When my new book came out this past fall, I thanked those students by name in the acknowledgments section, and offered a copy to each of them. I revised the course and taught it again a year later, with similarly enthusiastic students. If you are feeling low about your job, write something and send it out to be published.īut my course filled up, and students seemed to legitimately love participating in my research. Once you have a publishing deadline, or even a sign of interest from an editor about an idea you’ve pitched, you have a concrete reason to opt out of bothersome extraneous duties or superfluous obligations. On a very practical level: Writing deadlines can get you out of meetings, and get you through many a long night. You never know who will read it, but they won’t get the chance unless you get published. It may take three or 10 tries, but once the piece is published, you will experience a little relief. If you are feeling low about your job, write something and send it out to be published. It does feel good - even if the feeling is fleeting - to be able to send something you’ve published to friends, family members, and mentors, and say, “Look, I made this thing.” At some point along the way in this profession, you were drawn to the idea of writing or documenting your work, right? Don’t forget that. What follows are my own thoughts on why we might embrace - rather than flinch at - the slogan of “publish or perish.” And they are reasons that go beyond matters of promotion or remuneration. And by that I mean all the various processes and stages of publishing - writing and sending out my own essays, bringing book projects gradually to print, even helping other people to pitch ideas and get their work published.Īnyone who has worked on a book probably recalls that terrible feeling when you are so close to the project - to all the chapters, arguments, paragraphs, sentences, and words - that “the book” resembles a massive mound of mush in the brain, and it is inconceivable that it could ever exist as a simple bound thing that someone might read. Throughout my career so far, I can sincerely say that I have loved to publish. You can also create a relationship that can result in future opportunities to publish more work. It’s just that there are so many great smaller venues now looking for good content, and if you’re not snooty, you can help those places by publishing recent work in an inviting, grateful atmosphere. Not that I’m knocking scholarly journals with rich histories of gradually changing fields, or those cliquish edgy ones that come on the scene only to make important timely interventions. I’ve also been lucky to have my academic home at a university that does not police pretentious standards in terms of print versus online, top-tier versus so-called lower-tier journals. I had wonderful mentors who gave me publishing tips and encouraged me to send out my work. I have benefited from the flourishing of online, interdisciplinary journals, sites, and magazines - and the wide audiences that can come along with those outlets. And over the years I have culled posts from my blog for sections of my books. My blog posts are increasingly sparse these days, but I think the blog helped me get used to the practice of writing (and editing) short posts and essays that I could “publish.” I also used the blog as a place to post my conference papers and other written talks - things that never would have seen the light of day otherwise. I also started my own blog: What is Literature. But I kept at it and eventually found ways and places to get published.Įach publication seemed to lead to a new one - or at least the possibility of a new one. Of course, when I sent out my first journal articles, I received terse rejections with blistering anonymous reader reports attached. It felt good to see my writing out there - even in the modest format of a brief review of someone else’s more substantial work. My first publications as a graduate student were a couple of book reviews. It can actually be a spirited affirmation of a certain kind of academic life. It doesn’t have to be a threat or a gloomy mandate to live or die under. I have come to think about “publish or perish” in an entirely new light. Now, as an associate professor, it recently occurred to me that I don’t think that way anymore, and haven’t in a long while. It made publishing sound awful (at best, a miserable fate to be endured) and necessary. In graduate school, when I first heard the saying “publish or perish,” I remember it uttered as a dire warning: If you want to make it as a professor, you have to publish, publish, publish - and never stop, no matter what.
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