The situation with the manuscript has changed. This is because I am not only suddenly going to AWP in March, but I am being paid to do so by the organization. Yes, this is so I can shill for the W2W program. But I like that program, and it’s OK to get paid to do something worthwhile, and any publicity is good publicity, right. But long story short, that is a real deadline to have a ready manuscript, because you are now in a position to sell it. You are a Featured Presenter. Yikes.
January 6 2020
There’s a lot going on in this paragraph–maybe more than even I can fully explain. A piece of it is about institutional history, about AWP and its relationship to its disabled writer-members, of which I am (most years) one. Like a lot of disabled writers, I have a very strange relationship with AWP, the organization, which is a different kettle of fish than AWP, the event that everyone calls by the same few letters. That strangeness (as strangeness often does) has produced a lot of great, specific, political art over the last several years, including Jillian Weise’s Tippy Tullivan videos and Karrie Higgins’ “99 Problems”. More than one friend calls AWP a “country club” and I don’t disagree with the clubby aspect of it.
(The Groucho is strong in me.)
One of my main tasks this week in the present has to do with getting ready for our rescheduled panel. Part of that preparation is me spying on MLA starting tomorrow. The other part is thinking through what I want to contribute to the talk. I just reviewed my notes from the panel we would have done if COVID-19 hadn’t disrupted us. Man: I’m on point, and ready to roll, and the questions about care and power are the exact questions that my scholarly writing is also most concerned with. It’s what that kitchen sink of an essay about Jane Eyre and “Cassandra” is pointing at most interestingly. How does care become power? And how did Victorian women, in fact and in fiction, use care to consolidate and execute?
The other thing I noticed in rereading those comments is how consistent my interest in erasure has been since March 2020. Whether its the erasure of the invisibility of whiteness or the erasure of the long tail of survivorship or the erasure of ableist structures in work environments as different as retail space, the gig economy, the corporate world, and academia, erasure and its structures are where my focus often goes. More on this later.
But also: the perpetual struggle for me is getting that light out from under the bushel. In the AWP talk, the draft from last year, your big struggle is around the three directions you can go from the word “mean.” There’s more to say there, for sure.
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