I've been thinking a lot about the process by which I write (or not). There are accepted grand narratives about the writing lives of scholars, and there are those of us for whom the myths are not myths. I'm speaking here of the "we" that writes in the morning, every morning, for one to two hours. I'm referencing C. Wright Mills, and I'm referencing those of us who have been phenomenally prolific and important to younger scholar's thinking and writing. What are our writing stories? Where are these stories? I'm surprised by our reticence to describe and discuss our writing lives. It seems that openly revealing the difficulties of maintaining such a life while having families, friendships, and while working for change within classrooms and communities could be an essential part of crafting ways of having a writing life that do not lead to divorce, drinking, depression, or some combination of all of the above. I'm often surprised at how little we discuss the cultivation of a writing life with our graduate students.
I was raised by an incredible group of scholars--highly successful men and women by any standard. The lessons I learned from them run the gamut from "read periodicals like Atlantic Monthly and HER everyday," to sitting around a full professor's kitchen table, while she speaks aloud words that we transform into text, which we then cut with scissors and tape onto a legal pad, and transform again into text until what emerges is the semblance of an article. Most, if not all of the women came up in a time when they were the only woman in their departments, where they were expected to be better than the best, where they were expected to disappear and come back with manuscripts in press, or give birth and an hour later, work on article revisions. Where tenure was a matter of being alone with "themselves, God, a pad of paper and a pencil." I think it is important to ask ourselves how we have been taught to think about writing, not just for our own healing, but for the creation of revised or new models of a writing life that bring us more whole, into the scholarly discourses we care about.
I have many peers who were raised under the model of working as a second or third author under senior scholars. I have several peers who, as assistant and associate professors, have continued to work with their dissertation chairs and have published articles together over the years. Other peers have published with the help of fellowships, parents, grandparents, nannies, spouses, pets, and editors.
So how do we talk about our writing lives? Do we talk about them? And of course, who among us has written about the emergence and cultivation of our writing life? As our Griots pass on, or simply migrate into leadership and administrative positions, it seems important that we take seriously the task of storying our writing lives, especially as these lives are increasingly situated within different kinds of personal, academic and political margins.
I place a high value on books like Bateson's "Composing a Life," and Schultz and Lareau's "Journeys Through Ethnography: Realistic Accounts of Fieldwork"--in a much different and often richer way than Henson's "Writing for Publication: Road to Academic Advancement" though clearly these books all figure in some way into our understandings of what it means to have a writing life as an academic. I'd welcome, though, other's discoveries of people writing about their own writing lives, even as I try to make sense of my own.
