Process

Walt Hunter

Contributors

Past Process

Walt Hunter

This column for Process is about poetry that tries to make sense of sharing time together as it passes. For that I turn to John Ashbery, about whom I have never been willing or able to write, except in a very brief and unsatisfying conclusion to...

Tropical Harlem

Akua Banful

Sitting in my apartment, in parks, and on my roof, I have tried to keep track of the ebb and flow of the seasons in the relentless monotony of a socially distanced New York. Keeping track has been made all the more difficult by the seasonal...

Miscasting Identity: Context as Cause

Janani Ambikapathy

One of the frustrating things about academic writing is the categories set by the institution. These categories slice through histories to abstract people, epochs, and bodies of knowledge from their context and settle them deep into the belly of...

Movement Literacy

Patty Argyrides, Meindert Peters

In his latest work, contemporary choreographer William Forsythe tries to create, in his own words, a “short-term literacy” in his audience. The piece begins without music in order to isolate the individual phrases of movement: “it might be...

Poetry from Afar: Distant Reading, Global Poetics, and the Digital Humanities

Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu

Fig 1. “Deconstructing poetry with wind. To use nature to physically deconstruct a well-known poem by letting words individually blow in the breeze, when released from the tree. To have the public involved in reconstructing the poem by catching/...

Beginning Further Back: Dylan Thomas’s Early Work

Imogen Cassels

To begin at the beginning is a cliché, Dylan Thomas knew, worth opening with, and also a task more difficult than it seems.

The Aura of Autographs

Hunter Dukes

Always mornings. Early. And there should be coffee. Breakfast will come later, but the best hours are now—when the world is still blanketed, the mind “puddled in dream melt.” [1] There are particular parameters for the page. The margins must be...

Writing the Senior Thesis: A Conversation

Jacquelyn Ardam, Cole Walsh

In this conversation about Process, Jacquelyn Ardam and her undergraduate advisee, Cole Walsh, demystify the senior thesis. Cole’s thesis, “Mak[ing] Bright the Arrows: Recovering the Political Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay,” examines the...

On Not Knowing How to Dance

Walt Hunter

It’s rare to read an account of the process of learning about a new artform or medium from the beginning. Maybe because, at least for me, it’s hard to remember the first time I read a poem or a novel or saw a painting or heard a piece of music....

Opening the Book, Part II

Sarah Dowling, Rebecca Colesworthy, Helen Rydstrand, Alix Beeston

This second batch of writers on the process of finishing their books ranges from meditations on the situatedness of academic writing to blow-by-blow descriptions of the publication process to a call for more inventive and ethical ways of...

Opening the Book, Part 1

Michaela Bronstein, Chad Bennett, Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Janine Utell

For this two-part installment of Process, I asked eight scholars who had just finished a book—their first or their fourth—to write informally about their experience. Conferences often feature roundtables about writing and publishing, but I...

A Dialogue in Process

Johanna Winant, Walt Hunter

This summer, the modernist scholar Johanna Winant and I found ourselves working on a number of converging projects, from book chapters to essays on Stanley Cavell’s philosophy and Donald Hall’s poetry. Below we reflect on the process of writing...

Process Against Progress

Walt Hunter

I’m taking over the Process blog from Lesley Wheeler at the moment when I’m nearly finished the process of writing my first book and am waiting for page proofs from the press.

Eroding Partitions: A Conversation with Jahan Ramazani

Lesley Wheeler

My farewell post for the “Process” column is a brief conversation with Jahan Ramazani , University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia, and a scholar whose work I admire greatly and follow closely. He...

Seeking Anne Spencer

Lesley Wheeler

Archival research possesses a hushed glamor. To realize that Marianne Moore carried around the very book you’re holding—or that Langston Hughes rolled that exact piece of paper into his typewriter late one night and yanked out a poem with the ink...

Writer’s (Wood)block

Olivia Badoi

There is always some degree of confusion when I tell people that I am getting my PhD in English by writing a dissertation about wordless novels. While I’m used to giving my “elevator pitch” to fellow academics, describing my project to people...

How to Do Things with Poetry Criticism, or Scholarship and Justice, Part II

Lesley Wheeler

Some writing changes worlds, for better and for worse. The second executive order signed by President Trump, for example, speeds up environmental reviews “For High Priority Infrastructure Projects” such as the Dakota Access Pipeline. The effects...

Processing the Writing Process

Helen Sword

My process of writing this blog post about the writing process was slow, circuitous, and emotionally fraught. I started out with a clear idea of my overall structure—or so I thought—but ended up abandoning it after several hours of drafting,...

Scholarship and Justice

Lesley Wheeler

The U.S. presidential election of 2016 made many professors think harder about teaching toward a better world. My colleagues and friends found the immediate aftermath especially challenging. If, on November 9th, your students were shocked,...

Teaching/Writing Correspondence, Part I

Lesley Wheeler

If I were Edna St. Vincent Millay, I might begin this letter by describing some bit of local foliage I’d enclosed, its leaves pressed among scrawled endearments. But by the time broadband has advanced enough to transmit an actual crape myrtle...

On Collaboration (or, She Do the Blog in Different Voices)

Lesley Wheeler

Why would a modernism scholar want to write collaboratively? Aren’t solo ventures hard enough? Below are some rejoinders, meditations, and provocations, the first in dramatic form.

Listening to the Noise

Lesley Wheeler

In 2015, the airwaves crackled with debate about the value—or pointlessness—of academic conferences (see, for starters, “The Conference Manifesto” and “A Conference Manifesto for the Rest of Us” ). Yet I love the Modernist Studies Association...

Mar 2, 2016 By: Walt Hunter

The assignment for this column is “process” or, the writing life. How does interesting and inspiring work come to be?