Conference Season

I’m always a bit wary of these sorts of “how to” lists.  I suppose I really consider this more of a “how I try to” post.  While there are bits of advice one can give as an academic, everyone’s got to find their own way of doing things.  Advice isn’t the same for those with seen or unseen disabilities, and I’m conscious I can’t speak to that.  Maybe it’s different in your discipline, too – I’m in English, so maybe check with people in your own area if you aren’t.

So, with all those caveats in place, and with conference season rapidly approaching, here are some thoughts on attending conferences and getting the most out of them.

1. Enjoy talking to people and be enthusiastic about what you’re doing.

This sounds like a no brainer, but it’s worth reiterating.  Mostly academics like talking to other people who are interested in the similar things.  I’m a bit of a sceptic about planned networking: I have been known to opine that once you conceptualise it as networking, you’re already failing at it.  That’s probably a bit over the top, but if there is anyone I’m really keen to catch, I try to let it happen organically if at all possible, and then make a more concerted effort towards the end of the event.

2. Nobody is so important that you must cultivate their favour at all costs.

There are plenty of big names.  Most of them are very pleasant.  If they aren’t, then don’t dwell on it.  There will be lots of people who are friendly and welcoming, and they are much more worth your time.  There’s nobody who is so vital that you need to make an effort if they won’t make one with you.

3. Be friendly to everyone.

The converse of the above, is that it’s worth talking to everyone.  People from all career stages have interesting things to say, and people who are at your stage right now are the people you might well be spending the next thirty plus years working with.  Seniority isn’t everything.   Equally, senior colleagues, please make an effort to be inclusive and talk to PGRs and ECRs.

4. Take breaks if you need to.

At long conferences it can be really difficult to keep up the energy to be “on” all the time and attend every session.  Don’t worry about it!  Enjoy being wherever the conference is too.  Allow yourself time to recharge and give your best when you are there, rather than flogging yourself into the ground trying to do everything.

5. Ask questions about the material presented.

It’s always tempting to end up making a comment, asking a “have you read this thing I’ve read” question, or crowbarring one’s own interests into the mix.  Sometimes it’s appropriate, but try first of all to ask a reasonably open question, and frame it sympathetically.  Book recommendations can be made over coffee, and don’t need to be done as a form of grandstanding or taking up space.

6. Make critical comments discreetly.

Sometimes there will be people who’ll say things that you don’t agree with, or that are, perhaps, wrong.  That doesn’t mean that the right way to address these things is to call them out in questions.  Try to catch them one on one.  Frame it supportively by asking if they’d considered this other point of view.  Remember that we’re all still learning.

 

I’m sure I’ll keep thinking of more of these.  Maybe I’ll come back and edit this post.  I’m sure you’ve got more yourself.  Basically, as with most of my advice, it really all boils down to two things: be kind to yourself, and don’t be a dick.

Richard Aldington

Those of you who follow my academic stuff might know that I look after the New Canterbury Literary Society Newsletter.  It was founded and edited by the Aldington scholar Norman T. Gates for many years until his death.  Fellow Aldingtonians David Wilkinson, Norman’s Associate Editor and representative in England for many years, and Mike Copp, a regular publisher on and editor of Aldington, also edited a few issues before I took it on.

Last year I finally got round to bringing the NCLSN into the twenty-first century (OK, the late twentieth) and publishing it as a blog, rather than a physical newsletter.  It’s made it easier to post regular entries, rather than having to collate material into a quarterly digest.  It also means more time sensitive things can be posted.

Many previous issues are available via Paul Hernandez’s excellent website imagists.org.  There’s lots of useful information there about Aldington, H.D. and their circle.  You can also see there the original format, which included ten asterisks between items, representing the ten members of the original Canterbury Literary Society.

I’d really like to hear from anyone who’s working on RA.  I know that there are more people out there than were receiving the NCLSN when I finally sent it in e-mail format.

I’d also like to hear from non-academics who are interested in RA.  Do you have a favourite part of Aldington that others should know about?  How did you come to find out about him?

My own recommendation for a lesser-known work is All Men are Enemies (1933).  This is a classic war story not about the war – it focuses on the love between the protagonist Tony Clarendon and his inamorata Katha, and their attempts to find each other after the war.  I enjoy the brutality of Death of a Hero, but I think All Men are Enemies is Aldington’s finest, most subtle achievement.

Let’s hear your Aldington interests!

Reading, not researching

It took me ages to get back into reading for pleasure after I finished the PhD.  In a way it was as if I’d forgotten how.  I found reading anything slow going, no matter how long or difficult it was.

There were a couple of ways that I got my social reading mojo back.

One was to start reading things that couldn’t even be thought of in the same breath (to mix a metaphor) as my research interests.  I started reading things that were more in line with my recreational interests.  So, biographies and histories in music and sport were a good starting place – things where I “knew the story”, which helped me to turn down the dial on my analytical faculties.

I’ve read some great books in this line recently – Cosey Fanni Tutti’s Art Sex Music, telling the fraught story of Throbbing Gristle and her own performance art career; Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, taking us through the Sleater-Kinney years to Portlandia; and Bob Stanley’s Yeah Yeah Yeah, a compendious history of pop music in the widest sense.

The other, which I really had to make a conscious effort at, was to make myself read faster.  Reading things for work I’m always trying to be conscious of the language used, even if I like my first pass to be fairly quick.  It is, after all, what forms the basis of literary-critical work.

But reading for pleasure I don’t need to do that.  Sure, I notice particularly elegant or striking turns of phrase.  But I don’t need to be earmarking phrases and sections for later discussion.

I really got back into reading a lot when I was essentially out of academia.  It was seven years between me finishing my PhD and getting my Napier job, my first permanent one.  The final year before that I felt very little connected to academia (I’ll write more about the academic hinterland another time).  But it meant that I read a lot – reading’s something that I’ve always had to do, one way or another.

My biggest read in that time was all twelve volumes of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which I very much enjoyed over the course of about 18 months.  I do like a long read – I’m secretary to the Ford Madox Ford Society, and have written quite a bit about Parade’s End; I also have an enduring affection for George Eliot’s Middlemarch having taught it for many years at Manchester.

I’ve started to try and slacken the boundaries between pleasure and work reading in the interests of broadening my frame of reference.  As a good modernist, my project this year is to get started on Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.  I’ve been talking about this with my brilliant modernist colleague Tara Thomson since I got to Napier.  She is much better than me and has made a start.  I’ve now bought the first couple of volumes in the Vintage edition and am determined to get going.

Anyone want to read along and hold me accountable?  Any Edinburghers / Scottish modernists / interested folks want to join us, perhaps in the pub, to talk about it?

The precarious years

I tweeted a while ago about looking back at work I’d written but not managed to get published between finishing the PhD and getting my current job.  I wanted to try and be encouraging for those who are still trying.  But there was also an entirely fair comment about when encouragement isn’t enough.  I was also reminded of this post that I half-finished a while ago by various tweets yesterday about the REF and early career researchers.

So, to show a bit more of the complexity of these decisions, I’m going to be as honest as I can here about how that process played out.  I’m keeping this as neutral as possible – one person’s plus is often another person’s minus.

I started my PhD in 2003 when, it’s safe to say, the advice on what was necessary to have achieved to be competitive in the job market was radically different to when I finished in 2008, in the middle of a recession and at the end of an REF (then RAE) cycle.  Having something published by the end of the PhD was a good idea when I started; having a monograph published was necessary to get a job by the time I did so.

In the seven years post-PhD I had two fractional fixed-term salaried posts, a LOT of fixed-term teaching at a number of different universities, first year to third year, early nineteenth century to contemporary fiction.  I learnt a lot, and the range of reading I did has been invaluable.  It was utterly exhausting.

I’m financially more fortunate than most people.  I’ve had lodgers; I’ve let my house.  When I’ve done so I’ve never been much more than breaking even on this (paying bills when living with lodgers, paying my own rent somewhere else when letting, along with maintenance costs, house insurance, etc).

That “fortune” is only because I’ve cared for and/or buried direct relatives in the final year of my undergrad and PhD (my mum, and my granddad on the same side, respectively; I had an interruption to deal with the latter situation).  In terms of mental health and emotional wellbeing I don’t recommend this as a good way to achieve financial security in one’s late twenties.

When I got my permanent job I was actively phasing myself out of academia.  I’d stopped hourly-paid teaching because further experience wasn’t adding anything to my CV.  I was a registrar in south Nottinghamshire, marrying people at the Register Office and in fancy venues around the county.

When I applied for the permanent job I got, I didn’t have any university affiliation.  I did have an unpaid research fellowship by the time of the interview, which a friend very kindly facilitated for me.  My book was fairly recently out, which was the only reason I was keeping applying for academic posts.

I’ve given good interviews, bad interviews, not got permanent jobs that I was essentially doing, and in the end got a job that I thought I had no hope of getting.

I’d made my peace with not having an academic job and enjoying doing a job that I could leave behind.  I got paid roughly the same for a wedding as a seminar, and didn’t have to do any further e-mailing or administration.  I interviewed for other academic support roles in study skills and research development, and was applying widely for any job that was vaguely appropriate.

There are people who are better scholars than me among my peers who graduated from PhD programs at the same time who haven’t got faculty positions; there are people who graduated after I finished my PhD who have permanent jobs and have been promoted above my level.

I’m not sure if there’s any real moral or advice to be taken from this series of ups and downs.  I suppose, ultimately it boils down to the following: keep believing in yourself while you’re in and trying to be in academia.  If you’ve got a PhD you’re potentially good enough (and if someone tries to tell you that you aren’t, seek your mentorship somewhere else).

Doing other things isn’t a failure, and there are definitely positives to be taken from not having a job that is as consuming as academia is.  And keep in touch with friends you made in academia if they are struggling with precarity, or leave the sector by choice or necessity.

In a terrible job market there’s necessarily an element of luck to one’s appointment.  I know I’m lucky, but there have been a lot of bumps along the road.  All I can do having been lucky is keep hoping for other people to achieve that too and using my position as best as I can for the benefit of others.  It doesn’t feel like much, but it lets me sleep at night.

Good luck, wherever it takes you.

Stress management: some thoughts

Last Friday night when I was settled in on the East Coast mainline on the way back from a conference in London I rashly asked for topics that people would like me to say something about on my blog (which I’m playing with, updating, and trying to write more on).  One of our final-year undergrads, Hannah, asked for thoughts on stress management / keeping up motivation in the face of self-doubt.

It’s definitely getting to that time of year – we’re approaching the end of teaching (we start early in Scotland, and early within that at Napier).  Dissertations are due soon.  Students on other courses or at other universities might be starting to think about exams.

As I said in my set of tweets, I don’t claim to have The Answer to this, but I can tell you some things that have worked for me, or that I believe are valuable.  Some of these pieces of advice will be familiar to students I’ve taught over the years.  While I’m writing this in response to that undergrad query, I think all of these things are potentially useful general writing practices.

The first piece of advice on stress management is going to seem a bit counter-intuitive: give yourself a break.  You can’t work constantly.  I know you’ve got competing commitments, and it’s a struggle to fit everything in, but make time for activities that aren’t stressful.  Take a pause and make a brew.  Find an hour to do some exercise.  Take a night to go to the pub.  We all need to recharge our batteries from time to time in order to work better, rather than just more.

If you can’t do that, try to make doing academic work more fun.  Arrange a writing date with some friends.  I am a firm believer in the value of a bit of silently supportive peer pressure to do something, and if you’re working on similar things it’s good to have other people around to ask questions of, take tea breaks with, have three minute raves in your breaks, or whatever it is that keeps you going and enthused.

The subtext of both of the above is: don’t get too isolated.  Some people work best on their own, or don’t find social commitments relaxing; in that case take some time to be kind to yourself in whatever way works for you.

Stress can also often come from an accumulation of deadlines.  But these shouldn’t be a surprise to you.  Assessments normally come roughly at the middle and end of term wherever you are; at Napier there is actually an assessment matrix in the Programme Handbook that will enable you to plan ahead (these are always subject to a bit of change, but we don’t make a habit of changing submission weeks year on year).  Think about how you can strategise that work.  If you have three essays due in two weeks that might mean, for example, taking a calculated decision to write one of your essays on the text you were most interested in from the first or second week to give you space later.  (I say this as someone who was stupid enough to do an 80/40 credit split in his second year of a three-year English degree.  I got some of my highest marks in that term when I did two-thirds of the year.)

Stress can also come from deferral of work.  Everyone works differently, but I’m a big fan of the accumulative method.  Keep getting stuff down; writing is a process, and breaking the tyranny of the blank screen is soothing.  Brilliant quotation that you’re definitely going to say something about?  Type it into a word document and type a few sentences of preliminary analysis about it.  Critical quotation that says exactly what you want your overall point to be?  Stick it in a draft of your introductory paragraph.  Random quotations that you feel might be useful?  Type them in a document (with reference), keep them for later.  I still have bits and pieces that have travelled with me for well over a decade now, and once in a while they come in.  Cloud and tiny USB storage means this is easy.

For me, doing is soothing.  If you’re the same, keep doing things.  While I enjoy my own time, I also enjoy being around people.  If you’re the same, make sure you have social things planned.  Try to think about what makes you feel less stressed about writing and keep doing those things; try to create a virtuous circle of behaviour.  And if you find writing generally stressful – maybe try changing your writing practice and see if that helps.

As I said at the beginning – these things aren’t the answer.  I don’t even think I’m particularly brilliant at managing stress.  But they are a few things that you might try that work for me when I remember to do them!

I’ve ended up just writing about stress management here; I’ll come back to self-belief soon (although there’s a lot of overlap between the two, for me).