I’m going to be honest. I struggled to write my post this month. It might have been the long to-do list leading into Spring Break (next week!), or the other writing projects that have taken most of my attention. Actually, if I’m being really honest, I wrote an entire post and decided it was the wrong topic at the wrong time. So, maybe inspiration hit, but it missed.

In the Q&A of the keynote address at a conference I attended this weekend, a student asked Brontez Purnell how he responds to writer’s block. First, he answered that he doesn’t really have that problem but the opposite, “writer’s vomit.” (Purnell was the recipient of the 2018 Whiting Award, so we’re not all that surprised that he’s amazing and doesn’t struggle with writer’s block.) But then he shared that leaving your writing project for an hour and writing about what is directly in front of you, like that 5×5 square of wall before your eyes, can help to release the tension while still exercising the writing muscle. So, I am going to take his advice. Sort of. I’m breaking from my traditional, more-focused post to share some general updates and things that are on my mind. Continue reading “When inspiration doesn’t hit, write.” →

Thanksgiving is upon us. Hopefully, for all of us, this will be a week of good cheer, warm reunions, and full stomachs. Besides spending a little time with my digital project and syllabus for the Spring semester, I plan on carving out a few days of relaxation with my partner to cook, bake, and do NOTHING (have you heard of that?).

Last weekend, however, I stepped out of my comfort zone. I attended an academic conference. Even though I’m in academia, attending and presenting at conferences is not my favorite thing. They require public speaking, constant performance, inconceivable amounts of intellectual attention, and self-interested networking. 

Some senior scholars claim that it’s not worth it to go to conferences at all; they take up precious time during the semester, the feedback isn’t always valuable, and then there’s the fear of intellectual plagiarism, or conversely, wasting your time listening to too many half-baked ideas (a full professor in my graduate department once said that the only way to attend a conference is to go to your own panel and ditch the rest … and others have confessed to the same habit). And yet, while few scholars actually enjoy conferences, most (especially early-career scholars) must “endure” them to expand their professional network. Some have written on ways to attend conferences “strategically” and not exhaust yourself. But let’s face it: For many of us, it’s still just-a-little-too taxing to try and strike up conversations with 5 to 10 random people in a day, especially when we’re thinking in the economical, self-interested terms of: “what might this person do for me, now or in the future?”

Most of the time, we do not talk about how uncomfortable and fatiguing this part of academia can be. So, to “fill that gap,” here’s a review of my most recent experience at the 2018 PAMLA conference that I attended last weekend in Bellingham, WA. I applied specifically to this conference because there was a call for papers from an organization to which I belong, Women in French, asking for submissions related to “the theme of food in literature.” To my excitement, there ended up being three panels at the conference on the topic, which meant lots of food for thought (haha) and suggestions for further reading. On the second day of the conference, at 8AM (!), I read my paper, “Consumption of the Flesh in Marie NDiaye’s La Cheffe: roman d’une cuisinère,” in which I thought about how Jacques Derrida’s maxim on ethical consumption, “Il faut bien manger” (“one must eat well” OR “one must eat, of course”), structured the female protagonist’s culinary practices. Fortunately, I got a couple questions in the Q&A that helped me to think about how to move forward and flip the piece into an article. Continue reading “Relationality: Intermingling at Academic Conferences” →