Report

It is probably no surprise that I've been silent here for so long, especially since I only want to post when I have some real news to report. The baby will turn one year old in a little over a month. He is beautiful, delightful, a revelation. But he is also a handful. I haven't been able to truly work since before he was born.

(As an aside, I also haven't had a full night's sleep in over a year, but I've gotten over it. Mostly. I hold on to the knowledge that it will happen again someday, a full eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. Ah!)

Nonetheless, I have done some work. In October I presented at my first conference since giving birth. It was at the Rocky Mountain MLA in Reno, which I mentioned in my last post (from all the way back in May, wow). I had fun, although Reno itself and the hotel holding the conference were not that pleasant. But my panel turned out to be truly excellent and cohered in a way that none of us expected. I even drew a nomination for best graduate student paper, about which I am not holding my breath; I saw other presentations by graduate students and mine was certainly not the best!

What was nice about that conference was that I was able to dive into part of my dissertation work in a productive way, and now I get to present the material once again at another conference, this time in Hawai'i in April. I will probably report back again then. In the meantime, it needs to be revised further, even though it is already presentation-ready. Since the paper is the jumping-off point for one of my chapters, I also want to expand it so that I will have something more substantial to show my advisers in a few months.

Finally, I had some exciting news last week: I learned that one of my essays was accepted for a special issue of a refereed journal. The caveat: while I have heard from the editor at the journal itself, I am still unsure if the collection will be published; it might still be in the review process. But in any case, I was really excited, and not a little surprised, to hear that I might be published with a stellar group of scholars. It is a testament, I think, to the subject matter of my paper, which I will share here when (if) I learn that a publication date and issue number have been set. It has been about two and half years since I first submitted this paper for this particular collection, and almost twice that long since I first wrote it (five years? Yes, crazy, I know!). Our editor/collector has been incredibly patient and persistent with the publishers and the publications process, which has been more complicated than expected. To be honest, I wasn't sure if my piece would be included given the fact that I could not revise it properly when it was submitted for this particular journal. (At that time, two years ago, our heater had broken down in the middle of winter, my new kitten was dying, and an uncle in the Philippines had just been murdered. So, yeah, the revision process was an utter failure.)

After getting the feedback from two anonymous readers and a good friend, I am looking forward to properly revising the paper. And one last thing: I know some established academics have strong feelings against graduate students publishing their work while in graduate school. But given the attenuation of my graduate career, the fact that I am still in the early stage of the dissertation when I should already be finishing up this semester, and the uncertainty of my future as an academic, I feel a little better knowing that I might have another publication. It makes me feel like my time at this PhD has not been for naught even though most of the past year has been spent on childcare and self-care. I don't believe that I should feel guilty about putting my career on hold for this precious time in my baby's life, but I do, anyway.

Moreover, when I do finally go out on the job market -- which by all that I've heard is ugly and depressing and getting worse given this economic climate -- I don't want my application to be ignored. My job requirements are so specific that I need every edge I can get in order to land a good job in the location that will be best for my family. I felt convinced when I first entered my PhD program that I was doing it with my eyes wide open; then, I didn't mind the possibility that I might have to move to a different state for my job. I also planned to be on the fast track, given that I already had a master's degree. Oh, she was so, so naive, that old self! As the saying goes, if only I had known then what I know now.... Life blindsided me my first year in the PhD, and it has been doing it ever since. The last five or six years of my life have turned me around and sideways and every other which way. No one expects such big life-changing events to occur practically one right after the other. To tell the truth, I'm not sure I've adequately processed the last half-decade of my life. Yet here I am, still chugging along, still going after a PhD when a GED might have more than sufficed. If this article is actually published, it will, strangely enough, feel like I am moving towards more stability in my life. That means a lot (especially to someone with my personality).