This is Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. I'm Rachel Gordon. Here, we aim to make the process of writing and publishing a bit more transparent and a bit less overwhelming. Through conversations with editors and academics at all stages, from full professors to graduate students, independent scholars, and postdocs, We share stories, lessons, and helpful habits from our writing lives. In today's show, we will hear from Indiana University professor Sarah Imhoff about starting a new academic journal. Later, we will be joined by University of Cincinnati professor Jenny Kaplan, who will be telling us about her path from dissertation to book. We are very excited to be speaking with Sarah Imhoff, who holds the J. and Jeanne Schottenstein Chair in Jewish Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, where she is an Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies. 
Her research often questions how embodiment makes religious meaning and how religious discourse makes bodies. Her first book, Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism, was published by Indiana University Press. Her second book is The Lives of Jesse Sampter, Queer Disabled Zionist, and it was recently published by Duke University Press. We're speaking with Sarah today primarily about her decision to start a new journal called American Religion, which she did in 2019, along with her co-editor, Cooper Harris. American Religion is published semi-annually by Indiana University Press. The journal explores the boundaries of both America and religion and the ways in which the two intersect. And it is also beautifully designed, I have to say. So I need to ask, since we live in this time of many journals, why 
What made you decide there was a need for a new one now and why this one? I guess another part of this question is what were you maybe finding unsatisfying about the existing array of journals? I think it was less that there was something profoundly unsatisfying about the existing array of journals and more that Cooper and I felt there were really exciting and cool conversations happening throughout sort of on the margins of American religion. And we wanted to bring those together and bring them more visibility. So there's a pretty good origin story for our journal, which is Cooper and I applied for some grant money and got it to hold a couple of workshops that we called Taking Exception that were a little bit about American exceptionalism and its critiques. 
And so we brought together a group of scholars who we thought were doing cool and maybe not sort of marginal work in American religion and wondered what might these people learn from each other? Did we have a conversation to be had? And it turned out we did. It was a great set of conversations. And we closed the second workshop by fantasizing about what could we do? How could we bring these exciting and cool conversations about American religion beyond these workshop walls? Do we think that there's a space in the subfield of American religion for this? And we all thought there was. And so Cooper and I thought, wow, maybe a journal and others were supportive. So then since neither of us had ever founded a journal before, we set about learning how to do that. 
Yeah. So it was less a sense of there's something wrong and more a sense of we think there's something more here and we want others to see it too. You know, it's such a big thing. I wonder, did you wonder, is this the right time in my career? Should I talk to other people about that? Was that a question for you at all? It was. It certainly was. And Cooper had had experience working on a journal in graduate school. He worked with the journal Ethics. So he had a sense of what the behind the scenes stuff was going to look like and a decent sense of how much work that might be. So it was helpful to have conversations with him about what might this look like for us. 
And it was also helpful for me to have conversations with other journal editors. And of course, the process of starting a journal is not the same as just picking up the reins from when someone else has put them down, right? I think in the end, Cooper and I both thought it was a really exciting intellectual project and one that was worth the time we were going to spend on it. But we knew from the start that it was going to be a real investment of time if we did it well. And we really wanted to do it well. Can you give us an idea of some of the everyday experiences of running a journal and how this does or doesn't fit into your routine as a professor? 
Yes. So there are some things that are quite regularized. We've got two issues a year. So if we've done our jobs right and leading up to those issues, We go through a phase of copy editing. We go through a phase of proofs. We read the proofs. We always find something small. We go through another set of proofs. We find something small again. We go through another set of proofs. Then we approve the final version. Then there's the issue. There are other things that are a little more responsive. So we respond to articles when they're submitted through our online forum. And that means that our process there looks like this. An article is submitted. Both of us take a look at it. We ask the first question, could this be a fit for American religion? 
And does this look like it's of the caliber and kind of aimed at the right set of conversations? And if we get an affirmative to all of those, then that means we're going to send it out to readers. And then we need to come up with the right readers for it. This is, of course, other journal editors will tell you, too. becoming an increasing challenge. I think during the pandemic, a lot of people had a lot on their plates. Reviewing for journals was something that people began to say no to more often. I think now it's perhaps true that we all have continued to have a little more on our plates. So finding people who we think will be generous and collegial readers and also will have the time and ability to review an article can be 
And that's one of those responsive jobs, right? Oh, this one said no, let's try a new one. One practice that we've moved toward is often just asking an extra reviewer so that if everyone says yes, then woohoo, great, we'll have an extra review. That never hurt anyone's process. But generally, it's very unusual that everyone says yes the first time we ask them. Yeah. The other thing, and this is not true for every journal, but for our journal, we run a robust online website. And of course, an online website, but we run a robust website. And there we feature stuff that's related to the journal and stuff that is shorter form, more topical, stuff like a... a forum in response to a book. And so those things are kind of mini projects that are all about American religion and related to the mission of the journal, but might not look like peer-reviewed essays. 
And so those also work on their own timeline. But when we agree to do those, we'll usually set up the timeline at the beginning so that it, for example, doesn't conflict with one of our issues coming out, doesn't conflict with us having to do a say a special issue editor or things like that. So there are a lot of tasks to keep on top of. And some of them we have more control over than others, but the twice a year journal issue are the most regularized for us. And would you say there's a type of person or type of academic that this kind of editorial position, what you and Cooper are doing would work better for, or what would you sort of advise people who are considering 
at least one of you needs to be very organized. I know that sounds like a small thing, but there are a lot of balls in the air at any given time. It's easy to lose track of things. And if you lose track of things for a couple of months, then that's a couple of months that somebody has had no feedback on their article. So there are other things that we aim for too. We have creative pieces in our journal. So making sure that working with our creative editors, making sure that we've got things lined up for future issues. We've got a big whiteboard that is always describing the next issue and the one after that for planning purposes. We need to think about how many pages a journal will take up. 
We need to think about stuff like image permissions and things like that for both online and in the journal. So you certainly do need an element of organization. The other thing, that I think you need is an intellectual curiosity because you have to be interested in a bunch of different things in your subfield, maybe even beyond your subfield. You need to be open to the possibilities of different kinds of methods, different kinds of writing styles, how things might contribute to the subfield, even if they're not the kind of work you yourself would do, or even you yourself might read as an academic. So yeah, some intellectual curiosity too. I really love the big creative component in American religion. And I'm just curious, are you making a point about this kind of material poetry or art or fiction? 
Do you think it should be included in an academics profile for, say, tenure or promotion? That's a great question. I'm inclined to say that different faculties might make different determinations. That's also in the magical world where faculty governance really is the thing that's driving tenure and promotion. I can tell you that very closely related, when we talked about having a journal, we talked about the fact that when we teach and when pretty much everyone we know who teaches in American religion teaches, we don't just teach a bunch of secondary sources. We teach other things. We teach images, we teach poems, and we think that we learn from those too. Not just teaching because the students need to get it, but that we learn from literature and poetry and photography and other kinds of material art. 
And if we're learning from those, why shouldn't they have a place in the journal? So in that way, if that's the argument about tenure, then yeah, absolutely, those things should count. But I do understand that some universities or some faculties have stricter ideas about what might count. And I'm a little hesitant to prescribe that everyone must do this. My own personal inclination is that yes, absolutely. If these things are contributing to knowledge, they should be counted toward tenure and promotion. Yeah. Having never been on the other side of this, this journal process. I mean, I've never edited a journal. I'm really curious how it's changed your perspective on writing journal articles. Do you think it's improved your, how you go about that or just your understanding of how they work or what makes them good? 
Yes. I think it has made me think much better about audience and how your first audience is a couple of scholars or three scholars who are already tired and trying to cram this in mostly out of the goodness of their hearts, because we all know service isn't the thing that gets you promoted. And not that they want to be entertained, but that if you can do the heavy lifting of making things make sense and making things clear that you've done your job. I think that sometimes journal articles in particular can be so aimed toward the specialist that they spend little time on what you might think of as aesthetics, like, is this nice to read? But actually really does have an effect on how well the reader can comprehend. 
So clearly written, maybe beautifully written, at least nicely written, I now think of as an important part of communication, not just as a sort of aesthetic plus. Yeah, I totally agree. And I know it's hard to give a sort of blanket advice, but what you said there just kind of made me want to ask you, do you have advice for people working on their journal articles, you know, for sort of how to do this better or think about it better? Yeah, I do think clarity is really important. I think you get the best feedback from peer reviewers when your article is the most clear. It's obvious to me that sometimes peer reviewers are critiquing something they read in the article that I didn't read in the article, but the author still left the space for that misreading of it, or maybe it's not a misreading, but the author still left the space for multiple interpretations and 
a clearer version of it might not have left that door open. So I think clarity is really, really important, not only because you write a better article, but because you're more likely to get better advice through the peer review process, which is not to say that everyone's always going to be nice or that every article is a good article if written clearly, right? Some articles are not that interesting, no matter how clearly they're written. But that's a really important piece that, yeah, that would be my advice. Obviously, also, if you look in journals, it's not true that everyone followed that advice. There are sort of jargony, tough to get through, but important articles. And I do just sometimes wish that some of those were a little bit more clearly written because then the important ideas in them would be more accessible to other scholars and students too. 
Do you see value in, you know, since you were talking about clarity, trying to write the academic journal article that, quote, even an undergrad can understand or get through, is that something you think is worthwhile or is this not the way academics should be thinking about journal articles? I think there's space for both. I do think that there are some articles that can be written in ways that are accessible to undergraduates that are making a point that an undergraduate can understand. And if that's your article, then you should. So here's an example of that. An article that brings some historical phenomenon that we didn't know about before to light. That as a mostly descriptive project, that is something that you can write for undergraduates and they can understand. 
And then you can talk about how it changes, how it should change the scholarly literature, how we should think differently after this. But that's an in that is available with undergraduates. Now, I think there are also other kinds of articles that are probably not going to be undergraduate friendly, except at the highest levels. Are you intervening in a longstanding theoretical debate in your field? If that's the case, the people who are interested in your article are probably just other academics. And maybe one of them might want to bring it into a graduate seminar, for example. But it's unlikely that some undergraduate is going to read it just because they now need to write a research paper or something like that. So I really want to make space for both of those things. 
I'm not sure that it's true that every article should be written at an undergraduate level. In fact, I think it's probably not. There's a reason we have theoretical concepts that go by certain kinds of names. There's a reason you might want to make reference to discourse in a Foucauldian way and not have to begin at the beginning explaining Foucault. So yeah, I really think there's space for both of those. But I also do want to reiterate that I think that theoretical article that's making an intervention in a longstanding theoretical debate can still be written very clearly. It's just that it may have ideas that an undergraduate can't pick up just by reading that article. I totally agree. From the teaching perspective, I know my students feel immense satisfaction when I tell them, okay, this is an article from an academic journal. 
It's not the kind of thing I ever read as an undergrad. So, you know, they have that feeling of I got through this reading that is on a sort of higher level. So it's nice to have some of those journal articles out there. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I think, you know, as a journal, we have published both kinds of articles. There are some that I simply would not assign to undergraduates. But there are a few articles that I would that I think are quite clearly written, are making a point. that undergraduates can understand with the context they have and the evidence that's inside the article. So yeah, I agree. It's great to have those out there. I don't think that needs to be every single one though. 
For sure. You mentioned Reader's Reports before. So that reminds me of how academic journal articles can be the source of pain for a lot of academics. I think many of us have had the experience of getting back a review that might have verged on nasty or felt maybe a little mean-spirited. I wonder if that's something you are conscious of in your job as an editor and have been able to sort of cut down on, or I don't know if that's come up in how you dealt with it. That was something we talked about a lot before we started the journal, because we got to make up our own practices as we went. And one conversation we had with a large number of colleagues 
was the conversation about the difference between reviews of books and reviews of peer reviews of articles. And there was a strong sense that even in the meanest of book reviews, there is a, I don't mean published book reviews, I mean peer review reports on a book prospectus or on a manuscript, that even in the meanest of those, there was a sustained engagement with the piece. And in peer reviews of journal articles, sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes it feels really cursory and you think, oh, the person didn't even read this very well. So one of the things we wondered about was, is that in part because the reviews of book manuscripts are not anonymous to the reader? So the reader knows who wrote this book. 
And so when we began our peer review process, we decided to go with a singly anonymous review process, which means the reviewer can figure out who the writer of the article is. There are other academic journals who do this, Public Culture, for example. And we went with this because we hoped that people would have a stronger sense of collegiality, might have a different sense of what it means to be constructive if they could know who the person who authored the article was. We were very cognizant of bias, however. What if people know that A woman wrote this or a graduate student wrote this or somebody of color wrote this or somebody whose personal life is outside their tradition or is the same as the tradition they're writing about. 
So when we made that decision, we also made a decision to have a kind of heavy editorial hand to read really closely any peer review reports we got and to throw away any that we thought had any whiffs of bias. And I mean, like the whole report. And also, even to the ones that were useful reports, we decided that it was best for reports to go along with some editorial commentary. I think many of us have been on the receiving end of a couple of reviews that say generally nice things and offer some suggestions for revision. And then we think, well, this doesn't really make sense and I don't want to do it. But I also am worried it's going to go back to this person and they're going to say I 
what does the editor think? Does the editor think that this is required? And some editors really try not to have an opinion about that. We decided that we did want to have opinions about that, that we wanted to say, we've read your piece carefully. We've read the reports carefully. We think that these two things are really good ideas. We're not really sure about this. You might consider it. Or we had a different read from reviewer B and And so we thought this critique didn't quite hit the mark, but because reviewer B read it in that way, we'd like you to do a little revising to make sure that a future reader doesn't read it in the way that reviewer B did. So those are just some examples, but we did decide that a heavier editorial hand could blunt some of the blow of the nastiness of any readers. 
Although we also specifically decided that in addition to bias, any reviews that we thought were really nasty were just not going to be shared and we were going to find someone new to be another peer reviewer because both of us cooper and i think that our field is at its best when it's collaborative and constructive and you know to be honest i think most of our peer reviewers really have been constructive and collaborative and really have generously offered ways that they think would make the article better now In every case, do we agree? Not necessarily. But yeah, I do think the heavy editorial hand or the kind of editorial interpretation of the peer reviews can help the communication process, make it feel a little less like the peer reviewers have the definitive judgment and more like this is part of an editing process and we want to help you with it. 
Yeah, that editorial intervention there sounds incredible. incredibly helpful to me. I'm hoping that more journals start to imitate you on that. Are you hearing back from writers appreciating that? We have a couple of times. We've never heard anyone say anything nasty about it, or even like, oh, I didn't like that. But I'm not sure they would tell us that. Both Cooper and I read everything. We read the submissions. We read the peer reviews. We We read revisions. We're happy to help people if they're kind of confused about how to go about revisions or stuck between two visions of what the article should look like. Yeah. And if we were publishing six issues a year, I don't think we could do that kind of thing. 
But having a smaller, more, I like to think more humane journal does mean that we prioritize that kind of communication. Yeah. Speaking of creating a humane journal. journal. I'm curious how you go about choosing an editorial board and if there's anything our listeners should know if they're thinking, gee, I'd like to be part of an editorial board of a journal. What do academics do that signals to you they'd be good for this? At the cost of sounding trite, I'm going to go with some sort of academic good citizenship because your editorial board for whatever journal you're looking at, those people are sometimes called upon as peer reviewers. Those people are sometimes called upon for advice like, hey, we have an article that deals with these three themes in this theory. 
It's much more in your area. Could you recommend someone to review it or two people or three people? So what we're looking for there in both cases is somebody who's good with communication, can get back to you via email, understands... the scholarship around them and can think in networks and say, oh, this person, their work is adjacent. Oh, this kind of theoretical work, even though it's not about exactly the same topic, might be that person might be a really good reviewer. So that also suggests when you're thinking about the editorial board as a whole, you want real diversity. So diversity across seniority in the field, diversity across subfields, diversity across institutions. Those things are really important to make a journal run well, because as editors, we do rely on our editorial board, not tons. 
And it is interesting that they're called an editorial board because I don't know any where the people do actual editing. But that process is in many ways about making the peer review process a good and productive one by identifying good people to review. So it actually sounds like it's a lower time commitment than I might have thought being on an editorial board. It's different for different journals, for sure. I'm on another editorial board. That journal has meetings not very frequently, once or twice a year. And I probably review for them once or twice. I am a peer reviewer for them once or twice a year also. That's a bigger journal that's published more often. But some... I mean, we definitely also have some editorial board members that we've never called on. 
And that doesn't mean that we don't think they're excellent academic citizens. It just means we haven't happened to get an article that we needed their advice on. Yeah. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions that we're asking all of our guests. One is, what do you wish you had known about writing or publishing earlier in your career? that co-writing things can be really fun. As a graduate student, I feel like I did a lot of collaborative thinking, a lot of discussion, a lot of reading things together, a lot of thinking ideas together, and never wrote with anyone else until Hilary Kael and I were sitting next to each other at a conference in Princeton and realized that we had each done research that was 
closely adjacent to the other. And we thought, oh, wow, we should work together. And so we co-wrote an article about Jews and Messianic Jews in North America. And that process was terrific. I learned a lot. Writing with somebody else is cool because you can see somebody else's writing process. But I would say a word of warning, not every writing process meshes easily with every other writing process. So it doesn't mean you can just say like, oh, this person's a friend. It'll be great to write together. It might not, but it can be a great experience and a unique kind of pleasure. And I think in the humanities, we don't tell graduate students that that's an option on the table. Look, in part, that's because it doesn't always, people don't always know how to count it at tenure and promotion, but I'm hopeful that's changing. 
And even if everything doesn't, even if it doesn't count in the same way as a single authored article might for tenure and promotion, I do think it's It can be intellectually really fulfilling in a somewhat different way than writing your own article can be. Yeah, it sounds like a lot of fun. And I know you're working on a book now that you're co-writing with, I guess, a much more senior colleague. I'm curious how that came about or how it's been. It came about because... We had each observed a pattern of male academics networking and publishing in almost exclusively male groups. And we were both wondering why that would happen, especially in a time where in the humanities and religious studies and Jewish studies, where Rachel and I both work, there are plenty of women. 
And so we were curious about what is it about the academic culture that allows that kind kind of exclusivist network to continue? What might we do about it? So we've been writing together. And Susanna Heschel, who is my co-author, and I have, I think, very different writing styles. I'm more of an outline, very carefully, meticulously fill in the outline. She's more of a, wow, I have a thought, and then this is a related thought. And also here's another thing in ways that are really dynamic. So it's not always easy in the beginning, but it's also been... really terrific to think with someone who thinks in a slightly different way structurally than I do. It's not that we're coming to very different conclusions, but I do think of writing as a process of thinking also, or at least it's very closely intertwined. 
So I would say that Susanna and I have quite different writing styles, but it's been really great to work together to see how someone does it differently, to see how somebody crafts ideas in a way that's different from mine. And do you guys edit each other? Yes, definitely. And that's very much what makes it a co-authored work rather than two people each writing their own stuff. Yeah. I mean, there are parts of it that she drafted primarily. There are parts of it that I drafted primarily. And there are parts of it that I couldn't tell you who drafted. There's not even a primary anymore. It really is just collaborative. Wow. That sounds amazing. Yeah. It's been a great process. And I would recommend trying out co-writing to people. 
Another question that we wanted to ask is if there is a writing practice or habit that has been working for you recently. I am a fan of the write every day. I don't always make it happen, but I come close to doing a little bit of writing every day. I also think of writing in this sense very capaciously. So reading and taking notes on something that I know is going to be a part of a chapter that I'm writing can count as writing. But basically writing doing work toward the writing project that I'm working on every day is really helpful to me because there isn't time to lose track or to forget exactly what I was up to or have to relearn what I was thinking about before. 
That will be much easier as we are now heading into the summer for me. But during the academic year, it's not always simple, but it counts as doing it for me, even if it's just 15 minutes or 20 minutes that I squeeze in between two other things. I feel the same way. I also feel like it helps a lot to just kind of not break the chain and to be at it every day. But I wonder if you have this issue. I also feel it's almost like caffeine with me, where if I'm off it for like a day or two, when I go back on, it's like so great. And similarly, when I come back to writing that I left, it's my ability to see it and revise and to have the fresh eyes is obviously 
so much better. So I'm curious how you negotiate those two. Absolutely. I am a fan of once I have a draft of something, put it in a drawer and work on something else for a week before I revisit it. So yes, I think that the revising process requires some distance for me. There may be people who can magically see stuff with distance that they've been working on for a while, but I'm not I don't have that magic. So I do think there's an element of putting it aside where we then can see it with new eyes. I almost always have enough irons in the fire that I can work on a different writing project for a while and then go back to the one that I need to revise. 
So that's generally how I plot that out. I also have enough writing projects that sometimes I will say, oh, I really don't feel like working on this today. So I'm going to work on that writing project instead. And that's nice because it means that I'm less likely to... skip writing and default to answering yet another email. Totally agree with you on that too. I also keep a few going. For me, it is mostly because there's always going to be a time when I'm sick of something. So it's really helpful to have, you know, something else on the back burner. Yes, I agree. Well, thank you so much, Sarah. Really appreciated having the chance to talk with you about being an editor and founder of a journal. 
This has been really helpful, and I'm sure we will have another reason to talk again soon. Thanks so much, Rachel. This has been great. We're so excited to get to speak to Professor Jenny Kaplan today. Professor Kaplan is the Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati Chair in Judaic Studies and the author of a very recently published book, Funny You Don't Look Funny. Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials, which is published by Wayne State University Press. And that is why we wanted to speak with Jenny today for a topic that we will be revisiting in the future. That is the path to publication or the path sometimes from dissertation to book. Not everybody talks about all the ins and outs and bumps of this. 
But that's what we're trying to do here to demystify the process of academic writing and publishing and help people feel less alone in it. So we're very grateful for the generous colleagues like Professor Jenny Kaplan, who are doing a real service to the profession by sharing their experiences. So thank you, Jenny. So we'd love to hear about this book's path. And to begin with, I'm wondering, was this book your dissertation or close to it? Or was this really not your dissertation? No, this was my dissertation in enough ways that matter. Structurally, it doesn't bear any resemblance to my dissertation, but most of the pieces of the dissertation ended up in the book somewhere. And then there are some new chapters that were not part of the dissertation that were added for the book version. 
But functionally speaking, this is my dissertation book. to kind of fix or revise that dissertation so it was what you thought the book should be? That's a really good question. I sort of tried to look at it and think, if I were teaching a class in Jewish humor, which I do, what would I want out of a book that I were going to assign? Or if I were going to assign certain chapters, what would be most useful? Because the dissertation, as dissertations tend to be, was sort of centered around a certain theoretical approach. And that isn't what I thought was my most useful intervention into the field. So I kind of restructured everything and reconceptualized everything based on what I thought was a more interesting and useful thing for me to offer American Jewish studies, offer humor studies. 
And I sort of approached it that way. And luckily, my publisher and my press agreed with me that I had done that in a in a useful and interesting way. And we went forward with that. So to get really into the concreteness of this, how soon after dissertation were you ready to engage with the book idea? I was one of those people who needed to take some years away and did not have the stomach to look at the dissertation right after. I went back to it relatively quickly. I was I was changing jobs immediately after the dissertation. So I wasn't able to kind of go back to it, right? I mean, I kind of, I literally moved and then drove up to defend my dissertation about eight days after I moved for a new job. 
So I didn't immediately go back to it, but I had the initial contract for the book and the sort of draft of the manuscript that ended up becoming the book within two years of the defense. And that revision process for you, the writing it kind of again or slightly differently, how did that go? And how did it go as you were also beginning a new teaching job? It went okay. That was one of the points that I felt the sort of isolation of the post-PhD writing process, because as you're working on the dissertation, you have so many people who are are contractually obligated to help you. And some committees are more responsive than others. Some mentors are more responsive than others. But in theory, you've got a group of people who it's their job to read the stuff as you're writing it and give you feedback and respond to things for you. 
And so after defending and starting the revision process, that was the first time I was trying to do that just alone without anybody whose job it was to help me anymore. And so I sort of really felt the empty room around me in a sense. And it was very hard to get comfortable enough and confident enough to start really making changes. My brain kept telling me, well, maybe you should just send it out as is and wait until you get reader feedback. Because some grown-up needs to come tell me what I need to do. I didn't yet trust myself enough to just start to... cut things and change things and move things without somebody more senior than me telling me to do it. 
So it was very hard to start to trust my own instincts and trust my own authorial voice and begin to do those things alone. I really relate to that. When I was in that stage, getting to show people even just a little bit, say, of the new introduction or the you know, a new chapter breakdown and getting an okay or some feedback from someone else was so helpful in giving me that confidence to move forward. How did you go about finding readers if you did or people to bounce ideas by? Yeah, I didn't much. I certainly didn't as much as I probably should have. I have never been great at using my village in that way. So, you know, that is one of those things that as I've moved through my career, I've tried to get better about sending things to people, but I never really sent any pieces of the book to people throughout the process. 
And that's something I'm sort of rethinking for my second book, if there are ways that I can be more intentional about that and do a better job of getting feedback from people to help me along the way. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So how did you find your editor and the press? Had you heard that they were interested in this kind of book? Did someone recommend it? Yeah, I mean, I got the standard advice that I think everybody gets and that is actually not terrible advice, which is to, you know, go to your bookshelf and look at the two or three or four most recent books that you have found really helpful in your research or, you know, the things that have come out that you are excited about and look at what presses recommend. 
those were. And so in my case, it was actually very straightforward that the press I went with, Wayne State University Press, they have over the last maybe five or ten years, they've been publishing a lot in Jewish media studies and Jewish cultural studies. They published the journal on Jewish film and new media. So they really have that corner of the market kind of locked down. So they were my first choice all along. So I sent them my proposal first. And when they kind of immediately said, yes, we're interested, we want to give you a provisional contract, then I didn't even really bother sending it anywhere else. And how long did this process take from sending proposal to seeing it as book? I guess it took five and a half years approximately. 
Maybe I had my initial contract in 2017 and the book finally came out in March of 2023. So I'm not great at math, but it was more than five years, I think. Maybe it was 2018 that I got the contract, but it was a long time. It was not a quick path. Yes, for many of us. And so the longer than maybe expected path, how would you explain to others why this sometimes happens? There are a lot of reasons why it might sometimes happen. In my case, it had primarily to do with staff turnover at the press. So my editor left the press twice during the period between when I got my contract and when the book was eventually published. And both of those times that she left caused a kind of significant slowdown in the process and a lot of real lack of clarity about 
what was going on and what was going to happen moving forward. There was there was a lot of question about the first time she left. There was a lot of question about whether I was going to stay with the press or not. And I did decide to stay with the press. And I'm glad that I did. But there was there was probably an 18 month to almost two year slowdown over over those turnover issues. That must have been difficult, although I think actually most of us have some have periods of uncertainty in the communication with the press and the editors. Did you receive any conflicting advice about, you know, whether to go to a different press? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, of course, I got some people who said, you know, absolutely, you should, you should pull the book, you should go somewhere else. 
And other people who said, well, maybe wait it out. I ran up, not infrequently, I ran up against people who saw my who were confused about my decision to go with the press that i did and who saw it as sort of a quote-unquote lesser press which i absolutely do not believe to be the case i think that it's i think that it's really important that you find the press that is committed to the kind of work that you're doing and that 100 is wayne state right now for jewish humor studies but I ran into other people in the field who didn't even know where Wayne State University was and didn't feel like it was when it wasn't Stanford, it wasn't NYU, it wasn't Oxford. 
So when my editor was unexpectedly let go from the press, they saw that as a great opportunity for me to get out of what they saw as an unfortunate contract situation. But that's not how I saw it. And so I sort of resisted that. I resisted that advice. I decided to stay. stay with the press and trust the fact that the press was committed to the project, no matter who was at the helm. And that I think turned out to be the right choice. So the transition to a new editor, how was that for you? It was rocky the first time. So the sort of chronology of events is that my editor was, as I said, unexpectedly let go from the press. And there was a 
a fairly large public outcry at that. So there was kind of a period of instability. And then they brought her back. They sort of unfired her. So I didn't have a new editor in that gap. They never got around to replacing her or hiring. So that was sort of a very scary period when we just didn't know anything. We didn't know who they were going to replace her with. We didn't know what the new editor's priorities were going to be. And then they ended up hiring her back. So things sort of stabilized, but then she unexpectedly left after that. And so the second time around, I did end up getting moved to a new editor and things were fabulous at that point. I still don't fully know what was going on behind the scenes, but I guess there had been some things going on behind the scenes that had caused additional slowdowns in the process. 
So there were months that I was sort of sitting around waiting for a peer review interview that the book had never been sent for, but I didn't know that. And so once the new editor came on board, I had a meeting with her kind of right away. We had a Zoom and I sort of told her where I thought the project was. And she told me what had actually been done on the project and we got on the same page. And that was in November of 2021. She sent a That was in late November of 2021. She sent the manuscript out for the final peer review right after New Year's, got that review back in March, and the book was in proofs by May. 
So once things stabilized after that second turnover, the process was great. It was quick. It was communicative. It was really a pleasure. Everyone we've spoken to about editor-writer relationships has made clear this is really individualized and everyone's is different. So I'm curious, did you feel like you got real feedback on ideas or writing or organization or more help just sort of shepherding through the process? Yeah, my experience was more of the shepherding situation. I didn't get a ton of editorial feedback on shaping the manuscript, but I Again, it went out for peer review the first time under one editor. And then by the time I got the second editor, the book was theoretically good to go. It had already gone through a few ones. 
So there was less for them to talk to me about. So as you say, everything is very individualized. And so that experience may be idiosyncratic to where in the process I went through the editorial turnover. But no, they were more shepherding it and kind of less direct feedback. feedback on the manuscript itself. Right, which seems to be kind of the theme with most of the academic presses as opposed to the folks who are doing trade. Yeah, that's my understanding of it as well. So one of the things that your press, I feel like, got really right that anyone can see if they just Google the book is that it's a beautiful cover. It is. And I'm just curious if you got to play any role in this. 
Did you have a voice in design? I did, but I can't take any credit for... the final cover. They had a questionnaire that they sent that asked if there were particular things I wanted. If there had been a particular image I wanted, I could have suggested that. I do not have much of an eye for graphic design. So what I told them on the questionnaire was that I didn't want a movie still on the cover, which books about film and TV and media frequently do have And I tend to feel like that's just too busy. And so I didn't want that kind of a movie still on the cover. And so I said I wanted something that was going to be kind of clean, typographically clean, but with maybe eye-catching use of color. 
And I feel like what they came back with was so much more perfect than I could have possibly designed on my own. And there are so many little things about the design that I think are so great and I'm so very happy with. And so I think if I had had more of a personal vision of what I wanted the cover to be, I think they would have been amenable to that. But I'd very much let the professionals do that. And I'm so pleased with how it turned out. Yeah, I love it. I mean, it's not like it's, I don't know, it's just like so clean and yet kind of so perfect. Yeah. Yeah. I love the kind of mid-century Valley of the Dolls font that they picked. 
I love the comma in front. funny, you don't look funny is also the apostrophe in don't. And I love that the slightly sideways O's in the word look on the cover, on the front cover are back on the back cover as the eyes and a smiley face. So there are all of these little details that I just think are so, so great about it. It hasn't been a really long time yet, but I'm wondering if there's anything interesting or unexpected that you've heard from readers or feedback since it's still kind of I know your book is kind of like in the newborn stage, I feel like. Yeah. Yeah, it's not eating solid food yet. No, you know, as well as I do, that the speed of academic publishing is already slow. 
When you get into academic review publishing, it's glacial. So, you know, I haven't gotten any formal feedback in that way. I have one Amazon review so far that was nicely positive and was not from my mother. I think that The thing that I've been pleased with was that I didn't immediately get just like torn apart. You know, there are things in the book, particularly the fact that I talk about Woody Allen, that I thought could go either way. And I did get picked up right away by some strange European Woody Allen fan accounts who apparently just comb the news every day for anything that mentions Woody Allen. And so one of the interviews that I did when the book first came out, I mentioned the sort of conflict in teaching material like that and the decision making about whether I was going to include him in the book or not. 
And so some, you know, some Italian Woody Allen super fans like got mad at me on Twitter, but that that was as bad as it got. So there was nothing that immediately caused people to like set the book on fire. And so that had been my that had been my only concern at this point, because beyond that, yeah, it'll take time. it'll take probably a year or so before I start to see anything formal about it. You know, lots of people have told me that they are reading the book and enjoying it. Who knows if either part of that sentence is true, but I, I will, you know, I will believe that they are in fact reading it and they are in fact enjoying it until I have reason to, to suspect otherwise. 
Definitely. Speaking of Twitter, I'm curious how you're thinking about publicity or promotion in I think you and I have a lot of colleagues who've been able to kind of string together book tour type things or organize book events. Are you thinking along those lines? Yeah, to the best of my ability. One of the things that I discovered in this process that I had not been aware of or hadn't been prepared for is that academic presses really don't do a whole lot of promotion. You know, they have an advertising budget for each title and they will stretch that as far as they can, but they are not going to organize events for you. They are not going to send you out on a book tour, anything like that. 
And part of my, I guess, mistaken understanding of that is that I worked in a bookstore for five years between my master's and my PhD. And so I, and my job at that bookstore was special events. So I dealt lots and lots with publishers and with authors and with arranging book tours. And so it never really occurred to me that academic publishing didn't work that way. So I was probably not as prepared to market myself as I should have been. I'm also just not great at marketing myself, though. So I've done what I can in terms of kind of tweeting about the book when it works. was available for presale and periodically as it was leading up to the publication and then posting about it when it came out. 
And anytime if there's been any media about it, I've made sure to share that. And I always tag the press when I do that, A, so that they're aware, but B, because they will often then retweet stuff and they have many more followers than I do. So, you know, I've tried to sort of raise the visibility of some of it in how I strategically tag other more popular people than me. But that certainly has been a learning process that I didn't realize that any events of that type really need to be instigated by you. The press is not going to be doing that for you. To follow up on something you mentioned about the press having a limited budget that they might be willing to kind of stretch. 
Just curious what you meant by that or what you felt that they were doing. So, like, they've done, I think, a good job. I mean, again, I don't have a lot of frame of reference at this point, but they've tried to get ads placed in as many publications as they can, as strategically as they can, especially if they can have an ad that's like my book and somebody else's book. So there's an ad in the next AJS Perspectives issue that is my book and is also Melissa Wenninger's book. So that way they're able to split the advertising budget cost from that. So, you know, that ad is not entirely coming out of the budget for my book or entirely out of the budget for her book. 
So, you know, I know they tried to do things like that and really targeting the kind of publications where the readers are going to be maximally interested in something in my topic as opposed to just spamming, spamming whatever kind of book publication news is out there. regardless of whether it's geared towards cultural studies or Jewish studies or media studies or anything like that. So I think they've tried to be very smart in where they spend money on the book. And that's great to hear that they're doing ads. I hadn't always heard from our colleagues that they'd actually seen ads of their book. Yeah, and they've been really nice about sending me PDFs of the copy of any ads that they're sending out so that I can see what they look like. 
The only disappointing thing about the ads is that They are pretty much always in black and white. And as we discussed, the color element of the cover of my book is one of my favorite parts, but I think it still comes across okay in black and white. I'm curious about what you think you've learned from writing your first book about writing books or about your writing style that you think you'll take forward to writing in the future. Oh, that's a good question. I always saw myself or I never saw myself, I guess I should say, as a monograph writer. I sort of understood that I needed to write the dissertation because you have to. And I understood that I needed to turn the dissertation into a book because you have to. 
But it had always been my perception of myself that once I got the first book done, that that was going to be the only book that I was going to write. because I have always felt much more comfortable writing article-length essays. Partly that's just the way that my mind works, is I think of things that would make a good 6,000 to 8,000-word topic, but not necessarily something that's going to make a good 60,000 to 80,000-word topic. So the first thing I learned by writing the book is that people told me, and I didn't really believe them, that you really can write a book that is mostly just a series of connected... 6,000 to 8,000 word topics. And I always thought, no, you know, a book has a through line and a book, like every chapter is referring back to the previous chapter. 
And that's true. A good book does have a through line and the chapters do refer to each other, but you don't actually have to sit there and think like, I have an idea that will take me 70,000 words to articulate. You can have an idea and you can articulate it via smaller pieces. So, you know, a A mentor of mine who has also been a mentor of yours over the years, she was making fun of me in a loving way. The other day when I was talking about, you know, working on my second book next year, and she was saying, you know, this from the woman who always said, like, there would never be a second book. I don't have a second book in me. 
Now look at you going off to write your second book. So that's been one of the biggest things I've learned is that you don't have to, it's like eating an elephant, right? One bite at a time. You don't have to Think of a book in terms of this is a thing I want to say that is a 400 page idea. It's OK for it to be 10, 25 page ideas. So speaking of second book, is it related? Is it something totally different? It's totally different. I mean, it's related in the sense that it's still Jewish cultural studies. But the second book is tentatively titled Unmasked Jewish Identity in Comic Books. So it is it's taking some of these same ideas about American Jewish identity and the way that American Jewish content producers encode their Jewish identity into the work that they do. 
But it's it's a it's a whole different medium, at least until the later part of the book where I'll get into some of the Marvel TV and DC TV and movies. But even then, those are, they're not comedy films. So this is another thing I've sort of learned is that I was maybe not as strategic as I could have been in my timing. I think I probably should have given myself a full year before starting the new topic because what I'm getting now is lots of people because the book came out. And so some people became aware that I exist. And therefore, I've been getting lots of people who want me to talk about or write about humor right now. And I'm finding that I have to turn some of that 
down because I'm supposed to be spending the next year thinking and writing about comic books. And so I don't want to do too much that's going to pull me back to the previous research. So that was a tactical error on my part. I should have thought about giving myself kind of a gap year in between where my focus would still be on humor because it was going to be follow up to the book. And then once that had kind of quieted down, then I could move on to the second book. So that's one bit of advice. I would give to people, don't stack the books on top of each other if they are going to be very different topics. So what you just said answers or partly answers the question of how has your life as an academic writer changed since the first book came out? 
It sounds like, as you said, people became aware of your existence. You're getting invitations. People want you. Yeah, and that's been great. You know, this spring semester, ended up being kind of bananas in ways that are then running into the summer as well. So I've never traveled so much in my life as I am doing and will do over basically the six months between the book coming out in March and maybe September, which is as far out at least as I've booked stuff for the moment. So I'm incredibly, that's where my strategy, I guess, did pay off is that I'm very grateful that I'm on leave next year to work on the second book. But that means that I have a much more flexible travel schedule. 
So I'm able to attend some of these events and talks and give some of these lectures that people are asking me to do without having to worry about my class schedules. So that has been really helpful in scheduling stuff. But yeah, I have never felt so popular in my life. It's sort of a new world for me. I was not homecoming queen. It also reminds me, does having the first book come out or even when you were a few months away from publication, did that excitement... in the weeks and months before, and then this excitement and popularity in the months and hopefully years after, is that helping to fuel the writing of the second book? kind of cringe because there are always going to be some sentences that have made their way directly from the dissertation into the book, effectively unchanged. 
And you're looking at that and thinking, why did I write it that way? But you wrote it that way 10 years ago when you were just starting the process of who you were as a writer. So I'm very excited about working on something that's going to be whole cloth new. So that's definitely... as much as having written the first book has proven to me that I can do it, it's also really spurred me to try to create something that is better. I mean, you always want the next book to be better than the previous one. And so there are certainly places with the first one that I look at and I was like, hey, that's such dissertation speak. I can definitely make something that's more exciting for the next one. 
You brought up such an interesting point about having some time away and then looking at the piece again. I'm wondering when the book went into production, when the manuscript went into production, did you find yourself making some rather significant changes when you got back before the proofs? But when an editor had looked at it, was that time away that made you see some things you want to change? To some extent, yeah. I had an interesting process of peer review. So when the... When the manuscript went out for review the first time, one of the reviews came back very positive and with some interesting, helpful feedback. And the other one was horrible to the extent that I have not. It's been years now and I have not been able to look at that review a second time. 
I actually had to send it to somebody else and say, can you if there's anything usable for me in this review, can you pull it out and send it back to me? Because I can't I can't look at it again. And and then all of the lack of communication happened. You know, I thought we were sending it out for a third review and that just didn't happen for a year or more. And then when the third review came in, it was also quite positive. So from that first review and from the third review, there were things that I was able to add to clarify some of how I was thinking. There wasn't a lot that I felt like I changed or took out. 
It was mostly an additive thing. process because it's one of those things where this stuff makes sense to you because you've been looking at it for 10 years and you don't realize sometimes that you haven't articulated some of the connections that you really need to articulate because they seem so obvious to you. So there was a lot of that. There was a lot of stuff that I needed to say out loud that I had only been saying in my head. And that's really what I was able to take from some of the feedback. As I said, I didn't get a lot of editorial feedback per se that helped shape the manuscript necessarily. Yeah. One of the questions we're asking all guests is, is there something you wish you had known earlier in your academic career about writing or publishing that you think would be useful for listeners to know? 
Oh, so many things. But as we've already talked about and alluded to, I wish I had realized how much turnover there is at academic presses and how common it is for for somebody to go through this kind of upheaval with your editor leaving or the manager of the press, you know, whatever. Like, it turns out, as I've gone through this process and watched my friends going through this process, like, it's incredibly common. But as I was coming up and in graduate school and looking at, like, I heard all of these maybe romanticized stories of the relationships that people had with their editors that made me feel like it was this really, like, close personal bond bond and, you know, the editor is constantly in contact with them and they're shaping these books together. 
And so when that was not becoming my experience, I felt like I felt like it was a me problem that, you know, my book wasn't good enough or they just didn't like me enough to have that kind of a relationship. And it turns out that that relationship is a, as we already said, more common in trade than in academic presses. or at least in crossover books with academic presses. And B, I think it's also a bit of a myth of a past era that just isn't the way that the industry is right now. So I wish I had realized that some of these things that I was taking very to heart and taking very personally, in fact, had nothing at all to do with me. 
And it is much more common that you hear from your editor like twice a year and only if there is something that needs to be done. And then otherwise, you know, it's mostly just perfunctory housekeeping kind of emails until you get passed on to the the proof and the marketing people. So I wish I had known that. Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up. I think I also imagined a different kind of, you know, author-editor relationship. And I don't even know that I'd heard other academics speak about it. In fact, I mostly heard a silence about, you know, what was really going on or the level of communication between academic and editor. But it does seem like in the academic press world, what you're describing is the norm. 
Yeah. And another question that we're asking folks is whether there is a writing practice or habit that's working well for you right now. So I feel very strongly anytime I'm given the opportunity to talk about the writing process, I always feel compelled to say writing is very personally specific. And you may very well be someone for whom the overwhelming quantity of it There's so much advice out there that tells you write a little bit every day. All of the books out there that are how to write your book in a year, how to write an article in three months. And it always talks about write a little bit every day, write 15 minutes a day, write a half an hour a day. And that never worked for me. 
It never has. I cannot make that work for me. And again, I got to a point where I thought that that just meant that I wasn't a good enough academic writer. So What I've learned is that that's not true. I have eventually found other people. It's not just me. And so some people are like me. And what I have to do is I have to give myself, I have to block off at least one full day for writing. And when I need to write something, there has to be at least one dedicated writing day a week. When I make myself not do anything else, no grading that day, I don't schedule meetings that day, that day is for writing. And I may end up sitting down and writing for... 
four or five straight hours, or I may only write for one or two hours out of that whole day if I'm pulling out sources and whatever, but it has to be a dedicated chunk. And so maybe I produce the same 5,000 words a week as somebody who's writing a little bit every day, but I have to do it in one big go. And that's absolutely valid. I think that that's my advice is you need to trust your instincts about how you write and how you work. and not worry if people are telling you that, you know, best practices are something else. Oh, you know, Pomodoro timers, set yourself, you know, do the, do the tomato timer and set yourself little 15 minute writing chunks, or, you know, make sure that you always start a new pair, you know, never end on a, this is advice I got once, never end on a clean paragraph break, always start the next paragraph and end mid paragraph so that you know what 
You were trying to say, you know, just weird stuff that people think are universally applicable writing tips that really aren't. And even if they work for the preponderance of people, they're not going to work for everyone. So my biggest bit of writing advice is just really do trust what feels right for you. And if it seems like it's some weird thing that doesn't work for anybody else, it's still fine. Yeah, I totally agree. This is not like a case of there's one right way. It's more of the find what works for you. And I guess... In asking people, we're hoping to kind of show that in hearing all these different answers that, in fact, all sorts of different things work for people. Anything else you'd like to add, Jenny? 
I appreciate this space to sort of talk about and demystify publishing. Oh, I guess that would be the other thing that I would add about my writing process and advice for people. People sometimes have the mistaken impression about me that I'm a very fast writer because it only takes me... maybe a week to write an article or a chapter, but that's because it takes me three months of thinking about it before I actually sit down to write. So, I mean, that's sort of related to my previous point. I will sit there and I will think about the idea and I'll mull it over and I'll think, and I'm not even writing down like outlines or anything. This is just shower thoughts that are kicking around in my head until the point where I actually need to sit down and write it. 
And then I just start at the beginning and end at the end and write it in order and And, you know, I have a draft in a week. So people sometimes look at that and they're like, oh, my God, you know, you're such a fast writer. And it's not like I'm no faster than anybody else. It's just that my my process is is weird. And I spend 95 percent of my time thinking without writing anything down at all. You see a lot of people who say, you know, their process is like, oh, I wrote a thousand words and maybe I'll keep a hundred of them at the end. And that is I wish I could do that. I wish I could think out loud. 
in a sense, or kind of process as I write and be writing stuff all along. And then, you know, going back and cutting out the stuff that doesn't work. That just isn't my process. So I pretty much have the whatever it is I'm writing, I have it written in my head before I sit down to start writing. And then it all just kind of comes out in one go. And is that something you realized about yourself in grad school? Or is that a recent kind of I think it's something I realized more recently. You know, certainly in grad school, if I had ever looked at the fact that I always wrote my papers like the night before they were due, but I never felt I never felt time pressure in doing that. 
Like I never felt like I was cramming. It's just like, OK, I have thought about this and now I begin to write it at exactly the point where I have enough time left to write it. And so like I have I always wrote my papers at the last minute, but it never felt last minute. Because I'd written it in my head already. So I didn't really put that together as a student. It was it was a few years ago when somebody it was I was in the Young Scholars in American Religion program, which you also did. And when we were working on our writing, one of the meetings that we had and we were talking about how long it had taken us to write the thing that we had brought. 
to share with each other and like looking at our metadata on word to see, you know, you know, this, this, you've been working on this for like nine weeks. And my thing was like three days and and somebody said like, how do you write that fast? And like, I don't know, I don't type that quickly. I just, I write it in my head first. Right. That's funny. It's always like the comment of someone else who's like, this is how unusual this is. That makes you realize. Right. Well, this has been really fun and helpful. I've I really appreciate your sharing all of this with us. Thank you, Jen. Yeah, thank you for having me on. This has been great. Thanks for listening to Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing, sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. 
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