8 June, 2008 | 2 Comments

My reading on Friday went swimmingly. I was so nervous though — I thought I was going to hyperventilate in front of everyone. My friends and my advisor said they couldn’t tell I was nervous at all. I hope they weren’t lying.

It was a packed room — the head of the department was there and lots of faculty, plus students. Part of my novel deals with teenage girls, so in the chapter I read there was discussion of boob size and stuff like that. Reading this in front of all these people was a bit embarrassing, to be honest.

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5 June, 2008 | 8 Comments

Anglofille had her PhD upgrade today. Anglofille totally kicked ass.

I have written about the “upgrade” in two previous posts. It’s a big deal. It’s been looming large over my life for months now. Getting all the materials together has side-tracked me from my novel in a big way, but the upgrade is a necessary evil. They have to evaluate your work to be sure you can handle doing a full PhD — if you pass, you are “upgraded” to full PhD status from MPhil status. So now I am a real PhD student. Ahhhhh.

Tomorrow there is a conference for the whole department, where the upgraded students will present their work. I am going to read a chapter from my novel. I am the only fiction writer who has upgraded, so I’m the only one who will be reading from a novel-in-progress. Everyone else will be reading scholarly stuff. The chapter I’m reading has a few naughty words in it and ends with a line about a guy in prison masturbating, so I hope I don’t ruin this whole dignified affair. Everyone will think I’m a total slut.

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17 May, 2008 | 3 Comments

Thanks for your comments and emails regarding my PhD upgrading! I appreciate everyone’s support. I got everything submitted yesterday. I won’t know until the beginning of June whether I passed or not, but I will try not to think about it too much.

I think it’ll take me a few days to get back on track with my work. I feel as if there’s a big hole in my life suddenly. This upgrading deadline has been looming over me for months and it’s weird to have it behind me now. I’m not quite sure what to do with myself! This doesn’t mean I don’t have tons of work to do. I have even more work ahead of me than I realized. As part of the upgrade, I had to make detailed outlines of my dissertation and also submit a timeline for completion. Seeing it all written down was a wake-up call. I was aiming to finish in September 2009, but now I think December 2009 is more realistic. I have so much work to do it’s overwhelming. What’s worse is that I’ve wasted a lot of time, which is making me kick myself, but all I can do now is move forward, slowly but surely…

13 May, 2008 | 5 Comments

You probably won’t hear from me again until this weekend. I have the deadline for my PhD upgrade on Friday and I still have massive amounts of work to do. If I stay up until 3:00 a.m. each night, I might just make it.

Right about now I’m starting to wonder if it was smart to choose Fight Club as one of the novels I’m examining for the academic part of my dissertation. I could have chosen Jane Austen or something. What is wrong with me?

Fight Club has lines like this:

“It’s easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.”

or this:

“Everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash. Anything you’re ever proud of will be thrown away.”

I also get to write about the fear of castration and all sorts of fun things. This is such a strange subject matter for a feminist like me to be writing about. On the bright side, I’m hoping to be the only person in the history of my university to submit a dissertation with the sentence “F–k Martha Stewart” in it. Fingers crossed.

9 May, 2008 | 1 Comment

An update to my previous rant…

Today I met with my supervisor, a well-respected novelist. She read three of my chapters this week and she said, regarding my concerns raised in the previous post:

1) I worry too much.

2) I am writing a novel that is highly publishable.

That’s a good way to end the week, at least.

I am stressed right now because I have to upgrade soon. When you register for a PhD, you are technically an MPhil student. You have to upgrade to full PhD status, usually at the end of your first year. I took a leave of absence at the end of my first year, so I am upgrading now at the end of my second year. At my school, this is a formal affair — I must submit completed chapters, a bibliography, an outline of my dissertation, etc. I must go through a mini-viva and then participate in a conference where I have to give a reading of my work and take questions from the audience.

I am quite nervous about this (duh — as if I wouldn’t be!). My materials must be submitted one week from today and I am frantically racing to get things done. I’m not used to having deadlines like this. It’s a shock to the system, actually. Normally I just email my supervisor when I want a meeting, which is all very laid back. This is major stress now. I’m not in the habit of doing academic writing, either. I have been working on my novel all year but now I must submit academic work for the upgrade in addition to the novel. Academic writing is hard, dammit. Fiction writing is harder, of course, but academic writing uses a different part of the brain. Fiction writers just get to make sh*t up. Now you want me to use citations?

As a result of all this cruel stress, I have not been sleeping well. I have the hugest bags under my eyes to prove it. Plus I’ve had headaches every day. Part of this is thanks to the change in the weather - it’s suddenly quite warm and summery and because of that, the students in the hall where I live have gone berserk and make so much noise outside at night that I can’t sleep. Still, if this little upgrade can impact me like this, imagine what I’ll be like when I actually have to submit my PhD. I may need around-the-clock psychiatric care.

7 May, 2008 | 5 Comments

<start of rant>

Today at a meeting of PhD students, the head of the English department invited us all to submit our CVs so we can be considered for teaching work for the autumn term. Oh, except those of us doing PhDs in creative writing need not apply. Apparently, the students refuse to be taught by anyone who hasn’t already published a novel. After the meeting, I asked him if I should at least submit my CV, you know, just in case something opens up. He said not to bother.

This is the major downside of doing a PhD in the UK, at least in a subject like English. There aren’t many (if any) opportunities to teach, which kinda sucks if you want to have a career as a university lecturer. I mean, what am I paying these people for? I thought it was to train me for my career. Newsflash: PhD students, particularly int’l ones like me, are not just cash machines. If you’re a student in the UK right now, you should know that there’s a good chance your university lecturers haven’t been trained to teach at all. See, that’s the flip side of this idiotic system.

In other news, we also learned today that our department has a very high rate of placing their PhDs in teaching positions. Their high rate of success is…drumroll…50%.

Basically, if I want a teaching career in creative writing (and I’ll have to teach creative writing — given that I’ve specialized, no one will consider me to teach straight English, apparently) then I need to publish my novel. It needs to be published by a reputable publisher and get reviewed well. If I can’t manage to pull this off in the next couple years, I won’t have a career. Then what will I do for a living? I really have no idea. It’s not as if I didn’t know this already. I did. But the stark reality is just hitting me. It’s difficult enough writing a book but now I have to live each day with the knowledge that my whole future is depending on it.

</end of rant>

5 May, 2008 | 5 Comments

I went to a conference recently called Narratives in Transition: Literary and Cultural Change since 1989. I only went because I needed to fill my quota of conferences and seminars for the year, but it turned out to be a fantastic experience. Not only was it super informative, but it felt good to get out of the house and mingle with actual humans. Now that I have become a full-time writer, I am essentially a recluse, which is a bit sad. Note to self: Attend more conferences. Did I mention there were lots of cute thirtysomething English professors there? By “English professor” I don’t mean “professor who is English” but rather “professor who teaches English,” even though they were all English anyway.

During one of the many coffee breaks (where I ate too much shortbread), one of these gents taught me how to pronounce Toibin, as in Colm Toibin, the Irish writer. The answer is: Toe-bean. Ahhh, one of life’s mysteries solved. [There was still, however, much disagreement over how to pronounce Coetzee. I'm getting tired of this debate. I suggest someone get Coetzee's phone number and call him. He'd either answer the phone (doubtful) or even better, his voicemail would pick up: "Hello, this is J.M. ---. I'm not home right now, please leave a message." Problem solved.]

Anyway, on to the substance of the conference. There was a lot of discussion regarding narratives of trauma. I am particularly interested in this, since the narrator of my novel has suffered a trauma and it’s difficult to portray this in a way that is not self-pitying. While the conference was primarily academic in that it was aimed at scholars, not practitioners of creative writing like me, I got many good ideas and insights into my own work.

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28 April, 2008 | Comments

Just received and excerpted below for your reading pleasure. This is a ‘welcome back’ message for students returning from the month-long spring break. PhD students didn’t get a spring break, so this is really for those lazy undergrads and master’s students (ha!):

We hope you are all well-rested and as happy as any student can be with the prospect of exams looming…

We would also like to remind you to continue to be vigilant and take care of yourself when in the locality off-campus. There have been a number of incidents reported to us involving one particular group of local youths whose general anti-social behaviour includes harassing students…

Once exams are over, we are sure you will have a seriously good time, but may we draw your attention to the guidelines for responsible partying to make sure your well-earned relaxation doesn’t cause any additional local tension…

So very British.

19 March, 2008 | 5 Comments

As of today I am a full-time writer. This morning I finished up the lingering teaching duties I had and now I am free. Free!

Gulp.

This was a big decision for me, to quit teaching and focus on school full-time, which essentially means full-time novel writing. Once again…gulp.

This academic year I’ve taken on too many responsibilities. The teaching entailed 13 hours a week of actual teaching time, not including lesson prep and marking. I also work in the hall of residence (in exchange for rent) and I still work for the American company (which I realize I never explained after my cryptic post last December). That’s three jobs. What was I thinking? What got lost in all of this is that little thing known as my PhD. You know, the PhD, otherwise known as the whole reason I came to England and what I’ll be paying off until I’m 96. Oh yeah, that.

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2 February, 2008 | 5 Comments

Today I went with a friend to a literary seminar. We listened to two professors each give a paper. Sometimes at these events, I often wonder if the whole pursuit of academic literary study at this level is pointless. What are we really contributing to society? Nothing. People are writing dissertations on the role of postage stamps in the work of Anne Bronte or how often the color yellow appears in the poetry of Ezra Pound. Okay, these examples are absurd but not necessarily too far off the mark in some cases. We’re just speaking to other academics and students in our little bubble of minutiae and accomplishing nothing except churning out more academics who will write more crap.

During the discussion that followed the lectures, a student raised the issue of how a capitalist society creates work for the “surplus educated.” Are all of us doing PhDs in the humanities the “surplus educated”? I wonder. I know this is a horrible attitude for someone doing a PhD in English to have, but this is part of the reason I switched to doing creative writing. I’d rather attempt to create art than just dissect the art that others have created. It gives me more of a sense of purpose.

To illustrate my point, during the seminar there was a man outside who began screaming. For about ten to fifteen minutes he was yelling something over and over again. To me it sounded like he was screaming “Help!” Everyone in the seminar just ignored the sound of this man from outside, though a few of us were laughing at him. I really did wonder if he’d been stabbed or something, though I didn’t get up to look out the window. Afterwards my friend said this just underscores how detached literary studies can be from the “real world.” We’re discussing ethics in literature and we want to shut the window so we can’t hear the man outside screaming for help.

4 December, 2007 | Enter your password to view comments

21 November, 2007 | Comments

I was just up at King’s Cross and while I was there I spotted a member of the English faculty from my university. I approached him with the intent of saying hello, but as I got closer I realized it was a homeless person. Not a difficult mistake to make, I can assure you.

29 October, 2007 | 4 Comments

Today one of my PhD supervisors pointed out that the character in my novel is never happy. She is always sad. So now I need to write a chapter in which she steps off the Misery Express for a moment or two to enjoy life. Except there’s not much to enjoy in her life, what with all the psychological torture, alienation, loneliness, religious fanaticism, sexism, divorce, depression, abortion, terrorism and ultimately the death of her one true friend and companion, her sister the stripper and high-priced whore.

Hmmm. I think this reflects poorly on me and my outlook on life. I’ve learned recently that happiness is necessary, that it’s possible, that it can be just as meaningful as angst or pain. I don’t know how to write about happiness in my fiction yet, but I need to try. I need to add a little joy to this narrator’s life, a little hope. I owe it to the poor ol’ girl..and to myself.

24 October, 2007 | 6 Comments

Random movie line to describe my mood: Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue…

You know, there are days when I don’t think of myself as a teacher, but rather as a referee between dueling groups of Russians. The class I teach is divided between Russian and Chinese students mostly. The Chinese students do their work and don’t give me any guff. The Russians, meanwhile, are a handful. They talk continuously throughout class. They try to tell me how to do my job. Today I gave the class a vocabulary test and the Russian boys were betting one another money to see who’d get the highest score on the test. And they were totally trash talking each other before the test. In all my years as a student and a teacher, I’ve never seen anything like it.

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9 October, 2007 | 8 Comments

Me: “Just because I am writing on the board does not mean I can’t hear you talking to your friends and laughing behind my back. Unlike most teachers you’ve known, I can still hear you when I turn around. I have magical superpowers.”

I wonder how you say bitch in Russian and Kazakh and Korean and Chinese? ‘Cuz I know they were all thinking it.

2 October, 2007 | 7 Comments

As of last week, I am in full-time PhD mode again. I don’t think I ever shared the good news about my PhD, did I? As most of you know, after the first year of my studies, I took time off and went to Paris. I wasn’t feeling passionate about the topic I had chosen for my dissertation. More than that, when I started this PhD lark, I didn’t fully understand what I was getting myself into. In hindsight, I hadn’t considered carefully enough whether I was well-suited for this kind of academic work. At heart, I am a very creative and intuitive person. I’m a smart gal, but I’m not necessarily an academic in the traditional sense. Make no mistake, I don’t aspire to be that. That’s kind of odd for a PhD student, but there you go.

I was aware of the fact that the English department at my school offered a PhD in creative writing, but it’s a new thing and wasn’t an option when I applied. I was quite disappointed when I found out about this, because it seemed like the perfect avenue for me. Still, I didn’t inquire about changing when I found out, I just kept plodding along on the traditional English PhD that I was doing. My thought process: Changing is hard, I’ll feel like a quitter, I like my supervisor, blah blah blah. Sometimes we are our own worst enemy. Sometimes we undermine our own chances for success. Yes, that was me. But this past February in Paris when I was trying to figure out the mess that was my life, I suddenly got a lot of clarity about what I wanted to do. It became clear to me that I needed to do everything in my power to change to the creative writing PhD. It was the right path for me, that much was blindingly obvious.

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24 September, 2007 | 4 Comments

Yesterday I wrote about the heartwarming sight of parents moving their children into the hall of residence where I live and work. Turns out that while I was writing that post — literally — the neighborhood thieves were hard at work too, smashing windows in the parents’ aforementioned Mercedes, Range Rovers et al. and swiping laptops.

What’s moving day without a few tears, shards of glass and a visit from the police? All I can say is, Welcome to the neighborhood, kiddies!

In happier news, this morning I was passing by a used bookshop and saw on their display table outside a sparkling Virago edition of Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel The Enchanted April for only £1.95. Score!

23 September, 2007 | Comments

Happy first day of autumn! I love how the British always say autumn. Americans tend to say fall, which is just wrong. Autumn is such a beautiful word.

[For readers in the Southern Hemisphere, happy spring!]

The students are moving into the hall today! Right now out my window I can see a string of parental cars double and triple parked. [At least half of these cars are of the Mercedes/Beamer/Range Rover/Jaguar variety. Do you have to be rich to attend a London uni and live in hall? I have no idea. Thank goodness I don't have to pay rent on this place.]

Most London colleges start this week, including mine. Forget January — this is when the new year starts. This time of year is always very exciting for me. Autumn. School supplies. Beginnings.

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19 September, 2007 | 1 Comment

Last week my summer job teaching at the university ended and I already lined up another job! I feel special. I don’t know why people in London are always clamoring for my services, but I’m not complaining. I feel sad the university job is finished (they only need extra part-time staff during the peak summer period), but I found a job at a little college run by a major language school, teaching essay writing and other academic skills to international students. I think it’ll be fun.

Another reason I’m sad the university job is over is because being a part-time instructor (or what Americans call an adjunct) at a British university pays a motherload. The job I had teaching for the university here pays more than any job I’ve ever hard before in my life. Not only that, but get this. Because of an EU directive, part-timers get one hour of holiday pay for every twelve hours of teaching. So I’ve just raked in several hundred pounds in holiday pay for what was a two-month job.

Contrast this with my American job. I’ve been working part-time for this company for nearly three years; earlier this year I got a promotion, so that shows I do good work. What benefits have I gotten during these three years of hard work? Not one single solitary cent. Zilch. Nothing. And if I complained about this (as people have), they’d tell me that if I don’t like it, they’ll just replace me with someone else. This is really just a reflection of the American employment situation in general, particularly for those working part-time, which is really a way for employers to avoid providing health insurance. In every field I’ve ever worked in, I’ve been paid peanuts and worked to death.

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22 August, 2007 | 5 Comments

Today I told two of my fellow instructors at the university that I am quite irritated with one of the classes I’m teaching. The students chat the whole time and ignore my requests that they be quiet and pay attention. My two fellow instructors — both raised in Eastern Europe — said they didn’t have that problem, that their students were too scared to ever misbehave. One of them said to me, “Your problem is that you’re too nice.”

The other teacher said, “No, her problem is that she wasn’t raised under a totalitarian regime.”

True enough. One of them offered to switch classes with me for the day. He said after he was done with my class, they’d never act up again. Besides just being generally scary, he engages in other kinds of psychological warfare too. For example, since we’re teaching English to foreigners, he said most of his example sentences involve violence.

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