Writing Wednesday: Kilns, NDQ, and Finishing a Book

One of my not-so-secret habits is that I write three days a week in a little notebook. The notebook isn’t where I write my most personal thoughts (I learned a long time ago that deeply personal thoughts are more or less a waste of my scant supply of cognition), but rather a secret blog where I write about things that I I’m working on BEFORE I’m working on them.

I’m going to pull back the curtain a bit and show you two things from my notebook (and then admit that I need to finish my #@$% book).

Thing the First

For anyone following this blog, you know that I should be working more on stuff from Polis this fall than I have been. Like a student who tries to make up for all the missed readings and assignments in the final week of the semester, I’m going to invest in Polis this December. Because of some (un?)expected delays in moving our larger book length publications forward, I am going to write a traditional archaeological article on the kiln area in the area of E.F2 at Polis.

For those in need of a refresher, we gave a paper last year at ASOR on this area and the kiln. The area features three interesting features. First, there is the beehive shaped kiln which appears to have been cut into the sloping sides of a ravine through the area. Second, the kiln appears to have been filled in perhaps as part of a terracing operation, and on the resulting level terrace is a tile lined levigation pool and a ceramic workshop. Finally, from levels above the levigation pool perhaps associated with the leveling fill of the later Early Christian basilica at the site, there was a deposit of earlier Roman lamp fragments. What made these fragments unusual is that they were almost all from a single type of lamp and many were from the same mould. Moreover, some of them were unused. The distinctive and discrete character of this lamp assemblage become more obvious when compared to lamp fragments across the area which represent far more variation and diversity than those found in the trench associated with the kiln and levigation pool. This hints that the lamps found in the basilica leveling fills might be from a context where we would expect a uniformity of lamp types such as a context associated with production.

My plan is to write this to submit to BASOR in the spring. BASOR has always been on my bucket list of journals and it would be fun to see something published there after serving so many years on the ASOR Committee on Publications.

Thing the Second

I’m getting pretty excited to formulate an argument for a short piece that I’m writing on the early history of NDQ. Rather than being a deep dive in the UND archives (which would be a good idea at some point), this article will look to situate NDQ in history of regional “little magazines.” My two main points of comparison will be The Midland and Frontier both of which are loosely contemporary with NDQ, but decidedly more grounded in modernism and literature rather than the more progressive leaning of the Quarterly.

Here two major secondary works will be my touchstones. Robert Dorman’s Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920-1945 (1993) and Molly Rozum’s Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U. S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies (2021). Both books trace the development of particular regionalist tendencies in the early 20th century (with Rozum’s book more deeply rooted in the experience of the Northern Plains). These regionalist tendencies became a space to negotiate the optimism associated with the rapid pace of cosmopolitan modernization (at the dawn of petromodernity and in the shadow of the 1893 World’s Fair) and concerns associated with this speed of the modern world and its tendency to fragment, shatter, and homogenize all experiences before its relentless pace. In short, regionalism became a key arena for  modernization and its discontents to play out. This feels to me like an exciting article to write and is my winter writing project.

Thing the Third

Then, there’s reality. I’m neck deep in a book project and while these other projects are simmering. As much as I work to remind myself that I should shoot the wolf closest to the sled, my attention it dragged elsewhere.

That said, I’ve re-read the first chapter and made some solid revisions to it. Chapter two beckons and as I dig deeper into the book and writing the little summative introductions to each chapter has proven to be quite rewarding. Maybe next week, I’ll share some of them with you as I gain momentum toward my November deadline. For now, I have to keep the distant wolves at bay through my dedication to dissuading the closest wolf from having me for dinner.