life « Eira Tansey

Posts for the ‘life’ Category

Time Sheets: April 1-September 30, 2024

October 25, 2024

Back in June I wrote about how my relationship with time has changed since I transitioned into self-employment. Reflecting further on this topic, something that’s worth highlighting is how much self-employment revealed the kinds of temporal conditions that I need for productive work. For years at my previous salaried position, I despaired over how difficult it was for me to move forward on many projects. On an intellectual level, I knew that working five days a week on-site in an office that faced constant interruptions and where I was often forced to put out fires of others’ making probably had something to do with feeling like I could never get anything done. My previous position basically had me working in on-call circumstances while expecting me to accomplish deep cognitive work–the exact kind of work that is not conducive for an environment with constant interruptions. But it really took working for myself–where I could control many of the external disruptions–to realize that I wasn’t broken and incapable of doing deep work. I can do a lot of deep work when I am not constantly battling interruptions.

Here is the other thing that I’ve had to unlearn, and it’s hard because even a committed socialist like me has a lot of internalized capitalism: I’ve had to let go of the idea of the 40-hour work week as a proxy for “productivity.” As I laid out in the last post, running a business means not just doing the work that gets you paid (i.e., billable work for clients), but lots and lots of unpaid work you need to do to keep the business running.

There is emerging research and self-reported anecdotes from knowledge workers showing that most individuals engaged in cognitive work have an upper limit to how many “productive” hours they have in a given day. In other words, most people are not only not actually working a “productive” 40 hours a week, most of them cognitively cannot perform deep work for more than 3-5 hours a day, even with ideal circumstances. Trying to do 40 hours of paid client work a week on a regular basis is a fast path to burnout, because then you would have to spend many more hours on top of 40 weekly in order to handle non-billable tasks. For example, AIIP advises allocating between 30-50% of your working hours for the overhead work of running your business.

Indeed, my own meticulous time-tracking I’ve undertaken since transitioning to self-employment underscores that there is a maximum limit to how much work I can do while ensuring I don’t accidentally replicate the cognitive exhaustion (and resentment, and anger, and lack of time for involvement in hobbies) that I routinely experienced in my previous salaried role. This has been super eye-opening. Since self-employed people love to compare numbers, I thought it would be helpful to break down what my average working time looks like, measured across six months. As with all self-employed stuff, assume the usual caveats, disclaimers, and gentle reminders that my numbers may not look like other’s numbers. I feel pretty self-conscious about sharing these numbers. I don’t know if it’s survivor guilt that I’m not grinding as hard as I used to, but I also know that my health and well-being is phenomenally much better right now since I can determine my own working pace.

I use Moxie¹ for time-tracking all of my paid work, and much of my unpaid work. I exported all of my time tracking data from April 1, 2024 through September 30, 2024. Here are some of the major highlights of that time period:

I maintained a heavy workload with an ongoing major client, a second new major client, and engagements with several one-time client projects (speaking engagements, workshops, teaching, etc)
In March I was still recovering from being hospitalized for appendicitis and my father passing away, but was slowly getting back to normal work capacity
In April I traveled to Florida to see extended family
In May I had my interval appendectomy
Over the summer I finished my service on the National Archives Freedom of Information Advisory Committee and was elected to the Society of American Archivists Council
In late summer, my mom was hospitalized multiples times due to a post-surgery infection and I provided significant support to her and my stepfather
I attended the Society of American Archivists (August) and Council of State Archivists (September) annual meetings
I had some other minor health and household things come up that while not catastrophic, were generally annoying and took time and energy to deal with that I would have rather used on literally anything else

Here is how the overall numbers shook out:

Type	Duration (hh:mm:ss)²	Monthly Average (hh:mm:ss)	Percentage
Paid Client Work	344:01:45	57:20:18	65.81%
Unpaid Business Dev/Admin Work	162:18:48	27:03:08	31.05%
Volunteer Work	16:26:35	2:44:26	3.15%
Grand Total	522:47:08	87:07:51

April 1-September 30, 2024 hours tracked

For those of you who like things visually represented, here’s a pie chart:

In some ways, the volunteer work is a bit underreported, because this represents only major current ongoing service commitments, such as my Society of American Archivists Council work, and some of my previous ongoing service work was counted under unpaid business dev/admin work. I strongly expect that this number is going to increase in the future, given that I only just started my Council role a few weeks before the end date of these numbers. Until I was elected to Council, I used to count professional service/volunteer work as part of my general unpaid overhead work, but given the major time commitment of being an SAA Council member, that’s why I recently designated SAA Council work as a totally separate time-tracking category.

Are you curious about how the 162 hours of unpaid overhead/business development/administrative work shakes out? I have those numbers as well!

Memory Rising Overhead/Biz Dev/Admin/Service	Duration (hh:mm:ss)
2024 Accounting and Admin	35:24:44
2024 Business Development	44:20:28
2024 Professional Development	21:20:01
2024 Professional Service	19:07:19
New Deal podcast	42:06:16
Grand Total	162:18:48

April 1-September 30, 2024 hours tracked for business development/overhead/admin

Here’s a little explanation of what’s in each category:

Accounting and administration:
- Updating my bookkeeping and receipts in Quickbooks
- Calculating quarterly estimated taxes
- Reviewing what tasks/projects I have to do over the next week/month
- Triaging my email inbox
Business development:
- Working on my newsletter
- Updating my website
- Attending mostly virtual and sometimes IRL networking coffees/meetups
Professional development:
- Attending webinars
- Meetings with a mentor
- Identifying grants/fellowships I may be eligible for
Professional service:
- Media interviews
- FOIA Advisory Committee meetings
- ALA/SLI National Climate Action Strategy for Libraries
- Society of Ohio Archivists newsletter column
New Deal podcast:
- This is not yet off the ground but it’s a huge goal to launch it in the first half of 2025. Until I a) establish that it’s a project I want to commit to long-term and b) find a funding model for its longevity, I’m counting it as part of my business overhead until I can justify breaking it out into its own category.

Disclosure: this is a free trial affiliate link that gives me a small payment if you try out Moxie. I’m not paid by the company, I’m just a big fan of the software. It’s not perfect, but it meets most of my time tracking/scheduling/project management/proposal drafting needs, and I’ve been using it almost since I started working for myself. ↩︎
hh:mm:ss means hours:minutes:seconds ↩︎

Share your thoughts on this

Money is a renewable resource but time is not

June 7, 2024

Since leaving salaried employment to work for myself, my relationship to time has transformed in ways that are good, bad, and not ugly, but undeniably….weird. The math of salaried employment is relatively straightforward: you trade a relatively consistent amount of your time for financial compensation (which is also why people who routinely work beyond the hours of a normal work week, or take work home with them after their normal office hours, are effectively participating in undermining their own salary).

But when you are self-employed, the math of time and money totally changes. You are no longer earning a dependable, predictable monthly salary. You are bringing in variable amounts of money depending on what you have negotiated with a variety of clients. And unless you have figured out a way to totally standardize every aspect of your business and have a predictable way to bring in a reliable number of reliable clients…the reality is that your monthly revenue is likely to fluctuate. That’s just the nature of running a solo business.

Within the small business world, there is a lot of emphasis on selling your services based on value or as a package, not based on hours/hourly pricing. But the reality is that no matter how you price your work, there are hours being factored in at some point in the equation that translate into the revenue you bring in. If you write a book and then sell it, those hours at the front end will hopefully transform into a book contract, advance, and if you’re really lucky, maybe even royalties if you earn out your advance. If you pitch a consulting or research contract to a client and then they agree to do business with you, then the hours come afterwards to deliver the work so you get paid. Even if you don’t price per hour, savvy business owners have a general sense of how much time something should take, so they don’t accept or negotiate prices that would not bring in enough revenue to pay their bills.

This is where the opportunity cost of time comes in for self-employed people and why it has fundamentally changed my relationship to time and money. Before I entered the wild west of self-employment, I worked for fifteen years in academic libraries as a salaried worker. I commuted on-site five days a week to work normal business hours, with only a few exceptions like the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic and my sabbatical. My monthly paycheck was the same regardless of what was happening at work. If I was on vacation or out sick, was helping to organize a conference or had a rare lull between service commitments, whether the archive was super busy or super quiet, I received the same paycheck each month, and it only changed on an annual basis when either a promotion or union-mandated pay increase and benefits election amounts were used to adjust my salary.

Now, my self-employment math means that there are typically a certain number of hours I need to work every month, with an average hourly rate of X, to ensure I am bringing in enough revenue so that I can:

a) pay my taxes (which are higher than before due to self-employment taxes),
b) pay my business operating expenses (website hosting fees, Zoom license, etc, and also closely track these expenses with receipts and bookkeeping since IRS-approved business expenses reduce your taxable income), and
c) pay myself a reliable amount so I can cover my living expenses, fund my retirement, and also enjoy life.

When you are a salaried academic librarian and asked to do volunteer service work, the cost-benefit analysis is typically “Do I want to do this work? And will it benefit my career somehow?” Obviously, salaried people have to run some calculations based on whether they have workplace support and energetic bandwidth to do service. For academic librarians in a tenure-track system that counts service towards promotion and tenure, these decisions do have some degree of indirect economic consequences. But in general, most academic librarians’ salaries are not directly and immediately impacted by performing service work. When I worked in academic libraries, my salary did not change depending on whether I was chairing a conference program committee or faculty executive committee (a ton of ongoing work stretching out over months or years) versus a lighter weight commitment such as performing peer review of an article (a one time commitment of a few hours).

In contrast, now that I’m self-employed, there is also another question I have to ask, which is whether I can quite literally afford to do uncompensated service work (or, even work that is poorly paid). This is where opportunity cost comes in. Opportunity cost is an economic term that means when you make a choice, you lose out on the benefits from not making a different choice. When I choose to take on service work, there is an opportunity cost of not otherwise using those hours for work that pays me. In other words, if I know that I can generally allocate X hours a month for revenue-generating work, allocating some of those hours for work that will not result in direct monthly revenue generation means that I am choosing to forego potential additional monthly revenue.

That trade-off is one I’m willing to make, especially since I have a lifelong orientation to service, and since no business spends its time solely on billable client contracted projects anyway (in order to run a business, you also have to set aside time for non-billable work like marketing, bookkeeping, etc). My career has been immeasurably helped at every stage by those who volunteered their time to help me, and I consider it a reciprocal obligation to the universe to pay back that help as much as I can afford to do so.¹ But this trade-off now that I am self-employed is calculated far differently than when I was salaried.

One of the ways in which running this calculation has become pretty weird is that I find myself increasingly having to decline requests for unpaid and underpaid work that I would have been much more likely to say yes to when I was salaried. This is awkward and weird because I really like being helpful (and I think I have a reputation in my profession for this?), and I can tell some people are offended when I say no, or tell them I can only accommodate their request if the stipend is increased. Something I wish more people understood is that stipends might be lagniappe for someone who is already salaried, but most stipends for unclear service work commitments or talks do not come close to the actual compensation needed to do this work well if you aren’t salaried.

Time and money are both forms of currency, but they function differently. Money is a renewable resource, but time is not. I can do all sorts of things to change how my revenue is replenished–increase my rates, bring on more clients, invest profits from my business somewhere, cut expenses, etc. Because time is a non-renewable resource, this requires me to be incredibly discerning in how I use it. Even if I bring in assistance or remove various commitments, I cannot invent more time in my week or month. I have the exact same number of hours each week and each month that you do. I love self-employment, and I know that if I don’t use my most precious finite resource, time, as responsibly as possible, my business will not have staying power.

I’m running for SAA Council this year, and am fully cognizant that if I am elected, it will likely artificially depress my earning capacity over the next few years since it is a major time commitment without compensation. I do not think it is an accident that I am the only non-university person running for Council, since university-based archivists typically have the highest rates of support for service work. If I am elected, I apologize in advance to those I’ll be serving with for how much of a stickler I will be for not wasting time. Now you know why. ↩︎

Comments Off on Money is a renewable resource but time is not

What it took to take the leap

December 20, 2023

It’s been about eight months since I took the leap to self-employment and building my business. In reality, the transition started much earlier, because it took months of planning and laying the groundwork to follow through on such a major decision. With the end of the year coming up, and today as the anniversary of my LLC registration, I’m reflecting a lot on the major behind the scenes work it took to take the leap.

When I was knee deep in navigating my career transition, I was (and remain) constantly hungry for stories of how people made their own major career shifts. Over the last couple years I’ve received more advice and wisdom from strangers, acquaintances, and friends than I could ever possibly pay back, so I want to share a little bit here about how it went (and is still going) for me. Life is too short to stay in a job that’s making you miserable, but sometimes when you’re in the middle of the misery it’s difficult to even see an exit strategy.

In order to take the leap, I had to talk to a lot of people, and then I had to listen. A lot. And I also had to start listening to sources of information I had never really listened to before.

Over the last two years as I knew I needed a change, I talked to people who had left academic libraries altogether. I talked to interviewers during job interviews for new roles. I talked to people who had moved back and forth between employee and freelancer roles. I talked to friends who were laid off from salaried roles who unexpectedly became self-employed and loved it. I talked to friends who voluntarily left salaried roles to deliberately become self-employed and loved it. I talked to formerly self-employed people who decided it wasn’t for them and went back to salaried roles. I talked to retired people. I talked to people in my network who ended up becoming some of my first clients. I talked to self-employed librarians/archivists/museum people who had been doing it a long time who helped me see what the day to day would look like (and every single good, bad, and ugly thing they told me about all happened within the first six months I went out on my own).

I talked to my friends in group chats. I talked to my friends over phone calls. I talked to my friends over beers. I talked to my friends over ice cream. I talked to my friends so much I got to a point where I felt sheepish about continuing to talk about it. I talked to my parents (my dad told me that one of the best jobs he’d ever had had started out as a part-time consulting gig when he was between jobs). I talked to my cousin, who is like my sister. I talked to a therapist. I talked to a career coach. I (silently) talked to God every Sunday morning at 10:00 AM at my Quaker meeting. I talked to a clearness committee at my Quaker meeting. I talked to my financial advisor. I talked to my husband so incessantly that at one point he bought me a shirt on Valentines Day that said QUIT YOUR JOB.

I had to talk to a lot of people because my brain had to see that it was possible, that I was not trapped, that I wouldn’t be ruining my life forever if I left a tenured and unionized faculty librarian role for something else, and that I not only could but maybe should try something new. I had to listen to the stories of tons of other people, see where their paths could inform or inspire or caution my own. I talked, and asked, and then I listened, over and over. But then I also had to talk with myself, and I had to listen to not just my head but ultimately to my body and my gut and my heart in a way I was not used to doing.

I’ve mentioned before that teaching the CalRBS seminar on Archives and Climate Change was a real turning point for me. But part of how I knew intrinsically – almost immediately – that it was a turning point and not a fluke was because of how I physically felt during and after teaching the seminar. I knew this was exactly how I was supposed to feel, by doing the work I am supposed to be doing, and that I needed to figure out how to shift my working life towards that as much as possible. There were some days my face began to feel sore because I was smiling so much, because it was so powerful and it felt so right to be in community with other librarians and archivists who cared about this issue just as much as myself. Nothing in my previous job made me feel that way – in fact, often the opposite.

For the last couple of years in my previous role, I had often tried to describe how I was feeling with a series of pretty grim metaphors – like I was dropped into a forest with no map, or that I was running a marathon where the route kept changing, or that I was on the Titanic and I was the only one who could see the iceberg ahead. But when I started figuring out how to make a business work and how to chart my exit strategy, the metaphor that came to me was that it felt like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle (I like jigsaw puzzles, though I don’t do them as often as I’d like). There are multiple paths to putting together something big and unwieldy, and it can be a lot of fun along the way.

The other physical signal that really confirmed for me that I had made the right choice was that when I gave notice at my prior role, my long-term sleep issues immediately improved. I recently read that our bodies often start preparing for major transitions long before our brain/rational mind catches up. Looking back on this, I think when I finally gave notice, it must have been such a flood of relief for the rest of my being to finally feel heard and respected and honored for the things it had been trying to tell me for a very long time. Since leaving academia, I have increasingly learned to rely on my gut and the way things make me feel in terms of business decision making.

When you are in the middle of making a transition and talking to a million people about how they did it, there can be a point where you cross the threshold from information gathering to reassurance seeking. Ultimately, a lot of people can open the doors for you, but only you can walk through. The single best piece of advice I got from everyone I talked to was my cousin. She said something to the effect of, “Would you rather bet on an institution that is making you miserable, or would you rather bet on yourself?”

Every day I’m glad I took the leap.

Comments Off on What it took to take the leap

A career change for climate change

April 11, 2023

I’m about to embark on a major new professional transition: working full-time for my new business, Memory Rising. Memory Rising provides research, consulting, and archival services for cultural and humanities institutions and other organizations, with expertise on climate change, environmental and labor movements, and Ohio Valley regional history.

Memory Rising will offer services such as:

Conducting research on archives, public policy, and environmental issues
Working with cultural heritage institutions on climate change action and adaptation
Providing archival services to environmental, labor, and Ohio Valley organizations that need the guidance of a professional archivist to steward their own archives and historical memory

You can find more on the Memory Rising website and also sign up for a periodic newsletter.

My major professional goal for some time has been to shift climate change to the primary focus of my career in archives and libraries. Until now, it has mainly existed on the margins of my job as an archivist/records manager in academic libraries. Teaching the California Rare Books School seminar and writing A Green New Deal for Archives (coming out soon!) became major turning points in giving me a glimpse of a working life focused on climate change, and I felt an increasing sense of urgency to find a way to make this shift.

I started building Memory Rising a few months ago, as I received more consulting and teaching requests related to climate change. I also have a deep commitment to environmental and labor movements, and my home of Cincinnati/the Ohio River watershed, which is why Memory Rising will also serve those communities with the skills I’ve honed as a working archivist for the last 15 years. I’m thrilled that enough behind the scenes activity has come together to make my professional goals a reality. I am leaving my current role at the University of Cincinnati at the end of April to fully dedicate myself to the work that brings me the most meaning and purpose.

In the coming months, I’ll share more about Memory Rising’s work, and will remain a very active presence within archives and libraries communities, as well as branching out into new communities (I recently joined the American Society of Adaptation Professionals, and have learned a ton!). At some point, I’ll also share my story of what it’s been like to transition from working in academic libraries to starting my own business.

I talked to so many people over the last year as I figured out how to make this leap. I am enormously grateful to the kindness and wisdom of old friends, generous colleagues, and new acquaintances who helped me chart out a way to scale up the work that is so necessary for the continuity of archives and cultural memory in the face of climate change. I’m beyond excited about making this new change. Also, if I’m being completely honest as a risk-averse person, I’m slightly terrified of this leap, but the time is right to do it. Climate change remains as urgent an issue as ever, and our profession needs as much help making the transition as quickly as possible. I hope that my path will cross with yours soon as we build a better world that all of us deserve.

4 Comments

Resisting weapons of mass deception

March 18, 2023

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Life on the left in 2003 was often an experience of being in the wilderness and yet it was also a much more populated place than any of the war propagandists from that time period ever would admit. I know because I was a teenage anti-war protester who protested the invasion of Iraq on a weekly basis in Cincinnati with a small group every Friday afternoon on my college campus, and because I went to DC at least once (maybe twice?) to protest the war.

I joined a group called Coalition to Prevent War with Iraq, and after the invasion we changed our name to Coalition for Peace with Iraq. For a time, I was so scared that the government would bring back the draft and that it would apply to women that I compiled a folder with my notes from the meetings I attended, articles, flyers, and news clippings so I could document my commitment to being anti-war and receive conscientious objector status.

A folder labeled "anti-war articles, etc"

In retrospect, it was an intensely archival act carried out long before I had any inkling of what an archivist was. I held on to that folder even as my fears of being drafted ebbed, but I have only recently returned to looking through it. It now serves as evidence of my own witness against the collective gaslighting invocation of “weapons of mass destruction,” built upon a tapestry of lies that resulted in the deaths, injuries, and permanent trauma to countless Iraqis and thousands of military service members.

Copy of speech opposing the Iraq War written by the author as a teenager

One of the protests in DC required fundraising to hire the bus to drive from Cincinnati to the capital. I got up in my west side church and gave a little speech asking for donations so our group could ride to DC and protest the coming war in Iraq. Today I am a Quaker, but back then I was raised in a different denomination, and I wasn’t exactly sure of the reception I’d receive. And while several people donated, what I remember most clearly was the middle aged guy who accosted me before coffee hour to tell me that I was wrong, and that the Iraqis would welcome our liberation. And then I went to this big protest in DC, it was so big that the streets were filled for blocks, and I came home and looked for any coverage in the national newspapers at our local library branch and there was nothing. Or maybe there was a small clip on page six, I don’t remember. But I knew I was part of an immense crowd people protesting the war in the nation’s capital, and yet everyone in power pretended that everyone else was just fine with the coming war. And this weekend, when the 20th anniversary is upon us, once again I can barely find any examination or retrospectives in popular media of what was committed in America’s name.

When I sat down to write some of my reflections about how the seeds planted during my anti-war teenage experiences have shaped my politics and work on climate change, what came out was raw and incandescent with fury and grief, to the point where I’m not sure if and how to share it publicly. Perhaps one day I will. For now, I want to share more from my files to show that a lot of us tried very hard 20 years ago to resist the war.

Flyer advertising an anti-war protest in Washington DC on January 18 2003

Photocopy of an ad addressed to President Bush "Jesus changed your heart, now let him change your mind"

Comments Off on Resisting weapons of mass deception

2020 media highlights

February 4, 2021

Perhaps the only thing that worked out well in the hell year of 2020 was that I met my personal reading goal – no doubt aided by insomnia induced by world events as well as spending more time at home.

Keeping up with the past practice (2019, 2018) of identifying the various themes in my favorite media picks, here are some of the highlights.

Women’s Memoirs

I read several of these books at the height of my pandemic-induced stress insomnia around 3-4 AM. Margaret Renkl and Sue Hubbell’s books soothed me the most.

Trick mirror (book, Jia Tolentino) – A wonderful book of essays by one of the most talented millennials currently writing for the New Yorker.

Thick (book, Tressie McMillan Cottom) – I hope that one day I can construct a sentence, let alone a paragraph, like Tressie McMillan Cottom. Another moving book of essays.

Late Migrations (book, Margaret Renkl) – I first noticed Margaret Renkl when she wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about possums. Stories about nature and family in the South.

A Country Year: Living the Questions (book, Sue Hubbell) – Sue Hubbell was an academic librarian who moved to the Ozarks with her husband. Their marriage dissolved but she became a beekeeper. I love her description of the seasonal work and descriptions of her working on her barn, her pets, and working with hives.

Deep Creek (book, Pam Houston) – A memoir of Houston’s life, surviving childhood abuse, and living on a ranch. I stayed up late one night reading the chapter in which she fled a wildfire that nearly wiped out the ranch and it was one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever read.

Public Policy

If you constantly wonder why the US can’t have nice things, eventually you need to read some books about public policy.

Cadillac desert: the American West and its disappearing water (book, Marc Reisner) – Read this if you want to develop some really strong feelings about water infrastructure!!

The triumph of injustice : how the rich dodge taxes and how to make them pay (book, Emmanuel Saez; Gabriel Zucman) – Read this if you want to know how we can finally have nice things and feel justified in your hatred for the 1%!!!

Are Prisons Obsolete? (book, Angela Y Davis) – Read this if you want to learn more about prison abolition but need someone to break it down for you!!

Neither snow nor rain: a history of the United States Postal Service (book, Devin Leonard) – Read this if you love sending and receiving mail as much as I do!!! The US Political Service is arguably one of the greatest things the United States has ever created and we must protect it!!!

Portraits of political leaders/movements

Maybe it’s an age thing but I find that the older I get, the more I enjoy reading biographies – sometimes as inspiration, and frequently as cautionary tales or warnings.

The woman behind the New Deal : the life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and his moral conscience (book, Kirstin Downey) – Frances Perkins was one of the few people in FDR’s Cabinet who was there for his entire tenure, and we still benefit from her legacy through things like Social Security and workplace safety protections. Frances Perkins witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and it deeply shaped her policy work. She died as a broke adjunct who had been housemates with Paul Wolfowitz (seriously). I was powerfully moved by the opening chapter in which FDR asked her to become the first woman in a President’s Cabinet and the decisions she had to wrestle with to say yes.

Ella Baker and the Black freedom movement: a radical democratic vision (book, Barbara Ransby) – I think the whole concept of bibliotherapy is a little cheesy, but this book was both an intensely soothing restorative balm for my anguish about leftist sectarianism and also an inspirational look at how to organize and build power. If your main lens for understanding the Civil Rights movement is through charismatic leaders like Martin Luther King, you must read this book to expand your understanding of the period. Ella Baker is one of my non-sectarian leftist heroines – intensely practical, process-oriented, and no time for bullshit. I think this book might have the most marginalia of any book in my personal library – I was underlining and writing things like YES or OMG or !!!! in the margins of nearly every other page. After I finished it I sent Barbara Ransby an email thanking her for writing such an immensely transformative book that put my own political experiences into perspective.

Before the Storm (book, Rick Perlstein) – I kept describing Rick Perlstein’s book as a biography about Barry Goldwater but then my smarter friends who’ve also read the book pushed back on that description: in their opinion, it was more of a chronology of a political movement. They’re absolutely right. I had been under the impression that the Southern strategy was more of a Nixon-era thing, but Perlstein’s book really helped me understand how much of the current right-wing ideology has its roots in the Barry Goldwater movement. I’m currently reading Perlstein’s Nixonland which is also good, but Before the Storm is masterful on another level.

With Babies and Banners (documentary) – Many know about the 1936-1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike organized by the UAW at General Motors, but fewer know about the incredible role that women played in it. This is a wonderful documentary that has both extremely 1970s/80s labor historian vibes AND big second-wave feminist oral history vibes (i.e. pretty much genetically engineered to be relevant to my interests).

Comments Off on 2020 media highlights

Sabbatical Months Two and Three

February 1, 2020

I’m now about halfway through my sabbatical, having been on leave in November and January. I have mixed feelings about the alternating months nature of this sabbatical – there is a bit of intellectual whiplash in going from normal workday headspace to sabbatical headspace. On the other hand, it’s nice to carry around the sense of being able to hit a reset button every month.

I stuck close to home in November and January, and the only travel I took was in Cincinnati’s backyard. At the beginning of November I gave a presentation on fracking and recordkeeping at the (Re)covering Appalachia symposium at Shawnee State in Portsmouth. It was a small conference, but I found it really transformative in shifting my thinking of Cincinnati’s role in the region. One of the panels I attended was about media coverage of Appalachia, and while I’m used to thinking of the Washington Post or The New York Times as parachute journalism, it was jarring (in a healthy “examining my assumptions” way) to hear locals from the Portsmouth area characterize the Cincinnati Enquirer as being in a similar category. I often think of Cincinnati in relation to larger cities, it is really humbling and necessarily perspective-shifting to think of Cincinnati in relation to smaller towns in this Appalachian border region.

In mid-January I spent a few days in Athens at Ohio University’s archives on the other side of the reference desk, researching their collection of District 6 United Mine Workers of America records. One of the great pleasures – and also sources of anxiety – about being on sabbatical is the affordance of having time to fall down various rabbit holes without a sense of when you’ll climb back out. I wanted to use the UMWA records because of a totally speculative hunch I had about early union bargaining demands (as I was finishing this article, I was curious whether those early demands included documentation related to mine safety). It turns out I didn’t really find the kind of thing I was hoping to find, but everything else was pretty fascinating and filled in a lot of knowledge gaps I had around the New Deal and labor. The OU library staff are a great bunch of people, and I loved spending time with them.

I haven’t totally shaken off the productivity guilt I talked about after my first month. I feel both thankful for the space to rest my mind but especially my body – a feeling that was especially acute after a traumatic event that impacted my well-being in early November. But I also feel guilty: capitalism has so thoroughly coopted the idea of rest as being the ultimate productivity multiplier that a persistent part of me feels disappointed with myself that all of this resting hasn’t corresponded to some kind of peak productivity, that I haven’t completed both of my sabbatical proposal projects already. Rest for rest’s sake is not something I know how to translate into my final report showing how useful my sabbatical was to higher ed administrators.

But the reality is that I have “done” a lot of stuff. I took two open courses on maps and GIS. I’ve read dozens of articles and a couple of books. I’ve been writing and editing and planning and keeping up my usual levels of service work. For the first time, a publisher asked me to review an author’s book-length manuscript under contract which was incredibly rewarding (and hard!). I met with an IRB representative about one of my project proposals and while the staff member I met with was awesome, I quickly realized that my institution does not offer very good structural support for non-STEM human subject research. And then I also realized I don’t have the money, assistance, or patience to transcribe hours of interview-based phone call recordings. I read a bunch of literature and realized my original proposal would have simply replicated other work out there, and so I’m changing up that original project plan and think it will result in a much richer and more exciting and hopefully less tedious project.

I’ve also been doing a lot of work that is completely invisible and erased within the value systems of higher education. I’ve spent more time at the gym which helps me think and keeps me healthy. I’ve been doing a tremendous amount of emotional labor with the fallout around SAA’s election petition (both supporting friends who have been hurt by this and also talking to petitioners to express my severe concerns about the impact of their decision amidst other ongoing issues within the association). I took field trips to museums and lectures that aren’t obviously relevant to my work but which are planting small seeds that might germinate into something I reap years from now. Or maybe it won’t. Who knows. Not everything interesting or pleasurable or fascinating or educational has to produce a return on investment to be worth the time.

1 Comment

2019 media highlights

January 11, 2020

Something I’ve been chewing on with the recent annual spate of “this year in reading” social media proclamations is my discomfort with the book as a form of media exceptionalism. People brag about how many books they read, how often they read books, and what books they read in a way that simply doesn’t exist with other forms of media People get excited about end of year publishing sales more than magazine subscription sales. A pile of 50 unread magazines is treated with a far different attitude than a pile of 50 unread books. People post “shelfies” of books they have to read, but not screenshots of their podcast queues.

I also have a lot of straight up insecurity around the number of books I read, because it is a number that has nothing to do with how much of my time I actually spend reading. I read a ton of news, pamphlets, zines, magazines, long-form investigative journalism, the occasional literary journal, and academic journals. I gut tons of academic books. None of these items make it on to my annual compiled list of what I read. Putting together a “books I read this year” list is at odds with trying to convey how my media consumption actually shapes my understanding of the world, since magazines and podcasts and even social media accounts influence me as much as books.

As a slow reader, I look at the number of books I read compared to other readers and feel really self-conscious about how few books I read compared to others (even though I often read dense non-fiction books that are well over 500 pages, and I came close to my own personal reading goal this year). But I have to remind myself that the number of books read is not a proxy for time well spent. Time spent with friends and time spent outdoors is just as vital to my intellectual development and personal well-being as reading.

Last year I did a reading roundup of thematic highlights of my favorite books (quality and context over quantity, baby). I’m repeating that format this time, but with other media mixed in besides books.

Water

The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy (book, Anna Clark): An excellent foregrounding of the urban history of Flint, Michigan informs this book about the city’s water crisis. Clark does a great job of making clear that the water infrastructure problems in Flint are not unique, but exist across the country.

Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (book, Elizabeth Rush): Hands down my favorite environmental book I read this year. Elizabeth Rush visits the communities already suffering from sea-level rise and treats their stories with a significant amount of compassion and empathy. The story about the community on Staten Island working through managed retreat deeply shaped how I think about the topic of adaptation to changing coastlines.

The Water Will Come (book, Jeff Goodell): This was a fascinating book to read right after Elizabeth Rush’s book, because while the book’s premise is very similar, Jeff Goodell is like Hunter S. Thompson trawling for the most outlandish stories to Rush’s gentle but determined Rachel Carson approach. One of the more memorable stories is when he interviews the benefactor of the Perez Art Museum in Miami, Florida.

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes (book, Daniel Egan): This was the first thing I read when I began preparing for my Access keynote since I knew I wanted to focus on the Great Lakes. A great historical overview of the many, many human interventions in the Great Lakes watershed and the cycles of pollution and renewal it has undergone over the last 200 years.

The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare (article, Nathaniel Rich): This is the article that inspired the movie Dark Water (which I also highly recommend!). As with the book by Anna Clark, Rich makes it clear that the water issues particular to DuPont’s devastation of Parkersburg’s water supply is not limited to just the initially affected area, but exemplifies similar stories happening elsewhere.

The Allegheny Front (podcast): This podcast is produced out of Pittsburgh, and it often covers regional environmental stories, including those about the Ohio River. The podcast has covered everything from the ORSANCO debacle to the emerging threat of new petrochemical facilities in the watershed.

Energy

Cultures of Energy (podcast): Although this podcast is now on hiatus, Dominic and Cymene have a massive back catalog of interviews with other (mostly) academics that delve into their research areas. Most of the scholars work in energy studies, but other environmental studies topics like water, plant, and food studies sometimes come up.

Thunder on the Mountain: Death at Massey and the Dirty Secrets Behind Big Coal (book, Peter Galuszka): An easy to read overview of one of the deadliest coal mine explosions in recent years, and a short history of the coal wars in Appalachian between labor and management. Read this to find out why former CEO Don Blankenship ranks among the worst people on Earth.

Tarot (yes really)

Modern Tarot (book, Michelle Tea): This was the first book I read about tarot when I wanted to begin exploring but didn’t really know where to start. The book is arranged into short chapters that correspond with the major and minor arcana of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck and its derivatives. This book is a little more Witchy with a capital ‘W’ than I tend to roll (for example, every chapter ends with a spell, many of which use very specific crystals), but I still found it to be a super accessible intro to tarot since it keeps things pretty simple and also uses a lot of gender inclusive language.

The Creative Tarot (book, Jessa Crispin): This book is great for folks who don’t use tarot for divination (reading the future) but are interested in it for its capacity to generate ideas and support creative work. Crispin includes recommended books, music, and painting to correspond with each card, and a number of spreads (ways to lay out your cards) for finding inspiration, clearing roadblocks, etc.

Rust Belt Arcana: Tarot and Natural History in Exurban Wilds (book, Matt Stansberry and David Wilson): This book accompanies the Rust Belt Arcana tarot deck put out by Belt Publishing, which I cannot praise highly enough. The court cards in the deck are represented by naturalists and scientists (think Aldo Leopold, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Rachel Carson, etc), while the minor arcana depict birds, fungi, trees, flowers, and insects. The book itself is a series of short essays describing why certain symbols were chosen for each of the major arcana cards (for example, a possum is the Hanged Man).

The New Tarot Handbook (book, Rachel Pollack): This was a good “advanced” book to read on tarot once I had the basics down. Pollack gets into some of the more subtle symbology of the tarot, and especially the numerology associated with each deck.

Tarot for Radical Self Care (zine, Diana Rose): A short zine with some thoughts on using tarot as a healing practice, especially for folks with marginalized backgrounds. It includes several spreads for supporting different facets of individual and community health. I also love Diana’s instagram account.

Religion

Living the Quaker Way (book, Philip Gulley): This is a very good introductory book that was written for non-Quakers (though I still got a lot out of it as someone who’s been attending a Quaker meeting for a few years). Each chapter is based on an exploration of Friends’ major testimonies.

The Magnificast (podcast): A Christian left-wing podcast that delves into all sorts of historical and current topics. One of my favorite episodes this year was about Dorothy Day’s trip to Cuba.

Modern Ritual (instagram): An instagram account about Judaism run by two young women, a rabbi and a rabbi-in-training. Lots of thoughtful posts on Jewish theology, practice, and politics.

Ben Wildflower (instagram): Prints and art of left-wing Christian themes. I adore the interpretation of Luke 1:46.

Heath and community well-being

How To Do Nothing (book, Jenny Odell): I read this during my first sabbatical month. A great book for helping you consider how you pay attention to things.

Nap Ministry (instagram): By far one of my favorite accounts on instagram. The Nap Ministry is rooted in black feminist politics, and asserts that resting is a form of resistance in a culture that insists that the highest form of achievement is to always work hard.

Refuge (book, Terry Tempest Williams): Another book I read during my first sabbatical month (and while out in Utah, the setting of the book). This also had a lot of themes of religion in it, given Williams’ LDS family. Williams witness of her mother’s end of life with cancer against the backdrop of a flooding of a bird refuge is very moving for those of us who see our family’s health connected to the health of the wider world we inhabit.

Burnout (book, Emily and Amelia Nagoski): Some of my closest friends recommended this book, and it was great! If you have ever suspected that the problem with your exhaustion isn’t because of your messy closet but because of the patriarchy and late-stage capitalism, this is probably the best mainstream self-help book you’re going to find that acknowledges that reality.

The right-wing

Know Your Enemy (podcast): As someone who occasionally reads a copy of the Wall Street Journal solely because I believe in studying one’s enemy, this is hands down my favorite podcast I’ve found this year. I rarely go back and begin listening to a podcast from the beginning, but shortly after finding out about this I went back and started listening from the beginning (and I highly recommend at least listening to Episode 1 so you have a sense of the hosts personal backgrounds – which really help them illuminate their material in a fascinating way). The show takes a left-wing approach to analyzing conservative intellectual history (so if you like the work of Corey Robin, you’ll appreciate what they’re doing here). I think it’s essential that the left-wing understand the infrastructure of the right-wing, and this podcast provides a great foundation.

Rising Out of Hatred (book, Eli Saslow): This is the story of how a former white nationalist was converted away from his beliefs during college. I am perpetually fascinated by stories of total political transformations, particularly because political defectors often play a prominent role as a “translator” within their new political home (for example).

The Shock Doctrine (book, Naomi Klein): Written before This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, Klein’s book about the inherent links between violence and the spread of capitalism is not an easy read. I had to pace myself through it, since parts of it are pretty nightmare-provoking. If This Changes Everything is the book that takes progressives and turns them into full on anti-capitalists (as it did to me), this is the book that provides a historical underpinning for the expansion of capitalist violence with the rise of neoliberalism since the 1970s.

1 Comment

Sabbatical Month One

October 3, 2019

Currently I am at the gate of Toronto’s international airport waiting to board my flight back to Cincinnati. I spent my morning chatting about my adoration of Ursula Franklin with librarians at the University of Alberta, two days after I got on a microphone and did a very radical (for me, at least) keynote to open up the Access conference in Edmonton. In between I saw men lining up to fly out to Fort McMurray which is the epicenter of Canada’s oil and gas extraction, and I crossed what felt like endless points of surveillance to get back into my own country. In the line before US Customs and Border Patrol (something I feel like we don’t talk about enough is how the omnipotence of the US surveillance state asserts itself even in foreign airports), the woman in front of me was juggling two kids, one of whom was so tearful and she was handling them with such quietly frustrated stoicism that I secretly hoped this woman would somehow be on my next flight solely so I could buy her a shot of liquor. And this trip was the sixth I’ve taken in the last month – over the last several weeks my shamefully disgusting carbon footprint that I incurred, at the same time children half and sometimes even a third my age poured into the streets bearing witness to the horrors of climate change, has taken me to all five of the Great Lakes watersheds, Red River Gorge, Chicago, Salt Lake City, and Edmonton. Most of this was professional-related travel, but when your work involves existential dread its sort of hard to shed the archivist perspective especially when contributing directly to it with the fossil fuel use inherent to the majority of transportation methods.

Tomorrow I’m heading back to my office tomorrow where I have a number of emails waiting for me from high levels of the university asking for advice/meetings regarding our various records policy that I haven’t gotten to yet because I have been on my first month of academic leave (i.e. sabbatical) for the last several weeks.

I have been reporting to a full-time archivist job every day on a regular basis for the last 11 years of my life. That goes back to when I had just graduated from college. And before that, the only time I wasn’t working at least several hours a week part-time since I was 16 or 17 was when I studied abroad briefly for a semester (in England) and several weeks (in China).

This summer I was awarded tenure and I was also granted academic leave, the UC version of sabbatical. I get to take my six months of leave in alternating months where I’m in and out of the office starting in September 2019 and culminating in July 2020. This will be the longest period of time in my life when I’ve been able to be away from the office and still gotten paid. One month in, its still a bit hard to wrap my head around.

During the last several months I have been profoundly aware of the major fortune and privilege in having both tenure and sabbatical available to me. I’ve been having a continuing sense of “I feel so lucky to have this and also every worker deserves access to these things” and then I remember tons of workers don’t even have access to health insurance, paid sick days and paid vacation.

When I submitted my application for my academic leave, I outlined two major projects to work on. During this first month, I didn’t get as much done on those because I was so focused on writing a very good keynote for the Access conference in Edmonton. I felt Extraordinarily Guilty and Freaked Out about this towards the end of September – shit, I was turning into the embodiment of every conservative’s worst stereotype of lazy academics who take sabbaticals. This in spite of the fact that I was writing more than 500+ words a day for my keynote (or later on, spending hours editing it, reading more source material in the form of environmental impact assessments and legal opinions, and rehearsing it several times).

In the months leading up to my leave, I was incessantly angling for advice on how to spend my time. One colleague told me she tried to work the same number of hours she did while in the office but allowed herself the freedom to do her hours whenever. Two separate acquaintances told me they didn’t anticipate how much they would miss the social contact that comes from reporting to an office every day. A retired professor Friend from my Quaker meeting pulled me aside one day after meeting for worship to advise that I should go nowhere near campus during the first stretch of my sabbatical, or otherwise it would be like the bat signal going off that I was available for whatever problem had cropped up in my absence. One of the articles I read from the AAUP (disclaimer: AAUP is my union) website lamented how sabbaticals had been appropriated by much of the same neoliberal logic as the rest of higher ed, and that in the quest to make their sabbaticals the height of productivity, folks had lost sight of the root word of sabbatical – sabbath and its inherent connotations of the spiritual and ecological needs for rest.

Despite my usual orientation towards demanding that rest and time for restorative reflection is a basic human right and something that workers must assert their rights to both collectively and individually, I have a difficult time allowing it for myself (I suspect because I struggle so much with the fact that something like tenure + sabbatical, or its equivalent, is such a rare status for the vast majority of workers. Can I still identify as a worker when I have such privilege?). Towards the end of sabbatical month one, I read two books that profoundly moved me and ultimately helped me reframe my fretfulness around the fact that while I had been working very hard this month, I had made less material progress on my original project proposals than I would have liked.

A friend had given me a copy of Terry Tempest William’s Refuge a few years ago when I was dealing with a very difficult stretch of health crises involving my elderly father. I’d read a little bit of Williams’ writing before, but I finally plucked this off my bookshelf because I was heading to Salt Lake City for a family wedding and I enjoy reading books that are set in areas where I am visiting. Williams’ book is a memoir of the deaths of several women in her close-knit Mormon family, and much of the book focuses on how she supported her mother dying of cancer. The book is set against the historic flooding of the Great Salt Lake and the devastation of a bird sanctuary at which Williams, a naturalist, had long sought refuge. Homages to different bird species are woven into every chapter.

Shortly before I started Refuge, I had been provoked into something of a state of deep existential despair and ecogrief. I’ve been working on issues around climate change for a few years now, and I usually do a pretty good job of managing my emotions so I can keep doing the work. I think what probably set me off was some of the research I was doing for my keynote, where I began listening and reading to Albertan oil and gas industry publications and podcasts. One of the very curious things about Canada’s oil and gas industry is that it acknowledges the reality of climate change more than its US counterparts – which then requires it to engage in even more brazen displays of rationalization. So Canadian oil and gas propagandists will tout their “ethical oil”, or claim that their oil and gas is much more environmentally friendly because of improvements in extraction methods. I think the thing that actually triggered this particular wave of despair was a podcast episode in which two very intelligent women chirped that Canadian oil and gas would be a strong player through 2040, that it would be “part of the climate change solution” and that carbon capture and sequestration would ensure Canada’s oil and gas would have a long future ahead. And that’s when it really shattered my heart in a way only my brain had been able to handle before, that these motherfuckers know the car we’re all stuck in with them is going over the cliff and they’re slamming their foot on the gas while telling us it’s not going to be that bad of a drop.

Perhaps that’s why Refuge finally opened the floodgates I so badly needed to let my anger and grief pour out of me. Williams’ knew her mother was dying a horrible death, amidst the fearfulness and denial from her family members and the loss of the natural landscapes she relied on for solace, and all she could do was to be very, very present for it. When I can pull myself out of my grief and despair, this is what I remember: that for years I have felt a calling to do work around climate change using whatever outlet I can find, and the downside about a calling is once you realize it’s there (or what some Quakers refer to as “the still small voice”) and it’s not going anywhere, you can’t walk away from it.

During the end of my sabbatical month I also read Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing. I had run across Odell’s work first as a visual artist and have always wanted to buy one of her prints of collections of stadiums or industrial waste ponds. How To Do Nothing is kind of a hard book to explain since it’s sort of meandering in the best possible sense of the word. Odell builds a multi-layered and multi-lens argument calling for us to radically rethink how we pay attention to the people and things and beings and landscapes that surround us, but which technology and capitalism train us to very much ignore.

Reading How To Do Nothing made me realize that in fact my first month has been profoundly essential to my sabbatical work, even if its not quantifiable in the normal neoliberalized measures of attention productivity. I realized that what my first foray into sabbatical leave has given me is the recovery of my attention span, which is going to be critical to any further work I do over the next year (I would be remiss if I didn’t mention I also mostly stayed off social media this month, which undoubtedly helped with the repair of my attention span). I was able to read for hours at a time (including difficult and dense law reviews!), and dwell on a particular idea for days at a time by being able to unplug from email and maintain a flexible schedule. Under my normal office schedule, I usually work from 8-5 and am strict about not working after 5 in order to protect the other time chunks of my life. During this month it was not unusual for me to stay up till midnight reading about things relevant to my professional interests, or to be able to go on a much longer morning run than usual because I wasn’t required to be in my office at 8.

For a long time I’ve had a very strong sense that while as essential as this time is to my continued health on several levels, it is still incumbent on me to use it responsibly. I am trying to avoid the usual impulse here to bow down to the managerial perspective of trying to quantify how Time X off produced Y amount of things (though the reality is I am going to do that anyway, both because I have to per the requirements of my leave and because I’d like to ensure I maintain a good chance of being able to take academic leave again). I’m thinking instead along the lines of, “how can this sabbatical help me make more of my work available to the public? how can I use this time to expand my mentoring skills? how can I develop resources that will be of use to the larger archival community?” I’m excited by the potential for the next several months.

1 Comment

I got tenure (and I had a ton of help along the way)

June 28, 2019

One of the upsides of the stressful year of applying and waiting for tenure is that it’s nudged me to reflect on how grateful I am for the people in my life who have given so much of their energy, wisdom, knowledge, and kindness. If you read articles about getting tenure, there’s a lot of emphasis on the individual – what you have to write, what you have to document, what you have to apply for, what you have to speak to, what you have to appear in, and most importantly, what and who you have to say “no” to. This weirds me out, because it plays into a lot of harmful constructions around what success looks like, portraying it as a solitary and highly individual quest. And it erases so much of the relationships and networks that help individuals reach success.

I would not have achieved tenure were it not for dozens and dozens of people who consistently said “yes” to me, and the communities that I am connected to deserve to be acknowledged for their role in helping me along the way.

I wouldn’t have become an archivist in the first place had it not been for the people who introduced me to the field, advised me on what the various paths were into it, and hired me for the archivist jobs I’ve had. I’m profoundly lucky in that I’ve reported to supervisors who probably trusted me more than I trusted myself and allowed me a lot of autonomy to figure things out and chart my own path. I’m grateful that they have been consistent advocates for my professional development.

I’ve been an archivist for over a decade now which blows my mind. The vast majority of archivists in my professional network I’ve met directly or indirectly through the Society of American Archivists, which has been my professional association “home” for almost as long as I’ve been in the field. Many archivists have a gregarious streak, and it didn’t take long for the SAA annual meeting to start feeling like an amazing cross between a college and family reunion. So many archivists I’ve met through SAA have become not just professional contacts but trusted confidants who I can call to discuss a range of messy ethical issues with. A few of them have even become close friends who I chat with so regularly that we’ve ended up traveling together or I’ve met their families when we pass through each other’s towns. I know this is cheesy but I really think archivists are some of the best people on Earth. We aren’t perfect, goodness knows we have so much work to do to be better collectively, but there’s something sublime about the fact that I know an archivist in almost every state who would show up for me in a pinch if I were travelling and got stranded within 50 miles of them.

One of the greatest joys of my career so far has been finding a niche where I can write and speak on issues I care about. For several years, this focus has been on archives, recordkeeping, the environment, and climate change. While climate change is anything but joyful, the co-authors and co-panelists I’ve spent time with writing articles and presenting at conferences on this topic have been some of the most thoughtful and generous people I’ve ever worked with. Being asked to speak at an event is such an honor that when I was asked to do a keynote for the first time I went into the restroom at work and cried because I was so bowled over by the thought that someone thought the things I’d been saying were worth having that kind of platform (for you astrology nerds keeping track of my chart, it won’t surprise you that I’m a Cancer moon).

Writing – for print or for a keynote – is really hard work. The only way to get good at it is to have folks who you can trust to be honest with you about what to keep and what to cut from your drafts. Having a go-to list of people who are willing to give me that kind of feedback is priceless, and with the exception of my hot takes on social media and my room temperature takes on this blog, everything I’ve ever published has scores of invisible ink marginalia from my most trusted comrades.

My colleagues at the University of Cincinnati have taught me so much, from technical skills (how to use GitHub) to informal coursework (a crash course in environmental history) to workplace solidarity (a front-row seat to shared governance and being a union member). Like all public sector environments, public universities can be challenging given the lack of public investment in common goods. But I’ve always felt very fortunate to work somewhere where I get along very well with my colleagues, and where there is a lot of mutual appreciation, support, and sharing of what we know with each other.

Sometimes some communities are a way station and not a place where you end up sticking around for very long, but you can still learn a lot from liminal spaces. Over the last several years I’ve spent some time in and out of a number of civic and political groups, all of which have contributed to my voice, writing, politics, and sense of responsibility for making archives meaningful to people who are not archivists. I am grateful to have been welcomed into those spaces while they, or I, lasted.

I think it’s important to end this on a note that recognizes that while getting tenure is an amazing achievement, there is a tendency – encouraged by the process of getting tenure – for people to wholly define themselves through their work. A few years ago I returned to an active religious life and community for the first time as an adult. It has been one of the most grounding things I’ve done to stay anchored and continually renewed for the long haul, and I’m grateful to those I worship with for the space they’ve held for me to slowly form this part of my life.

I’m so fortunate to live in a city where I have a very strong friend network, many of whom are such incredible women that I’m at a loss for words to describe how much they mean to me and how difficult it is to imagine my life without them. Some of these friends I knew from growing up here, but a number of them I picked up when I returned to Cincinnati, primarily through a fundraising group connected to Planned Parenthood. These friends, as much as my family, are what make Cincinnati home for me.

Cincinnati has been my home for almost all of my life because my parents live here. After I completed my MLIS while I was still in Louisiana, I knew I wanted to be closer to them and crossed my fingers I’d end up with a job within a day’s drive of Cincinnati, but luckily now I’m within a 10 minute drive of both of them. My dad and I regularly debate each other about religion, politics, and history which keeps both of us sharp in our respective writing. My mom and stepdad regularly make dinner for my husband and me, and both are such inspiring role models for developing local community networks situated around their musical activities. I’m also beyond lucky to have taken that detour to New Orleans, where I ended up with someone who had never been to Cincinnati before he met me, but the communities he’s built here have sustained both of us. I will be forever grateful to him for moving home with me.

Comments Off on I got tenure (and I had a ton of help along the way)

< Older Entries