The blog is back
Not only is Writing Well and Being Well for your PhD and Beyond now in to my publishers, but we have a publication date and a preorder link.
Not only is Writing Well and Being Well for your PhD and Beyond now in to my publishers, but we have a publication date and a preorder link.
It’s another Australian summer, so it’s time to edit another book, so it’s time to remind myself that I need to twist again.
Writing advice gets under people’s skin and into their guts and hearts. When I chat to a person whose self perception of their writing is a long way off the reality I see on the page, I often ask them ‘who told you your writing was like that?’ A school teacher, an undergraduate lecturer, a supervisor. Those comments stick, sometimes for decades.
There is no one ideal posture that you should take and maintain for the full working day. Instead, the best posture is actually a series of different positions. At home, you already have a range of furniture and spaces available to you, so it’s easier to switch it up. Changing how you sit every so often, even if it’s just moving chairs every few hours, can make a huge different to your comfort and mobility. Move from the desk to the sofa and back again, or out to the balcony. Stand at the breakfast bar, or use that treadmill or stationary bike in the living room.
Your brain is not seperate from your body. Your brain is an organ of your body, and it requires energy, hydration, blood flow and rest.
I can easily see how theory that is wrapped up in liberation, that sees and tries to help people in pain, can be understood as ‘healing’. I can see how philosophy that emerges out of the lived experiences of marginalised groups, allowing them to be seen and heard and valued, would be ‘healing’. But what about other kinds of theory?
I am a massive fan of writing luxuries. Somehow the beautiful pencil or the diffuser scent or the ideal snack makes an outsized difference to how excited I am to sit at my keyboard. Maybe it’s a bourgeois trick, and maybe it’s self-care, and maybe it works for me and anything that works is worth exploring.
This one is going to be a lot of messy thinking aloud about the place of writing and self-care. There will be Latin and Greek! There will be Lorde and Foucault! If you don’t like theory, run very fast in another direction. If you do like theory–this will be a bloggy exemplar of thinking with, not a tight conclusion, and I’d love to talk to you about it!
So often academic reading is experienced as a chore, or an anxiety, or an extractive industry. You might skim, mine or categorise your reading. You might read to critique, to look for the gaps. Perhaps you are looking forward to the day when machine learning tools can do your reading for you. Perhaps you would like to keep up with the wider reading in your field, but don’t feel like you have time. All of these mean that we often have a fraught relationship with reading.
Join me for an event on 21 June on Writing Well / Being Well in Academia, with my series editor Narelle Lemon (Swinburne University) as
