Writing Wednesday: Projects for the Fall

Lately, I’ve struggled a bit to find the enjoyment in writing. I’m not exactly sure what the deal is. Perhaps I’ve been writing too much technical stuff and not enough creative stuff. Maybe I’m just feeling a bit like I’m on a treadmill or writing too far ahead of my reading.

Whatever the reason, I’m struggling to get motivated to do something that I fear will be a drudgery. To help my precarious state of mind, I’ve signed up for a writing group with the idea that maybe the social aspect of writing will help me get motivated again. It should be timely too boot. I have five writing projects this fall. If the prospect of writing for pleasure fails to motivate me, deadlines will have to suffice.

Here are my writing project (and by extension what you’ll be reading on this blog over the next couple of months):

1. Polis I. I’ve written most of my section of the first Polis volume which is due to the publisher by the first of the year, but I’ve still offered to write the conclusion. In some ways, I’m in a holding pattern until I see the various parts of the book, but it is on the schedule.

2. Grants. I have two grant proposals: one for Polis and one for our work in Greece. These are nice things to write because they get me working toward next summer’s fieldwork and thinking through how to articulate our historical and archaeological questions. More than that, neither of these are particularly long grant applications (I think they’re both about 1000 words).

3. Walls as Place Paper for Michigan State. I’ve been reading about walls lately and thinking about ways to talk about the Hexamilion Wall. Right now, I want to do something that emphasizes how the Hexamilion is not a border wall (in a traditional sense of, say, Hadrian’s wall or the Anastasian Walls in Thrace). Perhaps it served to protect both the Peloponnesus as well as a corridor between the mass of Mt. Oneion and the Isthmus through which traffic could move to Corinth and to the city’s western ports.

More than that, over its life, the wall became a landmark and a material asset for communities in the region. The Roman bath at Isthmia which forms part of the southern face of the wall appears to have undergone adaptation that suggests the continued use of the structure for centuries after the bath itself went out of use. While the reuse of monumental buildings in the countryside is not particularly unusual in Greece, it does suggest that the afterlife of the bath and the ongoing presence of the wall created new opportunities for settlement.

This is not particularly profound, but it is work in progress!     

4. City of Work Paper for ASOR. Scott Moore, Nancy Serwint, and I are giving a paper at ASOR in November and I will write the first draft. The goal of the paper is to dig into some of the evidence for industrial activities at the area of E.F2 at Polis with particular attention to the lamp deposit. In particular, I want to toy around with the argument for the construction of industrial terraces on either side of the drainage that runs through the area and connect one of these terracing activities with a unique deposit of lamps. These terraces not only created flat surfaces for buildings, but also produced odd opportunities for the reuse of earlier industrial remains for new (if hard to understand) functions. 

5. Pseudoarchaeology Paper for ASOR. Finally, I’m giving a very short paper on pseudoarchaeology for a workshop session at ASOR. This will be a nice opportunity to present some of my ideas and get some feedback. I also should be fun.