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?

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

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.

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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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.)

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.