It’s been ages since I’ve been here. I could blame it on COVID-19 and lock-down and being out of routine but the truth is, my head has been fully in the research.
This is what happens when you and your project are getting along. You start to figure things out. You get focused. You stop worrying so much about things and become fully immersed, getting it done.
What am I up to?
Well, I have collected my data—aka written my poetry collection—and am now in the process of thinking through the discoveries I have made.
As I wrote, I asked myself ‘how is this allowing me to access my trauma?’. I kept track of the insights I had along the way and assumed that writing the exegesis would just be a summary of that. I was delightfully wrong.
The exegesis has been an amazing journey of academic writing—still is an amazing journey as I’m only half way. Now that I am putting my findings into an academic context, more and more begins to emerge. Things I didn’t think were possible are revealing themselves.
It’s all very exciting…and tiring.
Researching trauma wears a person down. Actually, research itself wears a person out. So much reading and thinking and paying attention!
You pull together all sorts of things only to unravel them again on finding something new.
I’m not complaining. This is my natural bent. I can’t help but find everything interesting for just being itself. Ideas and concepts light my brain up and give me much to ponder.
I didn’t think I would enjoy academic writing. All of those quotes and everything. But it seems that there is a great deal of pleasure to be had writing about other people’s ideas, drawing connections and finding new things.
It’s a myth that greatness belongs to the individual. Great work is always the product of the person and the sum of their connections. The more purposeful and deliberate we are about our connections, the more it appears that greatness is ours alone. But we are wrong. True greatness is a collective effort. Together we can do much, much more than what we are capable of alone. That is why research always begins with the work of others.
My poetry collection stands on its own but it isn’t the product of only me. I am closely supported and mentored. I know when a poem is working and when it is not because I have an expert who is telling me the truth about what they are seeing. My supervisor directs me to the work of others, both poets and theorists, and expects that I am seeking to improve myself.
We all have things we can learn from each other, if we can humble ourselves enough to learn it.
This Writer's Life 