I recently wrote about embracing the word “scholar.” In that post, I told you that my dissertation manuscript is in a pile on my floor. It’s moved around a bit in the year-and-a-half since I handed in the final version of my dissertation. I have worked at it, making changes big and small to the Introduction, Chapter 1, and the Conclusion, and tackling other bits here and there. But I never found a place for it. For a while it was on my desk; then it lived on top of a filing cabinet; then, atop my dresser; now, on the floor beside my dresser. It’s like my manuscript is on hold, in a waiting room to an uncertain destination. Because I don’t know what its place is in my life, I’ve never made a home for it in my room.
I like it when everything’s in its place. I regularly tidy my room, moving papers to their proper home, creating folders in a filing cabinet for new projects. I fold and put my clothes away; I place magazines in neat piles and shelve read ones alongside older issues. There’s something very satisfying about all this. Jobs left undone weigh me down. My manuscript is one of those jobs.
Yesterday I spoke with Susan Robison, who’d generously offered to hear me out about the book to help me clarify my thinking. The questions she asked and feedback she provided reminded me of ideas and insights I’d had over the past two weeks about the manuscript and/in my life. There’s definitely something about the topic that gets me excited. I love “my guys,” as I call them, the American Red Cross and YMCA workers who went to revolutionary and civil war Russia to lend a hand. I get a kick out of their amazing stories but mostly—ultimately—I want to know what they were about, what made them do the things they did. What motivated them to go so far from home and take on this work? What was in it for them? Although I spent years researching, thinking, and writing about them, and I’m extremely proud of what I accomplished, the story feels unfinished to me. I know that analytically speaking, stories are always unfinished, conclusions are by definition temporary, finality is futile. But I’m not done.
Susan had a wonderful suggestion: What if I made February, the anniversary of my defense and final submission (in 2012), my manuscript month? What if I put the thing away until then, only to take it out a few months from now and see where I was at with it? The suggestion resonated with me, for two reasons. First, the last time I edited my book proposal was in February 2013; second, my last research trip was in February 2011. (I love archives. I love archives trips. They are the best things.) Coincidence! In the meantime, perhaps I might “publish” my manuscript or dissertation as-is, on my own terms. How would it feel to upload the .pdf on my website, perhaps alongside the .pdf of my Master’s thesis? Then, I could find a physical home for “my guys,” at least until February.
I really like this idea. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
