Jennifer Jordan

Here’s some math about having an academic job. It could take three hours to write two paragraphs of a scholarly article, and that’s not counting the time it took to think about my research. Then after those three hours, I might delete one of those paragraphs because perfectionism gets me every time.

That’s the thing about academic writing. It never flows the way creative work does, mostly because it can’t. Each claim I make has me wondering if someone else said it before me. Academic writing is filled with tasks, like the drudgery of double-checking and the pain of in-text citations. Software can help with citing, but learning the software is also a time suck, especially when I could be out climbing a tree.

I need to publish six scholarly articles to get tenure. I am getting close to that number. The nifty thing about working in my library is that they count creative works toward publication. Since I started my academic job three years ago, I have published four articles, one grant proposal, one dataset, eight poems, and one personal essay is also coming out this year. I still have to publish scholarly writing, but I can strike a balance between scholarly and creative writing.

I recently published a scholarly article. It took two years to see the light of day, from formulating a research question, to data gathering, to data analyzing, to editing, to integrating the feedback of peer reviewers, to alt-text-tagging graphs. This article had a methodology section. Methodology! There were also results and a conclusion.

Inconceivably, creative writing can take even longer than two years for publication to happen, though it can be for different reasons. There is more competition when submitting literary works, and the rejections rates are much higher, so a piece that takes a few months to write could take several years to get published. At least for me.

My most recent scholarly article was about librarianship journals, and it asked the question, how open are they? When I say open, I am talking about open access and not behind a paywall. This is especially important given the fact that librarians love to share information. I won’t hold you in suspense for too long. The journals could be more open.

I thought I would weep when it was finally published, but I didn’t. I felt relief for the rest of the day before promptly returning to my thinking and writing feedback loop.