Writing Wednesday: Rolling the Rock

At some point, someone told me that writing was like rolling a rock up a hill. Maybe the idea was to invoke the Sisyphus myth or, more optimistically, to suggest that at some point the rock crosses the top of the hill and starts to roll on its own momentum. Both seem apt, but the former seems more common. 

One of my writerly habits is to use winter and summer research leave to start projects and produce writing. Then, once the semester is upon me, to tidy up the words that I’ve produced and turn it into something I can submit. Sometimes, as readers of this blog may recognize, my winter or summer writing spills over into my semester work. In other cases, reviews take less or more time than expected causing me to have to pivot abruptly to handle a request. As a result, projects that have been rolled most of the way up the hill have stalled and I find myself juggling multiple projects at the same time (as well as new smaller writing adventures that emerge in the semester’s interstices). 

Right now, I have three projects underway and I need to calm my mind enough to get through them all this semester.

1. The Kiln at Polis. My main winter project was a short paper on the kiln in the area of E.F2 at Polis. The final post of this was here and you can track back through this post to earlier parts of this article. Right now, we have completed a draft of the text and a draft of the associated catalogue. All I need to do really is to put in all together into something that is a bit more polished, create the bibliography, and organize the figures.

2. The Early History of NDQ. Readers of this blog know that I’m working on a chapter for the Edinburgh Companion to the Regional Magazine on the first 20+ years of North Dakota Quarterly. The final section of this text basically fizzled out which may be for the best because my chapter is well over the word length limit. I wanted to try to weave into the history of NDQ, the story of the “domestication” of the rural radical tradition in the institutions of the state. In North Dakota this manifest itself in the state bank, the state grain mill, and the universities which combined to create a counter balance to industrial interests of “the East” (which might just be Minneapolis or Chicago!). This may be a bridge too far for such a short article and best reduced to a couple of suggestive sentences rather than full explication.

3. Archaeology, Photography, and Oil. Two weeks ago, I heard that the book manuscript that I submitted was accepted for publication. The reviewers offered substantive and helpful reviews which will take some time to incorporate. A key review was that I needed to rethink how I presented the photographs in the volume. Since the photographs are the entire point, this will involve less a reassessment of my argument and more a reappraisal of the number of photographs, their size, and their organization. I have an idea that I can index the photographs with a series of chronological (month+year), descriptive, and interpretative terms that will allow viewers to engage with the images in a series of different ways. The designer at the press is currently working how to do this in practice. 

The goal now is to figure out how to prioritize these three projects and keep one of the stones from rolling back down hill and crushing me!