On...Practicing What You Preach

I've been a bit quiet lately, mainly because my writing has, unusually, taken me elsewhere.

A few weeks ago now, I received an email out of the blue from an editor at Public Humanities. He was inviting me to write an article on Taylor Swift's new album, The Life of a Showgirl.

The editor -- who is a professor at Harvard -- pitched the piece as part of an "Of The Moment" roundtable, a space that "offers articles that are short, peer-reviewed, open access, and written for a wide audience of non-specialists."

First emotion: YAY WHAT FUN.

I'd be one of the first (academically) to publish on Life of a Showgirl.

But then the Imposter Syndrome kicked in.

Second Emotion: NO WHAT ARE YOU THINKING YOU CAN'T DO IT.

Hi, it's me. I'm the problem, it's me.

That's the funny thing about Imposter Syndrome, right? You don't grow out of it, it just hides, waiting for the right moment to strike.

After all --

• I hadn't even heard the album yet -- what if I hated it? What if I couldn't think of anything to say, or write about? What WOULD I write about?

• I didn't have the time! They were asking for drafts one week after the album came out: I have class and grading! I have kids and laundry! How could I possibly write 2000 words on an album I hadn't heard yet?

• The last time I wrote anything of substance -- beyond blog posts and assignment sheets -- was for a grad school course. I took 2 courses that semester: one went well, so of course the details are fuzzy. One did not; the professor (whose background was in history) told me that my argument had promise, but needed less quotations from the text and more historical context. (This was for a literature class.)

• I'm Teaching Faculty now -- my lane is teaching! Shouldn't I stay in my lane?

• And finally -- WHAT WOULD I WRITE ABOUT?!

Luckily, there's a Taylor Swift song for this. (I know this is a cringe song on a cringe album, but as a Millennial, IDC.)

Rather than focusing on the worst that could happen, I tried to focus instead on "what's the best that could happen?"

And I found that teaching writing for over a decade might have made me a better writer. Because I did what I advise my students to do.

I thought about the Taylor Swift articles that I had read, and the ideas that had stuck with me.

• There's a piece from NPR's Leah Donnella where she opens with the idea that "There comes a moment in a lot of Taylor Swift songs where it becomes hard to sing along. ...in that moment, you realize that this isn't a song about you. It's a song about Taylor Swift." The hyper-specificity that Donnella draws attention to is, as she points out, unusual for pop music -- and I've always gotten the feeling that she didn't think it was a good thing. That line has always stuck with me; I think about it constantly when listening to Taylor's music.

• There's a scholarly article that talks about Taylor's discography and how she moves through archetypal phases -- passive innocent --> hero --> anti-hero. (I've disagreed with that last categorization, even though "Anti-Hero" is literally a song title.)

• And there's the fact that there is no research on Taylor's Track 5s.

I did some research, read a few more articles.

I put Taylor's music on Shuffle and eventually zeroed in on the Track 5s, listening to them on repeat.

I mined Threads and Instagram, reading fan theories and predictions and speculation.

I took notes -- copious notes, so many notes. (Literally 12 pages of notes. Single spaced.)

All before the album even came out.

And you know what?

It was fun.

Don't get me wrong: the insecurities were definitely still there. But I'd forgotten how much fun actually putting into words all the ideas that are bouncing around in my brain could be. How much fun it is to figure out how the puzzle pieces all fit together.

I try and emphasize to my students that (academic) writing thrives in the messy, gray spaces. The answers aren't easy -- and the type of writing we do isn't black-and-white, right-and-wrong. Which is frustrating. And complicated. And we rarely get it right on the first try.

Anyway, imposter syndrome aside, I'm really proud of the article I wrote. And, more importantly, I'm really proud of me for writing it.