Journal 10 Oct 2022

I wasn’t going to try to blog for a bit. The material I had scheduled has dried up and I haven’t prepared any more. I was feeling a bit of pressure with increasing deadlines in my paid work and the ramping up of my Arts Council England project to the writing practice phase when we were hit hard with Covid infections. I’m feeling angry that the deemed-on-our-behalf healthy and working population haven’t been offered an autumn booster when it was inevitable that all the nasty viruses would be rampant as soon as schools and universities were back in action. By the same measure I’m grateful I had 3 jabs in 2021, even if their efficacy has waned as I suspect my infection may have been severe enough to warrant hospitalisation had I had no protection at all. I’m recovering a tiny bit more every day, but progress is slow and I am significantly weakened. 

On top of that my mum had an accident and needed emergency surgery on a fractured hip. I’ve been very anxious about such a scenario for some time as her mobility wasn’t great. No being able to immediately go and help out was upsetting. As it is, I worry I’ve travelled too soon, but we’re in a time of no restrictions, an emphasis on hand-hygiene and little concern with where you put your face germs. On my flight to Belfast, as far as I can tell, it’s just me and a couple of elderly Daily Mail readers wearing masks. I don’t know where to put that information; it simply is what it is.

I’m making myself write to force myself out of the temptation to give up. It’s surprising what a strong wave of depressive and anxious feelings can hit with Covid. It’s quite scary as it is and seems easy to spiral into despair rather than the less significant feeling sorry for yourself that can happen with colds and flu. I feel determined to fight those feelings. I can’t make them go away but I can force myself to do things regardless. I worked so hard to drag myself out of debilitating depression, anxiety and PTSD from my last experiences in academia in 2016–17. I’ve achieved too much in 2022 to give up. Things finally felt on track and I owe it to myself and my work to fight. Plus I do love what I’m doing. I feel excited by and scared of it in a positive way, and I’m lucky for that. It’s a healthy distraction and it’s important to keep flexing the writing and editing muscles, so even if I just use this to journal and keep myself accountable then that’s something.  

Where I’m at with ACE is I managed from my sick bed to submit draft work of likely questionable quality to a memoir writing competition. My practice is experimenting with my own blend of memoir and art writing with a foundation of academic research that maintains a personal/personable tone. I’m seeing if the research journey interwoven with personal experiences can make for a good yarn. If you’re aware of auto-theory, it is something along those lines and inspired by auto-theoretical approaches, but does not exactly fit the category. 

Entering competitions can be a good way of having your work read and to raise awareness of your existence to potential readers and publishers. I feel it might also be good to put in my report to ACE due in late February/March that will hopefully secure the remaining 10% of any grant. It gives me deadlines, and sure, you never know what will come of it. My academic book was a competition winner so I know first-hand there’s no reason not to try.

I’m now at a point where I need to form a schedule to stick to. I was progressing with interviewing a particular person which I now must reschedule, and I have some mentorship in place of a course on creative non-fiction I was due to be completing around now but it didn’t run because of under-subscription. Instead, the instructor has been giving me the equivalent in mentoring – the money was budgeted training and this has actually worked out well as the biography writing course I took in June and July had me basically ready to get going. Sam has been supportive, encouraging and wonderfully direct in his feedback on my scribbles and I need to update him properly and get back on track.  

I’ve jotted this during my 30-minute flight to Belfast. It feels good to use snatches of time to do what I can. In the airport I also managed to read through an academic chapter also on my Treasures research in a book that will hopefully be published later this year or early next. I’m happy with how it reads and it’s had positive feedback in editing and peer review. I’ve had a complete wobble of confidence lately and the imposter syndrome is very strong with this one. I keep reminding myself of the evidence I have that I’m doing okay, my writing skills have a good basis, and I have interesting stories to tell. It might seem arrogant, but reading over my own research reminds me of that and encourages me that I’m not the only one who thinks so. It’s in there and I can do this.

Quite a useful exercise, and one which highlights the glacial nature of academic publishing, was checking that final submission version of my chapter in preparation for the manuscript going to typesetting. The book is about theatricality in the arts and I’ve writing about staging mythologies in Damien Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. I think my initial version was submitted in 2018. Usual delays lengthened by Covid mean it’s only getting ready for the actual book production now. It’s been good to read it over again and see what I’m capable of. It’s quite relaxed compared to how I prepared my research publications before and a voice is in there somewhere. It’s pretty thoroughly researched across a wide range of topics, which I feel proud of.  

It’s also been interesting reading my chapter after finishing reading a book called Mother Tongues by Helena Drysdale. In the late 1990s she along with her husband and two young daughters travelled around Europe in a camper van for 18 months while she sought out and learned first-hand about minority peoples and languages. Her writing is matter-of-fact and research-based while being personal and including the humorous and sad interjections from her children. It was a suggested text for the course I ended up not being able to take and, if you swap out the linguistics for critical engagement with art, it’s close to what I’m trying to develop. 

Reading my own work with critical distance and immediately after this book felt continuous, from which I take some heart. It’s a book I recommend reading as much as if you’re a parent of young children for the candidly told experiences of early parenthood as for the fascinating schlep around the continent. It has geed me on to keep up with learning Irish – we keep languages alive by learning them, speaking them and loving them. The final chapter in Drysdale’s book was about Breton, a Celtic language spoken in Brittany, France. It has distant connections to Welsh and Cornish, and in the lists of example words I found some striking similarities with Irish (which does not feature in the book), not least because the language stems from the land and place names inspired by their geographical features have been meaninglessly Frankicised (which isn’t a word but should be) in the same way Irish place names (Béal Feirste, mouth of the River Farset) have been abstracted by English (Belfast). But read it because my goodness is it well written. It’s become a real inspiration to me all round.

Fittingly (and all being well for the travel) I’m planning to give my copy to my linguist friend Jenn whose research has involved indigenous and first-nation languages in Canada and who currently teaches in Switzerland (so I’m dusting off my GCSE French). This is the same friend I visited in Venice and saw the Hirst show with. I do enjoy consistent threads.

 

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