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. We're really glad to be speaking with Alicia Kaufman today, who is an Associate Professor of History at Baylor University, where she specializes in American religious and intellectual history. And the most recent book that you published that really caught my eye was this book on Turning Points in American Church History. And I'm noting, too, that on your profile, it mentions you were a journalist before becoming an academic. 
And I'll be curious to hear how that informed your writing. But this idea of a book around turning points seems really interesting. What was your idea and goal with that kind of focus? Yeah, yeah. Thanks for that question. In this whole conversation, I'm really looking forward to it. I cannot take credit for the turning points idea. That was... from a mentor of mine, historian Mark Knoll, who published a book, Turning Points, Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity, over 25 years ago, I think. And that was the whole sweep of church history, first century to 20th century. And he designed that format, especially for teaching. I first encountered the book in his church history class at Wheaton College, which I took not as an undergraduate course, 
But right after I had graduated, I was working as a magazine journalist at Christianity Today International just up the road from Wheaton College. And I found myself editing Christian history magazine, having never taken Christian history classes or having really any expertise in it at all. And so I went back down the road to take a church history class, and it was his, and that was the book that he used. So he had used this idea, and had you thought for a while, gee, that was great, or what was your then leap to sort of do it yourself? Right. After I got my PhD at Duke, my first teaching job at this very small Christian college in southwestern Pennsylvania, there were two people who taught history. 
I was all of U.S. and my colleague was the rest of the world from the dawn of time. And basically as many different classes as either of us could possibly offer is what we needed to be able to offer enough classes for our majors. And so I thought I could do a church history course. class. I had precepted that series at Duke, and I could use Noel's Turning Points book as a way of structuring it. So I taught that book as well. Then my second teaching job was at a seminary, University of Dubuque Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa, where I did the church history sequence there. So every fall, it was early church and medieval. Every spring was Reformation, modern Europe, and all of US. 
And we had 12-week semesters. And so to get any U.S. church history in there at all, I had to cram it in in about two, two and a half weeks. And I thought it would be great if there was something like Noel's Turning Points book, but just on U.S. church history because it reads very quickly. I could imagine assigning seminary students, most of whom are already in ministry. So they're adult learners with a lot of demands on their time. But this is something that, yeah, they could read in a couple of weeks and they could maybe use in their churches later. So I went to the publisher of Knoll's Turning Points book, which is Baker Academic, and started asking, is there a plan for a series of these? 
Is there a plan for a US version of it? And they hadn't planned a series at all, even though Knoll's, it's never been out of print. It's in its fourth edition now. It's been a really strong seller for them for a really long time, but they didn't, it wasn't a franchise. There weren't other versions of it. And then after my first, first book came out, so I was a little bit more known as an author, the conversations with Baker became, well, would you be willing to write that book? And it was kind of intimidating to think of how I'm really trained in 20th century. And there's so many different topics in a book like that. Where would I even start? Which where I started was calling Mark Knoll and saying, so, hey, if you were to do, if someone were to do a 
turning point style book, but just for US church history, what would be some dates to focus on? How might that work? And the gestation of the book ended up being very odd because I started it back at that job in Iowa. I had about half of the chapters written when I took this job at Baylor and was told I needed to write another university press book for tenure consideration. So I had to shelve the seven chapters that I had written and That's when I researched and wrote the Margaret Mead book and then finally came back around to this. So it was about 10 years between when I signed the contract for this and when I finally finished it. Thanks for sharing that. I mean, it's something actually in the podcast we're trying to do is sort of share these stories that don't always get told about writing and publishing. 
And that is sometimes the reality. For folks who haven't gotten to read the book yet or maybe haven't read any kind of Turning Points book, what does it mean? How does this actually work to look at Turning Points? Are you looking... Are you describing a before and then the moment of change and then some of the after? Honestly, I kind of cheated on the turning points part. I realized because U.S. church history, and it's not U.S. religious history, so it is confined just to Christian churches. And there could even be some quibbles about, I don't say much about LDS, for example, that has to do with the publisher and lots of considerations. But But even within that scope of U.S. church history, there's so much potentially to talk about. 
And if you want to be able to teach it in a survey setting, you want the focus dates to be spaced out on a timeline. So the list of turning points that I ended up with, some of them really are before and after. The church is splitting over slavery in the 1840s. You can see the before Civil War is happening. You can see the after. Several of the dates are more like launch points than turning points. The beginning of sort of institutional Catholicism in the United States or the Azusa Street Revival beginning Pentecostalism. Some of the dates are really not either of those things. It was more there was something I wanted to talk about and there was a gap on my timeline. 
And so I anchored that discussion to something, some event that I could talk about in some depth. But yeah, my list of turning points, they don't They're not all turning points in the way that I think Knowles were in part because he was narrating the whole big sweep of church history with maybe more of a teleology in mind. Like, this is the shape of the church, whereas I'm not even comfortable defining anything as the church in the United States. There are many churches. And really, once you've gone that route, there are many churches. Well, then they all have their own timelines and trajectories. And so... turning points is going to be either there's a million of them, or they're going to be a little bit more, some of them are a little bit more forced into the format of the book, I would say. 
I could imagine these could be sort of dramatic, really exciting moments. And that's sort of the draw for the reader. Is that how you were selecting or thinking, you know, what's going to surprise readers to realize this church history actually has all these dramatic, really interesting moments? That's definitely part of it. I think my thought process was more because of these different academic positions I've held, I've taught US survey classes, and I've taught church history survey classes. So a lot of what I was keying in on was what showed up in both? What was something that was important in US history and something that was important in church history? And how did those things interact? Yeah, especially the foundings of things, those don't tend to be super dramatic. 
You can try to focus on the people and what was at stake for them at the time and stuff. There are some, a few war type things. There's the Civil War one. There's no American Revolution chapter exactly. That was the, what I wanted to say about some church history trajectories took precedent over what you would do in a US survey there. Although where the revolution comes up is actually in a chapter about the beginning of the black church tradition, which enabled me to then say, yeah, the revolution didn't mean freedom for everybody. didn't change everything, had these consequences that maybe you didn't think of. The Black church pioneers that I was looking at, many of them had to flee what became the United States because they had been more on the British side. 
And so that enabled me to talk about something that readers might think they knew about, but from a really different angle. Yeah. I'm curious who you were thinking of as your ideal or intended readers. It started as a book for my seminary students. If I had stayed in that position, I would be using this now in that spring Reformation to Modern U.S. class. And then thinking ahead in their careers, this was a Presbyterian seminary. It also trained a lot of Methodist pastors in the upper Midwest. Often they were going to smallish, small to medium-sized town congregations. So imagining my students as the audience and then their congregations as the audience. undergraduates, like the ones that I had taught in my first teaching job, imagining the professors using this, how would it teach, even if the professor wasn't an expert in this topic, or certainly wasn't an expert in all of it. 
I mean, the turning points range from the defeat of the Spanish Armada to the election of Ronald Reagan. Nobody's trained in all of that. And then also, I suppose, like my parents, people who grew up going to churches. I hadn't learned church history growing up going to churches, even going to a Christian college. It wasn't until I was working at Christianity Today and found myself working at Christian History Magazine that I was even introduced to this topic. So Christian History Magazine was a quarterly, and most of the authors were academics, but most of the subscribers were not. They were pastors, they were high school teachers, and We had a strong cohort of dentists as subscribers. We never figured out why exactly. So also imagining sort of that readership, the curious non-specialist reader. 
Yeah. Many of us as writers, academics, are told to break writing projects down. The way this book was organized around turning points seemed like it just did that naturally. I wonder if you found the writing of it easier in a way because it was – these sort of discrete moments? And also then what about the work of connecting them, making transitions? Going back to my first career, short career as a journalist, I write very short. There were a lot of my editor's notes in the magazine were about 700 words. If I wrote something for the magazine, it was probably about 1500. I had an email newsletter that I was supposed to write every week that went straight from my computer to 50,000 subscribers. 
I was supposed to spend no more than half a day a week on this. It was whatever I could research and write and get out that quickly. And that also was in the 750 to 900 word range. My mental and writing unit is very small. It was difficult for me then in graduate school, writing a dissertation and book, to think in big enough units to have chapters, to have journal articles. All of my writing tends to be a lot of small components put together. And this book format, the chapters are all pretty short. They are further subdivided into sections. It works for readability. It also works for just sort of the way that my mind works. And the chapters being so different was useful since I was starting to write this at the seminary job, which didn't have a heavy teaching load. 
My first job was a 4-4 with a lot of advising, did not have a research library on campus. The seminary job had a little bit better research resources. a little bit more time to write, but still there wasn't going to be any research leave. There wasn't going to be any, any really long period. So to go into a summer and say, okay, we are starting with the Spanish Armada and go to my library shelves, everything that seemed relevant. I would pull that to my little library, Carol, and I could sort of write that up and then put those books back on the shelf and grab the books for the next topic. So it did work well. in a sort of modular sense for the writing of it as well. 
And then the fact that I had to take this break in the middle, it wasn't as difficult as it might have been for another type of project. There was not then any effort to connect the chapters together. They do all stand alone. I tried to have a little bit of an arc in each one. They don't really make arguments. That's something that we might want to talk about too. It was strange to write in that way, a book that didn't have an argument. Then I tried to maybe have one in each chapter, but even some of those didn't. It's hard for me to write if I don't know what I'm arguing, but what's basically a survey text is different than an argument. So that sometimes posed challenges in knowing, okay, of all the things I could say, which ones are relevant? 
Usually the test for that is, does it further the argument? If I wasn't sure what my argument was, then I wasn't sure what was relevant either. the kind of chapters without argument, was it a peer review book or, I mean, and if so, did the, I'm just curious how they're, I can imagine the reviewers being like, where's the argument? So what sort of freed you from that standard that we usually have to follow? Right. The peer review for this was what I went out and found on my own. It was not required by Baker because I was writing on so many different topics, most of which I didn't know that much about. I would often write Start by asking somebody I knew in the field, hey, I'm going to write about like there's a there's a King Philip's War chapter that's also about Native American and Christian history, which is something that I knew I needed to know more about. 
I reached out to colleagues saying, OK, I'm trying to write this chapter. What do I need to know? How might I structure this? What are the points I need to hit? And then I would write it and then I would send it to them and be like, OK, save me from my own ignorance here. which isn't exactly like peer review, obviously. It's not blind, but I was getting feedback on different chapters from different people that I knew in the field. There was a writing group back at Dubuque that was several of us who did church history. There were three little colleges in town there, a Presbyterian and two Catholic. And these were people with quite different specialties, but that was who was available. 
So some chapters went through that writing group for feedback. A few went through an online writing group. One went through my current department's works in progress. And then my graduate advisor, Grant Wacker, read the whole manuscript. And again, I was seeking out all of that because I knew how much I didn't know and wanted the feedback. But yeah, I'm not sure what a formal peer review process would have yielded. And then it's also perhaps an issue for reviews, right? I'm not sure where the book might be reviewed, but I'm trying to imagine if I were asked to review, like in an academic sense, what do you say about a book that doesn't have an argument? Yeah. What you described, though, with the sort of friends sourcing out the work of reviewing and letting you know what you missed. 
I mean, this is something that's come up a lot in the podcast, how helpful these networks and communities are that it sounds like you've been lucky enough to build over time. Yeah, absolutely vital. I would not have known how to write this. I would have made so many more mistakes than I'm sure I did anyway, without all of that support. And also, you know, having deadlines, you have to get something to your group for feedback. That was really helpful as well. Yeah. And you knew that, obviously, from your journalist career. This was interesting to hear how that training really made you a good producer of sort of these short pieces on demand, it sounds like. Yeah, I'm used to writing short. I'm used to writing on deadline. 
I'm used to writing about things that I don't already know a ton about. Obviously, those habits can be taken in deleterious directions, but for something like a survey project that was initially fit in around a lot of other things that I was doing and then came back to and had to finish fairly quickly, I was able to get a semester of leave here. So I think I had a summer and a semester to complete maybe the last five chapters, but I was on a rigorous, And again, each chapter is on such a different topic. It was, okay, I have to get up to speed quickly on some topic that I maybe know just a little bit about. I need to identify a particular event that I can talk about. 
I need to know something about those individuals. The book format also has some primary source types embedded. Each chapter starts with a hymn text and ends with a prayer. There are some other primary source sidebars. So I had to be looking for all of that. it was somewhat similar to the Christian History Magazine, The Quarterly, because there each quarter, it was a completely different topic and it could be from anywhere in the sweep of church history. And it's, okay, how fast can I get up to speed on Jan Hus? How fast can I get up to speed on Dante? How fast can I get up to speed on Protestant missions in the American West? That it would have been very difficult to write this book if I hadn't done something like that before. 
Yeah. I'm hearing a strong vote for this kind of format of a book. I mean, it just seems, it feels like it inherently makes the project, the writing more manageable in a way and possibly more, I mean, more interesting in that you've got all these different moments in one book. Yeah, it was fun to write in that way. It was fun to be able to think in chapter units and know, again, I'm grabbing all those books, I'm immersing myself in this briefly, and then I'm moving on to the next thing. I think it's going to be useful for classroom environments. I think it's probably going to be appealing to people who don't read a lot of history. I've gotten a little bit of feedback on that. 
Like I haven't taken a class like this in 30 years. I don't usually do this kind of reading, but this is really easy to follow. This is a manageable size. But again, I did not get any tenure or promotion credit for this. So you have to be at a point in your career where you can do something like this. Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm wondering if there's a way to do it with a university press that's going to be within the tenure and promotion guidelines. It's possible. There's also, I think, a movement to think a little more creatively about scholarship for tenure and promotion. Certainly strong indicators from American Historical Association and other professional bodies that public-facing scholarship counts for. that the monograph is not the only way to do work that's genuine work. 
I do think peer review is really important. I do think university presses are really important. I wouldn't say that this book is the same as the university press books that I've done. But when I was trying to make an internal case for this, at least getting time to finish the book, even if it didn't count exactly, I was able to draw language from the American Historical Association saying synthetic work is important. work. It's different than a monograph, but it's not non-scholarly work. And we hear so often about the humanities being irrelevant. Well, it's public-facing scholarship that makes it relevant. And so it doesn't do us any good as a field to say, nobody understands what we do. Oh, and also, junior faculty, don't do that. 
Don't do the stuff that anybody else might care about. At some point, we need to at least internally think about what we mean by scholarship and how we might address different audiences and not only tell people only after you've done X amount of this exact kind of work that only five people will read. Do you get to do something that maybe somebody else would find accessible and important? So true. So I'm wondering, did you know, or did you know this wasn't going to count in that tenure and promotion way? Or was this a decision you were wrestling with? Do I want to go forward with it despite that? At the seminary where I started working on this, they had stopped granting tenure. They still granted promotion, but it wasn't tenure and it wasn't quite what you might think of as like an R1 style metric. 
So it wasn't a concern there. They would have supported the work on it, especially because it was immediately useful in that context. Coming to Baylor, and there was quite a bit of administrative work turnover between when I was hired and when I got tenure. I think we had five provosts in four years. So there was a lot of mixed messaging or you'd hear one thing at one annual review and then by the next year everything had changed and there was no memory of the prior conversation. So I didn't know year to year exactly whether this was counting. I did get the signal fairly early on. no, you need another university press book. And fortunately, I had been approached to write the Margaret Mead book for the Spiritual Lives series, which was Oxford Press. 
Great. And because the books in that series all had to be short, then that was something that I could research and write quickly enough to be able to fulfill those requirements at my new department. And then once I got tenure, whether it counted for It wasn't as big of a deal. It was mostly that I had seven chapters of a book written. I didn't want it to cease to exist. Also in the interim, in addition to changing institutions, the 2016 election happened and there was this seismic explosion in American church history, particularly in the evangelical world. A lot of scholars thinking, what we thought was going on in church history, the narratives that we had, they don't work anymore. We've, we clearly missed some things that we need some reinterpretation and it, it affected, there were changes made to those chapters that I'd already drafted. 
It really affected the book going forward. The, the biggest evidence of that was the, I had planned a civil rights chapter and it was going to focus on the March on Washington and I have a dream speech. And then after that, George Floyd, it became about the Birmingham church bombing instead, that I had realized how much more violence was part of the story and that focusing on the rhetoric and oratory and feel-good moments was just inadequate. So there's some of me wrestling with our historical moments and discussions in the field going on as well. So again, I wanted to finish the book. I wanted it to exist. I felt bad every year that my editor with Baker would check in, I'd be like, yeah, it's still not done. 
I have to write this other book. Yeah, it's still not done. I applied for funding and I didn't get it. Yeah, it's still not done because at some point I wanted to be able to say, yes, it is going to be done and this is going to be the date and it's going to be real and all of this time and effort on both of our parts is not wasted. Yeah. I mean, this sounds in a way very common to me. Many of us have projects that had to to be stalled for a time or, you know, changing institutions changes how and if they will be counted. But, you know, you brought up the Margaret Mead, the second academic press book that you did. 
That sounds very fortunate, as you said, that you were invited to write this, it's called a spiritual biography. Can you explain what this part of a series and how did you get invited? It is part of a series. Tim Larson at Wheaton launched this Spiritual Lives series with Oxford. It's Oxford, UK, that he conceived of as the spiritual lives of people who are famous for something other than being spiritual. And the figures 19th and 20th century US and UK. I'm not sure exactly why that's the parameters of the series, but that was how he thought of it. And he wanted to line up a number of authors and subjects to be able to pitch the series to Oxford. And he knew from having just written a book about anthropologists who were people of faith or had some kind of interesting relationship with religion and spirituality, at least, he knew that Margaret Mead was going to be a good candidate for this series, that she was famous for something other than being spiritual, but that there was a lot there. 
And I had never met him. He just emailed me out of the blue saying, I'm launching this series. I want a book on Margaret Mead. You've written on the Protestant mainline. She was an Episcopalian. Would you be willing to do this? And I was still at Dubuque and I was working through turning points. And my initial response was, that sounds super interesting. I have this other book project. It's going to be a while till I can get to it. But if you want to put this on your list so the press can get a sense of what's coming ahead, then go ahead. And then I got the on-campus interview at Baylor. And my line here is intellectual history, U.S. intellectual history. So to be able to say in the interview, and I'm going to be writing this book about Margaret Mead, who was this towering 20th century intellectual. 
I don't know that I knew. I certainly didn't know when I was interviewing what order those books were going to have to be in. It was after I got here that it was made clear to me that Margaret Mead would have to be the next one. And yeah, it was just amazing that I had a a book that I had been asked to write. So I could be relatively certain that it would be accepted and published by this. Although it went through peer review and everything, just change the order of it, do that one. It could only be 80,000 words. So, and, and the subject matter, the Margaret Mead archive and South Pacific ethnographic archive is the largest single collection in the library of Congress. 
So either you're going to spend 20 years there, or you're going to say, I have looked at some things, and this is what I found, and there's clearly more to say, but this is what I have. And since I had to do a book that had to be short and had to be quick, I took that option, and it worked out really well. So, yeah, I've spent time with different LOC collections, but probably never one that big. How did you – was it just sort of a period, a year span that you narrowed down which parts to look at, or how did you decide – What's helpful is that for the 531,000 items in the collection, there's a 400-page single-spaced finding aid. So that was just a tab on my computer, and I would Control-F just search for keywords, names, because the material that I found that was relevant was spread out across. 
There's all kinds of different series within the collections. There's her personal papers. There's the organizational files. There's a bunch of other people's papers. And there were a whole... swaths of the collection. A lot of the South Pacific ethnographic stuff, some of it was inaccessible for processing when I was there, but also tons and tons of ethnographic photographs and film. That wasn't anything that I knew how to use. And yeah, I was mostly focused on her church participation, relationship to the Episcopal church. Certainly not everything that could be said about her perspectives on religion and spirituality more broadly. There's way more stuff there that somebody else could use. But just searching for Episcopal Church, World Council of Churches, National Council of Churches. Oh, she was on this committee. 
Look that up. Grab that file. It was a lot of use of the finding aid. Yeah, I bet. All three of your titles, your books, The Christian Century and The Rise of the Protestant Mainline, Margaret Mead, A 20th Century Faith, and then This Turning Point in American Church History, have a kind of more popularized popular or mainstream. These are recognizable names. Christian Century was a, you know, big sort of popular Christian magazine. This wasn't a little academic journal. Margaret Mead is actually a name that's pretty well known. And then The Turning Points, which just seems more of an accessible way to think about church history, make me wonder if, in general, this has been a sort of guiding aim of your research, this kind of publicly accessible public scholar, 
approach? Yeah, probably. It was a letdown to go from my job as editor of Christian History, again, editing this quarterly magazine for which I got to recruit academic authors and then give them assignments and edit them. I was a 22-year-old with a BA in English literature, but the way I was relating to them in the field was they were shocked when they would meet me at conferences and stuff. Going from Again, email newsletter straight from my desk to 50,000 people to a grad seminar where I was writing for the professor. And it was so much smaller. And I very quickly realized that a lot of the stuff I'd written as a journalist was not at all adequately researched. And there were things that I would say very differently now. 
Unfortunately, I was doing that at the dawn of the internet age. So it's all still out there. When you find me referenced on a Wikipedia page, it's probably something I wrote as editor of Christian history with a BA in English literature. And I will still occasionally get emails. I see that you wrote the article that this was based on. What more can you tell me? Nothing. There is nothing more I can tell you. I wrote that 25 years ago. I have no idea what my sources are. I, I, I am not an expert in that. I never was. I'm sorry. I'm, I'm useless in this conversation, but writing for audiences, um, Another thing that would happen when I was editor of Christian History, again, people around the world would just email any question because they assumed the editor of Christian History magazine. 
One of my favorites was, why are so many church doors red? And I spent half a day Googling, trying to find that out. I don't know. But answering questions that people have is something that I really enjoy. So coming from a public perspective, position like that. I'm sure that's always been part of my thinking as a writer and a researcher. I want to answer questions that people have rather than be very, very deep in purely academic discourse. I get kind of frustrated with that. I admire people who can do that. I guess that's not quite how I've been trained or formed or something. I've also always been interested in public influence as a topic. And those were questions that were very much in the foreground when I was doing my dissertation and first book on the Christian century. 
Christian century was routinely described as influential, the most influential Protestant magazine in the United States. And I always wondered, what does that even mean? Influential on whom and how would we know? What would constitute evidence for a claim like that? And that's a question that came to me from my grand mentor, from Dr. Bill Hutchison at Harvard who trained my mentor, Grant Wacker. I never met Hutchison, but he was really interested in questions like that as well. So if one of your central questions is what constitutes influence, then yeah, you're going to be talking about public figures and maybe participating more in that public facing work as well. Yeah, I'm often using Christianity Today for primary sources. And I think I too always have that assumption like, well, if the title of it is Christianity Today, then I guess this tells me what 
Christian's thought in 1952 or whenever I'm looking. There's two questions we're asking all guests. One is, if there's something you wish you had known about writing earlier in your career. I'm having a great opportunity to think about this because I'm teaching our graduate research and writing seminar this semester for the first time. And so then trying to see where grad students doing their first archival research are in almost every in some ways, giving advice to my own younger self on this. And one thing is travel grants. Nobody told me as a grad student that you could apply for travel grants to go to archives. I was self-funding all of my archival travel because I just didn't know that there's this whole universe of grants that you can get and that applying for grants also gets more visibility for your work and gets you lots of archivists helping you out. 
And So, yeah, that was that was definitely something I wish I had known about earlier and making sure to tell my graduate students about try to get those travel grants. Yeah, really helpful. Another question we're asking is if there is a writing practice or habit that's been working for you. Another thing I'm doing alongside my students as I'm teaching this research and writing class, which is go from find an on campus archive to write a journal article in the course of the semester. I'm writing alongside them. trying to hit all of the benchmarks that I'm asking them to do. And I'm requiring them to keep a writing journal, which I've never formally done before, but I'm really enjoying it. I have my little journal with pictures of birds all over it that my daughter gave me for Christmas and just jotting down every day. 
I was looking at this file, I was looking in archive, this particular one today, it was Father Charles Coughlin's FBI files, What am I noticing? What do I wonder? What do I need to follow up on? How does this pertain to what I think my central research question is? And just actually writing that down. I'm finding that super helpful. Yeah. And this class sounds great. So is it within the semester that folks are supposed to find their sources in the archive and actually have a draft of a journal article? Yeah, that's the plan. After one sort of introductory class, day two was physically walking to all the special collections on campus and meeting with the archivists and finding out a little bit about 
what they have and how you would access everything from our Victorian literature library to our oral history collection to our legislative library. And then the students had to pick an archive and make an appointment with an archivist and start to find something arising out of that material. And we're reading some journal articles as exemplars along the way. But yeah, they had to go from zero to draft by about week 10. Wow. I mean, when I have been... when I had a semester off from teaching, I remember that was possible for me to do that. But I'm curious, since you probably got other things going on too, and you're doing this alongside them, how are you finding that or what's been key to this working for you? 
I had already done my archival research, so I cheated on that. I had grabbed all kinds of scans from, again, I finally discovered travel grants. And so I was in Philadelphia and then up at Vassar last summer and got all these piles of scans for my next project on religion news service. And I hadn't done anything with them in the fall because I was teaching an undergrad class and we had searches going on and I was just too busy. And I just, I needed to get back to those scans and wrestle them into some kind of shape of an article draft that then I can use applying for bigger grant funding to spend more time. So again, what I'm doing is a little bit different than them, but since I already had the research, then I think I'll be able to, 
catch up with them on the writing a draft part. And it does seem like an impossible amount of work, even for somebody who's been doing this for years and years. But then I think often students are required to write an article draft in a seminar. But, you know, sometimes that comes after basically a full semester's worth of common reading. And I never had a class where it broke down. This is how you talk to an archivist. This is how you take notes in the archive. We had a whole day, I had friends come in and be like, what's your archive process? What app do you use to scan things? How do you label your files? How do you organize things? How do you manage your citations? 
And hearing six different ways to do that, nobody ever, I just had to make it up on my own. Totally. So I'm hoping that it is ambitious to go from zero to draft in that many weeks, but I'm hoping that by focusing so much on all the skills that you have to do that, that it will be doable for them. And is the checking in with it daily? I mean, I'm just thinking the recipe of the nitty gritty of how this works. I'm assuming this might get them into the practice of kind of at least looking at this thing almost every day, because I'm just wondering how do you get this thing to grow into the full article? Yeah, I have several checkpoint assignments along the way. 
By this week, I'd threw together something I was calling a 3-3-3 plan, like three documents that you found in your archive so far, three secondary sources that you're going to consult to try to shape them into something, and three research questions that you have at this point, sort of ranging from very concrete, when did this happen, to larger questions. And then they'll have an abstract that's due at some point. They'll have a conference paper version that's due at some point. So trying to build up. And I haven't been looking at their writing journals. We'll sort of flash them for each other because I don't – I wouldn't know how to assess that exactly. And I want – some of them are keeping it online. 
Some of them are keeping it in a notebook. I want them to find out whatever works for them. So I'm not being super nosy about that. But the overall schedule is ambitious enough that I've often told students, you know, you can meet with me outside of class. And they often don't. But they're on such – a short leash here they are. So when they hit that roadblock, oh, there aren't as many sources as I thought there were going to be, or I thought there were five things in this archive. It's actually just five different editions of the same thing. Now what do I do? And so we can have that conversation and have those conversations over and over again. They're also presenting sort of updates to each other in class. 
And so then we can see what are common problems. You're not the only one having this problem. You haven't had that problem yet in your process, but you might later. And now you've heard one, oh, when you hit that kind of roadblock, here are three things that you can try at that point. Great. Alicia, I'm wondering if there's anything else you want to share with us since you've had already maybe a couple of decades of this career, including grad school and at different institutions, if your writing or how you've understood writing has changed over time or sort of what you've learned about what works for you. Anything else you'd like to share? One thing that has stayed consistent, although the shape of it has changed, is writing in a group, writing for an audience, writing, writing, writing a lot. 
Before I was at Christian History Magazine, I was at Christianity Today's Teen Magazine, which had an unusually large editorial staff. There were five people on that staff, and everything you wrote went through that whole group twice simultaneously. Before it was designed and then it went through them again, I'd never before or since gotten that much feedback on everything I wrote. That's maybe an extreme version, but having a writing group when I was in graduate school, always finding writing groups in person or virtual, I just don't think there's any substitute to writing a lot and writing for an audience. Hmm. Writing can be so isolating and the project sizes can be so big and the deadlines can be so far away that maybe there are some people who do great with, I will sit here, I will write this book, and in two years, I will let somebody else see it. 
But for me, writing, writing, writing, and writing for an audience have been really, really important all the way along. That's a great point. It's come up often how helpful this is for us academics. I just wonder if you have any advice for... how to find those people or make those connections. It sounds like you've been pretty good at finding these kinds of groups. Yeah. And there are advantages to having readers who know your subject pretty well, but there are also advantages to having readers who don't. Interdisciplinary groups or groups of the same methodology, but wildly different time and place don't feel like you have to You don't have to maybe be as selective as you might think. It's not as hard to find somebody who can read your writing and give you feedback on it. 
You can, especially if you're beyond grad school, other faculty at your institution, even if it seems like they do something very different. Or now with Zoom, it's easier to people you want to talk to at a conference, any discussion group that people would be interested in having that kind of conversation. And they can be porous. People can come in and out. Some groups end up being mostly personal support and some end up being we always read drafts and give feedback. Just keep trying and finding different connections. Maybe they go from social media to something like this. Conferences were really key for me, especially early on when I was the only U.S. historian at my institution and there were no other institutions for miles and miles. 
I ended up using Facebook to continue conference conversations online. I'm not going to see these people for a year, but I have nobody else to ask. What primary source should I use for this? Or how do I design an exam? How can I assess this? Who else is working on something similar that we can put together a conference panel? Moving from that to writing group worked as well. So to break this down for listeners, does this mean that you might actually sort of cold call or reach out over email or whatever, or Facebook, someone you'd spoken to at a conference and say, gee, I wonder if we might swap or read work? The writing group relationships tended to grow out of institutional connections, people that I was seeing more often. 
But a conference panel, we were both at or in a panel. Now I'm working on this topic again. Could we be on a conference panel together? And then whatever I wrote for that, could you look at it? So that was a little bit more targeted for a particular piece of work, whereas the ongoing, will you read anything that I write, that tended to be more institutional connections. Great. Well, this has been really helpful and fun. So thank you for taking the time to talk with us. Yeah, thanks so much. I love the design of this to talk about writing. It's just fantastic. Thank you. 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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