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. Hello. If you're enjoying writing it or feel like you're gaining some new insight or tip about academic writing and publishing, we sure would appreciate your taking a moment to rate and review us, and it also helps other folks find us. Today, we're speaking with Laura Yaris, who is an assistant professor of religious studies at Michigan State University. Her research and teaching focus on Jews and Judaism in modernity with particular interests in Jewish education. 
She is the author of Jewish Sunday Schools, Teaching Religion in 19th Century America, which explores the gender dynamics of 19th century supplemental Jewish education and the ways that women and men who pioneered the field sought to recreate Jewish education as religious education. And the book was just published by NYU in their North American Religions series. So congratulations, Laura, on that. Thank you so much, Rachel. The writing of that book will probably come up in our conversation. But we're talking with Laura today about a subject that affects many of our listeners and for others might be something they envision in the future. That is writing while parenting. So I'd love to ask you, Laura, about how having children changes. change the writing part of your academic career? 
Well, thank you so much, Rachel. Thank you for having me on the podcast. This is a subject that is certainly near and dear to my heart. Having published my first book as a mother of two children, I have two boys who are six and three. So they are on the younger end. So I'm a parent of young children and parenting looks different depending on who your children are and what age they are. And mine are at the youngest age in life. So I had a pretty non-traditional path towards my current job, which is assistant professor in the religious studies department at Michigan State. So I finished my my Ph.D. when I was I was I just turned 30. And at that time I was single. 
I'd just gone through a divorce, and I was offered a job in a place where it would have been really difficult for me to build a life as a single Jewish woman. And I thought about it and thought about what I wanted my life to look like. And I thought about the fact that the past few months that had been so tough in my personal life, I really managed to get through that because of the support of local community and friends. And so I decided ultimately not to take that academic job that I was offered and stayed where I was, which was in Washington, D.C. And I took a job in a nonprofit. So I worked in the nonprofit field for five years. 
Fast forward during that time I met my husband who is a, my now husband, who's an elementary school teacher and so has a somewhat flexible career in terms of geography and applied for my current job at Michigan State and began that job in 2018. So I finished my PhD as a young single person and started my first academic job five years later as a parent of a then one-year-old. So I didn't have a time except for the time when I was a graduate student, when I was a working professional as a parent. So I became a working professional as when I was already a parent. And I think that having that time away from academia, whilst being not particularly traditional in terms of how most people's path towards an academic career tends to go, did yield some benefits. 
So what I bought into my work when I came back into academia from my time working in a nonprofit field, which was the job I worked in, was had a very sort of corporate business like sort of atmosphere to it. What I bought from that experience was was very, very strict scheduling. I was very used to calendaring everything, putting everything that I needed to accomplish in a day, a week into a calendar. keeping myself accountable to myself, to the people that I reported to and thinking ahead weeks, months, in terms of how I was going to spend my time. And that's something that I carried in when I came back into academia and still do today. So I use my calendar very, very deliberately. 
I block my writing time on my calendar. I block all of my appointments and my children's appointments. And I schedule everything that I'm going to need to accomplish. And that helps me keep on top of a lot of different things. My children both have some very complex health needs, so we do a lot of doctors and therapy appointments, and calendaring very, very strictly helps me accomplish that. Early on in my first year at Michigan State, I also took a seminar from the National Council of Faculty Diversity and Development that I found really, really helpful. And that seminar emphasized starting every semester with a plan for what was to come over the next weeks and months. And putting into that plan everything that you would need to accomplish, not only in terms of your professional goals, but also your personal needs, what you needed to do around the house, what you needed to do in terms of taking care of children or other caregiving responsibilities. 
But also the things that you wanted to accomplish personally, the things that would bring you personal fulfillment, whether that was taking a yoga class or weeding your garden or whatever it might be. What I took away from that seminar, in addition to the idea of thinking ahead and planning out everything that you wanted to achieve, was really giving myself permission to think of achievement beyond just professional accomplishments, but also think of taking care of my family and taking care of myself as all things that should get billing on the calendar. And from that point on, I have made sure that something that I always put in my semester plan It's something that brings me a lot of fulfillment and makes me feel healthier and better about myself, which is exercise. 
So really scheduling time for exercise. And it's so easy, I think, as a parent to be so taken up with all of the needs of your professional responsibilities and taking care of the children. It's very, very hard. It can be very, very easy to forget to take care of yourself, too. So lots of scheduling and having a plan for every semester and remembering to write myself into that plan, too. Are you an online or hard copy person? I do tend to, I make a Word document with bullet points and a lot of contingency time as well. I've done a lot of contingency time because especially with kids, things always turn out differently to the way that you expected. Yeah. And what happens too, because we're not robots, so I'm assuming sometimes it doesn't go exactly to how you calendared it. 
Is that, does that, produce a feel bad situations or what is that? What happens when you don't follow the calendar? So, of course, that always happens. And I think something really, really important to remember whenever you are putting together a calendar, putting together a plan is to build in contingency time, right, to not schedule yourself to every single second, to have realistic ambitions about what you can achieve and and build in overlap time for when things change. do go wrong and give yourself permission to not always be successful and know that what is important is not necessarily checking off every box on your to-do list, but getting up the next day and doing the best that you can. You know, some of our listeners might be those type of people. 
And at times I've been this way where they're like, I think I'm someone who can actually hold all of this in my head. And maybe at times many of us can. Anything you would say to that person about why you might encourage them to consider this type of system? Yeah, I find this system really, really helpful because I think putting everything down on paper, whether it is the physical piece of paper or Word documents or calendar, whatever it might be, forces you to have a very, very realistic sense of what kind of goals that you're setting yourself and whether they're really realistic and achievable. And whether you are making time for all of the aspects of your life that you need to take care of, personal, professional, familial, friendships, whatever it might be that exercises a claim on our time and to bring us joy, they all deserve a place on the calendar. 
And putting it all down in one place forces you, I think, to do a little bit of soul accounting and to ask yourself the question of whether everything is getting its due dividends. The other thing that I think is very, very helpful about this method is that I think especially with writing, sometimes there is a tendency for writing to be the thing that we do once we've checked off everything else on our to-do list, because other things might have more immediate demands on our time. Syllabi have to be prepped. Meetings have to be attended. Assignments have to be graded. Kids have to be schlepped to the doctors. And writing can often, unless there's an immediate deadline, feel like the thing that can always be pushed until last. 
I think one of the advantages of scheduling and developing a semester-long plan that you check in with yourself on week by week, day by day, is that it does force you to put writing on the timetable as something that has its own intentional time and not just this thing that you'll get to when you can and you drive yourself into writing into waves of guilt when you never quite get there because other things just exercise more immediate claims on your time. About the scheduling of the writing time, I'm curious if you find you can actually predict how long you need. I know that's been a problem for me is that I actually have no idea. However many times I've written a journal article, I just can't predict. 
And sometimes it's taken me much quicker than others. What I do know is when I have a sort of satisfying feeling of a good amount of writing having gotten done, either because actually a good amount of words got on the page, or I have that feeling that some conceptual move was made that feels like a development in the piece. So that, you know, when I have that kind of satisfying feeling, I feel like, all right, I did my writing work for this morning's session or today. But what about for you in the whole knowing how much you need or predicting how long a project will take? That's a tough nut for any of us to crack. I think for me as a parent of two young children who also works full time and takes on other side projects in addition to my full time job as well, the reality is that everything gets the time that it gets and sometimes that's all I have to give. 
And while I certainly recognise that feeling of feeling like I have done the conceptual work that I want to do and that is really the ideal, sometimes things have to be done when they're done. And I think one of the things that having children forces you to do is stick to the time that you have available. So at three o'clock every day, my children need to be picked up from school and I can't sit at my desk waiting for that conceptual clarity to come because I have to pick my children up from school, and that's the time that I have. I will say, though, that one of the things that I do increasingly believe in is the value of what in Jewish tradition we might call a shmita, letting things lie fallow, right? 
And so building into writing time, time for things to lie fallow, time when I'm not writing, but I might be thinking or giving some time just to lie dormant and for realizations to crop up. So one of the things I do build into my calendar time is finishing a writing project in advance, giving it a shmita, letting it lie fallow, and then coming back to it. Because so often that is the time when those insights occur. I think another way of achieving that goal is sending it out to a writing buddy or somebody who is a reader of your work, because while they are reading it, similarly, you're having that time to let it lie fallow, to give it a little bit of a shmita. 
you had the conversation or you read the feedback of whoever has been reading your work, you've allowed some of those ideas to germinate. I don't think there's any right answer to that question. I think one of the realities of academic writing is that you can always do more. And when a piece comes out in print form and you get that book in your hand or that published edition of the journal in your hand, I certainly always have the experience of feeling like I could have said more there. There was more that I wanted to say. I could have clarified that that point better. But at some point, things also just have to be done. And continuing to think about ways that you could drive the conversation forward is is for me what propels the next project. 
Yeah. And I love the way you put that about giving it time to life. Also, the act of sending it out. I know I've I've had the good fortune of being able to share work with you and you've been a brilliant reader. of my work, but even just sending it out seems to be the thing that sometimes make me, makes me think, Oh my God, I can't believe I just sent that to Laura. It's now obvious to me that I, it was stupid of me to have written X, Y, and Z. And, you know, sending it out makes, makes you think about the reader a little bit and their experience with it, which can be, be helpful for like another changed perspective on the material. 
Um, I know you kind of alluded to this, but I'd love to hear more about what helps you find balance in your writing and parenting. I love the idea that you think that I've struck the chord of finding that balance. You know, when you wrote to me and said that you were interested in having this conversation with me for your wonderful podcast, what immediately came to mind was a wonderful poem by a British poet called Stevie Smith. And the poem is Not Waving But Drowning. And the poem is all about a person on the shore who is watching somebody in the sea and they think that the person in the sea is waving to them. And in reality, they're drowning. And it's a beautiful poem, a little bit depressing, but it's a beautifully written poem. 
And it was a very interesting moment for me to receive your email because it struck me that in that moment, wow, Rachel thinks I'm waving, but I feel more like I'm drowning. Having said that, in thinking about this this Question. There are certainly some things that i think have enabled me to be writing productive over the last five years since i started my my job at michigan state and came back into academia even even despite COVID. And there are a number of things i think that it is very important to say in that regard. And the first thing i think is really important to say is that resources help. So I want to begin by acknowledging my privilege. I have a tenure track appointment at a large state school and I teach a 2-2 course load. 
And having those opportunities gives me time to write that might not be afforded some of the listeners to this podcast based on the kinds of appointments that they have and the kinds of teaching load that they carry. So I teach two classes a semester and that does free up time for writing. And I think it's really, really important that we acknowledge that. Something else I'd like to acknowledge is that I had my first child in 2017. And so everything that I have been able to access as a mother, accommodations around paid parental leave, recognition of the challenges of being a working parent, I'm really standing on the worked to make those accommodations possible. Women who did not have paid parental leave and who have fought for younger colleagues to be able to have access to those kinds of resources. 
I've also really benefited from having women in positions of leadership who have really advocated for young scholars and young female scholars and young mothers. in particular, because they themselves know how hard it is to be a parent of young children and also be productive as a scholar. So I have a in my current position at michigan state i have a dual appointment and both the chair of my department of religious studies uh my friend and colleague, Amy dirigatis and the program director of our jewish studies program uh my friend and colleague, yell Aronoff, are both uh wonderful fantastic female scholars who are also uh parents and I have felt very mentored by both of those friends. And in many ways, they have advocated for me as I have sought to achieve all of my goals, both as a mother and as a scholar. 
So during COVID, for example, Yael was able to utilise some of the funding that we have in our Jewish Studies programme to get a course released. for all of us who were caregivers, particularly caregivers of young children. So I really think it's important to acknowledge that sitting here in 2013, we're really benefiting from the work of generations of not only women, but many, many women who have made sure that I've been able to access things like release time when I had a child and course release time during COVID as well. So those structural things really do make a difference in terms of how productive that we're able to be. And those resources, the reality is in academia, are very, very unevenly distributed. Yeah, thank you for acknowledging that. 
I think I'm also wondering, I mean, I guess you've sort of addressed it a bit, but how COVID changed your writing schedule? And, you know, maybe sometimes we talk about the silver linings of it, but if it's taught you anything or changed how you do things now? Those of us who were parents during the COVID lockdowns are still navigating the trauma of what it was like to be a parent at that time. I think maybe, especially for folks who were not parents or caregivers, it's worth just setting a little bit of the context of why that still today feels So, so traumatic. So when when COVID started, I had a three year old and a newborn and their daycare closed. My other daycare closed, of course, in March and didn't open until until August. 
But what I think it's really, really important to remember is that young children and children who are under the age of five didn't have access to COVID vaccines until the summer of 2022. So that was just a year ago. During that time, not only were we for much, much longer than for other populations who were able to access vaccines for their family at an earlier period, where we sort of locked down and really having to be cautious about socialising in person and masking and going into other people's houses. So my family didn't go into other people's houses until my youngest child was vaccinated last summer. But because children weren't vaccinated because of their age, They had to quarantine a lot. Every time that my children were exposed to somebody in their daycare class or their preschool class who had COVID or had been exposed to somebody with COVID, they had a 10-day quarantine. 
And if you know anything about young children, they get sick a lot and they get up close and personal a lot and they share various illnesses and diseases a lot. So for about two years, my children were quarantined. constantly quarantining. I remember during 2021, between January and March, I think I had six days of childcare because one or the other of my children was always on a 10-day quarantine. So when did writing happen when you have tiny children at home? It happened after they went to bed. And so writing was happening maybe starting at eight o'clock and going until one or two in the Of course, you pause because young children get up really early. And so six or seven a.m., you'd be getting up and you'd be parenting. 
And it was and it was exhausting. It was it was really, really tiring during that time. And I think I still feel shocked that I was able to achieve anything in terms of my writing goals during that time. And also still feel, I think, quite shaken by it and shaken of it. By the fact that I think I was robbed of the opportunity to really enjoy my children's childhood, especially my youngest, who was a newborn, we were immediately thrust into crisis mode. I think some of the silver linings of the pandemic is that I think that it really did force more visibility around the challenges that we face when we try to combine caregiving and academia. And here I'm not only talking about childcare, I'm also talking about elder care, which I think really gained a lot more visibility during COVID as well. 
So just in my own academic unit, in my own university, I've seen a lot more openness to talking about children and families and dependents and more visibility to elder care as well as the other kinds of responsibilities and pleasures that both bind our time and and bring us joy, our pets, our romantic relationships, our friendships, our extracurricular pursuits and leisure activities. I think that certainly in my own experience, and I don't know that this is necessarily true for everybody, but certainly in my own units, I think that we didn't have any choice but to confront the fact that we were all not waving but drowning in some way or another, either because we had young children, because we had elderly dependents, because we were stuck living hundreds of thousands, countries and continents away from loved ones that we couldn't visit because of the travel restrictions, because I think we were all drowning in that moment. 
It did force conversations about the fact that we are our whole people and that we can only be successful when we are able to fulfill everything that we are responsible for and have to do. that bring us joy. Yeah, that's a really good point about the pandemic having raised awareness and I think even making conversations around those caretaking topics more acceptable. I'm wondering if, I don't know if you used to hear about this, but I don't have children, but I would hear from colleagues who have children. I think especially women really would say that, you know, they felt like it often wasn't as acceptable to talk about their experiences caretaking or family responsibilities, that it was sort of a taboo subject. And again, I kind of think that was maybe especially for the women. 
And from what I heard, I think some people felt like, you know, men might have even gained points when they mentioned it. And sort of the reverse could be true for some women academics. But I think now bringing that up or letting people know this is part of your life or part has become a little more acceptable? I think so. I think COVID was a collective moment when, as I said, we were all drowning and we all had no choice but to kind of throw our hands up in the air and say, this is hard. This is really hard to be isolated, to be separated from our loved ones, to feel lonely, to be taking care of young children, to be trying to guide older children through Zoom school, to be 
navigating physical health care challenges, mental health care challenges, immunocompromisation. And I think that collective experience of in some way, it was hard for everybody, right? Not necessarily in ways that were even, right? We didn't all face the same challenges. We were all sailing on the same sea, but we didn't all necessarily all have the same kind of boat that we were. that we were sailing in, but it was hard for all of us in some way. And so I think that collective moment did make space for us all to articulate what was particularly hard and challenging for us. Yeah. So what does your writing day or writing week look like now? Yeah. Yeah, so I think that one of the things that makes writing different as a parent, particularly as a parent of young children, is that evenings and weekends are pretty much off limits. 
Very, very little can be done when you are with your children in the evenings and the weekends. So I typically start my working day at somewhere like three or four, depending on how I'm negotiate pickup, uh, responsibilities with my, uh, with my spouse. He's an elementary school teacher. And so he has his, his own dismissals to be taken care of. And, and then it's a, uh, you know, it's a kind of whirlwind of getting everybody fed and bathed and read stories too, and into pajamas and bed. And by the time that that is accomplished by usually eight o'clock, I have very little energy left to, to accomplish much. If anything, I'm, I'm taking care of emails, I'm maybe reading. I'm reading some new literature in my field that I'm excited to read about, but that's really not when my creative time is going to happen. 
That's not when I can achieve any writing. And certainly not on the weekends either. During the weekends, my children need my time, and that's not a time when I can be taking time away from them and working. Sometimes when I explain that to friends who don't have children or other kinds of caregiving responsibilities, The response is something like, how do you get anything done? And, you know, I think actually having that limited availability actually does force you to get things done because I have a very limited window of opportunity. And so things have to be achieved and they have to be very, very strategic about how I achieve them. So one of the things that I have started doing that has been very, very productive is only doing a very, very limited check of my emails in the morning. 
And answering things that need to be answered immediately. You know, Professor, I can't get access to this material. OK, here you go. Right. Things that can be can be resolved quite quickly and everything else gets flagged, gets flagged for a later time, because otherwise you can kind of get sucked into the email back and forth, the correspondence, the administration. And then I've noticed about myself that mornings tend to be my my freshest time to write and to be creative. And so having done that initial email check, trying to schedule two hours every morning to work on my writing projects, to read, to take notes, to engage with literature, to meet my writing goals for the day, and then spend that time in the afternoon to devote more time to taking care of correspondence, emails, lesson planning, administrative responsibilities, and that kind of thing. 
And it's been very, very helpful for me to kind of block that time out for writing at a time of the day when I know that my brain is going to be at its most active and really try and schedule, use the afternoons to schedule meetings and other kinds of administrative labor so that everything can get its time on the calendar. Yeah. So to get concrete about this, it sounds like that might just be, maybe that's two to three hours a day that you really have for writing? Two to three hours a day, five days a week. And and that's that's it. And I don't know whether that's a paradigm or a best practice. You know, I think other people are probably more productive than I am in all sorts of ways. 
And maybe I'm more productive than others in other kinds of ways. You know, we're all kind of running our own race here and we're not in competition. But that has, again, been what has worked for me in terms of my goals, which are achieving. everything that I need to achieve, not only in terms of my professional ambitions and things that I need to complete, but also my personal responsibilities as a parent and my responsibilities to myself to invest in things that bring me joy and make me healthy and happy. Yeah, no, I mean, I shouldn't have said just two to three hours. There are plenty of days when I'm feeling very lucky if I get one hour. I think it's helpful for folks to hear that there's sort of a range in what 
people are doing. And what you said too reminded me, even in grad school, I had classmates who had kids and we all felt like they were some of the most efficient and productive because of the reason you mentioned this sort of forcing you to really make use of the time. I wonder, does that mean you're a, are you a kind of no or limited wireless internet person while writing? Are there sort of no interruptions or how strict are you about that sort of thing? Not too strict. I definitely don't turn off the internet because I think like everybody else, I'm constantly looking things up, looking up journal articles and using citation software. And so I do turn off my emails. I will silence my phone, try and be diligent about not checking social media and things like that. 
So I would say not draconian, but the internet, like everything else, is a research tool and not something I think to be stigmatized for the user. Yeah. I wonder if there were, you know, other colleagues either at your current institution or just folks you knew in the field, other universities that you felt provided you models, maybe even before you were a parent, but you noticed what people did to kind of keep their academic career going while having kids and parenting. Yeah. Before we go there, can I say something about what you said about colleagues in graduate school? So to piggyback on that, I think that In addition to limiting the amount of time that you have to spend on your academic work, having children also raises the stakes of being successful. 
So I'm a parent of two children. I'm a spouse of a public school elementary school teacher. I'm the breadwinner for my family. And I moved my family to Michigan from Washington, D.C., where we were living, for my job so that I could pursue my professional ambitions. And so for me... have to be successful i i have to achieve the professional goals that i need to achieve and hopefully get tenure because my family is is counting on me. And our particular personal circumstances, we we don't know that neither my husband or i come into this with generational wealth. I was the first person in my family to attend college. And so what we have is is what we earn. Those are our only financial resources. 
And so the stakes feel high. The stakes feel really, really high in terms of being professionally successful, because everything that my children will have, everything that they will have access to, the resources that they will get, their ability to pursue their own dreams and ambitions, to go to college, to pursue extracurricular activities, to do all the things that they would want to do. All of those things take take money and it's only going to be there if I earn it. So the stakes are the stakes feel high. OK, your question about mentors. Yes, I've definitely talked with with colleagues about how they get their writing done and how they balance being a parent or a caregiver with also being professionally successful and achieving what they want to achieve professionally. 
And I think to some extent it's idiosyncratic. I know some parents who write most well at night, other parents who have a strict trade off system with a spouse or a partner. And, you know, I think it's it's to a certain extent dependent on your own particular family needs and situation and and what works well best for you as a as a person. But I do feel an enormous amount of appreciation for mentors and for colleagues who are a little bit further down the road than than than me in terms of their professional careers. You have just really modeled being a parent who also. works in academia and sharing their own struggles and frustrations and their joys and saying things like, I will not schedule this meeting now because I have a responsibility. 
Because whenever somebody who is more established in their career, who has a position of authority says, no, I will not do this thing because my child, my elder care responsibility, my long distance spouse, whatever it might be, Those things have to come first right now. It gives permission for those of us who are less secure and less established to be able to do the same. It sets a precedent. And so I'm very, very grateful for those opportunities. Yeah, I agree. Even in my own very different status, having senior colleagues who will sort of put down the work on Friday, you know, if we're working on a committee or something and say we will return to this on Monday, but not do the weekend corresponding about it, you know, that is much appreciated because they're often in the best position to do that. 
I'm also wondering, I know you, I feel like you touched on this, but how your experience or how you think about writing, sort of what writing means to you as a parent, how this has changed from the pre-parenting days? I really appreciate this question because it is forcing me to I think, realised something about myself that I had maybe not put into concrete words. Before I became a parent, I was a graduate student with all of the insecurities of being a graduate student and the time pressures of completing a PhD dissertation while you still have funding and not quite sure what you will find, in my case, in the archives. And so writing felt like a very, very, very high stakes and very stressful situation because 
your whole life is stressful. You don't know what is to come and what kind of hand you'll be thrown in this academic world of ours that is such a lottery in so many ways with so few opportunities and so many wonderful, deserving scholars. And then coming back and again, having the privilege of coming back into a tenure stream position, one of the things that I think has really changed for me as I, picked up the metaphorical pen and began to write again, is really leaning into writing as a creative act. And I think this was especially true during COVID. You know, during COVID, so much of the time, I felt like I was on autopilot in terms of being home with my children all day and trying to take care of their needs. 
And they were struggling so much because they didn't understand what was happening what was happening and why they were locked down or quarantined. They couldn't go to the playgrounds or see their friends, why they couldn't give their friends a hug or see their grandparents. And so much of parenting, especially when you have young children, isn't necessarily the most intellectually stimulating exercise. So as I said, my children are six and three. And when I'm in mom mode every evening and every weekend, I'm saying a lot of things like, Don't climb on your brother, darling. Please don't put your fingers up his nose. I don't think that we should be climbing the curtains. And my three-year-old is potty training right now. And so just to get really real for a second, I spend a lot of my day talking about poop. 
We talk about poop. We spend a lot of time going to the toilet. It is what it is. And it's a privilege to do all of those things. It's a privilege to be their parent. And then also when I'm able to come to my writing and to think about, using a different part of my brain that uses a very different set of topics and vocabularies to sort of just relish that time where I can be in a different kind of mode, having a different kind of conversation and speaking to a different kind of audience about a different set of topics feels refreshing in a way that I don't remember it feeling when I was in graduate school. To me, a really important turning point that I remember in 
learning to think about writing as a more creative exercise, as an opportunity for me to be creative, came in a seminar that I took part in that was run by the AGS, the Association for Jewish Studies, for women and trans and non-binary folk during the summer and run by Laura Liebman, a colleague of ours who is a wonderful mentor and a wonderful strategic thinker also about how to um do humanities work and, and, and write in particular? And one of the things that laura really encouraged us to do in that writing, and this was a prompt based on the textbook that she used, which was wendy belcher's how to write your journal article in 12 weeks, was to read literature in our field, not only to learn about what content was being presented, but also to take time to think about, to savor the writing style the different authors used. 
Think about what resonates with you. Think about how they write introductions, how they structure their work. And I don't know if I was just late to the game or really, really naive. I don't think anybody had ever told me to read with attention to thinking about what I enjoyed about the way that people wrote as opposed to just trying to cram the content. And that was really kind of eye opening for me because it gave me permission to then to start really paying attention to the way that I write and to think about writing as a creative act. And I want to be candid. I don't think that I necessarily do this in a superlative way. I don't think of myself as nearly as talented a writer as some of the people that I read. 
But also, I think that's the point of creativity. You don't have to be a perfectionist. You don't have to be perfect at a creative act to get fulfillment from it and to feel that it nourishes you in some way you you just have to be to be in it and to be immersed in it and so thinking about writing not only as instrumental as a means to an end as a means to to translate you know research or data or to kind of check the box on the tenure and promotion file but as the thing that I do that is probably my most creative thing as a person who who doesn't naturally tend towards the creative you know I'm not a knitter or 
a painter, all those kinds of those kinds of things that do not come very, very naturally to me. You know, I work, I parent, I exercise and I see friends and have a social life. And there's not necessarily a lot of time for anything else in my schedule right now. And so really leaning into writing as something that I do that is creative has has allowed me to see it as rejuvenating in a way that perhaps it wasn't before. Yeah, I really appreciate that reframing of writing, you know, especially because as academics, we do so many things like grading, writing recommendation letters, picking up assignments and tests that are important, but, you know, don't always feel creative. And so this, you know, our other writing can sort of fill that outlet. 
I wonder, do you feel that in book project two, you are approaching that in a more creative way, creative writing way? Definitely. I think... one of the things too that I have really valued having come back into academia after spending time working outside of the academy is that, you know, in other kinds of organizations you very rarely get to completely own what you write. So I work for a non-profit and anything that I wrote would have to go through so many screeners and editors before it could ever see the light of day. My immediate supervisors, the marketing executives, the branding folks. And so anything that I wrote as an op-ed or a grant application or whatever it might be, very, very rarely looked like what I wanted to say. 
And the opportunity that we have as academics, particularly those of us who work in the humanities, as you and I do, to own our writing and to say what we want to say, of course we have. the reviews, the critiques and the feedback of peer reviewers when we submit journal articles and books. And that is not to be taken lightly. That's very, very important. And that helps us to do our best work in many, many ways. But I think we really do have just such an incredible amount of freedom in comparison to other industries to own what we write and to write what we want to. And that is something that I really don't take for granted. Yeah, it reminds me what you say of one of my professors in grad school saying, you know, describing the privilege of being an academic as all of these other even prestigious professions like doctor, lawyer, accountant, nurse, you know, people are coming to them with their own problems and the person has to try to help solve them. 
And we really get to sort of dream up our own problems and then spend our time sort of writing our way through them and kind of find creative answers. So that has always felt like a real pleasure and honor to get to do that. Two questions that we're asking our guests. One is, what is something you wish you had known about writing or publishing earlier in your academic career? This is a great question. And the answer that I have is, is not directly about writing, but it is about the infrastructure that supports writing. And it's, I wish someone had told me to think about how I organized my files. And that might seem a little silly, but, you know, when I was doing the research for my dissertation, which became my book, Jewish Sunday Schools, which was a book that was really based in archival research, 19th century archival research. 
And During the course of my dissertation, I went to lots of different archives and took lots of notes and took pictures of things and downloaded screenshots of historic Jewish newspapers. And that kind of research, like any research, is a very iterative process. The things that you think that you are maybe looking for don't end up being the things that you end up writing about. You've got lots of false starts, lots of wrong turns and things. you know it's it's it's much more like a sort of meandering uh walk rather than a sort of straightforward hike from from point a to point B. And then so i left academia and came back five years later. And as i began the process of revising the dissertation into what became the book, which was ultimately a very, very different book from my dissertation, my files were unintelligible even to me and i i created them. 
And I think it is worth just especially for any listeners who might be graduate students, thinking about future you and playing the long game, because what makes sense to you as you are doing the research and writing about it might not make sense to you three or four, five or six years down the line when you are coming to revise that research for a journal article, a book, a public presentation, whatever it might be, because so often projects develop and our thinking develops and The things that we thought we thought don't end up becoming the things that we that we write about. And so something that I have learned to do, and this is advice I always give to students, is to be really, really diligent about taking notes to explain the research that you did to your future self. 
So not organizing. I used to organize my files with titles like, you know, trip to the New York Public Library in 2020. And here are all the pictures. And that doesn't make any sense to me four or five years down the line. So being really, really fastidious in describing which collections I went to, what were the major themes, making a sort of cliff notes version of the notes to myself, taking pictures of the boxes that I looked at to preface all of my notes, taking notes on the actual experience of doing the research and not only the content and remembering that academia really is a sort of marathon of a sprint to think about the long game and to think about the fact that the research that you are doing that you are doing now might not make it into the project that you're writing immediately, but five or six years down the line might end up becoming research that supports a very, very different kind of writing project. 
And you'll only be able to use that research that you did if you have thought strategically about how to explain it to yourself a long time down the road when you have possibly sort of moved on to other things. Yeah, that's a great idea. I love this thing of taking notes on the research experience. I've started doing some of that, although you have some better ideas here, including, you know, taking the photos of the boxes and the folders. And actually sometimes even when there's, you know, photos that seem particularly evocative or a document, I will, you know, like send myself an email with it with my sort of initial sort of the reminder of like, this is what is exciting about this. This is the connections I'm already starting to make as I saw it in the archive. 
Because I do feel like when you're seeing in the archives, sometimes all sorts of things occur that, you know, later when you're coming upon it, you're sure you'll remember, but you don't always actually. And there are lots of different software products that will do this in a much more sophisticated way than I do it. And I know this is something that I've spoken to Laura Liebman about. And I think the technical term for that kind of information is metadata, right? Metadata, a picture or a sound clip or whatever it might be. I am not so savvy on some of those projects, but I can ensure that every folder that I save on my hard drive has at least a Word document in it that says, you know, read this first. 
And this is the sort of cliff notes to everything that is in this folder. That at least I have the tech savvy to do. Yes, I guess this conversation between you and me reveals where we are on the spectrum of tech savviness. But the other question we're asking is if there is a tip or writing practice or habit that is working for you now that you could share with us? Yeah. So I think writing is very idiosyncratic in lots of ways. But I think the thing that really helps me to engage in my writing is community, is the feeling that there are other people who are kind of walking this walk and going through the same struggles that I'm going through. So I've really benefited from being engaged. 
even just a part of social media, online communities that are for academic moms and particularly Jewish academic moms to share their joys and their struggles and crowdsource ideas and tips. And those communities are very, very helpful because so often, particularly in academia and particularly in parenting, you can feel so alone. It can be such a lonely feeling. One of the peculiarities of parenting while being an academic is that they say it takes a village to raise a child, but as an academic parent, you are often asked to move your family away to places that you had never imagined yourself living and where you have no village and where you have no community infrastructure. And depending on your resources, there may be very few opportunities to visit family members or have family members visit you so 
That is my case. For example, my family are in the UK. I live in East Lansing, Michigan, which is a wonderful place to live and also not somewhere I had imagined myself living. And financial constraints make it very, very difficult for me to visit my family or for them to visit me. So that village that in other kinds of jobs might be geographically proximate isn't necessarily the case when we have moved to new locations. And so having those opportunities those virtual villages, those sort of networks of community members and friends who understand what it is like to be in this strange job that we call academia, living in places that we might have never imagined ourselves living and trying to do the best we can to raise our children and be their parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents as well, has been really, really helpful. 
Very concretely, I still do something that I started during the pandemic, which is meet with a colleague for a Zoom writing session once a week. We get on Zoom and we start with a conversation, a good old kvetch, a complaint about, you know, what's been challenging and what we're having a hard time with. This is a colleague who is also a parent of young children, our Jewish studies colleague, Kara Rucksinger. And it is lovely to sort of get that kvetch out and to have that point of connection and then to say, OK, what are your goals? state our goals, mutes and get on with it. I think the loneliness of academia can feel acute sometimes and parenting can be a very, very lonely business too. 
And so any opportunities that we have to find community and to sort of travel alone together can be something that can just give you the boost of energy and joy that you need to sort of get back to it and put words one in front of the other on the page. Yeah, I love that in part because it's, I mean, it is what we're trying to do here with making the writing, the academic writing experience less lonely by having these conversations about things that we don't always talk about. But this is a great example of how to do that, even if you're not geographically close to a friend, to have that kind of Zoom coffee work date. So that's a great idea. Thank you so much, Laura, for spending this time with us. 
Thanks for listening to Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing, sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. Visit our podcast description to find out how to contact us and send us your questions about academic writing and publishing. Follow us on social media at writingitpod and subscribe to us so you never miss an episode.