My Home Away from My Department

Today I attended a lunchtime workshop in the Women's Studies department on the topic of "Creativity in Academic Writing." I have a certificate in Women's Studies and so am a sort of satellite member of that department, but since I completed all of my WS course requirements almost two years ago, it's been a while since I've been a regular in those parts. After the workshop today I remembered all of the reasons why I love that department and would rather hang out with that crowd than with my own English department any day.

The topic of the discussion today is one that has been coming up regularly for me since I started grad school, but especially since I began teaching and writing my dissertation, and even more so when I decided to start writing this blog. Unlike some of my fellow grad students, I am not a poet, short story, or novel writer. I have never considered myself to be a 'creative writer,' and have never taken any courses in 'creative writing.' When I was in high school I wrote for the school paper, and besides the odd news article, wrote a regular column that ran on the op-ed page. Even though it definitely wasn't scholarly or academic in nature, and was markedly more informal than anything I would have written 'for school,' my column was still a public expression of personal opinion and personal perspective.

Apart from academic or scholarly writing, most of my writing since I started college is in the form of correspondence (these days, mostly electronic) and this blog. The blog is by far the most informal form of public writing in which I have participated since high school. Somewhere in those intervening--what? nine?--years it somehow became problematic for me to have those informal and public expressions of personal opinions and perspectives attached to my name. You have all been witness to the problems associated with the attachment I used to think nothing of sending into the mailbox of nearly every person I knew (and their parents! and my teachers!). Even though my opinions are hardly contentious, and my topics never stray into the realm of the salacious (hi, Mom!), libelous, or obscene, I have now been conditioned to purge my public life from any taint of the personal or--even worse--unprofessional. The Director of Graduate Studies can't know I have a blog...because then he'd know that I spend my time not reading...and not writing an article/book/grant proposal...or not thinking serious thoughts! And as we all know, serious academics--real academics--can't even watch an episode of The Simpsons without finding a handy pop cultural reference to the postcolonial condition of the silenced subalternate subject to work into her next lecture/article/book (but really--why else would you turn on your television except to collect handy pop cultural references with which to sprinkle your otherwise serious academic work?).

Unlike my fellow graduate students who are creative writers, and who struggle to find ways and time to continue working on their poetry and fiction as they also work in academia, my struggle with the relationship between creative and academic writing has more to do with the stifling of the emotional, personal, or subjective impulse in academic work. This is a large part of what was discussed in the workshop today. Why is feeling deeply for something and thinking deeply about something a mutually exclusive practice? Why do we divorce our feeling for the things we study from our study of them? Why do we spend our lives learning and studying the most intimate details of fictional and nonfictional human lives but insist on excising our lives and lived experience from our reckoning of all of that humanity? Why do I spend nine weeks teaching Ulysses--a novel so up-close and personal that we stay with the main character as he shits, farts, fucks and jerks off in the course of his day--but tell my students to get rid of the personal pronouns in their papers about that same novel?

The ivory tower is rarely the haven of the great risk-taker. The liberalism and radicalism to be found here often has more to do with theory than practice (sometimes literally). The reason I so love to be in the Women's Studies department is not just its fundamental interdisciplinarity (let the students of women's pre-natal cardiac health sit down with the students of nineteenth century women's painting and share what they know!), but the committment to vulnerability and openness that lies at the heart of many of the feminist and gender theories that founded Women's Studies as an academic discipline. If you are a woman, your lived experience as such is important and should be brought to the table of discussion and dialogue and study as much as anything else. Your fear and shame and discomfort, your pride and anger and pain, your pleasures and desires and creativity are meaningful aspects of your existence. But as members of a much larger academic community made up in many cases of much more established disciplines, Women's Studies departments still find themselves trying to validate their work in those same often stultifying and depersonalized terms. Those who risk stepping outside of the box of the impersonal, the objective, and the jargon-filled proof of esoteric mastery more often than not find themselves unpublished, untenured, or jobless. Not a pleasing prospect for the Ph.D. candidate planning her first go at the academic job market next fall...

These issues certainly weren't resolved in the course of an hour and a half long workshop, but raising them and airing them--and hearing them voiced by respected scholars who already have publications and jobs and tenure--was a positive step and a reassuring sign. I am not so progressive as to think that we should completely abandon the more formal and tried-and-true forms of literary study--you have to master the fundamentals before you can play in big-leagues, after all (i.e., practice your free-throws and your subject-verb agreement!)--but I do think we can stand to make some room for the people behind the professors we are all mostly just pretending to be.