Blog Apologies and General Life Update

Hello!  I realised with some shame that it has been two months (ish) since I've updated this blog!  Partly it's because I've been busy, and then because I wasn't sure I had anything to say.  So, I've decided to break the ice with a quick update on the Easter vacation and Trinity Term have been like for me.

In the last two months, I've...

• Gone to Paris, the Loire Valley, and Avignon on vacation (see obligatory Eiffel Tower photo above - with more pictures to come!)
• Finished another section of my thesis, this time discussing domestic violence and other forms of male dominance in the Bronte novels.  Next up is a short section on male relationships (primarily on how they can be damaging when they impinge on domestic/family life).
• Read many books for fun, including some that I plan to review on the blog in the near future.
• Given the Michael Mahoney Graduate Seminar at my college - a one-hour lecture on my research, which was actually really fun, especially as it was followed by a fancy dinner in the chapel (which is currently serving as our dining hall).
• Completely rewrote the end of my novel for the first time.  The ending is different from what I originally intended, but it fits better with my expectations for and conception of the book now.  I hope to start submitting it really, really soon - after one more proofread and a couple small changes.
• Helped to organise this year's Oxford English graduate conference, "Object", which went really, really well.  I chaired a fantastic panel on Victorian material culture; there was an fabulous panel discussion on the Book as Object, featuring Nick Cross, Digital Products Manager at the Oxford University Press and fellow SCWBI member, Paul Nash, the University's printing tutor, and Stephen Walter, text/map artist.  The day was capped off by a fantastic keynote address on the construction of the author as "object" by acclaimed children's author Frances Hardinge.  (Her most recent novel, A Face Like Glass is amazing and Frances is absolutely lovely in person to boot!)
• Went up to London to see The Book of Mormon (amazing, with brilliant music, and much blasphemy - not for the easily offended) and finally visit the Tate Modern (loved the first floor Surrealists, then became increasingly bored by the abstract art and installations - I am a bit of a traditionalist, I suppose)
• More recently, went up to London to see Neil Gaiman talk about his most recent novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.  Amazing.  Also snagged a signed first edition, which is very good so far.
• Plus, I attended the seminars for the Developing Teaching and Learning course run by the Humanities Division and am working on a teaching portfolio to submit in hopes it will gain me Associate Fellow status with the Higher Education Academy.  As part of my teaching training, I ran revision classes and tutorials to prepare first-year Mansfielders for their exam on Victorian literature, which was a rewarding experience.  It was great to really dig into the Victorians with friendly, enthusiastic, and hard-working students.

Okay, I think that's it.  I will try to update more frequently, and will definitely post pictures from our France trip.  The next big thing is that we're going home for two weeks on Saturday, which is shockingly only two sleeps away!  Yikes.

Chapter-Writing Survival Kit: Chapter Three Edition

You can find my must-haves for chapters one and two if you follow the links.

1.  Notebooks!  I've been keeping a small notebook with me for the last year or so to write down my daily to-do lists, track my hours, jot down ideas or library call numbers but all of sudden, I've become a notebook fiend.  I've been using medium soft-cover Moleskines for the last couple months to jot down ideas, brainstorming, lists of books to read, rough paragraphs, lists of quotations and page references - all the messy-ish work that goes into writing a chapter.  I used to do this on loose leaf but I think that began to feel too serious or formal or finished.  If it goes in a notebook, I have permission to do unfinished writing and thinking.  Also, they're fun to carry around.  I like the feeling of them.  I like the heft of a nice black Bic pen in my hand.

Please don't mock my terrible penmanship.  I can handwrite quickly but only I can usually read the scrawl.  This is something I wrote up two days ago, outlining my thoughts for Chapter Four.  This excercise, helped by multiple colours of pens, helped me to realize that I had a much better idea of what I wanted to cover in this chapter than I thought I did.  So, hurrah to notebooks!

2.  CBC Radio.  This is also a weird one.  For years, I've enjoyed listening to music while I worked - school-work, novel-writing.  I can happily listen to music with English lyrics; I know some people can't. I think Philip Pullman has said in interviews he can't listen to music at all, because it throws off the rhythms in his head.  But writing this chapter, for some reason talk radio was my go-to for a background track to run through my head.  I'm not sure how much radio I actually absorbed, but I learned some interesting things from the many episodes of As It Happens, Ideas, Quirks and Quarks, and The Sunday Edition I listened to.  I think it also made me feel not quite so far from home and, when Tim is at work, less all alone in the flat (?)  Hard to say.

3.  This isn't to say that music didn't help me a great deal.  It did.  I listened to and enjoyed the new Kamelot album, Silverthorn, towards the end of this chapter, plus the usual mix of Florence + the Machine and classic rock.

4.  In the beverage department - hot chocolate and chai.  Hot drinks make writing so much more fun.

5.  Also, going down the road to our local Costa for coffee after Tim is done work.  Sometimes it's just really nice to have a change of scene, a place that feels less like "work".

(I think I had ten things in my survival kit for each of the last two posts in this series.  I can't think of ten this time.  Alas.)

Seven Things I Learned from Sarah Stickney Ellis

Sarah Stickney Ellis was a Quaker turned Congregationalist who wrote numerous conduct books for women during the Victorian period (as well as other educational works).  I'm currently skimming through the sections on education and training for boys in her 1843 book The Mothers of England.  Some of her points are rather amusing, so I'm going to summarize the best ones here.

(I'm reading parts of this book because I'm writing about contemporary expectations concerning the raising and education of boys during the early Victorian period.  I'm writing about this in Chapter Three of my thesis, on Charlotte Bronte's The Professor, but will be revisiting this material when I write about Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.)

1.  Not everyone who praises your child is sincere.  "One-half of those apparently interested inquirers [...] would say pretty much the same, if the heir of the house should appear toothless, bald, shrivelled, and with every feature of his face distorted."

2. Why mothers are better teachers for their children than paid governesses or tutors: a mother's love "might weight in the balance against a little extra Latin and Greek".

3.  On choosing a school, one must remember that aim of education "should be to dignify the sphere of life to which they belong [ie: the middle class], not to creep up into another."  My, my.

4.  If your husband is "deficient in religious knowledge", children should be sent to school for a proper religious education.

5.  In opposition to the writers who claim that men and women "have equal powers, and are fitted for the same field of action", Ellis asks, don't women have "at present enough to do in their accustomed and familiar place?"  The spectre of separate spheres rises once more, but with a twist.  If women want to become members of parliament, an equal number of men must stay home and "darn stockings" or there will be a loss of "useful exertion in that department where it cannot well be spared".  Funny to think these are issues we are still dealing with today, vis a vis women's representation in the highest levels of politics, academia, and management, as well as the issue of men's place in raising children, etc.

6.  "In the first place, let it be remembered, that boys must be humoured to a certain extent.  Boys and men require this and have a right to expect it from women."  *rolls eyes*

7.  Tyranny in boys may begin "with the little boy in the nursery, when he snatches up his sister's kitten, and throws it into the nearest pond".  GASP!  Who does this?  Did little boys do this in 1843?  Yikes!  (I love, love, love cats for the record).  This energy and love of power should instead "be so directed  as to find an appropriate and delightful use in the feeling that he is the natural protector of his sisters."  Somehow, that doesn't seem quite as dramatic as throwing poor, innocent kittens into ponds.

Chapter Writing Survival Kit: Chapter Two Edition

1.  Classical music - Beethoven, Verdi, Saint-Saëns, Mozart, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and Tchaikovsky most recently
2.  Other music: Apocalyptica, Lacuna Coil, and lots and lots of Florence + The Machine
3.  Werther's Hard Candy
4.  Emerald green gel pen - to make writing by hand more fun
5.  Peppermint tea
6.  Kitchen timer for writing sprints
7.  Moleskine notebook for tracking progress
8.  Laptop
9.  Sitting in bed - to trick myself into thinking the writing isn't stressful
10.  College library - so I can spread out my work on a big table and stare at the beautiful ceiling when I need to think

Here's the Chapter One Edition, which is slightly different.

Working in the Library

Somehow these last few days, I've hit upon a working routine that seems to be going quite well.  For the first time all year, I've started working in my college's beautiful Victorian library.  I think I was afraid before that I would take a table away from some poor stressed undergraduate while term was on.  In any case, now the library is all but empty and usually peopled by fellow graduate students, grinding away on their theses.  Yesterday, there were four of us, a political theorist, a geographer, a medievalist, and me, each happily encamped at one of the (apparently still original) oak tables, each in his or her own bay of the library.  I seem to be sitting at the end of the classics section and by the beginning of literary theory.  It's nice to have a work space that feels like your own.

I've only been working on Chapter Two in the library for the last week, so perhaps psychologically it has clicked that when I'm sitting at my nice oak table, I should be planning and writing about silver fork novels and dandies.

During my Master's degree, all of us English grad students had offices on two floors of the main humanities library.  It was great - first of all, you had your own space: a place to surreptitiously nap, a place to store books and notes and perhaps coax potted plants into liveliness, and a place to stash life-giving snacks.  The other joy of this set up was the ability to wander about when bored and bother your fellow students.  I found it was really useful to talk to other people who were having the same problems working or writing or researching.  Research can be lonely; human contact is hugely beneficial.

Working in the college library has allowed me a similar degree of socialising with my fellow students, which has been wonderful.  Because there are no university-related seminars or lectures running over the long vacation (which is indeed very long - term doesn't start again until the beginning of October) I had been wondering if I was going to wither away for lack of seeing anyone I knew.  Crisis averted!

The other plus to looking in the library is that if you need a little mental break while your unconscious figures out the details of the paragraph you're agonising over, you can gaze up at the lovely painted tiles on the ceiling.  (Pictured above - can you spot the boss of the Green Man?)

Starting Again: Chapter Two

Last week, I felt pretty at sea.  I had just finished my transfer paper and thesis outline, and was beginning Chapter Two.  It felt awfully strange to be able to stop thinking about Chapter One and be able to consider new territory.

Now, Chapter Two isn't entirely new.  Both it and Chapter One look at Charlotte and Branwell Brontë's pre-1846 writing and, at one time, I mistakenly thought it would all fit into one chapter (ha!).  So I've read my primary sources and I've known since January what I wanted to cover in this chapter (the shift from hero-worship and fantasy to realism and irony, as well as the possible Victorianizing and maturing of the siblings' writing).  But, possibly because I already have a half-formed argument in my head, I didn't quite know where to start.

So, I went back to the beginning, to the primary and secondary sources that started me thinking about fantasy and realism, 1830s fiction, the beginnings of Victorian literature, and the pull between fantasy and realism in Charlotte's writing.

I'm also reading more Brontë background: Sue Lonoff's edition of Charlotte and Emily's Belgian essays (to see if I should be discussing them in my chapter), Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë, and Charlotte's letters.

It feels so wonderful to go back to reading and thinking and processing again, after a few weeks of writing and revising.  I'm reminded why I decided to pursue doctoral studies in the first place and why, despite this being an exhausting, self-doubting, and brain-twisting way to spend several years of one's life, I love it so much.

For more on the joys and realities of thesis-writing, check out the Guardian's story Ten things I wish I'd known before I started my dissertation…  Many of these points ring true, though during my Master's thesis, I never did feel like I wanted to start from scratch at the eleventh hour.  The guilt and self-doubt, however, is definitely something I'm familiar with.

Still Alive!

Hello, I'm still here.

The last couple weeks have been rather busy, as my parents have been visiting from Canada (which involved much visiting and touring about - including an afternoon at Blenheim Palace and a run up to London!).  I've also been working on revisions for my first chapter, which I need to submit at the end of next week for my transfer of status to the DPhil...

So...  More blogging to come in the near future, once I come out the other end of my transfer of status submission.

When Is It Time to Start Writing?

As I embark on actually getting the words down for the first chapter of my doctoral thesis (on heroes and hero-worship in Charlotte and Branwell Bronte’s early early writings), I’ve been thinking a bit about taking the leap from research and planning to actually writing.  I’ve realized that my process for academic writing is in many ways similar to my creative writing and since I suspect some other grad student and writerly types may be reading this, I thought I would attempt to explain how this works for me.  As with everything concerning the writing process, this is highly individual.

Before I start writing, I need to know where I’m going.  If I start in on an essay or a novel without having worked out what my end goal is and, at least in general, how I’m going to get there, I flail around hopelessly.  I'm totally lost in the woods.  Generally, I just don’t go in to a piece of writing until I know my major road markers, unless I’m trying to write an abstract or a proposal, when getting my ideas down messily and then shaping and cutting for word count after seems to work quite well.

I know some writers can go into a book and not know what’s hiding behind each corner (I’m thinking about fiction writers particularly here, but I know students who write this way too – it boggles my mind).  But then they go back and revise and work their book, essay etc. into a workable shape after the fact.

For whatever reason, I can’t do this.  For essays, I need to know each major point I’m trying to make before I start.  I need to see the shape of the argument in my head.  I also know it’s time to start writing when the essay, in a sense, begins writing itself, when I hear random sentences in my head that belong in the essay, when I come up with a way to describe something I’m trying to prove.

I used to plan out my essays in great detail, writing down every point and every quotation and page reference in a gigantic outline, then typing everything onto the computer.  That way I got to put off the actual writing for as long as possible. I think I’m better at embracing a bit of mess now, and have found that roughing out a paragraph or a section on paper and then typing and refining seems to work quite well.

I seem to need less detail going forward on a novel, but like an academic paper, a novel also needs to have enough complexity in the ideas and plot to move it forward.  Now that I am hopefully coming toward the end of revisions on my current novel, I’ve begun thinking about what the next one might be like.  Over the last couple years, I’ve had about three reasonably novel-like ideas, but none of them is tugging at me, shouting at me to write them now.  I suspect they are rather half-baked.  I don’t think there is enough imaginative force there to propel me through an entire novel.  I started, and even finished, so many longer stories that were really just dead inside as a teenager and discovered in the process that novels need a critical mass of ideas, so that a chain reaction occurs and ideas spark new ideas and pull up old ideas and rework them for the new context.  I think that’s what I’m waiting for at the moment.

And even then, when will I know when to start writing?  Well, I’ll need an idea of the plot structure and my end point.  And, as occurred with this novel, I’ll know it’s time to start when it begins writing itself in my head.

I remember this quite clearly.  I’d had the original idea for this novel back in March of 2006, and then on August 17^th, after I had just finished a summer Latin class and put another old (and frankly not very good) novel to bed, I was sitting on my bed, eating strawberries, listening to CBC radio, and reading Wuthering Heights, and I think the cadences at Emily Bronte’s language set something going in my mind and the book began writing itself.

At that point, you really do just need to start.

So It Begins

I had a very productive meeting with my supervisor today.  Well, I've got my marching orders.  In four weeks, I need to submit an introduction and a chapter plan for my transfer paper, which will either make up a large portion of Chapter One or will be all of Chapter One and a section of Chapter Two, depending on how I ultimately decide to split the material up.

This is a bit frightening.  I mean, I realize I'm here to write this thesis, but it's really quite daunting to actually be on the cusp of starting.  I've committed to submitting a rough draft of the 10 k transfer paper for the end of term, which is, if you recall, only eight weeks away.  Ack!

However, I'm also feeling quite excited to be starting.  I've been thinking about this project since Autumn 2010, when I had to come up with a research proposal to submit with my PhD applications.  Since then, I've read a gargantuan amount of Bronte material, criticism, other Romantic and Victorian writing, and done a fair bit of thinking.  Up until recently, I felt like I was looking at a pretty amorphous mass of small ideas and a great deal of material - 6 volumes of early prose and poetry by Branwell and Charlotte Bronte, as well as goodly chunks of Anne and Emily's poetry - and not having much idea of how to wrestle that into one or two original, solid chapters.

That's changing now, thank goodness.  I think I've picked up the major threads I want to follow through the Brontes' works; I have some ideas about how sibling collaboration and influence worked; ways to structure material are beginning of present themselves to me.

But it's really begun now and I have a real, live deadline to meet.  Better get moving.

New Term

Today is the first day of Hilary Term 2012 at Oxford.  (Well, technically the start of term was yesterday, but this is the first work day of term.)

To celebrate, I am shortly off to central Oxford where I will renew, return, and or take out a number of books from at least three different libraries and will attempt to read the 100 or so pages of Branwell Bronte's writing that I still need to read, plus a late novelette of Charlotte's and take a skim through her poetry.  I've also downloaded from JSTOR an edition of her early, incomplete novel Ashworth, which marks a transition from her early writing in the imaginary kingdom of Angria to her later, mature and more realistically grounded fiction.  Should be interesting reading.

While out and about, I'm also planning on posting my application for membership to the Bronte Society - perhaps it's about time.

This term will probably mark a move away from the exploratory reading and thinking I was doing back in Michaelmas, as I need to start work on my "transfer paper", a 10 k word essay that I will submit as part of my Transfer of Status in April.  Only once I pass my transfer (which also, nail-bitingly, involves an interview with two assessors), will I actually hold DPhil status.  At the moment, I am technically only a PRS or Probationary Research Student.  In any case, I need to do some actual thesis writing and soon and I need to start hammering out the approach I'll be using for the thesis and how I plan to structure thing.  Interesting times ahead in thesis-land, that's for sure.

Back to the Grind (Kind Of)

Now that the stress of moving out of the apartment has worn off, I've managed to get some school-related work done this morning.

I've discovered that it's scholarship application season once again and I'm applying for at least three this year in hopes that I only have to self-fund one year at Oxford.  I'm hoping the process will be a bit easier this year, since I already have a research proposal to work from, but there will be tweaking involved and I know I should try to hunt down reference letters from my University of Saskatchewan professors before I leave for the UK...  So, suddenly, there's lots to do - plus sorting through boxes, plus submitting changes of address, plus trying to squeeze in some time to work on my novel and my "fun" paper and read.

Yesterday, out of nowhere, I started playing around with ideas of how to structure my doctoral thesis.  Perhaps something clicked in my brain, telling me it was time to start thinking about this, as term is only just over a month away now.  I also started coming up with some more specific themes I'd like to track through the Brontes' works: the mentor-figure (and his relationship to M. Heger) in Charlotte's works (without being biographical in a reductionist way, which I always find annoying), Anne's use of more conventional morality, Emily's inclusion of very strong female protagonists alongside her male characters, in Wuthering Heights and the Gondal works.

I'm also becoming more aware that I really need to tackle the juvenilia, since I've only just touched it here and there and don't have a very good understanding of it yet.  I also need to read the two published Bronte novels I haven't been through yet: Charlotte's The Professor and Anne's Agnes Grey.  Both should be very interesting.

As for fun reading, I'm currently about a third of the way through Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, The Stranger's Child, which begins the summer before World War I and runs through most of the 20th century and deals, in part, with a poem and changing perceptions of it.  It's just the sort of the thing I like to read: complex, well-written, British, historical.  So far, I recommend it very highly.  The book hasn't even been released in North America yet (and won't be until October, I think), so I sent my parents on a mission to buy me a copy while they were in the UK on holiday in July (also, the UK cover is nicer, I think).  They picked up a copy at Hatchards, which I really must go visit, as it is the oldest surviving bookshop in London.  They also managed to nab a signed copy, which is quite wonderful.