#AcWri2019

Last year I wrote a handful of posts reflecting on my relationship with academic writing, using Scholarshape’s reflective #AcWri project. My writing was inconsistent this time last year, cycling through several rough weeks of writing followed by one good one, but I still maintained something that resembled a regular writing practice.

This semester, much to my great frustration, I had to give up my regular practice before the end of September.

Writing during the semester is always a challenge, and not being in a stable position only compounds the difficulty. In addition to the usual preparation and grading, both magnified by the financial pressure to take on a heavy teaching load, there is the anxiety of the job market, both for permanent jobs and for classes for the next semester.

Going into this semester I had resolved not to submit any abstracts this year. I quite like giving papers despite chronic struggles with anxiety, but preparing them takes time and time has been in short supply, so I had hoped to grant myself forgiveness in advance. FOMO (fear of missing out) is real, though, and I’ve sent myself into a neurotic spiral on at least two occasions, once while seeing updates from a conference and again from a reminder that a deadline for proposals is coming up next week for a conference I am almost certainly going to attend in the spring. But my situation this year is in flux: I lack institutional support for conference travel and there is a very real possibility that this will be my last year in academia, so for the time being I am resigned to collecting ideas and reminding myself that it is okay to rest.

For similar reasons, my writing has largely been stuck on the same topics for some time. My primary focus is still my book manuscript on Classical Ionia, which I described last year, but I have become increasingly interested in memory in ancient Greece and begun to dip my toe into a future project on bread and bread baking. The problem of course is that research and writing take mental energy that I have not had while also teaching five classes and applying for jobs.

On the other hand, I am almost done with job applications, I can taste the end of the semester, and I am practically aching to get back to my writing projects. Regardless of whether I continue to teach at a college level after this year, I have ambitions of continuing to write and want to at least finish the projects I have begun. I am not there yet and there will invariably be new difficulties––among them, interview season, figuring what happens next, holiday travel, and recurrences of depression and anxiety––I am close enough that I am looking forward to reestablishing a writing routine.