Eira Tansey

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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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I’ve been tracking my reading for the last decade, and in 2018 I set a new personal record for books I read (19). I read a lot of awesome books last year, and inspired by my friend Ruth, I’d like to share a roundup of the thematic highlights.

Environmental history

Nature’s Metropolis (Bill Cronon): One of the canonical works of American environmental history. Cronon uses Chicago as his case study to show the relationships between the rural hinterlands and urban center. I have a new appreciation for the development of grain elevators after reading this.

The Thousand-year Flood (David Welky): This is a history of the 1937 Ohio River flood. It’s always struck me as a little weird how much literature concerns the Mississippi River, and how comparatively little there is on the Ohio. As I get into water issues locally and regionally, I’m trying to increase my knowledge of the Ohio River. Much of the current US environmental disaster response policy was forged during the New Deal, and this is a great look at how that played out during a massive wintertime flood that dramatically affected Cincinnati, Louisville, and Paducah.

The Hidden Life of Trees (Peter Wohlleben): If you need a gentle, lovely work of quiet non-fiction to make you feel better about the shitty times we live in, pick this up. Wohlleben discusses how trees live in community with one another, how they communicate, and how things like fungi are important members of forest communities.

Nuclear non-fiction and apocalyptic fiction

The Power (Naomi Alderman): This was a hell of a book to read within the fallout from the Me Too movement. A dystopia in which women gain the power to electrocute men, it’s a cautionary tale of how absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The Doomsday Machine (Daniel Ellsberg): Before he was known as the force behind the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was a nuclear policy researcher with the RAND Corporation. There was some wild shit in here, like the time RAND researchers came up with a plan to thwart a Soviet missile attack by STOPPING EARTH’S ROTATION. This book got a bit dense at times, but if you need some more nightmare juice for more sleepless nights for the remainder of the Trump presidency… pick this up!

Almighty (Dan Zak): Protests are often (weirdly, in my opinion) derided as being symbolic performance, and little more than that. I’ve never been moved by this argument, but if you’re someone who earnestly makes it, then I hope you’d at least be willing to admit that protesting the biggest symbol of state violence – nuclear weapons – is at least a hell of a target. If you’re not familiar with the Manhattan Project (i.e., the US military-academic-government project to create the atomic bomb), the Plowshares Movement (the most colorful anti-nuclear protest movement), or the Catholic Workers (a Catholic social justice movement midwifed by Dorothy Day, a Catholic anarchist and someone who I regard alongside Martin Luther King as an American prophet), then Almighty is a damn good crash course into these important chapters in nuclear history, and religious left history, centering around an ill-fated protest involving a veteran, a housepainter, and a nun at Oak Ridge.

Inequality

Titan (Ron Chernow): I’ve been trying to learn a lot about the history of energy and fossil fuels, and it became pretty clear that at some point, you have to dive into the history of Standard Oil, the first major oil company started by John D. Rockefeller. There still has never been any American as wealthy as John D. Rockefeller was, and there’s a pretty compelling argument one can make that Rockefeller and Standard Oil charted much of the path for American capitalism, environmental attitudes, and worker exploitation through the 20th century. I was disappointed by some of the paths Chernow took (as a socialist, long passages about the furnishing decisions of the Rockefeller estate at the expense of shorter passages about the Ludlow Massacre and other labor horror stories sent me into periodic fits of rage), but overall this is a fascinating book.

Automating Inequality (Virginia Eubanks): Ed Summers recommended this to me, and I know that anything Ed recommends about data and algorithms is going to be good as hell (good as in well-written, the insights are usually terrifying). Eubanks dives into a few case studies about how seemingly benign attempts by the state to automate things like benefits for people with disabilities, predicting the future likelihood for abuse to children tracked by family services, and triaging services for homeless people can lead to reinforcing the very inequalities that supposedly “neutral” technology was supposed to ameliorate.

Winners Take All (Anand Giridharadas): I have not been able to shut up about this book since I read it, and if there is one book right now that I wish everyone I know would read, it’s this one. You can read an essay-length version of Giridharadas’s book in his recent essay in The Guardian. This book delves into the favorite farce of rich people too high on their own supply – that they are best positioned to solve the problems they created in the first place. I loved this book for far too many reasons to list here, but one of the passages that sticks out in my brain is so vivid I have to share it with y’all here:

In her reluctance to be the only fool, Tisch was revealing the hold that the status quo had on her. Again and again, she had voiced an ideal for which in the end she was unwilling to sacrifice. It was important to her to feel superior to her rich friends, but she was unwilling to rush out in front of them and be the only one not to take advantage of a system she knew to be wrong. Her repeated confessions that she will not be the one to bring about the world that she swears she believes in sent a message to Darren Walker: If he wants a fairer system, he is going to have to seek it in spite of people like her, not with them at his side; he might have their moral support, but he could not count on them to make the decisions to change the system that made them everything that they are. “The people who get to take advantage of the system, why would they really want to change it?” Tisch said at one point. “They’ll maybe give more money away, but they don’t want to radically change it.” Was there anything she could imagine that would convince them otherwise—that could inspire them to pursue a fairer system? “Revolution, maybe,” she said.

Community repair

The Romance of American Communism (Vivan Gornick): One of my DSA friends recommended this to me, and after Winners Take All, this might be my second favorite book I read in 2018. Vivian Gornick grew up in a Jewish Communist home in New York, which gave her a great deal of familiarity with the subject material of this book. In the 70s she went back and interviewed tons of ex-Communist Party (CPUSA) members, and using pseudonyms, wrote up their stories (and often embellished them). It’s written in a somewhat dated style, but the stories are so wild and entertaining, thrilling and disturbing, that it’s hard to put down. I see so many echoes of what Gornick’s subjects talked about in today’s left, from the good (the thrill of winning unlikely victories) to the mundane (the basic tasks of organizing) to the bad (meetings that go on forever) to the ugly (mansplaining and party expulsion).

Bowling Alone (Robert Putnam): The popular sociological text of “why are Americans so lonely?” This book is nearly 20 years old so I guess now maybe it’s a classic?? While obviously some of it is dated, there is so much useful information in here. If, like me, you are a young person affiliated with an older institution (voluntary, religious, community, etc) that is wringing its hands about why “young people aren’t involved these days,” it’s good to remember that this trend has actually been going on for a long time, and can’t be blamed on millennials!

Conflict is not Abuse (Sarah Schulman): I felt really conflicted (pun intended) about this book. Schulman has some excellent arguments about the conflation of conflict with abuse and harm, when it is important to distinguish between the two. At the same time, I think she formulates what she believes to be a universal ethical framework based on her specific life experience in a way I often took serious issue with. Ultimately, this was a very thought-provoking book that forced me to think about how I deal with conflict resolution in real life.

What am I reading for 2019?

I don’t tend to stick to a reading plan (except for the year I only read women authors) – I’m generally a bit of a meandering reader, and often start new titles based on whatever titles are currently available through my  library’s eBook program. I tend to juggle a few titles at a time – typically one I’m reading from most days on my bus commute to work, and a couple others on the back burner. Most of the books I read last year were eBooks. I occasionally worry I’m getting out of the habit of reading print books, particularly because a lot of books I eventually want to read are only available in analog.

Right now, I’m really interested in reading about water issues, filling gaps in my knowledge of important political history, and boning up on religious left thinkers. I recently finished a book about the Flint water crisis, am in the middle of a book about the French Revolution, and am occasionally dipping into Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You. My only reading goal this year is to beat last year’s reading record – so if I hit 20, I’ll consider it a success.

 

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