Introducing The Quiet Space: A set of offerings for scholars and knowledge creators

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.

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

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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:

  1. Do a little bit every day.
  2. Use your leisure time wisely.
  3. Use your waiting time efficiently.
  4. Put it away, not down.
  5. Make your bed.
  6. Keep your flat surfaces clear.
  7. Unf*ck tomorrow morning.
  8. Trash goes in the trash can.
  9. Do the dishes every day.
  10. Wash, dry, and put it away, gddmit.
  11. Deal with your invisible corners.

Welcome to Camp NaNoWriMo with me!

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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

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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.

  1. 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.

  2. “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.

  3. “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.)

  4. 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

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?

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

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

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!

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

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

Quick Review: The City We Became 📚

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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

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

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

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 👩‍‍💼

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

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

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.

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 📚

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.

  1. Get paid for your work.
  2. Live in a place you love with people you love.
  3. 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.
  4. Stop applying to academic jobs.
  5. 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

People, organizations, and resources to look up

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

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 💻

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 ♿ 📺

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!

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

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.