The Peeps thing, of course, distracted me. Then, making up for lost work due to the Peeps thing occupied me. Now, on a Sunday afternoon, when I can't face creating lessons for online classes or grading more papers, and feel a deep need to create something -- ANYTHING -- I return to this meme.
So, here goes. Twenty-five authors who have influenced me:
- Laura Ingalls Wilder
- James Joyce
- David Sedaris
- Joan Didion
- Charles Dickens
- Ernest Hemingway
- Dorothy Parker
- A.S. Byatt
- Walt Whitman
- Margaret Atwood
- Jack Kerouac
- Woody Allen
- Frederick Douglass
- Flannery O'Connor
- William Faulkner
- Anne Rice
- Paul Simon
- Maurice Sendak
- Carolyn Keene (or the women behind the name)
- Harper Lee
- Shirley Jackson
- John Demos (for Unredeemed Captive)
- Annette Gordon-Reed (for Hemings of Monticello)
- Carolyn Heilbrun
- Toni Morrison
- Valerie Martin (for Property)
- Valerie Solanas (what can I say? I was younger and furious when I encountered her -- I no longer want to cut up men, but the radicalism and rage altered my psyche).
- Babu (this one is more direct than the others, since I actually know him and would not have finished my first book without his help).
- Professor Zero (since I mostly write in blog form, and she is a blogger, her blog forces me to think about identity and joy and, well, some of the stuff I'm going to bore you with below)
Clearly this is the list of a former undergraduate English major. As is true of most aspects of my personality, I veer between one extreme and another. I love both lush and intricate prose and stories as much as the spare and terse. I love comedy as much as tragedy.
Oddly, although there are a number of men on the list, I no longer read them, nor do I find myself gravitating toward books by men, with the exceptions of Sedaris and Babu (so write one, Babu!). This wasn't really a choice. I didn't say, "I will no longer read male writers." I just found that my choice of books tends toward women, as it did when I was a girl.
You will notice that two of the three children's writers are women. Wilder made me want to write; and Keene (all of them) made me love mysteries and investigation. I cannot separate the fact that they were women writing about women from my interest in them and my subsequent desire to read and write. Heilbrun brought me back to that on two occasions, and I loved her more when I discovered that she was also a mystery writer under a pseudonym. Her explanation for taking a pseudonym in Writing a Woman's Life is mine for Clio Bluestocking, and any other pseudonym that I might assume at a future date.
Although I am a historian, there really aren't many historians on the list. I don't read history for the art of writing; and I am more attracted to a particular book by a historian rather than their body of work. History is work, and I dive in for the information, for the meaning, for the research. The prose should just stay the hell out of the way.
The history books that I listed affected the way that I thought about crafting a story from bare and spare facts. Gordon-Reed, most recently, fascinated me with the way that she handled the spaces of perpetual unknowing in history that most interest me. I always considered those places the realm of the historical novelist, but she handled them as a historian, always returning to what we can know based on the evidence.
This returns me to the Peeps, believe it or not. The project may have been silly, but it produced so much unexpected joy. Making it was joyful to me; and, although this was never actually a goal, seeing it gave joy to you, which may me joyful again. That joy shook something loose in me that I cannot see or name, but still aggravates, frustrates and distracts me.
Then, I returned to this list. What writers have inspired me? As I thought hard -- this was not an easy list to make after the first entry --that thing kept fluttering just within my peripheral imagination. Why did they inspire me? Why are historians -- my work, my love -- not on the list in greater numbers? What is this list telling me and why does it unsettle me?
So, the Peeps and this list give me anxiety about the next creative commitment in my life. I don't feel like a legitimate, serious historian. I know my limits of intellect and energy in that direction, and always have. That has not been liberating. I also have a lot of PTSD connected to my training as a historian, which I must work to separate from my love of the subject itself, and from the way that it has affected my vision of all else. The knowledge of those limitations and the trauma become this dark muck that I must claw through to create anything having to do with history. Sometimes, that muck is too thick and I don't have the spirit to face it; but I must if I am going to work toward --- toward what? The next serious history book, which will meet with hostility or, worse, be damned with faint praise. Worse than that: be a creation for which I make excuses and about which I am not proud.
Which brings me to the question: why do I do it? I do it for the love of research and the need to write. Why am I not becoming obsessed with that; or, at least, why am I not allowing that to guide my life with a stronger force?
My whole adult life has been dedicated to history. My identity has merged with it, but not entirely. A last bit --perhaps more significant that I realize -- remains separate and wants to wander. That separate part wants more, and it spends much of its time trying to distract the historian identity. That separate part should want to merge with the historian identity, but fears that it will be sacrificed instead because it creates so many distractions. That separate part, along with the awareness of limitations and the PTSD, are my greatest obstacles.
So, I imagine myself, part stone statue, focused and formed, and part formless flesh, writhing and twisting. I have always been like this, and it disturbs me.
Now, I see that I am making some sort of chimera out of my own laziness and distraction. That, too, is a form of procrastination; and I am procrastinating by spending more time than necessary on this post.
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7 comments:
To procrastinate more, I wanted to add that this post isn't about my job, for once in my life. My job is a great job! I'm trying to figure out where to put my creative energies next.
Can't the separate part just coexist?
Or: does "historian" have to be the main identity or can it be something that includes both parts, e.g. "researcher" (or whatever)?
P.S. This may be the key to my own struggles over professordom. In graduate school, in the way that I went to it, the deal was, I was an intellectually oriented person who liked research and writing and was interested in a certain field, and was funded as a graduate student in it, so I worked at that, and was still also myself in a broader way, and it wasn't a conflict. It was in professordom that one started to have (except in the best of circmstances) to *reduce* oneself to a narrow professional identity and let that take over.
One can say, from one optic, that that is the inevitable and unfortunate result of professionalization but actually I note that the best and happiest professionals think of it all the way I originally thought of it. My whole blog is about getting back to that.
Meanwhile: to be wondering where to next put creative energy is a great place, actually. It's great not to be having creative energy sucked away in some bad way, and instead to be choosing where to put it.
Professor Zero, I think in your second comment you have nailed the struggle except that, in my case, even in graduate school I was told explicitly that my whole identity was supposed to be consumed with being a historian. That always made me passionately ambivalent about becoming an academic because I had this other part of my self that was actually growing and wanted to express itself.
You are also quite right in that having the creative energy and having several places to put it is a much much better place to be than having it sucked away by montrous people or situations. Wishing that you were doing anything else but what you are doing is just depressing. Knowing precisely what you would rather be doing is better.
Perhaps, at its most mundane, my problem is one of time and time management. There are only 24 hours in a day. At least eight are taken up by sleep, x are taken up by teaching, so the rest of the time is limited and I have to be more efficient in what I do with those leftover hours. What is going to be most satisfying? That requires silencing a lot of voices in my head.
Yes - I was *right* as a graduate student but it did not mean all faculty approved of me. Only those so nerdy that all they cared about was a decent paper. Image conscious ones did not like me because I did not suffer enough for academia, act like it was the only thing in the world, and so on. I thought the image conscious ones were just aberrant but later I discovered they were the majority.
Time management, yes. What is going to be the most satisfying, and what will give the greatest return, and will these two be the same project, was always my problem.
I recall that you were taking an acting class -- can you take that into an interesting direction? I guess it resonated with me, since my non-historian life is oriented towards performance, and I find it to be a very stimulating balance most of the time.
It's true that in grad. school one is acculturated to an all-encompassing identity as an academic, but then we, as students, and later as profs., collude with and usually replicate this through the academic generations. There can be something comforting in the simplicity of that identity, the streamlined unity of being *one* thing. I suspect that's why so many academics persist in it, rather than exploring a more multifaceted existence.
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