she was writing her first critical lit review in grad school. I also tweeted a couple more advanced lit review tips at her, and I wanted to gather those here. So here goes!

Make a concept map before you outline. If you haven’t concept mapped before outlining, go back and do that. (I scoffed at my prof who suggested this. I thought I was so good at lit reviews I didn’t need it. I was wrong.) I like to use bubbl.us, which I learned about from Dr. Summer Pennell.

Synthesize. It’s tempting and easy to just summarize studies, but putting them in conversation with each other is much better. Synthesizing the results of multiple studies is a good way to bring them together. Focus on grouping them by findings and briefly mention context and methods as you introduce each article.

Explicitly articulate critiques of studies. Identify gaps and point them out. I usually say something like ”It’s worth noting that none of these studies address…" or similar. I try to be descriptive rather than speculative - noting what’s missing - without directly pointing to how a specific study could be improved, but that’s just me.

If you simultaneously synthesize instead of summarize AND provide a strong description of each study’s context, methods, and results, you’ll be way ahead of most people.

I hope in the future to provide more specific examples for these tips like I did in my earlier post, but I decided it was more important to go ahead and get this out in the world than to wait until I had perfected it.

Cross-posted to: Twitter

Creative Time as Meditation Time

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 10:25:42 -0400

What if we considered our creative time to be meditation time? Repetitive crafts like knitting, crochet, and cross-stitch can have that effect. (The scholar-librarian in me wants to track down a reference/link for this. The human in me is granting me a pass.) What if this wasn’t an indulgence, but a matter of health? What if it were like a dietary supplement or a daily medication?

I think the circumstances of my learning crochet help me think this way. I bought my first hook, yarn, and pamphlet while I was stopped at Wal-Mart to grab supplies to help with a migraine that was debilitating enough I had gone home from student teaching because of it. I took them back to my boyfriend’s house (I don’t think he was there, but I preferred his house to mine, always. Now he’s my husband and we have just one house between us) and in addition to my usual migraine remedies, I applied crochet. I think having it to focus on helped me ignore the pain, almost. So I really do think of crochet as an OTC migraine remedy.

If you aren’t motivated by the capitalist notion that your productivity is the highest good (I am, though I’m trying to break myself of it), what if you think of your creative time like food, exercise, or a nap? Something that, if you grant yourself the time to do it, will leave you renewed, with fresh vigor to apply to your other tasks?

This post is lightly adapted from a post in Kim Werker’s Community of Creative Adventurers. If you need a community to support your creative adventures, please come join us! You can join for free. We’ve got a forum and weekly Zoom hangouts. And if you choose to be a patron and support Kim’s work, you get access to her amazing classes and extra forums.

My new dream: To write and share helpful things

Sun, 19 Jul 2020 18:05:34 -0400

I think a lot about dreams. Following them. Achieving them. Making new ones.

The first dream I remember - one that felt aligned with my life purpose - was to be a big sister. I achieved that at age 4 1/2.

There was a very long time when my dream alternated between being a celebrated science fiction and fantasy novelist and being a Broadway star. I think that dream was, I don’t know, from maybe ages 8 to 18?

I toyed briefly with a screenwriter dream when I was in college, and then after that I kind of didn’t have a dream for a while. After a few years of teaching, being a librarian became my dream. And when I went to school to achieve that dream, I found a new dream: working for LEARN NC full-time, instead of in my position at the time as a graduate assistant. I spent a year working as a school librarian and then achieved the dream of getting a full-time gig at LEARN NC. I had that job for two years before it became clear that our supporting department’s priorities were changing and the organization would not be supported in the coming years, so I left for what I thought was maybe a dream, but was definitely an interest, getting my doctorate.

Getting my PhD wasn’t actually a dream and still isn’t, but it does remain an important interest, and one that I intend to achieve by May. But I still HAD a dream once I started on that one and confirmed it was more interest than dream, and that was to be a mom.

Of all the dreams I’ve achieved, that one was the hardest to accomplish. But I did it, and it has been every bit as fulfilling and exhausting as you might imagine.

So for 3+ years, I’ve been flailing a bit for a new dream. Was it to swim in a mermaid tail? Or with manatees? No. Those were more interests than dreams. (The difference between an interest and a dream in my mind/experience is the level of visceral desire involved. If you think in your head, “Wow, that’d be cool! I hope I get to do that!” it’s an interest. If you feel in your gut, “That would fundamentally change who I am and how I define myself in a way that I really want to be changed,” that’s a dream.)

But today I found it. I was reading Derek Sivers’s description of his book Hell Yeah or No in which he writes that after selling the business CD Baby and realizing that rather than just building a business again he could make a real change in his life,

For the next ten years, I wrote for hours a day in my private journal, asking myself questions and answering them. Then often taking experimental and radical actions based on these thoughts.

The thoughts and experiences that seemed useful to others, I’d share on my website, which are now collected here in this book for you.

I read that and I thought to myself, “I want to write useful things.”

Then I thought about the word “useful” for a moment.

I decided no, that’s not it.

I want to write helpful things.

It might seem like a small distinction, but to me, if something is useful, its value is defined purely by utility. What can you do with this information? Something that is helpful might be useful. But its value might be defined by something else. It might be defined by how it makes you feel: less alone, understood, moved. That’s a little different than useful.

Writing these things, of course, isn’t enough if they just stay with me. Rather, I want to write them, but I also want to share them.

So that’s the dream.

I want to write and share helpful things.

Let’s get started.

📺 Netflix's Babysitters Club: Response and Link Roundup 📚

Fri, 17 Jul 2020 13:58:31 -0400

I binged the Netflix Babysitters Club series last weekend. Growing up, I was not a Babysitters Club obsessive like many of my peers. They were one of the many series on offer that I enjoyed. The main thing about them that thrilled me was that, unlike many of the other books I read, they were books that other kids had also read and would talk to me about.

So. Not obsessive. But I’m still filled with nostalgia for them. And, unlike many of my peers seemed to do, I read them mostly in order, so the Netflix series sticking with the order for the first few episodes made me really happy. I told W. the other day that much as women older than us did with Sex and the City, many girls my age strongly identified with a particular BSC character. (In case you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, the main characters on SitC were Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda, and you could buy lots of merch that proclaimed things like “I’m a Samantha.” In case you’re curious, I’m a Charlotte with aspirations of being a Carrie.) Lucy Aniello, director of the Netflix BSC series, describes herself as “a Kristy with a Stacey rising” (and in case you aren’t familiar with that, it’s a reference to astrology. I’m a hard Mallory with some Kristy tendencies, who wished to be Claudia but was too good at school and bad at art to come close. (I did wear coordinated-but-mismatched earrings and hide candy all over my bedroom, though.)

I loved the show. Its tone is amazingly perfect. The performances are great. I would like Alicia Silverstone to be my co-parent, please. All of the things done to update it are beautiful and none of them feel weird. I don’t have a lot to say about the show itself besides that.

What really hit me this time around was Stacey. When I read the books, I was relatively poor, unfashionable (though not without style), and the only big city I had ever been to was Miami. Stacey was so far out of my reach. (By the way, the costume designs on the new show perfectly evoke the original characters; of all of them, though, Stacey’s outfits look the most like I think Stacey’s outfits should.) I was sickly, catching every virus that came my way and maxing out my 10 allowed absences before I started being considered truant, but I wasn’t ill.

Life is different now. Now I’m diagnosed with four chronic illnesses (two mental), with another one undiagnosed but likely. While illness doesn’t define me, it strongly shapes my experiences and decisions. And watching Stacey deal with that moved me so thoroughly. Stacey’s not wanting anyone to know about her diabetes, because then she won’t be a person anymore, she’ll be a sick person. Fearing the consequences. And, the point that actually brought me close to tears: after Stacey goes into insulin shock on the job, her having to face a room full of clients (along with her fellow BSC members, blessedly) and listen to them say things like “Do I even want her watching my kids if something like this could happen again?” (I’m paraphrasing here.) Y’all, the impact of chronic illness on work and hireability is real, and to see it in microcosm for a twelve-year-old was every bit as affecting as seeing it for an adult would be, if not moreso.

Anyway. That was a new perspective. A part of me wants to go read the books again and pay close attention to how my feelings about Stacey are different now.

So. I didn’t have a lot of insight to offer on the series, just my personal response, but if you want to read more about it, here are a bunch of interesting and relevant articles:

‘The Baby-Sitters Club’ Is Back: Help Yourself to the Fridge (New York Times)
The Baby-Sitters Club Taught Me Everything I Needed to Know About Literary Fiction (New York Times)
‘The Baby-Sitters Club’ Defies and Exceeds Expectations (New York Times)
How The Baby-Sitters Club raised a generation (Vox)
‘The Baby-Sitters Club’ Gives Us Intersectional Feminism Without the Angst (Gen)
Why THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB Netflix Series is Even Better Than the Books (Book Riot)

Who will I be? 2020-2021 edition

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 12:05:12 -0400

On my last birthday, I set out a list of things that described who I wanted to be in the coming year. I’m pretty satisfied that those describe who I have been this year and who I will continue to be. So a couple of days ago, I asked myself again, Who will I be next?

So here’s who I want 39-year-old Kimberly to be:

I want to be someone who brings all of herself into play as often as possible. I want to pick up parts of me that I’ve let lie fallow for a while and nurture them again. As Austin Kleon says, “Don’t throw any of yourself away.” See: Me taking CS50x. Me remembering that OH RIGHT I LOVE MUSICAL THEATER.

I want to be someone who connects with her friends. I spend more time than is fair to anyone feeling like people don’t respond when I reach out, but when I take a look at myself I see that I, too, am prone to not responding when friends reach out to me. So I want to be a more responsive friend, to respond to my friend’s bids by turning towards them, not away from them. And also to remember that when people don’t respond to my bids, it’s not necessarily because they don’t want to be friends anymore.

Loftier:

I want to be a civic hacker.

I want to start a microbusiness (the business will be called Kimberly Hirsh; I’m currently considering two possible income-generating projects for the business called Kimberly Hirsh, and may end up pursuing both of them).

Not so lofty:

I’d really like to be a doctor of philosophy by my next birthday. 🤞

How to Celebrate Kimbertide (AKA my birthday, AKA Bastille Day)

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 14:51:00 -0400

About 10 years ago, when I shared that I usually take at least a week to celebrate my birthday and consider it a season, my friend Dr. Alison Buck suggested that I refer to this season as Kimbertide, and so I do. I usually plan several different celebratory possibilities so that if friends can’t make it to one event, I still get to celebrate with them at another. (If you have questions about why a woman as grown as me still celebrates, you can email me and we’ll talk about it.)

This year, obviously, is a bit different. At first I was going to try to coordinate a number of virtual activities, some synchronous and some asynchronous, but instead I’m going a bit more free form. So instead, I’m providing a menu of possibilities for fun things you might do to celebrate. If you do any of these, I’d love it if you comment here and share a link!

Bake something. Bonus points if it’s cupcakes. I’m going to be making myself chocolate cake using this gluten-free vegan mix and vegan frosting that I discovered at Target. I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to have a gluten-free, corn-free, potato-free cake mix that I don’t have to create myself. And canned frosting! That’s something I never thought I would eat again. (If you know me, you know that I tend to be a cake and frosting snob, due to having a strong obsession with cupcakes when I was getting my MSLS. But more than a cake and frosting snob, I am a tired doctoral candidate looking for something easy to make as an activity with my kid, so. Mix and can.) I’d love to see what you bake!
Cosplay. I’m planning to spend tomorrow morning painting the belt buckle for my Kitty Pryde cosplay. You can go elaborate or casual. Whatever you want. Closet cosplay is always a good option. My favorite fandoms are anything Whedonverse, X-Men, and Disney. I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to wear tomorrow. But if you dress up, SEND ME PICS!
Have a Darkwave Dance Party. You can put on this Spotify playlist created by my friend, author Nathan Kotecki/DJ Twentieth Century Boy. Grab a little video and tell me where to find it! Or just do it and tell me you did, you don’t HAVE to make a video or anything. Alternately, you can attend the Zoom party [Facebook link] he’s hosting tomorrow night, which may be more just strange and a little less dark.
Watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’m probably going to watch “Once More with Feeling” in the next couple of days, because I’m just feeling that vibe right now. (Hulu is probably the best place to stream BtVS.) Never seen it before? Need a starter episode? The double pilot is a solid introduction, but if you can’t commit to more than 45 minutes, you can jump in with the Season 1 finale “Prophecy Girl,” Season 2 Episode 7 “Lie to Me,” or Season 3 Episode 11 “Gingerbread”." If you want to have the full Kimberly Hirsh experience, start with Season 4 Episode 8, “Pangs.” (I’m pretty sure that was the first episode I ever saw. It’s possible it was an earlier one but I think what I’m recalling when I recall bits from the earlier episodes is probably what was in that night’s “Previously.”)
Watch The Little Mermaid. For my ninth and twenty-ninth birthdays, I had The Little Mermaid-themed parties. For my thirty-ninth, I might try to talk my kid into watching The Little Mermaid, The Little Mermaid II, and the prequel. (Well, maybe not the prequel.) I’ll be all IT’S MY BIRTHDAY! and he’ll be all I WILL WATCH ANYTHING YOU’LL LET ME!
Play a game. Video or board, your choice. I’m actually thinking about trying to pull together a Jackbox games remote play, maybe for Sunday, 7/19, around 2:30 pm ET. Let me know if you’re interested.
Make something. My go-tos are cross-stitch or crochet, but you make whatever sounds fun to you.

There you go, seven ways to celebrate my birthday/excuses to do something fun. Thanks for joining me!

My Favorite People with Weird Internet Careers

Thu, 09 Jul 2020 14:36:47 -0400

I started reading Because Internet, by Gretchen McCulloch, this morning. I first became familiar with her work when I listened to her on an episode of the Fansplaining podcast. I’m not quite sure what pointed me to her Weird Internet Careers series of blog posts, but I have read and re-read these posts, working toward building a roadmap for myself to have a Weird Internet Career. Because it seems like of all the people in the world who could have a Weird Internet Career, I’m one of them.

In her bio for the book, McCulloch says she “lives in Montreal and on the Internet.” Me too, Gretchen. I mean, I live in Durham rather than Montreal, but also on the Internet. We are of a kind, Gretchen McCulloch and myself.

So. Go read those posts. If you’d rather read them all smooshed together in one Google Doc, you’ll get a link sent to you after you sign up for Gretchen McCulloch’s newsletter.

Do you know of any people with Weird Internet Careers? Here are my favorites, besides Gretchen McCulloch.

Kim Werker - Kim Werker started the online crochet magazine Crochet Me back in the early 2000s, which led to an offer to be editor of Interweave Crochet. She did that for a few years, and moved on to other work. She is a freelance editor who probably gets most of her clients from Internet interactions. She is a speaker and instructor. You can sign up for her latest class, Crochet for Challenging Times and get access to an ever-growing library of instructional videos and patterns, as well as access to a class-specific forum on her Community for Creative Adventurers, which she crowdfunds through both Patreon and the community software. Use code STUDENTLOVE40 to get 40% off the cost of Crochet for Challenging Times through the end of July. Now’s a great time to buy, since the cost of the course is going to increase in the future. Kim has a lot of other classes you can find on her website. too. And if you join her online community, you can jump in on video calls, which are a great source of delight and help to stave off loneliness in these super isolated times. Kim has also edited and written books; all of this has been fueled by stuff she does on the Internet.

Austin Kleon - Austin Kleon’s first book, Newspaper Blackout, was the result of him posting a newspaper blackout poem on his blog every day starting in 2005. He is one of the most generous people online and has four other books you can check out, videos of him that you can watch, and is currently experimenting with doing more online speaking.

Leonie Dawson - Leonie Dawson is a freaking rainbow hippie goddess, artist, writer, and multimillionaire. Her career started because she was a blogger; she created custom artwork for clients she met online, hosted women’s retreats for Internet friends to meet in person, and for many years offered a subscription community that included access to everything she made, including ecourses, ebooks, and meditations. Now she offers several ecourses and, like both Kim and Austin, is immensely generous.

So these are my favorite people with Weird Internet Careers and the thing is - NONE of them monetize their blogs through ads. While they might do some affiliate marketing, it’s unobtrusive and not their main source of income. I’m thinking if I want to have a Weird Internet Career, too, these are the models I should look to.

Who are your favorite Weird Internet Careerists?

📚 Reflecting on Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility"

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 18:07:28 -0400

Please note: Robin DiAngelo says she’s writing for a white audience, and I’m white, so my perspective on this book will likewise be more about its usefulness for white people. Author and scholar Lauren Michele Jackson states that for her (a Black woman, I think), “much of the material felt intuitive.” I don’t feel remotely qualified to tell any BIPOC if this would be a valuable book for them to read.

I read White Fragility over the weekend, only reading it so quickly because my university library limits checkouts of the eBook to a 24 hour loan period. The book reinforced a lot of the things I learned as I was working on Project READY.

I would especially recommend it if you need an introduction to the concept of racism as a systemic force rather than a personal failing. Whether it will be helpful for you will depend on where you are in your journey. If you have done some Racial Equity Institute training, a lot of the concepts will feel familiar, I think. (It’s been a few years since I did mine, and I think they’ve changed a bit, but certainly some of the ideas are related.)

I’ll share some quotes in a bit, but as a person who has been (slowly) increasing my awareness in this area for a few years, the most valuable part for me was when DiAngelo offered a specific example of a time when she made an unintentionally racist joke in front of a Black colleague who had only just met her and later worked to repair the breach this caused. I don’t want to summarize because I don’t want this to be seen as a set of tips, tricks, best practices, or lifehacks. I’ll just say that much of the book is introductory concepts and it’s all leading to the discussion DiAngelo offers of what to do next.

One of the articles about the end of the girlboss that I mentioned last week in my post about Naomi Alderman’s The Power critiques the book as “the Lean In of the 2020s, a book by a white woman, for white women, that says: See this big systemic problem? Start by working on yourself.” I think this is a well-made point, one that I’d like to unpack in the future so I will keep thinking about it. The article’s author, Leigh Stein, then points out that “White Fragility is social justice through the lens of self-improvement and, as is always the case with self-improvement programs marketed to white women, there’s money to be made here.” Stein cites DiAngelo’s speaker’s fee of $30,000 - $40,000. I’m keeping my eyes peeled for more people writing about this but haven’t tracked it down yet. But, as a point of comparison, see Ijeoma Oluo’s Twitter thread about the pay gap between white speakers on race and BIPOC speakers on race; Oluo’s fees are $0 - $12K+, depending on who’s asking. I’ve just bookmarked a Slate article about “White Fragility” to read for later.

What I think both Stein, and Lauren Michele Jackson, author of the Slate article, worry about is that people will read this book and think, “Cool. I am antiracist now. I did it, I read this one book, I’m done.” It’s a reasonable fear. I urge you not to be the person who says that to yourself. This book is a fine introduction to systemic racism. I don’t think it can begin to touch on the larger project of dismantling that, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t value in improving your own day to day interactions and working to be more conscious of the ways you can’t help but be influenced by a system centuries in the making.

That said: here are some bits I found especially noteworthy. All page numbers are from my ePub edition.

“…we don’t have to intend to exclude for the results of our actions to be exclusion.” (p. 14)

I did not set this system up, but it does unfairly benefit me. I do use it to my advantage, and I am responsible for interrupting it." (p. 126)

“…stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don’t have them.” (p. 129)

As I continue to read and work through Project READY at my own (very slow) pace (because working on a project is not the same as actually trying its outcome), I hope to write more about why this is work for white people, the tricky balance of honoring BIPOC knowledge without demanding BIPOC labor (pro-tip, lots of BIPOC scholars and thinkers share their work in easily accessible spaces, so you can learn a lot without asking anyone you actually know to do this work for you), and why (unfortunately) white people seem to receive this kind of thing better from other white people than from BIPOC.

School and Life goals for 2020 Q3

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 11:52:15 -0400

Here are my goals for 2020 Q3:

School goals

Complete my dissertation data collection.
Write two chapters of my dissertation: Ch. 2 Information Horizon Maps and Ch. 3 Information Literacy Practices.

Life goals

Read for fun, a lot.
Find my relaxation response triggers as described in Ginevra Liptan’s book, The FibroManual: A Complete Fibromyalgia Treatment Guide for You and Your Doctor.

I’m keeping it light. I had many more goals in mind but these are the most important things right now.

📚 Dr. Kelly J. Baker's "Grace Period" resonated strongly with me.

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 13:26:38 -0400

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading Dr. Kelly J. Baker’s book, Grace Period: A Memoir in Pieces. I read it very quickly, over the course of maybe two or three days. I would stay up late reading it and walk around the house in a bit of a daze, squinting at my phone (I read it via Kindle Unlimited and have no Kindle, so).

I read the book hoping it might illuminate post-ac options for me, particularly the path of a freelance writer. I found that it struck me on a much more visceral level than that.

It’s interesting that it touched me so deeply, because Dr. Baker and I are very different. Dr. Baker came into academia with a dream of being a tenure track professor. She worked as a contingent instructor and a full-time lecturer, spending six years on the academic job market before determining she needed to take her “grace period.” I came into the PhD program focused on getting good at both conducting and understanding research, without my heart set on a specific professional outcome. I assumed there would be no tenure track job for me, and as I watched my tenure track, highly respected advisor deal with all that this professional life entails, I determined that it wasn’t something I was interested in.

AND YET.

In spite of that, so much of this book resonated with me.

Baker talks a lot about love, the way we are supposed to love our work, discipline, scholarship. She says,

I both adored and loathed my training. I see-sawed from romantic highs (seminar discussions, research, theory) to tortured lows (self-doubt, impostor syndrome, research). I almost quit multiple times. Yet I trudged through, because love is about compromise, or so they say. (p. 28, Kindle edition)

This resonated with me so strongly. I had my first PhD meltdown, as I call them, in the first week of my program. I remember it well. I was working on my back deck, enjoying some unseasonably tolerable weather on our hammock, and I realized that in the first week I had already fallen dreadfully behind. “I can’t do this,” I thought. I even told W. that maybe I should quit.

“Maybe I should quit” and “I’m going to get kicked out” were constant refrains from me that first year.

And yet. When people ask me if they should do a PhD, I say “YES TOTALLY!” followed by “No, definitely not.” Because you totally should; when else are you going to have time to prioritize deep learning? But you totally shouldn’t; it’s almost impossible financially without a supporting partner. (Two of my fellow SILS PhDs that I can think of and I myself have lawyer husbands, and I don’t imagine any of those three could do this otherwise.)

The love we feel for this deep learning, as Baker points out, allows us to be exploited. The minimum graduate stipend in my program is about $7000 below the minimum cost-of-living for one person in the town where the university is located. That exploitation, Baker says, “doesn’t make us love our work less. Instead, it often pushes us to love that work more—to consider it something deeper, a vocation instead of just a job.” (p. 30) I’ve fought against this sense, pretty successfully, but I suspect that’s because I’ve already experienced that vibe as a K-12 educator and I’m so burned out from it that I won’t let it happen again.

Baker writes about how most years, her birthday was a day to mark all the ways in which she failed in the past year, but after she began her grace period, “My birthday became a day that showed I made it through another year. For once, that was enough. It always should have been.” (p. 78)

My birthday is two weeks from now. I do use it to reflect on the past year often, but mostly, I celebrate it with great fanfare, because it is worth celebrating that I made it through another year. Both Dr. Baker and myself live with mental illness; sometimes I feel that I’m connected to life by a very fragile thread. For that thread to hold up for a whole year is always a cause for celebration.

I’m working from my Kindle notes and highlights here, so things are getting a bit fragmented and disjointed.

As I mentioned earlier, the chapter “Writing Advice” as a whole felt worth noting to me. In particular, how no one had suggested to her that writing could be a career. Me either, no one who I trusted on career matters, anyway. Baker writes,

At 18, 19, or 20, I wished someone took the time to tell me that my perspective was unique. That the only person who could write like me was me. That I shouldn’t try to be someone I wasn’t. That background, the place where I landed, made me who I was. That this place that birthed me might not be New York City or San Francisco or Boston and that was okay. That this place, that no one had ever heard of, created me and pushed me to be a writer. That I shouldn’t try to be someone I wasn’t. That I could emulate other people’s writing styles on the way to finding my own. That there was something about my voice that needed to be heard. That writing would give me the chance to speak and be heard. That my voice mattered. That my writing mattered to me and that was enough.

Finally, Baker says some things that remind me of my favorite Kitty Pryde quote from Astonishing X-Men. Baker notes:

Maybe I’m seeking something big when I should focus on something smaller, like a chubby toddler hand in mine.

I used to hate waiting, but now, I wonder if waiting is where living resides.

Life is about how we weather our transitions.

Reading all those bits inspired me to reply to her in this Twitter thread:

Also, also, I'm getting a little weary of the "Kelly's gotta figure out her life & work again" thing I've been doing for the last 7 years.

I'm extra. And maybe tedious.
— 💀Dr. Defund the Police💀 (@kelly_j_baker) June 17, 2020

Maybe... maybe figuring it out is all life is. Maybe that's "the fuck" Cheryl Strayed is talking about.
— Kimberly Hirsh, Future Library Doctor (@kimberlyhirsh) June 17, 2020

So. This is a book that shifted a lot for me. I highly recommend it to anyone at all connected to academia or just trying to figure out what’s next.

📚 Naomi Alderman's "The Power" and the end of the #girlboss era

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 16:42:00 -0400

I read Naomi Alderman’s The Power very quickly (well, what passes for quickly now that I’m a mom) over the past week or so. I found it riveting; it was the first fiction book in a while that actually kept me from going to bed at a reasonable time.

The framing device is that one writer, a man living 5000 years from now, has written a historical novel set in roughly our time, and has asked his colleague, a woman and another writer, to read it and give him feedback. A quick bit of epistolary writing introduces that set up; the book then immediately jumps into the novel proper. In the history of this world, sometime around our time, teenage girls began to discover that they had the power to discharge electricity from their bodies similar to the power electric eels have. They are also able to awaken the same ability in adult women. And, as you might imagine, this changes the world a fair amount.

It’s an interesting book to read in the middle of a pandemic and widespread protests; each step of the way you see how the world is changing due to this new power, how a paradigm shift happens. It often felt like I was reading about right now, though of course the details are different.

What’s more interesting to me, though, is how it begins as a bit of a power fantasy.

I mean, just imagine. Imagine being able to walk down a dark street alone and not fear for your safety.

I didn’t realize until I had read this book that I never feel safe doing that. (What a privilege to have this fear at the back of mind than at the front, I know.)

As I read it more, this seemed more and more like a power I would like to have. Oh, I wouldn’t use it except in self-defense, I would tell myself.

I don’t want to spoil much, but as you might imagine, a lot of things that currently are things we expect of men become, in this book, things that women do. (What’s that saying about absolute power? Oh yeah, it corrupts absolutely. Though maybe it doesn’t, according to the study described in the linked article. But in this book, it definitely does.)

Layer upon layer of recognition settled in as I read the book, even close to the very end, constantly saying “Oh, THAT is a parallel to THIS thing that happened in our world…” and as I read, it reminded me of a recent Atlantic article, The Girlboss Has Left the Building (as well as The End of the Girlboss Is Here in the Medium publication Gen).

When I read the Atlantic piece, I highlighted this quote:

…when women center their worldview around their own office hustle, it just re-creates the power structures built by men, but with women conveniently on top.

And that’s what we watch happen again and again in The Power. It begins as a fantasy and ends as a dystopia.

More quotes from the Atlantic article:

Slotting mostly white women into the power structures usually occupied by men does not de facto change workplaces, let alone the world, for the better, if the structures themselves go untouched.

Being belittled, harassed, or denied fair pay by a woman doesn’t make the experience instructive instead of traumatic.

Making women the new men within corporations was never going to be enough to address systemic racism and sexism, the erosion of labor rights, or the accumulation of wealth in just a few of the country’s millions of hands—the broad abuses of power that afflict the daily lives of most people.

And Amanda Mull, the author of the article, concludes:

Disasters disrupt the future people expected to have, but they also give those people the space to imagine a better one. Those who seek power most zealously might not be the leaders people need. As Americans survey a nation torn apart and make plans to stitch it back together, admitting this, at the very least, can be an easy first step in the much harder process of doing the things that actually work. Structural change is a thing that happens to structures, not within them.

I have never been all in on the hustle, but I’ve had a waxing and waning admiration for girlboss behavior. The idea of making your way to the top appeals to me; the idea of treating your employs poorly - of firing them for becoming pregnant, harassing them, berating them - that appalls me. The Power is entertaining as can be, and also a reminder to watch myself. Watch myself for the ways that, when I want to dismantle a structure, I might end up reinforcing it instead. Watch myself for the ways I can use what power I have to help rather than to hurt.

Still would love to walk down the street at night with no fear. I don’t think the dismantling of the structure that prevents that will be finished in my lifetime.

Looking back at the first half of 2020

Fri, 26 Jun 2020 15:15:22 -0400

We’re coming up on Q3 of 2020 and I don’t know how the year is going for you (except to the extent that I totally do), but 2020 has gone differently than I thought it would back in December 2020. Most years, I buy Leonie Dawson’s My Shining Year Life Goals Workbook, and indeed I did at the end of 2019. If I’m remembering correctly, it was my gift to myself for finishing writing my dissertation proposal.

I never get all the way through the workbook, and that’s fine. This year, I set myself a goal of finishing it by March 21 in time for the astrological New Year but, guess what, it didn’t work out. I still got pretty far though, and today I’ve been looking at it and noticing where I’ve been sticking to these even though, due to the pandemic and the vibe it’s given me, I haven’t looked back at the workbook since I last worked on it in early March.

I wrote in the workbook that this year, I want to feel creative and connected. I’m moving in those directions, but only recently recommitted myself to both of those desired feelings, even though I didn’t remember that I’d put it in the workbook. I said, 2020 will be the year that I defend my dissertation proposal and it’s possible I wrote that down after I’d scheduled the defense for early February. (By the way, I finished writing the proposal at the end of November but didn’t get to defend it until February. THANKS FOR NOTHING, HOLIDAYS. j/k, holidays can be great.)

I said I wanted to learn more about web development and build a foundation for my own business. These are both things I’ve been taking steps toward and will keep working on.

I brilliantly didn’t have any conferences or workshops in mind to go to, so that’s worked out fine. (I did get to travel to Charleston in February, which was lovely.)

I said I wanted to invest in Leonie’s Money, Manifesting + Multiple Streams of Income ecourse and that was my reward to myself for defending my proposal successfully. I haven’t completed it yet, but just working on the first parts has helped me save a lot of money and be a more responsible financial custodian.

I also said I’d like to read books that Dr. Katie Linder and Dr. Sara Langworthy recommend on their podcast Make Your Way, and I’m doing that. Again - without looking back over the workbook.

I wanted to reuse or buy used instead of new more, and I’ve done that. (Ask me about the $17 Nook battery I got on eBay rather than replacing my Nook with a $170 Kobo eReader.)

Hilariously, I said I wanted to do Zoom calls with friends. And guess what? I HAVE.

And I said I wanted to do my dissertation research, on which I’m making good progress.

Is there a bunch of stuff I haven’t gotten to yet? Of course. Am I going to get to everything I wrote down? Probably not, and that’s okay.

I’m still really impressed with what I’ve done so far this year. What about you? What things that you wanted to do this year have you already done?

Move Slowly and Mend Things 📚

Fri, 19 Jun 2020 14:07:00 -0400

I’m re-reading Jeff Goins’s book, You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) and I came upon a bit that I highlighted and made a note on. Goins, writing about legacy, quotes Steve Jobs:

we all long to “put a dent in the universe”

And in my annotation I respond:

I would rather have a legacy of having added something to the world rather than damaging it. Is Jobs’s language here reflective of the tech industry as a whole? Disrupt. Move fast and break things? How is that working out for us? What if instead we moved gently and restored things? Pretty sure I’m stealing this idea from Jenny Odell.

Jenny Odell writes in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy about how our current American society values growth over maintenance. She writes about the value of restoration and care. Her writing makes me want to mend and tend and fix.

I’m going to keep thinking about this. I think if I keep reading and thinking, I can connect it to visible mending, Kintsugi, the idea that women respond to stress with a “tend and befriend” approach, and the New Domesticity. Stay tuned.

Hands can blog today, but brain won't, so have some stuff from other people that's great. 📚 🖖

Thu, 18 Jun 2020 14:05:00 -0400

Kelly J. Baker’s book Grace Period, which I devoured over the course of 2 days. I want to say so much about it, but my brain just won’t get it all together right now. For now, I’ll point you to the post that is the source of the chapter about which my only note/highlight was highlighting the title with the note, “This whole chapter”: “Writing Advice.”
Max Temkin’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation in 40 Hours.” The best of the show selected for you. As Temkin suggests, if you like these 40 hours, go ahead and watch the rest. I watched the show as it aired, so after about 8 of Temkin’s recommendations I felt confident that I still love the show now as much as I did then and went back to the beginning and am slowly making my way through. Great crafting TV, as well as incredibly soothing and full of delightful characters and truly, if you ever need to understand me, imagine if Data had the big feelings of a toddler and the empathic abilities of Deanna Troi.
Dr. Olivia Rissland’s thread about learning from reading a paper a day. I’m going to start this today (though I’ll be mixing in book, thesis, and dissertation chapters) with my key areas of interest: where information science and learning sciences intersect and where LIS and fan studies intersect. (And then I’ll keep researching and writing at the intersections of those, I hope.)
Alexandra Rowland’s thread about growing and caring for super long hair, written right before Alex got a haircut that is short and very cute. (Alexandra Rowland is probably my favorite Internet person discovery of the past couple of years; I maybe ought to write Aja Romano a thank you note for this.)

Okay, that’s all for today, I can now use the restroom and get back to data analysis. (SO INTERESTING! Like, no sarcasm, it’s really cool finding out where cosplayers go to find and share information!)

Which characters feel like friends to you?

Wed, 17 Jun 2020 13:15:55 -0400

A little over a year ago, M. and I were in Atlanta to accompany W., who was attending an organizational meeting there. On our second full day in the city, we visited the Center for Puppetry Arts and their Worlds of Puppetry museum. They have a Jim Henson gallery there, and there’s a video tour of it on their Facebook page.

You enter through a lovely entrance and move through spaces dedicated to Jim’s early life, his office and earliest work, and Sesame Street. There’s a really cool Sesame Street-style set that you can actually work on yourself, with monitors so other people with you can watch your performance. And then leaving that space, you turn a corner and directly in front of you is…

Yes, Kermit.

M. and I turned that corner and my breath caught in my throat. “Hello, friend!” I wanted to say. It felt like seeing a dear friend you hadn’t seen in a long time, which was something I had done the day before, so I had a very recent memory to draw on. I wish I could have hugged Kermit, but you can’t really, through that plexiglass or whatever it is box. But I could look at him and smile. It was such a feeling of homecoming. Somehow, though he is but felt and foam, I feel like Kermit gets me.

Lately, I’ve been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. It also feels like visiting with old friends, in the moments when I’m not amazed by my own new middle-aged-woman lust for Jean-Luc Picard. (And that’s all I’ll say about that.)

Geordi. Riker. Troi. Not Data, because I am Data. Data knows so much and always shares more than is useful. Why wouldn’t you want to know the intricacies of how this ship is constructed, or the details of that culture’s expectations surrounding honor? Oh, right, because we’re all about to die, or at least one of us has been abducted, and you probably would rather only have the information you need to handle the situation. Oops.

Yes. Data and I are one.

But the others, they feel like my friends, in the same way Kermit does. When Jonathan Frakes showed up on Patrick Stewart’s Sonnet-a-Day video, I was like, “YES! FRIENDS! Let’s all sit outside and read Shakespeare, MY FRIENDS!” (And also know, I was not imagining them as Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes. Sorry, my dudes. You inhabit those other guys in my heart forever. And reading Shakespeare together is totally a thing your characters would do.)

I’ve been wondering about why I feel this way about these imaginary people/frog, and why I don’t feel quite the same way anymore. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my favorite show, and I wrote a Self-Insertion Mary Sue expressly so I could imagine what it would be like to be friends with the characters on it, but when I watch it, it doesn’t feel like visiting old friends, or even seeing people I visit with daily. It feels like watching a TV show I love. Same thing with 30 Rock, New Girl, How I Met Your Mother, Difficult People, and Happy Endings. Is the difference that I encountered The Muppets and ST:TNG as a kid? I don’t know.

Was I a lonely kid? I’m not sure. I changed schools about every two years until high school, when I stayed at the same school the whole time. I had good friends from 6th grade on. I was verbally bullied and came home crying almost every day in 5th grade. I don’t know. Maybe these characters feel like my friends because they were there for me in those times?

Regardless of why, I think I’m just going to lean into it and embrace it. As I’ve mentioned before, our family is all-in on Muppets these days, and I’m loving TNG. It’s nice to visit old friends.

I'm done being hard on myself (for today).

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 11:20:16 -0400

I saw this tweet today:

Want to succeed #withaphd?

Don't disappear into an academic bubble while you study:
-work #altac jobs
-do placements
-volunteer
-network

Do this during the #phd and it won't be as hard to reinvent a career after. Don't get locked in the ivory tower
@AcademicChatter
— Chris Cornthwaite, PhD (@cjcornthwaite) June 16, 2020

This is excellent advice.

BUT.

It might not be for every PhD student.

For the past year or so, I’ve been reading and re-reading Karen Kelsky’s The Professor Is In. Most of the book is about what you need to do if you want to be competitive in the academic job search (in a pre-COVID world, mind you). I have done very few of these things, and that’s okay.

I came into this hoping to get really good at research - especially qualitative research. I have started doing this and will be lucky enough to get to do it for another year, working on both my own project and someone else’s.

In my interview for the doctoral program, the admissions committee asked me, “What do you want to do after you graduate?”

I said to them - honestly, but calculatedly - “I would love to be in a situation where I could research and teach, but of course I’m realistic about the job market.”

One of the committee members said, “You might have to move to get a job.”

My once-and-future advisor said, “You might have to go wherever W.’s job is.”

W’s job is here, where we already are.

I won’t say we definitely will never move. But I will say that it’s very unlikely any job offer I might receive would draw us away.

I came into this program already attached to this particular geographic area - which is saturated with both higher education institutions and scholars. And I came in viewing it much more as continuing education than as job training, which I think has only benefitted my mental health.

I say all this to let you know that I really don’t need to do all the things Karen Kelsky says to do for the academic job market. And yet I would look at her lists and think, “OH NO! I HAVE DONE NONE OF THESE THINGS!” Like… It doesn’t matter. Those aren’t the things that will get me a job I want. But I still worried about not having done them.

I came in from an alt-ac job, and had every intention of returning to a (different, because my department was dismantled) alt-ac job after graduation. Now, alt-ac is probably not going to be much of a thing, so I am turning my attention to post-ac possibilities. The advice in the tweet above applies equally, I think, to both alt-ac and post-ac. But it’s another list of things I haven’t done, with the exception of having taken on one metadata analysis contract gig.

I didn’t disappear into the academic bubble, though. For the first year of my PhD I disappeared into improv, but after that I disappeared into my family.

I got pregnant in my second semester of the PhD program, and while it was not expected (because I was dealing with PCOS-driven infertility and had only pursued minimal interventions thus far) it was very much desired. My son was born in October of my second year.

I started to make a list of all of the things that have happened with my family in the time between when I started my PhD program and now, but giving specifics felt too much like violating privacy, so I will alternate between specifics and being vague, depending on the level of disclosure I feel okay about.

Here are things that happened in my household or family of origin during my time in the PhD program:

My adult autistic brother tried living on his own for much of the summer that I was pregnant, with only myself and my sister as support. A mile from my house, and more than a few miles from my sister’s house. In the end, my mom moved in with him, and now he and both of my parents live in the house we bought right before he was born.
I had a baby who grew into a toddler who grew into a preschooler, for whom I have been the primary caregiver in terms of weekday care and invisible labor (though I will say I’ve had amazing support from my partner, who often gives me long stretches to myself on weekends, and our extended family; we’ve also had part-time childcare either from family or at a Montessori since he was about 12 weeks old).
Two family members were rushed to the ER with chest pain on the same day, several states away from each other. (They’re both alive still, thank goodness.)
One of those family members has had five surgeries, four of which happened while living in close proximity to me. More than one of these made that family member unable to drive, and I became the driver of choice for this family member.
A different family member was diagnosed with cancer and had surgery to remove the cancerous organ. That seems to have gone well, but you know, recovery from that is not nothing, and required a little support from me.
One of the aforementioned family members was hospitalized on suicide watch for a few days, and has since taken on a lot more medical appointments in response to that.
Another family member has dealt with mysterious digestive issues and only in the past year has figured out the reason; this family member hasn’t needed much from me in material or physical care but there’s still a toll that providing emotional support takes.
I myself have had mysterious fatigue and pain that persisted even when my diagnosed conditions were well-controlled.
I spent about 8 months figuring out how to get my kid settled at his Montessori school, because his body would not conform to their schedule. (In the end, we switched from afternoons to mornings, and it made everything easier immediately.)

And also, until the past year or so, my husband traveled for work A LOT, which was only a problem in that I was so focused on child caregiving during those times that I couldn’t get much PhD work done.

I essentially became a member of a sandwich generation 5 - 10 years before I expected to have to do so. This period of my life is inextricable from caregiving for other members of my family.

So I look at those things and consider that my childcare was devoted at first exclusively to attending class (that’s right, I worked the writing around the baby), then to attending class and writing, then to writing. I consider that often by the time my childcare hours came around, I didn’t have the spoons left to do good work for my PhD, much less the time for extra jobs, volunteer opportunities, or networking. And I ask myself, when? When on earth would I do those things?

And the answer is, I don’t know. If I wanted to devote more energy to finding fault with myself, I could answer that question. But for today, anyway, I’m over it. I’m over blaming myself for life being what it is. I take control where I can, and do well with what I’m given; I have an internal locus of control and rarely feel powerless about micro-level life stuff. But I’m done being harsh to myself about it.

I’m done.

Addendum: the author of the above quoted tweet followed it up with this tweet:

I should have added this! I was really just thinking about some ideas, not a laundry list.. I'm just adding pressure
— Chris Cornthwaite, PhD (@cjcornthwaite) June 16, 2020

So like I said - good advice that you can use if it works for you, but don’t need to feel pressure to take on.

I should also add that it’s easy for me to say I’m done, because I have had some of the uncertainty around settling the next year resolved for me. Details on that to come later.

My (Remote) Interview Workflow, from Recruitment to Member Checking (Dissertating in the Open)

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 15:24:00 -0400

Last Friday, I finished correcting the AI-provided transcripts for my dissertation interviews. This process didn’t go as I’d originally imagined it would. When I wrote my proposal, I expected to conduct these interviews over the course of the entire summer, at various fan conventions. I expected to first explore online to find where cosplayers hangout and only then recruit participants. But then COVID-19 happened, and face-to-face research was no longer an option. (It was prohibited by my university. Cons were cancelled. I’m at high risk of severe complications, so even if there had been cons, I wouldn’t have been able to go to them.) So I changed my plan significantly, starting with sampling and recruitment.

I originally was going to use purposive sampling, identifying cosplayers through my online exploration who were local to me and might be able to provide valuable insight into their information literacy practices. Once I was in quarantine, it became clear that this wasn’t going to be an option. In my revised IRB proposal, I stated that I would use convenience sampling, recruiting cosplayers with whom I had contact in the past, either because I met them in the cosplay area of the con where they were guests, or because I attended their panels. I reached out to cosplayers from two local cons I attended last year. I also used snowball sampling, asking the first several cosplayers I interviewed to recommend other people for me to talk to. At first, they were all recommending the other people I had already invited to participate, but later participants introduced me to more cosplayers I hadn’t known before, and I rapidly ended up with a group of about 12 or 13 confirmed participants, of whom 10 actually scheduled interviews.

So how did I do it? Let me take you through the process…

Recruitment

All of the cosplayers I met at the two cons I attended last year were on Instagram. I have a dedicated cosplay Instagram account that I use both for personal and research purposes. Using this account, I DMed several cosplayers with a message similar to the following:

Hi [Cosplayer Name as Listed on Instagram],

My name is Kimberly Hirsh and I am a doctoral student from the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I also go by Luna Wednesday Cosplay. I am writing to invite you to participate in my research study about how cosplayers find, evaluate, use, and share information. You’re eligible to be in this study because you are a cosplayer I encountered at [Name and Year of Con] when I attended your panel, [Title of Panel]. To be eligible to participate, you must have cosplayed at least once since 2012 or be currently working on a cosplay project; you must also be over 18 years old.

If you decide to participate in this study, you will draw a diagram and participate in an interview that will take about one hour. We will conduct the interview using Microsoft Zoom. I would like to record your interview and then we’ll use the recording to ensure I understood your answers to my interview questions correctly.

Remember, this is completely voluntary. You can choose to be in the study or not. If you’d like to participate or have any questions about the study, please email or contact me at kimberlyhirsh@unc.edu or @lunawednesdaycosplay.

Thank you very much.

Sincerely,

Kimberly Hirsh

kimberlyhirsh@unc.edu

@lunawednesdaycosplay

The text of this recruitment message was approved by my university’s Institutional Review Board.

If the cosplayer responded that they were interested, I would say something like,

Great! The next step is to schedule a time for an interview. You can do that here:

And provide them with a link to a special type of event using the scheduling service Calendly. This was useful because I gave Calendly access to my Google Calendar, and participants could see what times I had available and sign up directly. In most cases, we didn’t have to back and forth. A few participants weren’t available during the times on the calendar, so I worked with them to set up special times. (The limitations on my time were about childcare, and it was easy to leave M. alone with W. for an extra hour on a Saturday or Sunday to do an interview.)

If you’re curious, you can read about Calendly’s security and privacy policies and practices. Calendly is a black-owned business, though I did not know that when I selected the service for my scheduling. I am happy to know it now and plan to continue using Calendly to schedule meetings.

The Calendly event description included the following text:

For our interview, you’ll need to have paper and something to write with, and the ability to take a picture of your diagram and send it to me via DM, text, or email. You’ll also need to have the Zoom app installed; if you’ve never worked with it before, it’s probably easiest to install on a phone. If none of the times on this calendar work, message me or email kimberlyhirsh@unc.edu and I’ll find a custom time for you.

Feel free to use your cosplay name rather than your real name when signing up for an interview slot.

Once we settled on a time, I would schedule a Zoom meeting in my University’s Zoom instance and send the details to the participant by email if they had signed up for a meeting in Calendly, or by DM if they hadn’t. Calendly does have Zoom integration, but I chose to do this manually because I wanted to fine-tune the security settings in Zoom. I used Zoom not because it is my favorite service of this type, but because it has integrated recording and is supported by my university.

I made sure to use the following security features to prevent Zoombombing:

Password-protected
Waiting room
Locked room after the participant arrived

Conducting the Interview

The day before or the day of the interview, I would contact the participant either by email or DM to remind them that they would need paper and a writing utensil for the interview. I would also include a link to the consent document and release form, so I would know what name to call them in our communications, what name to call them in my writing, and what information I collected was okay to share. I created this consent document and release form in Qualtrics, another piece of software supported by my university.

This was the text of the consent document:

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Research Information Sheet
IRB Study #: 20-0351 **Principal Investigator: Kimberly Hirsh **

The purpose of this research study is to explore how cosplayers find, evaluate, use, and share information. You are being asked to take part in a research study because you are a cosplayer over the age of 18 who has cosplayed at least once since 2012 or is currently working on a cosplay project.

Being in a research study is completely voluntary. You can choose not to be in this research study. You can also say yes now and change your mind later.

If you agree to take part in this research, you will be asked to draw a diagram of the sources you use for finding, evaluating, using, and sharing cosplay-related information and participate in an interview about your diagram and experiences. Your participation in this study will take about one hour. If you choose, I may contact you with follow up questions sometime in the next 6 months. Each follow up question should not take more than 15 minutes of your time and I will not ask you more than 3 follow up questions. We expect that at least 10 people will take part in this research study.

The possible risks to you in taking part in this research are:

Feeling uncomfortable discussing your information process

Having someone else find out that you were in a research study

Potential loss of confidentiality of data

The possible benefits to society from this research are:

Making it easier for cosplayers to find, use, share, and evaluate information in the future

Helping information literacy educators understand how people work with information when they pursue their own interests

To protect your identity as a research subject, the researcher(s) will not share your information with anyone unless you choose. In any publication about this research, your name or other private information will not be used unless you request that it be. If you have any questions about this research, please contact the Investigator named at the top of this form by calling [my phone number] or emailing kimberlyhirsh@unc.edu. If you have questions or concerns about your rights as a research subject, you may contact the UNC Institutional Review Board at 919-966-3113 or by email to IRB_subjects@unc.edu.

The release form included the following questions:

Please state your initial requests regarding the use of your name and the information you provide, as well as any media I collect. You can change your requests at any time! If you agree to be recorded, you can tell me to turn on and off the recorder at will. If you permit me, I may record your interview. You may choose whether I use your information horizon map as an example in my final dissertation report or not.

All recordings and photographs will be stored on secure UNC servers, password-protected, and accessed only through a Virtual Private Network.

What name should the researcher call you? Is it okay to identify you in the project? (This included a space to write the name that should be used for identification in the project.) Is it okay to record you for the project? Is it okay to use videos of you in the project? Is it okay to use photographs of you in the project? Is it okay to publish your information horizon map, the diagram you will be creating in our interview?

About fifteen minutes before the interview, I would get set up in the space I was using, either my home office or my bedroom depending on what W.’s schedule was that day and whether he needed a more private space (the bedroom) to give a presentation. I would plug in my headphones. I would load up Firefox with the following tabs:

My interview guide
The Qualtrics survey
Instagram
My school email

The Qualtrics survey was so I could refer to it and make sure I used the correct name for the participant and that it was okay to record. Instagram and email were open so that I could see if the participant needed to communicate with me last minute (this happened at least once, when we ended up delaying the interview by an hour or two because of the participant’s work schedule) as well as so participants could send me their information horizon maps.

We began each interview with greetings and introductions, followed by the information horizon maps. I’m really excited to share with the world how different they all are from each other. They’re so cool, and while my participants have many shared practices, each of them represented those practices in a unique way.

Then I would ask several questions, depending on what the think-aloud process alongside the drawing of the information horizon map revealed.

At the end, participants had a chance to revise their maps. My original intention was to allow them to do this only if they chose to do so, but I found that most participants tended to be general in their map and specific in their interview, so I often took notes on resources they mentioned in the interview and then asked them to add those resources to their map. I’m not sure how this is going to affect the trustworthiness of this research method, but I thought it was worth doing this to make sure I had the richest data possible and could understand not only what resources they used, but the relationships between those resources.

The end of the interview consisted of demographic questions.

A note on pronouns, gender identity, and demographic data more broadly

I asked the participants to identify their gender in the demographic questions, but failed to ask most participants if they would like me to use specific pronouns. Some participants voluntarily offered pronoun possibilities along with their gender, especially if their gender and the pronouns that might go with it weren’t the only pronouns with which they were comfortable.

I had one genderfluid participant who prefers different pronouns at different times. I asked this participant, given the fact that the dissertation will be published a long time from now and this participant might be using different pronouns at that point, what would be the best way to handle this. The participant told me that using he/him pronouns would probably be fine, because he tends to be using those consistently lately, but we both agreed that I could also simply refer to the participant by name, just in case the participant’s pronouns have changed by that time.

Asking a person to give their pronouns in a classroom setting can be fraught; sharing your own and making them option to share can mitigate this some. I don’t know if much work has been done with this for studying research group demographics. (I had a disagreement once with some other researchers who created a survey and only offered two gender options.) If you know of any, I’d love to look at it.

My goal is always to respect participants’ wishes with respect to their identity, but at the same time there is value in disclosing the ratio of participants in different groups. To try and straddle the line between these two things, I offered all participants the option to skip any demographic question they wished, skipping to the next question with no further discussion of the skipped one.

There are some identity markers that may have been relevant that I didn’t include. In my next study, I will probably include more varied demographic questions.

Transcription

I used the service otter.ai to transcribe the interviews, uploading the video files, correcting the transcripts on the website, and downloading PDFs to share with participants. (I downloaded .docx files for the purpose of importing them for data analysis, but I’ll talk about data analysis another time.) Otter.ai offers a generous student discount (50% off I think?) so be sure to look for that.

Member Checking

The final step I took in the interview process was member checking, in which I gave each participant a chance to review the transcript of their interview and add or correct anything they wish. I emailed them a PDF; this meant that for the participants who hadn’t used Calendly to sign up, I had to DM them and ask for their email address. So far, no participant has requested major changes; one participant noticed filler words in her own speech patterns and asked me to mitigate that, which I will certainly do when quoting her.

The End!

Whew! This was a long post! Thanks for reading. I’ll give you the same thing I give anyone who reads something lengthy that I write: Neil Patrick Harris riding a unicorn (on the Harold & Kumar 2 poster, the poster for a film I have not seen). Also, please feel free to ask me questions about my process. I love talking about process!

100 Days of #bluemind, Day 4: Aquarium Playlist

Thu, 28 May 2020 16:42:44 -0400

In November 2018, I had respiratory inflammation that was on its way to becoming pneumonia when I traveled to Charleston with my husband and then 2-year-old son. (He’s 3 now.) My husband was presenting at a conference, so my son and I touristed about; I was exhausted and stressed caring for a toddler alone for much of the day, away from home, while dealing with respiratory trouble. One of my favorite places to visit in Charleston is the South Carolina Aquarium. As I sat in front of their Great Ocean Tank and my son climbed up and down the steps that double as stadium seating, I felt an immense sense of calm come over me. Dr. Wallace J. Nichols would attribute this to what he calls “Blue Mind,” and he’s not wrong, but in that moment, I felt that Blue Mind was enhanced by the beautiful soundtrack playing in that exhibit.

So I sought out aquarium music. I don’t know what the soundtrack was there, but I learned that Douglas Morton composes music for aquariums, and put together all of his aquarium music on Spotify in a single playlist. (He has other ocean-themed music as well that you may wish to check out.) Enjoy!

This is not a polished blog.

Wed, 27 May 2020 13:59:50 -0400

I’m still in a mostly flow, very little stock place.

I’m coming up with ideas for blog posts all the time, and keeping a list of them in Notion:

Most of these blog post ideas are for helping people, for sharing ideas related to work. I do tend to and intend to blog about everything, and work is part of everything. But I never feel like writing these posts, even though I have all these ideas. And I think it’s because I mostly conceive of this as a personal blog. And those topics all feel only personal-adjacent. Not impersonal, mind you, but they’re just not where I’m at right now. Maybe I’ll get to them later.

My friend @tiff_frye posted her first substantive post here on Micro.blog yesterday, saying

I guess this is a personal blog, and through it I want to explore the things I think about every day in an effort to clarify and examine my thoughts.

That’s what I mean to be doing here, but instead I’ve been coming up with lists of things like I was trying to create an SEO-optimized, super pro, Darren Rowse-approved (let’s be clear, I love Darren Rowse, I think he’s great) blog. And that’s NOT what I’m doing. I’m trying to create an old-fashioned, late ’90s/early ’00s online diary. Jennicam, but with words.

Maybe clearly stating my intentions in that fashion will help me stay where I mean to be.

Maybe this is an impromptu manifesto.

📚 Reading Notes, Having Trouble Reading, and a Read What You Own Challenge

Fri, 15 May 2020 17:37:00 -0400

I added a page to the index section of my Bullet Journal that tracks Reading Notes. I don’t like to use collections; I inevitably end up ignoring them. So Reading Notes get stuck in my notebook on the day that I did the reading, and then I add the book title to the Reading Notes bit of the index, along with the numbers of pages where I’ve taken notes on that book.

Here are all the books that one might consider me to be “currently” reading right now:

Getting Started in Consulting
Dracula - a gorgeous edition illustrated by [Edward Gorey]
Ghostlands
Moby Dick
Writing with Power
A Choir of Lies
How to Do Nothing
Jim Henson: The Biography
The Artist’s Way
Steal Like an Artist

I’ve actually finished reading at least 5 books in the past couple of months, which is impressive, I think. But I’m really having trouble deciding which one to read at any given time. So I still count this as having trouble reading.

Austin Kleon has some advice for if you are having trouble reading. I think I will pay attention to it. I’ve been doing some of these things, but I might benefit from doing even more.

Leonie Dawson challenged herself to only read books she had in her home before buying any new ones. I’ve been flirting with this challenge but I think it might not be right for the current moment. I don’t know. I do have a lot of awesome books lying around.

Settling In

Fri, 08 May 2020 14:05:58 -0400

My son is registered to start at a Quaker school in August. I don’t know what that will end up looking like, but one practice that they (and Quaker meetings) have that I’m thinking about today is settling in. I first encountered this practice when my advisor, whose son attends the same school that my son will attend, introduced it to a class for which I was serving as teaching assistant. This is time at the beginning of a gathering to settle in silence, to transition from the world to the meeting. It’s a practice that I have done without realizing it at the times that I consider most sacred.

Usually before getting ready to perform. I like to get to the theater early. Preferably before everyone else. (For my first community theater show, I got there so early that the company ended up being charged for extra time in the theater. Whoops.) I need this time to transition between spaces.

Early in my teaching career, the only teaching job I could find was part-time - 30% I think? I taught two Latin III classes in the afternoon. I needed more money than that paid to pay my bills, so I took a customer service representative job. I was a CSR in the morning and a teacher in the afternoon. I had a 15 - 20 minute drive between my two workplaces that served as the beginning to a transition, and then lunchtime in the teacher workroom to complete the transition. I needed that time to shift my headspace.

I have 2 - 3 jobs now, too. I spend about half the work day momming and the other half the day scholaring. Which one I’m doing when varies depending on the day, but either way, I need to transition from one to the other. And there’s no physical space where I can transition, because everyone who can works from home right now. So I need time.

I get frustrated at myself for taking the time. Why oh why, I think to myself, can’t I just hand my kid off to another caring adult, then plop in front of my laptop and jump into my research?

Because I need time to settle in.

So I’m giving myself permission to settle in. Today, I’m writing this blog post, and that’s how I’m settling in. Do you need transition time? How do you settle in?

Life update: How things are going for me

Wed, 06 May 2020 11:35:00 -0400

How’s your day going? Aside from the continuing world situation + its impact on higher ed (and thus my possibility of being funded for next year) and an ongoing I-think-it’s-fibromyalgia flare-up, things are going well from where I’m sitting.

Yesterday was W’s birthday. He’s 42 but not a Douglas Adams fan, so it was not as thrilling a birthday for him as it might have been otherwise. He doesn’t seem more enlightened than he was on Monday but he might be keeping the reason why 42 is the answer to the life, the universe, and everything to himself. I made him his favorite casserole for dinner and he ended up with two cakes (this is the advantage of having the mom who gave birth to you and the mom your dad married after the one who gave birth to you both in town).

We’ve been experimenting with standing in the driveway talking to local family members. We try to keep the 6 feet between us. I fear we don’t always succeed, but we try. It feels so nice to see them in person instead of through a screen. It’s just more jovial.

There are some lovely cardinals that have been courting in our yard. I just saw the female hop down some stone steps. Apparently bird watching has become a huge hobby since folks started staying at home, and I get it. I was already noticing birds (and other wildlife) more after reading Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, but I’ve started noticing them a lot more lately. Birds and bunnies. And bees. I really paid attention to a bumblebee for the first time the other day. It flew like a hummingbird does, zooming and stopping to hover. I watched it eat some clover. I noticed how whenever anyone walked by it on the trail, it would get up and fly away and seem to lose its place before returning to the same bit of clover after they had passed. If you’re looking to learn more about birdwatching, DCist has an article about How to Get Really into Birdwatching While You’re Stuck at Home.

We propagated some rosemary from a plant in our front yard. I took three cuttings and put them in water, changing it every day, for several weeks. Eventually the cuttings grew roots and this week we planted them in 6-inch pots. I’m planning to do this with mint next.

I’ve been crocheting my first sweater. It’s the Sailor’s Moon Cropped Sweater. I’m hoping to wear it over camisoles once it’s finished. I’m also creating a bundle of all the size-inclusive crochet sweaters I can find on Ravelry. KatieBea’s Sweaters for All group inspired me. I tend to be a uniform dresser, wearing a black dress or t-shirt with black or more interesting leggings. I’m adding black bike shorts to the mix for summer. My hope is that if I crochet a bunch of sweaters and cardigans for myself, I can wear those to make my wardrobe a bit more interesting.

I’ll save what I’m reading, watching, playing, and listening to for another post. Let me know how life is looking for you!

I know how to do stuff. Impostor syndrome is nonsense.

Tue, 05 May 2020 11:16:08 -0400

Are you at loose ends? I’m at loose ends. I have a number of projects on the go but I am not doing a good job of organizing them. I am steeped deep in impostor syndrome as I try to figure out how I will contribute to my family and my community in both the immediate and distant future. Since beginning my doctoral program I have felt that all I’m good for is literature searches and giving presentations, and that nobody would want to hire me for those things.

As I consider what to do next, I find myself wishing that my last full-time job were still a thing. Of course if it were, I might be in it. It was my dream job, an alt-ac position as Managing Editor/Public Communications Specialist for a web-based university outreach program serving K-12 and, later, B-16 educators. It was a great hybrid example of what Emilie Wapnick calls a “group hug” job, which leverages several of a person’s interests, and a “good enough” job, which still leaves a person time and energy to pursue interests outside of work. I ended up leaving it to go to grad school, after institutional priorities shifted and all of my immediate colleagues were either laid off or transferred to a different department. But had it stayed the same, I expect I would still be there now.

As I’ve asked myself who has a career path that I admire, I find myself looking to people with alt-ac careers who have started their own businesses. Some maintain their on-campus alt-ac positions while others go full-time with their own business. Examples include Dr. Katie Linder and Dr. Margy Thomas. They’re both incredibly generous about sharing their experiences and advice. And at first I thought, “I gotta get that alt-ac job before I can move into my own thing.” Then I remembered: I already had an alt-ac job, and that job is exactly the kind of work I want to have again. So the next step seemed to be nailing down what the activities associated with that job were, so that I can position myself to build a career that involves them again.

Fortunately, I have a Google Drive folder full of documents from that time, so I was able to go back and look at what I did. When I learned at those documents, I realized:

Impostor syndrome is nonsense. I know how to do many different things. I am a person with skills who can complete projects and collaborate with others. I am not just a literature search robot.

Here are the kinds of things I did in that job:

develop new content for the web: digital books, articles, lesson plans, other large-scale web publications, blogs, webinars
edited that content from initial development through final proofreading
published that content using a custom content management system, HTML, iBooks Author, WordPress, and Blackboard Collaborate
maintain a huge collection of over 10K digital objects, both handling metadata and coding the objects themselves, using a custom content management system, custom taxonomy, and HTML
present on a wide variety of topics at individual schools or organizations as well as large conferences
maintain and implement an editorial calendar across multiple channels, including press releases, a monthly newsletter, 3 blogs, a website, social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, Edmodo, and Google+), a podcast, and videos
collaborate with subject matter experts both on campus and in the community to develop the aforementioned content

Those are all things I would love to do again, and I have no professional commitments this summer and am on the market for positions that fit that description right now. If you need a person who does those things, I can consult for you; if you have a job for a person that does those things, please feel free to email me at kimberlyhirsh (at) kimberlyhirsh (dot) com and let me know.

In the meantime, I’m going to approach my current projects with this renewed sense of my own competence and by implementing some of the tools I used to use. I’m Managing Editor of my own personal organization now, and I’m going to start acting like it.

A (self)diagnosis

Wed, 22 Apr 2020 20:07:37 -0400

For the past couple of years, I’ve felt like I was having a Hashimoto’s thyroiditis flare. But aside from a small dip in my thyroid hormones which was easily corrected by L-tyrosine and iodine supplementation, there hasn’t been any evidence that that’s what was making me feel like garbage. When I asked my doctor about it, almost a year ago I think, she said that maybe it was a food sensitivity or a new autoimmune disease, and asked me to track my symptoms and things that might be triggering them. That tracking got very overwhelming, very quickly, because I was trying to track food and sleep and and and.

I’ve been feeling even more flarey recently, especially since I started sheltering in place, and the other day had extra terrible pain. I’ve also had laughably frequent urination, like, more frequent than when I was pregnant, and in the past I thought maybe that was a sign of diabetes but I wasn’t diabetic. So I started Googling around and discovered that frequent urination can be a symptom of fibromyalgia. (Hi yeah if you don’t believe fibromyalgia is a thing, kindly see yourself away from my comments/replies, because I don’t want to hear it.)

My doctor is also my sister’s doctor, and told her a while back that she probably had fibromyalgia.

So I started talking to my sister about it and researching more. A while back I installed a sleep app on my phone to track my sleep, and it showed that even when I was “asleep,” my movements and breathing indicated that my brain activity was similar to that of an awake person and that I was only getting about 15 minutes of deep sleep on a given night, even if I slept for 7+ hours. My kid only wakes me up maybe once a night anymore, and sometimes not even that, so this isn’t a parent thing. Guess what that sort of sleep pattern is a symptom of?

Did you guess fibromyalgia?

It’s fibromyalgia.

Now is a terrible time to try and get a new diagnosis of a chronic illness if you don’t need pharmaceuticals for it, so I’m not pursuing one right now, even though I’ve got a bit of a Crazy Ex-Girlfriend “A Diagnosis” vibe:

The main thing that is valuable about focusing on treating fibromyalgia over autoimmune stuff is that the books I trust for autoimmune focus on food first, but I’ve been so exhausted I can’t even deal with food prep most of the time. Which, guess what? Is a problem a lot of people with fibromyalgia have. The autoimmune protocol I have has four steps: 1. Food 2. Stress and rest 3. Digestion 4. Detox. Whereas the fibromyalgia one from the book my sister recommended has four similar steps but in a different order: 1. Rest (Stress included) 2. Repair (Digestion + Food combined) 3. Restore (I think this might be the detox one, not sure yet?) 4. Reduce (taking care of lingering symptoms). This re-ordering of things is a revelation for me. Of course if I am not sleeping I don’t have energy to meal plan and shop and cook. OF COURSE.

I feel silly writing it all out, but whatever.

Anyway, I’m acting like a person who’s trying to do as much for her fibromyalgia as she can on her own. First thing, biofeedback via Hearthmath.

#100DaysOfCode Round 1, 1/100

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 23:09:21 -0400

Today’s #100DaysOfCode progress:

I completed all of the “Basic HTML and HTML5” challenges at freeCodeCamp.

I also read/watched the following:

I forked the 100 Days of Code repository to make my own 100 Days of Code Log.

I also set up a Dev page in Notion, with subpages to track goals, deadlines, schedules, a reading list, tools and resources, and notes about things I always forget. (Like how to do forms in HTML5. Because I’m very old-fashioned and not used to it being so straightforward.)

But Kimberly, why are you doing this now? Aren’t you getting a PhD in cosplay or something?

I’m getting a PhD in Library and Information Science. Knowing how to code has rarely made anyone’s life worse.

But one of the main reasons is that, though I’ve been developing websites for about 25 years, I have almost never made money off of it. Which is kind of ridiculous, when you think about who gets paid what for what. It occurred to me that perhaps my potentially lucrative hobby might be a thing that could make me money.

And why I’m doing it right now, is that yesterday I started watching the BeyondProf webinar, “3 Things You Should Do Now to Maintain Momentum in Your Job Search.” BeyondProf is always putting out great stuff and this is no exception. Maren got real about what higher ed might look like in terms of hiring in the near future. And sure, the likelihood of getting a tenure track has been tiny for years.

But until recently, alt-ac seemed like a very good option. A preferable option, even, in my case maybe.

And in this webinar, Maren confirmed what I began to suspect when I heard about hiring freezes at local institutions: that Plan B (or, again, in my case, probably Plan A) well is about to dry up. She talked about having to take odd jobs while you figure stuff out.

And I asked myself in what industry I could be content taking an entry-level position at age 40, with a PhD in LIS and 9 years of experience in education, aside from the cough number of years I’ve spent in grad school. (When I graduate, it will be 9. I will have spent half of my post-grad time in full-time work, and half of it in full-time school.)

The answer was immediately apparent: tech. The nice thing, too, about gaining web development skills is that it doesn’t actually chain you to the tech industry. Lots of library vendors, socially conscious businesses, and non-profits need web developers. And pay them better than they pay librarians. (I know money shouldn’t be a thing or whatever but I have a lot of loans and health care expenses and a 30+ year old house that needs maintaining, so. Also, hi there, we live in late stage capitalism, it means we need money to survive.)

Anyway.

My goal is to have all the skills needed to be a full stack developer by the time I graduate in May 2021, so that if necessary, I’ll have my pick of front end, back end, and full stack jobs.

My deadline for some kind of employment is November 2021, when my student loan deferment grace period will end.

Is it ambitious? Yes, but I’m not starting from scratch.

Thank you, Reviewer 2! (No sarcasm!)

Sat, 18 Apr 2020 06:37:03 -0400

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been sitting on an accepted-with-revisions paper for well over a year. (I know. I know. Okay?) The paper needs major revision, which I will do.

I’m actually kind of glad I let it sit for so long, because it gave me the opportunity to look at the reviews again with fresh eyes. I went through this thing when I first got the decision where I was very excited to be accepted with revisions. Then I read Reviewer 2’s comments.

Reviewer 2 says things like, “This feels like the work of a beginning researcher ‘writing one’s way’ into a topic.” Reviewer 2 is not wrong. I wrote this my first semester of the PhD program, sat on it for 3 years, and revised it minimally before submitting. (I KNOW. I had a baby, okay? And then he turned into a toddler. SHH.) I re-read it before reading the reviews this time, and REVIEWER 2 IS NOT WRONG.

I also took Wendy Belcher’s point that reviewers who take the time to offer detailed comments think something is worth working on until it’s better and can be published; if they thought it was worthless, they would simply say it should be rejected. (The decision recommendation from Reviewer 2 was “Not acceptable as is; needs major revisions as indicated.” There is an option for straightforward rejection; Reviewer 2 did not take it.)

The first time I looked at these reviews, I read Reviewer 2’s comments and got all “BOO you don’t get me, you’re wrong” and now I’m like, “Oh, Reviewer 2, you’re so right, thank you thank you thank you.” Because Reviewer 2 said:

The conclusion’s intriguing ideas indicate that perhaps the author, after writing the paper, has discovered a few trends in the review that, if revisited, could reshape the literature review to be more powerful and deliver more impact, finding deeper insights than those that are listed here. I hypothesize that this is one of the first research pieces written by a student doing first forays into scholarly writing, and that now that this preliminary work is done, a second attempt would be more nuanced and in-depth.

And Reviewer 2 also said:

It may be that focusing on three topics meant that all three issues could only be covered in a cursory way within the page limitations. It might be interesting to consider going deep in just one or two of these areas, which might open up more space for that deeper understanding to happen.

This is a brilliant idea. My original audience for this was a professor, who needs to know different things than other researchers and library professionals might.

From now on, I think I’ll think of peer review as getting free editing.

I have a lot to think about. This is going to be a lot of work to rewrite. But it’s going to be really good work to do, and will (I hope) break me of my distaste for/impatience with revision. (As an editor, I’m super into deep revision. As a writer, I’ve already moved onto the next thing…)

Time to be my own developmental editor, I think.

Information and Learning Sciences: Situating my work at the intersection

Fri, 17 Apr 2020 11:49:50 -0400

Since the beginning of my doctoral program, I’ve struggled to situate my work and research interests. The role of libraries in learning. Interest-driven learning in libraries. Connected learning. Information literacy and learning. In particular, geeky interests and their relationship to learning. Nothing felt quite right.

Last year, a new journal called Information and Learning Sciences launched. I noticed. I maybe signed up for table of contents alerts? I don’t know. But I kind of forgot about it for a while.

I remembered it again when I needed to read a couple of chapters from the book Reconceptualizing Libraries: Perspectives from the Information and Learning Sciences for my comps, but then once I was done with that, it slipped out of my mind again.

People have only been embracing the interdisciplinarity of these two particular fields for the past few years; nobody really would have thought to use them together before that. Now, this is a defined interdisciplinary intersection with a growing body of scholarship, and it is a place where I can actually plant a flag for my own work.

It’s funny, because right before I started my PhD program, one of my colleagues at LEARN NC, Joseph Hooper, and I would talk about the intersection of LIS and LS all the time. And if you look at my coursework choices, one of the only courses I’ve taken that was about content rather than theory development and methods is Intoduction to Cognitive Science and Sociocultural Perspectives on Learning. It feels like I should have arrived at the realization that this is where my work sits much earlier.

But it doesn’t really matter. I’m there now, and I’m looking forward to immersing myself in the relatively small body of literature about it and seeing how it relates to my dissertation work and other research plans.

Doing a 15 minute #AcWri challenge

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 13:57:29 -0400

I’m reading Dr. Katie Linder’s blog archive. One of her earliest posts is titled 51 Tips to Help Academic Writers Be More Productive. It’s a very different sort of set of tips than the kind I was complaining about yesterday. The latter is all about telling you what kind of work you ought to be doing. Not, here are actual tools to help you get the work done, but just… remember all this work you could be doing. Don’t forget how you could use this time wisely.

(Phrases I hate: “use your time wisely” and “live up to your potential.” Blargh. If I want to fritter my life away reading fantasy novels and only be an A- student, that’s my business, middle school teachers. Oops, sorry, went to a dark and distant place there.)

Dr. Linder’s post, on the other hand, doesn’t remind you that there’s work you could be doing. Instead, it gives you tips for how to tackle the work you’ve decided to do.

Her first tip is to start a daily writing practice. I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, and struggle to build up consistency. So I went beyond Dr. Linder’s help, and went to another favorite scholar of mine, Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega. He offers four strategies, both for creating a good container in your schedule for writing, and for deciding what to write when you’re making it a point to write daily so you don’t just stare at a blank screen for 15 minutes a day.

The first of his tips involves working to deadline like Wendy Belcher suggests in her book, Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks. So I “got out” my ebook copy of that book and looking through the table of contents, discovered that she has a whole chapter dedicated to responding to journal feedback.

Well, I’ve been sitting on an accepted with revisions article for well over a year, and it’s pretty embarrassing. The other day I sat down to make the revisions and got overwhelmed quickly. I ordered a print of both the article and the reviewer comments from Staples, so that should be here soon. And now I have this schedule from Belcher’s book that’s got me ready to actually get down to it.

So here I am, essentially going to do Dr. Jo Van Every’s 15 minute #acwri challenge, using this revision to launch my daily writing practice. Guess what Internet? You’re my writing buddy and you’re going to keep me accountable.

Here’s the schedule:

4/15 - 4/19, Read through p. 298 in the book and follow the instructions for reading the editor’s letter and reviewers’ reports.
4/20 - 4/26, Identify which journal decision was made and decide how I will respond.
4/27 - 5/2, Prepare a list of recommended changes and how I plan to respond to them.
5/3 - 5/9, Revise the article.
5/10 - 5/16, Draft my revision cover letter and send the article back out.

Basically, a month to turn this thing around. And I’m going to try to have my (sadly at different times of day, thanks coronavirus) work schedule be:

First 15 minutes: Settle in, review to-do list. Second 15 minutes: Write. Remaining time: Work on data collection and other tasks.

Weekly Update: 04/11/20

Sat, 11 Apr 2020 11:43:51 -0400

We just finished up week 4 of staying at home. In one sense, I didn’t have much going on before this; grad school and parenting a young child don’t really leave much space for doing things. But I’m realizing now how I do have even less going on, because I’m not even going on playdate outings or whatever.

We started watching Animaniacs with M, just in time to get excited for new episodes coming sometime ever.

Like so many other people, I’m growing weary of doing all of my communicating with people who don’t live with me via Zoom call. I do like being able to see people’s faces; I hate phone calls. But it’s wearying, right?

I found out that I didn’t get a dissertation completion fellowship from my school. That would have covered my tuition, fees, and health insurance, and given me a (very modest) stipend to cover living expenses. Because life, I have missed the deadlines for all similar awards. (Though I only found 4 I was eligible for anyway.) This has prompted a lot of questions for myself about what comes next, specifically in terms of being able to contribute to my family’s financial wellbeing, which is going to need a lot more help because our childcare costs are more than doubling next year. I’m reluctant to take a (eventually) face-to-face full-time job, because I want to be with my kid in the afternoons. He’ll get out of school at 3:15 and I want to be there to pick him up, not put him in aftercare or delegate that to somebody else.

So, what can I do, that will pay me, lets me work from 9 - 3, and is flexible enough to accommodate both dissertating and chronic illness? I’ve landed on freelance editing, which I did for a few months after getting my MSLS. (And maybe a little writing, but it doesn’t pay as well.) My current assistantship contract ends on May 15; I’m open to taking on new work any time after that. If you need an editor, get in touch. I’m hoping the university will be able to work with me to at least fund my tuition and fees, but tuition doesn’t buy groceries or pay preschool teachers, soooooo…

That was kind of the biggest thing that went down this week. I spent a day moping about it and not feeling like doing much else. But I did read some Internet things. Let me share them with you!

I will be soothed, actually

Why We Turn to Jane Austen in Dark Times I love Jane Austen. This does a great job of explaining how her works are soothing without denying that life is hard sometimes.

I try to check Tumblr’s Week in Review most weeks, because I want to know what people are fans of. When I saw #cottagecore pop up, I was intrigued. It’s kind of like… hygge with more fairy rings and fawns? And also, from what I’m reading, a queer-friendly aesthetic in a way some other Internet aesthetics aren’t.I wanted an explainer, and the Internet gave me one. And then it gave me two more. This has me pondering Internet aesthetics. I’ll let you know what I’m thinking about those as I develop my thoughts further. (But FYI, two of my favorites are vaporwave and [seapunk]aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Seap….)

Also, I’m fairly certain the appeal of cottagecore/farmcore is related to phenomena like the Joy of Missing Out and the general consumerist move toward coziness more broadly. (I even briefly thought, “Maybe I should crochet big cozy blankets and sell them for exorbitant sums.” None of us are immune to this sort of thinking, I fear…) Also I got a little grouchy reading about grandmillenials, who I guess seem to me to be wee babes rediscovering the New Domesticity and sharing it online as though Gen X didn’t already do that over 15 years ago…

Currently

📖: Blue Mind by Wallace J. Nichols, A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland
🎬: ST:TNG in 40 Hours
🦸‍♀️: The Power of X
🎮: Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask, Lego Marvel Superheroes 2

Sesame Street is a great comedy school.

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 14:46:35 -0400

My preferred comedy format, though I’ve not really performed it, is sketch. Yes, I did improv for years, but basically because a sketch teacher was like “It’s like sketch if you didn’t write it first.” It was only recently in conversation with my mother-in-law and W that I realized that this love of sketch dates from when I was around 3 years old (like so many things!), and that aside from my parents’ churchy sketch parody show “Sunday Night Live” (which was one of my favorite things my parents ever did when I was a kid), this love of sketch also came from Sesame Street and The Muppet Show.

(A friend signed my high school yearbook, “Maybe you will become a writer for Saturday Night Live and then I can start watching it again.”)

Now that M is deep into Muppets and I’m more familiar with comedic structure, I’m noticing how good Sesame Street and The Muppets are at these things. This sketch with The Martians is a great example of a fish-out-of-water situation, playing the game of the scene, the rule of threes, and breaking the pattern.

Kind of makes sense that Muppets would be the source of solid comedy, given their background on SNL and everything.

Changing my research design

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 18:44:10 -0400

I submitted proposed changes to my research design to my committee today. I had to make these changes in light of COVID-19 eliminating the possibility of in-person fieldwork and the fact that my work has been both delayed and slowed due to not having my regular childcare/daily rhythm.

Here are the changes I’m making:

The consent document will be distributed to participants as a form in Qualtrics; they will certify that by submitting the form, they are consenting to participate in the research.

SUMMARY

Information horizon interviews will be conducted remotely via Microsoft Zoom, rather than in person. Participants will draw their information horizon maps, photograph them, and send them to the researcher via email or text.
The interview protocol will include a question about the anticipated impact of COVID-19 on the cosplayer’s future information practices.
Instead of inviting broad participation from the cosplay community, the research will use convenience sampling, inviting participation from cosplayers that she met at a con in 2019 and use snowball sampling to find additional participants to invite. She will only open up broad participation if she is unable to meet the minimum number of participants (10) through these methods.
Artifacts for the artifact analysis component will be selected, not based on the sustained, systematic observation of affinity space ethnography as originally described, but based on the responses of participants during the information horizon interview. Historical artifacts may be more prevalent than current artifacts, as most conventions are being postponed or canceled and cosplayers may not be working as intensely to meet cosplay deadlines.
There will be no participant observation.

Weekly Update: 04/03/20

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 17:41:19 -0400

First, some cute things my kid said.

He was talking about flushing the toilet and said that the contents go to the “water landfill.”

Also, I don’t like poop jokes, but he does. He asked if he could tell me a pee joke. I said, “No, I don’t like those either.” He said, “Why don’t you like waste jokes?”

So cute.

It’s the end of week three of social distancing over here, and we’re still relatively okay with each other as a family. M. is doing normal three-year-old stuff, W. and I aren’t sleeping well but at different times of night (he stays up late, I wake up and can’t get back to sleep). I’ve moved from anxiety into depression but am combatting it with as much sunlight as I can and it seems to be helping.

I had a week full of video calls: one with some Bronzer friends (the first two guests on my still-not-available-yet Buffy podcast, not especially coincidentally), with my BFF from middle and high school (that’s a link to her photography portfolio with a picture she took of M. when he was 6 days old). It was so lovely to see her face and chat, and I hope to do it again soon. I did Quarantine Book Club with Austin Kleon. I used Marco Polo to wish another friend’s cat well and was rewarded with a video of said cat making amazing cat sounds.

Today I did a video call with my advisor and another committee member, and we made a game plan that has soothed my concerns about being able to complete my research. It involves revising my methods some and scaling back the scope of the study. As my advisor said, “Would it be cool to do what you said you were going to do? Yes. But you can’t.” Eyes on the prize: me graduated in 2021.

I’ve been reading a lot online (I always read more articles when I spend less time on social media), adding to my ever growing pile of books I’m reading, enjoying watching Picard, and often having chocolate oatmeal for breakfast with a bit of peanut butter added. (It’s like having a no-bake cookie for breakfast; highly recommend.)

With that, let me recommend some online reading you might find fun or valuable.

Supporting Independent Bookstores

McSweeney’s has some thoughts and some advice on how you can help independent bookstores. I don’t have a ton of money to throw around, but I did buy myself and my kid books from our local independent bookstore, which is having their distributor ship the books directly to me.

One way you can support those independent bookstores is by buying books for your book clubs, which are apparently flourishing right now.

Funny Stuff

Speaking of McSweeney’s, their funny stuff often hits exactly the right spot for me. Witness:

I Know There Is a Pandemic, but I Am Leaving You for Bob Ross - A friend told me that ASMR videos always help her when she has a migraine. They didn’t do anything for me, but when I started poking around in the broader ASMR world I found the suggestion of watching Bob Ross, and he DOES help my migraines. I’m not leaving W. for him, but if I had a partner like the (I sure hope imaginary) narrator of this does, I might, in spite of his being dead.
Self-Isolation or Graduate School? - In case you missed it when I shared it earlier. Comedy gold, if you are in its very narrow target audience.
Frog and Toad Are Self-Quarantined Friends is perfect and beautiful, and now M. doesn’t want to play regular Frog and Toad, he wants to play Quarantine!Frog and Toad.

But they aren’t the only ones! Vulture brings it with If I Wrote a Coronavirus Episode. The 30 Rock, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, andYou’re the Worst offerings are perfect and oh my goodness Jane the Virgin actually filmed part of theirs. Will this prompt me to write fanfiction? Very possibly, because I’m sad that New Girl wasn’t in there.

Scary Stuff

Skip this section if you don’t want to read scary pandemic thoughts, but I found these pieces really helpful.

How the Pandemic Will End(The Atlantic)
The Four Possible Timelines for Life Returning to Normal(The Atlantic)
It’s the End and Nothing Feels Fine Apocalypse/zombie scholar and my new post-ac hero Kelly J. Baker talks about how this thing that feels like an apocalypse is very different from the apocalypse stories we tell ourselves.

Cut Yourself a Break

Okay, that’s enough scary, here’s some posts to convince you to give yourself some grace.

I Can’t Write About the Pandemic, But I Can’t Write About Anything Else “…avoid thinking like a careerist… Use your creative time to escape the zeitgeist… write the book that you most need to write.”
Against Productivity in a Pandemic “This is not a time to optimize or stoically pretend nothing has changed… This is a time to sustain.” “We do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive…” - Jenny Odell in How to Do Nothing I’ve been thinking more about maintenance and care since I read How to Do Nothing last summer, and I think right now especially it is where our focus should be. Which brings me to…
Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure This is a brilliant map, especially for academics, for how to get through this time. I am taking it to heart fully; once I get my revised research plans in place, I’m going to get some of my home stuff sorted out before trying to get back to work. I will be reading and re-reading and re-reading again this piece over the coming weeks.
Now Is the Perfect Time to Lower the Parenting Bar Sometimes I do elaborate activities with my kid. It’s usually to keep me from being bored. The rest of the time, we’re reading or he’s playing while I rest. Sometimes we watch TV, but I try to save it for when I need it. “Unlike the running joke that every working parent, single parent, or stay-at-home parent has uttered at some point, that ‘everyone was alive’ at the end of the day, that is actually the real job we all have right now. Trying to keep people alive. Even people we don’t know and can’t see, at the end of the day, every day, until this thing is done.”

Poetry

April is National Poetry Month. I highly recommend signing up for the Poem-a-Day newsletter from Poets.org. I’ll probably start listening to The Slowdown and watching Patrick Stewart read sonnets, too.

The Function of Humor in the Neighborhood “I wrote this poem in response to criticism that my work is ‘too funny to be taken seriously.’ I wanted to explain that I am writing in a Jewish tradition where nothing is more serious than humor.” - Allison Pitinii Davis This resonated so strongly with me. It also reminded me of that old Mel Brooks quote: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale”Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope, where you can rest and wait.“ This is a great reminder for those of us who are privileged enough to be in a situation where we can rest and wait.
Probably you should check out my friend Kit’s Instagram because he is writing a haiku a day and just… well, go get to know him that way. You won’t regret it.

What pandemic?

This post about Jessica Drew Spider-Woman’s costume (and Batgirl too) speaks much of what’s in my heart. As I’ve been planning cosplays, I’ve been thinking about both the extent to which I feel like playing up my sexiness (I don’t, not in cosplay, really) and also what’s comfortable (hint: not most superhero costumes, especially the ones for women). The awesome moto Spider-Woman costume here is one of my planned cosplays for whenever I can cosplay somewhere. (Still need to put together gloves and glasses.) I was so excited when I learned there would be a new Spider-Woman book, because I’ve been missing her, and so sad when I saw what her next costume will look like. Seems like with every iteration, it gets closer and closer to being less like spandex and more like body paint. I don’t mind unrealistic proportions. I do prefer outfits that look easy to fight in, though.

Until next time!

Wisdom from the Co-Star app

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 06:28:08 -0400

All you have to do this month is allow for things to feel uncertain.
Now is a good time to construct a solid home inside yourself so that you stop looking for a home in everyone else.
Now is the time to find beauty in what’s cracked or broken.
Resist delusional thinking when it comes to productivity.

Don't wait until you know who you are to get started, scholars.

Tue, 31 Mar 2020 13:45:22 -0400

This is part two of a series in which I’m writing up how Austin Kleon’s work particularly relevant for scholars, researchers, and academics. For a quick overview of his book Steal Like an Artist, you can watch Kleon’s TED talk.

You can find the previous post in this series here.

2. Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started. Kleon argues that it is in the act of making stuff that you discover who you are. This is true for research and academic writing, as well. It’s possible that this applies mostly to early career scholars, but I think scholars have the opportunity to reinvent themselves many times in a career, so it can apply more broadly.

Don’t wait until you have a research design to start thinking and writing about a topic. If there’s something you’re interested in, go ahead and start reading in that area. Write up your reading notes. They will come in handy when you’re ready to design your research.

Don’t wait until you have a narrow field of expertise to conduct a study. My first study was on the leadership practices of school librarians. My second was on school library preparation program’s special education courses. My dissertation is about the information literacy practices of cosplayers. These are not all related at all, but I learned different things during each one. (Or, in the case of my dissertation, am still learning.) The first study used a survey methodology, the second content analysis, the third ethnographic methods. I also conducted two small-scale studies for my coursework. If I waited to find my one true calling until I started designing studies, I probably never would have designed any studies. (I’ve actually designed many more than I’ve completed; maybe I’ll use those designs eventually. I really like designing studies. I’ve thought about hiring myself out as a sort of “research best friend” to talk people through their study design process.)

Kleon encourages creatives to copy their heroes. Scholars can copy - but not plagiarize - the work of others in a variety of ways. My favorite is to apply someone else’s research methods to a new population or scenario, adding on something extra to make the study uniquely mine. For my Master’s paper, I copied Daniella Smith’s methods, using the Leadership Practices Inventory. Dr. Smith used this to measure the self-perceived leadership practices of preservice school librarians, people who were training as school librarians but were not yet employed as such. I used the same instrument to measure the self-perceived leadership practices of National Board Certified school librarians - school librarians with at least three years of professional school library experience who had submitted to a rigorous certification program. This is a very different population, but I used the same instrument. I also added a second instrument, which I had developed to measure school librarians’ ability to implement professional guidelines, then investigated the relationship between leadership and that ability. I copied, but it was not a perfect copy. (And as Kleon points out, it never can be - in the case of research, something about your settings or materials or analysis is bound to be different.)

For my dissertation, I am building on the methods of Dr. Crystle Martin’s dissertation, using her interview and online artifact analysis methods with cosplayers. She used these methods with World of Warcraft players. Again, a different population. I also, in my original design, added face-to-face observation - something that built on her work but made it my own. (In the wake of COVID-19, I am sadly not sure how much face-to-face observation I will be able to do. We’ll see.)

Next time: Write the book you want to read.

Steal Like an Artist for Scholars

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 10:58:11 -0400

Austin Kleon is one of the creative people who have had the greatest influence on my thinking about art, life, and parenthood. I actually had a bit of a freakout tonight whenI couldn’t find my copies of Steal Like an Artist and Keep Going. (I’ve loaned my copy of Show Your Work to a friend.) They turned up, though, and thank goodness.

For years, I’ve thought someone should write up how his work is particularly relevant for scholars, researchers, and academics. (Often, one person is all three, but it felt worth listing them separately here.) Maybe somebody has, but I haven’t seen it, so I’m going to do it. For a quick overview of Steal Like an Artist, you can watch Kleon’s TED talk.

I’m going to do this as a series of 10 posts, one post per point on Kleon’s list/chapter in the book. First up:

1. Steal like an artist. Kleon points out that nothing is wholly original. With scholarship, it is a key part of designing research to situate our planned work in the work that came before it. We have a whole section of most scholarly writing devoted to this: the literature review. Kleon suggests that we build a family tree of thinkers, finding one who influences us and then learning everything about them, then learning about three people who influenced them, on and on up the chain as far as we can go. This is basically what citation chaining is. Kleon focuses on backward citation chaining. I wonder if the academic’s process of forward citation chaining might be useful for other creatives; what would Kleon think about finding other people who have the same influences as you and exploring their work downstream? I imagine this wouldn’t be as easy to do as it is for researchers, who can simply pop a reference in Google Scholar, Scopus, or Web of Science and track down the things that reference it, but it might still be valuable to do.

Kleon recommends saving your “thefts” for later. Scholars can do this by keeping up with the work in their field (I’m personally a fan of subscribing to journal table of contents by email and setting up Google Scholar alerts), skimming it, and keeping a research notebook to help them keep track of all of the things they’ve read.

One thing that applies perhaps more uniquely to scholars - though maybe works for other creatives, too - is to look for places where other scholars have explicitly called for work that builds on theirs. I don’t know to what extent other people mine the “Future research” sections of studies for their own work, but I have found it immensely valuable. Both my Master’s paper and dissertation topics came from paying close attention to where other scholars have called for work that builds on theirs. It’s been particularly rewarding to do this with my dissertation, as Dr. Crystle Martin, whose dissertation inspired mine, is on my committee and this is the first time she’s really seen someone build on her work. Why do we do all of this work if all that is going to happen is that it will sit unread somewhere? I suppose some people do it because they have to for job security or being competitive on the job market, but I like to imagine that most of us at least started with a plan for doing our research because we thought it could improve the world somehow. Drawing on other scholars’ work to build ours brings that work out of archives and into the world.

As Kleon quotes Mark Twain saying,

It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.

Next time: Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started.

You can comment on kimberlyhirsh.com now!

Sun, 29 Mar 2020 13:40:57 -0400

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about what I consider the golden age of blogging - probably 2001 - 2004. Some people might consider this late, since the first blogs showed up in 1997. Other people would consider it early; I’ve recently seen people refer to 2008 and 2009 as the best time for blogging in their memory.

Regardless, as soon as comments were a feature people could have on their blogs, they became a part of what made blogs special. Reverse chronological order, single posts, sure sure, but also the comments.

When I had my first blog, back in 2001, I longed for comments. My blog was hand-coded HTML and CSS, and I just didn’t have the chops for making comments happen. So as soon as I realized I could (probably when I switched from a free host to a paid host), I switched from hand-coding to using Greymatter, almost entirely because it handled comments.

I started kimberlyhirsh.com in 2009 on WordPress, so it always had comments. When I moved it to Micro.blog at the end of last year, the comments didn’t come with it. People could @-reply on Micro.blog itself. They could reach out to me via Twitter, Tumblr, or email. But they couldn’t comment directly on the post.

In an ideal IndieWeb world, everyone would have their own site, and write their replies on their and send webmentions here and, now that Micro.blog displays conversations on posts, they would magically appear and it would be beautiful. But most of the people who want to interact with me online are not steeped in the IndieWeb. They might like to comment, but it is an extra-extra step asking them to communicate not on the post directly, after they’ve probably already taken the extra step to click over to the post from wherever it’s syndicated that they saw it.

As long as I’ve been here, Micro.blog has had a help document with information on enabling Comments with Disqus. I’ve been getting used to Micro.blog and tweaking my space here incrementally, and this is the latest increment. I really hope people will use it. Looking at other peoples’ blogs and the conversations that have gone on in their comments makes me hope for times when that’s how things will happen again.

Weekly Update: 03/27/20

Fri, 27 Mar 2020 16:34:34 -0400

I’m trying a new thing with a weekly round-up on Friday.

This has been the second week of social distancing for us. We order our groceries via Instacart, always tipping 10%. I’m wondering now if we should tip higher. If they go on strike, we will find other ways to get groceries, but as someone who is potentially high risk for COVID-19, it has been such a blessing/privilege to be able to get groceries this way.

This was our first week “back” from M’s earlier-than-expected spring break, which means Zoom calls with babies, toddlers, preschoolers, parents, and teachers at 9:30 am every morning. It’s been such a balm to see all those precious faces, to hear the kids say each other’s names and say hello. M and I also did a call with the family of one of his dearest friends. He wasn’t super interested, so it was mostly me talking to them, but it was still nice to do. (Moms trying to talk to each other while the kids are around, though, isn’t really a thing that can happen.)

I have stolen a few moments here and there to work on both my dissertation research and the research for my assistantship. I’m hopeful that next week I’ll be able to dig into those more.

Very little gets done aside from keeping the kid alive. I have had a couple of glorious baths with sea or Epsom salt in them. Media gets consumed. Sleep happens, though often poorly. We eat, and the food mostly isn’t junk (my Hershey-bar-with-almonds habit notwithstanding) but I wouldn’t say there’s much cooking going on. W makes tacos, or I toss some chicken and potatoes in the Instant Pot.

It’s been beautiful outside. Going out and sitting on the deck, it’s easy to forget what a scary time we’re living in. People walk their dogs on the trail. Kids ride bikes. M and W’s mom play in the yard with a beautiful set of fairies and animals that she got for M.

I am trying to blog daily. I spent a late night using every resource from holisticism that mentions purpose or career to help me think about what’s up with my life. While I don’t think the movement of the heavens controls what we do, I think astrology and human design are valuable tools for interrogating ourselves. If we’re reading a description that is supposed to be of us, we can ask ourselves whether it resonates or not. Mine usually does.

Between those resources and Co-star, I am coming to terms with the fact that while I want to do meaningful and helpful work, my priority in life is more home and family and less career. Not that I don’t want one, but that career doesn’t define me. I’m realizing that spontaneous self-expression is very important to me, as is interrogating identity and how it is constructed. I’m embracing the fact that blogging is the most accessible form of spontaneous self-expression for me, that it’s one I’ve been carrying on in one form or another for almost 20 years, and that it’s a very fine hobby to have as one’s primary hobby. The others wax and wane, but blogging is always here.

This is a nice segue into what I’ve been reading online this week, because as I decided to really embrace kimberlyhirsh.com as a personal blog rather than a professional blog or something aimed at getting me jobs or providing income, I’ve been reading about personal blogging and its value. Here are some of the things I read that stuck with me:

How blogs changed everything This is a post from 2009, but still has a lot of value today. My favorite part is when Rosenberg says, “Blogging allows us to think out loud together.” I love the concept of blogging-as-thinking. Every time I run across it, I go, “Oh YEAH! THAT’s why we do this!”
Personal Blogging Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me This more recent piece, written in 2015 and updated in 2017, references the earlier one. The author writes:

Personal blogging does not require you to become an expert at anything but your life. We’re all experts at our own lives, and sometimes we have experiences that are universal that would bring like-minded people together. We share these experiences on a personal blog in the hopeful attempt to reach out and make other people who are going through the same thing a little less alone.

This helped me think about the purpose of my site/blog. It’s three-fold: first, it serves as a way for people who meet me to get to know me deeply. Whether we meet face-to-face or online, it has value because I try to be myself here. I’m old enough that I’m kind of done pretending to be something I’m not. If people see what I write here and don’t want to work with me or be friends with me, we weren’t going to be a good fit anyway. Second, it serves as a set of reminders to myself. My future self is the primary audience for this blog. Over and over I search its archives for things I’ve written, whether about health or academics or something else entirely. Third, it is a way to help people, to make them feel less alone, or to illuminate processes that may be opaque to them. This is really what this quote is getting at. (You’ll notice the new description, with both Helpfulness and Transparency included in it. That’s what this is about.)

The Personal Blog This piece, from 2014, claims that there is a renaissance of personal blogging happening. I like to imagine that’s still the case, or perhaps even moreso now than it was them. (For more on this question, see The blog is dead. long live the blog, The Death of the Blog, Again, Again, and Blogging is most certainly not dead.) This quote resonated with me in particular:

There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.

This is happening more and more, especially with technologies like webmentions supporting it. (Hat-tip to @c, author of that article.)

And this is an especially valuable moment for it, for focusing on this small bit of the digital world over which we have control:

Finally on the personal blog front, Robin Sloan and Colin Walker really get at the reason I’m embracing kimberlyhirsh.com as a fully personal blog (which will necessarily include my work, because it’s part of who I am):

The thing about blogging is, you can just write about the things you love. A “professional” “critic” (scare quotes because who even knows what words mean anymore) has to do something else, something more difficult: manage a kind of unfolding… aesthetic… worldview? Balance one thing against the other? A blogger suffers no such burden. A blogger can simply

love a thing, and
write about it.

In that aforementioned new tagline, “Enthusiasm” is the first word. It’s placement is very deliberate, I assure you.

And one more thing. Because it’s All Muppets All the Time (my DVD set of Season 1 of The Muppet Show just arrived!), I really appreciated this article asking Why Doesn’t Disney+ Have More Muppet Stuff?.

Last but not least, current consumption:
🎵: Labyrinth Original Motion Picture Soundtrack/The Muppets (2011) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
📖: Blue Mind by Wallce J. Nichols
🎬: Picard
🦸‍♀️: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures
🎮: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Lego Marvel Superheroes, Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask, Lego Marvel Superheroes 2

I ordered my sister from a catalog.

Thu, 26 Mar 2020 10:44:06 -0400

The other day I mentioned how I named my sister after a preschool friend.

When I was 3, I was looking at a catalog - maybe a toy catalog or a catalog for a baby supply store a la Babies R Us - and I found a picture of a blonde toddler girl in it. My friend Elizabeth was older than me, and blonde, and I thought she was great and that her name was the best name. (I have no idea what her last name is, what became of her, etc.) I had been telling my parents that I wanted a baby sister. I took the catalog to them, pointing at the picture of the toddler with blonde hair and light eyes, and said, “I want that baby to be my little sister. Her name will be Elizabeth.”

My parents, both dark-haired, one with brown eyes and one with blue, said, “We’ll do our best, but we might not be able to get that exact baby.” I was adamant.

I did get a little sister. When my mom went into labor (we were in the middle of having pizza for dinner, and her water broke, and she said, “Oof! My water broke!”), I went to my grandmother’s house and spent the night with her. In the morning, I talked with my parents on the phone. “You have a baby sister,” they told me. I was like, DUH. “Her name is Mary Elisabeth.”

I was LIVID. I scolded them for giving her the wrong name. Elizabeth, with a Z, was supposed to be her first name. And they’d made it her middle name? That was untenable. (I wouldn’t put it past my four-year-old self to know the word untenable, but I don’t think I did.)

They explained that “Elisabeth Mary” didn’t sound as good. I don’t know if I ever found out why they went with the S instead of the Z. I prefer the S now anyway.

She was born with light brown hair and light eyes, but it quickly became apparent that my parents had, in fact, produced a blonde baby sister for me. Eventually I forgave them for getting her name wrong.

Do stuff your three-year-old self liked.

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 21:59:47 -0400

After realizing that 1. The Muppets (specifically those of The Muppet Show) is pretty much my first fandom and 2. I got into them when I was the same age M. is now (3) and they still bring me immense joy, I’ve been thinking about what other things I was super into at that time, and trying to bring them back into my life.

In addition to The Muppets, I was very into swimming and going to the beach. I can’t do either of those things right now, but I have been reading [Blue Mind] while taking salt water baths, and it is scratching that itch.

I went to see my first musical when I was three. It was A Chorus Line. I remember not understanding how speakers work, so I kept insisting to my parents that there was a performer behind me. It’s weird to realize that these are the days that will be the foundation of M.’s earliest memories, memories he’ll still have when he’s in his 30s and beyond. I’ve been listening to cast recordings more lately than I have in a while. (It’s taking me forever to get through Hadestown. It’s gorgeous, but so long.) Broadway HD has a 7 day trial, so I’m planning to get that and maybe keep it for a month or two.

I’m pretty sure I was super into Star Wars already at this age (and so is M.). I’ve been systematically consuming ALL THE STAR WARS CONTENT thanks to the Star Wars Canon Timeline (in release order, of course, because I’m me). I’d taken a break to dig into some other stuff, but I’ll probably get back to it soon.

The other things I know I liked when I was three including imagining what it would be like to be a ballerina (but not actually doing ballet, apparently I was creeped out by the mirrors?), and this one girl named Elizabeth. Who I ended up naming my sister after. But that’s another story for another blog post. (Maybe tomorrow.)

🎵 Introducing: #showtunesisters (i.e., me challenging my sister to sing showtune duets with me)

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 18:01:15 -0400

View this post on Instagram

Challenging @ailuruscosmos to join me for a #showtunesisters duet. An anecdote: one time after one of my improv student shows, ME came out with the class to the brewery. Someone told us we sound alike. When one of us mentioned that our voice teacher said we had all the same vocal problems, someone said, "You sing? Will you sing for us now?" I said, "Sure, what do you want us to sing?" Clearly thinking they had us stumped, this person said, "The Confrontation from Les Mis." This person did not know that we had watched @nph and @jasonsegel do this time and again on the Megan Mullally show and Inside the Actor's Studio. (Look it up. The best part might be @joshradnor's reactions.) #broadway #showtunes #lesmiserables #lesmis #confrontation #javert #valjean

A post shared by Kimberly Hirsh (@kimberlyhirsh) on Mar 24, 2020 at 1:49pm PDT

I like The Muppets (2015) TV show more than I thought I would. 📺

Sun, 22 Mar 2020 21:49:45 -0400

_My brother gave me [this Muppet version of The Phantom of the Opera ](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/546080/muppets-meet-the-classics-the-phantom-of-the-opera-by-gaston-leroux-and-erik-forrest-jackson-illustrated-by-owen-richardson/) a couple Christmases back, and I have genuinely never felt more seen in my entire life._

Back in June 2019, M. and I visited the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, GA while accompanying W. on a work trip. They have a whole gallery devoted to Jim Henson’s work. My family has always been a Muppet family, I suppose because my parents had only been married a couple of years when The Muppet Show started airing and I wasn’t born until it had been on the air for four years. I saw it a great deal, so it must have been available in second-run syndication. And then of course there were the movies, which I watched many a time.

This visit to the Center for Puppetry Arts reminded me of my long-standing affection for The Muppets, something I hadn’t thought about overly much since purchasing the Blu-Ray of the 2011 movie The Muppets, which I adore. Truly, coming around a corner from the Sesame Street part of the gallery to the Muppet part of the gallery, I saw Kermit the Frog sitting on a director’s chair in a glass case and it was like seeing an old friend. I think I may actually have said hello to him.

Since that trip, I have slowly been bringing M. into my Muppet obsession. I think it may have begun with this adorable clip of Kermit and a little girl on Sesame Street:

and continued with “Mahna Mahna”:

I’m not sure what order the rest of it all proceeded in, but it involved the Kermit stuffy I bought at the Center for Puppetry Arts, an old Muppet Babies Kermit stuffy from my childhood, a squeaky Muppet Babies Miss Piggy toy that my sister found in her house, some Muppet picture books that are probably over 35 years old (and not in great condition), and The Muppet Movie. Through all of these activities, our household is in the throes of Muppet Fever, and I love it. M. has been especially obsessed with Muppets Most Wanted, he says because he likes that there are two frogs in it (not counting Robin’s brief cameo). We used an audiobook on a doublet set of the novelizations of the two most recent Muppet movies. He falls asleep to it every night.

Earlier this week, when we had just finished watching Muppets Most Wanted and he said he wanted to watch more Muppets stuff, we decided to try the 2018 Muppet Babies. I had tried it once before and not been able to handle the CG-ness of it, but I will try just about anything for him. It’s actually super cute and has some phenomenal jokes and references for parents.

Since I hadn’t liked this before but was finding it fun now, I decided to try the muppets.. I had been very excited when it was announced, and immediately turned off by the clear references to The Office which is just not for me. I didn’t like the mockumentary style and I was really displeased by the character design for Kermit’s not-Miss Piggy-but-still-a-pig girlfriend. But that was 2015, and this is now! So I started it.

I’ve really been enjoying it. The writing is sharp; the showrunner was one of the writers on Muppet*Vision 3-D, which does a brilliant job of capturing Muppetness. There was an uproar when the show came out about its depiction of relationships, sexuality, and alcohol use as being inappropriate for a “family” property, but one of the earliest Muppet specials was called The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence, so that really doesn’t bother me.

I think the show gets better further in to the run, as the really familiar bits of character come out.

One critic compared it to Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, but I think it really has a 30 Rock vibe.

One of my favorite things about it is how very much screentime Uncle Deadly gets. He leaped into my top 3 muppets (after Kermit and Piggy) after I saw him in the 2011 movie and, upon researching him, discovered that he is the Phantom of the Muppet Show.

Anyway: I have loved watching this show and am looking forward to the episodes I have remaining. I have been reminded that I have no other OTP that I cling to as fiercely as I cling to Kermit/Piggy.

Finally, if you, too, are obsessed with Muppets, especially if you have seen The Avengers and understand fandom tropes, please go read what is possibly my favorite fanfiction ever written, Avengers: Earth’s Muppetest Heroes.

Our family's social distancing schedule

Sat, 21 Mar 2020 20:13:19 -0400

I wanted to share our family’s current weekday schedule, mostly to help other people feel okay about theirs. This isn’t what every day looks like, but it’s a good sense of ours.

7 - 8 am Get up somewhere in there.
8 - 8:30 am Laze about, take meds, go to the bathroom, do puzzles, read, snuggle
8:30 am - 9 am Family breakfast
9 am - 10 am W gets to work; K & M do activity - most recently from either Fun at Home with Kids or Hands on as We Grow
10 am - 11 am Free play in the playroom, snack
11 am - 12 pm Screen time (lately, the new iteration of Muppet Babies)
12 pm - 1 pm Lunch as a whole family
1 pm - 3 pm W goes back to work, audiobook and quiet bedroom play (I rest in M’s room during this time)
3 pm - 4 pm Snack, playroom free play
4 pm - 6 pm Screen time (more Muppet Babies, maybe Muppets Most Wanted)
6 pm - 7 pm Family dinner (both making and eating)
7 pm - 8 pm Stories
8 pm Lights out

You’ll notice there is absolutely no space for me to get any work done in here. That’s not sustainable long-term, though I was willing to accept it for this week and treat it effectively like spring break. In the future, I’m hoping we’ll get a 4 or 5 hour block of grandma time in there many a day so I can really get to work. If that doesn’t work out, one of the screen time blocks will probably be W & M together while I go off to get a couple of hours of work in.

Me getting rest is prioritized pretty highly here, too. I’ve been in the middle of an autoimmune flare for I don’t know how long, and have had many a coronavirus anxiety spiral. My sleep is… Not great.

Also, there’s not specific time blocked in here for getting outside. We do make an effort to get outside every day, sometimes for a family walk, sometimes sidewalk chalk in the culdesac, sometimes just catching some fresh air on the porch. I want to move toward more deliberate outside time and/or indoor physical activity next week. I also want to provide M. with resources to follow his interests. He wants to learn about robots and turtles next week, he says. He’s indicated that he wants to prioritize turtles over robots, but is interested in both.

Anyway, there’s no real deliberate learning and there’s absolutely zero teaching; the activities are fun things mostly to keep me from completely losing it. I do them first thing because genuinely by 10 or 11 I feel like I’ve already used up my spoons for the day.

So yeah. It looks structured, but it’s not. This is more of a DESCRIPTIVE schedule than a PRESCRIPTIVE schedule. It’s just kind of what’s been happening. I hope it’s helpful.

What I'm doing about my pandemic anxiety

Thu, 19 Mar 2020 11:10:10 -0400

Something in me has broken, and now I am cracked, open and vulnerable. For the first time yesterday, I set my armor of humor aside and sat with the fact that, as a high-risk person, I am scared. I am scared not because I think coronavirus will kill me; I am scared that it will incapacitate me for any time at all, that it will place a huge burden on my family. I am scared that I will have to be kept away from my child. I don’t think I have it, but I’m scared that if I get it, this will be the outcome.

In November 2018, I had walking pneumonia. It was miserable. If that’s what a “mild” case of pneumonia is, I don’t want to know what a moderate one feels like. My husband, W., was out of town, I was on my own with my kid, M. I don’t know why I didn’t seek out more help from my family. W. came home and we almost immediately set out for Charleston as a family; I could have stayed home with M. by myself for a few more days, but that didn’t really sound like convalescing. So with what my doctor had said was inflammation but not yet infection (this was before the walking pneumonia diagnosis), I traipsed about Charleston with my kid. Our last day there, at breakfast, my lungs actually started feeling wet and gurgly inside them. I made an appointment to see my doctor as soon as we got home. (I was past the worst of the coughing at this point, so I thought I was on the mend. Ha.)

I came home, she diagnosed me with walking pneumonia, gave me some antibiotics, and an order for an x-ray if I didn’t start improving in the next couple of days. I took ONE DAY to stay in bed all day, and then felt like I better get back to helping with my kid, since he is basically my only family responsibility and it never feels great to me to ask the person who provides 85% of our income, cleans, does laundry, does dishes, and does yardwork to take on more childcare than he normally does. (He’s basically primary caregiver on weekends, too. He is remarkable.) I don’t think it was apparent to anyone else except maybe my mom how sick I was. Including M. and W. I think they thought I was a little unwell.

I got better, though pneumonia - even walking pneumonia - takes several weeks before you get as strong as you were before. And I don’t think I ever really got close to my pre-pneumonia level of strength and energy (which itself was not that great, because chronic illness). My lungs still feel a bit wobbly whenever I get anything respiratory.

I don’t want to feel like I did then.

I also am increasingly believing that the current disruption to life which has led me to be a stay-at-home mom more and a scholar less is going to continue for longer than I originally anticipated. And it’s kind of hard to feel like cosplay research is important right now (though honestly, it’s actually information literacy research and that feels VERY important right now). So I’m re-evaluating what I want to direct my attention to right now.

I’m not doing great with combatting social isolation. My introversion combined with flare up/world state low energy makes me less likely to initiate communication, so I’ve been trying to stay connected in more passive ways. But my efforts to stay connected, which have consisted mostly of scrolling Micro.blog and Twitter, have now driven me into middle-of-the-night anxiety spirals, so I’m taking action to disrupt those. Here are the things I’m doing.

Getting my news once per day via email. I get The Skimm for national and world news, the Indy Primer for local news (though it also covers national and world news), and the Wired coronavirus update for coronavirus-specific news.

Only looking at notifications/mentions. I am not going to scroll Twitter or Micro.blog anymore, as each time I do it throws me into an anxiety spiral. I’m only looking directly at my notifications or mentions. I have pinned these pages in Firefox as top sites, so I can go to them without having to navigate timelines or feeds to get to the notifications/mentions.

Consciously connecting with communities I know will alleviate my anxiety. Mostly, this is Kim Werker’s Community of Creative Adventurers right now.

Committing to doing more with my hands and living in my body. In the middle of the night, a balm for my anxiety came over me: GARDEN. This works on a couple levels, because gardening is a soothing activity, and also because I’m in this panicked near-survivalist mindset and if I can garden, I can learn to grow my own food, and then it won’t matter if the grocery store doesn’t have strawberries. (Obviously that’s a more long-term outcome, but I’m feeling pretty dire right now.) So I got out my copy of You Grow Girl and visited Gayla Trail’s blog, where I found a blog post from her that perfectly echoed my mindset. So this is where I’m at right now.

Watching Muppets Most Wanted with my kid as many times as he wants. It’s bizarre to me that he prefers this to the 2011 The Muppets, but whatever. This song, in particular, delights me every time. (Also, Tina Fey. Tina Fey delights me as well.)

🔖 Keeping kids busy at home

Fri, 13 Mar 2020 10:41:26 -0400

Storing links here so they’re easy for me to find when I need them during the next two weeks. Maybe they’ll help you, too?

More to come.

Changing my research plans in light of COVID-19

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 10:05:24 -0400

All friends & students who are in the midst of dissertation data collection - I know recent events have made the process even more stressful. I hear & acknowledge the worries. Reach out to your supervisor/chair/colleagues/mentors - we can talk through options & possibilities.
— 𝔻𝕣. 𝕃𝕖𝕚𝕘𝕙 𝔾𝕣𝕒𝕧𝕖𝕤 𝕎𝕠𝕝𝕗 (@gravesle) March 11, 2020

My kid has been sick the past few days. Today is our first day back at Montessori/co-working space since last Friday, and while I’ve been pondering how the spread of coronavirus will impact my research the whole time we’ve been out, today I actually plan to figure out what I’m going to do about it.

Yesterday, Governor Roy Cooper declared a State of Emergency in North Carolina. The press release includes several suggestions. The one that is pertinent to my research is this one:

NC DHHS recommends that people at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19 avoid large groups of people as much as possible. This includes gatherings such as concert venues, conventions, church services, sporting events, and crowded social events.

One of the key pieces of my research involves interviewing and observing at conventions. I’m not sure whether or not I am at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19, though I suspect I am, due to having pre-diabetic Polycystic Ovary Syndrome and autoimmune thyroiditis. Autoimmune disesases don’t make one automatically immunocompromised, but I don’t trust that there aren’t some hidden conditions going on in my body that would make me such. Additionally, I spend a lot of time with my son’s grandparents on both sides of the family, and all of them are in high risk categories. Even though so far none of the cons I was planning to use as field sites have been canceled, I am reluctant to attend conventions myself.

The interview protocol I’m using requires participants to create a graphic representation of their information horizon, drawing themselves in relationship to the resources they use when they have an information need related to cosplay. My plan was to do the interviews in person, giving participants blank paper.

One potential solution is to add more cons - further afield than the initial 50-mile radius I’d originally planned to maintain - that are occurring later in the year, in hopes that coronavirus risk will be reduced by then.

But with the situation changing so rapidly, I don’t feel comfortable relying on that.

So of course, I’m considering how to conduct these interviews online. I have access to Microsoft Zoom through my university, which provides excellent quality for video calls and easy recording. In one sense, this would actually be easier than a face-to-face interview. Except for the graphic representation piece. I could have participants draw on the Zoom whiteboard, but that would require me to give them a tutorial in the whiteboard features. What my colleague/committee member Casey Rawson suggested, and what I’ll most likely do, is have participants draw on some paper at their homes, then both hold the paper up to the webcam for me to see and take a photo of the paper and email/text/DM it to me.

I was concerned as to whether this shift would change my IRB exemption, but after examining the type of exemption I have, I don’t think it will. It is no less secure or protective of participants’ privacy than face-to-face interviews, and in some ways, it is moreso.

That still leaves the question of observations. Part of the unique contribution of my study is that it is the first to examine a blended affinity space, a set of spaces where people gather around a common interest both online and in-person. (Earlier studies looked at World of WarCraft but not BlizzCon, and Minecraft but not Minefaire.) If things go very badly and there are no cons, well, that changes things quite a bit.

On the other hand: Everything is data, so seeing how participants in the cosplay affinity space itself handle avoiding cons or con cancellation will be instructive in and of itself.

Whew.

I’ll figure it out.

I really just want to graduate before I’m 40, y’all.

Reintroducing Genetrix, curating stories about creative mothers

Mon, 09 Mar 2020 10:47:51 -0400

Last January, I launched Genetrix, a newsletter to curate stories of creative mothers. After sending two issues, I started to get overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. But I felt called to it again recently, so I changed up how I’m doing it. Now it’s a newsletter/blog. It’s now hosted on Tumblr and syndicated via Micro.blog @genetrixletter, RSS, MailChimp, Twitter, and Facebook. The rest of this post will be the intro post from there. Please check it out if you like.

Welcome to Genetrix!

I am having such trouble finding narratives of women who are mothers and artists, or mothers and musicians, or mothers and writers — stories in which women are both, without their struggle to be more than a mother overwhelming them… [I am] looking for a narrative in which creative women do not have to choose between abandoning their work or their children. I hope to find a story of women who live as men do: loving and ambitious, child-raisers and artists.

Elliott’s writing and this experience confirmed for me that I needed to seek out the stories of other creative mothers. And my natural inclination is to share the stories I find. Hence, this blog.

What are we doing here? Like motherhood itself, creating and curating this blog will be a process of trial and error. I’ll be sharing links to blog posts and articles that inspire me and can serve as a launching point into our journey at the intersection of creativity and motherhood. I’m hoping to include reviews of relevant books and media, and conversational interviews with actual creative mothers. But please tell me what you would like to see in this space. I’m especially interested in ideas for how we can build a community of people interested in stories of creative mothers.

03/02/20 Process Memo

Tue, 03 Mar 2020 17:40:52 -0400

I spent some time this morning installing encryption software so that I can encrypt the data files I will be backing up onto an external hard drive.

I created a spreadsheet to track the initial sources for my sustained, systematic observation and entered the resources Kroski (2015) mentions. I noted the title, author, URL, type (book, tutorial, blog post, etc), and whether the resource was part of a larger portal (e.g. YouTube, Instructables, Pinterest).

As you might expect of a 5 year old book, a few of the resources are now unavailable. Not a lot else to report today, and I expect this piece of the work will continue for a few more days before I start actually taking notes using my observation protocol.

02/28/2020 Process Memo: Beginning sustained, systematic observation

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 13:01:52 -0400

I began my sustained, systematic observation today by gathering my initial resources for this phase.

First, on my Dissertation Trello board in my Sustained, Systematic Observation list, I created a card called “Collect initial resources.”

On this card, I created a checklist and including the following types of sources to use to identify resources:

LIS sources

Those I mentioned in my proposal (book & articles)
Those referenced in Cosplay in Libraries (henceforth referred to as Kroski 2015) (specifically, LI Pop Culture Con)

Cosplay sources

Convention websites to review for guest or cosplay group names
Groups mentioned in Kroski 2015, such as Star Wars groups the 501st & Rebel legions
Sources identified by Googling “Marvel cosplayers” and browsing the first 10 pages of results. Kroski refers to her own cosplay “origin story” as being when she participated in a call for Marvel cosplayers for an episode of Cake Boss. This mention is why I Googled Marvel cosplayers.

Next, I began a close reading of Kroski 2015 to look for resources she suggests/mentions. This includes specific lists of tutorials related to particular techniques, books she mentions, apps, and references in her endnotes that are cosplay resources such as blog posts. I am flagging these with Post-it flags and will enter them into a spreadsheet before beginning using my observation protocol.

I will also need to perform the observation protocol on Kroski 2015 itself.

What am I opening? (Dissertating in the Open)

Fri, 28 Feb 2020 13:20:00 -0400

I’ve been doing some reading this week on what it means to dissertate in the open, and as there are many different ways to do it, I thought I would talk quickly about my plans moving forward.

First, here are some of the sources informing my ideas:

Dissertating in the Open by Laura Gogia
Granularities of the Open Dissertation by Laura Gogia
The Integration of Web Culture into Higher Education by Laura Gogia
Opening the Dissertation by Bonnie Stewart
Shifting my research question by Rebecca J. Hogue
The Open Dissertation by Maha Bali

Laura Gogia’s visual article and post on granularities sum it up best. I can open up my dissertation process and/or my dissertation content, using a variety of tools. So far, I’ve done a combination of both: I’ve offered insight into the process and shared documents such as my literature review, prospectus, and proposal.

For now, I’m going to focus on sharing process. I will come back around to content, especially as I want to share my research with cosplayers, but my primary audience right now is other researchers - especially doctoral students and early career researchers.

To that end, I will be blogging my process memos. In the course of working on my PhD, I’ve discovered it’s far too easy to forget how we got to a certain point, so I’m going to keep daily process memos about the work I did that day. I’ll probably be a day behind in posting them, since I’ll write them at the end of my workday. So you’ll see today’s process memo on Monday.

Have a lovely weekend!

Dissertating in the Open: Beginning to Set Up a Data Collection Structure

Thu, 27 Feb 2020 13:10:46 -0400

I’ve been trying to establish my data collection/analysis workflow and I’m running into the age-old problem with qualitative research: you don’t really know what you need until you’re in the middle of it.

One of the things I heard repeatedly from professors was that the difference between quantitative and qualitative research wasn’t how much work you would do, but at which end of the process you would do it. Quantitative research requires a lot of up-front work, designing surveys or experiments, etc. , but analysis can go pretty quickly as long as you already know which statistical tests you need. Qualitative research requires a lot of work in the analysis stage, and the beginning of the design process is a little more free-flowing and improvisational.

(She said, thinking about her detailed interview and observation protocols and meticulous research design…)

I’m the kind of person who likes to have structures in place ahead of time so that when I’m in a thing I can just do it. If I don’t get those structures in place, I can be a bit of a mess. For example - life example, not work example - if I don’t do all of my pill-sorting at the beginning of the week, there is an almost 0% chance that I will take anything besides my prescription medications. (I take 24 pills a day, when prescriptions and supplements are added together.)

So I wanted to have a data collection structure in place, so that my data would not become a mess.

I realized, though, that creating an elaborate data collection structure was a form of productive procrastination. After all of the complaining I’ve done about being ready to start on my own research, though, I really ought to get down to it.

I settled on only setting up the data collection structure for the first phase of my research, sustained, systematic observation. I gave myself permission to work exclusively on that for a couple of weeks before I design the next set of structures.

I’m going to start on that tomorrow, and my plan is to write a blog post about that process in hopes of helping future scholars who might use connective and affinity space ethnography.

Dissertating in the Open: Writing and Defending the Dissertation Proposal

Wed, 26 Feb 2020 11:34:15 -0400

I successfully defended my dissertation proposal on February 3, 2020.

I have one huge piece of advice for writing your dissertation proposal: buy or borrow Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches by John W. Creswell and J. David Creswell, and do what it says. It will guide you through the proposal-writing process down to the sentence level. It is expensive. It is worth it. It is the most useful graduate school textbook I’ve ever bought.

It’s possible you’ll discover at this point that you haven’t made as many decisions about your methods as you thought you had. That’s fine. Make them now.

For example, I realized that I had no idea where online I wanted to do my observation. This stalled me out for a few days, until I remembered that figuring that out was the whole point of the sustained, systematic observation part of affinity space ethnography (PDF). So I wrote about how I didn’t know that yet, about how my design is emergent, and about how I imagined that observation might play out.

In November and December 2019, I wrote the first draft of my dissertation proposal. I submitted it to my committee ahead of my comps, so they were able to quickly peruse it and offer me some feedback during the oral exam.

At first, some of the feedback overwhelmed me. Dr. Casey Rawson suggested that rather than a wide-scale ethnographic approach, I might take a case study approach, following just a few cosplayers through their process and attending to their information practices. This was an intriguing possibility, but the logistics overwhelmed me, as I’d have to know a few cosplayers well enough that they would allow me to actually physically be with them throughout their process, plus I would have to manage the time (i.e., childcare) to actually be with them. I decided that this was a cool idea, but it was a different study than my dissertation, so I ended up putting it in my suggestions for future research in the second draft of my dissertation proposal. Now I had a research program, not just one study.

I sent this second draft to my committee right before the winter holidays, starting the clock on the 30 days I was required to give them with the proposal before the proposal defense. We scheduled the defense for February 3, and I spent January creating my proposal defense slides. (As always, if you are a cosplayer whose photo I used and you would like it removed, please let me know and I’ll oblige ASAP.)

As I was working on the slides, I read through the proposal and asked myself what questions I would ask if I were a committee member, and then set out to answer them in the slides.

First, I realized that there were some terms I mentioned in the proposal and had defined in the literature review, but that probably needed to be defined again at the proposal defense:

Collective intelligence
Information literacy
Affinity space
Blended affinity space
Constellation of information

Then, I realized that my research methods were still not as detailed as I would like. I wanted to be able to show the committee what my research would actually look like, in practice. I remembered that for my theory development class, I had created a grounded theory proposal and included sample data that I had actually coded. I decided to do something similar for this presentation.

First, I demonstrated what the sustained, systematic observation would look like, using a librarian-recommended cosplay resource as my starting point. I created a specific observation protocol for this stage based on the affinity space ethnography literature, and applied that observation protocol to the resource. I evaluated that resource to determine if it was information-rich, and it was. I followed links out from it to other resources, evaluating them as well. I determined that the original resource was information-rich, and showed what it would look like to pull down data (in this case, YouTube comments) and code them using both my information literacy and collective intelligence coding schemes.

I put all of this stuff in my slides:

(I’ll say it again: if you are a cosplayer whose photo I used and you would like it removed, please let me know and I’ll oblige ASAP.)

The proposal defense went really well. I felt very prepared, having done all of this. My committee members said it was a thorough proposal and appreciated the demonstration of the methods. They also gave me several helpful suggestions for revising the proposal further before I submitted it to the Institutional Review Board. I submitted my final dissertation proposal to the review board on February 5, and a copy of it went to the SILS library, as well.

After one round of revisions and one correction of a typo, my IRB application was approved and determined exempt from further review. Time to get to work!

Starting to create a data collection/analysis workflow... Not there yet.

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 12:52:35 -0400

Most of my blogging has been micro this month, which is appropriate since I’m hosting my blog on micro.blog now. It has really made a difference in my comfort level and ease-of-blogging; much lighter weight than WordPress. I don’t feel like I have to have a 1000+ word essay to bother posting (obviously).

I do want to get back into longer form, though. The reason I haven’t this month is because at the beginning of the month I was getting ready for my dissertation proposal defense. As soon as I passed that, I had to write my Institutional Review Board application. Once that was done, I had to write an application for a dissertation completion fellowship. And then when that was done, the IRB application came back with 7 revisions I needed to make. I did that this morning.

I didn’t think all this stuff would take 3 weeks. I thought it would be done in the first week of the month, that I’d sail through IRB (more the fool me!), and then be doing data collection already. I also thought that during that brief wait from IRB application to IRB approval (again, haha, brief, apparently they’re moving very slowly lately), I’d come up with a beautiful data collection and analysis workflow.

Let me tell you what. Based on my quick Googling and visiting my favorite resources on academic writing (okay, my one favorite, Raul Pacheco-Vega’s blog) and my lit review, people really don’t want to share the nitty gritty details of their qual data collection workflow/process. Usually, when I bump up against something like this, my instinct is to then be radically open with my own process and create a resource other people can use so they don’t have this problem. (See: the Intellectual Freedom Toolkit I created with W. when there was a book challenge at the school library where I worked.)

But, well, for now, I’m at a loss as to where to start. I went back to my syllabi for what we call babydocs at SILS, and it had some good stuff for navigating the early part of a PhD, but not as much project management lit as I would have liked. I’ll dig into my qual methods course syllabi next, but I suspect they won’t offer much either.

Everybody wants to tell you: 1. why a given research design is appropriate 2. big picture how to do those methods And of course those are SUPER IMPORTANT!

But whoever is writing about like… Where they put their memos, and stuff - how they organize their workday when they’re doing fieldwork - esp. virtual fieldwork - well, I haven’t found those people yet. I’m sure someone must be writing about it. Not sure how much time I’ll spend before developing my own systems.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

I’ll probably take field notes in my personal physical notebook, originally.
Then I’ll transcribe those into MaxQDA I guess?
I’ll use a digital recorder to record interviews and panels, then import and transcribe those in MaxQDA, too.
MaxQDA has space for coding memos, but I don’t know if there’s good spots in there for reflective memos, so I need to check into that. (Also I’m thoroughly pissed at myself that I can’t find my favorite qual research textbooks - Goodall’s Writing the New Ethnography and Coffey and Atkinson’s Making Sense of Qualitative Data. I might need to do some deep decluttering in the next week or so to try to track them down.) If MaxQDA doesn’t have a good spot for coding memos, I guess I’ll write reflective memos in… I don’t know. Word? I might do it in Scrivener though.
I’m definitely going to read some advice on dissertating with Scrivener.
I think I can pull webpages into MaxQDA, too, so that will be helpful.

Anyway. None of this process is helped by an extreme lack of sleep and hormones running wild, so. Might just call today a win with the whole IRB resubmission thing and cut myself a break.

Anyway, soon, I’m planning to write a proper Dissertating in the Open post about writing and defending your dissertation proposal, so stay tuned!

Okay but WHY a PhD? And what next?

Mon, 27 Jan 2020 10:56:00 -0400

Sometimes I ask myself why I’m doing a PhD and what I’m getting out of it. This is actually a long set of many smaller questions. Why did I apply to a PhD program in the first place? Why did I enroll once I was accepted? Why have I not quit after any of my many, many PhD freakouts? That’s most of the Why questions. Then there’s the What questions. What was I hoping to get out of it when I applied/enrolled? What have I actually gotten out of it? What do I hope will come of it?

I don’t necessarily have answers for all of those questions, but I can kind of get at some of them.

I had been thinking about doing a PhD eventually just because I like going to school, honestly. And because I loved listening to people talk about their research when they visited for job talks or whatever (I was working at the university where I’m currently a student). But I never quite understood the discussion of their methods, and I wanted to. And I also wanted to capture good work people were doing in the world and find ways to share it. So the reasons I thought I wanted to do a PhD were those: understanding research methods better, documenting good work in education and libraries, communicating that work. And the reasons I applied WHEN I did were because all the other people in my department at work had been fired, laid off, or transferred. It was me and several graduate assistants closing out the department’s contractual and grant obligations, and I was fairly certain that once those obligations were handled, I would be laid off, too. So I moved up what was a someday thing to a today thing, and enrolled because I don’t much apply for things I don’t actually want.

Why haven’t I quit? Stubbornness. Attachment to the flexible schedule. Because I don’t think I will feel like what I’ve gotten what I came for until I complete the large-scale research project that is my dissertation. And a little bit because my mom has coursework credit toward two Master’s degrees she never finished, and I have seen her regret.

I have gotten a lot of what I came for. In particular, I have a deep understanding of qualitative and participatory research methods that I definitely didn’t have when I came in. I understand ethnography and grounded theory in a way there was no time for me to understand during my MSLS research methods course. And I’ve gotten some other stuff: an immensely flexible schedule that allows me to be there for my kid almost any time he needs me, the opportunity to work on a federally-funded grant project, an understanding of antiracist work thanks to that project, time to work with people I am always excited to work with, and time to actually do research.

Since I’m ABABD (if all goes well, I’ll only have my dissertation left to do after I defend my proposal on February 3), alongside actually collecting data and writing my dissertation, I’ll be exploring my next steps for after graduation. There are a few theoretical tenure track jobs for which I might apply, but given the fact that I want to keep my family geographically co-located (in the same house, even), it’s unlikely one of those will come up and be an option for me. So what are some other things I’m hoping this PhD will have prepared me for? Working at a research-focused organization. Working in research communication. Working as an academic librarian in a discipline familiar to me: education, library and information science, Classics, theater. Working as an editor for academic presses, academic publications, or scholars. Working as an independent information consultant and researcher. Combining independent research with web development somehow.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I’m sticking with what Karen Kelsky calls the “flexible opportunity model.” I could do a LOT of different things. My current plan is to build up my options for consulting/freelancing while also keeping an eye out for institutional work that looks good.

Reclaiming my Spotify recommendations

Tue, 21 Jan 2020 11:14:00 -0400

My kid has taken over my Spotify recommendations. My Discover Weekly this week includes:

Rainbow Connection - from The Muppet Movie
the theme song from Lilo and Stitch
Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me)
the Spider-Man theme
the Sonic X theme
10 in the bed
a song that is actually called “Pee Pee Poo Poo”
and other songs, including songs from the Lego Ninjago Movie, Phineas & Ferb, The Lego Movie 2, Teen Titans Go! to the Movies, Despicable Me, the Road to El Dorado, and an album called _Sharing Time).

There are 30 songs on every Discover Weekly playlist. Of mine, I think about 25 are kid-targeted. I’ve skimmed multiple articles about how to maximize the value of your Discover Weekly playlist. Almost all of them promise that listening to kids’ music will not fill your Discover Weekly playlist with kids’ music. Maybe I just don’t listen to enough other music. I don’t know. But I’m taking steps to get Spotify recognize that I want it to recommend new things for ME, not for my kid.

First: I realized I’d created an account just for my kid on our Spotify family plan a couple years ago, but wasn’t using it. Now, I log into his account when I’m going to play music for him. Is it a small hassle? Yes. Is it an obvious solution? For sure.

Second: I had 27 playlists dedicated to music for my kid. I rarely used any of these - he goes through seasons where he’ll want a couple songs on what he calls “repeat two,” so I had several of these - one for The Lion King that was only “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King” and “Hakuna Matata,” one for Frozen that was only “For the First Time in Forever” and “Love is an Open Door,” one that had just “The Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie and then the version from The Muppets. This sort of thing, and after a couple weeks, he doesn’t want to listen to that playlist anymore. I deleted all of the playlists that were for my kid. I didn’t lose much curation over this, but I sure cleaned up my account a lot.

Then I started following the advice from the articles. So far I’m mostly doing these two:

Saving music to my library.
Going down rabbit holes on artists and genres: listening to complete discographies, exploring similar artists, etc.

Next, I need to start:

Creating playlists.
Listening to Spotify radio. (For artists, songs, or playlists.)

I’ll let you know how this works out. It will take a few weeks to be sure.

A (somewhat dry) musical autobiography: Addendum

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 11:09:47 -0400

🎵📽 I realized as I was describing yesterday’s musical autobiography (which is different than an autobiographical musical) to W. that I had left out three of the most important musical pieces of my life. I think I left these out because they have been as ubiquitous for me in the past decade (or in one case most of my life) as water is to a fish. I imagine if a fish were writing an autobiography, it probably wouldn’t comment on the water around it, any more than a person who isn’t taking an explicitly ecological slant would comment on the air.

But here they are, three huge bits of my musical taste:

Enya: Especially her album Shepherd Moons. I don’t know when my family got into Enya, but we really committed once we did. We had the piano/vocal songbook for Shepherd Moons, and these were some of the only songs I ever learned to play on the piano. “How Can I Keep from Singing is a great favorite, which I think I’ve probably used as an audition piece at some point and just is the best when you need a boost. “Marble Halls” is so dear that when I came upon a beautiful bound score of its origin opera, The Bohemian Girl, I bought it without bothering to even look at the rest of the score. (I later gave that score to my sister, who might ever actually use that as an aria.) When I was in the darkest parts of my depression, Shepherd Moons and Watermark brought me great comfort (along with the soundtrack for The Princess Bride). (My love is like a storybook story, but it’s as real as the feelings I feel.) And perhaps most importantly, Shepherd Moons was playing both when my mother was in labor with my younger brother (I was 13 and in the delivery room) and when I was in labor with M. Soundtrack of my life much?

The Lonely Island: I know The Lonely Island got big because of “Lazy Sunday,” but it’s really “Dick in a Box” and “Motherlover” that made me fall in love with them. So many favorites: “I’m on a Boat,” “I Just Had Sex,” “Jack Sparrow,“and “Space Olympics” are tops with me (with “Space Olympics” as the one that best represents my comedic sensibility), and “Diaper Money” is especially relatable since M’s birth. (See also: Garfunkel and Oates’s “Pregnant Women Are Smug.”) And don’t even get me started on Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience.

Finally, because I’m the same as everybody else, Hamilton (except I’m a Hamilton hipster, having listened to it via NPR’s First Listen before the album was released). Hamilton reminded me that I actually liked hip-hop and R&B. (I failed to mention Eminem in my list of music I enjoyed in college, so let’s just stick that here.) It blew me away and made me believe that rappers were magicians. Around the same time Hamilton was released, I started regularly attending a hip-hop improv show, and the March after it was released, I actually joined the cast of that show. I set challenges for myself: first, to rap along with Angelica’s rap in “Satisfied,” my favorite song in the show mostly for the couplet “I know my sister like I know my own mind/You will never find anyone as trusting or as kind” (check out that sweet internal rhyme, btw), and then once I mastered that, I challenged myself to learn Lafayette’s piece of “Guns and Ships,” which has the most words in three seconds in any Broadway musical. I knocked that out and I kind of learned to freestyle, which was the most terrifying part of improv before I got into Hamilton. I called my flow “passable,” until my friend, actual rapper and hip-hop educator Rowdy, scolded me for not giving myself enough credit, so now I call it “good enough for comedy.” Which, since my heroes The Lonely Island aspired to be “the greatest fake MCs on earth,” is good enough for me.

I bet I’ll remember more music stuff later. I’ll write a new post about it when I do!

A (somewhat dry) musical autobiography

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 11:20:14 -0400

🎵📽📚 I don’t know if it’s a problem or a good thing that when my mind can’t come up with a topic to blog about and I’ve committed myself to blogging (as I’m now trying to do first thing everyday when I sit down to work), I just jump in and treat my blog like morning pages. Which is fine unless I’m working on a blog post that I’m not ready to write yet and that is sort of occupying my stream-of-consciousness. Which is what’s happening right now: later, I’ll write a post about reclaiming my Spotify recommendations - Discover Weekly and Daily Mixes - from my kid’s music tastes, and the different tools and articles I’m using to do it. But I’m not there yet.

I can talk about music, though. That’s a thing. So, I don’t consider myself a person who has well-defined musical tastes. When I was growing up, my parents had a Columbia House membership, and I listened to their Gold & Platinum tapes a fair amount. I feel like I mined their tapes for other stuff, too: Styx’s Kilroy Was Here, Culture Club’s Colour by Numbers, a Peter and the Wolf that they transferred from vinyl to cassette (I don’t know which one, but my money’s on Cyril Richard), and The Irish Rover’s The Unicorn, which I guess was my grandfather’s album and not mine. I also had a Mousercise album that familiarized me with a bunch of Disney songs from movies I may or may not have seen, and the songs in the Totally Minnie TV special: “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart,” “I Only Have Eyes for You,” “Let’s Hear It for the Boy,” “Nasty,” and “Eat It,” among others.

It was probably this early that I started getting into showtunes (my parents took me to see A Chorus Line when I was 3) and film scores, especially the John Williams oeuvre. These were always shared family experiences, and I loved them.

The first album that I remember as really being something I listened to because I chose it was Madonna’s Like a Virgin. I would put this on and dance, and of course had no idea what most of the songs were about. In fourth grade a friend introduced me to the movie Beaches, which brought me into the Bette Midler fold. I think it’s kind of hilarious that my mom was relieved when I traded Madonna for Bette Midler. I don’t think she’d done her research.

Also when I was in fourth grade, I first encountered The Phantom of the Opera and I fell in love right away. My parents had always enjoyed and shared Jesus Christ Superstar with me.

Around 1991, I started paying attention to pop hip-hop and R&B, and I think those are the genres that still speak to my heart in a very real way, especially R&B. In particular, I loved Kris Kross, En Vogue, Vanessa Williams’s “Save the Best for Last”, Des’ree’s “You Gotta Be,” and pretty much everything Boyz II Men. I briefly had a quick interest in Tim McGraw due to a friend liking him, but then returned to R&B. I also choreographed a secret dance to Paula Abdul’s “The Promise of a New Day” that no one ever saw.

Between Highlander and Wayne’s World, Queen got a lot of play. I think my mom liked them long before I knew I did.

In high school, I went back to Bette Midler and doubled down on the showtunes my parents had introduced to me in childhood, plus new shows. This is what I think of as my “musical taste” - a preference for showtunes to pretty much all genres, including R&B. My friends were into alternative from 1992 on, probably, and I can sing at least a few bars of every song on Spotify’s 90 Pop Rock Essentials playlist, less because I actually like them than because they were the big radio hits when I took Driver’s Ed.

My senior year of high school, I started dating W. and he loaned me CDs for many musicals, expanding/deepening my showtune horizons even further, and I really sort of locked in on showtunes until I was 20 or 21, when my participation in Domain Grrl culture led me to take an interest in more contemporary music as well as some older artists, and that’s when I got into artists like Michelle Branch, Lucy Woodward, Evanescence, and Jeff Buckley, with a little Dave Matthews Band thrown in because why not. I really loved Shakira’s “Underneath Your Clothes at this time, too.

Then I took a turn into punk/punk-influenced stuff, digging into The Sex Pistols, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, Jimmy Eat World(not sure that counts as punk, but I listened to it around this time), Superchunk, and older Goo Goo Dolls stuff. Plus I picked up a little bit of hairband stuff, mostly Poison’s Greatest Hits. Opposites, right?

I also listened to a lot of what might best be called “Buffy rock” at this time - bands featured on or somehow related to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and/or Angel: Velvet Chain, Darling Violetta, Four Star Mary, Common Rotation, and Kane. (And I guess a little Ghost of the Robot, and actually a lot of Tony Head and George Sarah’s album Music for Elevators, especially the track “Last Time,” over and over on repeat one until it made my friends very tired of it.)

W. gave me Cake’s Fashion Nugget and They Might Be Giants’s Flood around this time, both of which I love. Also, my friend A. gave me a copy of Eisley’s Room Noises, which I still love and find magical.

I retreated back to showtunes until around 2012, when I made friends with author Nathan Kotecki, who gave me a giant mix of all the goth/darkwave music that inspired him as he wrote his first novel, The Suburban Strange. In a real sense, this felt like going home, and when I then followed that up by listening to all the music Jillian Venters (also a friend) recommends in her book Gothic Charm School, I decided that Switchblade Symphony was my new favorite band. Which makes sense, because it’s a team up of a film composer and a musical theater performer.

And that’s where we are today. Writing this has helped me realize that actually, I totally have defined musical tastes. Look for tips on teaching Spotify to follow.

Why do I blog what I blog?

Mon, 13 Jan 2020 12:21:03 -0400

I’ll have a post later today with some links to things I’m reading, but for now, I’ll chat about the thoughts they’re stirring up in me. For a couple of years I’ve been sort of haphazardly using my blog as a commonplace book, but at the beginning of this year as I migrated my website from WordPress to Micro.blog, I really doubled down on that commitment. To that end, I’m not only posting notes, articles, and photos here, but also tracking what I read and watch, with plans to start tracking podcasts and music I’m listening to and games I’m playing in the near future. I’ve gone back and forth about posting replies. In the past, I’ve stated that I didn’t really care about owning my replies, and I think that still holds. Same with likes and favorites. A lot of these decisions are influenced by my (repeated) reading of @petermolnar’s post, Content, Bloat, Privacy, Archives.

Like Peter, I’ve noticed that when I’m tracking all of these things, they tend to drown out my more substantive posts. I read a lot, I watch some, and I don’t want these things to drown out my actual content. I considered only sharing what I’m reading or watching when I have additional commentary to add, but that doesn’t actually meet my purpose for sharing these things.

So why do I post this stuff?

Posting what I’m reading, watching, listening to, or playing is an invitation to conversation. Sometimes I add commentary, sometimes not, but either way, people who are following me now know that I am interested in this stuff and will talk about it. (I suppose it’s not explicit from the posts that I want to talk about these things, but now you know: all such posts are an invitation.) And they’re having that effect, like when @zap responded to my post about the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, when @odd responded to my reading @boffosocko.com’s post Thoughts on linkblogs, bookmarks, reads, likes, favorites, follows, and related links, or when in our weekly meeting my assistantship supervisor Maggie Melo, who’s a mutual on Twitter where I cross-post, said, “So I see you’ve been watching a lot of Star Wars” and then we got into a whole Star Wars conversation.

So that’s one reason I post this stuff.

Another reason is for myself. I’m constantly saying “I read this thing…” but then can’t find the source. If I track what I read, I hope that will be easier to find what I’m talking about.

One thing I’m trying out is doing sort of collapsed read/watch/listen/play posts. So if I read a bunch of picture books, instead of posting them singly, I’ll just create one post for all of them. Same for links to my online reading, or multiple episodes of a TV show. I’m hoping that doing that will keep my consumption from completely drowning out my creation.

Anyway, stay tuned for how I continue to refine my commonplace book/blog process!

Updated my Now page!

Wed, 08 Jan 2020 11:37:00 -0400

Just updated my Now page with the following information:

I’m living happily in Durham, North Carolina with my husband, W, and our three-year-old son, M. We eagerly look forward to M being old enough to get kittens. All of our parents and siblings live in our metro area, and we get to see them often. It’s really lovely.

We’re hosting monthly brunches so we get to see friends more. I’m planning to try to find more ways to get social interaction in, because both grad school and parenthood are immensely isolating.

I’m in the process of scheduling my dissertation proposal defense for my doctorate in Library and Information Science. My dissertation investigates how cosplayers find, evaluate, use, and share information, both online and in-person. I’m working as research assistant to Dr. Marijel (Maggie) Melo, on a lot of exciting projects related to academic makerspaces. I’m also accepting word-of-mouth referrals for information services consulting clients for summer 2020 (including literature search, bibliography, literature review, metadata analysis, content strategy, writing, editing, and web development) and exploring what it might look like to commit myself to an independent information services business more extensively.

I’m making it a point to take my fun where and when I can: reading books using recommendations from NovelistPlus, watching TV shows and movies based on Tumblr’s fandom statistics, and playing video games based on whatever mood I’m in.

I’m back to being gluten-free and corn-free, after the extreme indulgence of the holidays. My hormones are still finding their way out of the woods in the wake of weaning my son.

I recently found the term “agnostopagan” in Erin Morganstern’s book The Starless Sea, which the character who describes himself using it defines as “spiritual, but not religious.” For me, it’s more than that, but it definitely felt like something clicked when I read the word. Mostly, I believe we make our own magic through setting intentions and creating visual and metaphorical reminders to assist us in setting them and carrying them out, and also I believe that I don’t have enough knowledge to be certain about anything bigger than me. Lately, the tools I’ve been using for setting my intentions are moon cycles, the Tarot, candles, and crystals.

Currently:
🎵: Spotify’s “This is Big Daddy Kane” and “This is KRS-One” playlists
📖: The Starless Sea by Erin Morganstern and How to Be Everything by Emilie Wapnick
🎬: The Empire Strikes Back
🎧: Micro Monday
🦸‍♀️: Ultimate Spider-Man
🎮: Puzzle Quest: The Legend Returns

Last updated January 8. 2020.

Quick reading response - Why Johnny Doesn't Flap: NT is OK!

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 10:34:00 -0400

📚 Some quick notes on Why Johnny Doesn’t Flap: NT is OK!:

This is a kid’s picture book all about how sometimes neurotypical people are unfathomable, but that doesn’t mean neurotypical people and neurodivergent people can’t be friends. It was gifted to me by an autism mom, and as an autism sibling who exhibits many signs of neurodivergence, it delighted me.

When he talks to you, Johnny looks directly into your eyes, which can make you pretty uncomfortable. He doesn’t mean any harm, though. That’s just the way he is, and that’s OK.

I mean look how Johnny’s head takes up the whole page. I need some personal space, Johnny. To quote my second favorite new character in The Rise of Skywalker, D-O, “No thank you.” (First favorite is Babu Frik.)

The whole book is full of gems like this. Highly recommend.

Migrating my site from WordPress to micro.blog

Mon, 06 Jan 2020 10:46:00 -0400

I spent my winter vacation migrating my website from WordPress to micro.blog. I thought I’d write a little bit about the process. There’s a help page about doing a WordPress import and it worked for me exactly as described. I actually managed to accomplish the whole migration using only my phone: I downloaded the WXR file to my phone, uploaded it to micro.blog, and that all worked fine. I pointed my domain to micro.blog, requested SSH (so my domain has https:// in front of it), and @manton got that set up within an hour of my request.

I made the move because my webhost hasn’t been able to support IndieWeb technologies as much as I would like, but I’ve also found that the webhost I was considering as a replacement might not support all of the IndieWeb features I want, either. So I moved my personal site here to micro.blog. Then, I opened an account with Reclaim Hosting and - again, using only my phone - successfully migrated my webhosting over to them. They were able to migrate my entire hosting account. The whole thing was done, including manipulating of various domain names, inside of 4 hours.

It’s worth noting that in the case of both of these services, most of my tech support emails came directly from the founders of the services. I know that this level of service doesn’t scale, and for many people it would probably be less than ideal to have a founder or CEO handling things like site migrations and secure domain set up. But it felt really good to me - clear that I was communicating with a person who not only had the technical chops to support me, but who believed in their product.

I’m just beginning my interactions with these services in particular, but they both embrace an ethos that reminds me of my mid-90s technoutopian web developer origins, and it feels good.

There’s still a bit of work on my end to make everything work just so:

migrate featured images over from my WordPress installation
apply the "research" category to all of my research-related posts
decide if I want to apply any other categories

This will give me a chance to review all of my old posts.

I’m excited to be on micro.blog because theme development relies on languages I already know (HTML & CSS).

2019 Year-in-Review & 2020 Word of the Year

Wed, 18 Dec 2019 12:01:00 -0400

📄 I didn’t feel ready to write a year-in-review post before now, but here we are! So what did I get up to this year?

This year I:

keynoted IndieWebCamp New Haven
had my first freelance librarian gig
visited Knoxville, Atlanta, DC, and North Myrtle Beach
dealt with at least 5 house contractors
finished Project READY
worked as an exhibitor at a professional conference for the first time
weaned M.
went to 3 fan conventions
learned how to use MaxQDA
hosted M.'s third birthday party
moved M. into his own bedroom
got anxiety meds
tried and loved flotation therapy (still waiting for my ESP to kick in, though)
cosplayed 3 different characters
special ordered pies from Phoebe Lawless
wrote my lit review
drafted my proposal
passed my comps

I decided to focus exclusively on the positive here. There have been a lot of hard days this year, a lot of illness, a lot of scares, but even the worst days each had something redeeming in them, and I think that's important to remember.

Cosplays of 2019: Luna - Cat Version (Sailor Moon), Ariel (Ralph Breaks the Internet), Wednesday Addams (The Addams Family, 1991 film)

My word of the year for 2019 was PHASE. My goal was to accept cycles and understand that all things pass. I’m pretty satisfied with how I did with that. I think I’m a much more chill parent at the end of this year than I was at the beginning. In addition to embracing that energy, I wanted to own my personal goth aesthetic, read for pleasure, and have a good time. I think I did all of those really successfully.

With respect to my aesthetic, I expanded it so that it shifts seasonally (tying the phase energy in even here!):

I always transition to Gothic Girl Fall in September, leaving behind my Summer Mer-Goth Sea Witch vibes... In winter, I sport full Holiday Goth (lots of dark green velvet) and my spring aesthetic is Goth Fae... https://t.co/HmHMcgcu3W
— Kimberly Hirsh (@kimberlyhirsh) September 6, 2019

I read a lot for pleasure in the first half of the year, but once comps really ramped up, my brain just wouldn’t take in any more words. I met my goal for the year, thanks to counting single comic issues as books. And of course, if I’d counted every article I read, well… I’ve read a lot. I’ve also read many words of visual novels, but I don’t think GoodReads tracks those.

2019 Reading Challenge

Kimberly has completed her goal of reading 24 books in 2019!

hide

25 of 24 (100%)

view books

I definitely feel like I’ve had a good time this year. I went to Retro films several times, went to Silent Book Club a few times, had a blast wandering around DC with SILS folks for dinner, an escape room, and some Harry Potter Wizards Unite fun, and watched my kid continue to grow. I saw Frozen II and laughed and cried, and Will and I saw Knives Out twice and Benoit Blanc is my new favorite character.

The year’s not over yet, and I’m looking forward to a lot of family fun, submitting the final draft of my dissertation proposal, another trip to North Myrtle Beach, and maybe seeing The Rise of Skywalker before the year is out.

…but onwards, to 2020!

My word of the year for 2020 is FULL.

While there’s been a ton of good these past couple of years, I have more than once felt empty or hollow, like a pumpkin after you scrape its guts out. I’m done with that nonsense. I’m going to fill my well.

I’m also choosing full in the sense of going full something, in my case Going Full Kimberly. This means refusing to suppress all of the weird bits of myself that make me who I am. Obviously, we behave differently in different contexts, and that’s fine. But too often I find myself thinking things like, “Oh, I won’t double down on my affection for Star Wars because W. is out on Star Wars,” or “I won’t wear those sparkles because I’m too old,” or whatever. And I’m done with that. I’m 38, and it’s time to just be myself unapologetically.

Embrace imposter syndrome.
Revel in the fact you have fooled everyone.
You are a Trickster Goddess.

You are the Imposter Child for Deception and Clever Ruses.

— i’m a skELIton (@EliLizzieLizbet) March 17, 2019

I told W. that for my mid-life crisis, I’m just going to brush up my sewing skills and start creating adult-sized versions of all the sparkly little girl fashion at Target.

When I was a teenager, with only a few rare exceptions, I really liked being myself. Leonie Dawson talks about how you should love yourself, because you’re rad. I’m rad. You’re rad. Let’s stop acting like we’re not rad, y’all.

In the spirit of going FULL KIMBERLY, of being Kimberly af, here are the things I’m feeling, my non-resolutions, for 2020:

Continue to read for pleasure.
Play video games.
Pursue my core desired feelings of ease, creativity, and connection.

And then my beautiful, auto-text-generated resolution:

Reviving this from @thephdstory but for 2020... My 2020 resolution is to be a part of the team. https://t.co/dkeCjW6coX
— Kimberly Hirsh (@kimberlyhirsh) December 18, 2019

Featured image is a photo I took during Bull Moon Rising, when the Museum of the Moon (by Luke Jerram) was in town.

Dissertating in the Open: Comprehensive Qualifying Exams

Tue, 17 Dec 2019 11:05:00 -0400

I passed my comps last Tuesday, and I thought I’d take some time to write about it today.

Previously, on Dissertating in the Open:

And then I didn't really blog about the process for 9 months because I was too busy actually writing the literature review.

Over the course of that process, some things shifted.

As I mentioned in my post about my first committee meeting, my lens on information literacy changed from a broad one to one that narrowly focused on information literacy practices as a set of sociocultural practices, tied to a particular context and set of social interactions.

When it came time to write about theory, I decided to write exclusively about the theoretical concept of affinity spaces. I discussed collective intelligence and participatory culture in the information literacy chapter instead, and decided to included Sonnenwald’s work on information behavior as part of my proposal.

As I wrote about affinity spaces, I learned about some new-to-me methodologies: connective ethnography and affinity space ethnography. I took on ethnography as my broad research design, taking a constructivist research approach, and then used connective/affinity space ethnography as my stance for how to conduct ethnography in the cosplay affinity space.

Over the next several months, I drafted chapters of my comps and sent them to my committee for review. You can see the first drafts here:

I prepared for and wrote each of those drafts using some variation of my start-to-finish literature review workflow, drawing heavily on recommendations from Dr. Barbara Wildemuth and Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega. I didn't always follow the workflow in a truly linear fashion; sometimes I would find myself needing to memo a subset of literature before I could move on to another concept at all. Other times I would write a memo that was basically a draft, then mark it up with pens and rearrange the whole thing. Sometimes I would cut entire sections after writing them. I'm a little sorry I didn't document this process better.

As I finished each chapter, I sent it out to my committee. Different committee members provided different amounts of feedback, but none of them were under any obligation to provide any feedback at all. I’m grateful to them for their help.

When I started writing the final chapter, the methods chapter, I first began by memoing articles about my specific data collection methods. As I tried to turn these into a cohesive literature review, I realized I needed some guidance. So I emailed my advisor, Dr. Sandra Hughes-Hassell, and my research methods expert, Dr. Casey Rawson, asking them about this chapter. Casey suggested that this chapter should be about my research design and approach - constructivist? pragmatist? participatory? and ethnography? case study? narrative? - more than my specific data collection and analysis methods, which would be a key part of the proposal rather than the lit review. This help determining the scope of the chapter was invaluable, and let me really focus on connective and affinity space ethnography conceptually.

I revised the chapters based on my committee member’s feedback and my own notes, compiling them into a single document along with my prospectus, also slightly revised. I also sent the committee a brief statement of my research interests.

I submitted all of that to the committee at the end of October. We scheduled my comprehensive examination date for December 10. In my department, the literature review stands in lieu of a written exam.

Over the next month, I drafted my dissertation proposal, which will be another post, though I did finish it in time for my committee to have it for a few days before my comps.

For the comps exam itself, my internal examiners were physically present, while my external examiners called in via Zoom. We began the exam with me delivering the following brief presentation as an overview/refresher:

(Note: If you are a cosplayer or photographer featured in this slideshow and would like your image removed, please let me know and I’ll take care of it ASAP.)

After this, Sandra asked each committee member to ask me a question, working around the Zoom/room clockwise. Each committee member had one or more really insightful questions to ask that helped me think about my methods, my plans for data analysis, the role of theory in my study, and how I conceptualize cosplay and the relationship between cosplayer, character, narrative, and costume.

In the end, I passed and came out of the exam with several ideas for how to refine my dissertation proposal, which I’ll write more about in my next Dissertating in the Open post.

What It's Like to Live with Chronic Illness

Wed, 04 Dec 2019 12:08:08 -0400

I’m writing this in an attempt to help people without chronic illness understand the constant calculation people with chronic illness (whether physical, mental, or both) have to undertake to budget our energy, as well as the limits on our resilience.

First, go read about the Spoon Theory (which is technically a metaphor, yes I know). Then come back. I’ll wait.

….

You’re back! Great. Let’s continue.

To review:

The basic idea of the Spoon Theory (Metaphor) is that, while most people have a consistent level of energy that’s pretty high and don’t have to calculate how they expend their energy, people with chronic illness - whether physical, mental, or both - are engaged in a constant calculation of what they can afford to do before they run out of energy and have to rest or risk illness and collapse. For example, some days I have to decide - if I take the full recycling bin out first thing in the morning, will I have enough energy to get M. to our co-working space/Montessori school and then do any good work once I’m there? If not, I better wait on the recycling, or I risk having to spend my workday in a fog being unproductive.

An important part of this metaphor that the original explanation doesn’t address is that the number of “spoons” - the amount of energy a chronically ill person has - varies depending on a number of factors. So a person might be able to accomplish a lot one day and very little the next, or might have a run of bad days with very few spoons and need many restful days to recover. This happened to me when we rearranged the house rather quickly right before M’s birthday. I’m only now beginning to find energy for things other than school or caring for M.

There’s another element to this that the spoon theory doesn’t address, and that’s the case of having variable emotional resilience. Anyone can have their resilience depleted, but some people have more resilience to begin with. In my case, depression and anxiety mean when those conditions aren’t well-managed, I have much lower resilience than a normal person. A tantrum from M. that I could normally handle gracefully and with gentleness might prompt me to snap at him or have to separate myself from him when I’m feeling this way. The metaphor I find helpful for this is to think of myself as a rubber band. When I’m stretched close to my limit, a very small additional stretching could cause me to snap. My rubber band might be more brittle or smaller than someone else’s, someone who could tolerate more demands on their resilience before snapping.

I hope this has been helpful for people, especially if you care about someone with chronic illness but don’t have it yourself,

Connecting doesn't have to be hard.

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 10:53:21 -0400

Grad school and parenthood are both immensely isolating experiences. So when you combine them, you tend to be… immensely isolated. I feel very lonely most of the time, but also too exhausted usually to do the things I think you have to do to keep a friendship going. So I start to feel like I have no friends, when really I have a lot of friends, but I’m just not communicating with them much.

This is, I think, actually pretty normal. This article I read for class a few years ago had the image below in it.

[caption id=“attachment_9253” align=“aligncenter” width=“514”] Figure from “Question-Negotiation and Information Seeking in Libraries,” Robert S. Taylor, College and Research Libraries 29(3), 178-194[/caption]

The way I interpret this schematic, when people first become friends, there’s a lot of communicative acts that are of the getting-to-know-you type, not focused on any particular topic. But as the friendship endures and you know each other better, you communicate less frequently but more topically.

My friendships fall in line with this pretty well, but there’s not much communication that’s just on the topic of, you know, how we’re all doing, and how we value our friendship. So here’s me, lonely, missing my friends, too tired to do much about it, and also a little overwhelmed at the prospect, because what do you say to someone you care greatly about but haven’t talked to in months?

…

On Thanksgiving, W., M., and I drove over to W.’s brother’s place for dinner with that side of the family. M. hadn’t napped and fell asleep on the way over. I told W. to go ahead inside, and I would stay in the care and bring M. up if/when he woke up.

I’d brought books with me, but I found that my brain couldn’t process the words in them. So I played some games on my phone and watched “Pangs,” as is my tradition. After that I started to watch The Empire Strikes Back, but I got a text from Verizon saying I was about to use up all my data, so I decided to stop.

So there I was, in the dark, in a rare silent moment, all by myself, and I had a revelation:

All I had to do to connect with my friends was to say hi. It was as simple as a text. It didn’t need to be a dramatic letter full of reasons why I haven’t been in touch, apologies for ghosting them, lengthy updates on how things are going with me.

So I opened up the Contacts app on my phone and just started going through it, texting people I miss a lot and haven’t checked in with in a long time. (I did miss some people and only realized later that I should have included them, so the next time I find myself in a truly quiet moment like this, I’ll get to them.)

To each of them, I sent a customized version of a message that went basically like this:

"Hi [friend's name]! I'm in the car with a sleeping M. outside W's brother's house and taking the rare quiet time as an opportunity to text friends and wish them well. I hope you're having a great day!"

Some people just got “Hi! I love you!” and others just got a variation of “I hope you’re having a great day!” without the explanation about M. sleeping.

And in a few minutes, answers started coming in.

I am thankful for your friendship.
❤️️❤️️❤️️

We just pulled off our first Thanksgiving in our house!

I love you right back and I hope you had a wonderful day too! 💜

Thank you! We did have a good day! I hope you and your family did as well.

Thanks for the Thanks-greetings! I hope you’re doing well and junk!

I love you too! And I miss you!

Hey lovely! I hope you’re well! I adore you!

Friends. They’re great, right?

Now I’ve opened up all of these conversations, I hope I’ll feel more comfortable just sending a note to say “Hey! Thinking of you! How are you?” I can’t believe it took this long for it to occur to me that it’s as simple as that.

And let’s conclude with this:

If you’re someone who thinks sometimes of reaching out to me and then doesn’t, because it’s too daunting or whatever, know that I always welcome a “Hi! How are you?”

You don't have to love yourself to be worthy of love.

Tue, 19 Nov 2019 10:42:38 -0400

I’ve been thinking today about something Maria Bamford said - I think it was in her episode of The Hilarious World of Depression. She said that one of the times she was hospitalized for her mental illness, and before she met her husband, she saw the people in the psychiatric facility and how they had people who loved them visiting them, especially spouses and romantic partners. She said it made her realize that she didn’t have to wait until she loved herself for someone else to love her.

I think this is so important to remember. There’s a lot of rhetoric out there about how if you want to be loved, you have to love yourself first. But I’m here to tell you, and so is Maria Bamford: it’s just not so. You are worthy of love, whether you love yourself or not, and the people who love you will love you when you think you’re great and when you’re very down on yourself.

#goals: Welcome to #AcWriMo/#DissProWriMo!

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 11:12:00 -0400

This blog post contains affiliate links. If you click them and make a purchase, I may receive a commission (at no extra cost to you). Thank you for your support. I promise not to link anything I don’t use and love myself.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m participating in #AcWriMo this year and calling it #DissProWriMo, since I’m planning to churn out a pretty workable draft of my dissertation proposal this month. Is it an ambitious goal? It sure is. Can I do it? Here’s hoping!

But Kimberly, what resources are you using to help you?

I’m so glad you asked. Here’s a list:

Katy Peplin's ThrivePhD #AcWriMo resources
Raul Pacheco-Vega's Academic Writing resources
The 5th edition of Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches by John W. Creswell and J. David Creswell
My Bullet Journal (a Moleskine Hardcover Large Dot Grid notebook + Pilot G2 pen)
Paperpile
Google Docs
Forest app for the Pomodoro technique

Nice. What are your goals?

Final goals:

Finished draft of my dissertation proposal
Submission-ready version of a paper I'm co-authoring with Dr. Maggie Melo.

Progress goal: 1-3 pages of writing per day

What are your limitations?

I only have 17 days with childcare this month. I’m planning to spend at least 2 hours a day writing, but more if I can manage it.

Anything else we need to know?

I’ll be posting a weekly blog update on my progress. You can follow along by clicking any of the social links to the left or by subscribing for email updates (also in the left sidebar).

Remember conversation?

Sat, 26 Oct 2019 13:54:46 -0400

I was out at dinner with my family a couple days ago and four adults were sitting at the next table over, conversing about movies and books and society. For the first time since my son was born, I realized that I miss that flavor of conviviality.

Of course I love my kid more than anything in the world, but I also enjoy conversation that consists of more than “The potty IS a good place for poop!” and “I don’t know why Winnie the Pooh has a grumbly voice.”

To be fair, my kid and I actually have some solid commute conversations, but they’re still not the same as chatting with friends about pop culture and the world.

(Does this post - or my others about parenthood - mean I’m a mommy blogger now? When I was pregnant, my friend Whitney asked, jokingly, if I was going to become a mommy blogger once I had my kid and I was all, “Haha no!” But did I? Jenny Lawson and Heather B. Armstrong are considered mommy bloggers and I really like them, so I’m going to rock it, if that’s who I am now.)

We went to lunch with a friend of my son’s and her parents after the preschool Halloween party today. I thought, This will be great! The kids will entertain each other and we can have grown up talk!

Reader, that is not what happened.

Honestly, though, being a parent seems to mean being really behind on pop culture, so what would I even talk about besides either my kid or my work? And it turns out most people aren’t interested in talking about the spread of ethnography as a methodological approach beyond the field of anthropology, so work’s not great for much conversation, either.

My kid is so cute, though.

Freewrite! Writing is a messy process.

Wed, 02 Oct 2019 12:17:00 -0400

When we see a finished piece of writing, we rarely see all the mess that went into creating it. As Annette M. Markham and Nancy K. Baym point out in their book, Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method,

Research reports are carefully edited retrospectives, selected among different story lines and options, depending on one's audience and goals. Within these reports, research designs are generally presented as a series of logical and chronologically ordered steps. Seasoned scholars know there's a complex backstage story line and have experienced such complexities themselves. But for novice scholars, it is easy to imagine that the researcher's route was successfully mapped out in advance and that interpretive findings simply emerged from the ground or fell conveniently into the path. Qualitative research requires a tolerance for chaos, ambiguity, and inductive thinking, yet its written accomplishments—particularly those published in chapters and articles rather than monographs—rarely display the researchers' inductive pathways or the decisions that led them down those routes.

Two of my voice values are transparency and helpfulness, and I want to share some of the messier bits of my writing process. I have hopes of showing off some beautiful, colorful pen-marked-up copies of memos and notes to you in the future, but today, I’m just offering a few thoughts on freewriting.

I often hit a point where I’ve thought and thought and thought about something, ideas are all kind of swirly in my head, I’ve made notes, I’ve mapped concepts, and I’m still not ready to do formal writing for an audience that’s not me. I might be in a good place to talk to somebody, but honestly, I’m rarely around people who actually want to hear about things like affinity space ethnography (now I’m trying to imagine explaining ethnography to my 3 year old). When I’m in that place, eventually, I realize I need to…

FREEWRITE.

So I open up a new document and type out what I’ve got in my head, with notes to myself but also with citations. I know I’m not inventing anything new here, but this is part of the writing process that I think it’s easy for academics to forget.

Here’s what I freewrote today:

Ethnographic methods are appropriate for studying information literacy practices that are social and occur in an affinity space, as this looks at a sociocultural phenomenon, in a naturalistic setting. These methods cannot produce a full ethnography, but rather must be partial (Hine 2000). (BUT WHY? LIKE, THERE ARE REASONS, LEARN TO ARTICULATE THEM.)
Online spaces, however, present challenges to traditional ethnographic methods. Primary among these is the problem of location-based research; using spatial metaphors to define ethnographic research sites is limiting, because: Practices travel across various online “spaces.” Boundaries of online spaces are porous. And, more and more, boundaries between online and offline activity are also porous.

(Hine, 2000; Leander & McKim, 2003; Wargo 2015, 2017)

Ethnography has some key features.

The selection of a “field site.”

Observation or participant observation.

Interviews.

Artifact analysis.

There are ways to approximate these features online. The field site is the trickiest bit. It’s possible to select one environment (for example, fanfiction.net) and consider its boundaries to be the boundaries of the field site, but this lends an incomplete picture.

Now, this is not a useful introduction to ethnography for anyone. It’s incomplete, it privileges data collection over more conceptual issues. But it’s helping me move forward in my writing.

Coping when I'm not okay

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 17:50:55 -0400

I’ve been feeling moderately not okay lately. Nothing truly devastating, but a sense of doom. A sense of never being able to finish anything, of everything moving slower than I’d like while somehow also moving faster than I’d like. Of not being able to get out from under life.

I still feel that way, but I’m doing a little better today, for a couple of reasons.

To appease my child, after returning some books to the university library today I went and visited with my advisor and one of my committee members, who is also a dear friend. I talked to them about my slow progress, my frustration, the stage of the work I'm in, the sense that this part is a slog. They affirmed that it's normal to feel this way and that I'm still within my timeline for a May 2021 graduation, and I'm going to be okay. So, next time I feel this way, I should probably remember: talk to Sandra and Casey, because it always makes me feel better.
A few weeks ago, I read Danielle Laporte's The Desire Map, which focuses on living according to your core desired feelings. My core desired feelings are ease, flow, creativity, and connection. I have not been doing things in alignment with bringing about these feelings, but I know that I have the power to switch things up so that I do live in that alignment, and remembering that I can do that has me feeling a lot better.

So, I’m still not okay, but now I believe I will be okay, later.

On theoretical and methodological literature reviews

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 11:20:23 -0400

My blog post, A Start-to-Finish Literature Review Workflow, is probably the most viewed thing on my website. It’s a great overview, especially for people new to writing lit reviews. I’m pretty proud of it.

But it’s incomplete.

I’ve had plans for a long time now to write a more advanced lit review tips post, as well as one with some variations and modifications on that workflow.

But today I need to talk about what’s on my mind right now, which is that theoretical and methodological lit reviews are really different from lit reviews that describe a body of research on a particular topic.

The general workflow still works for these kinds of lit reviews, but once you get to that concept mapping stage, things get a little different. So here are a few things you might consider for these types of lit reviews.

Theoretical Lit Reviews

Trace the development of the theory. Who first articulated it? How has it changed over time? Who refined it? Who expanded it? What did they add?
Synthesize the development of the theory. As people refined and expanded it, how did those refinements and expansions interact with the theory as originally proposed? Can you pull it all together into a new statement that incorporates all those different things?
Discuss application of the theory. (This might be beyond the scope of your literature review, but it might not.) Who has applied the theory? How did they apply it? Did their application of the theory lead them to reconsider anything about the theory?

Methodological Lit Reviews

Identify the origins of the methodology. What type of thing was it created to study? What problem was it trying to solve?
Declare key characteristics of the methodology as it has been implemented over time. Not only what it was created to study, but how writing about it has contributed to our understanding of what the methodology is. For example, Hine (2000) discusses ethnography as involving travel (whether physical or experiential), participation, observation, the ethnographer as someone with the authority to describe the "field" where the ethnography has been undertaken, the participant/informant as a member of the culture being studied, and the reader of the ethnography as someone who has neither the participant nor ethnographer's experience and thus is gaining understanding of the culture through the ethnographer's account.
Describe methodological challenges that have arisen as people have implemented the methodology, and, where possible, how people have navigated those challenges.

I’m working on a literature review about affinity space ethnography/connective ethnography right now, and as I try to organize my thoughts, thinking about these things is helping me make sense of the tons of writing there is on ethnography more broadly.

References

Hine, C. (2000). Virtual Ethnography. SAGE.

A Brief Manifesto for My Research

Fri, 30 Aug 2019 12:26:00 -0400

Months ago now, Margy Thomas of ScholarShape released a 7-day email course called Deep Why. I tucked all the messages away in my Gmail archives and am just getting to them now. I’ll post my responses to some of them here on my blog.

The first prompt is to reflect on your manifesto:

In writing a manifesto, we let ourselves imagine the positive change that we can create through the knowledge we're building.

I’m writing one here. This isn’t a manifesto for life; it’s a manifesto specifically for my dissertation research. You can see the draft prospectus for that research here. Feel free to annotate it.

In the video that accompanied the prompt, Margy suggested that a manifesto articulates two things: VALUES and VISION. So that’s how I’m organizing this manifesto.

Values

My research takes an asset-based approach to information literacy. It’s easy to find doomy proclamations that kids don’t know how to find, evaluate, or use information. But they do it all the time, in pursuing their passions. Young people have information literacy: it just isn’t necessarily aligned with the way educators are attempting to teach and assess their information literacy. My research sees information literacy instruction and assessment as related to culturally sustaining pedagogy: just as young people’s heritage and community cultural practices are resources to honor, explore, and extend, so are their information literacy practices.

(So much credit is due to Dr. Crystle Martin, upon whose dissertation my work is building, for articulating this asset-based view of information literacy before me, and to Dr. Django Paris, for introducing the concept of culturally sustaining pedagogy, as well, of course, to Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, for introducing culturally relevant pedagogy before that.)

Vision

In my research, I seek to apply Dr. Martin’s model of information literacy, which takes this asset-based approach, to a new context: the cosplay affinity space. I also hope to find ways to extend or enhance her model, as new pieces of the interest-driven information literacy picture emerge from my findings. The ultimate vision is to create an accessible, asset-based model of information literacy and then share it widely with librarians and educators, along with ideas for how they might teach and assess information literacy in ways that are aligned with young people’s individual and collective information literacy practices. Or, more colloquially:

I want librarians and educators to stop treating kids like they don’t already know how to deal with information, and instead to start looking for ways kids can transfer the skills they use to deal with information in their own interest-driven pursuits across contexts, to address their academic, professional, and everyday problems.

Jargon in Academia

Tue, 13 Aug 2019 11:57:13 -0400

I’m having a little brainstorm over here about my frustration with jargon in academia and the way disciplines borrow from each other and then deposit that jargon on students as though they already know what these things mean, and it’s not all coming together yet so I thought I’d just throw some words out here and some of them will have notes on my understanding but others won’t yet.

space and place - this is what launched this brainstorm, because I was reading about bringing a spatial perspective to the internet and because I’m doing work on affinity spaces. A quick Google tells me that this comes from geography, from the work of Yi-Fu Tuan, and I have heard people throw this around so much in educational research and to a lesser extent in information science research, and I think it’s probably a really useful concept but at no point did anyone offer me an introduction to it as though it were a new thing.

Paulo Freire - I really ought to have read this guy’s stuff. I haven’t yet. Maybe I’ll get there one day.

Habitus (Pierre Bourdieu) - SAME. In my second semester of my doc program, John Martin was all “Bourdieu’s habitus” and, like, I know, he was right, this is a thing I should know, because I’m researching practices, and practice theory is a thing, and this is another one where it’s like, okay, I’ll get there someday I hope.

Bakhtinian carnivalesque - I ran across this because of cosplay but I first came across Mikhail Bakhtin’s work when I was doing a paper on expansive learning, and guess what, I could probably stand to read some more Bakhtin.

semiotics - this comes up a lot for me right now because Gee’s work is all over semiotics and Discourse/discourse and blah blah discursive practices blah.

hermeneutics - Ran across this one in an English class that I thought was about Digital Editing, which it technically was, I just didn’t know that editing has a different meaning in academic English circles than it does in the circles where I ran prior to starting a PhD.

I’m a fourth-gen postgrad and I struggle with this jargon. I don’t know how anyone makes time to deeply understand theory, especially theory translated into English from other languages, and I’ve taken two theory classes and three qual methods classes.

All of this language, in my experience, serves the purpose of gatekeeping and alienating people who could be doing phenomenal work. (Epiphenomenal?) How do we fix it? Can we fix it?

I kind of want to make it my job to fix it.

Memo: Affinity Spaces

Thu, 08 Aug 2019 10:57:00 -0400

Gee introduced the concept of affinity spaces in his book Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling (2004). Affinity spaces are a subset of what Gee calls a semiotic social space, a type of space for interaction with an infrastructure incorporating content, generators, content organization, interactional organization, and portals. Content is what the space is “about,” and is provided by content generators. Gee uses the example of a video game (the generator), which generates a variety of content (words, images, etc.). The space is then organized in two different ways: content is organized by the designers, whereas interaction is organized by the people interacting with the space, in how they “organize their thoughts, beliefs, values, actions, and social actions” (Gee, 2004, p. 81) in relationship to the content. This interaction creates a set of social practices and typical identities present in the space. The content necessarily influences the interaction, but interaction can also influence content. For example, with a video game, player reactions to the game may influence future updates to the game. Finally, Gee defines portals as “anything that gives access to the content and to ways of interacting with that content, by oneself or with other people” (Gee, 2004, p. 81). In Gee’s video game example, this could be the game itself, but it could also be fan websites related to the game. Portals can become generators, “if they allow people to add to content or change the content other generators have generated” (Gee, 2004, p. 82). A video game website might include additional maps that players can download and use to play the game or offer recordings of gameplay to serve as tutorials or entertainment. A generator can also be a portal; for the video game example, the game disc or files both offer the content and can be used to interact with the content.

Gee builds on this description of a semiotic social space to describe “affinity spaces,” a particular type of semiotic social space that young people today experience often. The “affinity” to which Gee refers is not primarily for the other people in the space, but for “the endeavor or interest around which the space is organized” (J. P. Gee, 2004, p. 84). He defines an affinity space as a space that has a number of features:

“Common endeavor, not race, class, gender, or disability, is primary” (J. P. Gee, 2004, p. 85). People in the affinity space relate to each other based on common interests, while attributes such as race, class, gender, and disability may be used strategically if people choose.
“Newbies and masters and everyone else share common space” (J. P. Gee, 2004, p. 85). People with varying skill levels and depth of interest share a single space, getting different things out of the space in accordance with their own purposes.
“Some portals are strong generators” (J. P. Gee, 2004, p. 85). People can create new content related to the original content and share it in the space.
“Content organization is transformed by interactional organization”(J. P. Gee, 2004, p. 85). Or “Internal grammar is transformed by external grammar” (Gee, 2005, p. 226) Creators of the original content modify it based on the interactions of the people in the space.
“Both intensive and extensive knowledge are encouraged” (J. P. Gee, 2004, p. 85). Specialized knowledge in a particular area is encouraged (intensive knowledge), but the space also encourages people to develop a broad range of less specialized knowledge (extensive knowledge).
“Both individual and distributed knowledge are encouraged” (J. P. Gee, 2004, p. 86). People are encouraged to store knowledge in their own heads, but also to use knowledge stored elsewhere, including in other people, materials, or devices, using a network of people and information to access knowledge.
“Dispersed knowledge is encouraged” (J. P. Gee, 2004, p. 86). One portal in the space encourages people to leverage knowledge gained from other portals or other spaces.
“Tacit knowledge is encouraged and honored” (J. P. Gee, 2004, p. 86). People can use knowledge that they have built up “but may not be able to explicate fully in words” (J. P. Gee, 2004, p. 86) in the space. Others can learn from this tacit knowledge by observing its use in the space.
“There are many different forms and routes to participation” (J. P. Gee, 2004, p. 87). People can participate in different ways and at different levels.
“There are lots of different routes to status” (J. P. Gee, 2004, p. 87). People can gain status by being good at different things or participating in different activities.
“Leadership is porous and leaders are resources” (J. P. Gee, 2004, p. 87). No one is the boss of anyone else; people can lead by being designers, providing resources, or teaching others how to operate in the space. “They don’t and can’t order people around or create rigid, unchanging, and impregnable hierarchies” (J. P. Gee, 2004, p. 87).

A space does not need to have all of these features to be considered an affinity space; rather, these features can be considered as a measure of the degree to which a space is an affinity space or how effective an affinity space it is. Affinity spaces can be nested within one another (J. P. Gee, 2017); for example, a website devoted to The Sims video game fanfiction would be an affinity space itself, while also being part of the broader The Sims affinity space, the gaming affinity space, and the fanfiction affinity space. At first glance, an affinity space may seem very similar to a community of practice as described by Lave and Wenger (1991); Gee argues, however, that defining a community implies labeling a group of people, including determining “which people are in and which are out of the group, how far they are in or out, and when they are in and out” (J. P. Gee, 2004, p. 78). Talking about spaces instead of communities removes this concern of membership; people who are present in a space may or may not be part of a community. Further, Lave and Wenger’s original conception of communities of practice described movement from peripheral participation for what Gee would call “newbies” to central participation as “masters,” while in affinity spaces, newbies do not need to be apprenticed to masters to become deeply involved in the space’s activity.

Gee (2004, 2005) offered the concept of affinity spaces as part of a critique of how schooling works; he argues that “people learn best when their learning is part of a highly motivated engagement with social practices which they value” (Gee, 2004, p. 77) and suggests that affinity spaces facilitate this kind of engagement. Gee argues that as young people encounter more and more affinity spaces, they see a “vision of learning, affiliation, and identity” that is more powerful than what they see in school (J. P. Gee, 2004, p. 89). He suggests that educators can learn from the design and construction of affinity spaces.

After Gee introduced the concept of affinity spaces, scholars investigated specific affinity spaces and what lessons they might have for educators working in the areas of literacy (Rebecca W. Black, 2007, 2008; R. W. Black, 2007; Lam, 2009), science (Steinkuehler & Duncan, 2008), and mathematics (Steinkuehler & Williams, 2009). These studies supported Gee’s original conception of affinity spaces, finding many features of affinity spaces in their research settings, which included fanfiction websites (Rebecca W. Black, 2007, 2008; R. W. Black, 2007), anime/manga discussion forums (Lam, 2009), and massively multiplayer online games and their related discussion forums (Steinkuehler & Duncan, 2008; Steinkuehler & Williams, 2009).

Refining the Concept of Affinity Space

As the technology available for online participation shifted from predominantly individual websites or forums to predominantly social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Youtube, online affinity spaces shifted as well. In the introduction to the book Learning in Video Game Affinity Spaces, Hayes and Duncan (2012) point out that, like online culture more broadly, online affinity spaces present a “quickly moving target” (p. 10) for study. They call for a refined and expanded conception of affinity spaces in light of this fact. While Gee’s (2005; 2004) original conception of affinity spaces consisted of eleven features that may or may not be present in any given affinity space, in his afterword to Hayes and Duncan’s (2012) book, he identifies five key features of what he now calls “passionate affinity spaces”:

People in a passionate affinity space interact around shared goals because of a shared passion, not because of shared backgrounds, age, status, gender, ability, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, or values unless these are integral to the passion.
Not everyone interacting in the space need have a passion for the shared interest (they could simply have an interest), but they must acknowledge and respect the passion and the people who have it and who form the main “attractor” for the space.
People earn status and influence in the space because of accomplishments germane to the passion, not because of wealth or status in the world outside the space.
The space offers everyone the opportunity, should they want it, to produce, not just consume, and to learn to mentor and lead, not just to be mentored and follow.
People in the space agree to rules of conduct - and often enforce them together - that facilitate the other features above. (J. P. Gee, 2012, p. 238)

Gee and Hayes (2010, 2012, 2011) distinguish between “nurturing” and “elitist” affinity spaces. Building on Gee’s earlier work and drawing on studies of fan sites associated with the computer game The Sims, Gee and Hayes “identify features of what [they] call nurturing affinity spaces that are particularly supportive of learning” (p. 129). They describe the following fifteen features of affinity spaces and the ways they are enacted in nurturing affinity spaces:

“A common endeavor for which at least many people in the space have a passion - not race, class, gender, or disability - is primary.” (p. 134) Gee and Hayes assert that the passion in an affinity space is for the endeavor or interest rather than the people; in nurturing affinity spaces, participants in the space understand that “spreading this passion, and thus ensuring the survival and flourishing of the passion and the affinity space, requires accommodating new members and encouraging committed members” (p. 135). Affinity spaces that are not nurturing may treat newcomers poorly or restrict access to participation according to experience.
“Affinity spaces are not segregated by age.” (p. 135) In a nurturing affinity space, older participants in the affinity space set norms of “cordial, respectful, and professional behavior that the young readily follow” (p. 135) while in other affinity spaces, knowledge accrued with age may not be readily shared.
“Newbies, masters, and everyone else share a common space” (p. 136). Nurturing affinity spaces make it easy for newcomers to participate, avoiding hazing or testing new participants.
“Everyone can, if they wish, produce and not just consume.” (p. 137) Nurturing affinity spaces set high standards for production, enforcing them through “respectful and encouraging mentoring.”
“Content is transformed by interaction.” (p. 137)
“The development of both specialist and broad, general knowledge is encouraged, and specialist knowledge is pooled.” (p. 138) Within a nurturing affinity space, specialists understand that their knowledge is partial, and everyone pools their knowledge by sharing it in the space.
“Both individual knowledge and distributed knowledge are encouraged” (p. 139). “Nurturing affinity spaces tend to foster a view of expertise as rooted more in the space itself or the community that exists in the space and not in individuals’ heads” (p. 139)
“The use of dispersed knowledge is facilitated” (p. 140).
“Tacit knowledge is used and honored; explicit knowledge is encouraged” (p. 141).
“There are many different forms and routes to participation” (p. 142).
“There are many different routes to status.” (p. 142)
“Leadership is porous, and leaders are resources.” (p. 143)
“Roles are reciprocal.” (p. 143)
“A view of learning that is individually proactive but does not exclude help is encouraged.” (p. 143)
“People get encouragement from an audience and feedback from peers, although everyone plays both roles at different times.” (p. 144)

Referring to the work of Gee and Hayes, Hayes and Duncan point out that “…while elitist spaces are sites of very high knowledge production, they tend to value a narrow range of skills and backgrounds, have clear hierarchies of status and power, and disparage newcomers who do not conform to fairly rigid norms for behavior” (2012, p. 11). Gee and Hayes (2010, 2011, 2012) suggest that nurturing spaces are more conducive to learning than elitist spaces.

Over time, Gee (2017) has refined the vocabulary that refers to affinity spaces. The attractor is “the thing for which people who move around in the big space have a shared interest or passion. It also beckons to anyone who enters any part of the space and seeks to entice him or her to stay in the space.” (p. 113) People who enter the affinity space because of an interest in or passion are affines. “Clumps of people who [overlap] in a good deal in various subspaces (locations)” of a larger affinity space and thus bump “into one another rather regularly” are fellow travelers (p. 113). Home bases “are key places where fellow travelers come together a good deal to engage in the activities that keep their shared affinity alive. They are places where the people with the most passion for the shared affinity are the key organizers, motivators, teachers, and standard-setters for the affinity space as a whole” (p. 114). A group of closely connected home bases form a home-base cluster.

Expanding the Concept of Affinity Space

Lammers, Curwood, and Magnifico (Curwood, Magnifico, & Lammers, 2013; Lammers, Curwood, & Magnifico, 2012; Magnifico, Lammers, & Curwood, 2013) draw on their research on adolescent literacy in the affinity spaces related to The Sims, The Hunger Games, and Neopets to “explicate nine features of an expanded notion of affinity spaces” (p. 45). Lammers and colleagues point out that the “introduction of numerous online technologies and social networking sites has created affinity spaces that are constantly evolving, dynamic, and networked in new ways” (p. 47). In the time of Gee’s original affinity space conception, a researcher might consider an affinity space “defined by one central portal (for instance, a discussion board),” but Lammers and colleagues point out that “contemporary affinity spaces often involve social media such as Facebook and Twitter, creative sites like DeviantArt and FanFiction.net, and blogging platforms such as Tumblr and Wordpress” (p. 47). One participant may operate in an affinity space that networks all of these different technologies; accordingly, knowledge within an affinity space “is effectively distributed across learners, objects, tools, symbols, technologies and the environment” (p. 48).

Working toward developing a new research method they call “affinity space ethnography,” Lammer, Curwood, and Magnifico offer the following features of contemporary affinity spaces for consideration:

“A common endeavor is primary.” (p. 48)
“Participation is self-directed, multifaceted and dynamic.” (p. 48) Participants in an affinity space do not only participate in existing portals, but may build their own portals to generate content.
“In online affinity space portals, participation is often multimodal” (p. 48). Contrasting Gee’s research on early text-based discussion boards as portals, Lammers and colleagues point out that participants in contemporary affinity spaces may produce not just text, images, websites, or maps as in the affinity spaces Gee originally described but also videos, maps, podcasts, and machinima.
“Affinity spaces provide a passionate, public audience for content.” (p. 49)
“Socialising plays an important role in affinity space participation.” (p. 49)
“Leadership roles vary within and among portals.” (p. 49)
“Knowledge is distributed across the entire affinity space.” (p. 49)
“Many portals place a high value on cataloguing and documenting content and practices” (p. 49).
“Affinity spaces encompass a variety of media-specific and social networking portals” (p. 50).

Bommarito also aims to expand the notion of affinity spaces; specifically, he states that “the present view of affinity spaces fails to explain how participants cohere when the group’s focus on a common endeavor is called into question, becomes unclear or disappears altogether” (p. 408). Based on a wide variety of affinity spaces research published by other scholars, Bommarito proposes a situated model of affinity spaces. Bommarito identifies certain assumptions in early definitions of affinity spaces that he argues limit “the ability of researchers to investigate the evolving nature of affinity spaces” (p. 410). These assumptions include:

“That the important activity in an affinity space is only that which contributes directly to the group’s shared interest or common endeavor” (p. 410)
“That the development of strong bonds among participants in an affinity space is necessarily subordinate to taking part in the group’s shared interest or common endeavor” (p. 410)
“That affinity spaces are largely stable entities, confined to single sites or discussion boards” (p. 411)

Bommarito proposes a situated model of affinity spaces (p. 411), in which affinity spaces shift between a “passionate” state, clearly focused on a shared interest, and a “deliberative” state, when the shared interest becomes unclear and participants have to resolve challenges unrelated to their shared interest. In the “passionate” state, the primary mode of interaction is what Bommarito calls “negotiation,” in which participants exchange ideas directly related to the shared interest or the organization of the space in a way that does not supersed the established shared interest; in the “deliberative state,” it is “deliberation,” in which participants debate “the nature of the shared interest itself” (p. 412) and what the space will become, potentially even changing or expanding the scope of the interest or shifting so that relationships become primary and the interest secondary. Participants in affinity spaces must deal with two different types of challenges, which Bommarito identifies as “adaptive” or “technical” drawing on Heifetz (1994). “According to Heifetz (1994, p. 72), technical problems are those for which ‘the necessary knowledge about them already has been digested and put in the form of a legitimized set of known organizational procedures guiding what to do and role authorizations guiding who should do it’.” (p. 413) This is the kind of problem participants tend to face when an affinity space is in a passionate state, when “participation means, primarily, gaining technical knowledge and skills related to the shared interest” (p. 413) and the problems to be solved are clearly related to the space’s shared endeavor. “Adaptive challenges, on the other hand, are situations in which ‘no adequate response has yet been developed’, ‘no clear expertise can be found’ and ‘no single sage has general credibility’ (Heifetz, 1994, p. 72)” and are the kinds of challenges participants face when the space is in a deliberative state, in which participants are “, identifying problems unrelated to some common endeavor while also pursuing and evaluating possible solutions as a collective.” (p. 413). Bommarito asserts, “For the affinity space that has lost a clear grasp of its common endeavor, members must adapt if they are to avoid dissolution.” (p. 413)

Bommarito also contrasts affinity spaces as to whether their participants can be considered a “seriality” or a “group”, drawing on Young (1997). “Young (1997, p. 23), explicitly drawing on Jean-Pau l Sartre (1976), argues that a series is a collective of individuals organized around some material object and the social practices related to that object.” (p. 413) When the affinity space is in a passionate state, its participants can be considered a seriality. “According to Young, however, serial collectivity is distinguished from groups in that groups are organized around individuals’ relationships to one another rather than to some external object or interest.” When the affinity space is in a deliberative state, its participants can be considered a group: their relationships become the heart of the space, rather than the shared endeavor.

From Spaces to Networks

The Leveling Up Study of the Connected Learning Research Network “was designed to investigate the role that online affinity networks play, and could potentially play, in connected learning” (Ito et al., 2019, p. 4). While Gee first used the term “affinity” to indicate the affinity participants in a space had for their shared endeavor, Ito, Martin, Pfister, Rafalow, Salen, and Wortman (2019) use it to indicate not only the interest in the endeavor itself but also “in order to highlight [the interest’s] relational and culturally situated nature” (p. 18), reflecting Bommarito’s (2014) emphasis on the social relationships developed within an affinity space. They use the term “network” rather than “space” to capture a wide spectrum of participation from casual to serious.

“Online affinity networks… are collectives that have shared interests, practices, and marked roles in the community that define levels of responsibility and expertise…” but also allow for more casual participation: “lurkers, observers, and transient participants” (p. 39). These networks are “united by a shared content world, infrastructure, and affinity,” but “successful online affinity networks are spaces of constant renewal” (p. 23) and “are sustained through interpersonal relationships, shared activities, and a sense of cultural affinity” (p. 40).

Online affinity networks have three key characteristics:

They are specialized, focusing on a specific affinity or interest.
Involvement in them is intentional; participants choose to affiliate with the network and can move easily in and out of engagement with the network.
“Content sharing and communication take place on openly networked online platforms” (p. 42) New participants can find the networks on the open internet and do not have to enter into a financial transaction or have any specific institutional membership in order to participate.

This shift from affinity spaces to affinity networks reflects both Bommarito’s (2014) suggestion that the relational nature of affinity spaces is a key part of their participants’ experience and the sustainability of the space, and also incorporates the concept of multiple and varied portals that Lammers, Curwood, and Magnifico (2012) suggest must be kept in mind when studying an affinity space.

References

Black, R. W. (2007). Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction. In D. Barton & M. Hamilton (Eds.), New Literacies Sampler (pp. 115–136). New York: Peter Lang. Black, R. W. (2007). Fanfiction Writing and the Construction of Space. E-Learning and Digital Media, 4(4), 384–397. Black, R. W. (2008). Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction. Peter Lang. Curwood, J. S., Magnifico, A. M., & Lammers, J. C. (2013). Writing in the wild: Writers’ motivation in fan-based affinity spaces. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy: A Journal from the International Reading Association, 56(8), 677–685. Gee, J. (2005). Semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces: From the age of mythology to today’s schools. In D. Barton & K. Tusting (Eds.), Beyond communities of practice: Language, power, and social contex (pp. 214–232). Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated Language and Learning : A Critique of Traditional Schooling. London, UNITED KINGDOM: Routledge. Gee, J. P. (2012). Afterword. In E. R. Hayes & S. C. Duncan (Eds.), Learning in Video Game Affinity Spaces (pp. 235–241). New York: Peter Lang. Gee, J. P. (2017). Teaching, Learning, Literacy in Our High-Risk High-Tech World: A Framework for Becoming Human. New York: Teachers College Press. Gee, J. P., & Hayes, E. (2010). Women and gaming: The Sims and 21st century learning. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gee, J. P., & Hayes, E. (2012). Nurturing Affinity Spaces and Game-Based Learning. In C. Steinkuehler, K. Squire, & S. Barab (Eds.), Games, Learning, and Society : Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age (pp. 129–153). New York: Cambridge University Press. Gee, J. P., & Hayes, E. R. (2011). Language and learning in the digital age. New York: Routledge. Hayes, E. R., & Duncan, S. C. (Eds.). (2012). Learning in Video Game Affinity Spaces. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. Ito, M., Martin, C., Pfister, R. C., Rafalow, M. H., Salen, K., & Wortman, A. (2019). Affinity Online: How Connection and Shared Interest Fuel Learning. New York: NYU Press. Lammers, J. C., Curwood, J. S., & Magnifico, A. M. (2012). Toward an Affinity Space Methodology: Considerations for Literacy Research. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 11(2), 44–58. Lam, W. S. E. (2009). Literacy and Learning across Transnational Online Spaces. E-Learning and Digital Media, 6(4), 303–324. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Magnifico, A. M., Lammers, J. C., & Curwood, J. S. (2013). Collaborative learning across space and time: ethnographic research in online affinity spaces. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. Madison, WI: International Society of the Learning Sciences, 81–84. Steinkuehler, C., & Duncan, S. (2008). Scientific Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 17(6), 530–543. Steinkuehler, C., & Williams, C. (2009). Math as narrative in WoW forum discussions. International Journal of Learning and Media, 1(3).

Why I Have Trouble Fanning These Days

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 14:31:35 -0400

I’ve been listening to the latest episode of Fansplaining, with guest Emily Nussbaum, and it’s led me to sort of a revelation.

[First, an aside: Emily Nussbaum mentions in the episode that in her Buffy days she was on the Bronze. It’s no secret that that was my first fannish home. It’s so nice to hear about Bronzers in the world. I don’t know if Emily would call herself a Bronzer, but my definition is just somebody who spent time at the Bronze, so she counts.]

Since I decided to do my dissertation on the information literacy practices of cosplayers, I’ve been reconnecting with fandom. For years now, I’ve had trouble staying connected to any particular fandom specifically, and fandom itself in general, for a number of reasons:

my fannish home being in diaspora
burnout after a failed Save Our Show campaign
the proliferation of social networks
grad school
parenting

W. has repeatedly suggested that being fannish is easier in your teens and 20s when you have fewer responsibilities than it is in your 30s when you have a kid, and that’s fair. But I always feel like none of these explanations are quite enough.

Listening to Emily Nussbaum say:

"...the situation in which somebody produces an entire show and then releases it to the audience changes the way that people talk about TV when it doesn’t come out week-by-week."

…gave me a little lightbulb moment.

My primary fandoms have all been week-by-week TV fandoms: Sailor Moon when it aired as an afternoon show in the 90s, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Wonderfalls (yes, Wonderfalls!), The Inside (I’m here for Tim Minear’s most obscure work), Veronica Mars, 30 Rock, New Girl. The intensity of my participation in fandom for each of these varies, but other than a brief flirtation with Star Wars fic in high school because Sonja was doing it, and some heavy time spent reading Harry Potter fic and playing in related RPs, weekly television is my medium of choice.

And the way we talked about weekly television in the late 90s and early 2000s is how I know to talk about things as a fan: what is the significance of what just happened? What will happen next? What do we wish would happen next?

You can do all of these things after bingeing a season of Stranger Things, and I do (though mostly only with W.), but it feels different somehow.

I’m going to try and crack it. I’m going to figure it out with Glow.

Anyway, this has not gone very far, but it’s just something that I thought about and wanted to write about a little bit.

GIFs do not display in webmention backfed from Twitter via Brid.gy.

Tue, 30 Jul 2019 11:03:40 -0400

See comment at kimberlyhirsh.com/2019/07/2… backfed from twitter.com/thoughtso…

The Space Between: Reading, Writing, and a Third Thing (Thinking?)

Tue, 30 Jul 2019 10:11:31 -0400

I’m not a very efficient writer.

I have 20 hours of childcare a week, and usually lose two or three of those hours to late arrival (mine), getting settled in, and winding down.

It feels like I ought to be spending every minute of that time either reading or writing.

But I actually spend a lot of it giving my mind space to process what I’ve read or reorganize what I’ve written.

Brigid Schulte writes about realizing that many of the world’s great male artists had women (wives, housekeepers, mothers) who protected their time for them. They used this time not just for the physical act of producing, but also for taking long, silent walks where they thought through their work. Schulte points out that throughout history, women’s time has been fragmented, and they have carved their work time out of these little slivers.

My time is extremely fragmented, though less so than when my son was an infant. He sometimes blesses me by taking a long nap, which I inevitably use as leisure time rather than work time because honestly, my brain is just usually no good for work at the time that he’s napping. (I also can’t rely on these naps, so I’m afraid to plan to work during them, because sometimes he doesn’t take them.) My mother-in-law also helps out by spending several hours with him every week, and my partner takes care of most of the things that those great artists’ wives, mothers, and housekeepers did, in spite of having a full-time job himself.

So, I’m blessed.

But I still feel wrong when, instead of churning out my own words or filling my head with the words of others, I take time to stare.

Even though that’s where my words come from, that space between reading and writing.

I need to reconceptualize this space as part of the writing process.

What about you? Have you successfully given yourself permission to view thinking time as productive time?

Life online and losing and finding my faith in it

Sun, 28 Jul 2019 12:56:20 -0400

Get ready for some rambling, stream-of-consciousness, blogging-as-thinking.

As a member of the Oregon Trail generation, I came of age alongside the Web. I had access to much of it a little earlier than my peers, because my dad’s work provided home access for him. As an adolescent, I had this sort of constant feeling of the immense potential of my life ahead of me and of the Web, and as a young adult I really leaned into that, blogging starting in 2001. It’s not a big leap from me to this rando kid on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “I Robot, You Jane” who says, “The only reality is virtual. If you’re not jacked in, you’re not alive.” I feel this visceral connection to the Web that I have a hard time putting in words.

As I shared last weekend, I’ve been looking at Pierre Levy’s writings on collective intelligence and cyberculture. I shared in the IndieWeb chat that I was reading Collective Intelligence and it was making me deeply sad. I actually had to put the book down several times and hit a bit of a wall in my plans for my comps because I just didn’t know how to recover from this sadness. The French edition of Collective Intelligence was published in 1994, and full of the kind of technoutopian rhetoric that I believed for years, that kind of still hums in my veins a bit. And reading it made me so sad about what I imagine we’ve lost, the weird internet Vicki Boykis talks about. Specifically, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that the kind of collaboration that excited me about the web, and that Web 2.0 promised to make more accessible, is so much harder to find now, perhaps nearly impossible, because of silos and the proliferation of advertising.

And maybe it’s because I’m 38 instead of 18 that I’m feeling this way, maybe it’s something else, maybe I’m wrong. I just felt immensely defeated, even in the face of examples to the contrary. I just felt sad and overwhelmed and to be honest, this feeling hasn’t gone away entirely.

But then I was poking around the Vaporwave subreddit, which of course is a brilliant place to be if you’re feeling disillusioned by the false promises of and simultaneously nostalgic for 90s-era technoutopianism, and found the thread for VA:10, a project resulting from collaboration between 88 creators, with plans to create not just an album, but also a film and an art book, documenting this digitally-born musical genre and aesthetic. With plans to donate all proceeds to the Internet Archive.

And my faith came back a little.

Other stuff from this week:

I finished playing Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and started playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (not for the first time). I've been lurking in the Metroidvania subreddit.
I finished reading Circe. It was good, but I liked Song of Achilles better.
I started reading How to Do Nothing.

Podcasts that are making my afternoons

Tue, 23 Jul 2019 11:51:15 -0400

M. and I have an agreement, proposed and enforced by me, after we spent months with him as a tiny audio tyrant during our commutes. Now, so that I don’t have to listen to Pharrell’s “Happy” on Repeat-1 for 40 minutes a day (or, as it would be now, “Belle” or “For the First Time in Forever” or “My Superhero Movie”), he chooses what we listen to on our morning commute (usually one of those songs above on Repeat-1, and he actually knows to ask for Repeat-1), and I choose what we listen to in the afternoon. He won’t begin a nap anywhere except in a moving car right now - ironic since we never had to do that with him when he was a tiny baby, but I guess it’s because we could always bounce him in the Boba and he’s too big for comfortable front-wearing at 33 months - and podcasts are more likely to lull him to sleep than music, and also I really enjoy podcasts, so most afternoons I put on a podcast.

For a while, we were listening to Fansplaining and The Mermaid Podcast, both of which are super fun, and which I intend to get back to. They’ve got huge backlogs, and also are a little distant from my current experiences in life, so I decided to check out some podcasts that are more relevant to my day-to-day and would be easier to catch up on. It’s made a huge difference in my quality of life. Here they are:

The Double Shift : “a reported, narrative podcast about a new generation of working mothers.” Every mother works, host and journalist Katherine Goldstein points out. This podcast is huge for me because it’s not about parenting as an activity and it’s not about kids. It’s about personal experiences of being a mother and how that impacts your whole life. I loved hearing her talk to a punk rock future rabbi and women who work in Las Vegas brothels. I want more media like this: acknowledging that being a mom impacts everything you do, but doesn’t have to limit you to activities and ideas that center exclusively on motherhood. It’s sort of the impetus behind my (dormant but I’ve got the next issue in draft form) newsletter, Genetrix.

Acadames: “a biweekly podcast that explores whether being a woman in academia is a dream, game, or scam through interviews with a diverse range of women.” This is hosted by two scholars in the health sciences at my university. They address lots of issues that feel deeply relevant for me, though I do sometimes bump up against the differences between health sciences and social sciences, for example when Dr. Whitney Robinson was talking about how she thinks the study of knowledge is called epistemology and I thought, “What a luxury, to be uncertain of the definition of epistemology.” (Her definition is one: epistemology as a branch of philosophy that deals with how we know what we know. In the humanities and social sciences especially, but also I think in the natural sciences, epistemology is also a scholar’s or scholarly community’s set of beliefs about how knowledge is constructed. Your “epistemological stance” is your personal take on this. Mine is that knowledge is constructed, that there are multiple ways of knowing that include but are not limited to both empirical and experiential ways, and that anyone can create knowledge.)

Motherhood Sessions: Dr. Alexandra Sacks is making matrescence, a concept with which I am obsessed, a more widely known idea. In her podcast, she talks to moms about all kinds of things, and basically does recorded therapy sessions. (The guests are people who volunteered to be on the show. She’s not secretly and unethically and maybe illegally? recording patients or anything.) Some of these are closer to my experience than others, but I found it especially valuable to hear from a mom of one who has mixed feelings about the fact that she’s okay with only having one kid, and a PhD student who has had her dissertation on hold for years and needs to talk through whether she wants to bother finishing.

Who will I be this year?

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 10:57:00 -0400

My friend Little Willow doesn’t make New Year’s Resolutions in January. She makes them on her birthday, which is not in January.

I like to set intentions lots of different times: in January. In March, when the astrological year begins. At the start of the school year. With each new moon. And, yes, on my birthday.

My birthday was yesterday, and I spent it packing up the last stuff from my brother and Mom’s apartment to move them back into the closest thing I have to a childhood home (where I lived from ages 13 - 18), having lunch, playing video games, and having a much better day than I feared I would, but I didn’t have the oomph to set intentions.

Today I’m asking myself who I want to be this year.

I want to be someone who takes care of herself, unapologetically, and who understands that there is no one in her immediate environment who would deny her the ability to take care of herself. (It’s easy for me to think that self-care needs to fall by the wayside because I’m a mom, but I’m at a point where that’s just not true anymore, so I need to not let it be an excuse for neglecting my own needs.)

I want to be someone who simultaneously understands that she is a person of value just by virtue of existing, but also contributes to keeping her family and household going.

I want to be someone who is invested in her community. (My family gave me a membership to the Durham Co-op Market for my birthday and shopping there and participating in the Co-op is one way in which I can really support my community.)

I want to be someone who makes things for pleasure.

I want to be someone who continues to live a life that is more for living than for documenting, but also be someone who documents her thoughts and understandings both to share with others and so that she can reflect on them later.

Who do you want to be?

What would you like me to write more about?

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 19:17:12 -0400

I love that Ton Zijlstra asked his readers a few years ago

What would you like me to write more about?

I want to blog more and to use the time when I need a break in the middle of an academic writing sprint to write other stuff. So I’m asking you to answer the same question for me. You can answer publicly or privately, and you should feel free to include fanfic prompts in your suggestions.

(And a note for Sandra, you don’t have to answer, because I know and I promise I’m working on it.)

I should mention that it’s my birthday today and answering this would be a great gift from you to me.

I’ll update this post with answers as they come in. Let me know if you want yours to remain anonymous.

The Kimberly Hirsh Eating Plan

Fri, 12 Jul 2019 10:54:38 -0400

Hello, friends! Today I’m going to write up an idealistic eating plan for myself based on what I’ve learned over the past four years about what’s manageable for me. This is as much to remind me as it is to share with you, because it turns out my primary audience for my blog is future me. So future me, here’s what you need to eat.

Requirements I’ve placed on this eating plan:

Must be gluten-free, dairy-free, corn-free, soy-free
Needs to distinguish between warm-weather and cool-weather foods
Needs to have options for both low-energy and high-energy days

Tricky things:

I'm really particular about vegetable textures and can never remember which ones I like or how I like them prepared.

Warm-Weather Eating Plan

Breakfast

Smoothie: non-dairy milk + fruit + greens + protein powder + fiber powder + greens powder + ice (homemade or storebought: e. g., Smoothie King's Vegan Dark Chocolate Banana or one of Jamba Juice's Plant-Based Smoothies)
Dairy-free yogurt and granola (on a high-energy day or a day when I have plenty of time, yogurt from a big tub; on a low-energy or rushed day, yogurt in a small package)

Lunch

Salad (e.g. PCOS Diva's Mango-Black Bean Salad in a Jar)
Sandwich on gluten-free bread

Dinner

Grilled meat + rice/quinoa/sweet potato + veggies
Something in the Instant Pot

Cold-Weather Eating Plan

Breakfast

Oatmeal with fruit and nuts
Toast with nut butter and fruit

Lunch

Soup (homemade or Amy's brand)
Leftovers from dinner

Dinner

Baked meat + rice/quinoa/sweet potato + veggies
Something in the Instant Pot

All-Weather Snack Options

Nuts and fruit
Larabars

All-Weather Beverage Options

Still water with ice
Sparkling water
Chai tea + stevia + non-dairy milk
Coffee + stevia + non-dairy milk
In true desperate times when caffeine is required and tea and coffee don't appeal, Zevia
As a rare treat, Izze

Next Steps

I’ve struggled in the past with actually eating the salads I prepare and figuring out how to incorporate more vegetables into my diet. My next steps are to begin trying different vegetables prepared in different ways and tracking how I like them.

This is an ever-evolving meal plan, so expect to hear more as I update it!

Constructing websites as constructing ourselves: Thinking out loud

Tue, 02 Jul 2019 09:42:54 -0400

This is just me, thinking out loud, so expect it to be rough, incomplete, unpolished. But I thought it was a train of thought worth stopping, so here we go.

When you’re driving down a city street at a cool 35 mph while “Belle” plays on repeat one for the 1000th+ time in recent months and your toddler is in the back seat sulking because Daddy has to go to work today and separation from Daddy is painful, your mind wanders. It does if you’re me, anyway. Mine wandered to the way in which the only thing I seem interested in besides sleep lately is tweaking my personal website. Then I thought:

As I'm building my website, it kind of feels like I'm building myself.

Identity construction is kind of an obsession of mine, specifically the idea that we create our own identities through narratives we tell about ourselves. Sure, there are identities the world forces upon us, but our narratives interact with those. Most of my work in my doctoral program has touched on identity in one way or another:

I wrote about the maker movement in libraries and found Breanne Litts's Activity-Identity-Community framework, which posits that the development of maker identities is one of the pillars of the maker movement.
I wrote about how libraries can leverage tabletop roleplaying games to support teen identity development (in revision for Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults).
I touched on the process of developing an identity as an improviser as a key part of participating in the improv comedy community.
I wrote about how horizontal learning enables young people to leverage their out-of-school identities for academic success.
I wrote about how young people imagine their possible future selves.

And my favorite fictional works often have to deal with reconciling different pieces of one’s identity: Spider-Man, Sailor Moon, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer all come to mind. (And the X-Men; I was just reading an old Chris Claremont book - Uncanny X-Men #129, 130 - somewhere in there - where Nightcrawler thinks about how he’s decided not to disguise himself as a normal human; I think there’s something to unpack there.) So, I guess superheroes are what I’m talking about, and I’m sure lots of work has already been done on how superhero identity plays out, including Brownie & Graydon’s book.

So I was thinking about how building my website feels like building myself, and I thought… hasn’t this been true since I first started building websites in 1995? I got my first personal domain in 2001, and building an online space to represent myself has always meant choosing what I want the world to know about me, who I want to seem to be, and by defining who I want to seem to be, am I not defining who I want to actually be?

Then I thought about social media and all the ways we’ve used them to represent ourselves, and all the ways that has gotten away from us. Before we knew how bad Facebook was, when my husband would add a new friend on Facebook, he would immediately peruse their profile to find out what books and movies they liked; what we like contributes to the picture of who we are, but what we want people to know we like does even more so, I think.

My train of thought loses steam here, but I’m definitely interested in digging into the intersection between technology and identity more. Our tools shape not only how we think, but who we are.

Project READY is live!

Mon, 17 Jun 2019 15:34:41 -0400

Still blogging infrequently and mostly absent from social media, but this is a huge piece of work. I hope to write up some reflections on what I learned through this process before too long.

Dear Colleagues-

Today, we are excited to announce that the Project READY (Reimagining Equity and Access for Diverse Youth) online racial equity curriculum is live and accessible at ready.web.unc.edu. Learn more at Booth 2650 at ALA Annual in Washington, DC.

A historic milestone was quietly reached in the American public school system during the 2014-2015 school year: for the first time in history,youth of color made up the majority of students attending U.S. public schools. Creating inclusive and equitable school and public library programs for Black youth, Indigenous youth, and Youth of Color (BIYOC) requires knowledge about topics such as race and racism, implicit bias and microaggressions, cultural competence and culturally sustaining pedagogy, and equity and social justice. Research shows, however, that few library and information science (LIS) master’s programs include these topics in their curriculum.A recent survey focused specifically on early career youth services librarians found that only 26.8% of respondents said that social justice was included in a substantive way in their master’s curriculum; 37.2% said that cultural competency was substantively included, and 41.8% said that equity and inclusion was substantively included. Related to these findings, a majority (54.08%) of respondents said that their master’s programs did not prepare them well for working with youth of color and other marginalized youth.

In 2016, The School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the School of Library and Information Sciences at North Carolina Central University, and the Wake County (NC) Public School System (WCPSS) were awarded a three-year Continuing Education Project grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to develop Project READY to address this existing gap in professional development opportunities for youth services library staff. The curriculum aims to:

introduce youth services library staff to research in areas such as race and racism, critical theory, and culturally responsive or sustaining pedagogy.
establish a shared understanding of foundational concepts and issues related to race, racism, and racial equity.
encourage self-reflection related to race and racial identity for both BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and white library staff in public and school libraries.
amplify the work of practitioners and scholars who are providing inclusive and culturally responsive services for youth of color and Indigenous youth.
provide concrete strategies for creating and/or improving library programs and services for Black youth, Indigenous youth, and children and teens of color.

The curriculum consists of 27 modules, designed to be worked through by individuals or small groups. Modules are organized into three sequential sections. The first section (Foundations) focuses on basic concepts and issues that are fundamental to understanding race and racism and their impact on library services. The second section (Transforming Practice) explores how these foundational concepts relate to and can be applied in library environments. Finally, the third section (Continuing the Journey) explores how library professionals can sustain racial equity work and grow personally and professionally in this area after completing the curriculum.

The curriculum represents the work of 40 researchers, practitioners, administrators, and policymakers, and youth from a variety of racial and cultural backgrounds. It is grounded in the work of scholars of color and Indigenous scholars who have thought and written about issues related to institutional and individual racism, equity, inclusion, and social justice.

We hope this curriculum will benefit and inform the work of the many organizations and individuals that are working to improve the quality of life and educational opportunities for BIYOC.

We will be promoting the curriculum on the exhibit hall at ALA’s annual conference in Washington, DC - Booth 2650. We invite you to stop by and preview Project READY!

Sincerely,

Sandra Hughes-Hassell, PhD Professor She/Her/Hers

Casey H. Rawson, PhD Teaching Assistant Professor She/Her/Hers

Kimberly Hirsh, MAT, MSLS PhD Student She/Her/Hers

My work is to take care of myself.

Wed, 29 May 2019 15:53:29 -0400

I’m still on hiatus from social media activity and comments on my blog posts are still closing after only 1 day. But there are some things that I want to capture in this space immediately, rather than waiting until I “come back,” and there are some things that I think could benefit other people by being public, so I’m going ahead and posting. This is one of those things.

I went to the doctor yesterday. I needed refills on my prescriptions. And I’d also noticed recently that a number of chronic illness symptoms had crept up on me slowly over the past… year and a half? Six months, at least. So I went in expecting to discuss those symptoms with her.

When she asked how I was, I gave her the list of symptoms:

Puffy face
Missing outer third of eyebrow
Low body temperature
Intense fatigue (can't put away laundry or cook)
Brain fog (Only about 2 good hours a day)
Joint and muscle pain
Anxiety
Depression
Coarse hair
Hair loss
Carpal tunnel
Worsening vision
Headaches
Dry skin
Brittle nails
Acne
Hirsutism
Tinnitus
Insomnia
Dizziness
Frequent urination
Excessive thirst
Sore throat
Waking with a racing heart

I said, "These symptoms are consistent with when my thyroid hormones have been off in the past."

“Your thyroid numbers are good,” she told me. I looked at them. She was right. They weren’t just normal; they were in what I know to be the optimal range for me. They were excellent.

I’d noticed that a lot of these symptoms were also consistent with diabetes. “Your blood sugar is at the high end of normal, but it’s lower than it was six months ago. It’s moving in the right direction.” So I’m still prediabetic. But not yet diabetic.

This is where most doctors would tell me I was fine, or I need to eat more protein, or it’s because I’m the mom of a young kid.

“But you’re having these symptoms, so you’re not okay,” she said. I love my doctor. “Have you noticed any pattern?”

I told her no. They have snuck up on me, sort of one at a time over months and months, and so I haven’t been tracking them.

“Well, they could be a food sensitivity. Or another autoimmune disease.” There’s a high level of comorbidity with autoimmune diseases, such that having one makes you a lot more likely to later acquire another. “But I don’t even know what to test without more information. So come back in two to four weeks with some data and we’ll decide what to test.”

I really wanted to be able to just increase the dose of one of my current medications to fix this, but apparently, that’s not an option. Straightforward dietary changes that have helped in the past, like cutting out gluten and corn, which I’d been doing for the past two months, didn’t seem to be helping. So here we are. I’m spending the next month collecting data on everything I can think of, looking for relationships. I’m tracking which symptoms I have on what days, what I eat, how I sleep, and anything else that comes to mind; the app I’m using, Flaredown, lets you add tags freely so I can track things like travel and even whether my kid naps.

…

Esmé Weijun Wang, who writes a blog for ambitious people dealing with limitations, writes:

My work, although it may not look like work to most, is to take care of myself. I must care for my health with as much attention as I once paid to the documents I was hired to edit, or to the long hours spent at the office on Saturdays. Aggressive pursuit of one's ambition is a skillset that, I hope, has not left me. In the meantime, I am aggressively pursuing a dream of recovery.

Similarly, I'm going to collect data on my own health with the attention I would use to collect data for a study, to analyze my own journal with the same tools I would use to conduct content analysis.

…

I don’t have a pat conclusion to this. I’m disappointed it’s not a straightforward fix. I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to work something out to help me. I’m relieved that I don’t need to make any drastic changes to my diet before I’m done traveling at the end of the month.

And I’m tired. I’m very tired.

I thought to myself yesterday, “I can’t believe that I’ve got another fifty or sixty years in this meat cage, dealing with these flare ups.” But I do. I will. And I’ll get through it, with the support of my family and friends and science.

❤️️❤️️❤️️❤️️

On hiatus

Fri, 10 May 2019 08:30:10 -0400

A little over a year ago, I told a friend:

Started blogging in my bullet journal, realized this is just journaling...

And that’s where I’ll be blogging for the next little bit.

As mentioned in my earlier post, I’m going on hiatus for a bit. I’m anticipating returning in July, but it might be sooner, might be later. Comments are off on all posts more than 1 day old; webmentions will be received but probably not displayed.

See you later!

TTFN

Wed, 08 May 2019 11:44:57 -0400

I’m taking a digital hiatus of sorts starting Friday, 5/10/2019. I haven’t decided how locked down kimberlyhirsh.com will be. At the very least, comments will be turned off for all pages and posts. It’s possible I’ll design a landing page about my hiatus and then set all other pages and posts to private. It’s also possible I’ll put the whole thing behind password protection.

Anyway, if you need to reach me, you probably already know how, but if not, let’s get that set up in the next couple days.

My writing process: Structure is central.

Fri, 03 May 2019 12:26:26 -0400

A quick note about my own writing and the way I’m working these days. I plan to do a more extensive post on this soon.

Way back in 2001 or 2002, I interviewed Joss Whedon. The questions were submitted to me by Bronzers. My lovely Bronzer friend andyourlittledogtoo asked, “How long did it take to go from the conception of ‘Restless’ until the finished product? And can you explain your writing process?” “Restless” is the finale of the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and it’s one of my favorite episodes. You can read more about it just about anywhere on the internet, and you should… But ANYWAY, Joss’s answer has stuck with me for 17, 18 years now:

My writing process is about two things: Structure and emotion. I'm incredibly strict about working out a tight structure, every piece fitting, so there are not too many surprises in a first draft. But it all stems from emotion. What emotion are we in love with here? What do we need to feel? What do they (the characters) need to feel (a dif ques). We build from that. with RESTLESS, i had to throw structure out the window. It was a poem. Though I knew what it meant and what the dramatic flow was, I literally just had to sit there (or lie there - I got my appendix out during that script) and wait for the next thing. It was very liberating for me. When i was BEGGED for an oultline for act 4, i made one -- and then ccouldn't write a word, because it was wrong. Had to wait for the flow.

I think a lot of people write first and structure second. I don't know how common this is in academic writing. I've always been a structure-first kind of gal, though that structure can take various forms. I used to be all-in on outlines, but my professor Barbara Wildemuth really hit mind-maps hard, and now I tend to bounce between synthetic notes, mind-maps, outlines, and memos. And the point when I transition from one to the other, and when I know I'm ready to begin drafting, has everything to do with structure.

Until I know the structure of a piece, I just write in little chunks. As I write, I re-arrange. I toy with new structures. Color-coding with pens is involved. I want to document this piece of my process better in the future, so as I begin my next lit review chapter, I’ll try to.

It feels good to remember that one of the writers who has influenced me the most works mostly from structure first. (How much of “Restless” was induced by the painkillers Joss was on for his appendectomy recovery? We may never know.) It feels good to know that there are as many ways of writing as there are writers.

Memo: Connected Learning, Libraries, and Change

Wed, 24 Apr 2019 11:55:00 -0400

The elements of connected learning (interests, relationships, opportunities, sponsorship of youth interests, shared practices, shared purpose, connections across settings, and a focus on equity) illuminate the ways in which connected learning already happens in libraries and the ways in which libraries need to change to expand their support of connected learning.

Libraries have traditionally supported personalized, self-directed, learner-centered, and interest-driven learning (Braun, Hartman, Hughes-Hassell, & Kumasi, 2014; Hoffman, Subramaniam, Kawas, Scaff, & Davis, 2016; Ito & Martin, Fall 2013). They also have facilitated relationships, sanctioning “intergenerational contact centered on youth interest discovery” (Braun et al., 2014, p. 9) and serving as “inclusive spaces that bring many different groups together” (Hoffman et al., 2016, p. 11). As libraries have transitioned from spaces that serve as warehouses for physical resources to spaces where teens can “build skills, develop understanding, create and share, and overcome adversity” (Braun et al., 2014, p. 4) through the proliferation of learning labs and makerspaces, they have embraced shared practices, especially production-centered practices for knowledge creation and sharing. Their position as a third space - neither school/work nor home - allows libraries to facilitate connections across settings, bridging activities from different spheres of learning (Ito & Martin, Fall 2013).

Libraries traditionally have had and continue to maintain “strong ties to non-dominant communities and families” (Braun et al., 2014, p. 9). Because members of nondominant populations perceive libraries “as lifelines to learning, technology, and information… libraries are well-positioned to not only connect formal and informal learning but also to do this for the populations that are most marginalized in terms of traditional academic programs and indicators” (Ito & Martin, Fall 2013, p. 30). These relationships with nondominant communities support libraries working toward the connected learning agenda of expanding access to connected learning experiences to people who may not have them without community and institutional support.

While libraries already support connected learning in many ways, they may need to undergo further shifts to expand their support for connected learning. Library staff must consider not only the physical and digital resources that support interest-driven learning, but also human resources (Braun et al., 2014), building relationships “among learners, between learners and experts or mentors, and between learners and people outside the learning context” (Hoffman et al., 2016, p. 17). In order to help learners to connect their interests and relationships with academic, career, and civic opportunities, library workers must reconsider their roles, learning to consider themselves sponsors and mentors rather than experts or authority figures (Braun et al., 2014; Hoffman et al., 2016, p. 17). Library policies for use of technology and space may need to change to enable learners to engage in shared practices, socializing, collaborating, and publishing their work online (Ito & Martin, Fall 2013). Libraries may also need to change how they evaluate the impact of their services and programs; traditional measures of impact, especially quantitative measures of participation, may not be sufficient to capture the impact of connected learning (Hoffman et al., 2016). Measures of connected learning need to capture the way learners move with their learning across settings; setting specific desired outcomes can facilitate capturing evidence of and communicating the impact of a program.

This shift to full support of connected learning “demands new competencies from youth-serving librarians that graduate programs in library and information science do not always provide, and may require a shift in thinking for some librarians and outside partners” (Hoffman et al., 2016, p. 19). Hoffman and colleagues identify the following “four categories of interrelated knowledge and skill sets… that librarians must have to promote connected learning among youth”:

...they must be ready and willing to transition from expert to facilitator… …[they] need to apply interdisciplinary approaches to establish equal partnership and learning opportunities that facilitate discovery and use of digital media… ...they should be able to develop dynamic partnerships and collaborations that reach beyond the library into their communities… ...they should be able to evaluate connected learning programs and utilize the evaluation results to strengthen learning in libraries… (Hoffman et al., 2016, p. 19)

The need for training to build these competencies can be met by in-house professional development, programs provided by professional organizations, open online learning resources, and formal educational experiences. The ConnectedLib toolkit (“ConnectedLib,” n.d.) is one example of an open online learning resource directed at meeting this need, while the University of Maryland’s Youth Experience Graduate Certificate program (“YX @ UMD – Youth Experience Post-Masters Certificate Program at Maryland’s iSchool,” n.d.) is an example of a formal educational experience designed to build these competencies.

References

Braun, L. W., Hartman, M. L., Hughes-Hassell, S., & Kumasi, K. (2014). The future of library services for and with teens: A call to action. Chicago: Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA). Retrieved from [www.ala.org/yaforum/s...](http://www.ala.org/yaforum/sites/ala.org.yaforum/files/content/YALSA_nationalforum_Final_web_0.pdf) ConnectedLib. (n.d.). Retrieved April 24, 2019, from [connectedlib.github.io](https://connectedlib.github.io/) Hoffman, K. M., Subramaniam, M., Kawas, S., Scaff, L., & Davis, K. (2016). Connected libraries: Surveying the current landscape and charting a path to the future. College Park, MD; Seattle, WA: The ConnectedLib Project. Retrieved from [connectedlib.test.ischool.uw.edu/wp-conten...](http://connectedlib.test.ischool.uw.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/ConnectedLibraries-SurveyingtheCurrentLandscape-and-ChartingthePathtotheFuture.pdf) Ito, M., & Martin, C. (Fall 2013). Connected Learning and the Future of Libraries. Young Adult Library Services, 12(1), 29–32. YX @ UMD – Youth Experience Post-Masters Certificate Program at Maryland’s iSchool. (n.d.). Retrieved April 24, 2019, from [yx.umd.edu](https://yx.umd.edu/)

When words won't go in your brain

Mon, 22 Apr 2019 12:26:28 -0400

I suffer from migraines. I’ve gotten them since I was around 7 years old. There are any number of triggers: changes in barometric pressure, eating MSG, but the most frequent one is hormones. I’ve got one right now, and though I’m not certain, I think it’s probably hormone related.

When I was in my teens and early twenties, I couldn’t do anything with a migraine. I had to go right to bed, preferably in a dark and silent room, banishing everyone else. This was before triptans got big, so I just guzzled Coca Cola, took some Percogesic (which researching it I now see is just Tylenol + Benadryl), and hid for twelve hours or so. After twelve hours of solid sleep, I usually felt like new.

As a college student and young professional, I tried Imitrex and some other triptans. They always came with nasty side effects: actually increasing the migraine-related nausea if I didn’t take them fast enough, giving me a weird lockjaw-type feeling but in my whole body. So I still mostly drank some Coke, took some Excedrin Migraine or Tylenol Arthritis Strength, and went to bed.

As a young teacher with a limited amount of sick leave, I couldn’t just go to bed. I worked through these migraines many times, doing what I essentially called “subbing for myself” - tossing my original lesson plan for something I would have been comfortable giving to a sub, and asking my students to please work in silence, in a somewhat darkened classroom.

As a parent, I can’t just go to bed. But also, my migraines aren’t usually as bad now as they used to be. I usually can get through them okay with just being chill. I don’t usually need to just go to bed and be left alone.

Usually.

I have one today. We’re in Day 2. My sweet child keeps asking me “Mommy, is your headache gone?” and it breaks my heart every time I tell him it’s still here. The first time I told him that, he said, “But I kissed your head!” I had to explain that kisses can ameliorate pain, but only sometimes take it away entirely, and this was not one of those times.

(BUT HOW CUTE IS HE?)

Anyway. All this to say: when I feel this way, words won’t go in.

I’ve been trying to read, because that’s one of the two key activities in my day. (The other being writing.) I’ve been trying to review my own notes. I’ve been trying to refresh my memory of the Dublin Core. I tried to watch a video that explained Dublin Core, and the professor’s words wouldn’t go in my brain through auditory means any easier than the DCMI specification’s words would go in visually.

There’s a very light halo on my vision in the eye where the headache sits.

Words can come out, apparently, though analytic ones won’t.

It’s possible fiction could make it in. I don’t know.

Anyway, it’s frustrating.

I guess that’s all I wanted to say, really. It’s frustrating that migraines make me unable to work with words, when words are most of my work.

Memo: Defining Connected Learning

Tue, 16 Apr 2019 10:44:00 -0400

Connected Learning can be conceived of in three ways: as a type of learning experience that occurs spontaneously, as an empirically-derived model or framework for describing that type of experience, and as an agenda for research and design approach for creating learning experiences. The model/framework was first described by Mizuko Ito, Kris Gutierrez, Sonia Livingstone, Bill Penuel, Jean Rhodes, Katie Salen, Juliet Schor, Julian Sefton-Green, and S. Craig Watkins in their report, Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design (2013).

The Connected Learning framework incorporates three spheres of learning: interest-based learning, peer-based learning, and academic learning (Ito & Martin, Fall 2013). These spheres of learning are derived from the HOMAGO framework outlined in the report, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (Itō et al., 2009). This report draws on three years of “ethnographic investigation of youth new media practice” (p. 2) examining how these practices fit into social and cultural worlds and how they are meaningful in youth’s everyday lives. Ito and colleagues found that youths’ new media practices tended to fall into one of three genres of participation: “hanging out,” a friendship-driven mode of participation, “geeking out,” an interest-driven mode of participation, and “messing around,” a mode of participation that tended to bridge the other two, in which either youth deepen their commitment to particular interests as they engaged in social practices, or in which youth engage in expanded social activity via participating in their current interests. Ito and colleagues found that young people transitioned easily between these three genres of participation.

The HOMAGO framework was derived from a study that was designed to describe current practices, especially in informal learning spaces (Ito et al., 2019). This study was not aimed at creating a design agenda for educational experiences or describing formal learning environments. Ito and colleagues (2009) found, however, that formal learning environments were often cut off from peer-driven or interest-driven learning environments. The Connected Learning environment seeks to incorporate academic, civic, and career opportunities with peer-driven and interest-driven learning, describing and expanding access to a mode of learning in which all three of these spheres overlap (Figure 1).

In its initial iteration, the Connected Learning framework encompassed six Connected Learning principles. The first three incorporated the spheres of learning: peer-supported, interest-powered, and academically-oriented. The other three principles described the kind of environments that tend to promote connected learning experiences: being production-centered, having a shared purpose, and being openly networked.

“Connected learning is a framework under constant development that offers principles and examples to be adapted and remixed rather than a template for programs and activities” (Ito & Martin, Fall 2013, p. 31). In the years since the model’s initial development, it has undergone some changes. A number of studies developed by the Connected Learning Research Network have provided new evidence that contributes to revision and refinement of the model (Arum, Larson, & Meyer, Forthcoming; Ben-Eliyahu, Rhodes, & Scales, 2014; Ching, Santo, Hoadley, & Peppler, 2015; Ito et al., 2019; Larson et al., 2013; Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2016; Maul et al., 2017; Penuel, Van Horne, Santo, Ching, & Podkul, 2015; Van Horne, Allen, DiGiacomo, Chang-Order, & Van Steenis, 2016; Watkins et al., Forthcoming). The three spheres of learning have shifted slightly (see Figure 2): “peer-supported” has changed to “relationships,” to indicate not only peer-to-peer relationships but also relationships between young people and adult brokers or mentors, while “academically-oriented” has changed to “opportunities,” to include not just academic opportunities but also civic and career opportunities.

Figure 1. Original spheres of learning.

Figure 2. Revised spheres of learning.

The other three principles of Connected Learning have shifted, as well (“About Connected Learning,” 2017). “Sponsorship of youth interests” is a new principle that was previously woven throughout the others; studies have consistently demonstrated that young people require adult assistance to make connections between their own interests and academic, civic, and career opportunity (Ching et al., 2015; Ito et al., 2019; Van Horne et al., 2016). This principle asks adults to reconsider their role in youths’ learning, to be more than either a “sage on the stage” or “guide on the side,” engaging in actively assisting youth in expanding their networks. “Production-centered” has shifted to being described as “shared practices,” including not just media production as the early model suggested, but also “friendly competition, civic action, and joint research” (“About Connected Learning,” 2017). “Shared purpose” remains, while “openly networked” has changed to “Connections across settings” to incorporate not just openly networked online platforms, but also connections between online and local affinity networks and relationships between home, school, and community.

All of the principles of Connected Learning are directed toward creating learning environments with an equity agenda, in which nondominant youth gain access to learning experiences that have historically been more available to those with privilege and financial access. Without attention to the cultural and social environment, new technologies like those that facilitate connected learning “tend to amplify existing inequity…access to social, cultural, and economic capital, not access to technology, is what broadens opportunity” (Ito et al., 2019, p. 6) (emphasis original).Youth need programs and mentors with social capital to broker connections; if brokering is treated as a market-driven process, this exacerbates inequity.

“The responsibility of providing mentorship, brokering, and connection building to link youth interests to opportunity is a collective one and cannot be shouldered only by families, nor only by schools and other public educational institutions. It entails a broader cultural shift toward recognizing the new learning dynamics of a networked era, paying more attention to learning and equity in online communities and platforms, and providing more educational supports in both formal and informal learning environments.” (Ito et al., 2019, p. 169)

Connected learning has often been conceived of as occurring along pathways, but recent research suggests that it “is more appropriately conceived of as the growth of a network of connections than as a linear pathway or an internalization of skills and knowledge” (Ito et al., 2019, p. 21). Connected learning is best seen “not as a journey of individual development that is transferrable across different settings that a person moves through, but as building stronger, more resilient and diverse social, cultural, and institutional relationships through time” (Ito et al., 2019, p. 167).

References

About Connected Learning. (2017, December 6). Retrieved April 12, 2019, from [clalliance.org/about-con...](https://clalliance.org/about-connected-learning/) Arum, R., Larson, K., & Meyer, W. M. (Forthcoming). Connected Learning: A Study of Educational Technology and Progressive Pedagogy. New York: New York University Press. Ben-Eliyahu, A., Rhodes, J. E., & Scales, P. (2014). The Interest-Driven Pursuits of 15 Year Olds: “Sparks” and Their Association With Caring Relationships and Developmental Outcomes. Applied Developmental Science, 18(2), 76–89. Ching, D., Santo, R., Hoadley, C., & Peppler, K. (2015). On-ramps, lane changes, detours and destinations: Building connected learning pathways in hive NYC through brokering future learning opportunities. New York, NY: Hive Research Lab. [hiveresearchlab.](https://hiveresearchlab.) files. wordpress. com/2015/05/hive-research-lab-2015-community-white-paper-brokering-future-learning-opportunities2. pdf (accessed November 15, 2015). Itō, M., Baumer, S., Bittanti, M., Boyd, D., Cody, R., Stephenson, B. H., … Tripp, L. (2009). Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out : kids living and learning with new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ito, M., Gutiérrez, K., Livingstone, S., Penuel, B., Rhodes, J., Salen, K., … Craig Watkins, S. (2013). Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design. Irvine, CA: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub. Retrieved from [dmlhub.net/publicati...](https://dmlhub.net/publications/connected-learning-agenda-for-research-and-design/) Ito, M., & Martin, C. (Fall 2013). Connected Learning and the Future of Libraries. Young Adult Library Services, 12(1), 29–32. Ito, M., Martin, C., Pfister, R. C., Rafalow, M. H., Salen, K., & Wortman, A. (2019). Affinity Online: How Connection and Shared Interest Fuel Learning. New York: NYU Press. Larson, K., Ito, M., Brown, E., Hawkins, M., Pinkard, N., & Sebring, P. (2013). Safe Space and Shared Interests: YOUmedia Chicago as a Laboratory for Connected Learning. Irvine, CA: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub. Retrieved from [dmlhub.net/publicati...](https://dmlhub.net/publications/safe-space-and-shared-interests-youmedia-chicago-laboratory-connected-learning/) Livingstone, S., & Sefton-Green, J. (2016). The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age. NYU Press. Maul, A., Penuel, W. R., Dadey, N., Gallagher, L. P., Podkul, T., & Price, E. (2017). Developing a measure of interest-related pursuits: The survey of connected learning. clrn.dmlhub.net. Retrieved from [clrn.dmlhub.net/wp-conten...](https://clrn.dmlhub.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/CRLN-Measurement-Paper-120714-for-CLRN.docx) Penuel, W., Van Horne, K., Santo, R., Ching, D., & Podkul, T. (2015). Connected Learning: From Outcomes Workshops to Survey Items. Retrieved from [hiveresearchlab.](https://hiveresearchlab.)files.wordpress.com/2015/05/clrn-from-workshop-to-survey-items-report-may-2015.pdf Van Horne, K., Allen, C., DiGiacomo, D., Chang-Order, J., & Van Steenis, E. (2016). Brokering In and Sustained Interest-Related Pursuits: A Longitudinal Study of Connected Learning. dml2016.dmlhub.net. Retrieved from [dml2016.dmlhub.net/wp-conten...](https://dml2016.dmlhub.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/14_vanHorne_CLRNBrokeringPaper040416_submit.pdf) Watkins, C., Lombana-Bermudez, A., Cho, A., Vickery, J., Shaw, V., & Weinzimmer, L. (Forthcoming). The Digital Edge: How Black and Latino Youth Navigate Digital Inequality. New York: New York University Press.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: Top 3 Most Resonant Songs for Me, Personally

Tue, 09 Apr 2019 11:21:51 -0400

I mentioned in my post about writing comedy from the heart that the TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is an important piece of art for me. And there are lots of lists of the top songs, I guess, though the only one I’ve paid attention to is my imaginary podcast bff Glen Weldon’s. (Weldon himself is not imaginary; the conceit that he and I are bffs is.)

But I wanted to do something more personal.

I came to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend a little late, not very - I think I started watching as soon as the first season was available via Netflix, maybe? I loved it immediately. The sheer perfection that is the song “West Covina” made my musical theater nerd heart sing, and I honestly saw a sort of alternate universe version of myself in overachieving lawyer Rebecca. (Because getting a PhD in Information and Library Science is the underachieving path in my mind, apparently?)

Anyway, this show has made me feel seen in a way few things have, so I thought I’d share the top 3 songs that resonated with me the most.

3. I'm the Villain in My Own Story

[embed]www.youtube.com/watch

For all those times when you realize the “good” things you were doing didn’t outweight how you were being a jerk.

2. Sexy French Depression

[embed]www.youtube.com/watch

The line “My bed smells like a tampon” is, like, scarily spot on. And this subtitle crawl:

My anxiety is so out of control that all I can think about is thinking about thinking about thinking about fixing everything I've ever done wrong and all of the ways I've already messed up my life beyond repair.

Perfection. If you ever look at my face and wonder what’s on my mind, it’s probably that.

And finally…

1. You Stupid Bitch

[embed]youtu.be/zgUKQCVie…[/embed]

This is a classic internal monologue of a person with anxiety and/or depression. This song makes me cry because it makes me not feel alone.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is amazing because, as Glen Weldon points out, the show “[respects] how fraught and complicated a prospect it is to turn the travails of mental illness into blistering one-liners and catchy ditties … and then [does] it anyway.” I’m actually finding myself without more words to talk about why it’s so important to me.

Writing comedy from the heart

Sun, 07 Apr 2019 14:47:17 -0400

It feels like there have been a thousand times Rachel Bloom has said something in an interview and I felt like shouting, “YES THIS!” but this is a new flavor of that:

I came from a very… rigid is the wrong word, but a very set technique of sketch comedy writing. When you study at UCB, if you do improv or sketch, you find the game of the scene, you heighten the game. It’s almost mathematical. And I think that for so long, some of the sketches I wrote, I wasn’t necessarily bringing my full self to them, because I was trying to fit into this like mathematical technique. I was surrounded by guys. So everything I wrote was probably subconsciously trying to, like, be acceptable to the male gaze. So when I started writing songs, because it was combining what I learned from sketch comedy with musical theater, my first love since I was 2 years old, it felt like I was bringing myself fully into my writing. I wasn’t trying to be anyone else, because I could bring in emotions, I could bring in those tropes that I’d been absorbing for my entire life, and then use my techniques to shape that.

Like Rachel, I have loved musicals from a young age. Like Rachel, I trained in improv and sketch writing at a school/theater that emphasized game: you begin a scene, find the first unusual thing, repeat it, heighten it, and break the pattern with your punchline. Not only did we learn that structure, but we also learned how to write particular flavors of sketch: fish out of water, comedic duo, commercial parody, satire, superpowers, torture game, literalization, and mapping.

I had a lot of fun and I got really good at recognizing game, if not initiating it, but there was a fundamental disconnect between how most other people in my comedy community did comedy and how I did comedy.

When I showed up at sketch class eager to show everyone Mike O’Brien and Tina Fey’s crazy car salesman, in my mind a brilliant example of a commercial parody combined with literalization, the class tore it to shreds.

[embed]youtu.be/sHJK9mF_X…[/embed]

My strongest sketch was one in which several adolescent girls show up at a county fare to participate in a literal melon growing contest and express their insecurities about their produce. (It’s a mapping scene, mapping their growing bodies onto the growing produce, see?) It was a deeply personal sketch, drawing on my own experiences with never feeling like I had the right body shape as an adolescent, whether that shape was too small or too big.

Eventually, I ended up on a hip-hop improv team - thanks almost entirely to developing a Hamilton obsession. (Seriously, if you want me to like something, just write a musical using/about it.) Again, I was a little sideways from the group sensibility; my favorite raps drew on my impostor syndrome and my frustrations with family holiday gatherings. My favorite scenes were often quiet little things, with comedy arising from the awkwardness of two people trying to connect, or things that used my heavily pregnant body as a punchline itself (I was pregnant for my entire tenure on that team), or preferably, things that combined both, like one scene where I had ended up on a blind date and ended the scene responding to my scene partner’s “This’ll be a funny story to tell the kids” with the line “Ohhhh… You want kids?” while I was eight months pregnant.

(We do comedy in our bodies. They are one of the tools we have, and we don’t leave them behind, even when we take on characters with different physicalities than our own.)

While everyone was very nice, I often felt out of place. And reading this quote from Rachel Bloom pinpoints a lot of the problem, I think. I imagine that, while she wasn’t writing with her whole self, Bloom was very good at writing that kind of sketch. I can even imagine some parallels between her Crazy Ex-Girlfriend character Rebecca Bunch’s success as an attorney and Bloom’s as a writer, both getting good at/pursuing the thing everybody says you’re supposed to want (in Bloom’s case, right down to auditioning for Saturday Night Live).

And I love that in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Bloom has gotten to finally write more personal things and bring her full self to the table. It’s such an important piece of art for me, personally, and reading about this part of her experience has led me to rethink how I engage with comedy and what types of writing and performance I want to pursue in the future.

So Rachel, thank you.

Photograph by Greg Gayne/CW.

2019 First Quarter Follow Up: How am I doing?

Wed, 03 Apr 2019 11:36:05 -0400

It’s always helpful to check in with ourselves every once in a while, and I like to do it quarterly if I remember to. Let’s dig in and check out how I’m doing so far this year!

I selected PHASE as my word of the year, and I have to tell you, I completely forgot that I had done that. Life has been a whirlwind.

Here are the things I said I wanted to do/try this year:

Embracing the PHASE energy.
Really owning my Mer-Goth/#seawitchvibes aesthetic.
Reading for pleasure more.
Having a good time.

And here’s some notes on how those are going:

Embracing the PHASE energy: Woof. I have not done this! Oops! I mean, I’ve kind of done this. Let’s see… I’ve gotten pretty good about really taking advantage of my high energy moments and giving myself permission to rest during my low energy moments (I think this is what Lindsay Mack is talking about when she talks about expansion and contraction). But that remembering that these things will pass? That part I haven’t done a great job of. My kid is two, and that comes with some tough parenting moments. I haven’t been handling them as gracefully as I’d like; I mean that both in terms of being graceful with him, but also giving myself grace when I get frustrated. I’m working on this one. Making progress, though.

Owning my mer-goth/seawitchvibes aesthetic: This is hard when it’s cold out. My aesthetic right now is mostly “grad student/mom who hopes her clothes aren’t too stained.” My go-to outfit has been this dress over some black leggings, topped with a hoodie. Throw on whatever socks are clean and a pair of black New Balance sneakers, and I’m ready for sitting at the co-working space OR going to the mall or museum with my kid! Honestly, I’m bored with this look and really want to change it up. I don’t have a lot of money to do so, but I’m starting to need more looks for conference presentations and client meetings as I’m taking on some consulting work (yay!). Trying to find things in my budget that capture the whimsy that I want in my daily life and still looked polish is a JOB OF WORK, let me tell you.

Reading for pleasure more. I’m doing pretty well on this one. I’m a little behind my goal for the year but I know I can make that up quickly.

Having a good time. You know, at first thought I’m like, “I’m having a hard time!” But then I realize that I’ve been going to Silent Book Club and Retro Cinema, that I went to a Comicon, that I get to see my kid exploring new places, that I’m crocheting things and playing video games every once in a while, and I think yeah, on the whole, I’m doing a really good job with this one.

Other things worth noting: I have drafted two of my five comps chapters. I had an article accepted with revisions. I am taking on a consulting job. My kid is growing and growing. I’ll probably write another post in the next few days with more details about general life stuff, so keep an eye out.

How’s your year going?

Dissertating in the Open: Keeping a Public Research Notebook

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 12:19:00 -0400

I’m making a few notes to myself here to document my process for keeping a public research notebook. They might be of interest to you, too.

First, I’m talking here mostly about keeping up with the literature. There are (in my opinion obvious) ethical implications of actually sharing your data on your website. I’ll explore them as I write my proposal, but right now, all I’ve got is other people’s research that I’m reading and writing about, and then I’ll probably have some memos on my own process of preparing for comps and selecting my dissertation topic. Nothing wild.

So, what am I doing? Well, inspired by some writing by Kris Shaffer and Chris Aldrich, and by the fact that I gave a keynote last weekend on Connected Learning and the IndieWeb, I want to share my reading notes on some of the readings I’m doing for comps. It will help me keep track of my most important notes, and maybe it’ll be useful for other people researching similar topics. I tend to pick fairly under-researched areas, and I know it can be frustrating to have to dig up the literature on those, so this is one way I can maybe make it easier for colleagues.

Raul Pacheco-Vega is another inspiration, as he both shares reading notes and has heavily influenced my literature review workflow.

What’s the workflow?

I find the source, as described through one of the various techniques in my literature review workflow, and pull it into Paperpile. If Paperpile can't find a PDF on its own, then I track a PDF down or, if it's only available physically, track down a physical copy.
If it's a PDF, I read it on my Android tablet with Xodo, making highlights and annotations using my Musemee Notier stylus. If it's a physical text, I take notes on a dedicated COMPS spread in my Bullet Journal (I use a Moleskine large dotted black notebook and a Pilot G2 07).
I create a new Google Doc.
From Paperpile, I copy the citation and paste it into the Google Doc. I name the Google Doc Author Year Article Title. (These are all in a folder called "Synthetic Notes," nested in a folder named after the literature area.)
I type up a quick synthetic note based on my highlights and annotations.
I use Paperpile to find a link to the source of the original.
Then, I use a bookmarklet with the WordPress Post Kinds plugin to create a new bookmark on my website. (I use the bookmark post kind instead of a read, because I'm only doing an Abstract-Introduction-Conclusion extraction, not a full read of the piece.)
I paste the abstract into the Summary box in the Response Properties box.
I paste the contents of my Google Doc into the WordPress editor and use the "Clear formatting" button to clean up messy GDocs code.
I give the post a tag related to the literature area (e.g., connected-learning) and select the category "Research Notebook," then publish!

You may have noticed that this workflow leaves out Hypothes.is entirely. This is for a few reasons, but mostly just that right now, Hypothes.is would add several extra steps as I read on my tablet rather than on my laptop. I'd have to open up the PDF on my laptop, re-highlight and annotate using Hypothes.is tools, then use the Hypothes.is aggregator plugin to bring over those to my website. So for now, I'm doing it all manually on my site and not sharing anything there.

indieweb-post-kinds Post editor URL doesn't display editor

Wed, 20 Mar 2019 11:08:02 -0400

When I use Post Kind WordPress editor URLs with the ?kindurl= extension, I get an editor window that only has a title box and a response properties box but nothing else, and the response properties box only has the “response properties” title and no content. I first encountered this with Inoreader’s custom URL feature but found it also occurred when inputting the editor URL directly into my browser’s address bar. Here’s an example URL I might give Inoreader, where [URL] is Inoreader’s URL variable: example.com/wp-admin/… If I do it with just kind=reply without trying to use kindurl=, it’s a normal editor with reply selected as the post kind and a blank response properties box as you’d expect.

Dissertating in the Open: Your First Meeting with Your Committee

Thu, 14 Mar 2019 11:06:00 -0400

It’s been more than 3 months since I had my first committee meeting, but I still want to write a little about the process.

If you’ll recall, my advisor, Sandra Hughes-Hassell, and I put together an awesome committee. She handled the scheduling of our first meeting, which we did using Zoom as I have two out-of-town committee members.

Before the meeting, I shared two things with my committee: a dissertation prospectus and a preliminary bibliography.

The main agenda item for the meeting was reviewing that preliminary bibliography and settling on the areas for my comprehensive examination package. One of my committee members couldn’t make it; there were 5 of us on the call. I had my prospectus and bibliography in front of me and my bullet journal at hand for taking notes. (My method is really a hybrid of Ryder Carroll’s bullet journal method and Raul Pacheco-Vega’s Everything Notebook, with some modifications of my own thrown in, but that’s a different blog post for a different day.)

I can’t tell you how this will go for you, but it had a couple of really positive outcomes for me.

First, with respect to information literacy: There is a whole world out there of information literacy standards, guidelines, and models, and quite frankly, by the time you’ve been working in this field for 10 years the basics start to get a little stale. I had them all on my preliminary bibliography and Casey Rawson suggested that, since we all know those models and nobody really wants to read about them again, I could focus on newer models. She specifically mentioned embodied information practices (especially as conceived by Annemaree Lloyd), as my research focuses on the information practices of cosplayers and cosplay is an embodied fan practice.

I mentioned to the committee that I was going to start with a focus on information literacy in affinity spaces and work my way out from there, and Heather Moorefield-Lang suggested that I consider subcultures as well as affinity spaces, specifically suggesting the work of Vanessa Lynn Kitzie, who has done a lot of work on the information practices of LGBTQ+ individuals.

Taking these two suggestions together led me to a complete reframing of my conceptualization of information practice and information literacy, moving me from thinking of it as an individual, knowledge-based process to a sociocultural set of practices. More on that another time, but this was a huge and immensely valuable shift.

Second, with respect to methods: Casey pointed out that the “mixed methods” piece of my study (counting qualitative codes for frequency) wasn’t really enough to qualify it as a true mixed methods study, and so it might be better for me to just focus my methods chapter on qualitative methods. This was great because it always helps me to narrow my scope; I tend to want to be far more thorough than is necessary or appropriate when I write a literature review.

After the meeting ended, I felt great. I was really excited about my work and excited about my committee, and those feelings have carried me through the last three months of slowly chipping away at the first two chapters of my comps package.

Featured image is the Chamber of the Council of 13 of the Guild of Calamitous Intent, from Venture Bros, provided by reddit user Empyrealist.

Unexpectedly shattered

Mon, 18 Feb 2019 13:16:20 -0400

I’ve been working on editing the fourth episode of my Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast, Things of Bronze, and in that episode I talk about how being a mom is like being the Slayer.

And then I’m reading Barbara Brownie and Danny Graydon’s The Superhero Costume: Identity and Disguise in Fact and Fiction and I run across Ana Álvarez-Errecalde’s beautiful work Symbiosis and it feels like my heart stops for a second. My breath catches.

And I go track down this interview with her, and save it for later, knowing it’s going in the February issue of Genetrix:

Symbiosis (The Four Seasons, 2013-2014) talks about relationships that nourish each other both physically and psychologically. It challenges the idea of a negated mother who also negates her body and her presence to her children, so they will all ultimately conform to our unattended, unloved, and unnourished society. It is not about being a “supermom.” It is about two complete beings that strengthen each other by the relationship they establish. That is where the mutual empowerment resides.

But also then I go back to Brownie & Graydon and flipping through I realize that Álvarez-Errecalde’s photograph is in a section called “Parent power,” with quotes like these:

As the death of family provoked the adoption of heroic identities in Batman and Spider-Man, new parents find themselves transformed by the birth of a child. (p. 130-131)

and

It is just as impossible to define any parent without acknowledging their parenthood, as it is to define Bruce Wayne without acknowledging Batman. (p. 131)

and

Parenthood, like crime-fighting, is labor-intensive, exhausting and emotionally draining... Superhero imagery allows parents to express the tremendous strength that is required in parenthood, along with the new sets of values that emerge with their new identity. (p. 131)

And this is all serendipitously making me feel immensely seen and I’m on the verge of tears.

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 22:54:06 -0400

I just finished reading Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell. And now I want to be best friends with her, because she gets me.

This book means so much to me. I didn’t have a good time in college. I was lonely. I had no interest in partying. I was clinically depressed. And fandom saved my life.

I did have an adorable tall boyfriend with a receding hairline. (Reader, I married him.) He talked through my magnum opus with me, a blatant Mary Sue in which I wrote my hopes and dreams for season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (I deleted it from fanfiction.net in a fit of embarrassment in 2009, but I’m planning to resurrect it from my old personal domain in the Wayback Machine and post it to AO3 soon.)

I was more distant from my sister than I’d ever been in my life. My little brother was very sick and ended up hospitalized.

I got a job explicitly to pay my way to fannish events. I made so many fandom friends. I printed up pages and pages of fanfic.

I started a fan campaign. It gave me a sense of purpose when my grades were tanking and my mom was in the hospital.

I embarked on a teaching career in a town two hundred miles away from anyone I loved. I read fanfic and posted on forums and LiveJournal and it was my only human contact outside of work.

This book just feels very personal and I’m so grateful to Rainbow Rowell for writing it.

Book Review: Pop Classics Buffy the Vampire Slayer 📚

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 17:54:00 -0400

Most people who know me know that the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of my favorite things. It has been the dominant pop culture text in my life for almost 20 years, so of course my husband bought our son the BtVS picture book for his second birthday.

We read it for the first time a few nights ago, and, y’all, this is done so lovingly, I almost cried. If you love BtVS and you like picture books, pick this one up.

The plot is simple. This is, let’s say, an AU where Buffy lived in Sunnydale when she was in elementary school. Don’t think about canon too hard. The writers of the show didn’t, so we probably shouldn’t, either. Sixteen year old Buffy introduces herself at the beginning, then sends us in a flashback to when she was eight years old and afraid of the dark, because OF COURSE there is a monster in her closet.

And you know how BtVS is all about literalizing tropes, so… She’s not wrong. She recruits Willow, Xander, and Giles to help her with the problem, and of course through the power of friendship it all works out.

But where the whole thing shines is the little touches in the illustration. Each time I read it, I find a new BtVS easter egg. I don’t want to spoil too much, so here are just a couple examples.

Below, I’ve noted a few special Sunnydale locations in the front endpapers in yellow.

Next, a few things worth noticing in Buffy’s room, this time in blue:

And this is just the beginning. Each page has tons of this stuff, and the book’s climax has the best references of all.

Right before the climax, though, we get this page:

And really, isn’t stepping into the darkness together what BtVS is all about?

Stop optimizing. Start nourishing.

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 13:20:00 -0400

A week ago, my friend shared the video for Lizzo’s song “Juice.”

I commented, “I want to feel as cute as she is.”

I started watching Dietland last week. I got to the scene where the main character, Plum, goes to her Waist Watchers meeting, and everything they talked about started to feel familiar:

Logging literally every bite you eat. Telling yourself you’re doing it to look good naked.

When Janice showed up with her amazing dipped hair and fabulous eye makeup and colorful clothes, I loved her immediately. And then when she responds to the idea that she is here to be her best self with “Excuse me?” and then launches in to her lovely monologue:

I love myself... I came here to get some help to lose weight because I have back problems, not because I hate my body... I am a unicorn. I am a goddess.

I was ready to cheer.

In the one-on-one at the end of the scene, the facilitator reminds Plum that, “Food is fuel. That is all.”

Later, there’s a scene where Plum absentmindedly licks a little bit of frosting off her finger, then realizes what she’s done and runs to the sink to try and spit it out.

There are a million tricks: put half your food away as soon as you get it at a restaurant. (I actually like that one.) Drink water and fill up on vegetables before you go to a party so there will be no room in your stomach for treats. And there are all of the fashion rules to make you look slimmer, too: black. Only vertical stripes. Prints on a very precise scale to match your body.

I realized watching Dietland how tired I was of this nonsense.

I have been trying to lose weight since I was 20 years old. And I know I started later than many other people. I have tried Slim-Fast. I have tried ChangeOne. I have tried the Fat Flush diet. I have done two elimination diets. I have walked on the treadmill. I have done the rowing machine. I have done bodyweight exercises. I have used hand weights. I have used gallon jugs as weights. I have done all the things you can do to make water taste better. I have brought my own special foods to parties.

And I’ve also tried intuitive eating and Health at Every Size.

The only correlation I have found between my actions and my body’s shape is that when I eat fewer inflammatory foods, I’m less-inflamed. So that informs how I think about food. Food is one of life’s great pleasures. It is a centerpiece for social functions. It is a source of comfort. And it is fuel. I want to give my body anti-inflammatory, mostly whole foods, because it gives me energy and is more flavorful. But not to punish it for being the wrong size or shape.

Lizzo said in this interview with the New York Times, “I had to really look myself in the mirror and say, this is it…This is the person I am going to be for the rest of my life and it is not going to change.”

I need to love this vessel I’m in. This chronically ill, hard-to-clothe piece of flesh that carries me around the world, that created the most amazing person I’ve ever known. I need to get okay with it truly at every. Size.

But my body shape isn’t the only way I’m not too much or not enough. I remarked on how I tried literally all the things that Anne Helen suggests won’t fix burnout.

I’ve tried a million things to fix my mood - not things that move directly toward giving me the neurotransmitters (a thing I wholeheartedly endorse getting via pharmaceuticals if your body isn’t making them), but things that indirectly help: sun lamps. Fish oil supplements. Scheduled friend times. Gratitude journaling. Affirmations.

I’ve tried gamifying my habits with Habitica and Fitocracy.

I have more than five different books about how to get my home organized and keep it clean. It isn’t organized. It’s only clean because my husband cleans it.

I have two different books about improving my wardrobe. I have four about fixing my finances.

I subscribe to two self-care newsletters and two self-care podcasts. But at this point, self-care feels like another to-do list item that overwhelms me, not something that actually involves caring for myself.

I read this New York Times piece on the genius of insomnia, and thought about all the different ways I’ve tried to fix my “bad sleep hygiene.” Red light bulbs. Blue light filters on my devices. Yellow glasses. White noise. Audiobooks. No caffeine after 4 pm. Using the bedroom for nothing but sleep.

And then I thought, “What if everything I am - everything I’ve tried to improve in this particular, optimizing, tool-utilizing way, is just fine?”

And then I thought, “Well, what if I try living as if it is, anyway?”

What if I give all facets of myself the nutrients they need, without judgment? What if I purchase things from companies that affirm the idea that I’m already great, rather than selling me the idea that I need to be corrected? What if, when I wake up at 4 am, I don’t chastise myself for being a bad sleeper, but instead use that time to relax while awake? What if the only self-improvement projects I take on are related to my curiosity, my desire to grow and learn?

And I decided I will live this way. I’m going to operate on the assumption that everything about me is exactly enough.

I’m going to stop optimizing.

I’m going to start nourishing.

On Millennial burnout

Thu, 10 Jan 2019 11:31:31 -0400

Some notes on Millennial burnout. This started as a Twitter thread because I needed a frictionless place to write my initial ideas, and apparently I was hoping they would get some attention. (They didn’t, really, and that’s fine now that I’ve slept on it.)

Anne Helen’s excellent piece on Millennial burnout sketches out a framework for us to think about why (white, middle class) Millennials are burned out. She admits that a framework is not a solution, and in her newsletter that acts as a sort of commentary track she talks about both why she didn’t use academic jargon (BLESS HER) and also didn’t offer a solution (which I’m sure is disappointing/frustrating for some people). Tiana Clark offers a valuable critique about the limits of this sort of generational thinking and its failure to capture the experiences of people of color. Helen published additional perspectives on what Millennial burnout looks like for different people: black women, first-generation immigrants, queer people, chronically ill people, people with disabilities, people at the intersections of more than one of these identities, and more.

I’ve collected some less in-depth pieces on the phenomenon in my Pocket, like Kristin Iversen’s Why Millennials Are Always Tired (found via Holisticism’s newsletter), which approaches Millennial exhaustion more from the perspective of the youngest Millennials, as opposed to Helen’s piece coming from the perspective of older Millennials. (Jesse Singal’s Don’t Call Me a Millennial – I’m an Old Millennial is my favorite piece that makes it clear how old Millennials and young Millennials differ and what the inflection points are for Millennialness.)

Helen says:

You don’t fix burnout by going on vacation. You don’t fix it through “life hacks,” like inbox zero, or by using a meditation app for five minutes in the morning, or doing Sunday meal prep for the entire family, or starting a bullet journal. You don’t fix it by reading a book on how to “unfu*k yourself.” You don’t fix it with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or “anxiety baking,” or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats.

This is basically a caricature of my life. I have been an avid follower of Lifehacker, obsessed with Inbox Zero, installed and uninstalled Headspace and Calm, prepped meals for the week ahead, used a Bullet Journal for approaching five years, read and re-read Unf*ck Your Habitat, have the immense privilege of being able to take a beach vacation annually, have a huge stack of adult coloring books, anxiety baked my way through my Master of Science degree, powered through PhD writing using the Pomodoro Technique, and had overnight oats for breakfast every day for a week. (Other things that won't fix it: mason jar salads. An Instant Pot. Subscribing to every self-care newsletter and podcast. Witchery.)

And I agree with Helen that

...individual action isn’t enough. Personal choices alone won’t keep the planet from dying, or get Facebook to quit violating our privacy. To do that, you need paradigm-shifting change.

But at the same time, I can't sit and wait on that paradigm shift. Helen doesn't have a plan of action, but I need one. So that's what I nattered about in that Twitter thread. And here it is, summed up:

We have to perceive ourselves, and by extension others, as creatures of inherent worth, not merely parties to transactions, in spite of existing within an economic system that views us exactly as such. Tiana Clark points out that being a literal commodity was an actual, physical reality for black people until 1865. I think our economic system still relies on people seeing themselves as engines or tools.

I think we have to reject that idea with our whole hearts.

When I was a freshman in college, I saw a clinical social worker in my school’s Counseling and Psychological Services department. I saw him once and never again, because he enraged me. But now, almost 20 years later, I’m realizing he was really right in one thing about his assessment of me. He’d asked me to tell him about myself. And after I did, he’d pointed out that everything I’d told him was about my achievements: the grades I’d gotten, the scholarships I’d won. I left angry. Of course those things were how I defined myself. Of course those things were what made me a person of value in the world.

My 18 year-old-self had completely bought into the idea that her value could be measured and had to do with the production of valued things. (In my case, scholarly output. That’s still the valued thing I try to produce.)

Almost-38-year-old me is ready to reject that idea. I have value because I am a person who exists. I don’t need to be productive all the time. I feel a sense of purpose when I work, but that work is not what makes me a person.

The current version of me is ready to move into this way of thinking.

But, as I admitted in my Twitter thread…

I’m not there yet.

–

For more on “fixing” Millennial burnout, read Jessanne Collins’s Having a Kid Was the Unexpected Cure for my Millennial Burnout. It resonates with my experience as a mother of a young child.

Noah Smith identifies another piece of the burnout puzzle when he says Burned-Out Millennials Need Careers, Not Just Jobs. (Ask any stereotypical Millennial about their #sidehustle.)

Many thanks to Austin Kleon for first running Anne Helen’s piece across my radar.

Featured image is my favorite panel from Joss Whedon’s run on the Astonishing X-Men, Vol 3 #22, drawn by John Cassaday. Colors by Laura Martin. Letters by Chris Eliopoulos.

2019 Word of the Year: PHASE

Wed, 09 Jan 2019 13:06:28 -0400

It’s January 9 and I’m finally ready to talk about my intentions for this year.

I selected PHASE as my word of the year because I wanted to capture my intention to be chill in the face of cyclical experiences. To accept that my energy will ebb and flow. To surf the big waves when they come, being as productive as I can, and then to rest at low tide, letting my body recover. To recognize that whatever hard parenting moment I’m having at any time is just that, a parenting moment, even if it’s a moment where my kid doesn’t sleep for longer than two hours at a stretch for four weeks, because eventually we’ll come back around to a 6, 7, 8 hour stretch.

One of my favorite lines from the Aeneid is Book I, line 199: “dabit deus his quoque finem” (forgive the lack of macrons, please) - which comes from an even better couplet:

O socii—neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum— O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem.

As happens so often, translating this directly is a challenge. And I don’t have my Fagles at hand and I’m not content with the Williams or Dryden translations at the Perseus Project, so I’ll paraphrase. At this point, Aeneas and his friends/comrades, who have sailed away from Troy, narrowly escaping death at the hands of the Greeks in the Trojan war, are shipwrecked at Carthage. And he rallies them, telling them, essentially, “We’ve been through bad stuff before; we’ve endured harder challenges than this; god will give an end to these things, also.” It’s the Wheel of Fortune in the Tarot. It’s the Circle of Life.

[caption id=“attachment_6507” align=“aligncenter” width=“443”] Wheel of Fortune from the Moonchild Tarot.[/caption]

Each of us has survived up to this point, and whatever we’re dealing with now, things will change before too long. And that might mean they’re worse, or it might mean they’re better, but whatever they are, they’ll be different.

That’s the key interpretation the Tarot reader gave me of the Wheel of Fortune right before my birthday, and it is the energy that I, as a chronically ill woman, as a mother, need to embrace. It is one of my key lessons in life: you’re strong, you’ve gotten through everything so far, you’ll get through this too. Don’t get too comfortable, don’t get too complacent, don’t despair too much.

So PHASE is my word, which captures cycles like the moon, which captures stages of projects, which in its verb form can be defined as “to adjust so as to be in a synchronized condition.” Also, it’s what you call it when Kitty Pryde uses her power.

I’m not big on resolutions, but here are the things I’m feeling/trying this year:

Embracing the PHASE energy.
Really owning my Mer-Goth/#seawitchvibes aesthetic.
Reading for pleasure more.
Having a good time.

That last one came from a fun Twitter autotext meme:

My 2019 resolution is to have a good time. https://t.co/dkeCjW6coX
— Kimberly Hirsh (@kimberlyhirsh) December 31, 2018

I think my phone’s keyboard is on to something.

Featured image is the 2019 Celestial Calendar by Rivtak. I put one on my Christmas list and got it. You can get your own here.

What Kimberly Wrote, 12/12/2018

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 13:21:02 -0400

I wrote 2 pages about new models of information literacy in affinity spaces today, or about 968 words.

I’m trying a new thing with my writing. Usually my process is Read > Take Notes > Concept Map > Outline > Write, the whole paper at once. But right now I’m trying a thing where it’s Read > Take Notes > Quick Outline > Write for just a small chunk of the paper and I’m really liking it.

I’ve probably read that this was a good way to write in a million places, but I can’t identify any of them right now.

There are lots of gaps, but I wouldn’t even know those gaps were there before I started writing, so there we are. If you’ve been struggling, maybe try this more cyclical writing process.

Toward a personal brand

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 09:30:33 -0400

I find myself admiring people who seem together. They are well-coiffed. Their clothes are carefully styled. They welcome you into their homes and effortlessly manage to make it feel like everything is totally fine and will continue to be so. They are pleasant. They are calm.

I recently gave myself permission to accept that I will never be one of these people.

Smooth and collected will never be part of my personal brand.

Then I gave myself permission to think about what is, naturally, part of my personal brand, and go all-in on that. Here’s what I came up with:

scholarly
whimsical
geeky
magical
enthusiastic
bada** who gets sh*t done
big and epic but also sparkly
warm
loving

And you know what? I really like all that stuff.

“I forgot to create a personal brand” card by Emily McDowell. You can buy it! There’s also a mug and a magnet.

Dissertating in the Open: Putting Together a Committee WITH TEMPLATES!

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 11:43:00 -0400

Y’all, I’m scholarlily-enamored of my committee. (Scholarlily is a new adverb. I give it to you.) Everyone on it is so cool and down-to-earth and does interesting work.

Want to know how to get an awesome committee like mine? Well, I can’t tell you, but I can tell you how to request that someone serve on your committee. After meeting to discuss my prospectus and where we thought my comps should go, my advisor and I planned for me to request that certain people serve on my committee, with her sort of taking over committee organization/management after they agreed to serve.

In my department, a dissertation committee consists of five people and at least one of them must be external to the department. We identified four people to be on my committee; the advisor is always the chair of my committee. We chose two professors from within the department, and two from outside the department. Here’s my prospectus in case you want to review it again. And here’s my committee:

Sandra Hughes-Hassell: My advisor. She’s on the committee of course because she’s my advisor, but also because of her interest in youth services.

Casey Rawson: A friend, colleague, and classmate from my MSLS days. She’s a professor of research methods, so she is my research methods expert. Youth services is also an area of research interest for her. In addition to her areas of research expertise, she has personal interests in fandom and crafting, both of which make my topic of interest to her.

Brian Sturm: A professor who taught me in my MSLS days. He studies immersion, and boy is cosplay about being immersed, right? Also helpful to have on the committee because of his expertise in youth services.

Heather Moorefield-Lang: My first external committee member. She’s got expertise in qualitative and has done a lot of research on makerspaces. Because I see making as a key element in cosplay, I wanted her on my committee. She also used to be a theater teacher and I am a lapsed theater person, so I expected there might be some good personality fit there. (I’m pretty sure I was right.) I didn’t know her, but I’d interacted with her some on Twitter and Sandra had met her at the Tennessee Association of School Librarians conference.

Crystle Martin: My second external committee member. If you’re basing your whole study on providing confirming evidence for/extending someone else’s study, it’s nice to have that person on your committee. She’s also a Connected Learning expert, and that’s a framework I definitely want to bring into my dissertation work, as it’s kind of my whole reason for getting a PhD. I also had expected a good personality fit here, as we share interests in fandom and gaming. (She once spoke on a panel called “What Buffy the Vampire Slayer Has to Teach Us about Games, Education, and Self-directed Learning,” soooo…) I had met her once about three and a half years ago, when she came to campus for a visit and I was working in the School of Education.

So Sandra and I settled on these four people to ask to serve, but then it was up to me to actually contact them. I looked around on the internet for examples of how to invite people to be on your dissertation committee and found a little advice but no clear templates. So, keeping in mind the advice from the blog post The Basics of Professional Communication, Part I, I set about constructing my own, which I will share with you in just a moment.

But first, a note: please remember that you are requesting a service, not conferring an honor. Serving on committees is part of professional service for faculty members. But also, if they accept, they are doing you a favor. So try to keep that in mind in your verbiage.

Now, three templates for asking someone to be on your committee! But be sure to read after the templates for one more note.

1. Someone you already know well (in my case, Brian and Casey)

Dear [Recipient Name]:
I hope this semester is treating you well. [Include some more conversational detail if you like.]

I am in the process of putting together my dissertation committee, and your expertise in [recipient’s area] would be very helpful. Would you be willing to be on my dissertation committee? I’ve written a brief draft prospectus for my dissertation research that you can review here: [link to your prospectus]

[Information about who will follow up - you or your advisor; scheduling a first meeting; any additional information you might provide later such as a bibliography]

If you have any questions, feel free to email me. Thank you for considering this request.

Sincerely, [Your name/email signature]

2. Someone you’ve met but don’t know well

Dear [Name]:
My name is [your name], and I am a [your year] doctoral student at [your institution and department] working with [your advisor]. For my dissertation, I am planning to research [your topic/research question]. [A one-sentence reminder of when and how you met.]

I am in the process of putting together my dissertation committee, and your expertise in [recipient’s area] would be very helpful. Would you be willing to be on my dissertation committee? I’ve written a brief draft prospectus for my dissertation research that you can review here: [link to your prospectus]

[Information about who will follow up - you or your advisor; scheduling a first meeting; any additional information you might provide later such as a bibliography]

If you have any questions, feel free to email me. Thank you for considering this request.

Sincerely, [Your name/email signature]

3. Someone you’ve never met

Dear [Name]:
My name is [your name], and I am a [your year] doctoral student at [your institution and department] working with [your advisor]. For my dissertation, I am planning to research [your topic/research question].

I am in the process of putting together my dissertation committee, and your expertise in [recipient’s area] would be very helpful. Would you be willing to be on my dissertation committee? I’ve written a brief draft prospectus for my dissertation research that you can review here: [link to your prospectus]

[Information about who will follow up - you or your advisor; scheduling a first meeting; any additional information you might provide later such as a bibliography]

If you have any questions, feel free to email me. Thank you for considering this request.

Sincerely, [Your name/email signature]

Some notes:

When selecting what to call the recipient in the greeting, here are my general guidelines:

If it's someone I know well, I use the name that I know they prefer. In my department, some professors prefer students use their first name, others prefer their title and last name, and others might prefer a title but last initial, so that their expertise is recognized but the relationship is still a little informal. Respect what this person wants to be called.
If it's someone I have only met once or don't know at all, I use the title and last name. Once they're on the committee and you're actually having meetings, you may end up calling them by first name as I have in the blog post above. But always begin from the most formal position possible.

All of the people I requested to be on my committee accepted, and we had our first meeting last week, which is why next time on Dissertating in the Open, I’ll write about Your First Meeting with Your Committee!

Thanks to Jegged.com for the Final Fantasy VII Party Select Screen Image.

Dissertating in the Open: Designing a Comprehensive Literature Review

Mon, 03 Dec 2018 12:03:00 -0400

I think every doctoral program is different in what they expect from students for qualifying comprehensive examinations, but in my program, there are two components: a literature review of about 50-60 single-spaced pages that offers an overview of the student’s research interests and addresses theoretical, methodological, and topical literature related to the expected dissertation, and a brief prospectus for the dissertation.

I wrote the prospectus first. Honestly, I think everybody should. Then my advisor and I met and discussed what should be in the comprehensive literature review. We wanted to have five areas to propose to my committee, with the understanding that these might change after our first meeting with my committee. Based on the prospectus, we settled on the following five areas:

Information literacy. As my central research question is about information literacy practices, I need to have a thorough definition of information literacy as a concept and an understanding of the historical development of that concept.

Cosplay. Since the cosplay affinity space is the locus of my research, this was an obvious choice.

Theory. It’s expected that all comps packages in my department will have a theory section. I chose to focus on theories Martin (2012) used in her dissertation: earlier models of information literacy, Sonnenwald’s (2005) framework of human information behavior, James Paul Gee’s (2004) concept of affinity spaces, Levy’s (1997) concept of collective intelligence, and Jenkins’s (2009) concept of participatory culture. There are other theories that may come into play, but I haven’t identified them yet. Theories I’ve researched in the past include possible selves, situated learning and communities of practice, and cultural-historical activity theory (especially horizontal learning). None of these are necessarily going to show up in my comps, but each of them has the potential to be useful for my dissertation work, so depending on how thorough I end up being with the theories mentioned earlier, they may end up in there.

Methods and Data Analysis. This is another section that is expected by the department. My proposed methods are primarily qualitative, involving interviews and qualitative coding, so this section will focus on those. It does have one quantitative element, however: analytic description, “an analysis method to illustrate transforming qualitative data into numbers and coupling that with qualitative description” (Martin, 2012, p. 78), so I included mixed methods in here as well.

Connected Learning. Finally, although it isn’t mentioned explicitly in my prospectus, my advisor and I decided to include Connected Learning in my comps package. Connected learning in libraries is my central research interest, and cosplay definitely has all of the characteristics of connected learning, so this is a good fit for my fifth area.

I hope this has been helpful as you think about your own qualifying exams and which areas you should be reviewing to prepare for your dissertation.

Next on Dissertating in the Open: Contacting Potential Committee Members!

References

Martin, C. A. (2012). Information literacy in interest-driven learning communities: Navigating the sea of information of an online affinity space. The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Retrieved from search.proquest.com/docview/1…

Adulting achievements

Tue, 27 Nov 2018 18:28:05 -0400

After yesterday’s musings on adulting, I found myself looking for various resources that indicate what some components of adulting are. I found my way to the syllabus for Adulting: Coming of Age in 21st Century America at Georgia Tech, which assigned some videos from the YouTube channel How to Adult. As I started to skim the video titles, I realized that there are, in fact, many things I am quite adult enough to handle. I thought I’d make a list, just to help me remember how very grown up I am on the days when I eat cake for breakfast and my child is the only person who I can manage to dress appropriately for the occasion and weather.

I can:

do my taxes
do laundry
furnish a kitchen
cook
write a resume
succeed in a job interview
open a bank account
bake
declutter & organize
quit a job
write a cover letter
open a retirement account
write thank you notes (though of course I don't as often as baby boomers and their parents would like)
buy a house
get a new car insurance policy
start a new job
make coffee (three different ways!)
meal plan
party plan
host a party
manage a pregnancy
care for a child (including feeding, changing, bathing, clothing, entertaining)
choose a doctor
enroll in health insurance
use a library
send mail
take out a loan
repay a loan
use public transportation
use a slow cooker
unclog a toilet (including using a toilet snake/auger!)

And this is just a small sampling, based on the How to Adult video channel! I can also:

take my own measurements
purchase clothes that fit and make me feel confident
get a mortgage
connect utilities
pay bills
buy a car
make tea (in a bag or loose leaf!)
assert myself in interactions with a doctor
replace the items from a stolen wallet
drive
put gas in a car
buy a plane ticket
navigate an airport
use a pressure cooker
use a microwave
use a toaster oven
use an oven
handwash dishes
load and run a dishwasher

And of course there are many more things I can do!

Probably we each need to cut ourselves a break sometimes and recognize how awesome we are and all the stuff we can do.

On adulting

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 16:14:49 -0400

I'm Turning 30. Do I Need Adulting Lessons?

There's a whole cottage industry devoted to teaching Millennials basic life skills. Are young adults that hapless, or is being a grown-up really harder now?

www.citylab.com

Pocket suggests things for me to read, and a few weeks ago, it suggested I read this piece about adulting. As I lay in bed, my toddler sleeping peacefully beside me, I thought, “I really need adulting help.” Which in one sense is ridiculous, because I have been doing some adulting basics, like holding a steady job, or paying rent or utilities, for almost 18 years. My adult self is, in fact, an adult.

But then I look at my immensely dirty car, or think about the extreme level of disrepair my home has fallen into over the past six years of home ownership, or remember that W. is the one who does the laundry and the dishes and the cleaning and the yardwork and I think…

Yeah. I could use some help.

…

I had a revelation a couple weeks ago while driving and noticing that my windshield wipers need to be replaced. I’m really good at projects. In one sense, it’s completely correct that my personal brand could be KIMBERLY: SHE GETS THE JOB DONE. If the job has a clear objective and a defined endpoint. I can manage human and material resources to make magic happen.

If, on the other hand, the job is a repetitive task directed at maintenance that will need to be done over and over again (like laundry or dishes or toothbrushing), then I’ll have to work harder to create a system to make sure it happens.

I’m trying to figure out what those systems look like.

Maybe acknowledging that all of life is a process of incrementally improving and coming up with ways to hack your brain is the real adulting.

Dissertating in the Open: Identifying a Research Question & Writing a Prospectus

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 13:26:00 -0400

First, huge thanks to Dr. Laura Gogia for the descriptive phrase “Dissertating in the Open.”

Early on in my PhD program, I decided that I wanted to be as transparent about my dissertation process as is ethically possible. Since I’m focused on studying Connected Learning, and openly-networked products are a key part of that framework, I wanted to share my own process. This blog post is the first step in that direction.

Grad school was like the part of Great British Bake-off where the recipe only says “now make frangipane” and people just stare at the camera. ?“Now make research.” ?
— Ian M. Hartshorn (@imhartshorn) November 11, 2018

When I came into this program, several of my cohort-mates already had clear ideas not just about their area of research interest, but about their specific dissertation projects. Others took a hard turn and completely shifted their research interests. I’ve followed a middle route; while I wasn’t zeroed in enough to turn every assignment into a chapter in my dissertation (or even my literature review), everything I did was somehow focused on interest-driven learning. But I was never clear on how it all would come together in a culminating research project.

Over the past three and a half years, I’ve probably floated almost 10 different dissertation topics or themes past my very understanding advisor, but none of them quite coalesced into a question. I should have known that the question would come out of the literature. My best research always comes from someone else’s “Possibilities for future research” section.

A few weeks ago, I was reading Dr. Crystle Martin’s (2012) dissertation. She investigated the information literacy practices of players in the World of Warcraft affinity space and, based on previous prescriptive models of information literacy and her own results, generated a new, descriptive model of information literacy for digital youth.

And then in her conclusion, she said:

“The more affinity spaces which are studied, the more stable the model will become, until eventually it will be a powerful predictive model that can approximate outcomes when parameters are changed” (p. 108).

I physically actually got chills. But I wasn’t sure how I would tie this into my own work.

Then I went to the Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy concert and saw the cosplayers.

Then I re-read Dr. Martin’s dissertation.

Then I realized cosplay is an affinity space.

I have really great professors, but I find it really frustrating that I have to google ‘how to write a prospectus’ because they give no official teaching on how to do it.
— Caris Adel (@CarisAdel) November 11, 2018

Then I sat down and over the course of a few hours banged out a dissertation prospectus to send to my advisor. It’s just a first draft. But I wanted to share it for those of you who are inexperienced in writing them. I’m lucky that my professor Dr. Barbara Wildemuth really walked my cohort through this process. Comments are open, so feel free to annotate it up and ask questions.

Next time, on Dissertating in the Open: building a comps package based on your prospectus!

#100DaysofCode

Thu, 15 Nov 2018 11:06:59 -0400

I’m publicly committing to the 100DaysOfCode Challenge starting today! #100DaysOfCode

I did my first coding in BASIC as a reader of 3-2-1 Contact Magazine in the late 80s and early 90s. My dad was director of IT at a law school in the early 90s and responded to every complaint I had about not having access to Prodigy or AOL by telling me that the Web was where things were happening, not there. I wasn’t sure I believed him, but in 1995 my mom bought me a book about programming HTML for Netscape and I started building websites, first for local non-profits, then as fan endeavors. Sure, I ventured into the world of WYSIWYG page editors like Geocities, Angelfire, Microsoft Publisher, Adobe Dreamweaver, and Homestead. But I always came back to hand coding. By 2001, I had a personal domain and was using HTML, CSS, and Javascript to develop a whole suite of fansites. I installed and troubleshooted Greymatter for my blog, but all the other pages were handcoded. I learned the basics of PHP so that I could serve dynamic pages and only have to update the content within a page when I wanted to make a change, and have the header, footer, and menus all be consistent throughout a site.

And then came WordPress.

I love WordPress.

But it made me lazy. Kind of.

Using WordPress is, I realize now after helping others with it, its own set of skills; it is not without a learning curve. But it doesn’t require me to know or use much code.

And I miss code.

Plus, WordPress is so much more customizable if you can code; you can create your own themes and plug-ins. Instead of shaking my fist when I want a functionality that’s not there, I’ll be able to build it. And, obviously, getting the skills needed for front end development has many benefits beyond just customizing WordPress.

The web WAS my job until 2015, but since then, all kinds of amazing developments have occurred and become widespread. (CSS Flex! CSS Grid!) I don’t know how to use them, and I want to.

So. To that end, and because I actually find coding relaxing - I once spent several hours of a vacation working through Codecademy courses - I’m committing myself to the #100DaysofCode challenge. I’ll be going through freeCodeCamp’s Responsive Web Design certification, because I’m rusty and want to get back to basics.

If this is something you have always wanted to try, why not start now? Join me!

From the NY Times: Brown Point Shoes Arrive, 200 Years After White Ones

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 09:36:30 -0400

Brown Point Shoes Arrive, 200 Years After White Ones

Ballet dancers of color have long painted, dyed or covered point shoes in makeup to match their skin. Could this small barrier to inclusion finally be disappearing?

www.nytimes.com

When we would talk about examples of white privilege in our Project READY work, the fact that I can buy dance shoes close to my skin tone was one of my go-tos. It seems like nothing until you realize that dancers are spending hundreds of dollars and hours to modify pink or nude shoes.

#AcWriMo: A declaration

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 15:13:00 -0400

Hi friends.

Here I’m declaring my intent to participate in #AcWriMo.

Here are my goals:

Revise and submit an article I've been working on for a long time.
Write the introductory overview to my comprehensive examination literature review package.
Create preliminary bibliographies for my comprehensive examination literature review package to share with my committee.

I recently wrote a six-page prospectus of my dissertation study. While it grew out of all the work I've done so far, it means that the many words I've already written and the unwritten-but-outlined parts of my comps either won't be used for this purpose or will be very much downplayed. I'm not starting from nothing, exactly, but there's a lot of work to do and not much time to do it.

To determine my goals, I looked realistically at my time constraints.

I have childcare five days a week for four hours a day. The first 30 minutes of that is usually settling in and the last is settling out, so really it’s three hours a day. I have a standing weekly meeting for the grant project that employs me, and writing isn’t the only work I need to get done in my childcare time. Because of travel, Thanksgiving, and meetings, I’ve only got 15 guaranteed writing days in November. (Other writing days are catch-as-catch-can; occasionally a grandma will offer a few hours of childcare or W. will take a long weekend stretch to solo parent, but those times aren’t predictable.) So aside from my task-related goals, I’m setting a goal for 15 hours of writing time this month. I’m not sure how long this overview needs to be, which is why I don’t have a word or page count goal.

Anyway, you heard it here: I’m doing #AcWriMo, but on my terms.

What do I want to do with my life? Resources to help you find the answer.

Wed, 24 Oct 2018 09:42:52 -0400

I was talking with some fellow co-working moms about matrescence and how it kind of shakes up everything you thought you wanted to do and how to figure out what to do next. I mentioned that I know a lot of books to help with this. (I didn’t mention that I’ve never finished reading any of them… which is kind of symptomatic of the problem they’re designed to address!)

But ANYWAY. I thought a blog post full of them might be helpful to more people than just other parents acting as primary caregivers trying to figure out their next steps, so here they are.

How to Be Everything: A Guide for Those Who (Still) Don’t Know What They Want to Be When They Grow Up by Emilie Wapnick. Also check out her website, Puttylike.

Refuse to Choose! Use All of Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams by Barbara Sher

The Firestarter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms and The Desire Map by Danielle LaPorte

The Renaissance Soul: How to Make Your Passions Your Life–a Creative and Practical Guide by Margaret Lobenstine

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One by Jenny Blake - this one’s got a tie-in podcast!

On living a fragmented life

Mon, 15 Oct 2018 11:45:04 -0400

Saturday night, W. and I went to the tour of Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy. If you like Final Fantasy, and it’s coming somewhere near you, you should definitely go. It was a magical evening. It’s a philharmonic with orchestra and choir on stage, and then three giant screens projecting scenes from the games. Arnie Roth conducted and bantered between sets; I think he’s delightful.

And the fans came out. There was that feeling of being among your people that happens at this sort of interest-based gathering. I have never seen so many cool t-shirts and gorgeous hair colors in one place before.

And then there were the cosplayers:

Nico Castillo on Instagram: ?Oh Celes... That is so... you! Traitor and trollop! @utopian_pigeon #distantworlds #finalfantasy #finalfantasyvi #kefka #celeschere??

Nico Castillo on Instagram: ?That tease of an old summoner decided to become a dancer now... Well I told her that I love to be Dancing Mad! @twiliheart #distantworlds??

Which reminded me that, oh yeah, about a year ago I said I was going to get into cosplay…

….

This summer, we went to North Myrtle Beach as a family. We stopped by Ripley’s Aquarium and saw their mermaid show. Leaving it, I thought, “Oh right! I wanted to take up mermaiding.”

….

My ambitions that aren’t obligations escape me, and I need to be able to achieve my obligations in fragments. This is life as a primary caregiving parent: any activity needs to be achievable in small bits of time, and preferably it shouldn’t be a problem if the activity is interrupted.

And let’s be honest: if the activity is interrupted, it might never get finished.

….

I left lemon juice on the counter overnight. I was using it to preserve apples for M.’s snack and lunch today, and I put the apples in the fridge. And my brain was like, “Okay! Done with this task!” I did the same thing with some almond milk last week after making a smoothie.

….

It might sound like I’m complaining. I’m not. I’m obsessed with my kid. I just was in the bathroom at our combo co-working space/Montessori, and the bathroom window looks out onto the play area, and I just watched him chase and pick up balls for a little while.

I love being with him. And in many ways, I’m most myself with him, more than I ever was before.

And in other ways, it’s really important to me to remember all the parts of me that are from before, because they’re all still here, and they need attending to, now and again.

…

I keep coming back to the idea that matrescence is like kintsugi, the Japanese art of using gold to repair ceramics.

[caption id=“attachment_6276” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] Rural cooking pot repaired with Kintsugi technique, Georgia, 19th century. Photo by Guggger. CC-BY-SA[/caption]

Having a kid shattered me. I still haven’t processed my birth story, and it’s been two years. I will. When I’m ready. I spent so many hours searching for resources on identity crises in the immediate post-partum period. But having a kid made me like this cooking pot. All the old parts of me are around. And I’m piecing them back together, slowly, with the new parts of me and the new parts of my life making everything more beautiful.

There are new pieces to come, too. I think the simile breaks down here.

….

This is life now. It will be different later.

Trends in YA Library Services

Fri, 12 Oct 2018 15:52:22 -0400

I did a quick count today of the trends identified by the Center for the Future of Libraries and the titles of every article ever published in Young Adult Library Services.

Results summary of # of articles per topic:

Gamification/gaming 12 Maker Movement 11 Fandom 5 Connected Learning 2 Privacy Shifting 2 Badging 1

All other trends 0

Let's party like it's 2016.

Fri, 21 Sep 2018 16:17:10 -0400

Because I still know some people who are into it and because it’s super fun to play with my kid, I’m back on Pokemon Go. Here’s my code if you want to be friends: 7480 5774 3887

Newly dedicated magic corner.

Fri, 17 Aug 2018 15:25:29 -0400

I just took a little time to clear out and clean my corner desk, which was never getting used for work anyway, and dedicate it to all my magic stuff.

A few words about my beliefs: I’m mostly agnostic. With respect to magic, I believe we make our own. Action follows intention, and I find these tools - tarot and oracle cards, crystals, candles, books - useful in setting my intentions. They help me trust my intuition.

I value balance. My professional life is all about truth claims, evidence, and figuring out what counts as empirical research. I need a thing in my life that is the opposite, and this is it.

A few more words, this time about Everyday Magic, my local witch store. It’s hard as the mom of a very little, to go shopping anywhere. Now imagine taking your magpie toddler into a shop full of crystals.

You might let him choose a small one to hold. He’ll immediately put it in his mouth, of course.

It’s fine. You were going to buy it anyway.

Next time, you might let him hold a larger palm stone. He’ll probably drop it. If it’s selenite, it’ll shatter when he does. When this happens, you apologize profusely. At Everyday Magic, they tell you, “It’s okay. Babies happen. He picked a good one to drop.”

Obviously, you offer to buy it. When they don’t make you, you buy a whole one. And also a book entitled Witchy Mama.

Then you have a dream about buying the Moonchild Tarot. But you know it’ll be a long time before Everyday Magic has it in stock. But you know they have the Starchild Tarot, by the same artist, in stock. So you decide to drop by after work - toddler in tow, because he almost always is - and look at their open copy of it and, if you fall in love with it, to buy it.

Your giant baby has a lot of words now, and when you get in the store, he uses all of them to scream about the crystals. He’s clearly outraged that you didn’t hand him one immediately. As you try to look at the cards, he shrieks and you toss off a “Seriously, dude?” that elicits a laugh from the shop’s owner. But of course snide remarks don’t settle babies, so he keeps yelling. You give up on looking at the cards and take him outside because you don’t want to ruin everybody else’s day.

Then you try to reason with him. Then you remember that you have veggie straws. He accepts the veggie straws. You go back inside and move toward the cards again. A shop employee shows you a stone and asks, “Would letting him hold this help stop the crying?”

“YES THANK YOU!” you say. Then, “It won’t shatter if he drops it?” You’re already bracing yourself for the tantrum he is going to throw when he has to give it back, but you really want to look at those cards, so you hand him the rock and get your peruse on.

You pick up the box and get a chill. You open it and start to look through. Yes, this art appeals to you. And then your favorite card, VII The Chariot, is a unicorn, and you’re buying this deck.

You grab an unopened box, take the stroller over to the counter, and miraculously, when you ask the toddler to hand you the stone, he does so completely without incident.

“Thanks for letting him hold it,” you tell the shop employee.

“Oh, he can have it,” the employee responds.

And that’s why you are going to buy all your magic things at Everyday Magic forever, because instead of shaming you for your screaming baby, they gave him a crystal.

Some quick thoughts on my IndieWeb implementation.

Thu, 16 Aug 2018 10:52:58 -0400

Hi Internet friends.

I have been tweaking my website a lot this week and wanted to write a few notes about my IndieWeb progress.

In my early days, I tried to just implement a ton of stuff. Then I had to tweak a bunch of things to get what I wanted. I can be too rigid sometimes, and I think some of my IndieWeb implementation efforts have fallen in this category.

I’m in a life moment where my IndieWeb commitment needs to be eclipsed by, well, most of my other commitments. So here’s where I’m at right now. I’m using the IndieMark list to work through it all. This will get a little technical, so if it’s not interesting, please move on with your day.

I do own my own domain, kimberlyhirsh.com.
I think it's set up for Web sign-in, but I sometimes struggle with the IndieAuth/Micropub plug-ins.
My posts do have permalinks.
Also they have h-entry markup.
Robots can index my site.
I'm pretty sure WordPress outputs my stuff in html.
You can defs use the site-specific search in Google to search kimberlyhirsh.com.
I have an h-card with contact info and a photo of myself on my homepage.
I am currently posting two post types to my site: notes and articles. Both get syndicated to Twitter and Facebook as I deem appropriate.
I have linear previous/next navigation between my posts.
I have a search UI.
URLs are auto linked.
I can both send and receive webmentions.
I receive backfeed from Twitter. (Facebook eliminated this functionality, sadly.)

What now?

I’m not adding any other post types just yet. For me, the inconvenience of creating replies on my own site and syndicating them outweighs the benefit of owning my replies, as my replies are rarely substantive. Occasionally, replies may inspire a longer article. But for now, I’m going to reply on the silos where I see folks post stuff. (That said: I will try to work out using webmentions to reply to folks replies that get backfed to my site, using my site’s comments. We’ll see.)

Similarly, posting photos here instead of to Instagram, events and RSVPs here instead of to Facebook, and reads here instead of to Goodreads is just not something I want to tackle all at once. So as I figure out which use cases I want to urgently own, then I’ll work that out.

But I will be posting links here instead of directly to Facebook or Twitter, so I may use the read post type for that purpose. Or bookmark. I’m trying to decide how I want to distinguish those uses.

I’m not really clear on how to make web actions happen, even though I have the necessary plug-ins installed.

I want to get back into documenting my own itches and participating more in the IndieWeb community.

But honestly, this is mostly just a post giving myself permission not to own my replies.

Unfollowing Everybody

Sun, 12 Aug 2018 01:49:16 -0400

I'm probably going to unfollow everybody from Twitter on Monday. Please don't take it personally. I'll then be adding my closest people back, and creating lists so it's easy to find everybody else later. I just need my default feed to be quieter.

I saw @tceles_B_hsup play Dickon in The Secret Garden. He was dreamy. A couple years later we were in a

Fri, 10 Aug 2018 16:48:42 -0400

I saw @tceles_B_hsup play Dickon in The Secret Garden. He was dreamy. A couple years later we were in a production of Brigadoon together. I played his dad. It’s been 20 yrs. Our kid is almost 2. @tceles_B_hsup is still dreamy.

@CupcakeGoth @Gwenda I actually have a Goodreads shelf called "jilli-recs" and these may have to go on there.

Fri, 10 Aug 2018 16:18:53 -0400

@CupcakeGoth @Gwenda I actually have a Goodreads shelf called “jilli-recs” and these may have to go on there.

@Gwenda I needed to find out what all of these were, and OF COURSE @CupcakeGoth had my back... cupcake-goth.dreamwidth.org/tag/avon+satan…

Fri, 10 Aug 2018 15:25:39 -0400

@Gwenda I needed to find out what all of these were, and OF COURSE @CupcakeGoth had my back… cupcake-goth.dreamwidth.org/tag/avon+satan…

Don't let me forget: next week I want to write up & blog some advanced lit review techniques that I

Fri, 10 Aug 2018 11:34:55 -0400

Don’t let me forget: next week I want to write up & blog some advanced lit review techniques that I shared with @allisunrae here on Twitter.

Things I like: space, unicorns, space unicorns, cats, space cats on unicorns, goth stuff, cupcakes, books, food sme… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Fri, 10 Aug 2018 10:49:26 -0400

Things I like: space, unicorns, space unicorns, cats, space cats on unicorns, goth stuff, cupcakes, books, food smells but not floral smells, ghosts, mermaids, pirates, pirate ghost mermaids (like a mermaid died and became a ghost and then took up piracy)…

…ghost cats, mercats, pirate cats, 80s fantasy movies and cartoons, crystals, some but not all tarot cards, pictures where there’s like a galaxy inside somebody’s uterus or whatever, crafts, zines even though I have only read like one (CROQzine 4eva), fandom, some comedy…

Most music genres that end with “wave,” literal waves from the ocean, the ocean, bioluminescence, coral, the moon, and now we’re back to space.

I bought this dress & wore it to a wedding recently and basically I want this to be my whole

Fri, 10 Aug 2018 06:56:56 -0400

I bought this dress & wore it to a wedding recently and basically I want this to be my whole aesthetic now.

@MagpieLibrarian I genuinely thought this was deliberate.

Fri, 10 Aug 2018 06:43:19 -0400

@MagpieLibrarian I genuinely thought this was deliberate.

Can't even focus enough today to copy notes from my bullet journal into Google Docs.

Fri, 10 Aug 2018 06:26:06 -0400

Can’t even focus enough today to copy notes from my bullet journal into Google Docs.

Pretty sure I can start counting consuming @acafanmom's Patreon as work? Yay!

Thu, 09 Aug 2018 12:29:53 -0400

Pretty sure I can start counting consuming @acafanmom’s Patreon as work? Yay!

Genuinely refreshing Twitter to keep me awake bc my kid won't nap and I feel like I'm dying.

Thu, 09 Aug 2018 11:06:56 -0400

Genuinely refreshing Twitter to keep me awake bc my kid won’t nap and I feel like I’m dying.

When you realize you're closer to being the Darling Mermaid Darlings than you are to being Chuck or the Pie

Thu, 09 Aug 2018 07:14:47 -0400

When you realize you’re closer to being the Darling Mermaid Darlings than you are to being Chuck or the Pie Maker…

Heeeeey Twitter, anybody up for being my writing buddy and offering feedback on a 153-word abstract for a lit revie…

Thu, 09 Aug 2018 05:35:12 -0400

Heeeeey Twitter, anybody up for being my writing buddy and offering feedback on a 153-word abstract for a lit review? Topic is TRPGs in library teen services.

To everyone who follows me in hopes of seeing pictures of @tceles_B_hsup's kid... Sorry.

Wed, 08 Aug 2018 18:50:05 -0400

To everyone who follows me in hopes of seeing pictures of @tceles_B_hsup’s kid… Sorry.

This is Damask Bowie, reporting for NPR News. twitter.com/jennievander/s…

Wed, 08 Aug 2018 18:18:46 -0400

This is Damask Bowie, reporting for NPR News.

@allisunrae I'm definitely still working on the critique part. But honestly, if you simultaneously synthesize inste… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Wed, 08 Aug 2018 03:19:32 -0400

@allisunrae I’m definitely still working on the critique part. But honestly, if you simultaneously synthesize instead of summarize AND provide a strong description of each study’s context, methods, and results, you’ll be way ahead of most people.

A grave error

Tue, 07 Aug 2018 14:49:32 -0400

I have made a grave error. I ate carrots and hummus for lunch, but that is not a lunch. It’s a snack.

Be who you want to be.

Tue, 07 Aug 2018 14:11:46 -0400

A thing I’m telling myself today that you may need to hear, too: Who do you want to be later? Go ahead and do the things that person will do.

First newsletter issue goes out today

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 09:58:20 -0400

The first issue of my newsletter goes out today. Thoughts on peak nostalgia and assurances that you are wonderful will be included. tinyletter.com/kimberlyh… to subscribe.

Katie Linder on Radical Self-Trust

Sat, 04 Aug 2018 02:27:23 -0400

I find myself having a lot of existential crises lately. I think it makes sense for somebody who is preparing for comprehensive exams but hasn’t fully articulated the research question for her dissertation, is parenting full-time with four hours a day of childcare, is sharing caregiving responsibilities for a post-op parent with her siblings, is in the middle of a chronic illness flare up, and lives in the world. (When I put it like that, it sounds like I have stuff going on!)

These crises come up especially when my kid is sleeping, especially especially when he’s having a rough teething night, so I feel like there’s little point in trying to sleep myself.

It was in the midst of just such a crisis that I decided to return to the work of Katie Linder, whom I think I found because she is one of the few people actually doing podcasts explicitly about scholarly communication and engaged scholarship. I took a break from her stuff when this flare up got unignorable, but it felt like exactly what I needed in the middle of my latest existential crisis.

And it was, even more than I anticipated. Dr. Linder’s latest blog post about Radical Self-Trust articulates exactly how I operate when I’m at my best, when I’m managing to keep the imposter syndrome and existential dread at bay. I highly recommend checking it out and following her work.

Not Being the Best Isn't the Same as Being Mediocre

Fri, 03 Aug 2018 15:13:07 -0400

I’m reading Emilie Wapnick’s book How to Be Everything and I got to this section header and felt like she was speaking very directly to me.

Several weeks ago now I was having a late night conversation with W. We were talking about how he would have fared at my high school, where he would have gone if he hadn’t gone to the local Friends School instead.

“I think you’d be okay. I mean, I was in the middle of my class, and I did alright.”

I was tenth in my high school class of about 300. I was in roughly the top 3%. And I perceived (and apparently, continue to perceive) that as the middle.

When my final report card came, my dad said, “Why didn’t you tell us you were tenth in your class? That’s amazing!” I said, “Well, you know, it’s not like I was valedictorian or salutatorian, so it’s not a big deal.”

I think my perception might be skewed.

It’s a very privileged problem to have, I’m aware, but I suspect this kind of thinking contributes to mental illness in academia.

Twitter. Let's talk about the intersection between #CLinTE and LIS education. Any iSchools doing great work in CL that you

Fri, 03 Aug 2018 08:27:53 -0400

Twitter. Let's talk about the intersection between #CLinTE and LIS education. Any iSchools doing great work in CL that you know about?

Impatient for #CLS2018 proceedings after seeing all these great tweets.

Fri, 03 Aug 2018 06:17:37 -0400

Impatient for #CLS2018 proceedings after seeing all these great tweets.

Lori Morimoto on Twitter

Tue, 31 Jul 2018 14:29:31 -0400

Thread. This is one of the reasons I haven’t spent my time in school worrying about doing everything right. If doing things right doesn’t get me the prize it’s supposed to, I might as well instead focus on doing what’s interesting.

edu522

Tue, 31 Jul 2018 07:36:28 -0400

Librarians and teachers looking to squeeze three more weeks of PD into their summer might want to check out Greg McVerry’s #EDU522: “three weeks to figure out the web and how to use it to teach.”

Let’s teach students how to own their data, manage their online identity, and build the web.

Woman About the Internet

Mon, 30 Jul 2018 19:53:19 -0400

Drew Zandonella-Stannard perfectly captures the reality of early parenthood in the latest issue of her newsletter.

Newsletter: You Got This

Mon, 30 Jul 2018 09:00:19 -0400

I have been really digging newsletters for the past several months. I’m planning to do a write up of my faves soon. But for now, think about these questions:

Are we BFFs? Should we be BFFs? Do you like to imagine we’re BFFs?

If the answer to any of these is yes, my new newsletter is for you. (Sorry, the two people who signed up for my old secret newsletter… This is a whole different thing. But it’s still for you.)

A really common exercise to help people decide how to spend their time is to ask them to imagine their funeral. What do they want to be remembered for?

The only answer I consistently come up with is that I want the people gathered to all feel, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I cared about them.

My brother-in-law got married this past weekend. My mother-in-law had to give a speech at the rehearsal dinner. She was self-conscious going into it. At the reception, she told me that as she stood there, she thought, “Well, Kimberly would tell me I can do this, so I can.” And thinking of that helped her get through it, and of course she did a beautiful job.

I want as many people as possible to feel that way. I don’t know what kind of reach this newsletter will have or where it will go. But I hope each person who reads it will feel like they’re not alone, like someone believes in them, like someone has their back.

I’m describing it as

Like a high five in your inbox. Platonic love notes and things that made me think of you.

If that sounds like something you would like to have in your life, you can sign up here.

My new newsletter: Like a high five in your inbox. Platonic love notes and things that made me think of

Mon, 30 Jul 2018 05:01:39 -0400

My new newsletter: Like a high five in your inbox. Platonic love notes and things that made me think of you. khirsh.us/b/1Rs

Hoopla Cookbooks

Wed, 25 Jul 2018 10:04:24 -0400

Just browsed the cooking section of the Durham County Library Hoopla Collection and I’m blown away by how comprehensive it is. I want to cook all the things!

What Kimberly Wrote, 7/24/2018

Tue, 24 Jul 2018 15:32:32 -0400

I wrote 279 words about definitions of “makerspace” today. Tomorrow: reviewing all 26ish pages I’ve written so far and making a plan for the conclusion.

The Jonathan Van Ness of Library Science

Tue, 24 Jul 2018 10:03:15 -0400

Just thought to myself, “I want to be the Jonathan Van Ness of library science.” I’ll let you know when I figure out what I mean by that.

Hey writers. What are your day jobs?

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 17:20:12 -0400

Hey writers. What are your day jobs?

Planning Microtasks to Match Your Energy (or Spoons)

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 15:13:33 -0400

I’m fairly open about the fact that I have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and polycystic ovary syndrome and that fatigue is my primary symptom for both of these. I’m in the middle of a Hashimoto’s flare up, and today I sat down and made a little table of the types of tasks I can do depending on what type of day I’m having: low energy, medium energy, or high energy.

This is a valuable table because often I think that, since I’m working on a writing project and a curriculum development project, I can only ever get any work done on high energy days. But that’s not so, because each of those projects is made up of smaller tasks. Writing up my literature review workflow really helped me set up this table. Here it is in list form, in case it would be valuable for anyone else.

Literature Review Tasks

Low Energy

Literature search

Medium Energy

AIC review
concept map
revision

High Energy

synthetic note
memo
outlining
writing

Curriculum Development

Low Energy

identify resources
format documents

Medium Energy

outline

High Energy

write

This is a great example of a library policy that was excluding people and how a library professional changed it.

Sun, 22 Jul 2018 23:22:33 -0400

This is a great example of a library policy that was excluding people and how a library professional changed it. Le… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Spider-Woman

Sun, 22 Jul 2018 20:45:50 -0400

Reading the Hopeless/Rodriguez run of Spider-Woman and feeling super seen.

Sorry for weird colors- I use a blue light filter app and it affects my screen grabs.

Anyway, highly recommend for parents-to-be or new parents.

Which, I recently read a thing that says postpartum is three years, so if you, like me, have been doing this for almost two years already and don’t feel a lot more competent than you did in the first six weeks, don’t feel bad.

Happy anniversary, Will!

Sun, 22 Jul 2018 12:39:13 -0400

When you have been together for almost 20 years and you’re both librarians. Happy anniversary, Will!

Writing Motivation

Sat, 21 Jul 2018 07:01:07 -0400

Me: ugh writing this comps lit review is such a slog Also Me: I should probably put together an annotated bibliography of everything that’s been written about Rupert Giles and librarianship

Internet like it's 2001

Wed, 18 Jul 2018 16:51:33 -0400

Me, February 2001

I’ve owned my own personal domain since 2001, though it’s a different domain name now than it was then. For the past year or so I’ve been trying to remember how I internetted in 2001, because I’m super nostalgic and think that was my favorite Internet time, and then I remembered that the Internet Archive has my back. So I visited my own domain on the Internet archive and have implemented a few things here inspired by that.

Here they are so far (probably more to come):

A "Currently" widget to let you know what I'm enjoying right now
A shoutbox widget where you can say hi
A "Speaking" page about where you can find me in meatspace
A "Following" page full of links with fun annotations

What Kimberly Wrote, 7/18/2018

Wed, 18 Jul 2018 15:22:29 -0400

My makerspaces lit review is just over 25 pages, with two sections left to write: definitions and conclusion. After I get those done, I’ll take a little break to work on other stuff. (Reading about Connected Learning, probably!) Then back to revise this.

I Robot, You Jane

Wed, 18 Jul 2018 03:57:45 -0400

True story, the “I Robot, You Jane” episode of Things of Bronze is the episode I’m most excited about recording. That episode of Buffy captures so perfectly what it was like to be a teen computer girl in the late 90s.

Your Website

Tue, 17 Jul 2018 10:39:51 -0400

Hey friend! Do you have a website and/or blog? I want to visit it! Tell me about it, please.

Instant Pot

Tue, 17 Jul 2018 10:24:57 -0400

Bought an Instant Pot at the urging of fellow co-working parents and I don’t know how long it’s been since I was this excited about a purchase.

It's my birthday.

Sat, 14 Jul 2018 20:43:59 -0400

I’m 37 today. It’s a number that sounds grown up. I think I felt more grown up at 27, though.

Maybe I’m Benjamin Buttoning. (Making that reference dates me. The fact that I’m pretty sure I’m repeating a joke I think I’ve already made on this blog and don’t care is also proof of my age.)

It only just occurred to me that reverse Benjamin Buttoning is just normal aging.

I have neither read nor seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

I find myself craving inspiration in the form of people sharing their stories with humility. I’m over gurus and authorities.

I long for stories of vulnerability and authenticity.

I miss distant friends.

Yesterday I found out that my thyroid is out of whack again. I’m trying to remember everything I learned before, not just about how to heal, but also how to cope.

I feel despair often, but then there’s this:

My kid is giggling in the tub right now and there’s no better sound in the world.

Roxane Gay

Sat, 14 Jul 2018 07:24:51 -0400

It feels perfect to come across this on my 37th birthday.

A good night

Thu, 12 Jul 2018 23:21:21 -0400

Tonight I went to Goth night at a Tarot-themed bar/lounge. I ate delicious Indian food from the restaurant next door. I got a spot-on, meaningful Tarot reading, for only $5. I had a strong drink. I danced to dark alternative music with my dreamy spouse and lovely sister while my friend spun records. For a brief time, I let my stress fall away and felt like a well person living in the world.

It was beautiful and I hope to do it again.

I've forgotten how to feel better.

Thu, 12 Jul 2018 16:19:33 -0400

Most of my adult life has been impacted by chronic illness. I’ve got two: Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and polycystic ovary syndrome. (I also have depression and anxiety, but they seem to be symptoms of those two physical illnesses, because when those are well-managed, the mental illnesses are barely noticeable.) I spent many years learning to manage them, and they were fairly well-managed before I got pregnant and for the first two trimesters of my pregnancy. Most importantly, I developed several strategies to use when I feel like absolute garbage.

I can’t remember any of them.

Breastfeeding is a funny thing; it basically takes whatever you knew about your hormones - whether they were affected by PCOS or not - and makes all of that invalid. Now your estrogen is suppressed, you’re producing prolactin, and when it comes to menstruation, all bets are off. So you might, for example, find yourself having your period for 4 or 5 weeks in a row, then not for a week, then again for several more days.

Which might, purely hypothetically speaking, leave you feeling fatigued, lightheaded, and with a sensation of pins-and-needles in your feet.

Perhaps from anemia.

I have, in fact, found myself in this situation, and I have seen my doctor, and she has assured me that yes, this is probably related to breastfeeding, and we’re doing blood tests to figure out next steps in fixing my symptoms, even if the menstrual wonkiness persists. So I’m doing what I can, medically.

But let’s say she puts me on an iron supplement tomorrow. (Likely.)

It’s still going to take some time to feel better. And I don’t know what to do in the meantime, because I can’t just retreat from life.

How old is my kid even?

Thu, 12 Jul 2018 06:27:54 -0400

I’ve been saying my kid is 22 months old for a few days but I’m just now realizing he’s only 21 months old. This is going to be so much easier when I can just say, “Two.” Right now, “One” doesn’t seem to give him enough credit for all the growing he’s done in the past 9 months.

Headcanon

Wed, 11 Jul 2018 22:43:36 -0400

At age 22 months, M. is generating Curious George/Pigeon crossovers, so yeah, definitely my kid.

What Kimberly Wrote, Through 7/9/18

Mon, 09 Jul 2018 16:47:17 -0400

My makerspaces lit review is now at just over 15 pages. It’s mostly cutting and pasting from synthetic notes rather than new writing. That feels a little like cheating but it also feels really nice to know that all the writing I’ve done since January is actually useful. There are lots of wacky little comments to myself like “Do a better job paraphrasing instead of quoting here,” and a few places that need to be better synthesized or fleshed out. Goal 1 is just to get it done. Goal 2 is to go back and make it better.

Now: July 2018

Sun, 01 Jul 2018 15:26:22 -0400

Here’s a complete list of everything I’ve got going on right now. And by “going on,” I mean a level of intensity ranging from “thinking about maybe doing it” to “seriously working on it.” (Categories come from the Integrative Nutrition Circle of Life exercise.)

Spirituality

Lindsay Mack's Tarot for the Wild Soul July Tarot challenge

Creativity

Things of Bronze podcast
Blogging
Indiewebifying kimberlyhirsh.com

Finances

Reducing grocery spending via using my Soda Stream, freezing leftovers, and eating out of the pantry/fridge/freezer

Career

Writing culture online curriculum module for Project READY.
Reading the archives of YALSA’s The Hub ya lit blog and trying the books mentioned there

Education

Working on the Makerspaces section of my comprehensive literature review
Developing workflows that will allow me to chip away at the other sections while im still writing this one.

Health

Visiting my doctor for my quarterly follow-up
Focusing on hydration

Home Cooking

Cooking meals from the PCOS Diva Summer Meal Plan

Physical Activity

Swimming with the Total Immersion Effortless Endurance self-coaching course

Home Environment

Putting together a list of tasks for the handyman
Reading Unf*ck Your Habitat

Relationships

Celebrating my 9th wedding anniversary

Social Life

Planning birthday celebrations

Joy

Watching GLOW
Playing video games
Delighting in my kid's ever-improving communication skills

A Start-to-Finish Literature Review Workflow

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 12:39:00 -0400

Remember how I was going to read Chris Guillebeau’s Side Hustle and see if it had any lessons for treating grad school like a side hustle? It does! One of the things Chris recommends is developing workflows for your side hustle. I’ve been tweaking my literature review workflow for a while, but as I write up the current section and start planning the remaining sections, I’m finally feeling like I have a handle on things. Today I’m ready to share it with you, in hopes it will make your own writing go more smoothly.

Before we begin, please note that this process draws significantly on what I learned in Dr. Barbara Wildemuth’s course Research Issues & Questions (aka babydocs) and from Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega’s blog post about preparing for comprehensive qualifying exams.

Let’s get started!

Step 1: Identify a topic.

If you’re writing the literature review for a class, this might be assigned to you. If you are developing a research proposal, then your research question will inform what needs to be in your literature review. You might just be interested in something and want to learn more about it. Regardless of how you arrive at your topic, make it as specific as you possibly can. Here are some examples, based on actual literature reviews I’ve written, of general topics vs. specific topics.

General	Specific
Makerspaces	Makerspaces in school libraries
Archives	The role of archives in K-12 education
Cataloging	Describing and organizing information for children
Leadership	School librarians as leaders
Gaming	Tabletop roleplaying game library programs and teen identity development
Everyday life information needs	The everyday life information needs of young adults
Information retrieval	Designing information retrieval systems for children’s use
Scholarly communications	Library professionals as practitioner-scholars

Step 2: Set up a process for capturing literature once you identify it.

For the first literature review I ever did, back in 1999, I photocopied journal articles and used index cards to write down citations. Now, I much prefer some sort of reference manager with a browser plug-in. I’ve tried RefWorks, Zotero, Mendeley, and am now using Paperpile, which I learned about from John Martin. Find one you like and work it. I loved Zotero for a long time, but the most recent versions kept being finicky for me. Plus, Paperpile was designed to work with Google Docs and that’s where I write now, so it was a more natural choice.

Step 3: Set up reading storage and a reading environment.

You may have to poke around for tutorials on the best way to do this with your reference system. You may just prefer to print everything on paper and take notes that way. I use an Android tablet, Xodo Reader, and the “Starred Papers” feature in Paperpile to put papers in a Google Drive folder, download them for offline reading, and read and mark them up. If you’re using Zotero, definitely investigate Zotfile. However you go about it, you’re looking for a system that will let you easily find, read, and annotate your readings.

Step 4: Identify potential literature.

And we’re finally at the place where most advice on literature reviews begins!

Here are the things I do, learned in the aforementioned Research Issues & Questions class:

Consult with a trusted colleague (advisor, mentor, disciplinary expert, etc.)
Search databases. I start with those directly related to my discipline (library and information science), but because I often am working on youth services or school libraries questions, I tend to incorporate education databases as well. Most research databases have a wealth of features that go beyond the simple full-text search box that is the default. I highly recommend meeting with a librarian and learning more about these features. Subject headings, search modifiers that let you exclude unhelpful things, and especially search alerts will make your life much better. Search alerts keep you up to date on the latest literature related to your search terms. A librarian can also help you identify the best search terms to use to begin with. And you can probably learn all this stuff without meeting a librarian face-to-face: your university and public library probably offer some form of online research services via email or chat.
Search Google Scholar. This will turn up all kinds of stuff you may not have seen in the databases (especially if you're looking at open access journals). But it can also be super overwhelming. Be sure to look on the left side of the search results page and use any filters that seem helpful.
Follow citations backward. As you find useful readings, look at their reference lists.
Follow citations forward. My favorite way of doing this is to just type a reading's title in Google Scholar and click the "Cited by" link. But you can also check with a librarian to see if you have access to this feature in ISI Web of Science or Scopus. Those are both very powerful but not especially intuitive, so I would definitely get a librarian's help with them if I were you.

As you find citations using any of these sources, capture them either manually or automatically. Most reference managers have a browser extension that makes this a one-click process. Obviously, if you’re using paper, that’ll be a more manual process. Reference managers will often capture the PDF/full text for you, too. Definitely get a copy of the readings if they don’t.

Step 5: Identify and eliminate stuff that's outside the scope of your literature review.

Sometimes a title will look like a good fit, but then when you dig in to the abstract, you’ll realize it’s actually not relevant to your work at all. Quickly skim the abstracts for all the citations you’ve identified. If it doesn’t fit with your current work, set it aside. I usually keep a subfolder in my reference manager called “Don’t Use” and drop these in there. That way they’re not lost if I change my mind or expand my scope.

This process will help you decide if you’ve got the right scope, too. When I was first working on my literature review, I grabbed everything about makerspaces and learning that I could find. At this stage, I realized I’d never finish if I tried to use all of them, and decided to limit my scope to only those studies that look at making in library settings.

Step 6: Read, highlight, and take notes.

Oh hey we’re here! This part can be really fun or really tedious. I recommend using Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega’s AIC extraction method. Read the abstract, introduction, and conclusion. Look for the context and rationale for the study. Identify the research question. Find what you can about the methods, especially the setting, population of interest, sample size and selection methods, data collection methods, and data analysis methods. Then grab what you can about the findings. Do this quickly. Use highlighters, take notes, whatever works for you. I highlight and add notes directly in PDFs.

Step 7: Write synthetic notes.

Another recommendation of Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega’s methods. Write notes based just on your existing highlights and notes. This might just be one sentence, or it could be multiple paragraphs. It will depend on what you have time for, the depth you need to go into, and how useful the particular reading is. Make a note of whether you want to read the study more deeply later.

Step 8: Add each study to a master list.

I like Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega’s Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump.

Step 9: Create a concept map, grouping different readings by big themes.

I use bubbl.us, which I learned about from Dr. Summer Pennell, for this. Here’s what the one for my current lit review looks like (click it for full size):

You can also do this same process using index cards or pen and paper if you prefer.

Step 10: Create an outline.

There’s a ton of advice on the internet about this already, I’m sure. It’s worth noting that bubbl.us will actually create an outline for you if you want. I think you’ll still need to generate your own to get you ready for writing, but it can help you if you want a more linear visual once you’re done with your concept map.

Step 11: Write.

Get it out. Identify gaps. Find the places where your notes on a particular study don’t give you enough information, and go back and skim or read the middle of it. Make more detailed notes on that, perhaps writing a memo and then putting some of that in your paper draft. Leave yourself funny little comments like “MORE HERE” and “Not sure if this fits here.”

Step 12: Revise.

Fix the gaps. Add more details. Do whatever your weird idiosyncratic comments tell you remains to be done.

That’s how I do it. I’m really good at literature reviews. I don’t know how many other scholarly endeavors I’m good at, but I’ve got this one down cold, and now maybe you do, too.

#FSN2018

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 11:00:26 -0400

Falling down the #FSN2018 rabbit hole and it’s keeping me going right now.

Too much/not enough

Wed, 27 Jun 2018 20:38:17 -0400

Isn’t it odd how it’s possible to feel simultaneously that you are too much and not enough?

What Kimberly Wrote, through 06/27/18

Wed, 27 Jun 2018 16:41:11 -0400

I haven’t been keeping track daily like I hoped to, but this chunk of my literature review now has about 6.5 pages written. Also, I’m finding that I can genuinely often just copy my synthetic notes whole cloth into the paper, which is huge.

Patronus Fuel

Wed, 27 Jun 2018 15:38:18 -0400

At Lafayette Cemetery No 1

Sun, 24 Jun 2018 14:04:37 -0400

A Goth in New Orleans, Day 1

Sat, 23 Jun 2018 11:08:59 -0400

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“2592”] Embrace your cliches.[/caption]

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“3000”] Our hotel has an amazing view of the river. This does not do it justice.[/caption]

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“2250”] They’re giving out Magic: the Gathering cards at registration. Yes please![/caption]

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“2250”] The one thing I HAD to do besides give my poster presentation was go to Cafe Du Monde and get beignets. Done![/caption]

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“2250”] We rode the St. Charles Streetcar all the way to the end, through the Garden District. We passed one of Anne Rice’s houses.[/caption]

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“3000”] Canal Street at Sunset[/caption]

I married well.

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 20:15:28 -0400

Just had a very serious conversation with my husband about our future as immortals and what type of vampire I should get to sire me while I’m in New Orleans this weekend, so… I married well, is what I’m saying.

On the eve of falling in love with a new city

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 19:51:51 -0400

I’m going to New Orleans tomorrow for the American Library Association conference and I already know I’m going to love it there.

Birthday Party

Thu, 14 Jun 2018 17:46:34 -0400

Kiiiiind of want to host/play in an improv comedy jam for my birthday on July 14.

Toddler Parent Responsibilities

Wed, 13 Jun 2018 14:06:44 -0400

In the interest of helping myself recognize what things I do as the parent of a toddler, I’m making a list. I’m just thinking through a typical day and every task that occurs on that day, plus every task that has to happen to make sure that task can happen. I don’t do all of these things - W. does a lot of them. But somebody has to do them.

Here goes.

Changing diapers.
Purchasing diapering supplies: diapers, wipes, diaper cream, diaper pail, trash bags.
Researching diapering supplies.
Toilet training.
Purchasing toilet training supplies: toddler potty/toilet seat.
Researching toilet training processes.
Dressing.
Purchasing clothing and shoes.
Researching clothing and shoes: sizes, fabric types, cuts. (Ask a toddler parent about snaps vs. no snaps, overalls or no, and you'll see what I mean.)
Feeding.
Preparing food.
Purchasing food.
Meal planning.
Researching nutrition.
Playing at home.
Purchasing books and toys.
Researching books and toys.
Playing out in the world.
Identifying potential activities.
Researching potential activities.
Purchasing supplies for activities: sunscreen, bug spray, specialized clothing.
Packing supplies for activities.
Transportation.
Purchasing transportation supplies: primarily a car seat.
Researching car seats.
Entertaining.
Learning new songs.
Vetting media.
Soothing.
Discipline.
Researching soothing and discipline methods.
Bathing.
Purchasing supplies for bathing: soap, shampoo, toys, brushes, combs, cotton pads, cotton swabs.
Researching supplies for bathing.
Getting ready for bed.
Dental care.
Purchasing supplies for dental care: toothbrush, toothpaste.
Researching supplies for dental care.
Taking to the doctor.

All of these have to happen. And in addition to all of these, there’s usually a decision layer associated with each one: which food to eat, which clothes to wear (based on the weather or activity of the day), whether that fever merits a call to the doctor. There are several tasks that could be grouped, obviously: purchasing and researching different types of supplies happens again and again.

And most of these happen every day.

On radically reduced sleep.

Alongside all the normal responsibilities that come with being an adult.

And I wonder why I’m tired all the time.

Kids. They’re a lot of work. But they’re worth it.

Alternatives to "What do you do?" and "What are you going to do with that?"

Tue, 12 Jun 2018 15:01:55 -0400

It’s not that careers aren’t an important part of our identity, they just aren’t the only part.

When I took my first improv class a little over four years ago, I was careful on the first night of class to ask other people, “How do you spend your time besides coming to improv class?” I phrased it this way because I didn’t just want to know what people got paid to do; I wanted to know how they chose to spend their time.

The most common question I get about my doctoral program after “How long until you’re done?” is “What are you going to do with a PhD in information and library science?” I think a more interesting question is “What do you want to get out of a PhD in information and library science?” Because honestly, who knows what I’ll do? Independent of what I might like to do (and teasing that out is a whole process itself), obviously I’ll be at the mercy of market forces.

But if you ask me what I want to get out of it, I have a great answer:

I want to spend some time in a situation where my number one professional priority is acquainting myself with the evidence about what works in libraries. I want to understand qualitative research methods better. (This was really my #1 desire and I think I’ve done a really good job of working on this.) I want the opportunity to think deeply about what effective library services for youth look like and how they can facilitate exploring passions.

Isn’t that more interesting than “I mean, maybe teach future librarians? Or just be a better librarian myself?” I think so.

If you want to get to know people better than just these surface questions without getting too awkward and personal, here are some questions you might try:

What's fun for you right now?
What kind of expert are you?
What do you want to learn/try next?
What kind of people are you hoping to meet?

They’re good questions to ask yourself, too.

Now: June 2018

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 21:23:25 -0400

Spirituality

Slowly re-reading WTF Is Tarot?
Listening to the Self Service podcast

Creativity

Things of Bronze podcast
Blogging

Finances

Reducing grocery spending via using my Soda Stream, freezing leftovers, and eating out of the pantry/fridge/freezer

Career

Revising culturally sustaining pedagogy online curriculum module and writing other modules for Project READY.
Reading the archives of YALSA's The Hub ya lit blog and trying the books mentioned there

Education

Working on the Makerspaces section of my comprehensive literature review

Health, Home Cooking, Physical Activity

Focusing on water: drinking it, bathing in it, swimming in it

Home Environment

Putting together a list of tasks for the handyman

Relationships, Social Life, Joy

Reaching out when I feel isolated

What Kimberly Wrote, 06/11/18

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 16:52:53 -0400

Finished converting my concept map to an outline. Tomorrow: WRITING!

A visitor

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 08:31:52 -0400

This friend was sitting on my front porch welcome mat when I left for the chiropractor this morning. I was running a bit late but I had to take a picture. The Luna Moth is one of my personal symbolic animals.

This morning I had a dream that my house (which was, of course, the house I lived in as a teenager and not my current house) was falling apart - paint coming off the walls all over, the wall between a closet and a bathroom falling down (a wall that doesn’t exist - a closet that doesn’t exist) - the only room that was in tact was the family room, with its ridiculous/amazing striped scarlet pimpernel wallpaper (actual wallpaper still in the house) - and the bedroom, closet, and bathroom were full of moths. I was very anxious about all the moths until I saw a Luna moth placidly perched on a closet-bathroom wall and thought, “OH, that’s a SYMBOL, this is a DREAM, I don’t actually need to figure out how to describe what’s wrong with this house to a real contractor for repair” and felt an immense sense of relief.

So after all that, to find one right in my path this morning felt extra magical.

A blog post about everything.

Sun, 10 Jun 2018 21:17:10 -0400

This might get a little stream-of-consciousness. Consider yourself warned.

I went to a play today. It was Wakey Wakey, the last performance of the last show at Manbites Dog Theater’s physical performance space. I’ve always been sort of Manbites-adjacent; I remember when they had a space in a different part of town than they do now. I have been friends with or worked with many other people involved with them. The art they have made over the years sits in this beautiful space - a sort of off-Broadway space - that is not beholden to the commercial, but is art explicitly intended to inspire conversation, as opposed to the let’s-put-on-a-show vibe of many theatre projects (including all the ones I’ve ever produced). Being in that space - reading the program - and most especially smelling that small theatre smell of painted scenery - made me feel keenly how this is a piece of my life that I have let go - certainly since having my son, but in some sense extending even farther back - to when I began college almost 19 years ago.

And yet the theatre is in me.

Wakey Wakey is a good show for making you think about the parts of you that are with you and in you that maybe you’ve been neglecting.

I started to think about Sarah Ruhl, and her book 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write. I haven’t read it. I want to. I want to read everything Austin Kleon recommends on art and motherhood.

Last week I had a frightening dizzy spell. It started as I was going to sleep Tuesday night. I thought, “Probably I’m just tired. It’ll get better overnight.” It did not. Wednesday morning I was genuinely afraid to go downstairs. W. was out of town, so it was just me and toddler M. We walked across the hall into my home office. I popped him in front of the TV with some Daniel Tiger and ate some candy I had on hand. At the end of the Daniel Tiger episode, I felt better enough to venture downstairs. I called in the grandmas, and my mom came over so that I could engage in enough self-care to try and get better. I thought maybe I was having hypoglycemia, because I’d only eaten a scone and cheese for dinner. Then I remembered that my hormones were acting all wonky in a way that maybe was leading to anemia. I thought maybe the intense nursing that M. has desired for the past couple weeks was leaving me dehydrated. Over the course of the day, through the careful application of food, water, and caffeine, I got mostly better. Thursday I wasn’t dizzy anymore but I was exhausted. Friday and yesterday (Saturday), I was basically a lump for most of the day.

I interpreted this episode as my body telling me that it was time to contract. Time to replenish. My mom said to me, “Please don’t let yourself get more depleted,” and I thought, “Yes, that’s the word.”

I was the opposite of replete. I felt like a jack o’lantern after the emptying and before the carving and lighting up. I felt scraped out. I genuinely felt as though my life force had left my body in very physical ways.

Today I started to feel better. I’m beginning to get a handle on it.

&&&&&&&

I unsubscribed from all my newsletters with Unroll.me. It’ll be easy to add back the ones I miss.

I unsubscribed from all of my RSS feeds.

I unsubscribed from all of my podcasts except The Hilarious World of Depression and Self-Service.

I lay in bed reading novels and playing mobile games.

I decided to let the Self-Service podcast be my guide. And it led me to water. Literally. An early episode is called “Stay Hydrated, BB,” and I decided to let go of the idea of calling things in for the next year of my life except water. I’m calling in water: for drinking, for swimming in. For making magic.

I was listening to Cinderly’s Mermaid Podcast months ago (I definitely want to pick this one back up!) and in one episode the host visits the Weeki Wachee Springs mermaid camp. One of the experienced mermaids tells her, “The water is a teacher.”

I have held that thought in my mind ever since.

Water changes its shape to fill the vessel it is in. Water can be solid, liquid, or gas. Water can carry things. Water can erode things. Water water water water.

&&&&&&&

I wasn’t kidding when I called this a blog post about everything and threatened stream-of-consciousness, y’all.

Being a mother feels like being a piece of kintsugi. It shatters you and puts you back together. You are shinier and more beautiful than before. You are disconnected from yourself, but all the pieces of you are still there. It’s easy in the early days to think they’re gone, but they’re not.

&&&&&&&

Some months ago I told W. that I felt like I needed a side-hustle because my research assistantship doesn’t bring in a lot of money, but that I simultaneously was struggling to do what I have to do now so I couldn’t really take on more.

“You’re a full-time mom and a full-time grad student,” he told me. “I would encourage you to consider one of those to be your side hustle.”

It was only this week that I realized mom is the primary gig and grad student is the side-hustle.

I’m feeling pretty silly right about now.

I kind of want to read Chris Guillebeau’s book Side Hustle and see if I can apply anything from it to how I organize my schoolwork. I told myself that I can buy it once I finish turning my concept map for the current chunk of my comps lit review into an outline.

&&&&&&&

It’s important to recognize that when you are caring for loved ones, even minimally, it’s going to impact what you can do elsewhere. It’s important to give ourselves grace and permission both to take a break from caring for others in order to care for ourselves, and to accept that the rest of life will move slowly when care is our number one priority.

&&&&&&&

Back in April, I did a lot of massaging of my online identity to make it fit a job I was applying for. I did want that job, and I do want to be the person who would get that job… but I didn’t want that job right now, not really, and I didn’t get the job, so that worked out well. (It’s the kind of job that isn’t available very often, in that it’s one particular position in one very specific organization, so I decided to go for it even though I wasn’t really in the place where I was ready for it, because I don’t know how long it’ll be before another chance comes along.)

Anyway, the massaging I did of my online identity has left me feeling a little dissatisfied, a little inauthentic, so I will probably be doing some reconfiguring of my bio everywhere, and my pictures and everything, to feel more like myself again.

&&&&&&&

I’ve recently started to allow myself to call myself a writer.

I wonder if I’ll ever be comfortable calling myself an artist?

&&&&&&&

How are you doing?

If you don’t feel like replying here, you can drop me an email. kimberly at this domain name right here. Love you, Internet!

Perpetual Mood:

What Kimberly Wrote, 6/4/2018

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 16:27:49 -0400

Today I added 11 studies to my concept map for my makerspaces literature review.

Tomorrow: finishing my outline.

And then, I write.

I will write a bad first draft. And it will be good to have written.

Make a Note

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 16:24:24 -0400

I’ve gotten into the habit of saving links in Feedly or Pocket with every intention of writing a blog post about them later. Inevitably, when I return to them, I have no idea how I wanted to respond. I need to start taking notes.

2018 So Far

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 12:19:28 -0400

I was listening to Lindsay Mack’s Tarot for the Wild Soul monthly medicine podcast for June, and she suggested that this is a great time for review because we’re coming up on being halfway through the year. Then I read the Astrostyle horoscope for my sun sign, Cancer, that said it was a good time to think about what I want to bring into the next year of my life, since my birthday is coming up soon. (About six weeks to go!) These are both great examples of the value I find in woo woo stuff - an invitation to consider what’s already within me and set my intentions for moving forward. I embraced the synchronicity of these two suggestions and decided to look back over the year so far, and then start making plans for what I want to bring into my 38th year on earth. (I’ll be turning 37. My dad will correct me if I call it my 37th year, since I had a whole year here before my first birthday, so.)

Before we make plans for the future, though, let’s look to the past!

I have a bad habit of telling myself nasty narratives about my own value: specifically, of thinking I don’t do anything. Life as a hybrid stay-at-home-mom/grad-student-working-on-comps is weird. You don’t go into an office. You don’t go to class. You theoretically set your own schedule. You spend a lot of time doing what your kid thinks sounds fun. You need to be ready to be interrupted at every moment of your day, yes even when someone else is taking care of the kid. It’s easy for me to let this unstructured amorphous blob of a life I have lead me to believe that I just sit around all day goofing off on the internet. I’m wrong; I know I’m wrong; but it helps to have documented evidence to remind me I’m wrong.

So here was my review process: I sat down with my bullet journals for 2018 and made a list of any metric I thought was interesting. I’ll be sharing those metrics here along with some additional notes. Categories are ad hoc.

School/Work

Submitted paper proposals: 2. One conference paper, one contest paper. The conference paper was rejected but I received some valuable feedback, Reviewer 2 Syndrome notwithstanding. (And honestly, Reviewer 1 was pretty harsh, too. Reviewer 3 was very encouraging, though.)

Submitted IRB applications: 1. Approved!

Comps prepared: See my earlier posts for notes on this.

Professional development modules drafted: 1.

Presentations given: 3.

Webinars attended: 1.

Job applications completed: 1. I’m not on the market, but there are a very few (okay maybe 2?) jobs that I would jump at regardless of my life circumstances, and one of them came open recently. I applied. I haven’t heard back beyond a confirmation that they received my application, but I’m not devastated because, as I mentioned, I’m not actually on the market.

Parenting/Relationships

Well Child Appointments: 1. And really, anyone who takes a toddler to the doctor should get a gold star, because they’re squirmy af and getting a weight/height measurement is always tricky. But my kid is done with vaccines until he goes to school!

Trips Taken: 3. At the end of February, M. and I accompanied W. on a work trip to Knoxville, TN. At the beginning of April, I took a whirlwind tour with my sibs, bro-in-law, and M., stopping in Savannah and Melbourne on our way to celebrate my grandmother’s life (she died in November at age 98) and then stopping in Melbourne and Atlanta on the way back (spending a couple of nights in Melbourne with my other grandmother, and a couple of hours in Atlanta with one of my bffs - remember that a best friend is a tier, not a person). WOOF. And then at the beginning of May, we took a much briefer trip just down the road to Greensboro, again accompanying W. for work travel. We went to the Children’s Museum and the Science Center. FUN!

Adjusted to new childcare situation. This has been huge. It’s taken a lot longer than I anticipated, but I think we’re hitting our stride. M. and I became members at Nido, a coworking space/Montessori school community. In the first few weeks, he was so demanding that they were devoting one teacher exclusively to him, which obviously was not sustainable. He threw a tantrum every time I left him. He would go on nap strike rather than sleep there. We were both stressed out by the whole thing. Now, he happily waves bye bye to me and takes two hour naps there. It’s been a long transformation, but what a big one! Next step: me leveraging my time there to get a lot more work done.

Health crises managed: 2. M. woke up with a slightly swollen eye one morning and by the next morning it was swollen shut. We had to figure out how to get him to take antibiotics. It turns out the least sneaky way is the most effective: squirt them inside his cheek and exhort him to swallow. Also, my dad had a pretty major surgery (it went well!) and I didn’t contribute much, but it still had a pretty big impact on how the day-to-day went for us during his recovery.

Creativity

Podcast episodes recorded: 3

Podcast episodes edited: 2

Journal pages filled: About 300. It’s worth noting that these are bullet journal pages, so this is a lot more lists and brain dumps and a lot less long-form writing than you might think. And a lot of this is notes that overlap with the comps preparation mentioned above. Still. 300 pages. It’s not nothing.

Blog posts made: 167 (including imports of old Instagram photos)

Doodles made: 2 so far. Keep up on Instagram for more.

RPGs played: I’ve got two running. One is face-to-face and one is via Slack.

Consumption

Books read: 9 (Including a couple of re-reads)

Haven’t tracked podcasts listened to or TV watched or articles read, but: a lot.

Adulting

Crises managed/in progress: 3. Got into a car accident (my fault). My wallet was stolen. There’s a big deal leak in our house, apparently from a flaw in our waterproofing somewhere (i.e. when it rains, we get water damage). I haven’t actually finished handling any of these, but I’m in the process on all of them and have taken steps.

In conclusion...

That’s a lot more than nothing, am I right? I should probably cut myself a break and stop thinking that I’m someone who takes up space but does not help. And I didn’t even mention all the invisible labor of parenting and adulting: meal planning, food prep, ordering diapers, clothes shopping, noticing which things we run out of and setting up Amazon subscriptions for them, figuring out developmentally appropriate activities, deciding how to spend the day… (I should note that I have a partner who recognizes a lot of this labor, rendering it visible which thank goodness, and who does a bunch of invisible parenting/adulting labor himself - laundry, dishes, yardwork, sweeping, mopping, reading to the kid while I make a smoothie - thank him. So when I call it invisible I’m referring as much to my own tendency to devalue this work as anything else.) Plus basic self-care, which I occasionally manage: showering, brushing my hair, brushing my teeth, washing my face, putting on clothes, remembering to eat, remembering to take my medicine and supplements…

Honestly, we all do a lot, don’t we? Just to live in this world?

Let’s give ourselves some credit. I will if you will! (I will even if you won’t. But I hope you will.)

Anne McCaffrey

Fri, 25 May 2018 14:37:24 -0400

I don’t know, do y’all feel like Anne McCaffrey liked dragons?

Ira Glass's Commencement Speech at the Columbia Journalism School

Fri, 25 May 2018 07:27:09 -0400

I love commencement speeches as a genre. I wasn’t remotely inspired by the one at my own college graduation and when I watch or read others, I like to pretend they’re for me Because isn’t every day the commencement of something?

I read Ira Glass’s rather than listening to it, and found myself highlighting a lot so I thought I’d share my favorite bits here.

You just have to get in there and make stuff and try things and push yourself hard and that’s the only way to find your way.

Glass is talking here about what to do when you’re lost and can’t figure out what you want to be doing. Multipotentialites can get paralyzed by possibilities. Perfectionists sometimes think they have to fully learn to do a thing before they can actually do it. But Glass has words that multipotentialite perfectionists (have you figured out yet that I am one?) need to hear: you learn the thing by doing it, and to find out if the thing is in fact one of your things, you have to pick it and try it.

It can take a long time to be as good as you want to be. And be kind to yourself, during that period. And work hard.

I ran into this a lot in improv, but I think it happens everywhere: you see the work of experts and are frustrated that your novice work isn’t good enough. I would watch people who had been improvising for 10, 11, 12, more years, and they would do what looked like magic, and I would think, “Why can’t I do that?” I started thinking this way when I had only been doing it for a year and a half. (Ira Glass has a great quote that expands on this idea.)

...the more idealistic your mission, the more cunning you have to employ to get people to engage with what you have to say.

This resonated with me immensely.

Everything will be better if you’re out for your own pleasure. Noticing what you’re actually truly interested in ... and curious about ... and making your work about that.

One of my core beliefs is that people do their best work when they care. Work you don’t care about won’t be good, no matter how important or meaningful it might be more generally. Find what lights you up right now (because it might change over time) and use that to change the world. And when it stops lighting you up, move on to the next thing.

Don’t wait. Make the stuff you want to make now. No excuses. Don’t wait for the perfect job or whatever. Don’t wait. Don’t wait. Don’t wait... Don’t wait. You have everything you need. Don’t wait.

Don’t wait.

#edcampcode

Thu, 24 May 2018 14:07:56 -0400

Who’s going to #edcampcode in Raleigh on June 20? @nathan_stevens?

What Kimberly Wrote, 5/21 - 5/23, 2018

Wed, 23 May 2018 16:33:02 -0400

I’m working on the concept map for my makerspaces in libraries lit review. Nice progress so far and I’m a little less than half done.

What Kimberly Wrote, May 20, 2018

Sun, 20 May 2018 14:43:50 -0400

Surprise work session today! Took advantage of bonus nanny time to get a couple’s work session in at the coffee shop near my house. Get you a partner who will sit across a table in silence from you while you both have your laptops out and secretly look at pictures of the kid you have together after you use a little work break to upload them to your shared album.

On to the reporting!

I reviewed and wrote synthetic notes for three studies today. Call that 600 words.

Then I transcribed synthetic notes for twelve studies from my notebook into Google Drive.

NEXT STEPS: revisiting my conceptual synthesis spreadsheet and adding new details to it. Making a new concept map. Revising my outline. Getting this chunk of my comps package drafted.

📺 She-Ra and Girl Culture

Sat, 19 May 2018 12:41:00 -0400

When I learned Noelle Stevenson was showrunning a She-Ra reboot, I was psyched. I haven’t read Lumberjanes or Nimona yet, but her Avengers fan art and D&D tweets are top-notch. I was super into She-Ra as a kid, and I love that this new one is called She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.

I’m on board with modern girl culture, at least as it’s manifesting in animation and comic books. I was talking to another parent recently who said she’d been afraid to let her daughter watch My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, but was pleasantly surprised by how feminist it was.

I recommended she look into DC SuperHero Girls and see if she would feel okay sharing that with her daughter, because I think it has a similar vibe.

And I need to read the “new” Jem and the Holograms comic, I know.

I love that the stories I’m seeing about girls and young women in these media place the girls at the center and let them have their own adventures. Romance tends to be sidelined. The girls are dealing with identity development and relationship building. Each of these properties has characters who are so different from each other in their interests and personalities. We’re seeing that there’s no one right way to be a girl or a woman, and I love that. The other thing I love is how they take colors and art styles that are coded feminine and use them to communicate that you don’t have to choose between strength and femininity, and that there are many different ways to be strong.

I’m sure none of them is perfect and I know that they are vehicles for selling toys, but I’m still excited about them.

I would buy that She-Ra poster and hang it on my office wall.

(By the way, DC SuperHero Girls creator Shea Fontana is going to be at ALA Annual and you can bet I’ll be at her session. DC SuperHero Girls is an incredibly accessible way to get to know the DC universe and figure out which characters appeal to you. I say this as an inveterate Marvel loyalist.)

What Kimberly Wrote, August 2015 - May 16, 2018

Thu, 17 May 2018 14:18:00 -0400

As promised yesterday, I’m going to start tracking my daily work productivity, mostly to help me realize that yes, I’ve actually done stuff. First we’ll get a macro picture of everything I’ve written as part of my doctoral program, and then I’ll get into the work I’ve been doing for my comprehensive exams, where I will detail more than just words written.

I have written the following items as part of my doctoral coursework:

The Maker Movement and Learning in School Libraries. Literature review. 8,000 words.
The Role of Archives and Special Collections in K-12 Instruction. Literature review. 7,000 words.
Organizing and Describing Information for Children. Literature review. 5,000 words.
School Librarians as Leaders. Literature review. 5,000 words.
Special Education Training for Preservice School Librarians. Original research. 4,000 words.
"A Real Fun Scene": Learning Improvisational Comedy in Community. Original research. 7,000 words.
Everyday Life Information Needs of Adolescents. Literature review. 4,000 words.
Designing Information Retrieval Interfaces for Children's Use. Literature review. 5,000 words.
Libraries, Tabletop Roleplaying Games, and Teen Identity Development. Literature review. 6,000 words.
Cultivating a Community of School Librarian Scholars. Literature review. 6,000 words.
Unlocking the Door to Adventure: Cultivating a Community of Practice in Improvisational Comedy (and related assignments). Original research. 10,000 words.
Expansive Learning, Third Spaces, and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (and related assignments). Literature review. 5,000 words.
Learning from Library Escape Games. Research proposal. 1,000 words.
Decolonizing and Participatory Research with Youth in Library Makerspaces (and related assignments). Literature review. 7,000 words.
Possible Selves. Literature review. 6,000 words.
Teen Participation in Library Makerspaces: A Grounded Theory Study. Research proposal. 5,000 words.
Youth-driven School Library Services. Research proposal. 1,000 words.
Racial Equity Initiatives in North Carolina's Public Schools. White paper. (Co-authored.) 6,000 words.

In the two and a half years of my coursework, I wrote 98,000 words.

Not bad. (Please don’t ask how many I published.)

Now, let’s talk about the work I’ve done on the comprehensive examination literature review package.

I identified 179 studies that were potentially of interest. Of those, I have identified as useful, read, and reviewed 35 studies. I have written synthetic notes for 33 of those; at an average of about 250 words each, that’s a total of 8,000 words. This is a marked drop-off in word count output. There are several non-writing reasons for that. I’m going to ramp it back up in the near future.

So that’s where I was as of yesterday. Look for another update after today’s work session!

From Wil Wheaton:

Wed, 16 May 2018 16:54:00 -0400

I love reading about other creative people’s processes, especially writers, so this look inside Wil Wheaton’s head as he revises his first novel is my kind of deal. (Add on top of that my near lifelong crush on Wil Wheaton and just… yeah.)

And it inspired me. I’ve been chipping away at my comprehensive examination package, a giant literature review and a milestone in my doctoral progress, slowly but slowly for a very long time. I started while I was still technically doing coursework in the fall, and spent the whole spring semester on it as well. And I expect to be done in December, because I expect it to take me as long as they will allow. (#thanksparenthood #gradstudentmomlife) But I have really been struggling to feel like I made progress.

So starting tomorrow, I’ll take a page from Wil’s book and actively blog each day about the progress I’ve made. I’ll begin with a report about my progress since August, and then add a little bit each day. I’ll be dropping all that stuff in a category called “What Kimberly Wrote” (nothing there yet). It will be everything that counts as part of my writing process, not just getting words out.

Crocheted Bobbles

Tue, 15 May 2018 12:06:10 -0400

Finally taking on Kim Werker’s Craftsy class, Next Steps in Crochet. Here is my little swatch with a row of bobble stitches.

#libfive

Mon, 14 May 2018 16:47:01 -0400

I love the amazing work that the students at Mount Vernon Middle School are doing to educate school librarians on how they can make their libraries more equitable. I can’t wait to learn more about the #libfive!

The Fair Garden and the Swarm of Beasts

Mon, 14 May 2018 16:20:45 -0400

Finished 05/09/2018.

This is a (perhaps the) foundational work on young adult library services. I disagree with Edwards in a few places, mostly due to her being a product of her time. Writing before the advent of true YA literature as she did, she tends to consider books for teens as a step on the way to more mature reading, rather than an end in itself. And she also suggests that librarians shouldn’t sponsor clubs that aren’t book clubs. (She doesn’t look too highly on book clubs themselves, either.) Whereas I think there is a wide range of activities that a teen librarian can sponsor and still be within the library mission. Still, Edwards has a lot of good to offer even those of us who already have a degree in and experience with YA librarianship. Some choice gems:

- You've got to read books if you're going to recommend them to teens. And you can do this by squeezing in reading in all those little moments. For myself, I'm trying to read at all the times when, for the past several years (since I got a smart phone, basically) that I would check my phone. Bye, Facebook. Hello, Stuff for the Teenage and the things you recommend.
- There are some basic tools that it's easy to forget about in our tech-saturated world, but that doesn't mean they're not valuable: having teens recommend books to each other, giving book talks, making book lists.
- Treat teens with respect.
- Remember that in a few years, teens will be voters.
- Meet readers where they are.
- Be friendly and helpful.
- Librarians are not police officers.
- Librarians need to get out of the library and connect with the community.
- Many librarians are in the business of customer service, not technical service.
- Treat your patrons as guests at a party.
- Focus on people rather than systems.

Thinking of you on Mother's Day

Sun, 13 May 2018 17:47:46 -0400

Art by Mari Andrew.

If you are a person for whom Mother’s Day is less fraught, perhaps you spent it like I did: claiming “me-time” by buying flowers and cards at Target while your partner played with the kid at home, hosting a gluten free brunch for your mother and mother in law, getting a little tipsy on mimosas, and napping.

And then getting up with every intention of taking a shower and realizing that no, you need even more napping.

As my kid would say, “Night night!”

How to Learn Anything

Fri, 11 May 2018 11:47:49 -0400

A couple of months ago, I asked my friends, “What do I know or can I do that you wish I would teach you?” Learning is my favorite thing, and I wanted to find out what my friends thought I could do already that I could help them learn. I found out that there wasn’t just one thing, but instead a sort of class of things. They said how to podcast, how to knit, how to learn another language, how to do improv, and how to sing. Those are all things I can do and they all have one thing in common: each of them goes beyond being a simple skill, and instead encompasses a whole domain of knowledge.

There are a lot of blog posts and articles that will give you tips for learning anything, but they tend to take the approach of learning how to do a particular skill. What I am good at, and what I’m going to teach you how to do in this blog post, is engaging with a knowledge domain, which encompasses finding relevant resources and using them both to learn a suite of related skills and to build a network of other people in the same knowledge domain with whom you can learn and grow (and who might even become some of your best friends).

Here are all the different techniques I use when I decide to get obsessed with something new.

Ask a friend. Do you already know someone who is really into the thing you want to learn? I don’t like to explicitly ask folks to teach me these things, but I am comfortable saying to a friend, “Hey. You’re into [x]. What are the top five resources you use to keep up with it?” This is a good way to find out the best places to go, without putting an ongoing burden on your friend.

Read a book. I like books because they are great places to get a lot of information in an organized way. They can take you step-by-step through a process. They can connect you with other resources to try next. They are portable. You don’t need headphones to enjoy them. I have used this book as I’ve learned podcasting, and even though it’s ten years old, most of the information in it is still pretty valuable. To find a book relevant to your interests, you can Google the topic and add “book” to your search, like so. You can search or navigate the categories at Amazon or GoodReads. You can use WorldCat to find relevant books in libraries near you. Or you can read on for more tips…

Read a blog or online magazine. Blogs are great because they can keep you up to date on the newest happenings in a domain. They often have rich archives you can read through, organize related blog posts into series, and have comments sections where you can meet other people who are interested in the same thing. When I want to know the latest happenings in the world of web development, I visit A List Apart and Smashing Magazine. As with books, the easiest way to find new blogs is to search for your topic and add “blog” to your search. You can also try browsing through an aggregator like AllTop or use the Discover features at popular blogging services like WordPress, Medium, or Tumblr.

Subscribe to a newsletter. E-mail newsletters are experiencing a renaissance, and I’m excited about it. I subscribe to several podcasting newsletters, and I always have a sense of what is hot or new in the podcasting world because of it. One of the best things about these is that once you subscribe, you never have to come back. They just keep popping into your inbox and are there whenever you are ready for them. Again, an easy way to find these is by searching for the topic plus “newsletter.” The newsletter publishing service Revue also offers a gallery you can browse to find newsletters that might interest you.

Watch a video. YouTube is the most obvious choice for this, but it’s not the only one. There’s Vimeo. And, of course, your public, school, or academic library may have subscriptions to video services that you can access for free to find things that aren’t available on the open web. I honestly don’t know how anyone parented before YouTube. When my son was a newborn, I used a YouTube video to learn how to swaddle him. It was immensely valuable.

Join a forum. There are many specialized forums for various areas of interest. Just like with books and blogs, a search for the topic plus the word “forum” should get you where you need to go. I did that “ask a friend” thing when I wanted to get into mermaiding, and my friend Lareina Ladyfish pointed me to MerNetwork, which has a resource page that then points to several valuable threads.

Use social networking services. Already spending a ton of time on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram? Why not turn that into learning time? Use hashtags to find people talking about your topic. Look for relevant Facebook groups and Twitter chats.

Take a class in person. It feels obvious, but it’s worth mentioning. This is how I learned to do improv, and there are some things where this is the way to go. In person, you’ll get to practice the thing you want to do with immediate feedback from a dedicated teacher. The easiest way to find these is to search for the thing you want to do, plus “class” and the name of your city. (For example, “aerial silks class durham nc.”)

Take a class online. For some things, it’s easier to learn on your own time. Platforms like Craftsy, CreativeLive, and Skillshare let you consume instructional content on-demand but also offer an environment where you can converse with other learners and receive feedback from the instructors who developed the course. This is how I learned to knit. The nice thing about many of these is that once you purchase a course, you can revisit it. Which I will definitely need to do with knitting, because like Liz Lemon, every two years I take up knitting for… a week.

Find an organization, meetup, or conference. In some cases, the best way to learn a thing is to just jump in and do it, even if you don’t feel ready. To do that, you might find an organization or event that is dedicated to it, like a community theater group, a ukelele jam, or a makerspace. You can find all kinds of groups at Meetup.com. You can also really immerse yourself by going to a multiday conference or convention. Just search for your topic with “conference” or “convention.” I went to Cosplay America this year, even though it would be generous to describe me as even a casual cosplayer, but I learned a lot that will serve me well when I really dig into cosplay. (Which I will.)

Find a mentor. This might be easier to do once you’ve tried one of the other options and met some people, but there are some people who reach out to strangers via Twitter or similar and ask them to be their mentor with some success. For tips on how to do that, read Never Eat Alone. I tend to obtain my mentors through more traditional means. A mentor doesn’t even have to know they’re your mentor, though; you can just watch and learn from them. But if you’re lucky, you might find out that they were intentionally mentoring you all along.

And finally...

Ask a librarian. For many librarians, helping people find the resources they need to learn what they want to learn is explicitly part of their job description. If you’ve exhausted all those possibilities above, or you’re overwhelmed by all those possibilities above, and you’re not sure where to start, find a librarian. Tell her what you want to learn. Ask him where you can find the best resources. Explain to them what specifically about doing this new thing excites you. Don’t know where to find a librarian? If you want to actually meet one, face to face, you should probably find a local library. If you’re shy about that, you might be able to find a chat reference librarian who will meet your needs or you can ask a librarian at the Library of Congress.

Did you find this helpful? Be sure to subscribe or follow me for more like it!

Podcast Movement 28 Day Podcast Challenge

Thu, 10 May 2018 11:54:56 -0400

I’m participating in a 28 Day podcast challenge with Podcast Movement through the end of this month. I’ve already had several Things of Bronze guests give me feedback on my first episode, but I’m sharing with you, the internet, that I’m doing this challenge so you can hold me accountable. Feel free to check in with me throughout the month to see how it’s going. (Sidenote: Podcast Movement is a conference that offers childcare. Libraryland, we should follow their fine example.)

Reply to Greg McVerry

Thu, 10 May 2018 07:00:17 -0400

With respect to standardized markup around online courses, are you familiar with lrmi.dublincore.org ? I don’t think it’s exactly what you are looking to create, but it may be relevant to your interests.

The Librarians Who Moonlight as Artists: A Roundtable Discussion

Wed, 09 May 2018 21:15:45 -0400

Occasionally, Google gets it right when it suggests articles for me, and all of its creepy data mining was very successful when it recommended this to me. Librarians who are committed to doing good work but also make art? Hello, my people.

Today I finished reading The Fair Garden and the Swarm of Beasts, a foundational text on young adult librarianship written by Margaret A. Edwards, the fairy godmother of YA (more on that in another post), and she suggests that in addition to doing their regular work and making plenty of time to read, librarians must have another interest: gardening, amateur theatrics, something. And here these librarians are doing that very thing

It’s interesting to me that none of them are performers, and that none of them serve children. I suspect many youth services librarians are musicians, dancers, actors, or comedians. (I’m all of these!) I would love to talk to youth services librarians about their art and its relationship to their work

Can you recommend anybody?

Obligatory Voting Selfie, 5/8/18 Primary

Tue, 08 May 2018 18:12:45 -0400

🔖🎭🎵 Hear Aaron Tveit’s ‘Come What May’ Before Moulin Rouge! Musical Premieres in Boston

Sun, 06 May 2018 22:42:00 -0400

I cried a little watching this. I adore Moulin Rouge. It shaped my aesthetic more than anything had since Beetlejuice. I saw it with W. It came out when we had been together about three years and were in that phase of our relationship that clingy homebodies like me love: early deep familiarity. There are many other beautiful phases of a romance (in my experience, there’s nothing like watching your partner parent to make you fall in love all over again), but I have an extra soft spot for that one, and Moulin Rouge as a whole and “Come What May” in particular will always hold a wistful beauty for me. Cost means I’ll wait for this one to go on tour but I am so looking forward to a soundtrack full of Broadway stars singing these songs.

This is what a happy birthday looks like.

Sat, 05 May 2018 22:57:47 -0400

Doing My Part to Fix the Internet: A Follow-up

Sat, 05 May 2018 19:04:50 -0400

A little over a year ago, I wrote about how a post by Vicki Boykis and a comment by Chris Aldrich had inspired me to do my part to fix the internet. Since that time, I’ve worked hard to get my WordPress site set up so that I can write content here, send it out to other places where people who want to follow me can see it, and get their responses here. I have, for the past six weeks or so, really succeeded at Vicki’s first mandate:

...write your own blog on your own platform.

In that original post, I talked some about her other suggestions, but I haven't followed through as successfully on those. I think I'm going to take on her second one next:

Share good content.

There are several things I'm implementing to help me do that. With respect to sharing in WordPress on mobile with Android, Chris has generously shared one way to do that. I have tried it, and while it works, I'm now content to simply copy and paste a URL from the thing I'm sharing into the relevant field in my WordPress post editor. I keep my New Post page bookmarked, and I'm good to go. (My current setup is enabled by the Post Kinds plugin and made easier by the External URL Featured Image plugin, both of which I am aware of thanks to Chris.)

But of course, to share good content, I also need to consume good content. I do this by following blogs and subscribing to newsletters. I use Feedly for subscribing to blogs and Pocket for saving articles linked from newsletters for later reading. (Chris has written a great post about another WordPress plugin, PressForward, that can replace both of these services, but my current web hosting plan doesn’t give me the power I need to use it for the amount of content I’m taking in.)

I’m working on a following page to share what blogs and newsletters I’m subscribing to. (I have one but it isn’t displaying like I want it to, so it’s in draft mode until I figure it out.)

But I want to fix the internet in other ways, too, which is why I’m going to dust off my recollections of HTML5 and CSS3, learn PHP, and dig into WordPress so I can do things like build my own themes and create plugins that give WordPress the functionality I’m missing from it.

Would you like to join me in fixing the internet?

#MomLife Text Adventure

Fri, 04 May 2018 14:26:23 -0400

You have 40 minutes before your childcare ends. Do you:

A) ? take a shower

B) ? take a nap

C) ? take a bath and ? read

D)? put away clean laundry

E) ?start a new load of laundry

F) ? watch TV?

The 57 Bus

Wed, 02 May 2018 18:02:14 -0400

Reading this book in the car while the toddler naps. I started this book on Monday. It’s a very engaging read. It uses second person effectively to pop the reader right into the middle action. It includes what seems to me to be a straightforward and sensitive handling of gender identity, especially non-binary gender identity. Not finished yet, but so far, highly recommended.

Healing PCOS

Tue, 01 May 2018 07:51:03 -0400

I’ve been awaiting this book since it was announced. Now it’s here and I’m going to devour it! I’ve neglected true self-care most of my life. In the months before I got pregnant, I was finally taking better care of myself. But since M. was born, I have once again let it slide. I’ve claimed it in little ways here and there, but it’s time to devote myself to it more fully for a while. I’m doing the prep work now and starting the actual 21-day program May 14. Let me know if you want to join me and we can do daily check-ins. (If there’s a bunch of us, we can even maybe do a GroupMe!) #pcosdiva #pcos #bookstagram #amreading

Rupert Giles, Actual School Librarian

Sun, 29 Apr 2018 17:28:57 -0400

Probably going to write a series of fics in which Giles just has to do normal school librarian stuff.

Epawnine and Clawsette

Sun, 29 Apr 2018 11:56:34 -0400

Thanks to Saturday Night Live’s Lobster Les Mis, Clawsette and Epawnine are now in the running for future cat names. (Meowrius is also a possibility.)

The Joy and Sorrow of Rereading Holt’s "How Children Learn"

Sat, 28 Apr 2018 23:27:27 -0400

How Children Learn by John Holt

Marked to-read 04/28/18.

PRE ORDER "Roll Like a Girl" Enamel Pins (ships Late June/ Early July)

Sat, 28 Apr 2018 10:33:32 -0400

If you got me one of these, it would arrive just in time for my birthday in mid-July! I like the teal one. $12

Internet Memories, 1993

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 13:43:00 -0400

I’ve been on the Internet for a quarter of a century. I think I want to write a big, full memoir on the subject, but for now I’m just going to make some notes.

I got my first email address in 1993. I was in seventh grade. My dad set it up on a public access server at the university where he worked. I don’t know why I was so excited to have it, because nobody else I knew had an email address. But I was sure that email would mitigate the loneliness I felt. I had a loving family and excellent friends. I had basically the best middle school experience a person could hope for. But I still felt this need for more connection, and I thought this tool would get the job done.

I signed my crush’s yearbook with my email address. We went to different schools for eighth grade, because of redistricting, or because I moved. (They both happened at the same time.) He never emailed me.

I don’t think I got much out of that email address until I signed up for listservs.

But that’s a story about 1995.

How to repay us

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 07:43:17 -0400

I love this so much.

Percolating Projects, April 2018

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 22:16:52 -0400

Spirituality

Daily tarot card pull as a means of connecting with my intuition

Creativity

Things of Bronze podcast
Compiling a YouTube playlist of comedy sketches that epitomize my comedic sensibility
Developing a concept for a geeky variety show
A memoir about adolescence/early adulthood in the early days of the World Wide Web
Something for the 10th anniversary of Doctor Horrible
Daily blogging
Indiewebifying kimberlyhirsh.com

Finances

Reducing grocery spending via using my Soda Stream, freezing leftovers, and eating out of the pantry/fridge/freezer

Career

Writing culturally sustaining pedagogy online curriculum module for Project READY.
Steeping myself in the world of YA librarianship

Education

Working on the Makerspaces section of my comprehensive literature review

Health, Home Cooking

Eagerly awaiting Healing PCOS

Physical Activity

Resuming walks with my family
Swimming with the Total Immersion Effortless Endurance self-coaching course

Home Environment

Putting together a list of tasks for the handyman
Cleaning out the upstairs linen closet as part of packing and purging in anticipation of putting our house on the market

Relationships

Treating Will to a birthday surprise
All the parenting: deciding how and when to potty train, buying springtime clothes, selecting toddler tableware

Social Life

Figuring out when to schedule game nights
Planning Google Hangouts

Joy

Continuing to have a super cute kid with an excellent giggle

Galatea Kent

Wed, 25 Apr 2018 10:24:44 -0400

What, you DON’T have a bunch of Harry Potter role-playing names just lying around?

PopSugar Stole Influencers’ Instagrams — Along With Their Profits

Wed, 25 Apr 2018 07:06:44 -0400

This has me thinking about the dangers of algorithms and the role of social media silos in the blogging economy. I have been watching hobby blogs become businesses for about 15 years. Affiliate links have always been one of the top ways to monetize a blog or website, but I think social media has changed how that traffic moves. (I haven’t paid as close attention to this sphere in the past 5 years or so but I’m sort of always a little bit aware of it.)

I’m thinking about the relationship between this phenomenon and the IndieWeb, of course. The thing is that all of the bloggers quoted in the article have their own domain names and seem to run their own independent blogs, but clearly get a lot of traffic from Instagram. Publishing on your own site and syndicating on Instagram wouldn’t protect you from this kind of content scraping. The way this affiliate economy seems to work, telling these creators to just wean themselves off Instagram seems like telling them to stop having their primary source of income.

If I were in a position to give them advice (as, say, a librarian whose job it is to advise young people on smart practices for information creation and dissemination), I’m not sure what advice I’d give them.

This has illuminated for me several issues I want to research/revisit, though:

The current state of affiliate marketing
The difference between a blogger and an influencer
The relationship between an influencer's blog and social media presence (Is their content being syndicated or do they publish different things in each venue?)

My friend who is a fifth grade teacher told me that all her students are already YouTubers and expect to monetize their content and support themselves full-time. Once of the bloggers quoted in this Racked article, Nita of Next with Nita, finished law school and then moved to LA “to pursue [her] dream as an influencer.” (She has over 210,000 Instagram followers. I can’t imagine telling her to just quit Instagram would be good advice.)

Those jobs that didn’t exist yet that those of us who were teaching 10 or 15 years ago were preparing kids for? Influencer is one of them. YouTuber is one of them. Educators and technologists need to think about how to talk to youth about their creations, how they are monetized, and who gets to monetize them.

What balance looks like right now

Sun, 22 Apr 2018 19:15:38 -0400

When my mind is sharp, I work on my comprehensive exams. When it’s fuzzy but not dull, I work on IndieWeb stuff. When it’s dull, I work on my podcast. When my body has energy, I tidy. When I’m ready to trade outputs for inputs, I listen to podcasts. In any given moment, I check in with myself and let how I feel guide my next action.

Silicon Valley S5E3

Sun, 22 Apr 2018 04:33:55 -0400

Was watching Silicon Valley S5E3 and Richard started waxing poetic about redecentralizing the internet and users owning their data and I got all ?.

Jenny Lawson is Very Fond of Creepy Smiling Dead Animals and Worries Quite a Bit

Sat, 21 Apr 2018 04:04:39 -0400

I’ve always enjoyed The Bloggess when she came across my radar (And that’s why you should learn to pick your battles is a particular favorite). For some reason, though, I’ve always resisted becoming fully obsessed with her. Maybe because she’s popular and I’m inappropriately contrarian? Well, no more. After listening to her episode of THWoD I’ve decided we should be BFFs, and you obviously can’t befriend someone without reading their books and blog, so off I go…

Haenyeo: Women Divers of Korea

Fri, 20 Apr 2018 17:29:25 -0400

Haenyeo: Women Divers of Korea - Marked to-read on 04/20/2018.

Found via Broadly via Laura Olin.

Define yourself in 4 films. #Filmstruck4

Fri, 20 Apr 2018 02:19:05 -0400

Splash (1984), Labyrinth (1986), Beetlejuice (1988), Beaches (1988) Tagged by @allieacts. Tagging @tceles_B_hsup, @ailuruscosmos, @Folio_Ninja, @WhitneyEllenB

Mars and Her Children,

Thu, 19 Apr 2018 21:57:52 -0400

Mars and Her Children - Marked to-read 4/19/18.

Found via Laura Olin.

To Somebody, You Are an Expert

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 14:51:28 -0400

This morning, I popped M. in the stroller and walked him the three quarters of a mile to the doula offices for their Movers & Shakers meeting. As the first babies they ushered into the world became toddlers, the community of parents who had worked with them wanted to continue meeting with each other beyond the New Parents hangout, and even some of the babes who had not technically aged out of the New Parents Hangout group got so mobile and handsy that the parents of said babes (mine included) started to wonder how safe it was for the little ones to be exposed to our friendly acrobats. So the doulas started a group for older, more mobile babies up to age two. Michael and I make it out about once every three weeks. This is a much better attendance rate than we had for the New Parents Hangout, probably because as he’s gotten older and more mobile I’ve lost any illusions I had about being able to get work done as he played, so we might as well go play with other families.

So, as I said - this morning, I popped him in the stroller - and when I say “popped” I mean that I strapped him in his five-point harness, ensured he had plenty of pretzels in the cupholder, realized that I had left his water bottle on the floor, picked up his water bottle, put that in the grown-up’s cupholder (because again, M’s was full of pretzels) and headed out to the doula office.

Michael was the only toddler in attendance, but he had the time of his life playing with the seven-year-old son of one of the owners. As the Movers and Shakers time ended and time for the New Parents Hangout approached, other families started to arrive, including one family with a very new baby.

I told Michael it was almost time to leave. I sang him the relevant Daniel Tiger song. (There is a relevant Daniel Tiger song for almost every toddler/preschooler parenting moment. A mom used the same “It’s almost time to stop” one on a playground recently and when I said, “Hey, M! We know that song!” she replied, “Daniel Tiger is my co-parent.”) I re-filled his cupholder, this time with veggie straws. I strapped him into the stroller and asked him to wave goodbye to everybody.

As I was strapping him in the stroller, I remembered my earliest New Parents Hangout, sitting with this tiny, fragile, incoherent, precious person in his huge carrier, not knowing how to do anything yet. I imagined what that version of myself would think watching me go through this process of getting Michael in the stroller, settling him in, getting him out the door.

I decided she would think, “Wow. That lady can parent a toddler so effortlessly. That’s amazing.”

And it was beautiful to have that dual perspective, to remember myself as a newbie and be able to look upon my expert self, shepherding this relatively giant creature, having him say goodbye to the doulas.

Then getting to the door and realizing I’d left my backpack in the classroom, then going back and getting it and truly heading out, then not realizing my phone had fallen out of the stroller in the parking lot until I’d walked a couple hundred feet past where it happened, then running back to find it while praying a car hadn’t run over it, then sighing with relief after finding it lying on the ground unharmed, then continuing the walk home.

These things keep us humble in the moments when we would be proud. I think it’s nice to be able to feel both at once.

And, of course, observing this moment is a nice reminder that whomever I’m looking at and thinking, “Wow, she really has it together!” is probably struggling in some way I can’t see, and that potentially any time I’m struggling, there’s somebody looking at me who thinks I’m doing a great job.

You can help the web be better in 2018: just ditch Facebook and use your browser instead

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 21:20:40 -0400

Step 1 was returning to my own site. Step 2 was returning to RSS I think Step 3 will be returning to bookmarks.

Cathy Fisher on fixing Fb: Go back to your 2001 fan site

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 17:55:27 -0400

This is basically what I’m doing on my own website. I ask myself, “How did I use the Internet in 2001?” because the Internet of 2001 is definitely the Internet for which I’m most nostalgic.

In 2001, I owned my own domain name. I blogged in a hand-coded html file. I made friends with other people through the Buffy the Vampire Slayer posting board. I made other friends through those friends visiting their blogs and commenting on their posts. We had link lists, blog rolls, fan Listings, and web rings, and that’s how we found new sites to visit. We made fan art and wrote fanfiction.

Some of this is still happening, most especially the fan works part. And some innovations have definitely made the Internet better - I switched to automated blogging software in 2002 and I haven’t regretted it once since. Other pieces inspired by other people working on the IndieWeb, I’m bringing back: my following page is basically a blog roll and I’ve started reading blogs again.

Rebecca Solnit on a Childhood of Reading and Wandering

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 20:11:43 -0400

This is a beautiful piece about trees, forests, libraries, reading, writing, distance, and connection. I found it thanks to Austin Kleon. I will definitely be picking up Rebecca Solnit’s books.

Fostering Family Learning with Video Games

Sun, 15 Apr 2018 17:42:49 -0400

Families at Play - Marked to-read on 04/15/2018.

Found via Connected Learning Alliance.

Library: An Unquiet History

Sun, 15 Apr 2018 16:18:36 -0400

Library: An Unquiet History - Marked to-read on 04/15/18.

There's no way to make something better than to let it out into the world first, right?

Sun, 15 Apr 2018 14:56:32 -0400

Kim Werker’s weekly newsletter contains gems like this. I highly recommend subscribing.

And now we have everything: On motherhood before I was ready

Sun, 15 Apr 2018 14:10:32 -0400

And Now We Have Everything - Marked to-read on 04/15/18.

Found via I’ll Be Right Back.

Walking: A Reading List

Sun, 15 Apr 2018 09:11:18 -0400

In his newsletter last week and this week, Austin Kleon has recommended several reads about walking. Given my reminder yesterday about the value of a good walk, I wanted to capture his recommendations so I can come back later. I didn’t want to have to dig through the newsletter archives, so I’m creating a list here.

A Philosophy of Walking, Frederic Gros
Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit
The Wander Society, Keri Smith
Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, Lauren Elkin
Rebecca Solnit on a Childhood of Reading and Wandering
"Walking While Black," Garnette Cadogan
"Due North," Garnette Cadogan
How to Walk, Thich Nhat Hahn
For All My Walking, Taneda Santoka

Tata to Twitter, Too (Again, Kind of)

Sat, 14 Apr 2018 22:30:40 -0400

Yesterday I posted about how I’m done posting directly to Facebook. Today, I’m announcing the same thing about Twitter. As with Facebook, I’m not disappearing entirely. Instead, I’m syndicating out to Twitter from my own website, kimberlyhirsh.com. I will be able to receive Twitter replies, likes, retweets, etc on the original post at my website. I can also send all of those things from my own site.

As for Twitter’s other functionality… I have, in the past, declared Twitter bankruptcy, unfollowing everyone and then refollowing. It’s harder than it used to be in the past, and I don’t necessarily want to lose track of anyone I’m following right now. So for the time being, I’m noticing when I do browse Twitter which accounts I am finding most valuable. Then I’m using TwitRSS.me to create RSS feeds of those accounts and subscribing to them in Feedly.

If you want to know who I’m following, I’ve got a page for that on my website.

The other key functionality that Twitter has for me is the use of hashtags to aggregate posts about conferences or on Twitter chats. For those purposes, I’m using Tweetdeck and creating a column for each relevant hashtag. My likes and retweets will be posted from my website and then syndicated back out to Twitter.

If you mention me on Twitter without replying directly to a tweet of mine, it should still ping me on my website. I’ve got a special page for Mentions. It’s not linked where anyone but me can see it without typing the URL in directly, but you can trust that I will see it.

Our beliefs grow out of our experiences.

Sat, 14 Apr 2018 12:09:04 -0400

I’m working on writing a statement of educational philosophy and yesterday I was stumped. I sat down to write and opened with “I believe…” Everything I wrote after that felt simultaneously true and hollow. My writing process, which wasn’t going great anyway, was disrupted by some family medical issues. (Everyone is fine.) I couldn’t wrap my head around what I was trying to do.

I texted two friends to complain/reach out. Each of them offered some really good ideas that I’m pocketing for later. They weren’t what I needed yesterday. What I was struggling with yesterday was the why. I knew what I believed about learning and teaching but I couldn’t figure out how to articulate why I believe those things.

I was very tired.

I emailed W. He was out of town for the day. I told him that I needed to talk my ideas through, that for whatever reason, I couldn’t get this done via freewrite (which is what I normally do). I said, “Tomorrow, let’s talk about it and then you spend some time with the baby and I’ll write.” (When do I need to call him something besides the baby? I mean, I use his name, obviously. But he’s 18 months old. The toddler doesn’t have the same ring to it.)

W. got home from his travels late at night. As he got in bed, I asked him if my plan was okay. He said, “Maybe we can talk about it when we go for a walk tomorrow.”

“Good idea,” I said.

I highly recommend finding a walking partner and talking about stuff as you walk. It’s so good. So we went for a walk this morning. W. wrote a teaching statement recently and I asked him to tell me about it. As he spoke, I realized that the piece that was missing, the why, comes from my own experiences as a learner and teacher. And that I needed to work that into my statement.

It felt blindingly obvious. I don’t know why I couldn’t make this connection without the conversation with W., but I have it now.

Farewell to Facebook, Kind Of

Fri, 13 Apr 2018 19:50:49 -0400

I won’t be posting directly to my Facebook timeline anymore. In keeping with my move to embrace the IndieWeb, any posts I make to Facebook will be syndicated there from my own website, kimberlyhirsh.com. Each Facebook post will include a link to the original post on my website. Through the magic of the IndieWeb, my original post will receive likes and comments that my friends post on the syndicated copy.

At my own website, I’m replicating most of Facebook’s features. I can post status updates, long posts, photos, and videos. I can share links. I can RSVP to Facebook events. I can create my own events and make copies of them on Facebook, and have Facebook RSVPs show up on the event post at my site. I use WordPress and I found a plugin that replicates Facebook’s On This Day feature. I can manually mark myself safe in an emergency and create a Year in Review post.

To make things super interactive, I’ve also created an old school Guestbook and a page where you can ask me anything. These two features aren’t entirely in keeping with the IndieWeb philosophy, which would have you create a post or page on your own site and then let me know about it. But as I don’t expect most of the people who want to communicate with me will be IndieWeb-ready, I’m trying to make it as easy as possible for you to get in touch with me still.

The one Facebook feature I’m not attempting to replace with my own site is Groups. My current plan is to check in each Friday to participate in my groups. That will also be when I check on my event invitations. I also can’t reply via Facebook comments directly from my site. If you want a prompt response or extended conversation, I recommend clicking through and commenting directly on my site. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait until my next Facebook log in.

None of this is way out of left field. I’ve had websites since 1996, and personally-owned websites since 2001. In many ways, I’m just going back to using the web like I did in 2002.

Information literacy needs to include creation and ownership.

Thu, 12 Apr 2018 16:57:51 -0400

This is just the beginning of an idea, but as I dig deep into the IndieWeb and think about social media, Silicon Valley’s entry into education, critical technical practice, and other words that I will try to come back and find good links for later, I’m having a little brainstorm.

Information literacy curricula tend to focus, from what I’ve seen, on consuming information and evaluating the information other people produce: is this a reliable source? What’s the purpose and audience of this communication?

But as libraries transition from having consumption as their central purpose to places where creation takes centerstage and consumption primarily serves creation, we need to teach youth to think about other things. Who is going to own the content they create? Who can see it? What rights do they have as creators and artists? What benefits accrue to them from the different possible ways they might share their work? If we’re looking to create a generation that makes stuff, we need to ask them to think about the impact of the stuff they’re making as well as the amount of control they have over that impact.

Again, it’s a little brainstorm that I wanted to just jot down, but I hope to come back with more thoughts on this later.

You can't really see it here but Tropical Diver is a gorgeous reef exhibit at the @georgiaaquarium and I kind of want to live there. Beautiful coral AND a Skeletor Moray? Sign me up!

Tue, 10 Apr 2018 14:44:31 -0400

You can’t really see it here but Tropical Diver is a gorgeous reef exhibit at the @georgiaaquarium and I kind of want to live there. Beautiful coral AND a Skeletor Moray? Sign me up!

Filter by post type

Mon, 09 Apr 2018 23:48:20 -0400

I use this blog as my home on the web, so in addition to traditional blog posts, you’ll find here all the types of things you might find on social media. I know that can be overwhelming, so feel free to only look at long posts, short notes, shared links, photos, social media interactions, or what I’m reading/listening to/watching/playing.

International TableTop Day

Mon, 09 Apr 2018 08:33:53 -0400

Maker Faire Burlington 2018 (Official)

Mon, 09 Apr 2018 08:25:03 -0400

The 7th Annual Festival of Legends: Dragons

Mon, 09 Apr 2018 08:14:26 -0400

Community and creativity in mundane retail spaces

Fri, 06 Apr 2018 16:14:32 -0400

Austin Kleon’s meditations on retail spaces for community building and creativity have me thinking about how libraries can learn from these experiences to create spaces that meet patrons’ needs.

Mermaid Legends Come to Life in Freeform’s Siren - Siren | Freeform

Tue, 03 Apr 2018 16:36:27 -0400

I watched the first eight minutes or so of this and got major X-Files/BtVS vibes and I’m into it.

Hey spring!

Tue, 03 Apr 2018 16:35:07 -0400

Hey spring!

Dear IndieWeb, it may be time to start considering the user, not just the technical spec.

Mon, 26 Mar 2018 15:46:13 -0400

Eli Mellen makes some excellent points here. I’ve been slowly chipping away at going full Indieweb for about a year. Only this weekend did I really get all the way there, and it took a lot of advice from Chris Aldrich, some assistance from David Shanske in the IndieWeb chat, and the judicious use of Chrome developer tools (especially the web inspector) and Google to get to where I am today, which is pretty much where I want to be.

I have WordPress and I installed all the appropriate plug-ins. I followed all of the directions in the Getting Started with WordPress parts of the Wiki. But these were the pieces that were missing that only recently did I get together:

Sharing links in a POSSE way and having them actually look good
Posting notes to Facebook and Twitter without weird link previews or my Gravatar popping up
Sharing on mobile

I wouldn’t ask your average social media user to do all the things I had to do to make this happen. As Eli says,

...the IndieWeb is at an exciting inflection point.

I’m immensely grateful for all the help I’ve received getting started, but I do hope that over time people won’t have to be as dev-headed as me to jump in. I am a far cry from any sort of developer, but I do have a lot more knowledge of how the web works than I think most people do. If it was tricky and took me a year to get it to do what I wanted, I can’t imagine what a challenge it will be for them.

Me, spraying this on my unwashed hair: my hair isn't dirty! It's BEACHY! #mermaidlife #seawitchvibes

Mon, 26 Mar 2018 11:16:31 -0400

Moroccan Sea Salt Spray - Me, spraying this on my unwashed hair: my hair isn’t dirty! It’s BEACHY! #mermaidlife #seawitchvibes

Starting a Podcast: Process

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 11:36:45 -0400

Here’s a quick write-up of the stages I go through when working on an episode of my podcast.

1. Prep. This includes scheduling guests, watching the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that we’re going to talk about and taking notes, analyzing my notes for themes, listening to other BtVS podcasts to see if they bring up anything new that I want to be sure to talk about, and doing some basic research on things like who wrote and directed the episode. [Tools: email, calendar, TV, Hulu, pen and paper, podcast app]

2. Recording. This is when I sit down and actually record with my guests. I bring in my notes, but it’s pretty freewheeling. [Tools: Audacity, microphone, earbuds.]

3. Editing. I go back and listen to the recording. I cut out basic stuff like “ums” and “ahs,” but also big tangents that don’t really tie into the episode discussion much. [Tools: Audacity, earbuds]

4. Processing. I clean up the sound during this stage. [Tools: Audacity, earbuds]

5. Finalizing. I add the intro and outro music and compress the whole thing into a tidy little MP3. [Tools: Audacity, earbuds]

6. Writing up show notes. I listen one more time and make a note of anything I want to be sure to link to when the episode goes up. [Tools: Audacity, earbuds, notepad app]

Again, I’m not actually releasing the show yet, so I don’t have any information yet on that part of the process. When I do, I’ll try to document the process of releasing and marketing episodes.

I took my kid for a walk so obviously glitter.

Mon, 19 Mar 2018 16:03:21 -0400

I took my kid for a walk so obviously glitter.

First smoothie of the year:

Mon, 19 Mar 2018 09:04:27 -0400

chocolate almond (but I added a teaspoon of instant coffee because grad student/toddler mom.)

The Moonchild Tarot

Sun, 18 Mar 2018 21:25:33 -0400

When I decided to come back to tarot and get to know it better, I looked at tens and tens of decks. None of them resonated with me. My first deck, the Mythic Tarot, gifted to me by my mother almost 20 years ago, was basically classical mythology layered on Rider-Waite but I never used it for more than ad hoc crisis readings. I bought the Thoth deck but its imagery felt dense and more obfuscatory than illuminating. I learned about this deck months ago now and with each piece of sample art felt more and more that it was the deck I wanted, but I didn’t want to wait. So I picked up the Tarot of Pagan Cats, because it’s basically a cuter Rider-Waite and I know Rider-Waite is good for beginners. It has been immensely helpful in my learning process. But now The Moonchild Tarot (@moonchildtarot) is available for pre-order and just looking at the box feels like a sacred yes. Neverending Story vibes combined with art nouveau and art deco influences? Yes please.

Starting a podcast: Resources, part 1

Thu, 15 Mar 2018 16:51:33 -0400

Yesterday I mixed and mastered the first episode of my upcoming Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast, Things of Bronze. This is a great example of a personal project that is helping me gain skills I can use professionally. Connected learning in action! Here are action steps and resources that have helped me along the way.

Finding podcasts

I’ve been listening to podcasts for… a while. I don’t know how long, but at least four or five years. Maybe more. I really got into them for a bit when they were experiencing their renaissance around the release of Serial’s first season. Back then I heavily favored Gimlet productions. I also dipped into The Indoor Kids from time to time and listened to the first thirty or so episodes of Kumail Nanjiani’s X-Files Files, watching along before listening to each episode. That was the show that made me want to start my own podcast; as I listened, especially during the segments where Kumail would dig up old posts from Usenet, I started developing the idea for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast that would, alongside rewatching, draw on my experience as a poster at the official BtVS posting board. So this podcast I’m just starting has actually been in development for four years. More on that later.

You can certainly listen to whatever podcast is trendy at the moment. (In the past year: Missing Richard Simmons, S-Town, Dirty John, The Daily.) Or venerable standbys (This American Life, Radiolab). You’ll definitely learn a lot. But I think you’ll do better with something that you’ll really love. That may be one of those podcasts I already mentioned. But it may be something else. People have written a lot about how there’s a discovery gap in podcasting, and I think that’s right. Until listener’s advisory in libraries expands beyond audibooks and music and starts to include podcasts, you’re going to have to do some legwork. Here’s how I’ve done that.

1. Get recommendations from friends and loved ones. My husband, Will, recommended Pop Culture Happy Hour to me forever before I finally listened to it and loved it. It was a lot like that Modern Family episode about wedge salad. (Sorry, Will.) It kind of seems like everyone I know adores Welcome to Night Vale. Podcasts have a viral-like spread through my community of comedy friends, which is how many folks I know got turned onto The Dollop and Hello from the Magic Tavern. And a recommendation from a friend is how I learned about Buffering the Vampire Slayer, which directly influences some of the topics I choose for Things of Bronze.

2. Let the internet tell you how to start. tl;dr: check out your favorite websites and other media sources to see if they have podcasts, ask your friends (see above), Google a topic plus the word “podcast,” use in-app lists of top or new or trending podcasts, find podcast directories. Or, what I’ve really enjoyed, check out this handy list of podcast newsletters from Bello Collective (more on that later, too). I used the in-app lists to find my current favorite podcast, The Hilarious World of Depression, as well as the super fun bomBARDed.

3. Pay attention to people you like - authors, comedians, actors, whomever - and check out podcasts that feature them as guests and podcasts they recommend. I’ve been dabbling in woo-woo as sort of an emotional antidote to the rigorous intellectual standards of empirical research, spending time especially in the Tarot end of the pool, and through following Bakara Wintner I found her guest appearance on Tarot for the Wild Soul, and via the website The Numinous I learned about Self-Service.

Keeping up with podcasting news and trends

Again, that Bello Collective piece is really handy. The top resources I’ve enjoyed for news are Hot Pod and podnews. They’ve kept me up to date on valuable projects like Preserve This Podcast and debates about recording loudness standards.

Advice on doing a good job

This piece from my podcast boyfriend Glen Weldon (look, the fact that he will never reciprocate my love is irrelevant as we’re both married and unlikely to ever spend much time together) is my favorite.

Developing, recording, editing, mixing, and mastering your podcast

This book, in spite of being ten years old, walked me through this every step of the way. I used Audacity for recording, editing, mixing, and mastering. I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on equipment, so I just used the same laptop I use for everything else and this cheapie mic - perfect because I wanted to be able to travel with it and record both solo stuff and group stuff.

In the future: hosting and marketing! Since I’m not ready to do those things, I don’t have a lot of advice on them, but I’ll be back when I do.

Preparing for comprehensive (qualifying) exams: My process so far

Wed, 14 Mar 2018 11:45:47 -0400

I have been chipping away at the comprehensive literature review my program requires that I write to prepare for my qualifying examination for more than six months now. My progress has been achingly slow. I am finally in a (slow-moving) groove, though, so I thought I’d share a little bit about my process.

I began by following Raul Pacheco-Vega’s advice. I read each piece, doing his Abstract-Introduction-Conclusion extraction process (a process similar to the advice offered in my doctoral seminar, but his is a bit more streamlined). [A note on tools: I do all of my reading digitally as I have limited printing availability, work in multiple offices, and sometimes need to read with a toddler napping on me. I use Zotero, store all my Zotero attachments in Google Drive, sync files to read on my tablet with ZotFile, make those files available offline using Google Drive on my tablet, then read and annotate them in Xodo.]

After this, at first I started writing a rhetorical precis for each piece but I found it didn’t help me that much. I wasn’t ready to write full synthetic notes, because I didn’t have enough of a grip on the literature landscape to determine what would qualify a study as something I would want to come back to and read later for more detail or expand into a complete memo. So I skipped ahead to the conceptual synthesis spreadsheet dump stage, leaving several of Raul Pacheco-Vega’s columns to return to later - I only used the concept, citation, and main idea columns to begin with. I added a column for which type of library setting the paper was addressing, because I thought that might be important later. I used the concept column not to tell me which concept in my lit review the paper was for, as I’ve created separate tabs in the spreadsheet for each of the five areas I’m exploring, but instead as sort of a tags column.

After filling out these columns for all the readings, I went back and re-read the main ideas column. Then I did some concept grouping (not really mapping yet) and a free-write of brief notes about all of the ideas I was synthesizing based on my reading.

Then, based on my concept groupings and freewrite, I created a preliminary outline.

I typed up this outline, filled in the introduction section based on earlier literature reviews I’d already written, and now I’m ready to come back and go through each study I have in my conceptual synthesis spreadsheet and write a full synthetic note with the ability to tell how helpful it would be to do a close reading and full memo of any given piece.

Loath to spoil this 90s art girl bedhead with self-care, but I'm gonna.

Sat, 10 Mar 2018 09:40:22 -0400

Loath to spoil this 90s art girl bedhead with self-care, but I’m gonna.

Does the world need another Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast? Yes, yes it does. When? Soonish. http://thingsofbronze.com #buffyslays20

Sat, 10 Mar 2018 02:53:34 -0400

Does the world need another Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast? Yes, yes it does. When? Soonish. thingsofbronze.com #buffyslays20

Imposter syndrome: a scene

Sun, 04 Mar 2018 13:13:50 -0400

Me: I don’t know why anyone would hire me to do anything. I’ve never done anything. My only skill is that I can tell you that somebody else wrote a thing about something.

W: That’s an actual job.

Me: Oh. That’s what a librarian does, isn’t it?

[Note: I know that is not the only thing a librarian does.]

Women are flocking to wellness because modern medicine still doesn't take them seriously

Sat, 03 Mar 2018 14:29:41 -0400

As a woman with chronic illness, both physical and mental, who is a prime target for the wellness industry and a person who has spent a fair amount of money trying to fix myself in the middle of a systemic problem with US health care, I found this piece especially resonant. The points about the accessibility of “wellness” and the role of disparate health outcomes for women of color and low-income women are especially worth noting.

Be Your Own Toddler, Part Two

Sat, 24 Feb 2018 16:57:55 -0400

This is an extension of this earlier note.

A common piece of advice for people with intrusive negative self-talk is to think about how you would respond if someone talked the way about a loved one that you do to yourself. Cognitively, this is helpful. But honestly, for me, it sort of just sits in the “thoughts” part of the cognitive behavioral therapy triangle. For whatever reason, it never seems to shift my thoughts or feelings.

But a couple of days ago, I did something that took that concept a step farther: I literally spoke, out loud, to myself in the same voice I use to soothe my toddler. Halfway between my car and the co-working space, I realized I’d left my phone in the car. Anxiety, she was waiting, and jumped on this: “God, Kimberly, why are you so stupid?” But Mom-Me instinctively said - again, out loud, “It’s okay,” in the sweetest way. In the same way I say to M. when he hurts himself, “That looked like it hurt! It probably doesn’t feel very good. I know it hurts right now, but you’re strong and you’re going to be okay.” And that out loud mom voice made all the difference. So what if I left my phone in the car? It wasn’t a high stakes situation. I turned around and went back to the car and got my phone, and didn’t berate myself for having left it there.

If you’re plagued by negative self-talk, imagine the creature you are most motivated to soothe, and try using the actual audible voice you use for that creature on yourself.

In the meantime, in case you need a mom to say it to you:

I know it hurts right now, but you’re strong and you’re going to be okay.

[Backstory: a friend recently expressed a wish to be able to take a moment out from busy, stressful life, as I had done long enough to share a slice of butter cake with my toddler. I replied that caring for someone else requires setting aside misery, for at least a moment. “Be your own toddler,” I urged my friend.]

It's okay to not be okay.

Thu, 22 Feb 2018 20:01:34 -0400

In my earliest days as a mother, I often found myself perusing the diagnostic criteria for post-partum depression. “I’m not as bad as all that,” I would think, “but I’m also not okay.” It was a huge relief the day I read a blog post that acknowledged that there’s a spectrum of possibilities between diagnosable perinatal mood disorder and unadulterated new mom bliss.

I’ve seen more than one of my friends recently articulate that they aren’t okay but they don’t know how to talk about it. I would speculate that they’re worried people will jump from “That person isn’t okay” to “OH GOD THEY’RE SUICIDAL!” I struggle with this concern myself.

We need to make space for the in-between, and we need to find the people around whom we feel safe expressing when we feel down. I have a few people. If you find yourself feeling this way often, I encourage you to find someone willing to act as a release valve. In my experience, it makes a difference.

Featured Image: Flying or Falling II by John Park

How Facebook Is Killing Comedy

Sun, 11 Feb 2018 09:17:22 -0400

I happened across this piece in Austin Kleon’s newsletter. It beautifully expresses a sentiment that I’ve heard from many of us who were around when the web was first becoming widely available: a desire to return to a time when individuals could publish things and you found them by searching or by word of mouth, not because an algorithm pushed them into a feed. This is not not about comedy, but it’s about a lot more than comedy. It seems more social media sites are adopting algorithms like Facebook’s all the time.

Here’s how I’m responding:

1. Publishing primarily here at KimberlyHirsh.com. Several months ago now I began to explore the IndieWeb movement. I’m still not really doing it fully - not using replies or events yet, for example. But I’ve gotten started and finally found my groove with long posts, status updates, and link-sharing, at least.

2. Using Facebook almost exclusively for its group functionality. Sadly nobody else is doing this with as widespread adoption as Facebook. This is where most of my communities are congregating. But I’ve unfollowed all of my friends and liked pages. If I want to know how a friend who internets mainly via Facebook is doing, I go directly to their timeline.

3. Subscribing directly to content providers in other ways. If I want to see everything, I go with RSS for a full blog feed. If I want more curated content, I go with a newsletter. I use Gmail labels to keep all my newsletters together and deliberately choose when to review them.

4. Observing my own response as I browse social media. If I’m scrolling Twitter or Instagram and I start to feel sad, angry, or bored, I step away. This is more about self-care than defeating algorithms, but it feels related, somehow.

There are scholars doing interesting and important work on this. Here are a few to check out:

Zeynep Tufecki

Safiya Noble

Anna Lauren Hoffman

New 'Queer Eye' Is A Reboot, Not A Retread

Thu, 08 Feb 2018 23:48:38 -0400

Hi I’m Kimberly and I will be ignoring real life long enough to binge the new Queer Eye, okay bye.

Shannon Crawford Barniskis | School of Information Studies

Thu, 01 Feb 2018 15:00:08 -0400

I’m harboring a serious scholar crush on Shannon Crawford Barniskis right now. Her work connects theory and practice beautifully. Her concept of “librarian as enzyme” is amazing. Look her up.

Velvet Chain

Thu, 01 Feb 2018 08:58:34 -0400

TFW you need to dig out your CD binder so you can take the official Buffy soundtrack that's been in your car's CD player for two and a half years out only to replace it with Velvet Chain's Buffy EP.

My 2018 Reading Challenge

Sat, 06 Jan 2018 07:06:03 -0400

My reading challenge for 2018 has two components:

Always be trying to read one more book than I have already read this year.
Read whatever feels good to read and will make me want to keep reading.

That's it.

More on the rationale behind these rules later.

Historical Women Taking Care of Business

Tue, 19 Dec 2017 18:28:13 -0400

Today in crazy on-brand for Kimberly, this NY Times Watching list of shows and movies featuring historical women getting it done.

My Word for 2018: LOVE

Sat, 16 Dec 2017 09:00:28 -0400

I found my word for 2018, and it is LOVE.

In 2018, I will love myself as much as I love anyone else, and I will love my body as much as I love my mind and my heart.

In 2018, I will work to be sure my love is apparent to everyone I love. I won’t hide it out of fear of overwhelming them. I won’t let exhaustion and busyness keep me from expressing it. The people I love are strong enough to receive my love undiluted and I am strong enough to give it.

In 2018, I will show up with love in the world every day. Love is my own personal brand of magic and it always has been.

This year, I’ve really come to embrace love as my core value, and I have simultaneously grown frustrated with people - myself included - not matching their actions to their stated values. In 2018, I will become a human incarnation of love, a glowing manifestation of love.

In 2018, I will let my love light up the world.

In praise of academic spouses

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 13:38:33 -0400

Moira Hansen has written a beautiful piece here about academic spouses.

As I was reading it, I nearly teared up thinking of the amazing ways W. has supported me - for our entire almost-20-years-together (yes, we got together very young) - but especially in the past two and a half years.

There are of course all the amazing daily things he handles - dishes, laundry, grocery runs, takeout orders.

And standard academic spouse moments: listening as I work out a new idea, talking me through impostor syndrome, telling me that I should apply for conferences and grants even if I think my idea is dumb.

But also, like, crazy champion moments: making sure I eat in the middle of a paper writing marathon…

Best life partner brings you Mattie B's while you work on your paper. #readerimarriedhim

A post shared by Kimberly Hirsh (@kimberlyhirsh) on Dec 4, 2015 at 5:10pm PST

…and being my rock as I’ve been tossed upon the seas of impostor syndrome and anxiety that are so common among doctoral students.

So yes. Let's hear it for the partners of academics. They are amazing people.

Harry Potter mobile RPG lets you become your own wizard for the first time

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 12:24:53 -0400

Yes please.

From Princess to General: How Many Times Can Leia Save the Galaxy?

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 09:07:17 -0400

This piece has me scrambling to read the Princess Leia novel & comics before I see The Last Jedi.

Kristen Bell Reunites High School Musical Cast Members for Encore!, Premiering December 10 on ABC | Playbill

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 05:25:12 -0400

High school classmates reunite 20 years after graduation to perform Into the Woods on the premiere of ABC’s new musical special.

Source: Kristen Bell Reunites High School Musical Cast Members for Encore!, Premiering December 10 on ABC | Playbill

This show is crazy on-brand for me.

Coursework Complete: What Now?

Fri, 08 Dec 2017 12:09:41 -0400

Hi. I’m Kimberly, and I just submitted my last coursework assignment ever (unless I take more after I advance to candidacy, which, let’s face it, is a very real possibility).

I feel like I should rest, but I also feel antsy. So I’m going to make a few public commitments and share a few thoughts about what happens now.

In terms of official officially what’s up…

Now I write a comprehensive literature review on topics related to my area of research interest, which include theory, methodology, and a few different Connected Learning topics. More on that as it proceeds.

Also, I keep working on Project READY.

But also…

I’m planning to publish e-prints of a few annotated bibliographies based on literature reviews I’ve been sitting on. Those literature reviews are the foundation of lots of research ahead of me, and I don’t want to publish my synthesis and analysis, but these are tricky topics where you have to dig into weird places to find literature, and I think it could really help other scholars to get those bibliographies out there. I’m not going to reveal the topics yet because I don’t want to accidentally hint at any conference juries that particular papers are from me.

I’m working with the UNC SILS Coalition of Youth Librarians to start a Triangle area chapter of the Harry Potter Alliance. To that end, I’m going through their Wizard Activist School program.

I’m submitting a proposal to the Connected Learning Summit.

And personally…

I’m going to be packing and purging stuff from my house. We’ve lived in it for five years and there’s definitely stuff that hasn’t been touched in that time.

I’m going to a twentieth anniversary reunion party for The Bronze posting board, the thing that made fandom a social activity for me.

I’m waiting to really dig into cosplay beyond the casual until I can get a good craft studio space set up.

I want to cross-stitch everything from weelittlestitches, but that’s not new.

I want to crochet myself a whole wardrobe of lacy things out of black yarn.

But really, what’s next?

A nap. Christmas decorations. Leonie’s 2018 Shining Year workbook.

Oh yeah, 2018! So that’s going to happen.

Yep. For several years now - probably inspired by Leonie but I’m not sure - I have selected a word of the year. I often find out around March that I picked the wrong word. My 2016 word was FLOW and it turned out perfectly. This year my word was WORK and it was the right word, but it didn’t manifest quite like I expected.

I’ve been searching for 2018’s word. I want to encompass healing, self-care. I had a revelation in the shower yesterday, as I was agonizing over whether my blood sugar would be good when I went to the doctor today (it was; I’m pretty sure that’s thanks to drinking crazy diluted apple cider vinegar, on the advice of the PCOS Diva). Showering and driving, the best activities for having good ideas.

Anyway, this thought came to me:

I want 2018 to be the year when I treat my body with the same care that I treat my mind and my emotions.

Obvi, I’ve invested more energy in my mind than in anything else in my life. And I tend to look after my emotions, and listen to them.

But my poor body. We have been enemies, thanks to chronic illness. I don’t treat it well at all. There are a lot of reasons. I mean, I don’t drink much or do drugs besides those prescribed to me/readily available over the counter. But I also don’t eat nutritious food as much as I’d like or move on the regular or take good care of my skin and hair.

I’m so sorry, body.

So yeah, I’m still working on finding out what word captures that feeling. It’s not HEAL.

I’m leaning toward GLOW right now, but how much that’s influenced by the Netflix series is hard to say. (By the way, Netflix… I need more GLOW merch. kthx.)

It’s what we’ll go with for now.

So, that was really rambly. What’s next, again?

I’m going to glow.

And take a nap.

Free af: A meditation on finishing coursework

Fri, 01 Dec 2017 23:11:37 -0400

It’s a Friday night at 10 pm. My toddler is sleeping beside me. I just spent the past hour browsing conference programs, finding potential colleagues on Twitter, and dipping my toe into the waters of academic Patreon. It’s 10 pm on a Friday and I’m engaging in activities some might classify as work. But to me they feel like play.

I submitted the last of my parental leave work today. I will finish my last bit of coursework next week.

Today I wrote two research prospectuses, both related to game-based learning in libraries. Earlier this week, I planned a partnership to leverage fandom for making the world a better place.

I am done with the tyranny of other people’s syllabi and it feels amazing.

I have had excellent professors who taught excellent courses and I have been either fortunate or strategic about following my interests in fulfilling my assignments. And yet today, when the only work I have to do is the work I have designed (because even my assistantship is something I was part of designing), I feel lighter. Like after two and a half years of getting by, I can finally manage to do the work I started this degree program to do.

I told myself that I would take a true break from work over winter vacation, but now I know that’s not what I want. I want to get moving on this work - work that fills my cup rather than emptying it, work that feels like play, work that keeps me up past my bedtime because I want it to.

I am aware of how academia works. I know this feeling won’t last.

But today… Today I’m filled with excitement about what comes next.

Let's Save the World A Lot: #AASL Fan Activism Workshop Recap

Wed, 15 Nov 2017 14:12:57 -0400

Last Thursday night, I attended the workshop “From Stories to Action: Inspiring Heroes for Our Own World” at the American Association of School Librarians conference. The workshop was presented by Janae Phillips, Director of Leadership & Education for the Harry Potter Alliance. It was the highlight of the conference for me. I left energized and eager to get involved.

The event began with an introduction to HPA - who they are and what they do. Their tagline is “We turn fans into heroes.” Their focus is on fan activism, which they define as “engaging in activism through storytelling and fandom by drawing parallels between popular media and real world social issues.”

Janae shared her background in leadership development, describing the social change model of leadership development as the model she used:

With a quick Google I discovered that this model is commonly used for student leadership development in higher education. If you want to read about it, there’s a lot of scholarly literature out there. From what I can tell, it was first introduced in this book.

Janae then pointed out that most of the stories that inspire modern fandoms hew pretty closely to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey:

You can read more about this in so many places, but I hear people talk about The Hero with a Thousand Faces the most. I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read it. Maybe I’ll try and squeeze it into my dissertation literature review somehow. (Here’s the part where I admit that this Hero’s Journey aligns closely with Western literature, and naturally has some limitations with respect to its value for analyzing stories cross-culturally.)

Janae introduced the idea that literally overlaying the leadership model on the Hero’s Journey illustrated the promise of using the power of stories to create activist leaders. You can line up the Individual part of the model with the beginning of the journey, see how tests, allies, and enemies might align with group values, and then the Society/Community part aligns with the resurrection and return. (I couldn’t really see if this is how Janae’s version lined up, but I think it probably is.)

Now that we had a theoretical foundation for connecting stories and social change, Janae introduced the innovation adoption curve and discussed the fact that most activist efforts target innovators & early adopters, leaving middle and late adopters out. These individuals - who might be ready to be activists, if they are just introduced to it the right way - can be approached via their own fandoms.

[caption id=“attachment_3288” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] Janae’s version had adorable Harry Potter theming with the Dark Mark over on the Laggards end. I got this version from Jurgen Appelo of management30.com.[/caption]

She likened middle and late adopters to Neville Longbottom, who at the beginning of the Harry Potter series is overwhelmed and not really sure how to help in the fight against Voldemort, but by the end of the series is protecting the world with as much strength as any of his peers.

Janae explained that someone who feels they lack the expertise to have a grounded discussion of a social justice issue like racism might be more ready to have that conversation if it is grounded in their own area of expertise - their fandom. She offered here the example of using how Muggle-born and the children of Muggle/Wizard pairings are treated in Harry Potter to get at the idea of racism.

She also pointed out that stories can serve as inspiration for specific actions. For example, in the world of Harry Potter, eating chocolate is an antidote to a dementor attack. Harry Potter-themed chocolate is a real-world product. Janae shared the “Not in Harry’s Name” campaign, in which the HPA lobbied Warner Brothers to ensure all HP-branded chocolate is ethically sourced:

Next up was the workshop part. We divided into groups by fandom (Buffy, Hamilton, Star Wars, HP). First we discussed WHY we loved the texts from these fandoms. THEN we brainstormed possible activist projects that could come out of those. (I was the one who kept calling for a Buffy group, and I got my wish.)

We closed with a sharing, a recap, and information about how we can get involved in the HPA.

Janae finished with a couple of key points that really resonated with me and made me feel energized about my work as a scholar looking at connected learning and culturally sustaining pedagogy, finding ways librarians can leverage youth interests and culture to learn, grow, and make the world a better place.

First, JOY itself is an act of resistance. The bad guys, whomever they may be, want us to be down and defeated. Doing things that make us joyful is part of resisting them.

Second, connecting your activism with something you love gives you the energy to keep going. Social justice work is hard. It’s demanding and exhausting. It’s easy to feel like it’s too hard and we should quit. But if your activism is grounded in a work of art you enjoy and a community of other people who also love that art, that can give you what you need to stick with it.

Finally, I want to close with a question that came up in my group: how do you know which fandom to have motivate activities for the youth you’re serving? The answer, of course, is whichever fandom excites them. You don’t have to know about Dementors or Neville or Muggles or House Elves to find ways to connect Harry Potter to activism, because people who love it, when talking about it, will share with you things that will naturally fit. Let kids share with you what they’re into - find ways for them to bring it in - and as you learn about it, you will find ways to help them think through its connection to the real world and how they can use that to make the world better. To decrease worldsuck, if you will.

5 WAYS TO DISRUPT THE WELLNESS INDUSTRY

Tue, 14 Nov 2017 07:52:47 -0400

This is a great blog post on how to engage in a traditionally exploitative space without feeling gross, i.e., how to transform the space within your sphere of influence.

Where is the Humanity in the Computer Science Curriculum?

Tue, 24 Oct 2017 08:29:08 -0400

Coding is not neutral and neither is cataloging. This is a great argument for requiring computer science professionals to learn about the social impact of their work. I would argue that information and library science should do likewise.

What I'm Learning: Cosplay

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 12:17:30 -0400

This is the start of a new series on What I’m Learning. Interest-driven learning is both my key area of research interest and how most of my hobbies get picked up. I consider myself an expert learner. And I firmly believe that there’s value in sharing the process of the things in which we are experts, in providing models for other people. So I’m going to let you in on the ground floor and give you a perspective on what I’m learning. And we’ll start with something that I’m feeling extra inspired to take up right now: cosplay.

What is cosplay? It’s dressing up in costume as a specific character from media or history. You see it most often at fan conventions. It’s distinct from, though has a lot in common with, any other time you might wear a costume - for Halloween or to perform in a theatrical or dance production, for example.

Why am I getting into cosplay? I have an extensive background of being into costuming. It’s essentially an extension of playing pretend, which is one of my favorite things. My first cosplay (specific media character as opposed to generic idea like “magician”) was my Halloween costume when I was 3 or 4: the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio. My mom is an incredible seamstress, so I often had very detailed costumes growing up.

[caption id=“attachment_3250” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] In a detailed replica of Christine’s Phantom of the Opera wedding dress, with my then-boyfriend now-husband, 1999.[/caption]

I’ve always loved dressing up and, while I don’t care to wear make-up for day to day life, I also really enjoy special effects make-up and hair/wig styling.

[caption id=“attachment_3251” align=“aligncenter” width=“283”] With my sister (right), brother (bottom), and a friend (left) as Cassandra, Rumpleteazer, Skimbleshanks, and Jellylorum from Cats, 1999.[/caption]

As a dramatic art major in college, I had to work in the costume shop for a semester. I learned more about make-up and drafting patterns. I also did some sewing and ended up creating a custom-fitted dress that was so detailed in terms of fit that the director the costume shop said I could get into couture.

But you know, life.

Life is crazy and I’m easily overwhelmed, so I haven’t pursued much making my own costumes and accessories or doing hair and make-up. I’ve done some closet cosplay and crocheted accessories, but besides using the hashtag #cosplaygoals to note things I’d be excited to dress up as, I haven’t really engaged.

[caption id=“attachment_3252” align=“aligncenter” width=“225”] Dressed as a lady from the Fruity Oaty Bars commercial in Serenity. Sitting beside the best cat.[/caption]

There’s a whole community around cosplay, but I have only briefly looked into it, admiring others’ work. But it’s time.

Why now? Honestly? Because this article popped across my Twitter feed, and because I’ve been at loose ends waiting for my next hobby to find me. I need something that I can do at home, in small chunks of time, but will eventually have a big payoff. Cosplay fits the bill.

What next? Here are my steps:

Get inspired. The most inspiring cosplay I've ever seen is this cosplay of Maui from Moana. Not only does it beautifully address issues of representation in terms of both race and body type, it's an example of many different skills that come into play: materials selection, inking, wig styling, jewelry creation, prop creation, programming, wiring. This quote kind of sums it all up:
"Cosplay is a blend of science and art, and being able to develop my craftsmanship skills and partner them with my performance abilities creates a magical experience. I thrive in these little pockets of shared sunshine where we can step outside of our ordinary lives and create the world we've imagined.
Start reading. My earliest step when learning anything new is to research it pretty deeply. The SLJ article I linked above provides a few good places to start, so I'm starting with those, beginning with The Hero's Closet: Sewing for Cosplay and Costuming. If reading isn't how you like to learn things, the post includes some great videos. You can also seek out expert cosplayers and find out what they have to share. The names of several are mentioned in the SLJ article.
Attend an event. I'm very lucky that Cosplay America is happening this weekend essentially in my backyard. With a toddler in tow and my husband out of town, I can't really swing a full three-day convention, but I'll be going on Sunday.
Recruit a partner-in-crime. This kind of thing is always more fun when it's social. I think I've gotten both of my siblings on board with digging deeper into cosplay, though I'll be taking the lead. My brother will be joining me at Cosplay America.
[caption id=“attachment_3253” align=“aligncenter” width=“225”] My brother as Kronk from The Emperor’s New Groove.[/caption]
Make a plan. I don’t have a lot of great costumes on hand right now, so I’ll be closet cosplaying as Wednesday Addams at Cosplay America. If I can find suitable clothing for the toddler, he’ll be going as Pubert.

[caption id=“attachment_3254” align=“aligncenter” width=“184”] Notes in my Bullet Journal about my Wednesday closet Cosplay Plans.[/caption]

So that’s where I’m starting. Stay tuned for updates!

Current Desktop

Wed, 18 Oct 2017 14:51:17 -0400

Inspirational Research: Improvising our Way through Tragedy: How an Improv Comedy Community Heals itself through Improvisation

Wed, 18 Oct 2017 14:11:54 -0400

It can be easy when you’re immersed in academia to kind of forget what the point is. I’m starting a series where I write about scholarship that I’ve found inspiring. Today I’m starting with Jason Scott Quinn’s Improvising our Way through Tragedy: How an Improv Comedy Community Heals itself through Improvisation.

Why did I read this?

I’m (still) working on a study I started a year ago as a project for my Advanced Qualitative Methods class. Sadly, I didn’t go through IRB, so I can’t publish anything from the study. I’ll just say that I am looking at how learning happens in the context of an improv team, specifically a team that performs the Harold. I picked this site not because it’s key to my research interests (though I can certainly argue that improv is a fruitful environment for connected learning), but because I knew it would be easy to get access.

As a smaller assignment leading up to the full report on the study, I’m doing a small literature review. I’m specifically looking at studies on improv comedy with an eye to their conceptual frameworks, use of theory, and audience. I came across this article in the course of doing my literature search for this lit review.

What’s so inspiring about it?

Content: This is an article about how the NYC improv community used dialogue and performance to heal after 9/11. I mean, that right there pushes a ton of my inspiration buttons. Anything that brings together community, healing, and performance is going to tug at my heartstrings. Also, it’s about improv, and while I’m taking a break of indeterminate length from performing and watching improv due to early parenthood and some other stuff, I still find improv fascinating.

Methodology: This is a qualitative study using autoethnography. Before I started this project, I wasn’t sure about autoethnography. I thought it sounded self-indulgent. But as I’ve gone through the process of collecting data and reflecting on my own experiences with improv, as well as my experiences with other communities, I’m really beginning to see the value of research that connects the personal to the broader world.

Presentation: This is what really makes this an inspirational piece for me, though. The results of this study are presented as a performance piece. This piece integrates quotes from message board postings, monologues, and improvisational performance. It provides an excellent model for me of how to use this kind of representation. It’s something that the assigned readings for my qual methods class touched on, but it offers a model that speaks very directly to my interests. Sadly, my final presentation for the class will have to be fully digital and thus won’t incorporate improv like this piece did. I wish it could, though, and this has been really helpful in thinking about how, if I ever do research on improv in the future, I might represent those results.

Should I read this?

If you’re interested in how improvisation can be a part of research presentations, absolutely. Also if you just like to read about improv, yes. Quinn’s language is accessible and will introduce you to some interesting theory you might not already know.

On not doing great

Wed, 18 Oct 2017 12:34:11 -0400

Sometimes I’m not doing great. Sometimes I’m struggling. In these times, though, I’m usually doing okay. I need sometimes to express that I’m not doing great, but I worry and minimize it, because I am doing okay, and I don’t want people to worry unnecessarily. Not even okay is really bad for me and happens only rarely. But my perception is that if I say I’m not great, people hear that I’m not okay.

I’m still working out how to communicate about how I’m doing.

Drawing as Self Discovery: 5 Ways to Start | Mari Andrew | Skillshare

Wed, 18 Oct 2017 08:44:31 -0400

Mari Andrew’s Skillshare drawing class is free until Friday. I think I’m going to try it out over the next few days. Let me know if you want to join me!

Lessons Learned from a Week and a Half of

Fri, 08 Sep 2017 12:31:02 -0400

I worked through the first two weeks of Wendy Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks in about a week and a half. Here I am at the beginning of her Week 3, and she suggests writing up what you learned and sharing it, so that’s what I’m doing here.

A few reminders about my situation before I begin: I am the mother of an 11-month-old son, a full-time graduate student doing 4 credit hours of coursework and 5 credit hours of dissertation work, a research assistant with a 20 hour a week position, chronically ill with endocrine and autoimmune diseases, and a dilettante who feels all the joy is sucked out of life if I don’t get to spend at least a little time on personal interests.

And yes, all of that is relevant to my writing process.

Challenges

Managing time and attention is my biggest challenge. I have fifteen hours of paid childcare a week, plus whatever gifted childcare I receive from family members including my son’s grandparents and solo time his dad spends with him. It’s not a lot of time, and I don’t even use it that productively. I’m easily distracted and if I can’t focus I can’t write.

Also? It’s hard to work when I’m responsible for supervising a toddler. But there’s definitely more than 15 hours worth of work to do to meet my 56 hour obligation (36 hours coursework/dissertation + 20 assistantship), so I’ve got to figure out how I can get some work done when I’m with him, or start giving up sleep.

If I haven’t sorted out everything I need before a work session I putter and am at a loss. This is a skill I want to get better at: taking a little time at the beginning of a work session to plan, and at the end to wrap up.

If I don’t get writing done early in the day, I don’t get it done at all.

Solutions

One solution that has really been working for me is using the Pomodoro method to churn out four Pomodoros (25 minute blocks of work) in a row. I have four primary areas of work responsibility, each with writing involved: parental leave makeup work, dissertation hours (where I’m using the #12weekarticle techniques), coursework, and my assistantship. I rotate through these areas, doing one Pomodoro in each, and even if that’s all I get done in a day, I have at least knocked out two hours of solid work.

Working in spaces where I can’t hear the baby is huge. I go to a coffee shop or the library or even my back porch and I’m infinitely more productive than I am when I’m within hearing range of him - even two floors away, I can hear my sister nannying him, and it’s a distraction. Especially when he gets upset. So spending more time in those other spaces is totally worth the little bit of time it takes to get set up in them. (This back porch thing has been amazing - sunlight, a cool breeze, and concentration - thanks, autumn!)

Dedicating the time I need to setting up the plan for a work session has been going well, but I’m still working on the wrap-up part of things.

I need to ask for help from my husband at the beginning of a day - have breakfast with him and the baby, then whisk myself away for a couple hours - rather than waiting for him to check in with “Didn’t you need to get some writing done today?” because if it doesn’t happen before noon, I’m already too tired to get started.

Next Steps

Spend half an hour at the end of each childcare-protected work session planning both what work I can get done when I’m with the baby and what work I will do in my next protected work session.
Spend half an hour at the beginning of each childcare-protected work session planning what I will do for the rest of the work session.
Continue to work in spaces away from the baby.
Get my work session in first thing after exercise and breakfast.

My Upcoming Paper Topic #12weekarticle #AcWri

Wed, 30 Aug 2017 10:49:36 -0400

Hello, The Entire Internet, my writing partner. How’s your writing going?

Today’s assignment from Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks is to get really clear on my paper topic before writing an abstract about it. Again, I’m supposed to call somebody on the phone or meet with them in person and talk about it. Again, I’m not logistically in a situation where that is an option right now (sleeping baby on the bed next to me!), so I’m blogging instead.

Am I afraid of someone scooping me if I blog about my paper topic? A little. But then, I’ve already shared my poster about it on the open web. Anyway, I’m more interested in open scholarship and sharing my process than I am worried about getting scooped. So here we are. I’m going to give you a preview of the article I’m writing.

I’m writing about special education training for preservice school librarians. School librarians, like other educators, are responsible for serving students with disabilities. School libraries are environments that are different from the classroom, and thus, I would argue, serve special education students in unique ways. I suspected that very few school librarians received training in how to do this in their school library education programs, and that even fewer were required to undergo such training. To find out, I performed a content analysis of the websites of all of the American Association of School Librarians-approved school librarian education programs, looking at their program requirements and course offerings. I looked at both course titles and descriptions, when available. I found that most programs don’t provide coursework that is specific to the school library; they outsource it to education programs. Some do require it for anyone who isn’t a teacher, but they assume that if you already have a teaching certificate, you’ve already received sufficient education in this area. A few school library education programs in New York, where there has been a specific initiative targeted at improving this type of education, both require this type of training and offer coursework specific to educators working in school libraries rather than classrooms. I would suggest that more programs should offer and even require this type of training, and that these programs in New York have the potential to serve as models for future coursework to be developed.

So let me open it up to you, Internet. Did I summarize the work clearly? What questions do you have? Engage with me here and in the comments I’ll try to do this again, but more succinctly. And then after that, I’m going to try to get this down to one sentence.

Creating Physical Writing Space as a Grad Student/Parent

Tue, 29 Aug 2017 12:27:55 -0400

I’m cramming all of Week One of Wendy Belcher’s book into one day. I might even start on Week Two. We’ll see.

Anyway. She’s got a part about identifying the physical sites where you’re doing your writing and what you need to do to improve them.

Here are the potential sites I listed:

Nursery/playroom
Kitchen
Public library
Basement
Coffee shop

I have fifteen hours of childcare a week and fifty-six hours of school-related commitments (including my assistantship), so obviously a lot of work has to happen outside of traditional office spaces. I work on the queen bed or in the glider we have in my son’s nursery/playroom. I work at the kitchen table. I meet a friend for communal writing time at the public library. I work at the dining table we have in our basement. And when I need a treat as motivation, I work at a local coffee shop.

With five “offices,” investing too much time, money, or effort in improving any one of them doesn’t really make a lot of sense. So I keep it all in a go bag or mobile office. This isn’t a new idea, but it’s something I’ve had to get okay with in a new way.

Here’s what has to be in my bag for me to be able to work:

laptop
charger
tablet
stylus
notebooks
pens
highlighters
readings

And then, in the nursery/playroom, at least, I have to have a lapdesk with me.

I’m a piler, not a filer, so I often have all my work stuff spread out around me and if I believe I will return to it, I just leave it out. (I’m usually wrong. I almost never return to it promptly enough to merit leaving it out.) So another shift to my process thanks to parenthood is that I’ve got to pack it all up every time, or I may find myself in bed next to a sleeping toddler with all my work stuff in a different room.

My Feelings About My Experience of Writing #12weekarticle #AcWri

Tue, 29 Aug 2017 11:36:20 -0400

In my doctoral program, before you can take your comprehensive qualifying exams, you have to submit two journal articles for publication. I’ve submitted exactly zero, in spite of two independent studies in which my plan was to create work. In one of them, I ended up doing a poster presentation instead; I’m still working on the other, as it ended up falling in the semester with my parental leave.

I have a thing about revision. I never revised my Master’s paper. I get paralyzed by it. But I’ve got to revise before I’m ready to submit, so when I wrote my learning contract for my dissertation hours this fall, I included revising one of those independent study papers for submission as one of the deliverables. So here we are.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about academic writing lately, especially academic writing habits and process, and consistently everyone recommends Wendy Belcher’s (2009) book Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks. I purchased this years ago, when I was first trying to revise my Master’s paper, and I’m pulling it out again.

So here we are. You, Internet, are going to be my writing partner sometimes. I won’t share drafts with you, but I’m going to blog about my process.

Belcher says, “One of the reasons that academics do not talk about writing is that it involves talking about feelings… So, let’s get started with a very broad question. What feelings come up when you think about writing?” (p. 2). Belcher recommends discussing this with a classmate or colleague, or composing an email to a friend or family member. I’m composing this blog post instead.

Here we go.

I’m the type of writer who dreams and plans for weeks, then churns out a draft in a matter of hours. I used to think my writing process was bogus, that I needed to be drafting non-stop. Last semester I realized that this isn’t quite true. As Raul Pacheco-Vega talks about, I need to be moving my writing forward, but that doesn’t mean drafting. Sometimes it means freewriting, memoing, or reading. So this is the kind of writer I am: I read, I think, I plan, I freewrite, I memo, and all of that takes a long time. And when I feel saturated, then I write like the wind. I turn out a paper that I usually think is hot garbage, but which professors often say are just a few revisions away from ready to submit for publication.

And this is where I get paralyzed, and I’m not sure why. I think it’s overwhelm. Overwhelm at the thought of having to figure out the literature. Of the possibility that my data is old and needs to be done again. At the notion of cutting down all the writing I’ve done into something manageable. I am paralyzed by overwhelm and anxiety, and there are just so many other things that need my attention that I give myself a break, and that’s why I’m sitting on five unpublished manuscripts.

I love writing.

I fear revising.

Those are my feelings on the matter.

Guarding My Time and Energy: Going #LessEmail

Sun, 28 May 2017 18:44:48 -0400

I don’t feel comfortable going #NoEmail, but I certainly use email for many things for which it is not the right tool and still spend too much time managing it. So beginning August 21, I will be checking my email only twice a day, and replying to emails almost never. My plan is to use email almost exclusively for long-form communication with trusted family, friends, and colleagues.

“But what will you do instead?” you might ask.

For urgent communication, I will be available by text.

For less urgent, short-form, private, and near-synchronous communication, I will be available via Facebook Messenger, Twitter DM, Skype, and LinkedIn.

For to-do management and note-taking, I will use Google Keep; my structure and methods for using it will be Bullet Journal-inspired. (Expect a future blog post about this.)

For tracking appointments, library book due dates, and event invitations, I will use Google Calendar.

For sharing files and collaborating on documents, I will use Google Drive or Dropbox.

For getting news from organizations, I will use social media and RSS.

For getting news from artists, I will use Patreon.

Breaking the compulsion to check for notifications

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 22:48:30 -0400

I have turned off push notifications for most apps on my phone and tablet, so that I won’t constantly be disrupted. But I, like many of us I suspect, still compulsively check apps for notifications: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram. I’m trying to wean myself away from this behavior, as it eats up a lot of time when I could be reading, writing, watching, listening to, or playing other things. Just today I remembered the simplest way to handle this: turn on email notifications.

I have WordPress set up to scrape my posts elsewhere and import replies as comments, but that doesn’t handle tags/mentions and event invitations. From now on, all that stuff will pour into my email inbox, giving me only one place to check compulsively. I find little value in scrolling my feeds these days, but am unmotivated to prune them. This will allow me to get the interactions I’m most excited about while cutting down on time spent checking in, I hope.

Doing my part to fix the internet

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 13:43:25 -0400

I happened upon this tweet from my friend Whitney the other day:

Another good read from the Hot Garbage newsletter: https://t.co/GtVOPhhXjQ
— blorp (@WhitneyEllenB) March 17, 2017

It links to Vicki Boykis’s post, Fix the internet by writing good stuff and being nice to people. Boykis articulates a problem that I’ve been chafing against recently, that I had chalked up to nostalgia. In the early days of the web, and even as the web came into what I consider its adolescence, she writes:

People used to write blogs. Long blogs. Rambling blogs. Blogs they weren’t sure anyone was reading. There was a LOT of noise. But there were also blogs that had fun stories, long posts about how to do something, analyses of government issues, of cooking techniques, of the Civil War. People used to write stuff other people wanted to read.

And then traces the process of consolidation of content and the move of the web from a medium where content was the product to a medium where content is the wrapper and eyes on ads are the product:

Whereas before content used to be spread out on numerous domains in numerous ways, content now mostly makes its home on the three domains that are most hostile to thoughtful human discussion: Twitter, Medium, and Facebook.

Now, she says, those of us who use these services are generating content that they are leveraging to make money off of us. Theoretically, we're getting their services in trade for this content, but we aren't where they make their money. We trade our content to them, and they trade our attention to advertisers.

The internet is broken; this is how it is broken. And, she insists, it is in our power to fix it. She identifies five steps we can take to do so:

Write your own blog on your own platform.
Share good content.
Acknowledge creators by paying them.
Use adblockers.
Engage in dialogue with people who are different from you.

In the comments on the post, Chris Aldrich mentions that this advice aligns well with the IndieWeb movement. Well, I fell down that rabbit hole, and here we are: I have put all the tech in place that I need to, I think, for my publishing to happen here at kimberlyhirsh.com, go out to my various social places, and then have responses come back here. This post will serve as sort of a test to find out.

So tell me: are you seeing this post somewhere in the world? Where?

Of course, that process really only addresses Boykis’s first step. I took a social media hiatus recently and tried to remember how I used to use the internet. And it really was blogs, forums, and LiveJournal. I’m certainly not going back to LJ, and so far I haven’t found forums that satisfy me, but good blogging is still happening, so I loaded a bunch into Feedly. Then I returned to social media a bit more consciously, and I do think I’ve been sharing good content then. But - you guessed it - now, I’m going to share that good content here.

As for the third step, I do this a little bit already, via Patreon. There I support Kim Werker, Emm Roy, and Kate Allan. I keep an eye out for other creators I like to support directly. Serendipitously enough, two posts came across my radar on Feedly from Geek and Sundry introducing their new partnership with Nerdist, Project Alpha. It’s a subscription platform providing exclusive content and other content in advance, and I think I’m going to try it out. I’m also probably going to try Seeso, too.

I have been taking a break from adblockers, but I definitely feel it’s time to get them back into my life.

As for number five, here’s where things get tricky. I can track down good blogs and engage in conversations there. But some of the most important conversations in my life are happening in proprietary spaces: Facebook Groups, Twitter, and Tumblr. As a new mom, Facebook Groups are an invaluable resource. As an academic and professional, Twitter is where many of the important conversations in my areas of interest happen. And fandom, well - it kind of lives on Tumblr these days, doesn’t it? If you have managed to move to engaging these platforms almost exclusively via your own hosted platform, how are you doing that? And are you doing it on mobile devices? Because that’s where a lot of my internetting needs to happen.

For the time being, I think my long form writing will happen exclusively here, but it will probably be a process to move short-form here.

Self-Care in Difficult Times

Fri, 03 Feb 2017 14:00:45 -0400

We live in a scary time. Many of us have been living in a scary time for hundreds of years. Some of us are only recently becoming aware of how scary life can be. And some of us always knew, but were able to set it aside. There are valuable discussions in the world about privilege and how it enables you to act like the world isn’t as scary as it is, but this isn’t one of those. This is about, wherever you are in realizing the world is scary, how you might handle it to keep yourself sane and whole in mind. I will acknowledge up front that some self-care techniques involve material goods. Please know that I’m keenly aware that all of my ideas are not accessible for all people. I don’t believe that makes them worthless. Do what you can, when you can.

Lately, I feel my resilience is strained. I imagine it as a wide rubber band. As it gets stretched, it gets thinner and thinner. It threatens to snap, and if I don’t deliberately create some slack, it will snap. Here are things going on with me that make self-care both difficult to achieve and especially necessary:

1. I am a graduate student. And being a graduate student is hard. It’s not intense physical labor, but it is intense mental labor. It is time consuming. It is never off in the way that some jobs are. There is always more work to do, and in my case much work leftover from the past. I am constantly filled with a sense that I am not being productive enough. Even as I write this post, I’m thinking about other things I could be reading and writing.

2. I am a new mom. I’m so lucky to be a new mom; it is a blessing that came as a happy accident after I had basically given up on getting to be a mom. I struggled with polycystic ovary syndrome for years before falling pregnant; I so appreciate this gift. AND YET. Being a new mom means my body belongs to someone else in a very real way. It means that at almost any point in time, I might need to stop any activity I’m doing - and this activity is usually schoolwork, food prep, or laundry - to attend to a tiny, helpless human’s needs.

3. I am a research assistant on a project focused on equity. My work that’s not for class is focused entirely on promoting cultural competence and culturally sustaining pedagogy, ensuring equity in schools, especially as it relates to race.

4. I deliberately chose my coursework this semester to require me to encounter issues of equity. Because I know that this is an area where I need to grow, I registered for a course called Decolonizing Methodologies and am serving as teaching assistant for a course called Information Services in a Diverse Society. These courses require me to grapple with issues of colonization, inequity, and intersectionality.

5. My usual take-a-break spaces - social media - are (rightly) full of news and protest. I’m a cat videos, cute doodles, and friends’ jokes girl. I would not suggest that we should remove the politics from our social media feeds, but I am not used to the current ratio of news to cat videos. I think it’s excellent that people are using these tools for resistance, and I myself have followed many organizations and people of late to increase my awareness. So I have deliberately transformed the ratio in these spaces for me. BUT it means that what used to consist of taking a break is now more getting aware. So I need to take a break in different ways.

So. Now that I’ve explained what’s straining at my resilience rubber band, let me share what I’m doing to give it some slack.

First, I’m staying engaged so that I feel in touch with the world. I have followed the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Teen Vogue on Twitter. While the combination of new motherhood and chronic illness keeps me from feeling confident in my ability to physically show up for protests, I am engaging in craftivism; I crocheted a pussy hat for a friend who was going to the Women’s March. I am going to make one for myself, as well; I’m also planning to contribute to the beanies for this Black Lives Matter march in Seattle and the crafted hats for the March for Science. I signed up for Kim Werker’s Craft + Activism newsletter, which sends me things to read and do. I sent emails and postcards to my senators; I used the Ink Cards app so that I could send the Women’s March postcards while nursing my baby.

Second, I’m escaping as I need to. This looks different for everybody, but for me it has meant watching old seasons of Project Runway, trying out the new CW series Riverdale (it’s not good and yet I’m enjoying it anyway), listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour episodes both old and new, reading Mark Waid and Fiona Staples’s Archie reboot, and reading Glen Weldon’s The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. (I’m just sort of generally fueling a new crush on @glenweldon. My husband was all “But he’s gay so don’t expect it to be requited” and I was all “That really doesn’t matter because a crush is not a thing that needs to be requited anyway what with me being happily married to you and all. And him being married too. And famous.”) Check your library for access to escapist reading material, y’all.

Third, I’m trying… a little… to take care of my body. I’ve gone for a few walks. I’ve cooked my own meals. I’ve delighted in warm beverages. I’m still not showering often enough (#thanksbaby) and I haven’t gone for a swim since probably September, both of which would make me feel immensely better, but still. I brush my hair most days. I live in my body so I should really care for it, and I’m making at least some effort. For a person with clinical depression (even in remission), this is an achievement.

Anyway. These are the things I’m doing to care for myself. Self-care can be an act of resistance, so please don’t tell yourself that it is unimportant, that you are unworthy, that there are more important things in the world. If we’re going to have the stamina to fight the good fight, we need to give ourselves a break from time to time.

The best I can do is not a fixed point.

Mon, 26 Sep 2016 07:16:07 -0400

Still reading the advanced reading copy of the @unfuckyourhabitat book. There’s a whole section called “The Perfection Paradox,” about letting go of your perfectionism, and not using perfectionism as an excuse to not get started on something. I don’t consider myself a perfectionist; I, in fact, chafe when other people do. I’m a graduate student and my advisor called me a perfectionist once and I was all, “No, that’s not the problem!”

And it’s true: I don’t mind things being imperfect. (A Latin teacher maxim: “Perfect means finished,” because perfect tense is the tense we use for completed action. We don’t want to be perfect, because then there’s nothing left to do, and what a sad state that would be!)

So I’m not a perfectionist. But I’m a do-my-bestist, or some more elegant way of expressing that idea. I feel like if I’m going to bother doing something, I don’t want to half-ass it. I want to give it my very best, or why bother. But if it’s not perfect even after I’ve given it my best, that’s fine.

The problem is, I conceive of “my best” as a fixed point, my best ever, not the best I can do right now. I struggle with chronic illness and right now I’m 38 weeks pregnant. One of the lessons that pregnancy has taught me that chronic illness never did is that my-best-right-now sometimes needs to be good enough; my-best-ever is not always attainable. I am only really internalizing the lesson here at the end, though, and I have this section of the #ufyh book to thank for that, partly.

My best at a given moment is defined by a number of factors. How much sleep have I gotten? How much physical pain am I in? Is there anything going on in my social or emotional world that is eating a lot of my attention? My best is variable. I can only do the best I can do right now, and I need to not compare the best I can do right now to the best I could have done at some other time. Before I got pregnant, I was doing really well healing my chronic illness; it wasn’t gone, but I was barely symptomatic. I had plenty of energy and almost no pain. I could churn out a solid, well-written ten-page paper in two days, no problem. I would just sit down and write for six hours, go to bed, then get up and finish it the next day.

Once I got pregnant, things shifted. I often had to choose: is this reading for class going to be done thoroughly, or am I going to skim it and then take a nap? Or take a nap and then skim it on the bus on the way to class, even?

I wish I had learned to be this gentle with myself when I was ill; in the long run I would’ve gotten more done. When I was at my most symptomatic and working as a librarian at two different middle schools, and was supposed to give each of them 50% of my working time but desperately wanted to give each of them 100% of my energy, as soon as I realized that what I wanted was unattainable, I shut down. If I couldn’t do my best, I would do only what had to be done. Because, inexplicably, I would rather do simply what is sufficient than something beyond sufficient but not my best. I guess because I think that people can tell when you’re doing the bare minimum, and somehow it’s less upsetting for people to think you’re just getting by, than for people to think you’re trying hard and you’re not getting it done? I don’t know. Brains are weird.

Regardless of what was going through my head at the height of my illness five years ago, I’m realizing that now, as I embark upon motherhood at the same time as I am pursuing a graduate degree, I’ve got to learn to settle for my-best-in-this-moment. It is actually the literal best I can do, and it’s better to do that than to shut down or, alternately, to be very unkind to myself and rail at myself for not doing as well as I would have liked.

Let’s all care about things!

Wed, 21 Sep 2016 17:52:17 -0400

I was a teenager in the 90s, so I’m used to everybody else having this constant air of detached irony, but I’ve never really been into that. Often friends tell me they are impressed by how when I pursue a passion, I go full-tilt.

You guys, don’t worry about whether caring about something looks cool. Because you know what? Caring about something feels awesome.

I firmly believe that the act of caring is the most important part, much more important than what you care about. I have cared about books, musical theater, the environment, middle school feminism, more musical theater, Latin, the humanities, basically any kind of theater really, teaching, kids, Joss Whedon both as a person and an artist, fantasy novels, crafting, having a baby, getting healthy, loving my family, improv comedy, school and school and school… Sometimes I get down on myself for not caring enough about the “right” things, but I think my caring about stuff that seems frivolous sort of bleeds out into the world and makes a difference even if the stuff I’m caring about isn’t, you know, IMPORTANT…

Am I giving you permission to be deeply interested in some sphere of activity aimed at harming other people?

NOPE. I wouldn’t call that caring.

Multiple meanings are fun, right? There’s another thing I care about: puns.

Care. Love. Passion. Giving a shit. I really think it’s the best thing you can do, and there are so many different ways to do it. If it seems overwhelming, just pick one thing, and DECIDE to care about it. Try it out. If it isn’t the right thing, there are basically an infinite number of things you might care about, so try a different one.

SHOW UP, YOU GUYS. I promise it’s worth it.

How I Bullet Journal, Summer 2016 Edition

Fri, 08 Jul 2016 10:05:37 -0400

I’ve been bullet journaling for almost two and a half years, and I finally feel like I’m hitting my stride with it. I take so many notes for graduate school that I fill up two Moleskines a year. I thought I would take the opportunity of switching to my second volume to share how I use the Bullet Journal system, and which parts I leave out. You can find pictures to go with these on my Instagram account.

My notebook of choice is the Moleskine Classic Collection Large Hardcover Squared Notebook. I began with a lined notebook, because when I first started I wanted to use something that I already had on hand; I wasn’t sure this system would work for me and I didn’t want to invest money in something I wasn’t going to keep using. I switched to a softcover squared notebook for my next journal, but I’m pretty hard on my journals, shoving them in purses and backpacks where they might be near drinks or food that could spill on them, so after the pocket on that softcover gave up the ghost, I switched to hardcover. I love Moleskines for their simplicity and sturdiness.

I love having an index, but I found that with monthly pages and collections all in one index, I was having a lot of trouble finding collections. For this reason, I’ve now divided the index; months go on the left, collections on the right.

In the bottom right corner of my index spread, I have this key. I found that I didn’t use the signifiers Ryder Carroll originally suggested such as an asterisk for priority or an exclamation point for an idea, so I just stopped including them in my key. I never left enough space to the left of my bullets for them anyway.

I tend to use the event bullet when I’m making a daily list; this keeps me from getting too ambitious and giving myself too many “today to-dos.” On each day, I set out specific tasks from my larger monthly list that I want to do; I leave a blank line and then items after that blank line are my rapid-logging for the day. I fill in the event bullet when the event is over.

When I started, Ryder was using boxes for tasks and bullets for notes; I actually like this bullet for tasks and dashes for note system much better.

You’ll notice there’s no bullet for migrating a task backward to the Future Log. That’s because I don’t use the Future Log; I tried but I never looked back at it, so I stopped including it.

Similarly, I usually would forget to refer to the monthly calendar; it wasn’t a good planner because I wouldn’t check it, and it wasn’t a good log of what had happened since I would forget to add things to it after the first of the month. I use Google Calendar for tracking future events, meal planning, and setting reminders. I also refer back to it when I need to know what happened in the past. So my monthly spread just begins with the task list.

I’m a doctoral student, so my work-related collections tend to focus on revising papers for publication, designing new studies, and the grant-funded project that will support my assistantship for the next 3 years. You’ll notice that in my “To Revise” list, I’ve used threading to point to revision notes in an earlier notebook.

School is out right now, and I don’t really feel like going back to my old notebook for examples of these, but I plan to write another post in September about the way I handle specific spreads and collections in the school year: weekly reading, notes on readings for literature reviews, and data collection and analysis.

Poster Presentation at ALA 2016: Special Education Training for School Librarians

Thu, 26 May 2016 11:54:41 -0400

I will be presenting the results of my study, Special Education Training for Preservice School Librarians, as a poster session at ALA 2016 in Orlando, FL on Saturday, June 25. You can find me in the exhibit hall from 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm. Here’s a preview:

Effortless Clarity

Mon, 18 Apr 2016 13:35:38 -0400

I experienced a rare moment of effortless clarity in improv practice yesterday. I’m on DSI’s hip-hop improv team Versus, and yesterday we were practicing infusing our scenes with emotion.

Our director, Rose Werth, instructed us to get on stage, choose an emotion, play in silence for about 15 seconds, and then speak when we were ready.

I got up on stage with Kit FitzSimons. Our suggestion was stargazing. I sat down. I chose “curious/confused” as my initial emotion. I knew, having played with and watched Kit for almost a year, that in that 15 seconds of silence he was going to commit to some very detailed object work, and I didn’t want to do my own object work that might conflict with what he was doing. So I gazed up at the stars. Looked over at him. Watched him fiddle with knobs on an invisible object. Looked back up at the stars. Looked back at him. Watched as he looked through an invisible eyepiece. Realized he was putting together and testing a telescope. Looked back up at the stars. Looked at him. Stood up. Cocked my head to the left. Took one step toward him. At which point he said,

“I’ve got it.”

And we were off. Over the course of the scene, we revealed that our characters were on a date and he was putting together this telescope as a gift for me, but I was constantly trying to help and provide advice and generally, in as polite and loving and in-a-new-relationship a way as possible, tell him he was doing it all wrong.

At one point, he said, “Well, I’m not a professional astronomer.”

And I paused, then said, “But I am.” And then proceeded to prove that assertion over the course of the rest of the scene.

When we were done, Rose and some of our other teammates said, “That was such a smart choice, for you to be a professional astronomer.” I really didn’t know how to respond, because in that pause before saying, “But I am,” I had thought, “There is only one best way to respond to what Kit just said.” So it hadn’t felt like an especially smart choice to me, but more the only one that made sense. So I just mumbled “Uh-huh” or nodded or something and then shared a look with Kit to sort of check in and see if he was thinking the same thing as me, which he seemed to be, and then practice moved on.

But after practice I continued to think about this moment, and why it had been so impressive from the audience when it felt so obvious on stage. I tried to imagine myself a year ago, in the middle of taking 401, watching more experienced improvisers. If I had seen that scene, would I have been impressed in that moment?

And I decided I would. I decided that the very act of effortlessly making that choice, of listening and recognizing and following what seemed like clearly the best path, doing that was impressive, especially because it was something that in the past I was so proud of doing consciously and with great effort. And I decided that it was a gift to have people outside the scene present to verbalize that I had done it, and it was also a gift to have a scene partner who had intentionally set it up and trusted that I would make that choice.

DSI founder, owner, and three-times-my-teacher Zach Ward often tells students (usually in 301) that to him, improv looks like all of that code from The Matrix. He sees the underlying patterns in scenes, not the details on top. And that often involves automatically recognizing the natural consequences of what has happened earlier in the scene. And, thinking more about that moment in practice, I realized: this was a Matrix moment.

I’ve struggled to create my own metaphor to describe that moment. In that moment I was on stage, all possible choices of how to respond to Kit’s offer were laid out before me like so many possible paths, like trails of light. The one I chose glowed brightly, and all the rest were so dim as to not even be noticed or considered. It was so clear and so obviously right. It was the answer.

I’ve also thought about what kind of ingredients go in to the improv cocktail that makes that moment happen. How can we manufacture effortless clarity?

Well, two years of practice doing improv certainly helps. Thinking about improv academically, reading all you can about it, reflecting on both what you do and what you see, all of that helps. It gets you to a place where you can recognize the underlying patterns that make comedy happen.

But there are other components, and I think the most important, and probably easiest (but also most time-consuming) to manufacture, is the relationship between scene partners. Get on stage with somebody that you’ve played with a lot, preferably in a variety of styles (short form, long form, weird formats); that way each of you trusts the other to knock down anything you set up. Get on stage with somebody you’ve watched a lot; when you’re in a scene with someone, no matter how hard you’re listening, you’re focusing on yourself in a way that you won’t as an audience member. As an audience member watching the same players in a variety of shows, you’ll get to know their personal patterns of play and be able to respond to them on stage. And get on stage with somebody you’ve talked to about improv and how it works, a lot.

Probably you’re not going to become improv BFFs with every potential scene partner. But the closer you can get, the more effortlessly you’ll be able to apply everything you’ve learned about improv in the past.

Advanced Improv Notes: Referential Humor

Thu, 17 Mar 2016 12:01:00 -0400

This winter, I took the Advanced Harold class at DSI Comedy Theater. DSI uses forums for class discussion, but being The Hermione Granger of Improv, I basically turned them into my personal improv blog for 6 weeks. Looking back over my notes, I found some themes being repeated over and over, so I thought I’d consolidate them thematically here. PLEASE NOTE: as thorough as my nerdy notes are, they are no substitute for taking a class with a teacher, practicing with a coach, or getting up on stage in front of an audience. So get out there and DO THOSE THINGS.

Previous posts in this series:

Consequences

—-

I’ve mentioned before, and will again, that I’m the founding producer of the Improvised Whedon Company. We draw our inspiration entirely from pre-existing work, and I love it. I love fan culture, fanworks, and fandom, and this team is one of the things I’m proudest of working on, ever.

In our practices, we spend a lot of time asking ourselves, How reference-heavy should we be? The answer depends on our audience. For an audience at a comedy theater, we strive to be reference-light. If a scene relies on a reference for its humor initially (like this one), it has to have its own game established pretty quickly. In this case, “What other sharp objects can we use to unintentionally threaten the pilot?” stands alone even if you don’t know the origin of the game. For an audience at a fan convention, we can be fairly reference-heavy.

In a Harold or other montage, references can be sprinkled in for fun. The best thing is something that is funny on its own, but extra funny if you catch the reference. I think the easiest way to make this work is to start with a reference but create a whole world around it, and the easiest way to do that is with mapping. So, for example, the DSI House Harold Team Blandly Handsome had a show replete with Star Wars references. It occurred to me that a fun idea to play with is all the normal kinds of stuff that could happen in that world. Something that would have simultaneously been a reference to both Star Wars and Clerks, but still be funny on its own, would be a scene where contractors working on the second Death Star are discussing how they can prevent the vulnerabilities that were present on the first Death Star. Even if you’ve never seen Star Wars or Clerks, the idea of contractors trying to avoid past mistakes is very grounded, creates real stakes, and yet still leaves lots of room for silliness.

THE KEY: A reference-heavy show should be like any other show, founded in good scenework where you establish relationships, explore a world, and heighten the stakes. It should be accessible for audience members who have never seen the source of the reference, and extra fun for audience members who have.

Working with scene partners who live and breathe references

You’re going to encounter this at some point, somebody who just drops references all over the place. (I actually really enjoy this in a scene partner, but not everyone does.) You should only ever not catch a reference once. Get thee to Wikipedia.

But I’m not going to go to Wikipedia in the middle of a show!

Nope, you’re sure not. So you have a few options:

1. Accept the reference as if it were any other new piece of information added to the scene by your scene partner, as though they had invented it on the spot.

2. Pick a strong emotional response to the reference, even if you have no idea what your scene partner is referencing.

Tools to help you get references:

Wikipedia

Fandango Movie Clips

Blog posts about this:

Know Everything (Will Hines)

Improve Your Knowledge of History (Alex Fernie)

Acknowledgments:

I am indebted to the following improvisers for teaching me or talking me through the ideas in this post: Jonathan Yeomans, Kit FitzSimons, Zach Ward.

Advanced Improv Notes: Consequences

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 14:50:34 -0400

I just finished taking the Advanced Harold class at DSI Comedy Theater. DSI uses forums for class discussion, but being The Hermione Granger of Improv, I basically turned them into my personal improv blog for 6 weeks. Looking back over my notes, I found some themes being repeated over and over, so I thought I’d consolidate them thematically here. PLEASE NOTE: as thorough as my nerdy notes are, they are no substitute for taking a class with a teacher, practicing with a coach, or getting up on stage in front of an audience. So get out there and DO THOSE THINGS.

Show me the consequences.

Playing consequences can come into play in one of two ways. It can either be the way we initiate a scene, or it can be used in a spread/tag out/time dash/callback. Regardless of which way you do it, it’s one of the most fun and rewarding things we can do, and a great way to hold an audience’s attention.

Initiate with consequences.

If the scene premise requires that one player demonstrate success or failure, instead initiate the scene about the consequences of that success or failure. The consequences are more interesting than watching the player do the thing anyway.

Leave room for consequences.

If the people in a scene have just had something big happen, don’t necessarily edit on that as a button. Give them a little room to play with the consequences of whatever just happened. Of course you don’t want to let a scene go on too long, but if it looks like the players are going to dig into consequences, give them a little time to do so.

Skip to consequences.

In addition to initiating with consequences or playing them directly within a scene, you can edit and then play with them in a later beat or scene, spread to them, or tag out/double tag out and show them. When you do this, make sure you get right to it: jump into the consequences immediately. My favorite example of this is from “Coach Feratu,” an episode of Rick and Morty.

This scene sets up that there’s a vampire in the school. And you almost immediately get this follow-up. You never see them fight the gym teacher vampire, because nobody cares about that.

CONSEQUENCES: They’re kind of the most interesting that happens, either on stage or in life.

In praise of informal mentors in improv

Fri, 13 Nov 2015 22:10:23 -0400

I’ve only done improv at one place, DSI Comedy Theater (462 West Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC - come visit!). So please know that, while I think the things I’m about to talk about probably apply in other improv communities, I’ve only experienced this one directly.

Improv at DSI, and as I understand it, lots of other places, does a great job of providing you with formal mentors. You begin by taking classes, where you have teachers who not only tell you things, but sidecoach you while you’re in the thick of it. They’ll go out with you after class and talk more about what you did in class. If you’re cast on a house team, you get a coach; at DSI, if you’re a company member and you’re on an indie team, you can get a coach. So we’ve got teachers and coaches, formal mentors whose job it is to help you work through stuff and improve.

But I think it’s really beneficial to have informal mentors, too. I think there are two types of informal mentors: the kind you talk to, and the kind you watch.

A talky-talk mentor is really great when you’re having improv thoughts, and the non-improv people in your life can’t relate, and a lot of the improv people who came in at the same time as you are maybe having similar problems. A lot of times improv brings up feelings, and a lot of times your more formal mentors or your comedy friends might not be equipped to deal with how many feelings you have, so it’s really nice if you can find a talky-talk mentor to deal with THAT. When you’re excited about a new thing you can share it with them; when you are struggling you can talk to them and find out that, hey, everybody has kind of the same patterns in their feelings about improv and goes through them around the same times in their improv careers. Bianca Casusöl has generously been exactly this person for me, talking me through some really slumpy times. Go find your Bianca. It might actually be Bianca.

A watchy-watch mentor might not even know they’re mentoring you, which is totally okay. This is someone who every time you watch them you feel like you’re learning something new. Sometimes, um, you have a video of a show that you’ve watched over and over and then after 30 viewings you notice a new bit of object work they did. (No? Just me? Okay.) Sometimes you’re even on stage with them and you learn a new thing. Sometimes, you think you’re doing a thing, and then you look across the stage and see that no, you’re not really doing that thing, but they are, and damn is it impressive and don’t you wish you were doing it better and oh hey wait - maybe you should from now on make it a point to do that more the way they’re doing it, since you’re so blown away. And if you know me at all, then you know what I’m about to say: an excellent watchy-watch informal mentor is Kit FitzSimons (to whom I am also grateful for his work as a formal mentor as coach/director for the Improvised Whedon Company, and a bit of talky-talk mentoring about improv thoughts, too).

Last week I was performing in the Family Improv show at DSI with Kit. We were both on the sidelines; neither of us was in the scene that was going on. Historically speaking, I’ve always prided myself on being activated whenever I’m on stage. As a perpetual chorus girl, I’ve had plenty of stage time when I wasn’t the focus, and I like to imagine I do a pretty good job of remaining present. I try to do the same thing with improv when I’m standing on the side, but I have a habit of putting my hands behind my back against the wall and resting my head back and getting super into watching the scene, which means if a walk-on is called for and I’m the right person to do it I kind of have to peel myself off the wall first. I had to do that very thing in an IWC show in September, in fact.

But at the Family Improv show, I noticed (and why I hadn’t noticed this so pointedly in the shows I’ve seen Kit in or been in with him before I don’t know because I guarantee you he does it every time), he was not just paying close attention to what was going on in the scene, he was basically AT attention: in position - head and shoulders back a little, arms slightly pulled away from his sides, light on his feet - and ready to jump in at any time if needed, but not pulling focus. And I thought, “I’ve got to be more like that; it’ll make it easier to jump in, it’ll lend more energy to the proceedings on stage, it’ll be better for me and my teammates and the audience.” It’s going to look different on me than it does on Kit, but it’s an energy and focus that I can shift to instead of my heretofore not-unpresent wall-sticking (better than sitting down or zoning out, but could be even better).

The great thing about watchy-watch mentors is you can find them anywhere people are doing improv, and you can have an unlimited number of them, and it costs them literally nothing to mentor you, as they were going to perform anyway.

All this to say, as soon as you feel comfortable enough in an improv community to do so, I would strongly recommend finding yourself some informal mentors to supplement your awesome teachers and coaches.

Improv will not fix you...

Wed, 11 Nov 2015 15:31:02 -0400

…because you’re not broken. YOU ARE WHOLE AND YOU ARE ENOUGH.

*******

I’ve been having a challenging few weeks. I suffer from clinical depression and social anxiety, and they’re usually in remission, but in times of transition (like, say, leaving a job and starting a doctoral program) they sneak their way back into my life and right around October or November they get their big reveal. So I’ve been feeling weepy and weird, guilty and self-judging. I spent most of the day yesterday working on a statistics midterm, and I had a good cry, and I had a bit more of a cry in the car on the way to improv class mostly just remembering the cry I’d had earlier. I had really been looking forward to class, thinking, “This is going to save my day. I have had a hard, lonely day, and this will fix it, and me.” (You know where this is going, don’t you?)

*******

I got to the theater. I talked to some friends. They also were having rough days. We hugged. I went downstairs. I decided to engage in some generous mischief, the results of which I believe have not come to fruition. I let another friend know about the generous mischief, and she played at (?) being jealous because she herself wasn’t the target of such mischief. I did my best to make it up to her. I had emotionally papier-mached these layers of fun and play over my extremely raw heart.

*******

Class started. We did warm-ups. They were fun. But I was feeling twitchy. And then we got to the meat of class, which involved doing AN EXERCISE.

The thing about exercises is that they are meant to give you specific skills. To achieve this end, they are rigidly structured and intensely focused, and the scenes that come out of them do not and are not designed to resemble what you would want to see on stage, necessarily. So all of the things I’ve been thinking about lately, which are techniques for building strong scenes, actually got in my way here.

Add to that, I got psyched out by the suggestion. The suggestion was “opera singer,” and I was keenly aware of myself as a singer and of the three people in the room who know I’m a singer, of their knowing I’m a singer and making the connection with the suggestion. I got thoroughly stuck in my head, working so hard to THINK through the ramifications of the suggestion with respect to this particular exercise and my own knowledge of opera singers.

My scene partner and I did two scenes. I’m not going to go into detail, but both scenes felt like a struggle. I felt so strongly that I had hung my partner out to dry because of being so up in my head. I felt that, not only had I struggled with the whole point of the exercise, but I had failed to do the two things I think are the foundation of the best scenes: trust and love my partner, even if I didn’t know him that well.

We got notes. It was hard.

I spent other people’s scenes running through all the things I could have done, what I should have done, and more generally beating myself up over those two scenes. I probably would have learned a lot more by paying attention to other people’s scenes.

*******

We got up in larger groups to do the exercise again. I ended up with the same scene partner. I told myself this time I was going to go out. I was going to have a strong, positive initiation. I was going to fix the night. (You still know where this is going, don’t you?)

I succeeded at coming out with a strong, positive initiation and maintaining a positive scene. We did a fun scene that met the requirements of the exercise. I got in it with my scene partner. I didn’t abandon him. That scene felt a lot better than the other two had.

*******

We went out after class, and that was fun. I got home. I was still beating myself up over those two tough scenes. That one good scene hadn’t fixed the night. The night hadn’t fixed me. It was more than an hour before I could get to sleep.

*******

This morning, I realized that when I notice myself start to get psyched out, probably it’s time to treat whatever exercise or scene I’m in like a game of Freeze. Get out there, do something, something big and strong and fun, and THEN FIGURE IT OUT. Not stand on the sidelines mulling over everything.

*******

The best thing to come out of this for me is the realization that just because I had a hard time with this exercise this one time, just because I had a bad night, that doesn’t mean that I am a bad person, a bad scene partner, or bad at improv. I had one bad night. Everybody has them. I’ll have a good one soon.

*******

Improv can’t fix me, and I shouldn’t ask it to, and I don’t need it to, because I, myself, am whole and enough. But it can give me tools that expand beyond the theater. Next time I have a bad day, a rough time, a tough conversation, I can remember: having a hard time doesn’t make me bad, and I’ll be having a good time soon.

Three tips for dealing with an improv slump

Mon, 02 Nov 2015 19:55:27 -0400

Modified from a note I published on Facebook…

First, YOUR TASTE GROWS FASTER THAN YOUR SKILL. (There’s a great Ira Glass quote on this here: www.goodreads.com/quotes/30…) So you’re going to know what really good improv looks like, not be able to make it happen yourself, and get frustrated. It’s okay. It’s okay. Don’t stop. DON’T STOP. (Unless you need to stop for reasons other than your frustration. It’s always okay to stop if you need to for reasons - but not because you’re starting to doubt yourself.)

Second, IMPROV GROWTH IS A SPIRAL. You’re moving up on the spiral, but you’re also moving around. So you feel like you are in the same place or even behind where you were months and months ago, but you’re actually on your way up. You’re maybe even right at the point where you are moving solidly up to the next level, and in the next week or two something amazing is going to happen. Trust. Trust. Trust yourself. Trust your teammates. Love yourself. Love your teammates. Trust and love. (Don’t forget to love people who aren’t yourself and your teammates, but don’t forget to love yourself and your teammates.)

LASTLY: Get up on stage with people who you think are better than you. Make sure they’re people you trust and love, who trust and love you right back. Fill the audience with people you trust and love, who trust and love you right back and are going to be blown away by what you do no matter what. Get on that stage and have a great time and worry about nothing except saying yes and going big. And then do it again and again and again.

A moment to be proud

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 10:19:21 -0400

Lately, I’ve been feeling rutty/restless in my improv. I had a run of shows that didn’t feel great, AND they were my last shows for the next few weeks so I had of course wanted them to be amazing. What’s that saying? Expectation goeth before a disappointment?

I had a conversation with Bianca

Casusöl a few weeks ago where she said that when you feel that way, it’s right before you’re about to grow. I knew she was right, so when I started feeling this way about a week and a half ago, I tried to keep that foremost in my mind: this dissatisfaction with my own performance meant that I was about to take a leap, to jump up higher on the improv learning spiral.

I started the jump yesterday, but I hope it’s not done yet.

The Improvised Whedon Company is preparing for a show inspired by the movie The Cabin in the Woods. Last night, we were working a scene where Sean Williams and I were two workers in The Facility. The scene went something like this:

Sean: Uh, I’ve got 300 crates of waste here, where do you want me to dump them?

Me: flipping through pages on imaginary clipboard Hold on a sec… There’s so much paperwork in this job. flip flip flip Uh, looks like those should go to Level 7.

Sean: Level 7? They just sent me down here! It’s always like this. I had to drive through all of these levels, and past all the monsters and the werewolves and through these ghosts just floating around, and I’m really getting tired of it. Well, I guess I’ll go back to Level 7.

Me: Uh, wait - go back a bit. Did you just say there are ghosts just OUT, floating around?

Sean: Yeah, they’re just floating in the hallway.

Me: That isn’t supposed to happen! goes over to pick up imaginary phone and call someone to fix this

Now, let me explain why I’m proud of this.

One of the most basic things we learn is to listen to our scene partner, but it’s also one of the easiest things to forget. Obviously with only a year and a half of experience under my belt I’m still working on it, but I’ve seen it be a struggle for improvisers much more experienced than myself. And the key symptom of not listening is failing to latch on to a thing your partner says in the first few lines that is a gift that can be the foundation of your whole scene. A new improviser will sometimes be so eager to get to the AND, they forget the YES.

It’s a classic piece of UCB-style play to be grounded in the real world and then latch on to that first weird thing that pops up. It’s not a super-advanced move, but it’s one that requires sharp attention, clarity, and quick thinking to actually do on stage. In the world of Cabin in the Woods (SPOILER ALERT!), monsters belong in boxes. Ghosts should be carefully contained. Ghosts in a box are mundane; ghosts in the hallways are A PROBLEM. I was immensely pleased with myself for accepting Sean’s offer. Was my move to get on the phone with someone the best thing to do next? I’m not sure - but I’m proud as hell that I recognized that offer and grabbed it and didn’t let go.

My Favorite Parts of Performing: Prep & Notes

Wed, 30 Sep 2015 13:10:30 -0400

It feels weird and a little wrong to admit this, but my favorite part of performing isn’t the performance itself.

Now, obviously, that’s key to the experience. And I love doing it.

But my heart flutters most before a show and after a practice or, in the case of improv, show. (In the non-improv theater, you stop getting notes after previews are done. In the improv theater, you may or may not get notes after a show. But I’m always happy when we do.)

I have a problem with presence, i.e., the being in the moment kind. (And now, we can begin a run of presence/present/presents puns! I’ll let you do that. Come back when you’re done.) I’ve got a bit of a Janus complex, always looking back and looking forward (at this very moment, I’m frustrated with myself for not focusing harder in statistics class today, and excited about having my team over for a movie night), and struggling to be in the moment. So, it makes sense that my favorite part of performing isn’t the actual moment when I’m most in it (though I’m proud to say I am present-as-all-get-out on an improv stage, saving analysis for after the show’s over).

I think one of the reasons I like the getting-ready and the getting-notes is because they are small, shared experiences. When you’re on the stage, yo’ure having a big shared experience: you, your fellow performers, and the audience are all in on something together, and it is MAGIC. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. BUT. When you’re in a dressing room or green room or backstage, or when the house is empty and it’s just you and your fellow performers and the director and crew on the stage, that’s it’s very own brand of magic, and I wouldn’t trade that for the world, either.

In my very first community theater production, I would arrive at the theater an hour before call, just to have some extra quiet time in the space. I was 13. It actually ended up causing a problem for the company; they got charged for the extra time I spent in the dressing room. Oops!

At the improv theater now, sometimes I get called down for notes for a show I didn’t even perform in - I’ll have crewed it, or I’ll just be around, or it’ll be a show with a format similar to the shows I’m on even though technically I’m not on the team - and every time - EVERY TIME - I get a warm feeling of contentment. I think it’s because GIVING & GETTING NOTES, as an activity, is targeted toward continuous improvement, and continuous improvement is pretty much my favorite thing. One of the reasons I’m skeptical that I’ll ever “outgrow” doing improv is that there’s no ceiling on it. You can always keep getting better. There’s always the risk of a bad show, and as devastated as I am when I perceive I’ve had a bad show (I’m usually wrong and at worst have had a mediocre show), I find it oddly exhilarating at the same time to know that 20 years from now, I’ll still be having bad shows and still be finding new ways to be better.

Improv is crack for productivity hobbyists, I guess, is what I’m saying.

Don’t run away from it.

Mon, 21 Sep 2015 08:20:19 -0400

Sometimes, you get a note in practice that on the surface looks like it applies really specifically to that practice, but after a little while you realize it applies to your whole style of play.

Last night, we had the last Improvised Whedon Company practice before our upcoming show. On at least two occasions, our director/coach Kit FitzSimons (I’ve mentioned him before) paused the scene and said, very pointedly and directly to me, “Don’t run away from it.” At both of these points, I very clearly had something I was ready to articulate in the scene, and I was choosing not to, or stopping short. And I guarantee you that in both cases, Kit knew exactly the thing I wanted to say, could see on my face and in my body that I wanted to say it, and could pinpoint the exact moment when I decided not to.

(This is the point at which I could go off on a tangent about why this might be the case, and whether it’s because Kit is extra smart, really good and experienced at improv, or the secret improv best friend I’ve been waiting for my whole life and just gets me. The first two are definitely true. The third is an intriguing possibility that I probably shouldn’t be exploring in such a public forum. Hey, I said I could go off on a tangent, and now I have!)

Back to the matter at hand: In more than one show recently, I’ve found myself hanging back and running away from an idea. I wonder if it’s an overcorrection, if it comes from trying to curb the impulse to stay so attached to my idea that I fail to listen to my scene partner. I wonder if it is giving me the illusion of that generosity I’ve been pursuing. I guess it doesn’t really matter what the source of it is.

What matters is how to move forward. It helps me to think about what I want from a scene partner. I don’t want a scene partner to get out of my way. I want her* to get in it with me (”it” being wherever the scene is going). I’m not inherently an obstacle on stage; I don’t need to move out of my scene partner’s way to let her shine. I need to get in there with her and we need to move together. We need to co-vary.

And now that I’ve used a concept from statistics to explain improv, my work here is done.

(But my work on stage isn’t, and I will be prioritizing “Don’t run away from it” in shows and practices for the foreseeable future.)

*I default to the feminine pronoun, because it’s mine.

More on generosity in improv

Mon, 14 Sep 2015 07:30:14 -0400

Last week, I had two opportunities to play with improvisers less experienced than myself. (Like most comedians, I have a hybrid inferiority-superiority complex, so it feels really uncomfortable to call anyone “less experienced than myself,” even though I’ve been doing this for more than a year and most of the people I played with had only done it for six weeks.)

Frequently, after a show, I will come off stage and think, “Enh. That was okay.” I’ll be dissatisfied with my performance, but unable to identify why, because I didn’t go in with a goal for the show. I consistently have better shows when I choose a victory condition for myself: just like board games have a certain condition to satisfy, and just like I sometimes like to come up with an alternate so that even if someone else wins I can feel like I won, I have a better time if I pick something different from the obvious victory condition, “Have a good show.”

Last week in both of these shows, my victory condition was to give my scene partner both space and support. As a more experienced improviser (still feels weird to say), especially in a short form scene like I played this week, my inclination is to go out with a strong initiation, name my scene partner’s character, and get some stakes on the table ASAP. These are the things I remember from 101 beyond Yes And and mirroring, and when I find myself faltering, I go back to them. But this week, my goal was to let my scene partner initiate unless they clearly were struggling, and then basically to let them drive the scene. I also wanted to provide gentle nudges toward a stronger scene if I could, a thing I’ve noticed improvisers more experienced than myself doing in scenes with me, and am always grateful for.

Achieving both of these components of the single goal is a balancing act. It’s not a balancing act I’ve had to perform much before, having been the junior improviser in almost everything I’ve done. But I felt like I achieved it. So even though I came off stage thinking, “Enh, I could have been funnier,” or “Gah, I keep failing to make strong or any character choices,” and probably a bunch of other mean thoughts about myself that I can’t remember now, I also came off stage thinking, “Hey, my scene partners had a good time and seemed to feel supported. Yay me!”

Not really related: If you need to remember the wisdom of your 101 self, find a small 101 class and ask to pad out their show. Or just go to a jam and play with a 101 student. Their energy, enthusiasm, and commitment to playing rather than working will rejuvenate you.

Improv and generosity

Fri, 04 Sep 2015 12:06:27 -0400

I’ve only been doing improv for a little while, but I sure do think about it a lot. And something I’ve been thinking about with respect to improv in the past couple weeks is generosity.

A friend of mine who has almost no familiarity with improv came to my latest show. Completely unprompted by me, he said he could tell from watching the show that Kit FitzSimons is a generous improviser. (If you’ll recall, I called both Kit and Vinny Valdivia generous improvisers in my post, Beginner’s Mind and Advancing in Improv.) I said, “Yes, exactly!” and the more I think about it, I’m not sure there’s a quality I’d rather have in a scene partner or have someone ascribe to me than generosity.

We learn lots of rules and tips and tricks in improv; we learn the power of YES AND, of unconditionally affirming and building upon our partner’s offers. We learn to accept those offers; we learn to listen. We learn to let go of our planned ideas and follow the consequences of the things our scene partners are saying. We learn a lot more, a lot deeper, a lot broader, but these fundamental principles, I think, are mostly teaching us how to be generous.

We learn early to give gifts: to endow our scene partner’s character with a particular quality, to direct them to do something or avoid something in such a way that it’s clear that in the scene they should do the opposite of whatever we’ve said. If we’re playing a character game that’s been established ahead of time, as the Improvised Whedon Company does, we give them the gift of naming their character and identifying their game at the top of the scene, because it’s hard to do that yourself and it not feel like becoming the improv equivalent of a human pretzel.

I think when we learn to be generous in improv, we learn to be generous in other parts of our lives, too. In a scene, I can give my partner the gift of establishing our relationship and the stakes of the scene up top. Having done so, I feel more empowered to give people in my life the gift of making it clear how much I value their presence in my life, how much I see their strengths, how much I want to see them succeed.

I’m still learning. I’ll always be learning; one of the things I’m gathering about improv is that after you’ve been doing it for twenty or thirty or forty years, you’re still learning. And one of the things I’m still learning, I hope, is how to be a generous scene partner and a generous person.

In addition to thinking about generosity, I’ve been thinking about success in improv, and what it means to be to be successful. Success in improv for me doesn’t consist of moving to Chicago, New York, or LA. It doesn’t consist of making it onto the mainstage at Second City or UCB or even onto a DSI house Harold team or Mr. Diplomat or DSI TourCo. Success in improv for me means two things: 1. I get to keep playing, consistently, with fun people I adore. 2.One day, somebody says to someone who has been on stage with me, “Kimberly strikes me as a really generous improviser,” and then my scene partner says, “YES EXACTLY.”

Beginner’s Mind and Advancing in Improv

Wed, 29 Jul 2015 18:05:21 -0400

I’ve been trying to read the UCB Comedy Manual, and fairly successfully reading Will Hines’s improvnonsense Best Of, but I keep getting distracted by my own thoughts so I thought it would be smart to write them down.

By far, my favorite improvnonsense post is the “How do I get out of my head?” post, which should surprise no one.

I’ve had a whirlwind of a time in my brief time at DSI Comedy Theater. I started taking sketch in January 2014, and found my way (nudged by the delightful Paula Pazderka) into improv in May 2014. I took 101, 201, repeated 201, and took 301 basically back-to-back. In February 2015, I auditioned for the company and was placed in the short-form ensemble. This puts me on stage with improvisers vastly more experienced than me.

In April 2015, I started 401.

So, given all that preamble, some thoughts.

In 101 and 201 (and even, to some extent, 301), I was a bold and confident improviser. My theater background and my delight at showing up carried me a long way. I was immensely flattered to receive comments from classmates like, “I always feel safe when I’m in a scene with you.” Being confident didn’t keep me from being eager to learn; I happily received notes and did my best to internalize them. (I did notice as early as 101 that I’m a lot smarter in class than on stage. I blame the adrenaline boost that bright lights and an audience inspire.) I happily initiated scenes when my scene partners seemed reticent. I fully committed. I mirrored the heck out of scene partners.

Before being cast in the short form ensemble, I had been away from improv entirely for over 12 weeks, due to another theatre commitment. I was shocked to be cast. But I had a blast at practices. Again, I was just so happy to even show up.

But something happened. I’m not sure when or how, but being up on stage with amazing, experienced improvisers - people I’d admired from the audience for months - turned me into the reticent scene partner, lacking confidence in my choices, assuming that everyone at practices was watching my scenes and thinking about all the things I’d done wrong (narcissism is a problem, y’all). I got less bold. I found myself questioning the director’s and coaches’ decision to let me in this ensemble. (I KNOW THIS IS SILLY. They wouldn’t put me on if they didn’t want me there.)

I felt myself making choices and then backing off from them. By late June or early July 2015, I was thinking that, despite the fact that I have the most fun at improv practice, more fun than almost anything else I do, maybe I was wrong to keep going with it.

THE STORY GETS HAPPIER FROM HERE.

I had some weird stuff going on professionally in early July that was maybe affecting how I felt about improv, I’m not sure. But I read that improvnonsense post, especially the email from Zach Woods, and something started to shift in me. I felt like okay, maybe I was right to want to keep doing this, even though I was feeling down and like I wasn’t doing a great job. Maybe I just had to move through it.

On July 11, I played in DSI’s Family Improv show with Kit FitzSimons and Vinny Valdivia, two incredibly gifted, experienced, and generous improvisers. If you ever want to feel safe on stage, get up there with Vinny and Kit.

In addition to that, the entire audience consisted of my sister, my brother, and my mother-in-law. For that one day, we re-named the Family Improv show “Kimberly’s Family Improv.” That was immensely liberating, because I knew everyone there was going to love and support me and be delighted by basically anything I did.

And on top of being on stage with two great players and having an audience 100% composed of people guaranteed to love me, I had decided that my goal for this show was to GO FOR IT. Whatever choice I made, whatever I did, I was going to commit to it like little Improv 101 Kimberly would. (Figuratively little. I mean, I’m short, but I’ve actually lost weight since Improv 101.)

It was the right call. That show was a ton of fun and I left feeling good. My next show I was a kind of weird and slow scene partner, but that was because it was a show I had proposed and it was just the most magical and craziest thing for it to actually be happening, so I couldn’t really believe the glory of it. (I left that show feeling amazing, too. Just more because of everyone else in the show than because of anything I did.)

And then, because life is how it is, I went on a 3 ½ week hiatus with no practices or shows due to life stuff. But I’m going to get back into it within the next week, and I think I’ll stick with that GO FOR IT mantra.

All of this to say:

I need to remember 101-201-301 Kimberly. I need to trust that if I make a move that isn’t the move it should have been, I will only benefit by having more experienced improvisers on stage with me. They’ll shore me up. I need to remember that this is the most fun and that if I’m making the most fun choices, especially in short form, I’m probably doing it right. And that if I’m doing it wrong, that’s okay, because I’m going to keep doing it and I’m going to get better.

A Love Letter to Fandom

Tue, 23 Jun 2015 10:06:07 -0400

My darling fandom,

I adore you. And I’m not referring to any of your specific aspects, but you, as a whole.

I love your stunning illustrations.

I love your clever and creative fanfiction.

I love your conventions and gatherings.

I love the way you make people feel valued and important. I love the way you inspire people to go on to make their own new things after they’ve played and workshopped and learned from you.

I believe, deeply, that you are, more often than not, a force for good in the world.

And I’m so proud to have been among you for so long - immersed in you for fifteen years, now.

Take care, dear.

Booking Through Thursday: Graduation | lectitans

Thu, 04 Jun 2015 11:22:13 -0400

Booking Through Thursday: Graduation | lectitans

I’m keeping my book blog separate from my tumblr, so people who only care about book stuff don’t have to scroll through my million reblogs. But go take a look at my answer to today’s Booking Through Thursday question, if you’re interested!

What I’ve learned after 3 weeks on an elimination diet

Mon, 01 Jun 2015 12:21:24 -0400

I wrote up some tips for spoonies here. If you’re eliminating gluten, dairy, corn, and soy, and you have limited energy, check those out.

In the past, I’ve been too scared to try eliminating any particular food for more than a week. The reason was two-fold: one, I have such limited energy and I perceived dietary restrictions as being lots of extra work and two, I really like dietary indulgences. I savor good food. I think having something tasty is a great pleasure in life. And I tend to be a person who is fairly well-behaved (drinking rarely, staying away from drugs that aren’t prescribed to me, OTC, or caffeine, avoiding smoking, almost never going to parties). I think because I have so few indulgences, good food and laziness feel extra special to me. (Having limited energy does not equal being lazy. But sometimes, even when I do have a bit of energy, I give myself a lazy day.)

This time, I knew it would be different, because I’d have my health coach Monica to talk me through the plan, and to check in with me on how it’s going (an extra big deal since she’s going to have a little one any day now! so it’s very nice that she takes the time to email me). I’ve found those ways to deal with the diet that I mentioned in the tips post linked earlier. But I’ve learned some other things, too.

I’ve learned that I can be very happy with a salad, if I put the right things in it. I’ve learned that locally produced meats are amazing. I’ve learned that sometimes you really want butter, not olive oil or coconut oil, and that is a good time to use bacon grease if you happen to have it on hand.

My big takeaway, that I hope will stay with me even after I’m done adding foods back in and seeing what does or doesn’t make me feel bad, is that if I’m willing to do a little work and carefully budget, I can get high quality ingredients and make myself things that are not only just as indulgent as any foods I was eating before this, but tastier. Obviously, I shouldn’t subsist on a diet of Izze and Lara bars, or even home-made almond flour muffins (though anything made with almond flour is going to be much lower in sugar than any other baked good). But I hope that I’ve given myself a good foundation for expanding my diet to include a wider variety of healthier foods, without feeling deprived of the junk food I ate so often in the past. And I’ve learned that I don’t need to be afraid of changing my diet. I won’t starve, eat something that will make me feel bad because I decide it’s worth it, or live off of pistachios and fruit (though that has served as lunch a few times in the past 3 weeks).

Tips for Spoonies on an Elimination Diet

Wed, 20 May 2015 10:04:41 -0400

Hello, friends! I’m on an elimination diet right now to see if I can identify specific foods as autoimmune triggers. I’m using a protocol from the book The Immune System Recovery Plan. This is a very basic plan where I cut out gluten, dairy, corn, and soy for 3 weeks, then eat them again and see what my response is.

My hope was that I would be cooking more when I started this diet, but I have very limited energy and a fair number of obligations, so I have found myself choosing meeting those obligations over cooking for myself. (Are my priorities out of whack? Perhaps, but they are what they are.)

I’m trying to be very gentle with myself about this - I’m doing the best I can right now, and I have been pretty successful in avoiding these foods. I thought I would share some of the ways that I’m dealing with this. If you are on a stricter elimination diet (for example, no nuts, eggs, nightshades, caffeine, sugar of any type, etc), these tips probably aren’t for you. But if you’re just avoiding those big 4, this might help.

Tip #1: Mexican food is your friend.

Rice + beans + spices + guac + pico = DELICIOUS. You can order a taco salad and ask for it with no shell or dairy. Add meat if you want. Add guacamole if it doesn’t come with it.

Tip #2: Sandwich places that offer lettuce wraps are your friend.

Be sure to carefully investigate the sandwich fillings, though - a lot of them might have hidden wheat or soy.

Tip #3: Salad bars are your friend.

A lot of big grocery stores have them. I work on a university campus and it has one. This is great - I just get a container and load up on spinach, cucumbers, bell peppers, hard-boiled eggs, and chicken. Be careful about dressings, though. I bought a dressing from the grocery store that is free of all the ingredients I’m avoiding (balsamic vinaigrette is most likely to meet this requirement). I don’t get dressing from the actual salad bar.

Tip #4: LARABAR is your friend.

Check the ingredients on your particular bar to be sure, but these are all gluten free, and all the ones I’ve gotten are dairy free as well. They tend to be sweetened with dates (OM NOM NOM DATES SO GOOD) and brown rice syrup.

Tip #5: Scrambled eggs are your friends.

You can even make them in the microwave if you need to.

Tip #6: Smoothies are your friends.

This one’s easier if you have a high-powered blender, and I haven’t availed myself of it much yet because I’ve been slow in the mornings. But especially on a hot day, this is great. My recipe is 1c liquid (I usually go with water or coconut milk, but sometimes almond milk), 1 frozen banana, ½-1c other fruit, 6 ice cubes. I’m planning to add greens, coconut oil, chia seeds, and nut butter in the near future.

Tip #7: Be kind to yourself.

What you’re doing isn’t holy. It’s not that you are a morally better person if you’re eating whole foods, or that if, like me, you need to take the prepared foods route, you’re a bad person. You’re just trying to figure out what works for your body. If you mess up, it’s not too hard to start over. You’re doing the best you can, with the situation you have. Always.

Mass Effect 3!

Wed, 13 May 2015 16:39:43 -0400

SPOILERS FOR CITADEL DLC CONTENT BELOW.

I started playing the Citadel DLC for Mass Effect 3 yesterday. I finished the “Identity Theft” mission and everything that comes with it. (I haven’t hosted my party yet.) A couple things:

It was super cool to fight Dark Shep, or Nega Shep, or Evil Shep, whatever you want to call her. I don’t know why, but I majorly dig this kind of story where someone feels they’ve been denied the life that is rightfully theirs. V. badass. This DLC is probably one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game for me.
I’m extra enamored of the way Clone!Shep was all, “Friends are a weakness. I’m better than you, because I don’t have friends.” And then all of my totally badass friends gunned down her mercs. All in a line, looking awesome. I told my husband about this part of the game, and he was all, “What, did you wander into a game written by Joss Whedon?” And I was all, “Kinda, yeah.” So good job, Shep. You’ve got that whole found family thing going on, and it’s really working for you. But you should feel free to tell them to go home - they sure seem to like hanging out at your place, and that’s fun, but maybe you need some Introvert!Shep time.

At improv practice...

Sun, 03 May 2015 22:02:38 -0400

R: Are you doing the bar mitzvah show? B: Yeah… Boys becoming men… Everybody: Men becoming wolves… Me (on the inside): Yes! I have found my people!

Renaissance Spoonie

Wed, 29 Apr 2015 10:58:37 -0400

I have a LOT of interests, and at various times I have kept up with not only the interest itself, but also the community surrounding the interest. I have too many interests to be an expert in anything. Several years ago I discovered the book The Renaissance Soul by Margaret Lobenstine. If, like me, you have trouble designing your life around your plethora of interests, it’s definitely worth checking out.

One of Lobenstine’s key suggestions is to limit yourself to pursuing 4 interests at a time. One can be a career interest and the other three can be personal interests, or you can mix it up differently, but career + hobbies should fall into 4 categories, unless you can work more hobbies into your career. You can rotate different things into your sampler of interests whenever you like.

I find, though, that thanks to my chronic illness and the extreme fatigue that comes with it, as well as the higher priority self-care must have in my life, that I can’t just pursue 4 things like work, improv, singing, and crochet. (Which leaves out so many ways I like to spend my time, including gaming, gardening, reading…)

Because of my illness, my sampler needs to look more like this:

Work or school
Self-care: food prep, exercise, hygiene
Home care: laundry, picking up, grocery shopping
ONE PERSONAL INTEREST.

This means I can only be intensely focused on one thing at a time, and it bums me right out. So I’m looking for ways to deal with it. One way is to rotate that one thing VERY rapidly - like “Today is an improv day. Tomorrow will be a video game day. The next day will be a crafting day.” And that’s sort of where I’m at right now.

The other is to combine things. For example, reading on my bus commute; crocheting while loading screens are coming up on video games.

I think I need to consciously utilize these two techniques to keep from feeling like I can’t have hobbies/interests.

Health lessons learned the past two weeks

Tue, 21 Apr 2015 12:32:02 -0400

I have my second session with Monica, my health coach/friend-from-childhood today. I wanted to write up how the past couple of weeks have gone, to help me think through things.

We set two goals: increase my water intake (simultaneously decreasing my intake of soda & coffee drinks) and prepare breakfasts at home.

My water intake has slightly increased - before I was ranging from ½ liter to 1 liter a day, and with the addition of mineral water (so good and better than the sparkling water from my Soda Stream) that’s up now to consistently at about a liter. I was sick with either a cold or allergies for most of the past couple weeks, and that did mean that I found myself inclined to consume Sprite or Ginger Ale when I should have been consuming water. However, I’m back off of those now and sticking with sparkling mineral water or berry-infused sparkling water from the Soda Stream. I did have one Coke last night after my improv class, but I think it’s the only Coke I’ve had in a week and a half. One thing I’ll say for being violently ill with cough and postnasal drip: it provides strong incentive to get off caffeine. I’ve had black tea a couple of times, but in small quantities and with no added sugar (which would tend to be in the form of honey).

I haven’t had breakfast from a restaurant or convenience store in about a week and a half either. The abovementioned-illness kept me from wanting much food at all for a few days, but since I started to feel even the littlest bit better, it’s been all gluten-free toast with nut butter & chia seeds, fruit, or yogurt. I’m finding that the fruit+yogurt combination isn’t very filling (probably because I’m eating less than a cup of yogurt, and the yogurt tends to be fat-free). It is convenient though, and that’s great. I also experimented this weekend with two new ways of cooking eggs - fried and poached. Previously the only way I’ve prepared eggs is scrambled or hard boiled. I don’t prefer fried or poached to scrambled, but it’s nice to have a bigger repertoire. A traditional weekend breakfast for the past several months has been a biscuit with egg, cheese, and sausage + a donut, both from Rise. Weekend before last I was sick, but this past weekend I made the eggs and then added sausage that I found at Target. It was maple chicken sausage, and it didn’t quite hit the spot, so I’m going to experiment with sausage from a couple of local providers over the next few weeks and see how that goes.

So there’s been some success with both of these, but I’ve also discovered new obstacles. I like Leo Babauta’s model of habit sprints, where instead of just plunging forward with goals you reassess them weekly (or in my case, bi-weekly), so it’s good to identify these obstacles and figure out how to solve them. The first obstacle is that I’m having a hard time getting my water intake up above 1L. I think there are two solutions here - only increase my intake by .5L a week, so it feels manageable - and go back to using the Water Your Body app for reminders. I learned how to set the notification volume for the app low without setting all my notifications low, which I think will help, as the biggest obstacle there was that the notification was loud and annoying.

The other obstacle I ran into was that, while I had every intention of making smoothies for breakfast occasionally, I got overwhelmed by the possibility of combinations of ingredients and didn’t make any smoothies this week. Which is too bad because, as a rule, I love smoothies. To help with that, I ordered the book Green Smoothies for Every Season, which will provide me with suggested seasonal flavor combinations but doesn’t prescribe quantities/ratios, so I can experiment to see what I like best.

I’m looking forward to tonight’s session, when I expect we’ll tackle plans for lunch and dinner!

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Wed, 08 Apr 2015 14:43:44 -0400

Yesterday I had my first session with Monica Barco of Nourish Health Coaching. Monica and I have known each other for about 25 years. When I heard about her health journey and how similar it was to mine, I knew she would be a great health coach for me.

I am big into research, of course, so I know that whole foods are the best things you can eat, and in the past I’d had a session with a nutritionist where the only advice she gave me that I hadn’t already heard was to buy produce from the salad bar if you only need a small quantity. I have done a lot of reading about nutrition and exercise, and familiarized myself with many possibilities, tried and failed on a variety of restrictive eating plans, and currently practice intuitive eating which, because of the food science that food companies use, lately has led me to eat more and more processed foods. Time for a change!

I recently took Gretchen Rubin’s four Rubin-types quiz, which told me that I’m an Obliger (which I kind of already knew). Based on this, I figured that if all I gained from Monica was a person to check in with me, to make sure I was actually doing the things I know I’m supposed to do - somebody whose job it was and who I wouldn’t get annoyed with for asking (as I might do with family) - then that would be worth our time and her fee right there.

But of course, a health coach isn’t just a person who asks you if you’re doing things, and the most helpful thing Monica did for me in our session yesterday was remind me of stuff I already know and give me some new things to try. And that’s, I think, very high value. Because I forget that there actually ARE black teas that I like. I forget that a person could potentially have nut butter on toast for breakfast with a bit of fruit and it would be fast, easy, tasty, and, if it’s the right toast, healthy. So I need someone like Monica, not only to ask me if I’m doing the things, but to ask me questions and draw out what I’m willing to do, what I’d like to do.

If you at all think that you could benefit from health coaching, you should try it out. I think Monica would be willing to work with you over Skype or similar, if you’re not local. Can’t hurt to ask!

Stay tuned for food photos as I start having a wider variety of healthy breakfasts and drink more tea!

Mass Effect!

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 10:59:37 -0400

While having the most fun playing Dragon Age: Inquisition, I remembered that, oh yeah, I like video games. So I’m working my way through Metacritic’s list of RPGs (sorted by Metascore; I know the methodology might not be sound but I don’t really care). Top of the list was Mass Effect 2, but I’m the kind of person who reads BSC books in order, so obvs I had to start with the first one.

I chronicled my experience primarily through Facebook status updates. Here they are for your entertainment:

So far, not as obsessed with Mass Effect as I am with DA:I, but I’m definitely into it enough after the first hour and a half to keep going.

…

Mass Effect update: definitely more into it now. Going full paragon.

…

Mass Effect update: vehicular combat, not my fave, but I’m getting better at it. I’m also getting better at using cover, but Tali and Kaidan are doing the heavy lifting in combat. Finishing quests is almost as satisfying here as in Dragon Age. The terrain is very crazy. I keep expecting to crash, but the only trouble I’ve had is driving off the edge of the Feros skyway. I’m very over the Mako. I have to remind myself that games are supposed to involve challenge… I find myself getting frustrated if I die in a spot more than twice. Also, even though I don’t like the Mako, I’m getting the hang of zooming in, which does make my cannon fire much more effective.

…

It’s an all girl party for me. Shep, Liara, and Tali. Haven’t settled on a romance yet. Stringing them both along at present. But leaning toward Kaidan for no reason in particular. I just met him first and liked him right away. But Liara is so pretty and smart…

…

Pretty sure I ruined things with Kaidan and accidentally committed myself to Liara. Oops. …But they’re both so broken. I want to love them both! Mass Effect, why won’t you let me choose polyamory?

…

I was like, “Maybe I’ll replay this to be really completist” because I’m not going to finish all the collections. And then I thought “NO BECAUSE THEN I WILL HAVE TO DRIVE AND FIGHT IN THE MAKO MORE.”

The Remarkable Difference Adequate Treatment Makes

Mon, 09 Feb 2015 17:51:12 -0400

I have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. It’s an autoimmune disease in which my body attacks my thyroid. The thyroid controls basically, you know, every bodily function. So if it’s under attack and starts to function poorly, your (or, rather, my) whole body becomes a sad mess. This affects both physical and mental stuff. The treatment I use is a combination of two synthetic hormones that supplement the hormones my body either isn’t making or isn’t properly converting into other hormones.

For more than a year, I’ve felt like this condition was getting worse. And the lab tests showed a decline, but were still kind of okay-normal, but suboptimal, and I was just too scared to bring it up with my doctor.

Then in January I got feeling bad enough, and the test results were finally suboptimal enough, that I went to my doctor and checked in about getting an increase in the dosage of these hormones, which after some hand-wringing about how they could actually be hurting me, she eventually agreed to. About a week before that appointment, I started taking a selenium supplement, which has been shown in medical studies to help Hashimoto’s patients.

In early January, I was having a lot of really bad days. I was too sleepy to accomplish much in the first week. I had an eight-day headache. My joints were constantly aching. Sometimes my muscles ached, too. I felt stupid and slow. Exercise sounded like something that would be difficult to get through both because I wouldn’t really be able to breathe afterwards and because it would just aggravate my joints more. Getting up in the morning was very difficult. Many days, I was not confident in my ability to meet my basic adult obligations.

About a week after starting the selenium supplement, I began to feel kind of like a person again. I hadn’t really, not for the first three weeks of this year. I felt like maybe I was capable of dealing with life.

It takes about 4 weeks to notice much of a change from a dosage increase in thyroid meds, and 6-8 weeks for it to show up on a serum test. But today is two weeks since my dose increased, and I can feel a difference in my body and my attitude. Yesterday I went swimming for the first time in more than a month. I got up, took my medicine, braided my hair, kissed my husband goodbye, wished him a happy morning of playing Dragon Age: Inquisition, and was on my way. I swam for I don’t know how long, but I swam until my legs started to say, “Please, no more, thanks.”

This morning, I went for a walk. It was a one-mile walk. A couple of weeks ago, I would do this same walk, and at the end of it, I would need to just sit for ten minutes to catch my breath. This morning, I came in, sat for a minute or two, and started making breakfast. I hard-boiled some eggs. For the past couple of weeks, all I’ve been able to do was mix up an instant breakfast powder with milk.

My mind isn’t as sharp as I’d like yet, but I feel optimistic that it will be in the next month or two. I still get sleepy mid-afternoon, but I get a few hours of good thinking-time in at work before that happens. I can’t convey just what a difference it is to feel like things are getting better, like it’s possible for them to keep getting better.

I need to remember this feeling. I need to remember, next time I start to feel low, that I can take control, I can talk to my doctor, and I can make it better. I have that power. I need to internal-locus-of-control this thing, and I can. I can. That’s the hardest, and most important, part to remember.

Unicorns are for grown-ups.

Mon, 01 Dec 2014 18:01:50 -0400

“You have horseys on your sweater,” my grown husband said to me. (I don’t have a husband who isn’t grown. I just want to emphasize that he was an adult using the world “horsey” when speaking to another adult.)

“No, I don’t.” I glared at him.

“Sorry. You have unicorns on your sweater,” he corrected himself.

“Yes. Horses are for children. Unicorns are for grown-ups,” I told him.

The Cure for Overwhelm: Plan a New Project (#mightyugly2015)

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 16:31:00 -0400

Right now, I’m working full-time, taking a graduate-level library and information science course, and taking improv. I’m on the board of 2 arts organizations. I’ve got family coming to town next week, and friends coming to dinner this weekend. I’ve got a presentation due and an improv performance next Tuesday, a paper due the Tuesday after that, and a final exam due the Tuesday after that. We just released a major project at work this week, but that project still has some loose ends, and we’re launching into the next phase of another big project ASAP.

And of course, there’s laundry to be done, dishes to load and unload, Halloween decorations to put away, Thanksgiving decorations to get out or make and then put away, mail to sort, bills to pay…

Earlier this week, I thought, “Am I going to get all of this done?”

Then I thought, “Obviously I will, because what is the other choice?”

But knowing it would all get done didn’t make it any less overwhelming.

Yesterday, in a startling moment of clarity, I knew what I needed to do.

I needed to recruit my likewise-too-busy, overwhelmed friends to a book group where we very slowly read Kim Werker’s Mighty Ugly together.

So I made a list of seven friends whom I thought might benefit from facing their creative demons right now and wrote them a loving missive inviting them to join me in January in this new adventure. I asked them to just let me know before Christmas so I could set up a Doodle poll for our first meeting. I said if they had to miss some meetings, that was totally fine. I was pretty sure they’d all say, “Oh, well, I’m so busy…” or “Let me see what the new year is going to look like…”

Within an hour, six of the seven had replied positively. (The last one hasn’t replied yet.)

And now we have a blog and a pinboard and a hashtag.

This is a thing that’s happening. I hope you’ll follow along, and perhaps start your own group or work through the book at your own pace. Maybe by January 2016, we’ll all be making a lot more and letting our creative demons stop us a lot less.

Booking through Thursday: Shakespeare

Thu, 25 Sep 2014 12:04:50 -0400

Okay, show of hands … who has read Shakespeare OUTSIDE of school required reading? Do you watch the plays? How about movies? Do you love him? Think he’s overrated?

I first read Shakespeare in 8th grade. We were assigned A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and that was a smart move on the part of whomever made that decision. Thirteen-year-old me was ripe for a play about fairies and lovers. It was one of those interlinear versions with the original text on the left and a “translation” on the right. I loved it, though I frequently found myself thinking the “translation” was dumb.

In 9th grade, I was assigned Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar. Again, genius job, people who decide 9th graders should read R&J. Because developmentally speaking, they are supremely relatable characters when you’re that age. JC wasn’t so great - I’ve never been big on the histories, and it just didn’t grab me. I think that while the language is what makes Shakespeare remarkable, it’s the stories that have to be the gateway for somebody new to Shakespeare. If you can get them with the stories, then they’ll get over the challenges of the language, and maybe even find the beauty. My senior year, we read Othello, another one that didn’t grab me, again because I couldn’t relate.

In college, I chose to take a Shakespeare class to fulfill my English requirement. I hated the class because it was mostly the professor reading aloud to us, and he had a gravelly, expressionless voice. I think the most important thing to know about Shakespeare’s plays is that they weren’t designed as great literature. They were intended to serve as popular entertainment. This is why I think the very best way to experience Shakespeare is to see it performed - either live or in a movie. I am lucky enough to have the means and opportunity to see Shakespeare regularly performed at Playmakers Repertory Company.

If you can’t get to a theater, movies are the next best thing. Here are my top 5 Shakespeare adaptations:

Hamlet, directed by Kenneth Branagh
Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Joss Whedon
Love's Labour's Lost, directed by Kenneth Branagh (not artistically brilliant, but a very fun time)
Titus, directed by Julie Taymor
The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford

And three honorable mentions:

A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Michael Hoffman
Twelfth Night, directed by Trevor Nunn

Plus there’s a great recorded stage performance of Twelfth Night directed by Nicholas Hytner.

If you think you don’t like Shakespeare, try the Whedon Much Ado. It’s probably the most accessible Shakespeare adaptation on film. It grew out of Shakespeare readings that Joss Whedon used to have in his backyard. Inspired by him, I hosted two of these myself, gathering friends, assigning roles, and just reading aloud. It’s so much better that way than trying to imagine it all in your head. Not everybody there was a Shakespeare expert, but you don’t need to be. Try hosting your own reading and see how it goes.

tl;dr: I haven’t done much extracurricular Shakespeare reading, but I do love him; watch Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing.

Edited to add: One more thing! I forgot to mention that if you can neither get to a theatre nor find a film adaptation, you should totally check out Manga Shakespeare. Having the plays illustrated in a cool manga style with the original text is the next best thing to actually getting to see actors perform it. Romeo and Juliet on the streets of Tokyo with katana fights? Yes please!

Edited to add, 2: I failed to mention Branagh’s Much Ado, which is what first set me in love with Beatrice. Because Emma Thompson is INCREDIBLE. Consider it to be #1.5 on my list of top 5 adaptations.

Stuff I Learned: June & July, 2014

Mon, 04 Aug 2014 14:44:29 -0400

June and July were very busy months for me and I learned a lot. I thought I’d share some of it with you. Here goes!

Maker Faire NC. I went to Maker Faire NC on June 7. It was my first Maker Faire ever and it was pretty amazing. I was rather overwhelmed by both the number of people and the amount of stuff to see, but I still managed to explore, try new things, and meet new people. At The Bored Zombie’s booth, I made my first quilt block.

[caption id=“attachment_1454” align=“aligncenter” width=“225”] My First Quilt Block[/caption]

This reminded me that I really enjoy sewing. I also bought the Learn to Solder Skill Badge Kit and learned that essential tremor and soldering aren’t good company for one another. My sister, Mary Elisabeth, made me a set of chain mail earrings with help from the good folks at Split Infinity Jewelry. Fueled by our Maker Faire fervor, she and I promptly went out and bought Aranzi Aronzo’s Cuter Book and supplies for making little felt stuffies, which we then promptly did.

Maker Faire was awesome and reaffirmed my affinity for the Maker Movement. I’ll definitely go back next year, and I hope to check out some local Maker Meetups soon.

Microsoft Office Mix. Have you checked out Microsoft Mix yet? It’s a supercool extension for PowerPoint that lets you make Khan Academy-style instructional videos and share them. I learned how to use this for a project at work. Here’s an example of a Mix I made - to show you how to upload your mix. How meta!

If I were still in the classroom, especially if I were in a 1:1 school, I would definitely use this for lessons students could come back to as often as they needed for reinforcement. I would also use it as an assessment, asking students to make their own Mixes to show me what they learned.

iBooks Author. Speaking of things I would totally use if I were still in the classroom, I learned to use iBooks Author to create incredible multitouch books. I hate that these are exclusive to the iPad, of course, and I hope to one day figure out how to build such things with HTML, but it can’t be denied that this tool is easy to use but also feature-rich. I highly recommend the Lynda.com iBooks Author Essential Training course, if it’s available to you. There’s also a series of iBooks Author for Teachers courses with Mike Rankin that might suit your needs. And Lynda.com does offer institutional memberships, so you might try to convince your school or system to throw a little Professional Development money their way to help you with technology integration.

Content Strategy. At work, I’m responsible for literally thousands of pages of open educational resources. Each of these pages includes a huge amount of information. Content strategy is going to help me organize it all. I’m just dipping my toe into the waters. If you work in any sort of web publishing situation, you should check it out.

Improv. You may have noticed that I stopped writing follow up posts after week 2 of my improv class. That’s not because I didn’t learn anything, but because everything from that point forward was deeper learning about stuff I’d already mentioned. Especially listening. I swear, improv teaches you to listen so hard. Since then, I’ve performed in my class showcase and in something called The Humor Games, which was beastly. From that experience, I learned that being a really good novice doesn’t mean you’re accomplished at something. Other improv performers who have been doing this a long time have an ease on stage that I just don’t yet. I’m game for anything and I go big, which means my improv is usually fun, but some of these performers just blew me away, and competing against them felt really hard. But now I’m taking Improv 201, refining my skill, and learning even more. But mostly still learning that you should really listen, already.

Crochet and Knitting. So this is half a cop-out. I already knew how to crochet. But I’ve been taking Kim Werker’s Crochet Basics and Beyond on Craftsy anyway, because I wanted to brush up on the finer points of crochet. Already I’ve learned how to make my stitches tidier. I also started Stefanie Japel’s Knit Lab. It’s a great class, but equally delightful to the class itself is the fact that it comes with the Knitter’s Handbook, an amazing in-depth resource with videos, images, and instructions for a variety of knitting techniques.

[caption id=“attachment_1459” align=“aligncenter” width=“225”] Crocheted Circles[/caption]

Thanks for reading all of that! I promise not to wait so long to update you on what I’ve learned next time.

An open letter to Joss Whedon

Mon, 23 Jun 2014 13:40:51 -0400

Dear Joss,

Happy birthday! I hope you’re having a wonderful time. I imagine you’re working, which is probably the most fun way you could envision spending a birthday. I might have a cupcake later on your behalf. We’ll see.

I just wanted to take a minute to outline the ways you’ve changed my life. I’ve been a fan of yours for about 28% of the time you’ve spent on this earth, and about 42% of the time I’ve spent on this earth, so I feel like you’ve had a pretty big influence on me. Here are some ways.

You gave me something to sing about. Metaphorically, I mean. (Literally, too, every time I sing a song you wrote.) As a college freshman, I was deeply depressed and anxious. My primary response to this depression/anxiety was to vomit. After one particular bout of said vomiting, my then-boyfriend-now-husband gently said to me, "Come watch Buffy. It'll be fun." I did, he was right, and my life has been better ever since. I fondly wished, before that night, that I would just not wake up anymore. After that night, I wanted to live. Watching Buffy deal with all of the trauma of starting college made me feel less alone. Which brings me to the next way you've changed my life...
You gave me many of my best friends. Joss, you know about the WB Bronze. You know that 1997-2001 was a beautiful time of deeply meaningful fan interaction there. You know that we all came together and raised money for the Make a Wish foundation. What you might not know is that these people are still my best friends. A little over a year ago, I got together with them and it was like coming home. These people get me in a way almost no other group has. (Librarians get me the same way.) And when I am dealing with life's miseries, they help me through it.
You gave me a reason to travel. At 20 years old, I flew across the country to party with a bunch of virtual friends and RL strangers. And it was one of the best things I've ever done. Which is why I did it again at 21, 22, 28, and 31. Would I have ever been to LA if not for your work? Probably not, and that would be a shame, because it's one of the best places to be a tourist ever.
You gave me a reason to get really good at working with websites, which led me to my current job. Would I be able to talk about CSS and web design and content management systems if I hadn't worked on jossisahottie.com and other fansites? Probably not.
You gave me a purpose when my life was a mess. As a senior in college, I was in a rough place. My grades weren't great. My mom was really sick. I was, for the first time in my life, performing in a play where the other cast members made me feel actually disliked. But your show (Firefly) needed somebody to light a fire under its fans to get them talking about it, and I got to be that person. And it gave me something to focus on for literally years to come.
You gave me great storytelling advice. Everything is about emotion and structure. Give even the most apparently insignificant character a reason to be there. Buy yourself chocolate just because you have the idea, before you've even done any writing. Via interviews and DVD commentaries, you consistently help me become a better writer and performer.
You give me the feeling that everything you write is a gift just for me. Granted, I'm a narcissist, so I tend to think everything everyone does is done for me. But I'm pretty sure many of your fans feel this way. All of your work speaks so powerfully to the little details of existence, which I think makes it personal for everyone who loves it.

That’s 7 ways. I’m sure there are tons more. And I know I’m one of thousands (millions?) who feels so grateful to have been touched by your work.

So thanks, Joss.

Love,

What I Learned from Improv: 101, Week 2

Fri, 23 May 2014 12:20:11 -0400

Remember how I went to improv class last week? I did it again this week! And I learned some new stuff, and had some earlier lessons reinforced.

Here’s what I learned:

Listen better. When you’re up on a stage with somebody, and you don’t have a script, you better listen carefully to what they have to say. Because if you don’t, what you say next might not make any sense or flow logically. And while that’s fun sometimes, it makes a story or scene hard to follow. I would argue that this is valuable even when you do have a script. As an actor, it can be hard to remember that the character you’re playing is saying your lines and hearing other people’s lines for the first time, ever. When actors bring the active listening technique from improv (and therapy) into their performances, I think the performances are much more effective and organic.

Be ready to let your ideas go. You might have a plan for where the scene is going, but you’re going to relinquish control of the scene regularly. So you need to know that your plan might never be executed, and be ready to work with somebody else’s plan. Again, this is valuable in daily life, too. I call myself a Type A- personality, which means I’m slightly less neurotic than somebody who’s Type A. I’m still a extensive planner. But I’m not actually in control of the universe, and my plans don’t always come to fruition, and I need to be okay with that.

Everybody hears Darth Vader differently. I’m not going to explain that one. Take from it what you will.

What did you learn this week?

What I Learned from Improv: 101, Week 1

Fri, 16 May 2014 10:59:00 -0400

Last night was my first improv class at DSI Comedy Theater, where I took sketch comedy writing from January to April. I’ve done improv in the past, as a “theatre person” (we pretend we’re British, so we spell it -re), but never for its own sake - it was either to build rapport with a cast, or in my least favorite situations, to try and discover things about characters that weren’t in the script. (Lots of actors find great value in this. I’m not one of them.)

Thanks to my theatre experience and a lot of time spent pretending I was on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, I didn’t come in as a total n00b; on top of that, I’ve listened to the audiobook of Tina Fey’s Bossypants at least 3 times, so I had a grasp of some basic improv vocabulary, chiefly the idea of YES AND.

But I had (and still have) so much more to learn, so my hope is that weekly I’ll do a little debrief here. These will be personal revelations more than improv tips. If you want to learn improv, you need to, you know, do it. Without further ado, here’s some stuff I learned in Improv 101, Week 1.

I can be a good listener, if I decide to be. I talk about myself, pretty much non-stop. It’s a known flaw of mine, it runs in my family, ohmygodI’mdoingitrightnow. When I watch other people do improv exercises (or anything in life at all, really), I tend to think, “What would I do there?” Knowing this about myself, I decided that when I got up for an exercise, I needed to listen to my partner carefully, rather than always having my mind racing on to the thing I was going to say next. I was pretty sure I was going to fail at this. But mostly, it worked. I only sort of skipped ahead to my next thought once really.

Relationships are funny. I didn’t really try this one in one of my own exercises, but stories are always funnier when they are about a relationship between two people with a shared history. So this is the thing I’m going to work on next time, I think - figuring out, in the first few beats, a relationship to my partner. And then being fluid with it, so if it evolves over the course of the scene into a totally different relationship, that’s totally cool.

Specific = funny. I already covered this in sketch comedy, but it’s true here, too. And it’s harder on your feet, when you don’t have time for revision, to get specific. So my hope is that I’ll learn to start specific, which will save me some time in my writing process in the future.

My life is a rich tapestry of pop-culture references. In one scene, I drew on both a B-plot from an episode of Sex and the City and a quest in South Park: The Stick of Truth that is itself a reference to Game of Thrones. I consume a lot of media, in many forms: TV shows, books, comic books, video games - and I really think that whole “If you want to be a writer, read a lot” thing comes up in improv, too. I felt like I was able to get specific quickly, to draw on stories I’d seen in other realms, without outright plagiarizing. Will Hines says you’ll learn a lot from improv because other people will mention stuff you don’t know. I look forward to my classmates letting some of their interests come through in their scenes, so I can find even more stories and facts to go check out.

And that’s just week one! Last thing: Our homework is to find a “Yes And” moment in life sometime this week and share it on the class forum, but I’m doing a little experiment - I’m going to look for a “Yes And” moment every day. And then I’m going to share it on Tumblr.

What I Learned from Sketch Comedy

Thu, 03 Apr 2014 10:40:40 -0400

I’m two sessions away from finishing Sketch 201 with DSI Comedy Theater. Since January, I’ve spent most Saturday afternoons sitting around a table with other sketch students, talking about what makes comedy work and figuring out how we can make ours better. Why am I doing this? One, because Tina Fey is my hero. Two, because I’ve always liked writing funny stuff. Three, because I felt like it.

But more important than why I’m doing it is what I’ve learned. I’m not done yet, so I’m sure I’ll learn more, but here are some of the things I’ve taken away, that aren’t necessarily about the mechanics of sketch writing.

I can sit down and write if I must. I’ve always been that idiot who thinks academic writing can absolutely be forced, but creative writing can only happen when the muse strikes. All of the writing books will tell you that you just need to put your butt in a chair and write, but like many people, I always thought, Maybe that works for you, but not for me. Nope. Turns out it works for me, too. But what I’m writing at that first pass might not be great, and that’s okay, because…

Sometimes the first draft is really the outline, and that’s okay. In addition to taking this class, I’m working full-time, taking a graduate level Digital Humanities course, and just finished performing in an operetta. That means writing time must be squeezed out, and there was one day when I had about 45 minutes to get my sketch done. This meant I didn’t have time for careful planning and brainstorming. It meant the writing was the brainstorming. I weekly send my instructor a note that says, “This is a very rough draft, I’m so sorry, I’m still working out my ideas.” But of course, that’s what drafts are for. In a research paper, you might be able to create a detailed outline before you sit down to write, but you’ve done a lot of the intellectual work already. In creative writing, the writing is the intellectual work.

The best comedy comes from pain. The funniest things I’ve written have consistently been when I’ve taken on something that depresses me. A sketch about how desperate librarians are to prove their relevance - how hard they are working to demonstrate their natural awesome - while at the same time not losing track of how much they really love the work? Hilarious. A commercial parody recruiting teachers to work in North Carolina, taking every change the legislature has made to gut the career and making it sound like an enticement instead? Priceless. Sometimes I actually feel worse after writing these - but they’re still funny.

I’d rather write satire than anything else. I’m very content to view fluff, but I want my comedy to mean something. I’d rather be South Park than Family Guy. (Which is not to say Family Guy is never satirical, but I think if you run the numbers you’ll find South Park is satirical more often.)

Specific = funny. A librarian pulling her pants down to show people her hip tattoo? Funny. A librarian pulling her pants down to show people her hip tattoo of Ranganathan’s laws of library science? Funnier.

Thinking Out Loud: Affinity Phases

Fri, 21 Feb 2014 14:51:18 -0400

If you’re familiar with the work of James Paul Gee and Henry Jenkins, then you’re probably also familiar with the concept of affinity spaces. Briefly, an affinity space is a place, either virtual or physical, where people with a shared interest can get together and informal learning takes place. If you want to know more than that, Wikipedia has your back.

I’ve been feeling like I want to take up a new hobby - in particular, an art or craft. I’ve been trying to figure out what it is. I was thinking about origami, but I’m not settled yet. I was also thinking about a decision I’ve made recently: to give up on being an expert. If I have an honest epitaph when I die, it’ll say, “She didn’t work up to her potential.” This was the rallying cry of my teachers over and over again. Which, I have to tell you, says a lot, because in high school and grad school I was pretty stellar. So my potential must be galactic or something.

I just don’t always apply myself. Or, more often, I apply myself, really hard, and then I stop. And it doesn’t just happen educationally, but in my hobbies/personal interests, too. Craft supplies and interests accrete to create a Great Barrier Reef of Stuff-Kimberly’s-Enjoyed-but-Doesn’t-as-Much-Now-but-Might-Come-Back-to-Later.

I’ve decided to call this process of getting super into a thing and then letting it fade into the background an “affinity phase.” I made a little timeline of my life to track these, and while some have distinct periods of activity, others sort of float around and I come back to them from time to time. What qualifies something to serve as an “affinity phase” in my life? The number of books I’ve read, blogs to which I’ve subscribed, or supplies I’ve bought can be a good indicator. The number of people to whom it connects me is another one.

I was watching the Making of Featurette on Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing Blu-Ray. He was talking about whether he’d do another Shakespeare or not, and sort of dodged the question, saying that he wants to do lots of different things. He said he’ll never get very deep into one thing, so he might as well go for breadth. I pointed at the screen and flailed. Joss Whedon gets me, you guys. (In case you’re curious, the Joss Whedon affinity phase of my life extends from 2000-2003; he hangs around but fades into the background after 2003.)

So I’ve identified this phenomenon in my life, named it, and am working to embrace it. My next step is to figure out how to make it work for me. In one sense, it already has - I’m currently working in a job where I get to do a million different things, most of which draw on some core affinity that I’ve had over time (education, web design, writing, editing), and where most importantly, I am expected to and rewarded with praise when I keep learning new things. But in a more personal sense, I feel at sea. I’ve got to figure out how to live with and be happy with this very essential part of my nature even when I’m not at work.

I’m re-treading ground here that Kim Werker covered more than 5 years ago. That’s okay. We’ve all got to figure these things out in our own time.

Stop Worrying and Start Showing Up

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 11:40:48 -0400

When I was a junior in high school, my teacher unceremoniously dropped a test with a low grade on it on my desk and hissed at me, “The play you were in is over. There’s no excuse for grades like these.” This was one instance in a long line of many when a teacher called me out for not working to my potential. (I worked really hard, so I’d probably be a supernova of brilliance if I’d actually worked up to my potential. Oh well.)

She wasn’t taking a scientific approach to the whole scenario, though. My grades as I’d been rehearsing the play were excellent, because I’d been forced to carefully manage my time and plan for reading and studying. Now, with my evenings completely unstructured, I regularly told myself that I could study later. And later often meant half-heartedly doing the readings and cramming the night before the test.

On the other hand, when I was rehearsing multiple plays, leading the Latin club, writing a skit for the NC Junior Classical League competition, and creating fan works for Sailor Moon, I was handling it all pretty well.

High School Kimberly has some wisdom to offer to 30-something Kimberly. Since I received a diagnosis of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis in 2011, I’ve been carefully guarding my energy, living in fear of trying to do too much for my poor self-attacking body. This month, through a confluence of small accumulating commitments, I find myself working full-time, rehearsing an operetta, taking private voice lessons, serving on the boards of two arts organizations, serving on the boards of two academic organizations, taking a graduate level English course, and taking a sketch comedy writing class. In addition, I’ve taken on the projects in the books One Year to an Organized Life and I Will Teach You to Be Rich.

And in spite of the fact that I feel overwhelmed and occasionally flake out on my responsibilities to the various boards and have a giant mound of dirty laundry at all times, it’s been a great thing for me. I haven’t been this engaged with the world and with life since my senior year of high school.

I really like when people talk about “showing up,” meaning bringing your full self into the experience you’re having - whether that’s work, learning, family time, or something else entirely. For the past 15 years I’ve barely been showing up for anything - out of fear that parts of me will be unwelcome, or that I will exhaust my inner resources, that I will be a disappointment, or that experiences will disappoint me. This month, I’ve been forced to show up. I’ve got too many things going with too little time to do any of them half-way.

I’m learning from this first month of what is bound to be an intense spring semester that not only can I handle taking on lots of things, I can thrive, and I am a better person for doing it.

Review: Pull Down the Night

Fri, 06 Dec 2013 11:53:19 -0400

Pull Down the Night by Nathan Kotecki. Houghton Mifflin Books for Children. 2013. Reviewed from ARC from the publisher. Buy it from IndieBound or Powell’s (affiliate links).

Bruno and his brother Sylvio are the new kids at Suburban High this year, but they quickly make friends with the remaining members of The Rosary, a clique steeped in elegant, dark music and culture. Sylvio has always had those interests, but Bruno finds himself suddenly drawn to them - perhaps because of his powerful attraction to Celia, the protagonist from The Suburban Strange. Through his connection with Celia and his interactions with the school librarian, Bruno discovers that his intuitive understanding of maps has a supernatural source. He has to use these skills and his new understanding of the supernatural realm of the Kind and Unkind to help him solve two mysteries: why students around school are receiving “kiss notes” from a ghost and then discovering loved ones betraying them, and why kids all over the school are suddenly finding themselves deeply depressed.

My relationship with the author:

You should know that I can’t be unbiased about this book. Nathan Kotecki is my friend (see more about how we met in my review of The Suburban Strange). I’m listed in the acknowledgments. So if you’re looking for an unbiased review, you probably want to look elsewhere. But if you’re looking for the honest perspective of the friend of the author who’s also a former high school teacher and school librarian, well, you’ve come to the right place.

What I love:

The supernatural stuff starts right away with Bruno mysteriously finding himself in the Ebentwine, a liminal space with a definite Wonderland vibe.
The references to dark music and culture flow fast and free, just like in The Suburban Strange. But this time, I didn't find myself wishing I'd had goth friends to shepherd me around, probably because I got that out of the way in the first book.
There sure is a lot of time spent in the school library hanging out with the school librarian, who is so much more pleasant than adults in YA literature often are.
Bruno has a geography teacher who won't let him coast, but gives him the opportunity to work on an individualized project that also helps him expand his supernatural skills.
Marco. Marco Marco Marco. He's a featured player in this book, and I love him, and it makes me so happy.
Everybody, Bruno included, seems to love Celia in a way that makes her dangerously close to a Mary Sue, but there is an actual explanation for why everyone loves her so much.
Bruno and Sylvio have a very positive relationship. I love siblings who get along most of the time. Of course they don't get along all the time, but they never seem to deliberately annoy each other or snipe at each other.
All the little ways in which you know this book comes from the same world as The Suburban Strange, but it really is its own story.
Bruno and Sylvio's dad, who is a minister, but understands that his sons need to explore faith at their own pace.
The whole mythology of this world. There are Kind and Unkind, talented people who have the opportunity to use their supernatural gifts for good or ill. And these aren't things like super strength or throwing fireballs, but things like literally traveling through the pages of a book, or being able to shape reality through drawing it.

How my wish from last time got fulfilled:

I said I wanted to see more menace in the school setting, and boy did Pull Down the Night deliver. This is the eeriest school library since they built Sunnydale High on top of a hellmouth. (We put that in lowercase, since we know there's more than one of them.)

What I need to warn you about:

While this book is much quicker-paced than The Suburban Strange, it's still not an action/suspense thriller. So if you're looking for that, maybe pick up a different book, and give this to your goth friend.
You're going to want to find all of the music that goes with this book. But you don't have to, because Nathan made a Spotify playlist. I highly recommend listening to the playlist while reading the book, if you're the kind of person who can have music going while you read.

The Quantified Self and Student Learning

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 13:42:32 -0400

[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“224”] Image from Bytemarks on Flickr[/caption]

Lately I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about the Quantified Self movement. The basic idea is that technology has made it increasingly easy to track small changes in our behavior and our lives, and that the data we collect can be used to improve our situation. I wanted to start my very own Quantified Kimberly project, but as I thought about it, I realized that I’ve been practicing one variant or another of the Quantified Self for years.

Here are some of the things I’ve tracked:

calories consumed
weight gained or lost
minutes spent exercising
miles walked
reps of various exercises
blood pressure
lipids levels
blood sugar
thyroid hormone levels
menstrual cycles
chores completed
grades
books read

Some people think QS has merit just by virtue of the fact that people are paying attention to what they do. But I think its real power lies in reflecting on the data and using it to inspire change and then track the results of that change.

Little Data

Of all the things I’ve tracked, the only ones that I’ve really used systematically or to improve my life are the medical data. I received two endocrine diagnoses (Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and polycystic ovary syndrome) largely because of my own efforts to track symptoms and hormone levels. Doctors are impressed by data. So are school administrators and legislators, of course.

It’s easy to feel bad about data collection; sometimes it feels like when we collect data on student achievement we are dehumanizing our students’ experiences and our own teaching. But I wonder if the QS movement has something to teach us about helping students take responsibility for their learning. This doesn’t necessarily mean having them pay attention to their own scores on standardized tests or benchmark assessments. It might mean something simpler and more readily visible.

QS and Formative Assessment

When I was teaching using the Cambridge Latin Course, each textbook unit came with an “I Can” checklist. The checklist put in jargon-free, student-friendly language the objectives for the unit. I would show this checklist to my students at the beginning and end of the unit. I think now that it would have been more effective for me to actually give them the checklist. Were I still in the school now, I think I might use completing the checklist as an exit ticket, and reviewing the checklist as a bellringer. As students walked in the door, I could hand them the checklist. Instead of checking or putting their initials in a box to indicate what they understood, I would have them note the date. I could then quickly review to see which students didn’t feel they had achieved the lesson objective. This would be a quick formative assessment and it would also allow students to see their own learning growing before their eyes.

QS in the 1:1 Environment

I think QS principles and techniques could be especially valuable in the 1:1 environment. I recently attended a Google Apps for Education summit, and I think you could probably use Google Forms and Spreadsheets to help students track their own learning. Many schools now require teachers to make grades available in a system that parents and students can review online, but how often do those particular numbers tell us about mastery or growth?

In the 1:1 environment, students might copy a simple form and spreadsheet that you provide, then fill out the form and be able to periodically review the data. The form might be as simple as one question - for example, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much did you learn today?” It could also be used, however, to track the relationship between learning and other variables - for example, whether students had gotten enough sleep, or how long it had been since they had eaten. We know these physical needs affect learning. It might be valuable to students to see their own learning in relationship to these concerns.

All of this is me spitballing. As I explore this movement more, I think I will generate more ideas about how it might apply to learning.

The Quantified Kimberly: Sleep

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="259"] SleepBot[/caption]

In the meantime, I’m designing my own QS experiment. In spite of the best thyroid numbers I’ve had in years, my energy has been low lately. I think poor quality sleep is the culprit. So I’m going to install SleepBot on my phone and track my sleep patterns for a week. After that, I’m going to use interventions based on the tips in this Lifehacker article. Follow me on Twitter for daily updates on my progress.

Here’s my schedule:

November 19 - 25 - Gather baseline sleep data; make no changes to sleep habits.

November 26 - December 2 - Intervention 1: Reduce screen time before bed.

December 3: Reflect on Intervention 1 and plan next steps.

What Do You Think?

Is the Quantified Self movement dangerous? Does it have potential for use with students? Are your students self-tracking already? I know self-tracking has been used in behavioral interventions; do you think it would be useful in academic interventions as well?

Missed Collaboration Opportunities: Health/PE

Tue, 03 Sep 2013 11:48:03 -0400

I think as a school librarian, there are some collaborations that come really easily, like language arts and social studies, while there are others that you have to work really hard to set up. It never occurred to me when I was in the middle schools that I should make an effort to work with the Health/PE teachers. I just didn’t feel like information literacy really fit with their programs. But lately I’ve been examining the North Carolina Essential Standards for Healthful Living, and I found some standards here that make me think I should’ve tried harder.

Because I work in North Carolina, that’s where I’m focusing, but I imagine the standards in other states have something similar.

Beginning with the fourth grade standards, there is a focus on analyzing health information and products. This is a great opportunity to teach critical literacy. You could have students watch clips from infomercials, examine magazine ads, etc. You could have them explore the internet and find conflicting information and try to resolve that information. This focus proceeds all the way through high school, with the objective “Monitor the effects of media and popular culture on normative beliefs that contradict scientific research on health."

If you’re currently in a school, I encourage you to talk to your health and PE teachers about how you can work together beyond just pulling books about the rules of certain sports (all that I really did for those teachers, I’m sad to say). This is a great opportunity to ask kids to think critically. It is incredibly relevant to their daily lives and will continue to be so as they become adults. Just figuring out what’s the healthiest food to eat requires us to use these skills daily.

If you collaborate with your health/PE teacher in this way, I would love to hear about it. Comment here or email me: kimberly at kimberlyhirsh dot com.

Summer Reading: All the Mermaid Books!

Sat, 29 Jun 2013 09:08:34 -0400

A few months ago, just for fun, I typed in “are the new vampires” in my Google search box, just to see what popped up. I found a stunning array of possibilities, including zombies, ghosts, and robots. But my favorite of all the suggestions was that mermaids are the new vampires. I’ve been obsessed with mermaids since I saw Splash more than 25 years ago; I sang “Part of Your World” in a mermaid costume at a high school chorus concert, insisting that boys carry me on stage since mermaids can’t walk. My home office is decorated around a mermaid theme, and this very website featured a mermaid in the header until yesterday. (See her in the picture on the right? My mom made her for me.)

A friend from high school recently connected me with the mermaiding community, where I learned about Raina the Halifax Mermaid’s book, “Fishy” Business: How to Be a Mermaid. Raina includes a list of recommended mermaid fiction, but even more useful, she provides the URL for this Goodreads list of the Best Mermaid Books.

As I’ve watched my former school library and classroom teacher colleagues chat about their summer plans on Facebook, I’ve occasionally had a twinge of longing for the times before I was a twelve-month university employee. That said, I wouldn’t trade my excellent job and full-time employment for anything, so I’m looking for ways to capture the feel of a summer vacation that match my current schedule. I think reading a giant stack of mermaid books (especially on my upcoming beach vacation) is a great way to get the job done.

So stay tuned for reports on mermaid reads. What are you going to read this summer?

Poetry Friday: Swim Your Own Race

Fri, 28 Jun 2013 13:12:01 -0400

The Poetry Friday roundup is over at The Poem Farm today. Our host, Amy, shares a poem about diving. I myself have been thinking a lot about swimming lately, and researching the Total Immersion method and my own options for pool membership. So I thought I’d look for a swim-related poem myself.

NPR obliged me with the beautiful “Swim Your Own Race” by Mbali Vilakazi. I’m just going to share some lines from the opening. Head over to NPR to read the whole poem.

Beneath the surface tension of shattered bones, dreams and splintered muscles things broken and those that may never be replaced.

Pulling the weight of it, you do not tread the water wounded and in retreat

By the determined strokes of fate you swim your own race

Poetry Friday: The Naming of Cats

Fri, 24 May 2013 13:39:11 -0400

My husband has a cat that he generously shares with me. Or perhaps it would be better to say the cat has him.

We confuse people because we regularly call him “The Kitty,” but his name is actually Laertes.

I explain this by saying that “The Kitty” is the name that the family use daily, but “Laertes” is his name that’s particular, peculiar, and more dignified. Of course, we’ll never know his deep and inscrutable singular name.

The Naming of Cats

by T. S. Eliot

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter, It isn’t just one of your holiday games; You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES. First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily, Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo, or James, Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey — All of them sensible everyday names. There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter, Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames: Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter — But all of them sensible everyday names. But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular, A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified, Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular, Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride? Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum, Such as Munkstrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat, Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum — Names that never belong to more than one cat. But above and beyond there’s still one name left over, And that is the name that you never will guess; The name that no human research can discover — But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess. When you notice a cat in profound meditation, The reason, I tell you, is always the same: His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name: His ineffable effable Effanineffable Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

Common Core Text Exemplars

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 15:23:34 -0400

A post from a friend on Facebook that linked to a blatantly incorrect article about new reading requirements in the Common Core prompted me to create this graphic.

Inviting ourselves to the table: The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 12:44:04 -0400

I learned just today about The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative. This initiative, sponsored by the Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons, aims to develop a common metadata framework for describing learning resources on the web. At LEARN NC, we have applied domain-specific metadata to our learning resources for years. Our resources are aligned to curricular objectives and searchable by grade level and subject area, among other characteristics. I would say we’re ahead of the curve on this one.

But I didn’t learn about LMRI until today. I consider myself fairly tapped into what’s happening in libraries, especially in school libraries, and I feel like this should have been on my radar before. When I explored the LRMI site I found that while they have solicited input from teachers and school librarians, the connection between this work and the work of school librarians, which seems so obvious to me, is not present in their framework.

I fault no one involved with the LMRI for this. To myself and other trained school librarians, the notion that making educational resources more discoverable would affect our work perhaps more than that of anyone else in a school might be obvious. But so many people don’t know what we do, that I’m not surprised or even chagrined that we have to make the connection ourselves.

But we have to make the connection. We can’t wait for somebody else to do it. We can’t sit around waiting for others to invite us to these conversations about open educational resources and how to make them easy to find and to use. It is our job to make this happen and we have to go out there and do it.

While I’m not situated in a K-12 school, I consider myself to be the librarian of a vast digital professional collection, and I think the LMRI, if adoption is widespread, will necessarily influence my work and how my colleagues and I ensure the findability and usability of LEARN NC’s resources. I’m going to keep a close eye on this initiative, and I would encourage all librarians, but especially those in school and academic libraries, to pay attention to it as well - and to look for opportunities to add our voices to the conversation.

What do you think about the LMRI? Is it an exciting development? What pitfalls might be involved? I myself am cautiously optimistic about the whole thing.

Review: The Suburban Strange

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 03:00:20 -0400

The Suburban Strange by Nathan Kotecki. Houghton Mifflin Books for Children. 2012. Reviewed from ARC from the author. Buy it from IndieBound or Powell’s (affiliate links).

Celia Balaustine is entering her sophomore year of high school, but it’s her first year at Suburban High. She’s all set to spend the year trying to be as invisible as possible, with only her sketchbook for a friend, when fellow artist Regine takes her under her wing and introduces her to a clique called The Rosary. The members of The Rosary are interested in dark alternative culture, including literature, fashion, and music. They pride themselves on being different from the other kids in their school. But as different as her friends are from the rest of their classmates, Celia can’t help but be drawn into the school’s drama as young girls begin to be gravely injured on the eve of their sixteenth birthday. She wants to stop these incidents from happening, as well as protect herself from becoming the curse’s next victim. But can she?

My relationship with the author:

Before I jump into telling you what I loved about this book (and there’s a lot), I need to tell you how it came to my attention. My former supervisor Emily (whose old job I now hold) contacted me and told me that her friend was having his first book released soon and would love to get a big name to be present at his book release party, and she knew I had connections in the YA lit world and thought I might have some suggestions. After some back and forth, Emily and Nathan and I sat down for lunch so he could pick my brain for my expertise as both a kidlit blogger and a school librarian (by training if not position). Over the course of the conversation it came out that we are both seekrit goths, me coming at it more from the fashion angle and him from music, with both of us crossing over into the other interest some. I confessed my lack of education on the music part of things, and he assured me that he could fix that. So, yes, I do have mix CDs that serve as, essentially the soundtrack for this book. Yes, the author treated me to lunch since I am helping him with publicity. Yes, I felt like it would be good if I liked this book.

So know all of that, because I don’t want to deceive you about my relationship with this book.

What I loved:

Celia's friends in The Rosary are darkly glamorous. They discuss music, art, and literature in ways that some reviews have suggested aren't realistic for teenagers, but as a former high school teacher, I found this eminently believable. Kids are into all sorts of things, and some of them are beautifully pretentious. Mostly they grow into pretentious but self-aware adults, the kind of people I like to spend time with.
This book has a gay couple in the most stable relationship in the whole book. And it's not a huge deal. They're just a couple, who both happen to be guys. And they're probably two of the most fully-realized characters in a book full of interesting people. They're my favorites.
The curse has a component whereby girls who are virgins seem to be the only targets. This leads to a lot of frank but not vulgar discussions of sex, its importance, when you should do it and who you should do it with. I think books that model this kind of conversation are far preferable to those that ignore it or make it all gross.
The members of The Rosary are immensely studious. Yes, they do party at Diaboliques (described in Colleen's review as a fairytale goth club and I can't put it better than that) until three in the morning, but they also encourage Celia to do her homework as soon as she gets home from school.
There's a romance in here that is a slow burn, which is exactly my kind of thing (both in my own love life and the stories I like to read). There won't be any flailing and crying, "I love you, but also I want you to be my dinner!" here - the obstacles to romance are external reactions to internal circumstances and I kind of love that.
The decadence of description of the clothes, atmosphere, music, and Celia's emotions. I spent a good chunk of this book being a little sad that I didn't have a tightly-knit group of goth friends to shepherd me through school. (I had a tightly-knit group of diversely-interested friends who were wonderful, but I was one of only two of us you could categorize as goth, and not at all aware of it as a genuine subculture rather than just a cruel label folks gave spooky kids.)
The quiet menace of the supernatural. You know the whole time that supernatural stuff is going on, but it's not the focus until far into the book.
The subtle way in which this fits the mold of a classic Gothic novel, going as far back as The Castle of Otranto and Jane Eyre and as recent as Rebecca or even The Thirteenth Tale.

What I'd like to see more of:

The school setting as a menace itself. This is definitely present here, but I have hopes that it will be even more present in future books in the series. I was lucky enough to hear Nathan speak to a young adult literature class at UNC's School of Information and Library Science (my alma mater!) and he mentioned that the school itself would serve as a unifying thread throughout the series. I hope he explores the relationship of this place with the supernatural mythology he's building more as the series goes on.
More supplemental materials (appendices, maybe?) consolidating the myriad cultural references. But I'm a librarian, so it's likely I'll do a re-read and pull together literary and musical references (perhaps even create a Spotify playlist) and share that here.

What I need to warn you about: This book is deliberately paced. There was definitely a point at which I thought, "Okay, I see why the Amazon reviewers complained about it being slow." That said, it's all leading somewhere and it's all valuable. If I were doing reader's advisory, I wouldn't hand this to somebody looking for fast-paced action. I would hand it to somebody looking for atmospheric spookiness.

The big climax and resolution of the mystery are not why you want to read this book. They are of course very important to have, but what’s going to keep you interested is the mood and the world-building. Don’t jump in here expecting a typical suspense thriller. If you ran the numbers, I suspect you’d find mystery resolution takes up a very small percentage of pages or words here. But the supernatural element is woven throughout.

My favorite quotes:

"We're a set of small black shiny beads who string around together, finding beauty the rest of the world has overlooked." (p. 5 in the ARC)
“We’re in high school. Of course we’re egocentric,” Ivo replied matter-of-factly. (p. 83 in the ARC)

Who should read it: I would recommend The Suburban Strange to readers who like books with a lot of atmosphere, a little mystery, and a slow but sustained reveal of supernatural elements.

Nonfiction Monday Review Roundup: Written in Bone

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 03:00:36 -0400

A review roundup happens when I read a book but either didn’t have the time to write a review or read it so long ago that my memory about it isn’t good enough to write a review. I gather links to other reviews in the kidlitosphere and share excerpts from them. These are reviews of books that I know darkly-inclined young people will enjoy.

Written in Bone: Buried Lives of Jamestown and Colonial Maryland by Sally M. Walker. Carolrhoda Books. 2009. Library copy. Buy it from IndieBound or Powell’s (affiliate links).

In Written in Bone, Sally M. Walker explores what scientists learned from excavating graves in Jamestown and Colonial Maryland. They book examines not only burial practices, but also the evidence these excavations provide about lifestyles in the Colonial era.

Spooky Factor: Any time the pitch for a book begins with, “So, we exhumed some corpses…” your spooky kids are going to be on board. I myself think it’d be fun to read this, then write an essay called, “What I Learned from Dead People.”

On to the reviews!

A Chair, A Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy:

Did you know that sometimes people used their cellars not to store food but as a trash dump? An archaeologist explains, “people lived upstairs and dumped fish parts and pig parts and chamber pot contents and goodness knows what else down there.”
Imagine that. Imagine dumping that refuse in your cellar. Wouldn’t it smell? How healthy would that be? Why would you do that? And then I thought about Laura Ingalls Wilder and the books where the Ingalls were snowed in for days and days and days. As a grown up rereading the series, I’d wondered, where did they put the trash? Go to the bathroom? Is that why a basement was used as a trash pit? And then… as the chapter reveals… a body was buried in the basement. Treated like garbage. Hidden. Unknown. For hundreds of years, until the secret was revealed. What was it like, to live in that house? To know that body was there?

Stacked:

When I first had heard about this book, I didn't quite know what to expect. I am pleased with this and found myself really fascinated with what archaeologists do with human remains. I think that this book has a huge appeal, both to those interested in history and science, as well as those interested in the all-too-common "something different." Oh, and boys will eat this one up! This is a book about people doing something and it gives boys tools to learn with (I mean, there's also really cool images of skulls and bones, too).

librarian by day:

Colorful pictures and flowing prose explains the process of excavating and studying a grave site, and explains how the details observed and analyzed tells us about life in colonial Virginia and Maryland.

Kirkus:

...profusely illustrated with photos of skulls and skeletons...

Making Time

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 10:36:38 -0400

In her first #TeachersWrite minilesson, Kate Messner talks about making time to write. This has consistently been a problem for me. I am undisciplined about it, like I’m sure so many others are.

The assignment that goes with the minilesson is this:

Make a writing plan for your summer and for your school year.

What you found that you might be able to cut out of your schedule or cut back on to make time to write.
When you’ll be writing each day & for how long. Remember to be realistic. 15 minutes is fine to start.
Where you’ll usually write. This can be different places on different days, depending on your schedule.
Who you told about your plans. Remember, sharing your writing plans with the people in your life helps to make them real and reminds your family & friends to give you that space for writing.

So. Planning time.

I spend a lot of time just aimlessly browsing online or watching TV. I think I can probably carve out 15 minutes of that time each day for writing, and as I’ve learned from FlyLady, 15 minutes at a time can accomplish a lot after a while.
So 15 minutes is for how long. When? I think it makes sense to do it as soon as my husband is out the door and off to work, in the summer. Once I’m back at work, I might take 15 minutes out of my lunch to do it.
Where? I have a beautiful home office that is serving as a storage space right now. In addition to spending 15 minutes a day writing, I’ll spend 15 minutes a day getting the office in shape. Once it is, that’s where I’ll write. Until then, I’ll write at our breakfast (and lunch and dinner) table.
I haven’t actually told anybody about my plans yet. I guess I’ll chat with my husband about it when he gets home tonight. And maybe my sister. I tell each of them a lot of stuff.

What about you? Are you making time and space to write?

Summer Enrichment: #TeachersWrite and #levelupbc

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 10:09:03 -0400

Like so many folks in the education industry, I recently embarked upon my summer vacation. I was that kid who couldn’t wait to sign up for the library summer reading program, who three weeks into summer was ready to go back, and who loved school/office supplies with a passion bordering on the unnatural.

And I’m not that different as an adult. After all, I am a learning enthusiast, so it follows that if I have more free time, I’ll learn more, not less. Two excellent opportunities came to my attention via Twitter. They’re both low pressure and easy to jump into at any time, which is great as I’ll be traveling for most of July.

The first is Teachers Write!, a virtual summer writing camp for teachers and librarians. Author Kate Messner and a host of her writing friends will be sharing advice, giving challenges, and generally building community. I am about to dive into it all now - 15 days after it officially started.

The second is the Level Up Book Club, a place to read books about gamification and discuss the gamification of education. Gamification is a topic near and dear to my heart and one of the things that drew me to library school in the first place. Should I go back for a doctorate, it would be one of my chief research interests. So I’m jumping into this one - again, late due to loose ends that needed to be tied up at the end of the school year - and will be making my way through Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken over the next week and a half - if I can tear myself away from the next book in A Song of Ice and Fire, that is.

Check these two out and let me know if you’re already participating or if you sign up. See you there!

Book Review: Social Media for Social Good

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:46:40 -0400

In Social Media for Social Good, former social media consultant Heather Mansfield, principal blogger at Nonprofit Tech 2.0, provides a guidebook for nonprofits entering the social media world for the first time. Mansfield divides the Web into three eras: the Static Web (1.0), the Social Web (2.0), and the Mobile Web (3.0). She explains the importance and value of online tools in each era, explaining that each builds on the era before it. She also identifies specific tools such as Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube, and gives best practices for using these tools. At the end of the book, she includes “Your Nonprofit Tech Checklist,” a step-by-step map for planning your organization’s social media strategy.

Mansfield provides a wealth of information and enhances her own advice by providing Nonprofit Examples of Excellence at the end of each chapter and a “Google This!” section with recommended search terms for more information and examples. Social Media for Social Good has both breadth and depth. I purchased it to support my work with the Durham Savoyards as we enter our 50th Anniversary year; the time seemed ripe for launching our organization into Web 2.0 and beyond. Mansfield focuses on suggestions that at first glance would work only for large non-profits with the budget to hire a social media manager, but with some tweaking, the work can be spread across a range of volunteers.

I highly recommend this book not only for anyone working with a 501(c)3, but also for anyone working in education. The principles are applicable to any organization that relies on external participation and support to succeed at its mission. I think they are especially relevant in the field of education, where providing readily-accessible evidence of the good work we do helps us demonstrate the need for continued funding and personnel support. For example, Mansfield suggests having the Board or staff of your nonprofit create a “Thank You” video for supporters. At a school library, you could have students create a video to thank donors or volunteers. In a classroom, you could create a Flickr pool for your Donors Choose project and post the URL in the project description so donors could follow your students’ progress through the project. Social Media for Social Good provides many more suggestions and best practices that will enhance your organization’s online marketing strategy. Check it out at your library or buy it today!

Social Media for Social Good by Heather Mansfield McGraw-Hill 2011 ISBN 007177081X

The Virtual School Librarian: Providing Library Services for Distance Learners

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 12:48:17 -0400

Storytime: My 17-year-old brother is a student at an online high school. (I think it’s TRECA but I’m not 100% sure of that.) Sometime last spring, my mother described to me a challenge he’d had when working on an assignment in his history class. The teacher had given him a question of causality: What were the reasons that a particular historical event had happened? (I can’t remember what event in particular; I think it probably had to do with the start of a war.) The teacher had instructed the students to “do some research” and “write a paper” about it. The teacher didn’t provide suggested resources for the research or guidance on the research process. Without this kind of guidance, my brother spent hours sorting through Google results and ended up writing an unfocused paper that chronicled every possible cause he could find, rather than a cohesive paper making an argument for a particular cause or related set of causes. I said to my mother, “Well, doesn’t he have a school librarian that he could ask for help on assignments like that?”

“No,” she replied. “They only just got a case worker for IEPs.” As a (at the time, future) school librarian, this made me sad. Since that conversation, I’ve been considering what it would look like for students like my brother to receive library services.

The North Carolina Virtual Public School, as I understand it, operates on a different model than TRECA does. It is not a full-time academy, but rather provides opportunities for students across the state who might not otherwise be able to take certain classes. Theoretically, students enrolled in NCVPS have access to school librarians at their home schools and would be able to ask for their assistance. But, at least in my experience as a middle school librarian, collaboration between the distance teacher and the school librarian is rare and could present significant challenges (mostly due to time constraints; in a world of Skype and GoToMeeting, I think actually setting up the communication would be pretty simple).

For this reason, I think there need to be dedicated virtual school librarians, who work exclusively with teachers and students involved in distance learning. As of 2009, “not one online high school [had] a school librarian position” (Darrow, 79). Because of this, we don’t know exactly what such a position would look like. University libraries, however, provide some promising models with e-learning librarians and distance learning services.

Based on an informal survey of job descriptions for university librarians serving distance learning students and instructors, plus my own brainstorming based on guidelines like AASL’s Empowering Learners and NCDPI’s IMPACT, here are the services I imagine a VSL might provide:

collaboration with teachers, either synchronous or asynchronous, to create information literacy lessons embedded in their courses, to assist with the research process, or to provide lists of resources
consulting with students, to help them through the research process and help them identify relevant and reliable resources
providing/managing a virtual space where students could create & share their work (blogs? wikis? I'm not sure)
creating free-standing information literacy lessons for commonly-addressed issues
participating in classroom discussion fora to answer questions
holding office hours for virtual reference/unplanned consultations

I'm sure given time, I and the whole world of my librarian colleagues could come up with more. There's plenty of evidence that having a full-time dedicated school librarian improves student learning. Isn't it time we served the more than a million students enrolled in online courses?

References

Darrow, R. (2009.) School libraries are essential: Meeting the virtual access and collaboration needs of the 21st-century learner and teacher. Knowledge Quest, 37(5), 78-83.

Using Developmental Characteristics to Build and Defend Your Collection

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:02:17 -0400

When you are building a collection and especially if you need to defend your collection against challenges, it is important to take into account the developmental needs of your user base. This is especially important at the school library, where discussions about what is or is not appropriate can become heated.

When considering the developmental appropriateness of materials in my collections, here are the resources I use:

Stages of Literary Appreciation from Literature for Today’s Young Adults by Alleen Pace Nilsen, et al. (PDF of first chapter provided by the publisher) Nilsen and her colleagues identify seven stages of literary appreciation, from birth through adulthood. When using this to build or defend your collection, it is important to remember that we retain characteristics from the earlier stages as we grow into the later ones. For example, in late elementary school, we may want to lose ourselves in the fantasy of literature. In middle school, we may want to find ourselves reflected in the books we read. Even though we now want to find reflections of ourselves, our desire for escape and fantasy has not disappeared.

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Facts for Families. The AACAP has created an excellent set of resources on a variety of topics of interest to the families of children and adolescents. At their website you can download a complete set of these resources, search them by keyword, or browse them by keyword or in the order in which they were released. Two I have found especially helpful are Normal Adolescent Development - Middle School and Early High School Years and Normal Adolescent Development - Late High School - Years and Beyond.

Developmental Tasks and Education by Robert J. Havighurst. Havighurst identifies six stages of development and tasks that occur within them. The quickest overview of these is at Wikipedia.

Developmental Assets from the Search Institute. For a variety of age groups, the Search Institute has identified 40 developmental assets. These assets describe what children and young adults need to be successful and to avoid high-risk behaviors. While the other resources have identified characteristics of your students, these identify resources that enhance their lives. This can be useful for advocacy more generally and for selecting books where characters have and benefit from the developmental assets or do not have them and must work to overcome their situation.

Having these resources available makes it easy to justify the inclusion of works in your collection without having to rely exclusively on your personal opinion or even your professional judgment.

Many thanks to Sandra Hughes-Hassell for introducing me to these resources in her Young Adult Literature and Related Materials course.

Merging blogs

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 21:40:51 -0400

Since I’m now working as a middle school librarian, I feel like what I read is inextricably tied to how I work. Because of that, I’ve imported all the posts from my lectitans reading blog to this blog. From now on, all reading posts will be made here in the category “Reading.” I will not make any new posts at either of the earlier lectitans sites.

Summer Blog Blast Tour Recap

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 11:38:20 -0400

Here’s a complete list of this week’s interviews:

Monday:

Tara Altebrando at Chasing Ray Shirley Vernick at Bildungsroman Jack Ferraiolo at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen at Writing & Ruminating

Tuesday:

Sean Beaudoin at Chasing Ray Neesha Meminger at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Rachel Karns at Bildungsroman

Wednesday:

Sarah Stevenson at Chasing Ray Emily Howse at Bildungsroman Ashley Hope-Perez at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich at Vivian Lee Mahony (Hip Writer Mama)

Thursday: Tessa Gratton at Writing & Ruminating Micol Ostow at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy Maria Padian at Bildungsroman Genevieve Cote at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast Vera Brosgol at lectitans

Friday:

Genevieve Valentine at Shaken & Stirred Stacy Whitman at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Alyssa B. Sheinmel at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy Matthew Cody and Aaron Starmer at Mother Reader

Summer Blog Blast Tour: Vera Brosgol

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 08:00:53 -0400

Vera Brosgol is the creator of Anya’s Ghost, a young adult graphic novel about Anya, a teenage girl who wants nothing more than to be normal. When Anya falls down a well and meets the ghost of a girl who died a century ago, she quickly discovers that her new friend can help her with her social life and her schoolwork. As is always the case, this friendship is more complicated than she initially realizes.

Vera was kind enough to answer seven questions for me for the SBBT.

Why did you choose to create Anya’s Ghost in black and white?

I honestly didn’t think it needed color. Full-color can really add a lot to a story especially when it takes place in an interesting location or fantastic world, but for this particular one I feel like it would’ve been superfluous. The monochromatic palette served the mood of the story, I think. And it would’ve made the coloring take twice as long.

In addition to creating comics and graphic novels, you are a professional animator. In Anya’s Ghost and the art on your website, you create a sense of movement in still images. How do the skills required for comics and animation overlap?

I’m actually a story artist rather than an animator, though I went to school for animation. [K: My bad!] In college I learned that the part of the process I enjoyed the most was the storyboarding part, so that’s what I went into. I didn’t have the patience for animating! I think animation made me a much faster and more flexible artist - when you have to do thousands of drawings you can’t fuss with them too much. It also taught me how to be efficient in communicating with a drawing. I started focusing less on making a pretty picture and more on telling some kind of story with it. That definitely carried over into my illustration and comics work. I feel like the same part of my brain gets used for storyboarding and comics.

Like you, Anya came to America at the age of 5. A lot of Anya’s concerns over her appearance and behavior are magnified by the fact that she comes from a Russian family. How do you think having this extra level of being different affects common teenage concerns?

It’s just one more thing making life difficult. Anything that makes you in any way different from everyone else makes you a target, and when your skin is bad and your clothes are fitting weird you don’t want to pile anything else on top of that. I didn’t have a hard time about being Russian but I was constantly aware that my home life didn’t exactly match that of my friends, and a part of me definitely wished it did. Of course it depends on where you live. I went to a high school in Brooklyn where there was a huge immigrant population and being from another country didn’t cause problems - at most it just dictated what group you’d be friends with.

While Anya’s worries are common to most teenagers, Anya’s Ghost adds a supernatural element to issues of friendship and peer pressure. What do you think is powerful about using the supernatural to tell this kind of story?

Part of the reason I added the paranormal element to the story was to make it more fun for me! Regular old school drama is all well and good but I don’t really get excited unless there’s something weird or creepy going on. And Emily served as a way to reflect all of Anya’s bad traits back at her, so that she could get a good honest look at herself. That would’ve been possible to do with a non-ghost character but it made sense for me to do that with someone who literally didn’t have a life of their own.

On your website, you feature fan art for other works such as Scott Pilgrim and The Hunger Games. Who are some of your favorite artists and writers? What about their work inspires you?

I’m a big fan of Fred Moore and Earl Oliver Hurst, both of whom drew lovely lady illustrations. Jillian Tamaki is one of my favorite modern illustrators - I love her embroidered Penguin covers and her amazing ink work. There’s a Czech illustrator named Stepan Zavrel who did the most amazing watercolors - I’d love to get some of that looseness into my own work. And I’m friends with some phenomenal artists - Jon Klassen, Chris Turnham, Steve Wolfhard, Emily Carroll… so I am constantly inspired by them. Writer-wise, I really like Haruki Murakami’s books. Before that I read Dracula and Geek Love. Right now I’m working through the Song of Ice & Fire books. I usually want to draw a picture to go along with whatever I’m reading just to get it out of my head!

A lot of your art, such as your collaborative Tumblr blog Draw this dress! and your many circus-themed pieces, draws on vintage imagery. What is it about these images from the past that appeals to you?

I love fashion. I wanted to be a fashion designer when I was little (as well as an animator and a children’s book illustrator and probably a vet or something). Though really I think what I meant was costume design - I love anything that tells a story and clothes can absolutely do that. Vintage clothes tell you about the kind of person who wore them, what their life was like, what was going on in the world at the time… it’s really easy and fun to insert a character into them, which is what Draw This Dress is all about. Modern fashion can be a lot of fun too but there’s definitely more variety if you’re borrowing from the past.

When you were in high school, you created the webcomic Return to Sender. What did you learn from this experience that has helped you in your career?

Haha! I kind of learned what not to do. I did that comic before school and the whole thing was a very fussily-drawn, poorly-planned experiment. I generally knew where the story was going but putting it up online one page at a time was not the best way to do tell it - once a page was up it was up, there was no going back and reworking things to improve the story. Maybe for a comic strip that would’ve been okay but I was essentially trying to make a graphic novel. It reached a point where it had gotten sloppy and I got too busy with school to deal with fixing it so I just stopped. I’m much more careful with plotting now and try to think of a book as a whole, rather than a series of installments. And I stopped using those darn Micron pens!

Thanks, Vera!

Summer Blog Blast Tour, Day 2

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 08:59:56 -0400

The fun continues: Sean Beaudoin at Chasing Ray Neesha Meminger at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Rachel Karns at Bildungsroman

Summer Blog Blast Tour 2011, Day 1

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 15:12:41 -0400

Hi there! It’s time once again for our semiannual (because we do one in winter, too, see?) smorgasbord of interviews with authors and illustrators. Every day this week, I’ll be posting links to interviews elsewhere, and then on Thursday, I’ll be sharing my very own interview with Vera Brosgol. Enjoy!

Today’s Interviews: Tara Altebrando at Chasing Ray Shirley Vernick at Bildungsroman Jack Ferraiolo at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen at Writing & Ruminating

Twitter and PLNs

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 09:56:27 -0400

PLN Challenge #3 is all about using Twitter to build your PLN. I’ve been on Twitter for a couple of years now, and it has been the focal point of my PLN. I feel that Twitter is an excellent tool for finding resources and connecting with others.

Many people think that Twitter is a service for broadcasting the minutiae of your day, the classic example being an announcement of the contents of your lunch. I’ve found it to be much more than that, but it can take some time to find the right people to follow. As I mentioned in my first challenge post, Darren Rowse’s excellent TwiTip blog provides a list of the top educators to follow. The Edublog Awards provide another excellent source for discovering potential colleagues.

An objection I often hear is, “Where will I find the time for this?”, followed by “How will I keep up?” The beauty of Twitter is that it requires very little commitment to be useful. My basic Twitter routine goes like this:

Open up the TweetDeck extension in Google Chrome.
Scroll back until I reach a post that says it was posted 2 hours ago.
Read from that point forward, clicking on interesting links as I go.

When I find something particularly moving or interesting, I retweet it so that anybody following me who may have missed it can take a look. I never read tweets that are more than an hour old. This eliminates the concern over catching up. Good stuff gets shared repeatedly, so if I’ve missed something, I trust that it will pop up again. Twitter is kind of like a party or a conference that happens all the time: when you’re there, it’s fun and enriching, but when you’re not, there’s no need to worry.

What is your Twitter routine? Do you have any limits like my 1-hour limit?

PLN: Looking Forward and Back

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 13:55:39 -0400

The PLN Challenge continues! The Teacher Challenge blog asked us to answer two questions:

1. What do you hope to learn more about with respect to your PLN in the coming weeks?

In every form of professional development - in-service provided by the county, conferences, PLNs - I have a habit of getting very excited about all the new ideas to try, and then filing the ideas away for later. Later rarely comes, of course. I’m looking forward to finding out how other people manage all of the exciting news that comes their way with their PLNs. There are great blog posts, lesson plans, and communities out there. How do people organize the immense amount of information they encounter every day? How can I do likewise, and then put these ideas into practice rather than letting them lie fallow?

2. What have you learned with creating your PLN that you wish that someone had told you before and what tips do you have to share?

Relax. This is the big tip I have for past-me and for everyone else building a PLN. Information moves quickly. The point of a PLN is not to be that dreaded “one more thing” teachers are always talking about having put on their plate. It’s to energize and excite. To improve. But it’s your thing, which means you get to figure out how best to use your time. I’m the kind of person who reads a magazine cover-to-cover, starts novel series with the first book, and will read six years’ worth of blog archives all at one blog. A completist, if you will.

That’s not how PLNs work. If I were to spend all of my time catching up on my Twitter stream, I’d get nothing else done. So I need to relax. You might, too. The PLN is there when we need it. It’s a resource, not an obligation. Sometimes we’ll be able to help others in our PLN and sometimes we’ll need their help. We can jump in or out as time allows.

What about you? What do you want to learn about PLNs? What advice can you give?

Building and Engaging with my Personal Learning Network (PLN)

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:09:29 -0400

Over on The Book of Faces, I noticed that Edublogs is hosting a PLN challenge - 30 days to build and/or grow your personal learning network. Fresh out of school, still with a bit of enthusiasm, and not yet busied by the responsibilities of a professional position, I think now is the perfect time for me to join in.

The Question Everyone (Including Myself) Asks: What does PLN really mean?

I’ve been building my PLN since fall of 2008, though I’ve torn it down and rebuilt it a couple of times now. Essentially, PLN is a blanket way of referring to all the different methods we have of learning new things by interacting with other people. For me, blogs have always been a big part of that. In 2008 I added Twitter. I’ve tried Nings but that format is not very intuitive to me, so I just dip my toes in and out.

That said, I’ve never really been able to wrap my brain around PLN as a concept. So in my head it looks like this: People I Follow On Twitter + Authors of Blogs I Follow + Colleagues from School + My Husband + My Dad + Any Other Resource I Happen Upon = My PLN. (In case you’re wondering why my mom isn’t on there, it’s because she’s not in libraries/education/academia.) It’s big and messy and organic, and The Internet tells me that’s okay. My librarian-brain disagrees but I’m working with her to move through this.

So, how did I decide who to follow on Twitter and blogs? (Because how I obtained my dad and school colleagues is pretty obvious, and how I got my husband is personal info not suited to a professional blog…)

First, over at TwiTip, Darren Rowse shared a list of the Top 10 Educators to follow on Twitter. Then, of course, I followed the old advice of looking at who those people follow and who followed them.

Next, as part of my School Library program, I was required to follow the blogs of luminaries like Joyce Valenza, Buffy Hamilton, Doug Johnson, Will Richardson, and David Warlick (most of these folks are on Twitter, too). These blogs post links to other resources which expand my network even further. I don’t remember how I found 8-Bit Library, but I’m so glad I did, because JP and Justin are my heroes.

But here’s what I think is the coolest way I found people to add to my PLN…

And it’s something I haven’t seen/heard anybody else talk about yet. At conferences, I’m in danger of being a wallflower. Sitting in the back of the room for presentations, eating by myself, this sort of thing. The bigger the conference, the more likely this is to happen. So when I went to ALA’s Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. last year, this was a big risk. Especially when my husband and my friend Katy weren’t around.

BUT! Because of my PLN, this never happened. I was wandering between sessions, all by my lonesome, when folks like JP Porcaro and Justin Hoenke (both of 8 Bit Library) would recognize me and we’d exchange greetings. Then I’d do things like follow JP to the exhibit hall where we’d sit and chat about video games in libraries, followed by some wandering around until he introduced me to people he knew, like Ed Garcia and Jenn Wann Walker. Or I’d meet up with him in the Networking Uncommons and happen to find him talking to people like Evelyn Bussell, who is actually local to me and had just returned from lunch with my advisor.

Because of my PLN in virtual space, I felt more comfortable in the physical space at ALA, and met new people who I then added to my PLN. It was amazing. Especially the part where Buffy Hamilton and I compared shoes.

What’s next?

This year I won’t be attending the ALA Annual Conference. But you can bet I’ll be keeping an eye on #ala11 on Twitter and soaking up everything I can from my PLN. I trust them to let me know what new connections are worth making.

Master's Paper Published Online

Wed, 11 May 2011 21:36:46 -0400

I have recently published my Master’s Paper here in my portfolio. This paper won the Dean’s Achievement Award for Best Master’s Paper. I will soon revise it for submission to School Library Media Research.

The Transformational Leadership Practices of National Board Certified School Librarians in North Carolina

Guest Post: Tim Lebbon

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 20:00:53 -0400

Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon’s new historical action novel, The Secret Journeys of Jack London: THE WILD, hits stores today. The authors and illustrator Greg Ruth will be touring blogs every day for the next couple of weeks to share their stories.

I asked Tim to share a bit with us about his research process. Here’s what he had to say:

For me, one of the most enjoyable aspects about writing this book was the research.

I usually don’t research that much. The book I’m writing right now is a fantasy novel, so I get to make stuff up. On the island of Skythe there are birds called merrows, herd creatures called hat-hat, fire-breathing creatures called lyons, stinging things called stark blights, and a god named Aeon. That’s all made up stuff, and the world I create is inhabited by creatures and people that require no research … because none of them are real. At least, until I’ve finished the novel and it’s published, whereupon I hope they come across as real to the readers. That’s one of the great pleasures of writing a fantasy novel––the geography, flora, fauna, and sometimes even the rules of nature and physics are mine to do with as I will. As I often like to say about my first fantasy novel, Dusk, I can have sentient tumbleweed without having to explain why.

That wasn’t the case with The Wild, of course. And I discovered that I enjoyed the research process far more than I’d anticipated.

First, I had to start reading a load of Jack London material. He’s a superb writer, so that was a pleasure rather than a hardship. It took me back to my teens, which was the last time I’d read The Call of the Wild. And I discovered books that I hadn’t read before, such as John Barleycorn, and enjoyed reading Jack London biographies. But the real pleasure came from researching the period and place where the book was set––Alaska, and the Yukon, during the Gold Rush.

I knew a little about those times, but not much. I had visions of people travelling comfortably into the wild, making huge gold strikes, and then returning home with their fortunes and futures secure, luggage loaded with gold and their skins a healthy sheen from the bracing weather.

The reality was far different, and far grimmer. The journey itself to the site of the gold strikes was terribly harsh, taking months for most people to make their way across mountains and through forests, along rivers and across lakes, all the time struggling to survive the worst that nature could throw at them––drenching rains, snow, ice, and temperatures that would freeze your spit before it hit the ground.

Camps were set up along the trail, such as the landing place of Dyea and the inland town of Dawson, and many people only made it this far. They were lawless places, where the law of gun and knife ruled. Beyond, along trails like the Dead Horse Pass––so named because its treacherous slopes were littered with the bodies of hundreds of horses that had fallen and been left to die––men and women ventured into the Yukon in search of their fortunes.

Thousands of people formed the Gold Rush, but the sad truth of it is that few struck lucky. Many died on their way to these base camps, and many more starved or froze to death in the wild. Scurvy was rife, as during the frozen months food was scarce.

Jack London himself almost died during his time in the Yukon. He returned with gold dust worth less than five dollars, loose teeth, a malnourished body, and memories and scars that would last him a lifetime. His time in the wild informed the type of man he became, and although it was probably one of the harshest times of his life––in later life he would become wealthy from his writing, and live very comfortably indeed––it was also the most inspirational. Much of his greatest work is about the land he found when he went in search of gold. And who is to say he didn’t find more than he revealed? Maybe he truly did bear terrible secrets about his time there, in the inhospitable, brutal landscapes of the Yukon. The wild.

Thanks for sharing, Tim!

The Secret Journeys of Jack London Blog Tour For the next two weeks, authors Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon will be traveling through the blogs of YA/kidlit bloggers who are also teachers, librarians, and/or adventurers. Each tour stop will offer an exclusive piece of art from Greg Ruth, whose stunning illustrations give life to the characters, locations, and beasts throughout the book. Follow the tour:

Monday, February 28th Little Willow at Bildungsroman

Tuesday, March 1st Kiba Rika (Kimberly Hirsh) of Lectitans

Wednesday, March 2nd Kim Baccellia from Si, Se Puede! and Young Adults Book Central

Thursday, March 3rd Melissa Walker, author of Small Town Sinners

Friday, March 4th Justin from Little Shop of Stories

Monday, March 7th Rebecca’s Book Blog

Tuesday, March 8th & Wednesday, March 9th Martha Brockenbrough, author of Things That Make Us [Sic]

Help spread the word about this exciting new series. Download the electronic press kit for THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON.

The Secret Journeys of Jack London Blog Tour Kickoff

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 17:35:41 -0400

The blog tour for The Secret Journeys of Jack London: The Wild kicks off today with an interview with the authors over at Bildungsroman.

Monday, February 28th Little Willow at Bildungsroman

Tuesday, March 1st Kiba Rika (Kimberly Hirsh) of Lectitans

Wednesday, March 2nd Kim Baccellia from Si, Se Puede! and Young Adults Book Central

Thursday, March 3rd Melissa Walker, author of Small Town Sinners

Friday, March 4th Justin from Little Shop of Stories

Monday, March 7th Rebecca’s Book Blog

Tuesday, March 8th & Wednesday, March 9th Martha Brockenbrough, author of Things That Make Us [Sic]

Help spread the word about this exciting new series. Download the electronic press kit for THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON.

The Secret Journeys of Jack London Blog Tour

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 12:11:42 -0400

Are you ready to take a journey into the wild?

Bestselling authors Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon have teamed up to create THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON. Jack certainly lived a wild life, which inspired Golden & Lebbon to create this new book series based on his real-life travels. They’ve taken his true stories and his fiction and mixed in urban legends and myths of the time. While THE SECRET JOURNEYS series is fiction, not biography, the books are extremely well-researched, and spooky elements add another level of intrigue to the richly detailed stories.

The first book, THE WILD, will be released on Tuesday, March 1st. When seventeen-year-old Jack London travels to Alaska to join the Klondike Gold Rush, the path he treads is not at all what he expected. Along the way, he encounters kidnappers, traders, traitors, and a mysterious wolf. Jack must face the wild head-on in order to survive.

The buzz for THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON just keeps getting louder. 20th Century Fox has acquired the film rights to the series. Garth Nix, author of the Abhorsen Trilogy, declared: “A masterful mix of gold, cold, supernatural creatures, and dread magic makes this a great action adventure story.” Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy, calls THE WILD “A great old-school adventure novel and the best use of the Wendigo legend I’ve ever read.”

Authors Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon will launch a blog tour the day before the book’s release, beginning at Bildungsroman on Monday, February 28th and traveling through the blogs of YA/kidlit bloggers who are also teachers, librarians, and/or adventurers through Tuesday, March 8th. Each tour stop will offer an exclusive piece of art from Greg Ruth, whose stunning illustrations give life to the characters, locations, and beasts throughout the book.

Here’s the full schedule:

Monday, February 28th Little Willow at Bildungsroman

Tuesday, March 1st Kiba Rika (Kimberly Hirsh) of Lectitans

Wednesday, March 2nd Kim Baccellia from Si, Se Puede! and Young Adults Book Central

Thursday, March 3rd Melissa Walker, author of Small Town Sinners

Friday, March 4th Justin from Little Shop of Stories

Monday, March 7th Rebecca’s Book Blog

Tuesday, March 8th Martha Brockenbrough, author of Things That Make Us [Sic]

Download the electronic press kit for THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON.

Publishing details: THE SECRET JOURNEYS OF JACK LONDON: THE WILD Written by Christopher Golden & Tim Lebbon Illustrated by Greg Ruth On sale: March 1st, 2011 Published by HarperCollins Childrens ISBN: 9780061863172

http://www.christophergolden.com http://www.timlebbon.net

Publication: Resolving the Quiet Crisis

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 21:17:08 -0400

My column in the January 2011 issue of School Library Monthly, entitled “Resolving the Quiet Crisis: Reading Apprenticeships in Middle and High Schools” and co-authored with Katelyn Browne and Elizabeth Koehler, is now available.

New Resource: Unit Plan

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 20:54:52 -0400

I have recently added a unit plan as an example of the type of instructional planning services I offer.

New Resource: Monthly Report

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 20:47:20 -0400

I created this monthly report for the school library media center where I completed my field experience:

Riverside High School Media Center Monthly Report November 2010

View more documents from khirsh.

Two Video Resources: Screencast and Book Trailer

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 20:39:15 -0400

Here are two video resources I created during my field experience:

Two More Stories

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 20:33:04 -0400

Here are two more videos of me telling stories in my storytelling class. The volume in both is very quiet, so you’ll need to turn it up on your computer to get the full effect.

Hello and welcome!

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 13:45:23 -0400

Welcome to my new home, here at my own domain. LiveJournal was just not doing what I needed it to do anymore, and thus we have the new lectitans.

If you’re looking for posts on a particular topic, please check out the tag cloud at the right. I haven’t settled yet on whether I’ll be using categories for new posts, so tags are the best way to navigate topically for now.

Coming soon: reviews of The Spymaster’s Lady and Rebecca.

Books read in 2010

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:03:00 -0400

1. Angel: After the Fall, Volume 1, Brian Lynch
2. The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin
3. Hooked on Murder, Betty Hechtman
4. That Was Then, This Is Now, S. E. Hinton
5. Rumblefish, S. E. Hinton
6. Tex, S. E. Hinton
7. Vampire Kisses, Ellen Schreiber
8. Brazen Careerist, Penelope Trunk
9. Emma, Jane Austen (Audiobook, re-read)
10. The Ghost Belonged to Me, Richard Peck
11. Are You in the House Alone? Richard Peck
12. Just a Minute! A Trickster Tale and Counting Book, Yuyi Morales
13. Chidi Only Likes Blue: An African Book of Colors, Ifeoma Onyefulu
14. Superhero ABC, Bob McLeod
15. Black Cat, Christopher Myers
16. Going North, Janice N. Harrington
17. Heat Wave, Richard Castle
18. Stan Lee: Creator of Spider-Man, Raymond H. Miller
19. The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
20. Amulet, Book 1: The Stonekeeper, Kazu Kibuishi
21. Magic Knight Rayearth, Vol. 1, CLAMP.
22. Food Matters, Mark Bittman
22. Feathers, Jacqueline Woodson
23. Which Way Freedom? Joyce Hansen
24. She’s All That! Poems About Girls, Belinda Hollyer (selector)
25. Creature Carnival, Marilyn Singer
26. Mirror, Mirror: A Book of Reversible Verse, Marilyn Singer
27. Wind of a Thousand Tales, John Glore
28. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (begun in 2009)
29. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
30. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
31. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
32. Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins
33. The Illustrated Mum, Jacqueline Wilson
34. Why the Sun and the Moon Live in the Sky, Elphinstone Dayrell
35. We Beat the Street: How a Friendship Pact Led to Success, Sampson Davis, George Jenkins, Rameck Hunt, with Sharon Draper
36. Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith, Deborah Heiligman
37. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen (audibook; re-read)
38. Coraline, Neil Gaiman (graphic novel version)
39. Persuasion, Jane Austen (audiobook)
40. Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen (audiobook)
41. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (audiobook, re-read)
42. Mansfield Park, Jane Austen (audiobook)
43. The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole

Homeschool Giveaway: Mare's War by Tanita S. Davis

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 05:07:00 -0400

Author and blogger Tanita S. Davis has set up a contest exclusively for homeschoolers to win a copy of her book, Mare’s War. Check it out!

Alt History/Steampunk Cover Design Contest

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 15:04:00 -0400

Have you ever found that the cover of a book grossly misrepresented its contents, and that this misrepresentation seemed to keep the book from finding what would otherwise be its natural audience? A bunch of bloggers have, which is why over at Bookshelves of Doom, Leila is sponsoring a cover design contest for Jenny Davidson’s, Ysabeau Wilce’s, and D. M. Cornish’s works, all of which fit in this category.

Go check it out - you could win books!

The contest is part of a larger multi-blog celebration of overlooked and/or misrepresented alternate history and steampunk books which will take place the week of December 13th. Keep an eye out for more info as that week gets closer!

Non-fiction Monday Book Review: Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 03:43:00 -0400

This review was written for my children’s literature class, so it addresses some concerns from a more professional perspective than many of my earlier reviews have.

Colman, P. (1997). Corpses, coffins, and crypts: A history of burial. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts demystifies a process which many children encounter for the first time in late elementary school: what happens to the body after a person dies. Penny Colman is an award-winning author of children’s non-fiction; while she is not an expert on burial practices, she is an expert on researching and presenting information.

This book, which will have a natural pull for spooky kids such as myself, is very straightforward in its approach. Colman first defines death and explains what exactly happens upon death. She then discusses various possibilities for what happens to a corpse, including medical uses, embalming, and creation. Next she discusses different containment options: urns, coffins, crypts, and mausoleums. She goes on to describe burial sites and celebrations, finishing with a discussion of death as portrayed in the arts and everyday life.

The book’s intended audience is readers age 9 - 12, although School Library Journal recommends it for grades 6 and up. I think it would appeal to an advanced 4th or 5th grader. The text is very clear. Colman frames her discussions of history and science with stories of her own experiences with death and those of her friends and acquaintances. This keeps the subject from being sterile, but does not sentimentalize. Colman draws on many disciplines, including anthropology and archaeology. Her information comes from a variety of sources, some as old as the Roman historian Herodotus and others as current as her own interviews with morticians. Images include photographs of burial sites and reproductions of paintings and engravings dealing with death. All of the images are in black and white. In most non-fiction texts I would consider this a detractor, but here I think the monochrome images suit the book’s somber subject matter.

The text provides both finding aids and additional material. A table of contents, chronology of burial customs, glossary, bibliography, and index are provided. Colman also includes a gazetteer of burial sites of famous people, a collection of interesting epitaphs, and an explanation of the symbolism of images commonly carved on gravestones.

Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts illuminates the burial process and illustrates how it is a common part of every person’s life. It is an interesting, warm, and respectful examination of customs across time. It may not appeal to a broad audience of middle grade readers, but it will interest and entertain some and comfort others.

New Resource: Storytelling

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 10:44:31 -0400

I’m currently enrolled in a storytelling class. This is a video of my first attempt at storytelling. As I learn more, I intend to offer storytelling as one of my librarian/educator services, as well as perhaps performing at storytelling events and in other venues.

New Resource: Banned Books Week Display

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 21:52:10 -0400

For Banned Books Week at the end of September 2010, I created the following display at my field experience school. Click each image to see more.

[gallery columns=“3” orderby=“ID”]

Book Review: Tales of the Cryptids

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 12:24:00 -0400

This review was written for my children’s literature class, so it addresses some concerns from a more professional perspective than many of my earlier reviews have.

Halls, K. M., Spears, R. & Young, R. (2006). Tales of the cryptids: Mysterious creatures that may or may not exist. Plain City, OH: Darby Creek Publishing.

This book caught my eye with its clever title. When I pulled it down from the shelf, its cover, cleverly designed to mimic a sideshow advertisement, drew me in even further. Despite its whimsical appearance, the text contains a good bit of information about how science is used to prove or disprove the existence of mysterious creatures.

The authors of Tales of the Cryptids have no special experience that qualifies them to write on this topic; it is an area of personal interest for each of them. To supplement their own knowledge from personal studies, they have interviewed cryptozoologists, primatologists, paleoanthropologists, and geneticists. Because cryptozoology inherently studies creatures whose existence is difficult to prove, it’s hard to evaluate the factual accuracy of the text. An important part of the book is that the authors emphasize this very dilemma; they go to great lengths to explain that some of these animals have been proven hoaxes, some may or may not be real, and a very few have actually been proven to exist. The authors focus on the importance of scientific inquiry, describing the need for DNA, blood, and bone evidence to prove the existence of many of these creatures.

The book is designed to inform, entertain, and teach critical thinking. It states, “We hope you’ll have moments of doubt and wonder as you read over this book, because that’s the reaction any smart reader should have to a book of unsolved mysteries” (5). It lists its audience as readers ages 11 and up, but I believe it is accessible to readers as young as 8 or 9. It covers several different types of cryptids, presenting reports from both believers and skeptics. The book may inspire readers to take on their own inquiry process while trying to solve mysteries.

Information in the book is presented clearly, divided by type of creature (Bigfoot, sea monster, prehistoric, mammal). Each type of creature is introduced by a brief narrative passage which invites the reader to imagine she has encountered the creature herself. Each section has several subsections. Content includes profiles of specific cryptids, explanations of possible evidence, and interviews with scientists and with artists who portray these creatures in various media. Illustrated maps indicate names of similar cryptids in different regions. Illustrations consist of photos, sketches, and maps. The book includes a table of contents, a “cryptidictionary” which describes different cryptids and provides a “reaity index” indicating whether they are more likely to be a hoax or real, a bibliography, specific citations for interviews including locations and dates, a list of related websites, and an index.

Tales of the Cryptids discusses a high interest subject while maintaining the importance of scientific inquiry. Its structure, illustrations, thoroughness, finding aids, and extensive proof of careful research make it an excellent nonfiction book for readers in the middle grades.

Book Review: Stan Lee

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 06:09:00 -0400

This review was written for my children's literature class, so it addresses some concerns from a more professional perspective than many of my earlier reviews have.

Miller, R. H. (2006). Stan Lee: Creator of Spider-Man. Farmington Hills, MI: KidHaven Press.

Stan Lee: Creator of Spider-Man is part of the KidHaven Press Inventors and Creators series, a series which introduces the lives of famous people to middle grade readers (Grades 4 - 8). The author, Raymond H. Miller, has written over 50 children’s nonfiction titles on various topics. While he is not an accredited Stan Lee expert, his experience in writing this type of book lends him some authority. The text, published in 2006, covers Stan Lee’s life from his birth until the 2000s, with up-to-date information about his current work. It focuses primarily on his career; sections about his childhood slant heavily towards how his childhood experiences influenced that career.

The book is clearly designed to provide an introduction to the life of one of the most famous writers in the history of comic books. The text is not overly complex, but it is not so simplistic as to bore or insult the intelligence of its intended audience. It does not present differing perspectives on Stan Lee’s life; it does, however, report conflicts objectively, simply stating the facts of situations like Lee’s lawsuit against Marvel rather than taking one side or the other in these matters.

The structure of the book is chronological; chapter titles and subtitles break up the text but do not reveal a great deal about the content that follows them. The book includes extensive reference aids, including a table of contents, a glossary, an index, endnotes which provide citations for quotes used in the text, a page of “For Further Exploration” recommendations, and photo credits. These serve as excellent examples for readers if they need to write biographical texts themselves.

Illustrations include photographs of Stan Lee in various situations, images of his influences (such as William Shakespeare) and experiences (such as chess, ping pong, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor), and scenes from movies based on his films. These are colorful with clear captions which add to the text’s meaning. There is one confusing illustration, a combined map of Manhattan Island and timeline which features characters from Stan Lee’s comic books. The text on this image, in comic-style bursts, is arranged in no discernible order.

Overall, this book is well-suited to its audience and purpose. The text is clear, the presentation is attractive, and it is a fine example of well-researched non-fiction.

New Resource: Kerry Madden Author Exhibit

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 09:29:29 -0400

I’ve updated the Education and Library Services page to include a link to a virtual author exhibit which I recently created about Kerry Madden. Kerry is one of my favorite authors writing for children today. I had the good fortune of attending her book release party for Jessie’s Mountain a couple of years ago and it was a delight to meet her. I hope this author exhibit prompts you and/or your students to seek out her work.

Book Review: Black Cat

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 08:05:00 -0400

This is another of the evaluations I wrote for my children’s literature class.

Myers, C. (1999). Black cat. New York: Scholastic Press.

Christopher Myers’s Black Cat is a poetry picture book about a cat who roams the streets of New York. This book is appropriate for students throughout the elementary grades. Its rhythmic language and collage artwork appeal to a wide variety of ages. It introduces readers to poetic devices such as simile – “sauntering like rainwater down storm drains.” Its theme is the search for a home in a big city. The text has predictable elements. The invisible narrator often addresses the cat directly and rhythmically, with questions like “black cat, black cat, we want to know/where’s your home, where do you go?” This particular stanza is repeated throughout the book, providing a measure of predictability. While the vocabulary is simple enough for younger readers, the poetic language will engage readers who are beginning to develop metalinguistic awareness.

The collaged illustrations feature a black cat painted on photographs of areas in Harlem and Brooklyn. The cat is usually shown in the middle of motion. Each page or spread relates directly to the text on the page. The images juxtapose photographic realism, which matches the theme of finding a home in the streets of New York, with the more fantastical painted postures of the cat – including dunking itself through a basketball hoop – which suit the poetic language.

The book is a large vertically-oriented hardcover with high quality pages. Endpapers feature photographs of parts of New York where the black cat might roam. Type is a bold sans-serif font, easy to read, in bright colors which vary to contrast with the colors in the illustrations. Sometimes the text is set directly on the picture and other times it is set on a black background. The pages are sturdily sewn into the book.

The colorful collages and text, as well as the poetic language, capture the energy of a lively city. This picture book’s rhythmic language and distinctive style of illustration might capture the interest of a variety of elementary-aged readers.

Book Review: Going North

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:11:00 -0400

For my children’s literature class, we write evaluations of the books we read. I thought I’d share mine here. These will illustrate some teacherly/librarian concerns which don’t come out as much in my reviews of YA lit.

Harrington, J. N. (2004). Going north. New York: Melanie Kroupa Books.

Going North is the semi-autobiographical story of an African American family’s move from Alabama to Nebraska in the early 1960s. The story is told from the perspective of Jessie, a young girl who is reluctant to leave the home she loves. She is both anxious and optimistic about the prospect of a new life in the North.

This book is appropriate for readers in grades 3 – 5, who are beginning to move away from egocentrism and beginning to be able to see things from others’ perspectives. It is set in the segregated South of the 1960s. This is conveyed both in text, with statements like, “Can’t stop just anywhere./Only the Negro stations,/only the Negro stores,” and with images of the African American family staying in their car at a gas station while a white family’s car is serviced by a white attendant. Jessie, the narrator, is the only character who is very well developed. Because she is telling the story, we get a sense of her own fears and hopes. Despite its focus on racial tensions, the book manages to avoid stereotypical portrayals.

The rich language conveys powerful images such as “I wish my toes were roots./I’d grow into a pin oak and never go away.” The language uses literal descriptions, onomatopoeia, and metaphor. Phrases such as “good luck,” with the first word in the phrase in larger print than the second, imitate the sounds of tires on a road. The themes of memory and movement are conveyed through the misty quality of the oil painting illustrations and the multiple perspectives of the yellow station wagon as it heads north. Jessie’s concerns, such as whether she will like her new home and if she will have much in common with the children there, are common to many children as they move to a new city.

The book is large and horizontal, so readers who are still struggling with fine motor skills can handle it quite readily. Endpapers with maps of the region the characters travel add to the sense of place in the story. The jacket design shows the family in its yellow station wagon. The title text and author attribution are in fonts which follow a curving line, adding to the book’s sense of movement. Inside, the text is printed with plenty of space around it so that the eye is easily drawn to it. The paper is high quality, glossy, and the binding is sewn together sturdily. At the end of the book, Ms. Harrington provides an author’s note explaining how the story reflects her own experience as a child moving from Alabama to Nebraska.

Going North is an excellent book to introduce middle grade children to issues of segregation and to provide them with a connection to the lives of children from earlier time periods as they learn that some experiences, such as anxiety about going to a new place, are universal across time.

Backwards design, inquiry learning, and Pokemon: Scenario

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 12:26:35 -0400

Before we jump in to the actual lesson planning part, let’s set up a scenario.

Let’s imagine that I’m an elementary school media specialist in the state of North Carolina. Animals are a key part of the 4th grade science curriculum in North Carolina. At my imaginary elementary school, a fourth grade teacher has approached me. She’s interested in inquiry learning and wants to incorporate popular culture into her class; she’s noticed that her students seem especially interested in Pokemon. Some of them have even been sneaking their Pokewalkers into school hoping to rack up more steps to help them in the most recent Pokemon releases, HeartGold and SoulSilver.

She knows that Pokemon look a lot like animals and she thinks she can somehow put that to use in her animal unit plan, so she turns to Google. A search for “Pokemon lesson plan” brings up JP’s post a little down the first page of results. She’s also familiar with the Thinkfinity project (let’s just assume it’s because I’m an awesome librarian and make sure my colleagues know about these resources). She performs a search there for “animals” and limits it to lessons for grades 3-5. She finds Animal Adaptations, which addresses adaptations and habitats - exactly what she wants to address in her unit.

Armed with these two lesson plans, she comes to me looking for any additional resources which might support her students’ research. I indicate to her that I’m very interested in games in education and ask her if she would mind if we collaborated more fully on this unit plan and offer to assist with the assessment of the final product as well. As you might imagine, she is thrilled to have an offer of help with that part of things. I give her a quick overview of the backwards design process, much like I gave in my previous post, and we set up a meeting to work through the backwards design template and create a unit plan with JP’s post and the Thinkfinity plan as inspiration.

Next time: Desired Results.

Earlier posts in this series: Introduction

My First ALA Annual

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 09:42:00 -0400

I'm very excited to be attending ALA for the first time next week. I'm trying to plan out my days. I'd love to know if you're going to be there.

And most importantly, if you’re going to be at KidLit Drink Night. Because I’m still undecided on that and I need to RSVP by Sunday.

Backwards design, inquiry learning, and Pokemon: Introduction

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 17:12:33 -0400

Soon after I wrote Pokemon for the 21st Century Learner, JP at 8bitlibrary.com continued the Pokemon series he began in Pokemon 101 with the posts Pokemon 102 and Pokemon Project Based Lesson Plan Idea: Habitats. JP’s lesson plan planted the seed of an idea in my head. I would go one step beyond a project based lesson, and turn it into an inquiry-based lesson.

My work at LEARN NC consists primarily of reading lesson plans and aligning them with the North Carolina Standard Course of Study. This means I’ve read many lesson plans about animals and their habitats. It also means that first and foremost in my mind in any lesson planning project are the standards, both from North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction and from the National Science Teachers Association (the relevant professional association in this case).

This focus pushed me to consider using backwards design to write my inquiry-based Pokemon lesson. Backwards design begins with the end in mind, asking three key questions:

What do we want our students to know and be able to do?
How will they demonstrate their knowledge and ability?
What activities will support them as they move through this process?

It was my original intention to write a whole unit plan and then present it to you, The Internet, fully formed. But I’ve since changed my mind. I’m going to walk you through this process with me. So get ready, because we’re in for what might be a lengthy ride.

The Generosity of the Internet: Smoothies, Streamys Nominees, Felicia Day, Leo Babauta & Tim Gipson

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 04:40:00 -0400

Again, I quote Maureen Johnson’s Manifesto: Make stuff for the internet that matters to you, even if it seems stupid. Do it because it’s good and feels important. Put up more cat pictures. Make more songs. Show your doodles. Give things away and take things that are free. Look at what other people are doing, not to compete, imitate, or compare . . . but because you enjoy looking at the things other people make.

On Monday I went to the thrift store with elfstar18. She asked me what I’d been doing this summer. (She’s been working, going to school, deconstructing and reconstructing clothes, and dressing up pretty for a con, among other things.) I was stumped. I feel like I’ve been doing a lot but it feels now like not as much - making cupcakes, crocheting hats, playing Dungeons and Dragons, straightening up my home office, decluttering… For some reason I didn’t think to say any of that and instead said “I’ve been watching a lot of web series, you know… I’m telling myself it’s research." Because I do want to write, produce, and direct a web series, ever. And I feel like the pacing in a web series is fairly unique. After reading Maureen’s manifesto and the comments, it occurred to me that I’d been learning a lot from free content people were just giving away on the internet. So I thought I’d share with you some of what that content is.

Smoothie Handbook I’ve been having a smoothie for breakfast every day for weeks now. It’s excellent - I get in two or three servings of fruit first thing in my day, it feels kind of like drinking a milkshake, and they’re so sweet that I’ve found myself searching out other sugary treats much less often than I used to do. (Fruit Smoothie > Snickers bar, if we’re talking about nutritional value.) Most recently, the smoothies have been from recipes provided by DaNae Johnson in a free ebook she gives away on her Smoothie Handbook website. The site also has a lot of information about what smoothies need to work and the benefits of particular smoothie ingredients, as well as advice on buying the best blender and vegetable gardening tips.
In my quest to learn more about how a web series should look, I went to The Streamys website and started to check out their 2009 nominees. Some of you are probably familiar with Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog and The Guild, but I was amazed by the variety and quality of production that is out there. I just want to throw out names and descriptions for a few I’ve really enjoyed:

After Judgement is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi about the people who are left behind once rapture happens. It has great acting, excellent production values, and most importantly excellent writing. I watched a promo for it and immediately wanted to know more about that world.

Backyard FX provides instruction videos on how to achieve professional looking effects with a budget of $50 or less. I had a lot of fun watching How to Build a Jet Pack.

Because I do want to be a writer-director-producer on any web series I might create, I decided Felicia Day, who is exactly that for The Guild, would be a good source of inspiration. I went to her website looking to see if she had done any how-tos and found an excellent post about the resources she uses for writing. Thanks to her recommendations I’ve got 3 used books coming my way and the intention of working harder at being a writer.
Felicia (I feel like we’re on a first name basis, even though we’ve never met or even communicated really) reminded me about some productivity blogs I used to read regularly, and I’ve been spending a lot of time reading Zen Habits, which is Leo Babauta’s blog. Leo writes not only about productivity but also about simplifying your life and there is an amazing amount of content there. You could probably spend the rest of your life just reading his blog posts. And that doesn’t even include his books, some of which he’s put in “beta” form on the internet.
For almost two years, my dishwasher has spewed crap onto my “clean” dishes, which means that at least 50% of our dishes have to be re-rinsed by hand. Yesterday when unloading the dishwasher I noticed there was some standing water in the bottom of it, so I went online and found this how to video for unclogging the dishwasher drain, provided by Tim Gipson, a home repair specialist. This is what he does for a living, and he’s giving it away on the internet. Which is good for me because he lives in Tennessee and it would take a long time for him to get here to help me out. So, thanks, Tim. I think my dishwasher might actually wash dishes now.

How many times a day do you benefit from content people have provided free on the internet?

Maureen's manifesto and my consumption

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 04:03:00 -0400

Hi there. Via Gwenda, I found my way to Maureen's manifesto. Do read the post itself but I quote the most important part below.

The internet is made of people. People matter. This includes you. Stop trying to sell everything about yourself to everyone. Don’t just hammer away and repeat and talk at people—talk TO people. It’s organic. Make stuff for the internet that matters to you, even if it seems stupid. Do it because it’s good and feels important. Put up more cat pictures. Make more songs. Show your doodles. Give things away and take things that are free. Look at what other people are doing, not to compete, imitate, or compare . . . but because you enjoy looking at the things other people make. Don’t shove yourself into that tiny, airless box called a brand—tiny, airless boxes are for trinkets and dead people.

In the comments, kathleen duey said: I learned how to de-seed pomegranites on YouTube today. Thanks, guy from Arizona who put it up. I have wrestled with pomegranites all my life and now I won’t. I really, really appreciate it.

And that got me thinking about the “mission” of lectitans. I started this as a way to share my feelings about books I read. I have lots of blogs other places - kimberlyhirsh.com is my online business card as it were and I use that as a blog on occasion, kibathediva.net has been most recently a craft blog which I’m not calling a lifestyle blog and focusing on the “new domesticity,” mimula is about my adventures in theatre, both as performer and audience member (performer most recently), and then Whedoncraft (not udpated for nearly a year - I need to get on that, seriously) is for pointing readers to things other people make when they’re inspired by Joss Whedon.

I have a lot of times when I get overwhelmed thinking about updating one or the other of these, or I think of something but am not sure where to put it. I think I’ve found a new grounding, sort of. Work/school stuff will go at kimberlyhirsh.com; kibathediva.net will be all about anything I produce (cupcakes, hats, a web series?), and lectitans will be about what media I consume.

The subtitle for lectitans is “reading eagerly and often,” but we use “read” to mean things other than books. So I’ll be going with that interpretation of the word. My next post will be all about what I’ve been reading lately. I want to thank the people who put free things on the internet, where I can then learn from them.

48hbc postponed until Wednesday-Thursday?

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 05:56:00 -0400

So there’s no way I’m getting time logged in for the 48 hour book challenge proper, but I’ve been longing for a break from myself (I was sick for a week and felt guilty about not doing housework the whole time). I’m going to try doing my own 48 hour book challenge from 10 am Wednesday to 10 am Friday. We’ll see how it goes.

My 48 hours postponed, probably.

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:54:00 -0400

My sister and husband are living with a broken air conditioner right now, and with temperatures poised to be in the 90s and up, and the inside of their home tending to be hotter than outdoors, I'm going to be hosting them for much of the next few days. I like them very much, and so I'd like to be a good host, which probably means spending time with them, as opposed to ignoring them while I read books, so while I'll officially sign on tomorrow morning when I get up, I don't anticipate getting many hours of reading done.

Booking Through Thursday: Short Stories vs. Novels

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 07:04:00 -0400

Which do you prefer? Short stories? Or full-length novels? I like both, but which I’m inclined to read depends on my mood. I generally gravitate towards novels - because they take less time, if you can believe it. By that, I mean that they’re usually divided into chapters, and in my experience, a short story is longer than a chapter of a novel. So if I’m riding the bus and want to read, I’m more likely to finish a chapter than a whole short story. But each has its place, and I think some of the best writing has been done in short stories. Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor spring to mind, but there are many others as well.

What about you?

48 Hour Book Challenge: It's almost time!

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 08:49:00 -0400

For the past couple of years, MotherReader's 48 hour book challenge has signified the start of summer for me. Now that I'm back in academia instead of K-12, I actually feel as though a third of my summer has passed me by. This is the start of the rest of the summer, this time. It runs from 7 am Friday to 7 am Monday, and you choose a 48 hour block within that window of time to do your reading. I'll be running 7 am Saturday to 7 am Monday. What will I be reading?

By Richard Peck: Are You in the House Alone?, Father Figure, Ghosts I Have Been, Remembering the Good Times By Patricia McCormack: Cut, Sold By Jacqueline Wilson: The Illustrated Mum By Robin McKinley: The Blue Sword, The Hero and the Crown By Gail Carson Levine: The Two Princesses of Bamarre By Azar Nafisi: Reading Lolita in Tehran By Holly Black: Ironside By Christopher Golden: The Ferryman By Herbie Brennan: Faerie Wars By Meg Rosoff: How I Live Now By Susan Beth Pfeffer: Life As We Knew It By Catherine Gilbert Murdock: Dairy Queen, The Off-Season By Sarah Miller: Miss Spitfire: Reaching Hellen Keller By Laurie Halse Anderson: Fever 1793 By Shannon Hale: Book of a Thousand Days By Kirby Larson: Hattie Big Sky By Russell Freedman: The Voice That Challenged a Nation: Marion Anderson and the Struggle for Equal Rights By Maya Angelou: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Do I expect to read all 24 of those in that time? No, but it’s always good to have some extra books lying around in case you’re not in the right headspace for one of the ones you pick up.

Will you be joining me in the challenge?

📚 Summer Blog Blast Tour, Day 3

Wed, 19 May 2010 05:02:00 -0400

Summer Blog Blast Tour, Day 2

Tue, 18 May 2010 07:12:00 -0400

Happy National Library Week! Also, Happy School Library Month!

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 07:33:00 -0400

Here just a few weeks away from the end of the semester, I feel like I've finally gotten into a rhythm where I'm ready to return to the kidlitosphere. I hope you'll all take me back! I thought this week was an especially good time for it, due to it being National Library Week, School Library Month, and the Teen Book Drop on Thursday.

While you’re waiting for me to return with real content, please contact your senators to support library funding, participate in Operation TBD, and/or help out with the reservation book wishlists at Guys Lit Wire.

Also, if you’re planning on going to ALA annual I’d love to know! My husband and I will be there at least Friday night through Monday afternoon, and we may end up staying through Tuesday. I’d love to meet up!

Resource Review: GameFAQs

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:47:57 -0400

GameFAQs (http://www.gamefaqs.com) is a fully-searchable online archive of video and computer game information. It is owned by the GameSpot network but independently operated by Allen Tynan, a member of the site since its inception in 1995 and a GameFAQs employee since 2004. GameFAQs is free but ad-supported. Strict policies ensure that ads are relevant and appropriate for all audiences.

GameFAQs provides multiple interface options. For the user who wishes to find information for a specific game quickly, a search box sits immediately below the site’s logo, with a drop-down menu allowing the user to limit the search to a specific platform. Those who prefer browsing may use the navigation bar labeled “Platforms” which lists all of the video game consoles in the two most recent generations as well as PCs and an “All Systems” option; the site also provides a dropdown menu on the same bar which includes several older platforms. The user can then further narrow her options by selecting titles beginning with a specific letter of the alphabet or in genres such as “Action,” “Role-Playing,” and “Sports.”

The site’s scope is both broad and deep. It includes user-submitted FAQs for games as old as the 1972 Magnavox release “Table Tennis” and as new as “Final Fantasy XIII,” with a US release date of March 9, 2010. The full system list includes over 100 platforms for computer and video games. The depth of FAQs varies depending on the game. For the puzzle game “Tetris,” only general FAQs are provided, consisting of information such as game controls, pieces, and general strategies. For “DragonAge: Origins,” a recent role-playing game, a nearly 40,000 word walkthrough guides the player through each plot element in the game; also available for this game are guides for specific character types, hidden content, the magic system, and item creation.

While GameFAQs is not the only resource of this type, it is unique in its affordability, comprehensiveness and accessibility. Commercially available guides such as those produced by Prima and Brady Games only address one game at a time and have list prices in the $20 to $30 range. Gaming magazines like GamePro do not have searchable archives and have cover prices of about $6 per issue. Other online sources, such as IGN, include only general FAQs. Unlike these sites, GameFAQs requires that most of its guides be presented in ASCII text format, ensuring accessibility and interoperability. GameFAQs also includes social aspects such as message boards and a Q&A feature where users can respond to each others’ questions about games. Both this and the fact that GameFAQs relies entirely on user-contributed content give young adults who join the community the opportunity to write for an authentic audience.

GameFAQs is a valuable resource for all gamers, but may be of particular interest to library youth services departments and middle and high school librarians. Teachers looking for authentic audiences for student writing can take advantage of the community aspects of the site. Young adult services librarians will find it useful both for individual patrons and as a support for gaming programming. With its low cost and wide appeal, this resource is suitable for school, public, and academic libraries.

Pokemon for the 21st-Century Learner

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:33:28 -0400

In his excellent post, Pokemon 101 for Teachers & Librarians, JP of 8bitlibrary.com answers the question, “What does Pokemon have to do with schools/libraries?” I’d like to take that a bit further and, based on his points, articulate what it has to do with school libraries.

I believe that gaming is an excellent way for students to develop the skills, dispositions, responsibilities, and self-assessment strategies which will carry them into the future. We can see exactly how this works for Pokemon by aligning it with AASL’s Standards for the 21st-Century Learner. [Note: I have only played Pokemon Red and I never actually finished it; I have played the Pokemon Trading Card Game quite a bit.]

First, let’s address a couple of the foundational beliefs.

Reading is a window to the world. If a student can’t read, she’ll have a hard time playing Pokemon, either the video game or the card game. In both the video game and the card game, students are required to read descriptions of the individual Pokemon and their powers to determine which Pokemon to use as they battle their opponent. In the video game, they also have to read as they engage in conversation with characters in the game.

Learning has a social context. In some versions of Pokemon, players can engage in multiplayer battles. Players must trade Pokemon if they wish to complete their Pokedex, an in-game database which contains information about the individual Pokemon. There is, to my knowledge, no solitaire version of the Pokemon card game; it must be played opposite an opponent.

Now, let’s move on to specific standards and indicators.

Learners use skills, resources, and & tools to:

1. Inquire, think critically, and gain knowledge.

1.1.2 Use prior and background knowledge as context for new learning. As students play Pokemon, they build their knowledge about the game's system and rules. They can transfer this knowledge to new situations within the game and to other games in the series.

2. Draw conclusions, make informed decisions, apply knowledge to knew situations, and create new knowledge.

2.1.4 Use technology and other information tools to analyze and organize information. As mentioned before, players must use the Pokedex as they play the video game to make decisions. As JP mentions in his post, the community-driven encyclopedia Bulbapedia involves a significant flow of information which students might use to enhance their playing or contribute to from their own knowledge.
2.1.5 Collaborate with others to exchange ideas, develop new understandings, make decisions, and solve problems. The social nature of Pokemon encourages this kind of behavior.
2.1.6 Use the writing process, media and visual literacy, and technology skills to create products that express new understandings. Bulbapedia provides players with the opportunity to do just this. It also has a style manual, which will help students learn to write within certain constraints.

3. Share knowledge and participate ethically and productively as members of our democratic society.

3.1.3 Use writing and speaking skills to communicate new understandings effectively. Once again, the social aspects of Pokemon and opportunity to contribute to a community-driven encyclopedia come into play.
3.1.4 Use technology and other information tools to organize and display knowledge and understanding in ways that others can view, use, and assess. I'm beginning to sound like a scratched CD here, but this is yet another example of a time when communication about the game, rather than the game itself, is relevant.
3.3.5 Contribute to the exchange of ideas within and beyond the learning community. See above.

4. Pursue personal and aesthetic growth.

4.1.1 Read, view, and listen for pleasure and personal growth. I think "Play" should be added to this indicator, but even if it is not, the other three actions are situated within the game. There is a wealth of relevant non-game material as well, including both fiction and non-fiction books, a cartoon series, and movies.
4.1.7 Use social networks and information tools to gather and share information. Look, another opportunity for social interaction surrounding the game to come into play! (Forgive the pun, please.)
4.3.1 Participate in the social exchange of ideas, both electronically and in person. See above.

There are many other ways in which Nintendo's vast Pokemon empire can be used to enhance students' learning. How can you take advantage of this opportunity in your school library?

An actual announced hiatus, kind of.

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 04:32:00 -0400

My participation in the Kidlitosphere is on again-off again, mostly off, and right now while I’m not actually physically stressed out by the subscriptions in my Google Reader or the messages in my inbox, it has become only so much digital clutter. So I am declaring myself on hiatus until further notice, which I hope will be sooner (March or April?) rather than later. I have a lot going on and I need to pare things down. So where can you find me in the meanwhile?

I’ll still be posting my booklists here.

I won’t be using the @lectitans Twitter account during this hiatus. I’m planning to use @kimberlyhirsh, though. You can search for me on Facebook.

What’s going on in my life?

I’m in library school. It’s excellent but it’s a lot of reading.
I’m in the Durham Savoyards’ production on The Mikado.
I’m working on my own happiness project. If that’s something you’d care to follow, I’ve created a livejournal for it at ping_jing. Adding the Kidlitosphere back to my life will be part of the happiness project but it’s a later phase. Right now, I’m focusing on my health.

Where can you not find me? Here for anything other than my booklists, probably. On mailing lists - I’ve set them to Web only, except for yalsa-bk.

I’ll see you all later. I’m not gone forever. I just thought it would be rude to keep up this absenteeism without letting you know where I was.

Comment Challenge 2010 Check In

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:38:00 -0400

How are you doing? Here’s my count:

Jan 8 - 5 comments Jan 9 - 5 comments Jan 10 - 0 comments Jan 11 - 2 comments Jan 12 - 0 comments Jan 13 - 0 comments

As you can see, I started strong and then fizzled out. I’m going to adjust my goal to 2 comments per day. (It’s 2 more than I was doing before!) That’s for a total of 42, which is always a good number to be aiming for.

Poetry Friday: Comes a Train of Little Ladies

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:47:00 -0400

I had my first rehearsal for The Mikado last night and in honor of that I'm using some lyrics from the show for today's Poetry Friday post. These are the lyrics to the song when I, as a member of the ladies' stage chorus, first appear.

Comes a train of little ladies From scholastic trammels free, Each a little bit afraid is, Wondering what the world can be!

Is it but a world of trouble — Sadness set to song? Is its beauty but a bubble Bound to break ere long?

Are its palaces and pleasures Fantasies that fade? And the glory of its treasures Shadow of a shade? And the glory of its treasures Shadow of a shade? Shadow of a shade?

Schoolgirls we, eighteen and under, From scholastic trammels free, And we wonder — how we wonder! — We wonder — how we wonder! — What on earth the world can be! What on earth the world can be!

Comment Challenge 2010

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 07:29:00 -0400

21 days x 5 comments per day = 105 comments. Do you think I’ll make it to 100? Those who do are entered for prizes. I just want to up my participation in the kidlit community.

If you want to join, sign up at MotherReader’s blog.

Currently Reading and Goals

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 06:30:00 -0400

So I have some goals in addition to reading 40 books this year that I’d like to share with you.

Read no more than one nonfiction, one fiction, and one graphic novel at a time.
Inspired by Colleen’s excellent post and this year’s YALSA YA Lit Symposium theme, I’m going to think more, read more, and write more about diversity in publishing.

I’m sure I’ll find more as I move through the year.

Currently Reading: Nonfiction - Time Management from the Inside Out by Julie Morganstern Fiction - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I’m not currently reading a graphic novel but I’m planning to pick up the Angel: After the Fall compilations (they’re hardcover!) from the shelf today. The shelf in my house. The comic book shelf. (It is supplemented by the comic book box. And then of course, there’s Will’s hundreds and hundres of issues in the attic.)

Next Up: Nonfiction - The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin or Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons Fiction - Dragon’s Keep by Janet Lee Carey or Dreams of the Dead by Thomas Randall

Which of these I read next will just depend on my mood, but it’s always nice to have a plan.

Happy New Year! 2009 in Review and Reading Resolutions

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 08:16:00 -0400

With all the writing I’ve been doing in library school, blogging in depth has fallen by the wayside a bit, but I have been keeping up my “Books Read” list. I read 54 books and graphic novels in 2009. Eighteen of those were related to my young adult literature class in some way. It’s amazing how much you can read when you’ve got a deadline.

I don’t believe I set a definite goal for 2009, but 36 books was probably about right, and it’s what we’re left with if we take away the books I read for class. I read 35 in 2007 and 34 in 2008, so 54 is quite a jump. I’ll be taking a children’s literature class in the summer or fall, so that will push the numbers up a good bit I expect, but I’d like to set a goal for reading entirely out of class. I feel like I should come up with an elaborate formula but I think we’ll just aim for 40. Since I do count graphic novels, and trade paperbacks of comic series, it’s not hard to push the number up quickly. I think 40 is a good number because it’s a bit of a stretch but it’s not at all out of reach.

So here I record it for all of you to see: I will finish 40 books or graphic novels (including TPBs) in 2010.

I say “finish” instead of read because I started reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 2009 but I’ve not finished it yet.

My favorite of the 2009 list by far is Rapunzel’s Revenge by Shannon, Dean, and Nathan Hale. It’s a graphic novel with a Western twist on the traditional Rapunzel tale. I’d strongly recommend it to fans of the fractured fairy tale genre and people looking for cool girl main characters.

What was your one favorite thing you read in 2009?

Library Services Page Added

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:55:22 -0400

I have recently finished my first semester of library school. Some of my assignments demonstrate the work I can do in the field. I have compiled these on the Library Services page. Please take a look!

Me and Twilight

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 06:14:00 -0400

I’m about to bare my soul here, so if you decide to criticize, please do so gently.

I first read Twilight in December of 2007, when it was just on the upswing, but before it became a proper phenomenon. I was 26, in Florida for Christmas to visit family, away from my then-boyfriend now-husband (who was my boyfriend of 9 years at the time), and for the past several years Christmas-time had been when I was at my most emotionally vulnerable. My husband would disappear to visit his family, where the internet is slow (meaning infrequent emails from him) and he would stay up until all hours playing video games with his brother, having what sounded like a right magical time to me, while I was with my family, whom I love very much and can stand individually for long periods of time but all together, three days is about my max. I was in Florida which now counts as far from home, I had a sinus infection (which was actually an infected wisdom tooth but I didn’t find that out until January), my sister had just gotten engaged (to her then-fiance now-husband, whom she had been dating for only a little over two years before they got engaged, which seemed like not a very long time to me) in August, so this was the first time all of our family was seeing her since then, and I was feeling supremely lonely and overlooked.

I picked Twilight up at Target just before we left for Florida. I started reading it on the way down. (I think I flew but I’m not 100% on that. All of my trips to Florida kind of turn into a swirly mess in my head, Christmases combined with summers, a few Easters thrown in, because the weather is about the same most of the year.) I was sucked in pretty much right away. Bella Swan and I were practically twins. She had dark hair. I have dark hair. She was clumsy. I was clumsy. She had moved in with her dad and started attending a high school in a very small town. I had moved away from my family and boyfriend and taught at a high school in a very small town. She had a boyfriend who was a vampire. I had a boyfriend who wanted to be a vampire.

I can’t remember how I felt about the sparkling at the time. I want to say I thought it was stupid but it’s entirely possible I thought it sounded very pretty. (I was supremely disappointed with the execution of that in the film, by the way.)

I ate it up. I’m pretty sure I sang its praises to my husband. I think I was all, “There’s this book, and the vampire says such pretty things, and it makes me think of you…" (Let’s not leave aside the fact that Bella had never had a boyfriend before Edward. Because the fact that she was having her first real relationship at 17 also parallels my life. And probably the lives of many more people than would actually admit it.)

I finished the book while I was still in Florida, I think. It was a vacation read. I came back to the real world (i. e., not Christmas in Florida) and forgot about Twilight, mostly. Then it started really becoming a thing and my students started talking about it. I had two that were very critical of it, and the more I listened to them, the more I realized that all of their criticisms were spot on. I started to feel ashamed for having enjoyed it so thoroughly.

I recently re-read Twilight for my Young Adult Literature class. This time I went in looking to examine exactly why I’d had so much fun with it the first time. For a while, I couldn’t figure it out. The prose didn’t impress me. I’m thoroughly tired of teenagers in books taking care of their incompetent divorced/widowed parents. The last time I found that charming was when I was watching Blossom. Edward’s behavior was mostly irritating.

But then I got to the sex-scenes-that-are-not. If you’ve read it, you know what I mean. The ones where lots of pretty words are said, but no touching happens. And I realized that those scenes were the ones that really got me the first time through, and that they have exactly the same power, even now. Sad. Embarrassing. I realized during this reading of it, though, that Edward is not only creepy, but also extremely patronizing. And that if I had a boyfriend who treated me the way he treats Bella (i. e., like a child) I would dump him posthaste. I think even if he were really pretty and made me feel very special. Because there are few things that bother me more than being patronized.

All of my problems with Twilight in terms of plausibility can be summed up by saying it reads like a fanfic - a fanfic I wrote in the Buffy universe, and one lots of other people have written, too. The Cullens accept Bella so readily, which I thought was ridiculous. (In fact, I think Rosalie is the most reasonable of them.) Vampires should not go to high school; I don’t care if it means they can stay in one place longer that way. As they’re undead, I’m pretty sure truancy officers aren’t going to come after them. Why anyone would go to high school more than once I can’t imagine. (And I actually had a pretty good time in high school.) And then, there’s some parts of vampire lore that are really sacred to me which Stephanie Meyer completely threw out the window, and others she fails to mention entirely.

Recently, I also started to object to the fact that Edward is just creepy, and it frightens me that this is the ideal man in the minds of many girls and women. But yesterday I had to start re-examining this objection, because my perfect man imprint in fiction is The Phantom of the Opera, and he’s really way creepier than Edward. He kills people a lot, he sings at Christine from behind a mirror - which means he’s probably been watching her dress and undress, he kidnaps her, he sends threatening notes to all sorts of people. So. What makes the Phantom different than Edward? Well, he’s smarter. Edward didn’t design an elaborate system of traps and such under an opera house. Also he’s not actually pretty. Which I think really is part of his appeal. Edward feels like he’s a monster because he kind of wants to eat people; Erik, however, looks like a monster but, in the strictest and least psychological of terms, is not one. Why am I not scared that people will actually hope deformed men will start watching them in mirrors and stealing them away in the same way I’m afraid women will think the ideal boyfriend is a patronizing stalker who looks like he’s going to throw up every time he talks to you? I think the distance in time is what does it for me. Erik doesn’t look seventeen. He doesn’t go to high school. He doesn’t feel like a person you might really run into who’s just, you know, a vampire, but otherwise “normal.”

So I’ve kind of figured out why I’m okay with the Phantom and not Edward, although I still feel like I’m not really justified in criticizing other people for loving Edward anymore. (I’ve never been on Team Edward or Team Jacob, but I move closer to being on Team Jacob every day.) I kept pursuing this line of thought, examining what I think is or is not okay to idealize in a relationship, and I came to the best in vampire/teen girl loves: Buffy and Angel. I am one of these Buffy/Angel OTPers. I mean, I hated Riley simply because he was Not Angel. And don’t get me started on Spuffy. (It always ends bad when I talk about it. Let me say that one of my other prime OTPs is Spike and Dru. So anytime they’re separated I’m unhappy.)

I was like, “Oh, but Angel’s different. He didn’t stalk - “ Oops. Edward sat inside Bella’s bedroom at night for two months. Angel watched Buffy hang out at school for a year. Angel followed her from LA to Sunnydale. “Oh, well, Angel’s different, because he -" And I just have very little, except that he’s not really patronizing. But, would you be, if your girlfriend had superpowers? Now, the fact that it’s Buffy’s job to kill vampires lends a lot more interest to the story, I think, than the fact that Edward kinda wants to have Bella for lunch. Sacred duty is more interesting than being a snack. Buffy as a story has many things to recommend it over Twilight, I think; complexity, mainly. (And I’m pretending here that nothing after Seasons One through Three exists, because it’s really the Buffy/Angel relationship that is of interest here.) Also Joyce is an adult who can cook her own food and do her own laundry, so that’s nice, and Angel points out how ridiculous it is for Darla to be pretending to be a school girl. So those issues of mine with Twilight are not a problem on Buffy.

But in the end, I’m pretty much a hypocrite. I do wish I’d gone on and read New Moon and Eclipse before the phenomenon really started. (Stupid not being in paperback at the time.) Because now, I will feel weird reading them. But the truth is, I’ll probably have fun reading them (not so sure about Breaking Dawn but I couldn’t have read it pre-phenomenon anyway since it wasn’t out until mid-phenomenon).

No matter how much fun they are, though, you’ll never find me being a Twilight tourist. I’m not about to journey up to Forks or Port Orange to try and recreate scenes from the book or the movie. Also, I don’t care how much you like the name Renesmee, it sounds silly.

There. Now this is the personal response to reading journal I always meant for it to be.

Winter Blog Blast Tour, Day One

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:36:00 -0400

It’s time for interviews again! I’m not participating due to having lots of school work, but here are yesterday’s interviews. Many thanks to slayground for the code.

Jim Ottaviani at Chasing Ray Courtney Sheinmel at Bildungsroman Derek Landy at Finding Wonderland Mary E. Pearson at Miss Erin Megan Whalen Turner at HipWriterMama Frances Hardinge at Fuse #8

NaNoWriMo Day 1

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 04:59:00 -0400

(cross-posted from my personal LiveJournal - originally posted there at 12:39 am)

I’m already past my quota for the DAY.

What, you don’t write 1700 words in 40 minutes?

I’ll give you a hint:

Make no attempt to disguise your character as not yourself, ramble on at length about the history of comic book characters (summarizing other people’s work really ups your word count!), pour out everything you know about the supernatural, and talk at length about all three of the mean things you and your sister did to each other as little kids.

Current Chapter Title: “Chapter The First: In Which Lauren Grace Vanderbilt Morlock Discovers That She Is, In Fact,Not the Most Important Person in the Entire Universe (Much to Her Dismay)”

Quotes of the Day: “If you would like, we can have a lengthy conversation about how superheroes are our modern mythology, and how it is actually a metaphor when these people gain their powers, for our changing bodies in puberty and our changing roles in life in adolescence and coming to understand our own power of being adult and working that out psychobabble blah blah blahcakes.”

“I get really bad headaches. I keep trying to walk through walls in hopes it will make them better. I usually just end up walking into walls instead, which is not as effective for curing a headache, actually.”

“…I was fairly certain I was destined to save the world at least once, perhaps several times, perhaps over and over again and maybe then someone would go back and actually retcon my life and it would all be different and I would have a new origin story and you do not know, okay?”

“I may be a Marvel girl, but Batman is really cool.”

“So my sister. I love her very much. I think people are supposed to love their sisters, and I love her. I maybe do not really understand her, but we fight much less than many other siblings, so, yeah. We are on pretty good terms, pretty much all of the time. I mean, I am fairly certain she has not stolen any money from my jewelry box for weeks, and I am even more certain that it has been a couple of months since the last time I handed her an empty soda can and said, ‘Here, you can have the rest.’ (Never mind that I fed her dog biscuits when she was two, okay? She was hungry.)”

“I am not known for my ability to shut the hell up.”

“She likes to help people. Which is a really good trait if you are going to have superpowers, I suppose.”

NaNoWriMo

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:29:00 -0400

Consider yourself warned. This reading journal is about to become a writing journal!

Here’s my MAGNA CARTA I (see No Plot? No Problem! for details) - a list of things I really like in books.

MAGNA CARTA I Magical girls Smart girls Sisters Love that doesn’t get in the way of adventure Love that isn’t too angsty Love that is fun Pretty hair Horses Smart men who have principles Misunderstood people (mostly because they’re too smart) A few close friends Fantastical elements Cleverly hidden exposition Intricate interweaving of mythology Imagery Talking cats Puzzles Girls who are strong but not physically tough

What about you? What elements do you really like in your stories?

KidLitCon etc.

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:13:00 -0400

I didn’t get to go to KidLitCon but I’m still learning a lot about it because I’ve been reading all the posts linked from MotherReader’s Round-up.

As you might surmise from my last post, I’ve been reading on average 4 - 6 novels a week for the past few weeks on top of my other assigned readings (articles and such). One of the things that keeps coming up in the KidLitCon posts is the question of why we blog. I’ve looked at that question for lectitans several times and it always comes back to the same answer:

I want to share my responses to books.

Sadly, when I read at the rate and with the urgency I’ve been reading, I don’t have time to become too emotionally involved in the books. So there’s not a lot of response to share. If things ever calm down a little, I hope to share with you the difference in my experience of reading Twilight the first time and the second time. I’d also love to talk with you about how reading The Book Thief and What I Saw and How I Lied has inspired me to research my roots - i. e., the Austrian Jews who came here before World War I (thank goodness they did), and also inspired me to confront my intense visceral response to any visual representation of the Holocaust (esp. symbolic memorials) rather than just looking away.

But those deserve actual, real posts, and I just don’t have time for that right now.

So… I’ll see you with my booklists and for quick little posts here and there, but probably you won’t get anything substantive until December.

I’ll leave you with a link to my first ever recommendation list, which is an assignment for my YA Lit class. (I haven’t read everything on it, I’m sad to say.)

Guest Post from Thomas Randall: STRANGE GIRL IN A STRANGE LAND

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:44:00 -0400

When Little Willow asked me if I wanted to participate in Thomas Randall’s blog tour, I jumped on it, mainly because I trust her. But also because she sent me an excerpt from the book to read, and it was excellent. Since my favorite thing about it was the atmosphere of the setting, I asked Thomas to write about his research on Japan. Here’s what he had to say!

Confession time: I’ve never been to Japan. The absolute best thing about the early feedback on THE WAKING: DREAMS OF THE DEAD is that I seem to have convinced people otherwise. But I’m not going to lie to you, my friends. The Miyazu City that exists in the pages of this trilogy exists only in my mind. Sure, a great many things that you’ll encounter in the book are real–landmarks and shrines and even street names–but this isn’t the real Miyazu City.

Though that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Most writers invent versions of the cities in which they set their stories, even cities they know well. You take what is useful, discard what you don’t need, and do your best to get the sense of the place…its atmosphere. When it’s a place you’ve never been, a place you’re unlikely to be able to afford to visit on your own dime, what makes the presentation of a setting feel realistic are the details you choose to include. And details, of course, require research.

If you live in Miyazu City, you’ll certainly know that the version of the place that exists in THE WAKING is fiction. But if you live there….sssshhh, don’t spoil it for everyone else.

When I set out to write THE WAKING trilogy, I knew the basic story. American teenager Kara Harper and her professor dad are still mourning the death of Kara’s mother two years after their loss. Her dad has been teaching Japanese language at an American school, and Kara has grown up with the dream of someday visiting the country. Her father has not only taught her the language, but instilled in her a fascination with the nation and its culture. In the aftermath of her mother’s death, Kara and her father begin their life anew in a Japanese community where few gaijins visit. She is the only non-Japanese student at her new school, and her father the only non-Japanese teacher.

Sometimes research feels like a chore, but not on these books. I jumped right in with both feet. My first job was, of course, to figure out where it would all take place. I thought of inventing a city (as Kara’s school, Monju-no-Chie, is invented), but as I surfed page after page online, printing up dozens (at first) of pages about schools in Japan, I ran across an article about the three most beautiful places in the country. One of them, Ama-no-Hashidate, immediately caught my interest. A long spit of land that juts out into Miyazu Bay, its white sand beaches are striped up the middle with a dense wood of black pines. From certain vantage points–scenic overlooks–visitors turn their backs to the bay, bend over, and view Ama-no-Hashidate through their legs. Upside down, against the blue water, it is said to look like a bridge across the heavens.

It seemed a peaceful place, and I liked the idea of the beauty and tranquility there. The shore of the bay, in view of Ama-no-Hashidate, seemed the perfect place to set the story of this American girl trying to live in a new country, and adapt to a new culture. And the perfect place for evil spirits and curses, among other things.

The research only began there, of course. What followed was a crash course on Japanese education, school uniforms, fads and hobbies, and behaviors in a culture so different from my own. I had always known that traditions would be different in Japan, but so many things surprised me. Japanese students have a period of time at the end of each school day (and before mandatory club meetings) when they clean their schools. Every day. When they enter the school, they remove their shoes and place them in small cubbies, donning slippers that are worn at all times while in the building. I loved learning about what Japanese parents put in the bento boxes their kids take to school for lunch and the details of various festivals, such as Toro Nagashi, during which lanterns are set afloat in the bay, each representing a loved one who has died the year before. I wanted to know what they might eat for snacks, what their traditions are when going to the beach, how boys and girls behave together, how they celebrate their holidays–and I wish I didn’t know what they put on their pizza.

Seriously. I hope one day to visit Japan, but I will not be eating pizza there.

I enjoyed every moment of discovering life in Japan with Kara Harper, and I hope you’ll enjoy it, too. It’s the perfect thing to lull you into a false sense of security before the really creepy stuff starts. After all, THE WAKING: DREAMS OF THE DEAD, begins with murder. You’ll understand, I hope, that I didn’t do any first hand research on that.

THE WAKING: DREAMS OF THE DEAD by Thomas Randall. In stores September 29th, 2009.

Follow The Waking blog tour to learn more about Dreams of the Dead, the first book in this thrilling YA series, and its author, Thomas Randall.

Monday, September 28th: An interview with Little Willow at Bildungsroman Tuesday, September 29th: Author Q&A with Courtney Summers Wednesday, September 30th: A guest blog about writing from the female POV at readergirlz Thursday, October 1st: A guest blog about researching Japanese culture at lectitans Friday, October 2nd: Q&A at Sarah’s Random Musings Friday, October 2nd: An interview at Steph Su Reads Monday, October 5th: A guest blog about writing mysteries at Books By Their Cover Tuesday, October 6th: Q&A with Kim Baccellia Tuesday, October 6th: An interview with BookChic Wednesday, October 7th: An interview at Presenting Lenore Thursday, October 8th: Special post for Michelle at GalleySmith Friday, October 9th: Last stop with Kelsey at Just Blinded Book Reviews

The September Carnival of Children's Literature

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 04:32:00 -0400

The September Carnival of Children’s Literature is online now. Please go take a look!

The Waking Blog Tour with Thomas Randall

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 04:38:00 -0400

Follow The Waking blog tour to learn more about Dreams of the Dead, the first book in this thrilling YA series, and its author, Thomas Randall.

Monday, September 28th: An interview with Little Willow at Bildungsroman Tuesday, September 29th: Q&A with Courtney Summers Wednesday, September 30th: A guest blog about writing from the female POV at readergirlz Thursday, October 1st: A guest blog about researching Japanese culture at lectitans Friday, October 2nd: Q&A at Sarah’s Random Musings Friday, October 2nd: An interview at Steph Su Reads Monday, October 5th: A guest blog about writing mysteries at Books By Their Cover Tuesday, October 6th: Q&A with Kim Baccellia Tuesday, October 6th: An interview with BookChic Wednesday, October 7th: An interview at Presenting Lenore Thursday, October 8th: Special post for Michelle at GalleySmith Friday, October 9th: Last stop with Kelsey at Just Blinded Book Reviews

Poetry Friday: Against Cinderella by Julia Alvarez

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:26:00 -0400

We read this poem in my YA Lit class the other day, and it’s phenomenal.

I can’t believe it.

Whoever made it up is pulling my foot

so it’ll fit that shoe.

I’ll go along with martyrdom:

she swept and wept; she mended, stoked the fire,

slaved while her three stepsisters,

who just happened to oblige their meanness

by being ugly, dressed themselves.

I’ll swallow that there was a Singer godmother,

who magically could sew a pattern up

and hem it in an hour,

that Cinderella got to be a debutante

and lost her head and later lost her shoe.

But there I stop.

To read the rest of the poem, go to the Calyx Publishing page and find the excerpts from A Fierce Brightness.

My two favorite parts are these: “who just happened to blige their meanness/by being ugly” - I love the notion that the stepsisters have a responsibility to be ugly, because that is what their meanness requires of them. It makes a good point about the nature of many stories - the good people are beautiful and the bad people are ugly, and the physical body makes easily apparent the character’s spiritual nature.

“…there was a Singer godmother,/who magically could sew a pattern up” - Because Singer is a brand of sewing machine. One other person in the class recognized this and chose it as her favorite part, and I was so excited she did. But it’s an excellent pun of sorts as well, of course, if you imagine that the godmother did, in fact, sing.

Poetry is so good when it’s good.

7-Imp's 7 Kicks #133

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 05:04:00 -0400

From Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast:

…7-Imp’s 7 Kicks is our weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week, whether book-related or not, that happened to you.

Here are my kicks:

Monday, I attended a board meeting for an arts organization, and we actually decided some stuff and got things done. That happens so rarely at meetings that it’s pretty amazing when it does.
On Tuesday night, I met with a group for a project we’re presenting this week, and they were wowed by the Powerpoint I’d put together for us to use. (It really wasn’t a clever smokescreen to cover up how I hadn’t finished my research. Really…)
On Wednesday night, I wrote a paper that was due Thursday morning. It looks like procrastination, but I’d been doing research, taking notes, and outlining for two weeks. Which made the actual writing go really quickly. And I feel the paper is pretty solid. And as part of the research process I found out why steam technology never took off in the Roman Empire!
On Thursday, my sister came over and I tried on my dress for her wedding and it’s lovely (needs a tiny bit of alteration) and we made banana bread.

5. My husband’s brother is the guitarist for Who’s Bad, the Ultimate Michael Jackson Tribute Band, and they had a hometown show Friday night. We went and my sister came with us. I’d been wanting to take her to one of their shows for a while, so I was happy she came. (Staying out until 2 am after a concert though is really not my thing.)

Yesterday I saw “Extract,” which is a cute movie. In the middle of the film the projector stopped working and it was a long time before management got it fixed and when they did, they’d gone too far forward, past where we left off, so we missed a few scenes. But the whole experience was rather hilarious, so that’s good.
Today I am going to do laundry, and clean clothes smell nice.

Weekend Wonderings

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 12:14:00 -0400

Remember these?

I’ve been doing more of that blog navel-gazing that we all do from time to time. I decided to examine the archives for my first couple of months and see what I came up with. I was looking for purpose and intent as well as content, and I ended up reminding myself that this is a blog about my reading experiences. It is, essentially, a personal blog that sometimes contains reviews and interviews, but has my own reactions to books at its core.

This weekend’s wondering: What is your personal history as a reader?

This was a freewrite that we had in my YA Lit class this past Monday. The professor asked us to write about our reading history for ten minutes, including earliest memories and influences. (I was extraordinarily prepared to write about this, as I’d spent the whole weekend thinking and chatting on Facebook with folks about the defining literature of their own adolescence.)

Here’s mine, completely unedited except to protect names of folks I don’t communicate with anymore or places that might rather not be mentioned.

My earliest memories of reading have very little to do with actual reading and it’s hard to separate my memories from anecdotes my mother told me. My first book was Stop, Go, Word Bird! And I read it when I was three. Around that time I also tried to exit the library through an emergency exit door, which colors all of my memories of the Melbourne public library.

I don’t remember learning to read – I was so small that almost all of my memories from that time have faded. My mother was the biggest influence on my reading – she would read with and to me and once I became an independent reader she would recommend books for me. I remember when I was in second grade or fourth grade (sometime in Tallahassee) and she was reading the Xanth books and I wanted to read them too and she said I was too young (which now I’m all, what?) but then when I was in middle school I was allowed to read them.

In middle school and high school, I read science fiction and fantasy almost exclusively, focusing primarily on the work of Piers Anthony. I can trace my development as a young adult through his books: I started with Xanth (Ogre, Ogre) and then moved on to the Incarnations of Immortality. Then I read the Mode series, which for some reason is inextricably linked in my mind with adolescence. (Probably because I read it in 8th grade which was a hard year and because Colene was 14, much younger than the main characters in Xanth or Incarnations.) I kept up a correspondence with Piers which was exciting and fueled my desire to read his books more. (I remember reading and re-reading my one copy of Hi Piers over and over again. Piers went with me on a lot of field trips, now that I think about it.)

I was in the middle of an Incarnations re-read when I met Will, and he encouraged me to pick up the Apprentice Adept series which I did – I read those during the spring of my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college. I think after that I read the Bio of a Space Tyrant series.

Letters to Jenny (like Alina said) falls in there somewhere, as does Tarot, but I can’t place either of them. Tarot is maybe my junior year of high school (I bought it the summer I met Will but I think I checked it out from the library before that) and Letters to Jenny much earlier.

Libraries played a big role in my reading history but a quiet one. I never asked for help selecting books - I would browse a lot and picked up the vampire books by Caroline B. Cooney and I volunteered at the library which was probably one of the happiest summers of my life. I loved the library and it was a source for much more than books – we checked out the same music and videos over and over again (I’m not sure why the French La Cage was such a favorite, but it was).

I loved school librarians – Mrs. F and Mrs. L especially (although I didn’t really know the librarians at my high school). I felt very at home and grown up at the library. I still have and use that 20 year old library card.

So what about you? In the comments or a post at your own blog, tell us your personal reading history.

Poetry Friday: Rain by Edward Thomas

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:26:00 -0400

Rain has been setting the mood here the past couple of days, creating a pleasant sort of gloom. In honor of that, I present you with:

Rain by Edward Thomas Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me Remembering again that I shall die And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks For washing me cleaner than I have been Since I was born into solitude.

For the rest of the poem, go here.

BBAW: My Shortlist

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:26:00 -0400

Remember how I was going to participate in Book Blogger Appreciation Week? That was before I got all caught up in board meetings, readings, projects, and papers. But I still want to, and I wanted to address Monday’s topic, so here we are.

Monday’s topic was to post your own shortlist of blogs that didn’t get recognized for the BBAW awards. Colleen and Liz both made excellent posts on the topic, so please read those.

My personal shortlist is really short. It consists of two blogs that defy categorization. I picked them because I wanted to introduce to you a couple of people who were my friends before any of us entered the kidlitosphere. So here we go:

Bildungsroman is the blog of Little Willow, a rock star in the kidlitosphere if ever there was one. She is incredibly sweet and one of my best friends, both online and off. I love her booklists most of all. I pretty much know that if she liked something, I’ll like it too. So if you are one of the three people on earth not already familiar with her blog, go check it out.

BriMeetsBooks.com is Bri’s blog, which is appropriate. Bri is another sweetheart of the kidlitosphere. She’s started a new Tuesday meme where she posts totally random Top 5 lists. Her latest one is Top Five Kidlit Characters Who Were Infinitely Cooler Than Me When I Was Younger. (Where she has Dawn Schafer on her list, I’d put Claudia Kishi, who I think still influences my fashion choices and I know definitely is responsible for my tendency to keep secret stashes of candy everywhere. Which is much less intriguing when your parents don’t care if you eat candy.) Bri reads a lot of books and posts a lot of reviews. Go take a look!

These two ladies are friends I made at The Bronze (that’s a Wikipedia link), the Buffy posting board which along with its successor, The Bronze: Beta, has had the greatest effect on my life of any internet thing ever. Buffy has been over for six years, and the official Bronze posting board has been gone for eight, but they are still my friends and I’m so happy to have them here in the kidlitosphere.

Book Blogger Appreciation Week

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:12:00 -0400

Hi there! We’re about to enter into a busy busy week - a board meeting, evening class, a paper due, and meetings with a project group - but it’s also Book Blogger Appreciation Week, for which I have registered. I will be focusing on the activities part of things and not so much on the awards or the giveaways.

Stay tuned!

Library School Update

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:23:00 -0400

Hello there!

I started my school library media coordinator program on August 25th and life has been a whirlwind ever since. I’ll soon have reviews of The Chocolate War, Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones, The Contender, and The Outsiders for you.

I was dropping in mainly to remind you that NaNoWriMo is just a couple of months away and to tell you that I will be participating. One of my classmates was an English teacher and assigned NaNo to her students last year and participated herself as well. She’s planning to get a group together in our program. I don’t know how successful she’ll be, but at least I’ll have one on campus writing buddy!

How are you? What have you been reading? What are you looking forward to reading?

My next assigned text is Wintergirls and I’m very excited.

The School of Information Overload and Library Science

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:48:22 -0400

So I’ll be using this space to chronicle my journey through library school over the next couple of years, because that’s pretty much what my life is going to be. We had orientation today, where I learned some new things and had old learnings reinforced. I’m looking forward to the first day of class tomorrow, though I suspect I’ll have a terrible time getting to sleep tonight because I’ll be so excited.

My course schedule this semester includes:

Human Information Interactions
Information Tools
The School Library Media Center
Young Adult Literature and Related Materials

I'm also working as a Graduate Assistant for LEARN NC.

I plan to talk here about my experiences and the issues we deal with in class. My reactions to the readings for the YA Lit class will be recorded at lectitans, my reading blog. I don’t plan to talk about any issues I might have in my personal relationships at school, so please don’t expect that.

The Swan Kingdom by Zoe Marriott

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 05:55:00 -0400

After Princess Alexandra’s mother is killed, her father marries a woman who charms the kingdom. Alexandra and her brothers, however, believe that this woman is a shape-shifter, the beast who killed their mother in human form. After an ill-fated attempt to prove this goes awry, Alexandra is banished and her brothers disappear. As she lives with her aunt, Alexandra begins to understand the nature of her own magical power.

I can’t say much more without giving away details of the plot that I think readers will enjoy discovering for themselves. It is my policy to give a book fifty pages before I abandon it. This book, while well-written, just wasn’t for me, all the way up to page forty-nine. But on page fifty, everything changed, and I found myself eager to know what happened next. The Swan Kingdom is a fantasy, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Wild Swans. In this story, Zoe Marriott has created a rich world. Alexandra is a strong female protagonist, but she draws her strength from emotion and magic rather than physical power. While she does spend more time than many of us would probably like waiting for her brothers to find her, she does take action and work to change the fate of her nation’s people. The Swan Kingdom’s greatest strengths lie in its world-building and unique magic system.

I would recommend this to anyone interested in adaptations of traditional fairy tales or looking for a female protagonist who has strength but doesn’t fight, who is able to use that strength without giving up her femininity.

Book: The Swan Kingdom Author: Zoe Marriott Publisher: Candlewick Original Publication Date: March 2008 Pages: 272 Age Range: Young Adult Source of Book: ARC requested from publisher Buy it: IndieBound - Powell’s [Affiliate Links]

One Shot World Tour: Southeast Asia

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 04:28:00 -0400

Over at Chasing Ray, Colleen has a round-up of all of today’s Southeast Asia posts. From the original OSWT:SEA announcement:

For those of you not familiar with the One Shot idea, a group of bloggers (and its open to everybody with a blog) all agree to read a book by an author from a certain region or a book set in that region and then blog about it on a specified day. You can also interview an author from there if you prefer. To make it easy for readers to follow the project, everyone emails their exact url to me and I post a master list with links and quotes on the One Shot day. In the end we manage to hopefully discover new authors, new books, and a little bit different perspective then we receive from reading primarily American works.

I don’t have my own post to contribute to the event, but I wanted to direct your attention to it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tylerdurden/ / CC BY 2.0

Non-Fiction Monday: You Don't Look Like a Librarian by Ruth Kneale

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:04:00 -0400

One of my recurring obsessions (that is to say, I get crazy about it for a few weeks and then forget it for a while only to come back to it later) is fashion. I recently decided that I would start a blog to chronicle my attempts to express myself through my appearance. One thing I wanted to address was the librarian stereotype; so I thought I’d explore the place where fashion and librarianship intersect, if it exists. Any time I decide on a new project, research is the first (and often only) phase. So I set out to find information about stereotypes about librarians, and happened upon Ruth Kneale’s You Don’t Look Like a Librarian.

In this book, Kneale chronicles librarians’ own obsession with their image and makes suggestions for how to deal with people who say “But you don’t look like a librarian!” (Why don’t you look like a librarian? My problem is my lack of glasses.) She also provides a vast survey of the resources available for exploring this topic further.

This is a fun little book (and Liz B. of Tea Cozy wrote the forward!) but its companion website is even better than the book itself, because it offers links to all the different resources mentioned in the book.

I recommend this for anybody who wants an overview of stereotypes of librarians and how actual librarians respond to them.

My favorite part, of course, was when the book addressed the topic of Rupert Giles, who is my librarian role model. (I like to imagine if Giles and Jenny Calendar traveled back in time to 1981 and had a kid together, she’d be me.)

Book: You Don’t Look Like a Librarian Author: Ruth Kneale Publisher: Information Today, Inc. Original Publication Date: March 2009 Pages: 216 Source of Book: Borrowed from library Buy it (affiliate links): IndieBound - Powell’s

Photograph by L. Marie

How to Build a House by Dana Reinhardt

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:00:00 -0400

Harper needs to get away from home for a while, to escape her heartbreak over her father's divorce from her stepmother and her confusion about her relationship with Gabriel, who is not her boyfriend but is definitely more than her friend. She signs up for the Homes from the Heart Summer Program for Teens and leaves her native California behind to help build a home for a Tennessee family who lost theirs in a tornado.

Dana Reinhardt does so many things right in this book that it would take a very long time to list them all, so I’ll just hit the highlights. As always, her teen voice is spot-on: Harper sounds like a real teen, not a grown-up’s idea of how a teen sounds. Her characterizations, as always, are excellent, too; the family for whom Harper is building a house, all of the other kids who work with her to build the house, and Harper’s own family are fully realized. This is a remarkable feat, especially considering that the book comes in at only 227 pages. The most unique thing about How to Build a House, however, is its structure.

Reinhardt has named each chapter after one of the steps in building a house, and within each chapter we get glimpses of how Harper’s life was at “Home” and how things are different “Here." Throughout the story, the step in home-building correlates with Harper’s experiences and memories. It could come across as contrived, but it doesn’t. It is, instead, just right.

I would recommend this book to just about anyone. Dana Reinhardt is one of my favorite authors for young adults today, and How to Build a House follows in the tradition of excellence she began with A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life and continued with Harmless.

Book: How to Build a House Author: Dana Reinhardt Publisher: Wendy Lamb Books Original Publication Date: May 2008 Pages: 227 Age Range: Young Adult Source of Book: ARC sent by author Related Posts: My Interview with Dana Reinhardt, My Review of A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life, My Review of Harmless Buy it: IndieBound - Powell’s

Color Me Brown Book Challenge: Theatre Recommendations

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 04:36:00 -0400

Color Online is hosting the Color Me Brown Book Challenge. The goal is to read and review books about people of color throughout the month of August. I will not be participating as given - I have a long list of books to read for my YA Lit class and am working hard not to add any new books to my TBR pile until I have a sense that I’m going to be able to get through all of those - but I will be making it a point to diversify my reading over the next year or so, and then maintain that going ahead.

I heard on the radio this morning that today begins the National Black Theatre Festival which is held in Winston-Salem, NC. If you are a reader of plays, I have some recommendations for you of plays that feature people of color. Some I’ve seen and read, some I’ve only seen or only read. Some I love, and some I don’t. I’ll list the ones that come to mind and add any more I think of later or if any of you add some in the comments. I’ll link the Wikipedia page or another resource for each play; several of them have been made into films you may wish to watch.

Plays I Love
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry - Audio Link - This centers on a family that receives a $10,000 life insurance check and the plans of each member of the family for the check. It also explores racially motivated land convenants when the family buys a house in an entirely white neighborhood and the neighbors attempt to bribe the family to leave.

Having Our Say by Emily Mann - This play, based on a biography of the same title, is about the Delany sisters. Sadie and Bessie both lived past the age of 100, and this play introduces us to them as they are 103 and 101. It takes us through their memories. They’re local girls to me - from Raleigh, NC, less than an hour’s drive from my home and the city where I taught for three years. My sister and I loved this play and the dynamic between the two sisters that, in 1999, we parodied it with a skit called "Getting Our Way." I was 17 and she was 13 at the time. Here’s my favorite exchange from the skit - I can’t remember which of us said what, so I’m just having me speak first.
KIMBERLY: People often ask us how we’ve stayed so young. I tell them it’s because we never married.
MARY ELISABETH: And I tell them it’s because we’re only seventeen and thirteen!
(Hmmm. I guess we’re old now; my sister’s getting married on October 17 and I just did.)
The film version of Having Our Say stars Audra MacDonald, one of my favorite Broadway stars.

The Colored Museum by George C. Wolfe - In this play, the audience witnesses different museum exhibits which satirize both stereotypes and actual elements of African-American culture.

Topdog/Underdog by Suzan Lori-Parks - This play is AMAZING, especially if you see it performed by an excellent cast. Two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, live together and struggle with work, love, and their relationship with each other. Incredibly moving and so well-written. An excellent blend of comedy and drama.

Fires in the Mirror by Anna Deavere-Smith - A series of monologues that chronicles the Crown Heights riots in 1991. (I can’t even begin to explain the riots so I’m just linking info about them.) I stage-managed this play my freshman year of college. It was by far one of the best experiences I had during that time. Anna Deavere-Smith is coming to speak at the North Carolina Literary Festival and I’m very excited.

Other Plays
Fences by August Wilson - A play about Troy Maxson, a garbage man, and his experiences and challenges in life.
Contant Star by Tazewell Thompson - The life story of Ida B. Wells, a journalist and leader of both the civil rights and women’s rights movements.
The America Play by Suzan Lori-Parks - A play about an Abraham Lincoln impersonator who decides to dig a replica of the Great Hole of History.

Further Notes
Most of the playwrights cited here have written more than one play, so I recommend checking out the full catalog for each of them. I didn’t want to list plays with which I wasn’t familiar, which is why I’ve only listed these eight. Taken against the vast number of plays with which I’m familiar, this small number exposes my own ignorance of theatre about people of color. Another thing for me to improve upon.

Books for Boys, Books About Girls

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 10:10:00 -0400

In this column at School Library Journal, school librarian Diantha McBride says:

I’m afraid this won’t be popular, but I need more books for boys—as do most librarians who work with young people. I’ve noticed that lots of books with female characters aren’t really about being female. In fact, in many cases, the main characters could just as easily have been males—and that would make my job a lot easier.

The part of McBride’s statement rankles me most is this:

I’ve noticed that lots of books with female characters aren’t really about being female.

I feel that her conclusion that since the books aren’t about being female, they should have boy main characters, suggests that books with female main characters should be about uniquely female experiences. Certainly there are many experiences unique to females, and those need addressing. But can you imagine if every book with a female main character was about that? I would get so bored so quickly. I would probably refuse to read books with female main characters then, too.

Books about members of marginalized groups should not have to be about experiences unique to only those groups. I’m reading David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy right now, and I love how even though Paul is gay and the book is about his romantic relationship with another young man, the exploration of that relationship is by no means limited to aspects that are unique only to individuals in same-sex/gender relationships. It is an exploration of universal experiences that could happen to anyone at the beginning of a new relationship, regardless of any specific characteristics of the people in that relationship.

Does that mean I think that no books should be about experiences unique to a marginalized group? Of course not. It’s important to acknowledge experiences and challenges unique to members of certain groups; to ignore those would be to act as if we live in a world where everyone is always treated equally and lives the same life. But to insist that being a member of a group means you must be defined only by membership in that group is absurd.

Photo by Foxtongue.

7-Imp's 7 Kicks #126

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 07:52:00 -0400

From Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast:

As a reminder, 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks is our weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week, whether book-related or not, that happened to you.

Here are mine:

1. I had a lovely wedding, on the beach, with beautiful weather and good company and delicious food and it was beautiful.

2. That was followed by a lovely (and cheap!) honeymoon. We stayed at my husband’s (oh that’s weird to say) family’s beach condo, and his moms (he has two, the one that gave birth to him and the one his dad married later) had left us a beautiful gift basket, a refrigerator full of fancy food, and some wine and sparkling cider.

3. The return trip home was easy.

4. Sad is that my mom hurt her back a few weeks ago, but the good that came of it was that it meant she, my brother, and my dad spent some extra time here in town waiting for her to be ready to travel (and giving her a chance to see her old chiropractor a few times).

5. A friend dropped by Thursday to pick up a script and then when I spontaneously invited him to come to lunch with my family and myself, he said yes. He hadn’t seen my family since before they moved away, so it was nice for them to get together with him.

6. My sister, who was away on an internship for six months, is back in town and we’ve been spending boatloads of time together and bonded over a shared love for Project Runway.

7. The show I’m rehearsing is a very brief ensemble piece. We get through the work we’ve set aside for rehearsal pretty quickly, and then we spend time after that just sitting around bonding, which I think is important for building chemistry.

Bonus Kick: Little Willow put up my Art Saves contribution!

Poetry Friday: Richard III

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:20:00 -0400

I’m currently working on a production called I Hate Shakespeare. It runs through quite a few of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, and then some of the lesser known ones as well, poking fun at them (and at people who claim to hate Shakespeare, actually).

My favorite part of the show is the "Zombie Theatre Presents…" segments, when zombies interrupt famous soliloquies.

The first of these is from Richard III, and I present it to you here, with some zombie stuff added at the end so you can get a feel for it.

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York;

And all the clouds that lowered upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,

Our bruisèd arms hung up for monuments,

Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,

Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

BRAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIINS!

Photo by JayT47.

Two Mini Reviews: Lessons from a Dead Girl and Goy Crazy

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:13:00 -0400

Today I have reviews of two books for you.

Lessons from a Dead Girl by Jo Knowles

When Laine's mother tells her that Leah Greene is dead, she can't help but feel that it's a little bit her fault. After all, she did wish for it. Each time Laine's mother says Leah's name, Leah is pulled back to a memory of an earlier time with Leah, of "Lessons" Leah gave her in what friendship is about. This first novel by freelance non-fiction writer Jo Knowles tells a tale about childhood loneliness and the abuse one child can perpetuate on another. I read it in two sittings, and I would've read it in one but I started it late at night and was just too sleepy to pay attention - and I didn't want to miss anything.

What I appreciate most about Lessons from a Dead Girl is that it gives us real people in all of the characters. Leah Greene is a popular girl, and it would be easy for an author to let her be one-dimensional. Jo Knowles gives us another perspective, demonstrating what I think can be one of life's greatest lessons, especially for adolescents: that everyone has problems, and no one acts entirely without reason.

With Lessons, Jo Knowles makes a strong debut. I look forward to her next book, Jumping Off Swings, to be released on August 11 of this year.

Book: Lessons from a Dead Girl
Author: Jo Knowles
Publisher: Candlewick
Original Publication Date: October 9, 2007
Pages: 224
Age Range: Young Adult
Source of Book: Publisher
Related Links: My Interview with Jo Knowles
Buy it [Affiliate Links]: IndieBound - Powell's

Goy Crazy by Melissa Schorr

It's lust at first sight when Rachel Lowenstein meets Luke Christiansen, a waiter at her brother's bar mitzvah. Luke is tall, blond, and decidedly not Jewish. She desperately wants to date him, but she knows her parents won't approve. Can she turn her back on her faith and her culture for a cute boy?

Goy Crazy is a charming romantic comedy that addresses coming of age issues common to all teens. Rachel feels constantly in conflict with her parents. She's been a good girl her whole life and she's sick of it. So she decides that her sophomore year of high school, she will be a bit naughty, and she'll start by pursuing a boy from the wrong religion.

I would recommend Goy Crazy to anyone looking for a fun read that is not so light as to be mindless, but is very clever and uplifting. It does rom-com right: there's the wrong boy who seems so right, the boy her parents prefer who is not at all what she wants, and the realization Rachel makes that the people she knows aren't necessarily the people they seem to be. It's a good time, and summer would be a great time to pick it up and take it to the beach with you, but it'll hold up any time of year.

Book: Goy Crazy
Author: Melissa Schorr
Publisher: Hyperion Books for Children
Original Publication Date: August 22, 2006
Pages: 352
Age Range: Young Adult
Source of Book: Author
Buy it [Affiliate Links]: IndieBound - Powell's

Poetry Friday: e e cummings

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 05:37:00 -0400

I’m getting married on Wednesday. (Yes, that soon, and on a weekday. It turns out when your in-laws are professional musicians, weekdays work better for them.)

So I thought I’d share with you the poem that my father will be reading during the ceremony.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly
beyond any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

And the poem from which we have quotes inscribed in our wedding bands:

love’s the i guess most only verb that lives
(her tense beginning,and her mood unend)
from brightly which arise all adjectives
and all into whom darkly nouns descend

Happy Friday! I’ll be spending mine on wedding tasks, seeing Harry Potter, and having dinner with my friends in honor of my recently-past birthday.

Photo by Frenkieb.

Where do the Kidlit conversations happen?

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:11:00 -0400

For my purposes, the term "kidlit" includes young adult literature as well.

For many reasons, I’m looking to become more active in the kidlit community. I know who the major blog players are. I’m a member of the Kidlitosphere listserv. I’m also a member of Child_Lit. I’m just wondering if there’s anywhere I’m missing where really great conversations are going on.

Suggestions, anyone?

Photo by Vimages.

Posts Other People Wrote: My Gift to You

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 03:02:00 -0400

Today is my birthday (yay!) and I’m going to give you the gift of some posts from other bloggers that I think you might find especially interesting. Are you ready? Here goes!

How to Get Over Writer’s Block Sonja asked her Twitter followers for advice and they gave her many and various answers, which she then compiled in this post for your reading pleasure.

Literature on the Web cloudscome shares a list of resources she developed for her collection development class in library school. So many resources!

Important News for Bloggers MotherReader provides links to three different articles about how the FTC is planning to begin regulating blogs. This especially affects those of us who receive review copies or use affiliate links in our blogs.

Naming Names Melissa Wyatt shares how she arrived at the names for several of her characters. Fun insight into an author’s thought processes.

Enjoy!

Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt.

5 Blog Posts to Help You with Book Clutter

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 15:31:00 -0400

We in the Kidlitosphere are probably queens and kings of book clutter. I think I must have fifteen boxes of books in my attic, and the few shelves I have available are always overcrowded. It runs in the family; I recently visited my parents’ new home in Ohio and found piles of books everywhere, waiting for new shelves to arrive.

Most of us would probably find we have a tendency to acquire books which then sit around for years and years, never having been read or read once and then never touched again. I’ve recently decided to release my book clutter, and I thought I’d share with you the blog posts that have helped me through the process.

Bringing your bookshelves back to order discusses how to decide which books to keep.
20 Ways to Get Free or Cheap Books, and Give Away Your Old Ones is an excellent list post, and helped me with my dilemma of what to do with ARCs. (I list them on BookMooch and just put in the notes that they are uncorrected proofs. Voila! The books aren't destroyed, but they're not sold/donated in the place of actual finished copies.)
Read a book and pass it on contains a list of six questions to ask yourself upon finishing a book to help you determine if it's worth holding on to.
Get rid of that library of clutter lists a few non-profit organizations that would be happy to have your donations.
How to use Powell's Books for uncluttering describes one blog reader's experience selling her book clutter to Powell's.

Happy decluttering!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/faeryan/ / CC BY 2.0

Reading List!

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:06:00 -0400

I just received an email from my advisor/YA Lit professor with a list for what we’ll be reading this semester. It’s at least a few books a week (so I’ll be achieving Jo Knowles’s recommended amount!).

Here’s the list with my notations:

Levithan, David. Boy Meets Boy.
Cormier, Robert. The Chocolate War. - Own it, haven’t read it. (Bought it at a library sale.)
Head, Ann. Mr. And Mrs. Bo Jo Jones.
Lipsyte, Robert. The Contender.
Hinton, S.E. The Outsiders. - Read it in middle or high school.
Anderson, Laurie Halse. Winter Girls.
Frank, E.R. America.
Johnson, Angela. First Part Last.
Dessen, Sarah. This Lullaby. - Sarah Dessen lives in Chapel Hill and I think both of her parents are professors at the university. (I think her mom, in fact, is a Classics professor who spoke to my students once when I taught in Chapel Hill.) It’d be cool if, you know, she came to our class. She probably won’t, though.
Gaiman, Neil and Terry Prachett. Good Omens. - Read it a few years ago, and I’m pretty sure Will owns it.
Lynch, Chris. Slot Machine.
Zusak, Marcus. The Book Thief
Blundell, Judy. What I Saw and How I Lied
Nixon, Joan Lowery. Name of the Game is Murder.
Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight. - Read it a year and a half ago and gave my copy away. I wish I’d thought to keep it, but I know it won’t be hard to find again. (I just hope I can get it used instead of new.)
Jones, Diana Wynne. The Pinhoe Egg.
Westerfeld, Scott. The Uglies. - Read it a little more than 2 years ago, still have it. It’ll be good to re-read as I never finished the series.
Myers, Walter Dean. Here in Harlem.
Freedman, Russell. Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Helfer, Andrew. Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography.
Pardes, Bronwen. Doing it Right: Making Smart, Safe, and Satisfying Choices about Sex.
Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian.
De la Pena, Matt. Mexican WhiteBoy.
Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese.
Hale, Shannon, Dean Hale and Nathan Hale. Rapunzel’s Revenge.

We also need to keep a journal about these, informal, to refer to during class discussions. I think my reviewing process here has prepared me really well for that. Yay!

If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my feed so you will get my other posts about library school.

Photo by Sister72.

7-Imp's 7 Kicks #120

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 06:40:00 -0400

From Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast:

“Welcome to our weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week, whether book-related or not, that happened to you.”

Here are my kicks, which will cover a couple of weeks:

I had last Sunday to recover from what had been a very social weekend, with outings Friday night, Saturday afternoon, and Saturday night.
At the Saturday night event (a party/meeting), I was elected an at large member of the board of the Durham Savoyards, one of only two theatre groups with which I’m currently active.
I went to Target on Monday and discovered that Frito-Lay offers a “Smart Pack” giant bag which contains 20 small bags of baked snacks. It’s hard to find snacks that are both easy and safe for my sensitive tummy, so this was a big happy.
On Tuesday I flew to Cincinnati where I got to spend the evening with my family, including my dad, who left for Boulder on Wednesday.
On Wednesday I spent the day with my mom and brother, and had another food-related glee when I discovered oatmeal in tiny packets sweetened only with evaporated cane juice and maple sugar. (Unfortunately it was meijer store brand, and we have no meijer here at home.)
On Thursday my mom fitted me for my wedding dress, which she is making. My top and my bottom and my front and my back are all different sizes, so if clothes are going to be stunning on me they have to be so fitted as to approach being haute couture. The pattern I’d bought for the dress required a few alterations, which my mom expertly made in some muslin to make a second, properly fitted pattern to use before she started cutting the satin she’ll use to make the dress.
On Friday, my sister called and asked me to dinner because she didn’t want to go home to her empty house yet.
Here’s to a new week full of shiny new kicks for all!

Get Books @ Your Library

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:24:00 -0400

The Collaborative Summer Library Program is at it again, with different programs for children (pre-K through Grade 5), young adults (Grades 6 - 12), and adults (everybody else). I registered through my library, which seems to be applying the young adult program theme to their adult program. I’m good with that. I made it my goal to finish 7 books between June 20 and August 10. Eminently doable, considering I’m about to fly to Cincinnati to see my parents and brother (and have my mom fit me for my wedding dress). Flying time = Reading time, as does Sitting Waiting to Board time and Standing Outside Waiting to Be Picked Up time.

But not Walking Through the Airport time, mainly because I am not as familiar with airports as I am with other places (my neighborhood, the schools where I’ve taught).

Have you signed up with your library’s summer reading program? Or has anyone you take care of (children, siblings, pets)? What’s your goal?

Last year I wrote a fairly comprehensive Summer Reading Round-up. Many of those links and resources are still useful.

Photo by emdot.

#48hbc Summary

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 02:12:00 -0400

I didn’t keep track of any blogging or networking time, because I did so little of it. Next year.

Total Time Spent Reading: 9 hrs 14 min Total Pages: 1120

Books Completed: Death’s Daughter, French Kiss, Stop Pretending, The Queen of Cool, Accidental Love.

#48HBC Update: 9 hours, 14 minutes

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 14:46:00 -0400

Book: Accidental Love by Gary Soto
Time Spent Reading It: 1 hr 31 min

Another cute, fun read. (Aside from Stop Pretending, which had me sniffling a good bit, that’s what I was really going for this weekend.) Marisa, a girl with a penchant for fighting, accidentally switches cell phones with Rene, a nerdy boy from another school. When they meet to switch back, she realizes she kinda likes him. This was a very sweet book. I kind of like this type of romance better than French Kiss - sweet, youngish, with all of the problems externally generated. (I’d much rather have parental disapproval be an obstacle in a romance than the fact that both of the love interests are incredibly moody, for example.)

Total Time Spent Reading: 9 hrs 14 min

Even though I technically have another hour and a half in my 48 hours, that’s probably going to do it for me. I’ll be back with an official summary later this evening.

#48hbc Taking Off the Pressure

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 12:37:00 -0400

So I’ve read 4 books in the past couple of days, which is more than I’ve read in the past several weeks. I’m at the point now where I’m not loving the book I picked up. Granted, I got sleepy part of the way in and took a nap. But I’m actually motivated to clean my office/craft room, so I’m going to take advantage of that motivation when I have it.

I was all, “But that’s not reading!”

But you know, this is a FUN thing, so if I need to do something else to keep it fun and not work, so be it.

There’s less than 4 hours left in my time, so I don’t think I’m going to make it to the 12 hour mark, but that’s okay. I still did a lot more reading than is typical of me on a weekend. (Though I hope the amount that is “typical reading” for me changes once it’s properly summer.)

#48HBC Update: 7 hours, 43 minutes

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 10:10:00 -0400

Book: The Queen of Cool by Cecil Castellucci Time Spent Reading It: 1 hr 15 min

I really enjoyed this book. It surprised me in many ways. I’d never read anything by Cecil Castellucci before, but I know a bit about her (I almost interviewed her once, then decided I couldn’t take the time to do the interview justice) and expected her main characters to be kind of hipstery thrift shoppers with cool glasses and entertainingly affected speech patterns. You know, the kind of people I like to have as friends. Instead, I found out that the Queen of Cool was ACTUALLY, you know, cool, like, popular-kid cool. At first I was disappointed, but as I read on, it was really refreshing. There are tons of teen books about not fitting in, not being part of the popular crowd, being a nerd and a loser (and let’s face it, the book-reading population probably skews heavily towards the less “glamorous” kids - I know I was horribly unglamorous as a middle and high schooler except for the few times I tried really hard, when I was fabulous) but you don’t get many books from the popular girl’s perspective. It’s always nice to be reminded that, oh yeah, popular kids are people too. And then, it’s also nice to read about all the stuff “cool” kids do that you didn’t and not feel like you were actually missing anything at all by being unpopular, because you gave your friends silly awards and did absurd fashion shows from your childhood dress-up box with the boys who were your friends and invented silly games and generally made your own fun. A good, fast, fun read. I recommend it.

Total Time Spent Reading: 7 hrs 43 min

I haven’t been keeping up with my blogging/networking, but I think all told it comes to less than an hour. Maybe closer to half an hour, even.

Next up: Accidental Love by Gary Soto

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