Jana Remy
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Jana Remy

  • Writing
    • Disability
    • Making History
    • Digital Humanities
      • dayofDH
    • Canoeing
    • Creative Nonfiction & Essays
    • Feminism
    • Bibliographies
      • Pacific Worlds Bibliography
    • Social Media
      • Mentions/Links
  • Scholarship
    • Awards/Fellowships
    • Conferences & Invited Talks
    • Collaboration
    • Workshops
    • Conference Planning
    • Technical Skills
  • Teaching
    • Blogposts About Teaching
Daily Archives

July 29, 2011

storytelling…
things I likeworldwriting

storytelling…

I’ve begun various narratives about my trip to Europe and either deleted them or kept them in the drafts file.  I’m finding it hard to write the whole story of that experience and what it meant to me.  Having been burned a bit by storytelling–especially the impulse to create a tidy, pretty narrative out of something that’s complex or messy…it just isn’t working for me right now.  While my trip wasn’t necessarily messy, it was complicated–I traveled with the intention of letting myself experience many things.  I pushed my comfort zones.  I traveled by saying YES and not letting fear stand in my way.  I traveled to make new memories to replace some painful ones.  And the trip was all of those things, as well as a wonderful way to mark my 40 years of life (happy birthday to me!).  It was utterly unforgettable, and deserves all of the flowery adjectives and adverbs that I’d like to attach to my descriptions of it.  But it was also a bit indigestible and my attempts to create a cohesive story of it have failed, or they just don’t say what I want them to–they don’t even come close to being as intense or as real as what I experienced as I traveled.

So I think I may have reached the limits of my storytelling capacity with this segment of my journey.  Or perhaps…I’m learning that some things are simply better left unsaid?

IMG_5034

July 29, 2011
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just like the Marquis de Sade
school

just like the Marquis de Sade

Last week’s NYT essay by Tony Perrottet, “Why Writers Belong Behind Bars,” suggests that the best thing that ever happened to the Marquis de Sade’s writing career was his incarceration, because “it was only behind bars that Sade was able to knuckle-down and compose the imaginative works upon which his enduring, if peculiar, reputation lies.” Perrottet offers other examples of writers whose work blossomed from behind bars, too, and suggests that contemporary writers could also benefit from a bit of self-enforced isolation:

‘A prison is indeed one of the best workshops.’ Colette declared. She wasn’t speaking metaphorically. In the early 1900s, by her own account, her caddish fist husband had stashed her in a tiny room for four hours a day, refusing to let her out until she had finished a requisite number of pages–a dramatic measure, but one that resulted in a novel a year for six years. ‘What I chiefly learned was how to enjoy, between four walls, almost every secret flight,’ she later recalled, sounding almost sentimental.

I’ve found that the focused bursts of “sprint” writing help me to maintain my focus on the task at hand–in 20 minutes there’s no time for a wikipedia diversion. But since taking on more responsibility as a single parent, and having some of my job responsibilities increase, it’s been harder to carve out the time for writing, even in short bursts.  I’ve found that when I travel, it’s a bit easier–such as writing from the parlor of a Cape Cod inn last year, or from the sanctuary of an old church this past spring.  But I can’t travel all the time, and sometimes that doesn’t work as well as I’d like–there are still all kinds of distractions and it takes time to settle into a quiet place (and to find an outlet for one’s laptop.  As a side note, I do think that if Woolf was writing about 21st-century scholars her requirements would not only include “A Room of One’s Own,” but also a steady power supply and a wireless connection…).

Thus, so far, I haven’t found the perfect recipe for a writing space.  But it seems that the search for one is part of the process–every day I keep trying to find that perfect blend of productivity and genius, and in that process I continue to make slow (and steady) progress on my writing projects.  On some level I would love it if someone ‘locked’ me away in a tower for awhile every day to  force me to meet my writing goals…but of course that would chafe in other ways that would be counter-productive.  Learning to discipline myself seems a more important, if elusive, goal.

Image above is of me (in my ivory tower office), holding the edits to a dissertation chapter.

July 29, 2011
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things I like

Twitter Weekly Digest for @janaremy, 2011-07-29

  • RT @patrick_mj @McAndrew: A dose of reality: Obama’s & Bush’s contributions to the #deficit side-by-side in one graph http://is.gd/DQKm7d #
  • MT @jwassers if an academic teaches 2 classes 3xs a wk, s/he only works 6 hrs a week. Just like it only took 2hrs to make Harry Potter 7.5. #
  • Font humor (for the geeks among us): "I am a sans serif Superman" http://bit.ly/pxhH2W #comicsans #
  • I'm a member of the fastest-growing religion (are you?): http://bit.ly/pHFbVP #appleist #iAm #
  • MT @joguldi: NYT declares, A Spatial Turn is transfiguring the Humanities http://nyti.ms/qok3Rr #
  • MT @AHAhistorians: Three articles on smell and history. http://t.co/ITLacBE #
  • RT @CatinStack: 60 Awesome Portraits Of Gay Couples Just Married In New York State http://t.co/nWGpDcY //got a bit teary-eyed at these… #
  • Kitchen table & chairs have a new home, as does my wedding china. Boxes piled everywhere! #thisisgettingexciting #Janastartsover #
  • Sunday morning happiness: NY Times, coffee w/ milk, a purry Ellycat, & sprawling out on on my living room rug in the sunshine. #
  • Just received happy (humbling) news about a friend's complete remission from metastatic cancer. Just one more reason to celebrate today! #
  • Live bar music with bagpipes is so full of win… :) #Pasadena #
  • Great meeting w/@adamarenson & more, to plan the next year of Past Tense seminars @TheHuntington #lifeofahistorian #
  • The scent of the rose garden @TheHuntington is so strong, it's hard to focus on picture-taking :) #
July 29, 2011
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About Me

About Me

Hi there friend, and welcome to my blog. I started writing on the internet two decades ago. Since then I've started and finished a PhD program, left the Mormon church and became a Quaker, got divorced, remarried, found full-time work in academia, took up rock climbing and outrigger canoeing, and traveled across the globe (China! Belgium! Italy! Chicago! Montana! Portland! Gettysburg! and oh-so-many points in-between). This blog is eclectic and random--it has poetry and cooking and books. And cats. And flowers. And the ocean (my ocean). But in that sense it's a good reflection of me and my wide-ranging, far-reaching, magpie curiosity.

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