It occurred to me recently that I have not been keeping up with posting to this blog. I thought that I should share some of the reasons for this, what’s been going on in my life, and how I might continue to use this blog.
Absence from the blog aside, I am still writing quite a bit. I have filled more notebooks during the time spanning from late 2019 to mid-2020 than I have maybe ever.
The original goals of this blog: to start writing again, to set deadlines for myself, to revise and polish and self-publish writing in a low-stakes environment. I think these goals are still relevant, but maybe with a twist that will be relevant to my current life as a PhD student.
Even as I tried to find ways to make the experience low-stakes, I think I have found writing a blog to be a little bit daunting: who am I writing to? As a student of rhetoric, this is probably the greatest crisis of writing a blog. I don’t know who I’m writing to. I know that I am writing because I want to set deadlines for myself, because I want to set goals and stick to them, and, ultimately, because I have things to say. But, in the months since I’ve started a PhD program, I’ve realized that this is not a good enough reason for me to write blog posts, and so I haven’t been posting. I write all the time, sometimes a different kind of writing that’s not necessarily appropriate for an informal blog, and so those things are not posted. Sometimes I think the idea that all published writing is perfect is a myth. This blog is an example of works in progress.
Life in the last year: we’ve moved, I started a PhD program in Rhetoric and Composition, started teaching English instead of Latin, remembered how to write the seminar paper. And of course there is COVID-19. I’ve done a lot of reading. I started playing the harp again. I walk our dogs a lot. Jen and I work from home right now: she on one end of the dining room table, me on the other.
Despite not teaching Latin, it will come as no surprise that this year has only reinforced what I’ve always known to be true: Latin and the Classics are relevant in the most surprising places and circumstances, i.e., everywhere. Or, maybe that isn’t surprising at all. In this PhD program, and in all other aspects of my life, I am still looking for connections, I am looking for ways to make those Classical texts relevant, for ways that they show up in even the most contemporary stories and places. I’m glad to say that a PhD program in English has not washed away my feelings about this, and perhaps gives me a platform to combine these two areas of study, in writing, in scholarship, and in the classroom.
Alexandra Sladky 