I’ve been thinking lately about what I want to accomplish with my daily published (but read by no one, as yet) writing. I remember being in an advance poetry workshop as a senior undergrad, where the prof (a poet I admired as a poet and despised as a teacher) revealed the secret to making our writing work for both us as writers and for our audience: we needed a “bag.” Like, his bag was being a tall, sensual, African-American male up from the ‘hood. Other bags in that workshop were the misunderstood pot-smoking long-haired mellow dude, the angry-ish lesbian, the Sylvia Plaith-like translucent-skinned girl exploring sex and sexuality, etc. I felt like getting into a bag as a writer would limit me–but I was also afraid of the bags I had available to climb into: married, young mother, white, writing teacher?
Now, though, I’m reading over at Palmer’s, I realize that my bag can be academom. Ack-a-DE-mom. I have been ignoring this too long: that my life really revolves around various short people who I must love, feed, clothe, bathe, teach, play with/entertain, breastfeed, drive to dance, pick up from school, and generally live my life AROUND them. There is a pudgy 7-month old, naked as the day he was born, clinging to my knees as I type this. I cannot ignore this. Plus, this plays quite neatly into my arguments-in-process about method and scholarship never travelling too far from the interests/lives of the researcher. It might seem a facile, obvious argument, but I think it’s one we don’t give enough consideration to, especially when examining rhetorical products of such research.
The 7-month old tires of slobbering on my thigh–and so I cut this short. The other decision I’ve made is to stay on Typepad instead of moving the blog over to my school server. This way, I don’t have any responsibility to any larger institution (except 6A) concerning what I choose to post. 🙂
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