There is the stereotype of graduate students working away alone, barely speaking to anyone and barely able to if the scenario arose. I do work alone, most of the time, and sometimes I like to be away from distractions (and possibly in my PJs, maybe eating instant noodles). However, alone does not equal lonely.

Research networks and associations, mailing lists, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, emails about faculty admin, training and teaching, emails about conferences and seminars, emails about organising your own conference or seminar, notes from your supervisor, emails about university club/society updates, college emails. We are definitely not alone in the universe. In fact, it is sometimes impossible to get a little bit of quiet over here.

I can ignore things if I really need to, but most days I’m like Pavlov’s dog – a slave to the ping my inbox makes. I discovered recently when I listen to music I sometimes hear a similar noise and without even noticing flick to my inbox. The sad truth is that I do quite like all the admin and communication because it breaks up the day and gives me short term goals. Every time I tap out a response and click send I feel like I’ve achieved something else on my to do list. Only, that email wasn’t on my to do list at the start of the day, and when the reply comes back it’ll add something *else* to the list. Somehow it doesn’t compute with me that short term pleasure will result in more work whenever a response arrives.

It is all very well to argue that if I need to get my thesis done I should just ignore emails, but it doesn’t take a theoretical mathematician to work out that that just exacerbates the problem in the long(er) term. It seem a key part of balancing research and other academic requirements is email management. And possibly turning the email ping off.

The Artist as Pavlov's Dog by Timothy Ralph

I’m pleased to say that Rick Hall has kindly summarized points from our discussion at Play’s The Thing. Some points that stick with me are the links between creative thinking and genius/madness, thoughts on working alone and resilience.

I increasingly view academic research as a highly creative endeavor in its own right – especially so in literary studies where conclusions are based on an understanding of the process of creativity involved in the production. And, criticism is not just a response to art, but a way of creating a discourse from these works. ‘Studying’ at all levels is not (and should not) be about repeating or reporting but understanding and engaging with – and there is a parallel between ‘getting’ it and the feeling of ‘creating’ it in the first place.

And, like academia, our discussion didn’t give any ultimate answer on the links between creativity and well-being. It just opened up lots more questions and proved that the area is more complex than we might ever have imagined. This is a perfectly good conclusion for this stage.

•  Feminist poetics and écriture féminine
• Protest poetry
• Generational influence and anxiety
• The development of twentieth century and post- millennial women’s poetry
• The women of the ‘Next Generation Poets’ promotion
• All-female anthologies and accusations of self- ghettoization
• Relations between poets from different backgrounds
•  Female laureateships; the journey from ‘poetess’ to poet laureate

Abstracts should be sent to women@pgcwwn.org by 17th February 2012. Full details at www.pgcwwn.org

In 2011 I wrote something like 35,000 words towards my thesis. I passed my transfer of status, did a course on academic teaching, planned 1 conference, attended 3 and presented 3 papers. I published 1 feature article and several book reviews. I also kept up 4 regular freelance contracts with poetry organisations on top of my study, along with some other commitments in the arts. As the year came to an end I must admit I felt exhausted.

Much of what I learned last year, and what I talked about on this blog, was to do with how varied the process of thesis writing is. When I describe it to people who don’t know about research degrees, they assume I spend my time in calm contemplation in a library, or scribbling in a notebook under a tree in a park, or tapping thoughtfully on a laptop in a coffee shop.

In fact, most of the time I feel quite manic. I go to libraries, parks and coffee shops, but I also send and reply to countless emails, I blog, I tweet, I try to draw out ‘to do’ lists to see how I can fit in a conference paper and a book review on two different subjects and still have time for a social life. I feel out of my depth sometimes, and other times I feel like I would rather do nothing else.

I’d like to say my new year’s resolution is to write more, faster, better, hand in quicker and be some sort of graduate student super hero. I do believe in resolutions, but not necessarily for new year. In fact, sitting at the desk and doing something is a resolution in itself when the eventual deadline and achievement still seems so far away (not to mention the job market so bleak on the other side). So, my graduate student resolution is to just keep going.* As they keep saying, it is a marathon and not a sprint… (I will try to keep Olympic puns to a minimum in 2012).

*Ok, so my other resolutions are to eat more fruit and exercise more.

I found this quote on writing (fiction), which struck a lot of chords with me since most of the past term has been spent thinking about writing.

“Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I’ve got there, because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000 words might well be rubbish – they often are. But then, it is always easier to return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better.”— Sarah Waters.

Writing may be a job, but in many ways it is more than simply producing 500/1000/5000 words a day. Even though I’m technically on a break, I’m reading some Irish women’s fiction (because god forbid I should allow my mind to stray or become polluted). I’m also reading a critical book for review. And I’ve been floating some thoughts around in my head both for my next chapter plan and noted some changes I need to make to the draft I’ve just submitted. I’m making notes on one book I did bring home, and before I get back I’ll need to make a start on a conference paper, plus possibly submit an abstract for something else. I’ve also been finalizing the CFP for an event I’m running on contemporary women’s poetry in Oxford in 2012.

If writing is a job, thesis writing is more like an obsession.

This event was a chance to catch up with former fellows – some experts in diverse fields from science, technology, business and visual arts. I was invited to speak about my experience, which was a privilege, especially given the esteem of the company.

The other speakers included Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh, inventor of the fantastic Sugru, Rob Kessler who produces beautiful photographs of plants on a molecular level, and Stephen Pizzey who spoke about science in the landscape.

The event got me thinking again about the way science and technology seeks to engage with the public and the wider world, while by and large the arts doesn’t. Stephen talked about being at academic conferences that weren’t in ‘conference bunkers’. At one the delegates boiled eggs and cooked meat at geysers and at another he spoke about the processes of a power plant to members of the public who passed it every day and gave it no thought.

Coming up to Christmas, I noticed that Prof Brian Cox has a high profile show where he is lecturing on advanced physics to celebrities. On top of that, there will be the annual Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (a personal favourite of the festive period – science for children is probably about my level).

As good as BBC Radio is for arts programmes, if academics and arts professionals really want to engage with the public and get extra credit for the public impact of their work, we need to take a leaf out of the scientists books. Carol Ann Duffy explains poetic meter to celebrities? A series of lectures on developments in literary studies at Christmas? At the very least, we could get out of our conference bunkers a bit more often…

The big change I made in more recent weeks has been to reduce the amount of time I give to my freelance work. Turns out, the world doesn’t end if I ignore an email for a few hours.

I set myself daily word targets, and kept almost fanatical record of my progress both during the working day and day-by-day. This worked well for me as a measure of my progress and a measure of my laziness. I get most done between 11 and 4, so those times are important for me to focus and not allow myself to be distracted by other work. On Mondays, I am quick out of the gate and gets lots done, but by Wednesday I am lagging. Simple changes to my working pattern – for example working from a library that day – beat my mid-week apathy.

Any finally, as is tradition here at More Books, Please, here is my post-hand in Wordle.

My posts have been sparse this term as I’ve been deep in the mire of poetry criticism for the chapter I unofficially call ‘the gender chapter’. I’m heading back to writing now, so I’ll let one of my thesis poets give a thoughtful approach on my behalf:

‘Gender seems to matter far more in how poetry is criticised. Publishing has opened up, thankfully, but criticism seems to find change harder. Male poets are usually criticised in relation to the canon whereas women poets are often discussed as working in a vacuum’

Colette Bryce, In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland ed. John Brown (Salmon, 2002), p.319.

November, as anyone with writer friends will know, is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) when people across the world aim to write a 50,000 word novel (or first draft of a novel) in just 30 days. Successfully completely NaNoWriMo is fairly heroic, and I’m not the first person to have thought about parallels with thesis writing and novel writing. Some livejournal-ers have already discussed starting a NaReWriMo (National Research Writing Month).

I’ve also recently come across 750 words – another online community which encourages people to sign up and write 750 words a day – without thinking too much about editing those words. This is another great idea and I can certainly see the benefit of producing 22,500 words by the end of a month.

However, the issue with academic writing is that for the most part it is about quality and not quantity. If I wrote 22500 words in a month it would take an age to follow up the ideas, pick out the ideas worth pursuing and then work more on them. It is more important to produce words that really get down to the issue you are meant to be responding to – making the words count rather than obsessing over the actual word count. The only problem – 5000 quality words do not make a thesis.

And, as we hurtle towards the end of term here in Oxford I’ve been setting myself a target to write up 1000 words a day of the chapter I’m working on. Given how mind-meltingly difficult some of the concepts I’m trying to explain are, this is no mean feat and I find myself having to take regular breaks and often work until 10pm at night.

I’m finding the problem with milestones like this is that the reality of academic writing involves cutting ideas that you thought were working but soon glaringly aren’t. Keeping them in for the sake of word count vanity is clearly not wise, but cutting them out feels like a step back.

Isolated research also means that when you do meet the target, there is no one there to celebrate with you. Which is why at the end of your day, I recommend visiting Freelance Thanks – for all the empty praise you need (even if it isn’t really aimed at researchers..).

Many of the questions I’ve come away from this conference with are to do with poetry – mainly because there was so little of it. Of course, that isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy papers on the gothic in contemporary women’s fiction – there was much to enjoy – but my paper was the only one which wasn’t about fiction, although there were a handful dealing with drama.

The keynotes were by Prof Andy Smith on Elizabeth Kostovo and Dr Paulina Palmer on Ali Smith. I’m more familiar with Ali Smith’s work, and found Palmer’s exploration of a lesbian/queer uncanny through apparational aspects in Smith’s work fascinating. She also circulated a recent Jeanette Winterson article from the Guardian which makes (a bit brashly) some interesting comments on the value of high literature.

Nobody blames maths for being difficult – and it isn’t difficult – but it is different, and demands some time and effort. It is another kind of language. Literature is also another kind of language. I don’t mean literature is obscure or rarefied or precious – that’s no test of a book – rather it is operating on a different level to our everyday exchanges of information and conversation.

That’s obvious in poetry and we welcome it. In fiction we seem to want a kind of printed television. Why?

Another highlight for me was Dr. Marie Mulvey Roberts paper on Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl – a hypertext fiction. I wasn’t familiar with this work at all, but I’m very keen to experiment with it now. Her descriptions of it reminded me in many ways of the poetic hypertext experiments at online poetry magazine Snakeskin’s website.

Overall, I’ve come away thinking about why Gothic seems to be a shorthand for fiction when there is so much dark and haunting poetry.  It could in fact be something to do with what Winterson says about the ‘difficulty’ of poetry; we simply aren’t accustomed to identifying themes beyond the most broad, or we aren’t looking for parallels in fiction. This is something I need to process more than these throwaway comments. Perhaps this could make a stimulating panel discussion for future Gothic conferences….