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. Well, we're really delighted to get to speak with Laura Liebman, who is the Kennan Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College. And she will be the Leonard J. Milberg Class of 53 Professor in American Jewish Studies at Princeton starting this July 2024. Congratulations, Laura. And she, in the past few years, she had three books come out, one of which is called The 
One was Once We Were Slaves, The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family. There was also The Art of the Jewish Family, A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects. And along with Adriana Brodsky, she's edited Jews Across America, which is a source book. So I actually wanted to start out, Laura, I know in our field of American Jewish studies, many colleagues remarked on how amazing it was that you had a bunch of great books come out really close together. And I heard from some of our colleagues just sort of amazement and curiosity, like, how did this happen? This great productivity spurt, it appears. Yeah, I think there's always the perception of like, whoa, so much stuff comes out all at once. 
versus the reality whenever you're writing books that I think of myself as a really slow writer. And I tend to be working on multiple projects at the same time. So it seems like they came out like bang, bang, bang. But in reality, Once We Were Slaves, I worked on that for over 10 years, particularly because the research for it was so arduous. So it came out right after the other one, but I had actually been working on it much longer than Art of the Jewish Family. So I think that's a good example of things kind of cluster or come out in groups. And it was, I have to say, I'm pretty much indebted also to Bard Graduate Center, who had brought me to campus for a complete semester to work on The Art of the Jewish Family and to give a series of public lectures. 
And without that, there's no way that I would have had both the luxury of working on a book in terms of producing that much, or, you know, the shame driving me to produce that much and get something out because there are the lectures looming, but also to have access to archives, which turned out to be incredibly fortuitous because of the pandemic, which I couldn't have predicted. Yeah. And about that, Bard's the, is it, what is it called? Bard Center? Bard Graduate Center. Bard Graduate Center. Right. Many people wonder, how did those things come about? How is it that you were invited to be there? Yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure I have a great answer. You know, some of I think like luck. Bard Graduate Center is a material culture institute. 
They were lucky enough to have a sponsor who funded a philanthropist who funded a series of people to come and visit in Jewish material culture. And they picked people from different eras to come and be visitors in that series. And I happen to be the person for the era that I work in. And so in that sense, I'm not sort of privileged to the decision making behind the scenes, but I was only one of a group of people who came for that. And I think it's a good example of in not just American Jewish studies, but Jewish studies more generally, that we really are indebted in a lot of ways to outside funding in terms of what people in the wider community are interested in hearing about. 
in terms of what positions become available, particularly at the senior level. The position at Princeton is another good example of that. That's also a donor-funded position, as opposed to my position at Reed, which I do have a named chair now, but I didn't start off in one in that position. And it isn't a specifically Jewish studies position. So I see that as something kind of peculiar to the subfield of Jewish studies. Yeah, we're also in that position here of being really fortunate to have a donor-sponsored center and endowed chairs. So you mentioned that because of this BART graduate center, you had this year of being able to focus on that book, the writing of it. But with the other books, I mean, did you have this feeling of having a lot of momentum for a few years in terms of your writing? 
Yeah. So The Bard Graduate Center was sort of fortuitous because it actually was a half a year, and it came on the tail end after I'd already had a year of sabbatical. So I basically had this really long block off when I was working on, for the first year, on what became Once We Were Slaves, and then that second half year just specifically on The Art of the Jewish Family. But I would say for both of those books and then also for the – Jews Across America sourcebook that I did with Adriana Brodsky, I really think of myself as sort of a disciple of Wendy Belcher, who has this phenomenal book called Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks. And she really emphasizes the idea that you should be writing at least a little bit every day. 
So I think she has something that to me seems absurdly small. It's like 15 minutes every day. And I usually try to do 25 minutes every day, which in the land of the Pomodoro Method is one tomato, which I'm happy to talk a little bit more about. But I would say the Pomodoro Method combined with Wendy Belcher's like, write every day, don't fetishize it, has been crucial for changing the way that I write and really made, I would say, all three of those books at some level possible. And particularly the amount of time, well, The Once We Were Slaves doesn't seem good because it took 10 years. But a lot of that was archival work as opposed to like writing work. But yeah, yeah. 
Yeah, I'm happy to talk more about either of those. So was there a shift at some point in your career since you've been at it for a while in your writing, how you approach writing, how it fits into your schedule? Was there some point when you realized, wait, something has to change or I'm not getting the writing done I want to? Or what was that thinking? Yeah. So I had a really big shift in between my first and second books. And as you said, I've been at it for a while. So I started off actually... in Native American Studies. So both my dissertation and first book are Native American Studies. And I would say both of those processes were a little tortured and were in large part for the Native American Studies one pre-tenure. 
And definitely, I had been very gifted when I was in graduate school to have an advisor who was very hands-on and gave me a tremendous amount of feedback. And then when I got to the position that I'm at at Reed, which is a liberal arts college, there was a lot of other stuff that suddenly demanded my time. And I didn't have anybody I was accountable to. And I didn't have anybody who like cared to read what I was writing. You know, you say basically had to go out and try and find somebody who would give me some of that accountability. And then also somebody who would give me some feedback. Cause I realized I was somebody who really appreciated having feedback on my writing and writing. 
wanted to see how things were playing with the audience in terms of reshaping it. So that really happened before I, along the, about the time that I started working on the book that would become Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism, which a lot of people at Jewish Studies think is my first book. It is actually my second, whatever. So, but it's the first Jewish Studies book. And for that, I got together a group, actually just of women at the college where I worked. And we were all in sabbatical at the same time. And we all worked in this writing group together where we met every couple of weeks at Starbucks. And we would workshop each other's work and just hold each other accountable of when we were turning things in. 
That sounds so familiar in terms of being in a position where suddenly a whole bunch of service and just other responsibilities fall in your lap. And you realize, wait, there's no one really... who necessarily cares what's going on with my writing. And so it really needs to be all self-motivated. But it sounds like part of your solution was finding some of that external accountability and finding people to care that you were writing. Totally. And I still today, I have a different writing group that I'm part of that I've been part of now for over 10 years. And we still meet regularly. We've added a new person. It um who's a graduate student this past year which has been really lovely but the rest of us have met for over 10 years together and there are more people in my subfield so you get more specific information about jews in the early atlantic world which is kind of a niche topic but i still find that kind of back and forth really helpful the thing that i think radically changed with that second well that the first second insofar as second to my dissertation director 
The first real writing group that I was part of that was other faculty at Reed College. The thing that really changed about my writing process with that, besides the accountability, was with my dissertation director, I had always wanted everything to be as perfect as possible before I gave it to him. So I would obsess over like every last detail has to be exactly right before I show it to him or shame will flood my body and I won't be able to slink into his office or whatever. I think, you know, will happen if I turn in something subpar. And really one of the things that I learned from that first writing group that has followed me ever after is it's actually so much more helpful to get feedback before you're completely wedded to the structure and content of the chapter. 
So I often both will have conversations to talk to people about the content of the chapter, but also I'm much more likely to workshop something before it's, quote, perfect. Mm-hmm. And when I'm still trying to figure out things that are not working for me. And that's really changed my writing process a lot too. I've spoken with colleagues who are in writing groups or who've tried them. And sometimes there's the issue of presenting something that's not quite ready. And you get a lot of different feedback that seems to be going in different directions. And it's overwhelming. And some of it doesn't seem like it's useful. I don't know if you guys have been able to... skip over what feels like overwhelming and unhelpful feedback or how you're able to focus it. 
Do you really feel like in these writing groups, they're able to somehow sort of get in my head and really think about how can I do my project best instead of getting that very common feedback we get in academia where someone, you know, where I might tell someone else how I would do their project, even though really they have a good idea and I need to help them, you know, do their plan actually. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's one of the advantages of having this longer standing group is we've got a kind of shorthand for making sure we communicate what kind of feedback we want and what stage in the process and like, where is this headed? And what's my timeline? So I, even for people in the group, one of my first questions will be, when do you need to submit this, right? 
So the kind of feedback that you need when it's due in a week is really different than when it's at the early stage. brainstorming stages of the project. So both feeling comfortable asking, telling people those questions and asking questions of people when they're giving you material, but also having a sense of what kinds of feedback certain kinds of people tend to like. And that's sort of just kind of stored away at this point that I don't need to every single time ask the person all of the questions I might ask somebody new because I already know. That person tends to give me stuff at this particular stage in the process. Yeah, right. It does seem helpful to have that history with people. So you mentioned that you are pretty into the writing regularly. 
What does that look like for you? Is that a morning, a specific time? Is it flexible what time it will be? So one of the things that Belt saw, again, I feel like I'm proselytizing this book, but go out and buy this book, particularly the newer version of it, totally worth getting. But one of the things that she talks about is figuring out what time of day and what kinds of places you do the best kind of writing and not trying to have everybody do the same kind of writing process. So I tend to write much better in the mornings and I tend to be a little, if not brain dead, I'm using like more running on fumes by late afternoon. So I tend to do lower concentration or less creative kinds of things late afternoon and try to focus on early morning as being times when I would do writing. 
Or if I'm doing writing late afternoon, it's stuff that's not requiring a lot of creative thinking through. There's always something in the book projects that, you know, bibliography work or whatever, or researching stuff in the humble opinion or like in my experience. Other people may be different. But really prioritizing the time that I tend to do better writing and not trying to schedule classes during that time has really been very helpful for me. That doesn't always work. So I feel like it's worth noting there's a luxury to being able to schedule classes not at the ponds when you are most productive. And that sort of bit me a little bit this year that this semester in particular, I was on low on our 
We have a rotating priority in terms of who gets first choice of when to teach. I was in the lowest category for this year. And so I have to teach it all the worst times for me. And it's been really, really hard. So one of the things I was like, my usual strategy is much better than this, which is to not teach it those times because it's much harder for me to get stuff done. So definitely both thinking about where I do good kind of writing and when I do good kind of writing and blocking off those times and not letting other people's desire for when they have to meet necessarily take priority over my writing schedule. Yeah. And you mentioned the Pomodoro method. 
Can you explain to listeners what that is and why it works for you? Sure. And this is something I learned from somebody in that first writing group that I was part of at Reed from another faculty member. And the Pomodoro method, which I use the timer that's online at mytomatoes.com pretty religiously, but you can actually use a real timer to Basically, you just set a timer. The default at MyTomatoes is for 25 minutes, hence why I was like, I write in 25-minute blocks. But you set it for the 25 minutes. You're not supposed to be doing anything else during that time, which means I don't attend to email. I close my office door. I don't get up and go to the bathroom. I've already got my water sitting next to me. 
Nothing. I just write, even if it's for the first few times I'm writing kind of nonsense stuff. It's the idea that I'm having this regular pattern of writing when I'm not disrupted. And then if it's the tomato timer, it goes off and it goes, dingle, dingle, dingle, dingle, time for a break. And then you have five minutes to go and go to the bathroom and check your email or whatever things were feeling like you needed to do. And then after that, it goes off again and says, time to get back to work. And you can set it for another 25 minutes. And the glory of the online timer for me is that you can track what you're working on. It asks you when you're done with the 25 minutes, what did you work on for the 25 minutes? 
And I actually find that quite helpful to be able to look back and see when I'm really deep into a project, how much time I'm tending to work on it. And I'm definitely somebody where once I start working on something, I'm more likely to continue to want to work on it. And it's helpful to see like when, what is my sort of best amount of time to be working. I think we have this idea, like if I could just work the whole day, that would be amazing. And at least for me, I don't have high quality work for the whole day. I have high quality work for maybe two hours, three hours. And then I could do, again, I could do researching stuff, but I can't typically write for 10 hours a day and have it be not stuff that I'm going to have to edit a huge amount the next day. 
That's helpful to know. And another reason I wanted to talk to you is just you have a lot of leadership kinds of positions. And I am curious how your writing or approach to scheduling writing changed as a result of taking on these kinds of leadership positions. So for people who don't know that I'm on the executive committee for the Association for Jewish Studies, and I've had various different roles in that. And some of the roles that particularly the first one that I had, which was the vice president for publications, I actually felt like dovetailed with my interests in terms of productivity with publications and trying to support other people and proselytizing the Wendy Belcher method, whatever it is. So I did a number of summers of writing workshops where people would use the Wendy Belcher book over the summer. 
And it's something I had done before that in American Jewish history as well. and just in American religion before that. So definitely there have been times where I feel like the work that I'm doing on behalf of the organization actually supports me getting my own writing done. Because if I'm running one of these writing workshops over the summer, I also will pick something that I'm working on. And usually it results in either getting a chapter that I might not have gotten done or an article out at the end of the summer. So I feel like those are examples of one way is to pick things that will actually support you in addition to being service to the community or to your field. I would say that's been less true with the other different roles that I have played for AJS, one of which being the vice president of program, which oversees mainly the conference and the program committee. 
And the other one being, now that I'm president, it sort of more general sorts of things with the organization. And I would say those ones, I do feel like that's where going back to doing the writing every day can be really helpful and just carving out that time. I tend to think of it as not trying to get away from like models of like, oh, there's something selfish about me doing this or whatever, but more that I'm happier when I'm doing research and the research keeps me vibrant in the field. And particularly since I work at a right now at a liberal arts college where there isn't a huge amount of oomph from them in terms of me continuing to publish and write. 
I don't want to say they don't care, but often it feels that way that they don't care. So there's not a lot of pressure. And I would say for me, having that reminder that I'm going to be more satisfied with my career when I'm doing the things that I want to be doing and that those are going to help balance my understanding of what's going on in the field more generally can be really helpful. I have shifted a little bit in the last couple of years with being MVP of program and on president of what I read. And maybe that doesn't seem completely related to writing, but I feel like it often is. I tend to read things much more broadly than I used to before I was on the executive committee. 
I often try to read things based on who's on our board of directors, which is quite large, that I try to make sure I read something by everybody on the board of directors so that I know what they're doing and what their expertise is and that I can sort of honor them as a scholar as well as somebody who's volunteering for the organization. And same thing for when I was in charge of program, that you have to really think about the discipline more broadly. And likewise, I would try to make sure that I was reading things from other parts of the field that have nothing to do with Americas, but are important nonetheless for our field. And I hope that that ultimately makes me a better scholar insofar as like I'm more aware of the larger trends in the field and able to get at sort of the bigger so what picture of what's happening with what I'm doing, even if it's not obviously relevant for my work. 
Yeah. And in case you're, is it Wendy Belcher? Is that her name? Wendy Belcher. Okay. So in case you're proselytizing, it's working and readers want to know, so now I'm considering doing this. Why is it an effective plan for writing journal articles? Yeah. So I think this, again, gets back to kind of basic things of how I was or wasn't trained about writing when I was in graduate school versus having to figure it out later on my own. So I think now that people tend to get a little more training about what a journal article is supposed to look like and getting help writing their first journal article before they leave graduate school. But we didn't get a ton of that back when I was in graduate school. 
It was a little bit hit or miss. So her book really goes through, it both provides a week by week, here's what you're going to do this week, which for people who like to have something concrete and things broken down into steps, makes it seem less overwhelming. It's not like by the end of the summer, an article will miraculously appear on my desk. It's like each week I have a set task that I do. So personally for me, I find that super, super helpful. But the second thing really is that she demystifies a lot of the academic writing process. And for me as a scholar, that was just a huge turning point of figuring out why things that I had written as conference papers, why I could never get them out the door, why they ended up languishing forever. 
on my computer or in a file drawer forever. And then when I think back to that, I'm like, oh, it was so painful. You know, all those things that I worked so hard on that never ended up making it into print when I was pre-tenured, which I can sort of understand why that happened, but it also seems super unfortunate that there wasn't any really good infrastructure to help figure out or navigate those. So she really does break down both what things might derail you at various points in the writing process, as well as what journal and book editors are looking for in ways that, for me, nobody had ever done when I was in graduate school. And so HENCE was just hugely, hugely helpful of understanding why certain things were having a hard time either making it from that leap from conference paper to publisher or why when I would get a revise and resubmit and it would just never get revised, what was keeping me from being able to do that. 
Yeah, I mean, the other thing that's encouraging here, Laura, is it sounds like, I mean, you're known as an incredibly productive scholar, but it does sound like you are explaining that there's been a learning curve for that to be the case and, you know, things you've discovered about your own process and about academic writing that made that possible. Yeah, I would totally echo that, that I think, you know, maybe if I'd been at R1 from the get-go, I would have been forced to, like, contemplate. I'll put more stuff early on and figure it out. Or maybe I just wouldn't have gotten tenure. I don't know what would have happened with that. But I do think there is a certain utility in knowing that what we perceive from the outside when books work out is not necessarily the process that book went through to get out in the real world. 
So I often will tell people that that first Jewish studies book that I did, Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism, the first time it went out, For review, reviewer number one was like, love it, love it, love it. Reviewer number two sent back 12 pages of single space, like, hate it, hate it, hate it. It was things like, I don't believe in messianism for this time period. You need to take it out of the book. I'm like, it's in the title. You know, how am I going to do that? So fortunately, I sort of was old enough that I persevered and like pushed it through and went to another press and moved on. And it ended up winning three different book awards. So it's sort of like... 
you know, bummer to be reviewer number two. But I do think it's super important that people know that it's not like even the books that win awards don't get turned down at various stages in their life cycles, right? Or that some of the chapters of it might not have been revised and resubmit, and that's how they end up in the form that they're in. That it's really important for us to know that sometimes you get reviewers' comments back and sort of looping back to your, like, I got comments from my writing group, but they weren't helpful. Sometimes things aren't helpful, and you need to just, figure out what's at the core of what you want to do and move on from it. But at least when I was starting out, I somehow thought the norm was I send, I write something, it's perfect. 
If somebody corrects my spelling, and then I send it out and they're like, love it. Don't change a thing. We'd like to publish it next week. No need to even send it out for review. And if they did send it out for review, the people would be like, the next genius who walks the earth. That's the article, right? You know, so, and honestly, that just never, or in my experience, never happens, right? Like there's always, it's a long process. You have to like go through the like stages of mourning when you get your reviews back, you know, anger, disbelief, whatever, and work through them and figure out a way to like still get the work back out there. And I just feel like for particularly young, 
Early career scholars, so important to know that and to not get discouraged because we do have a disproportionate, you know, in terms of gender and other factors, in terms of race, in terms of who is successful. And I feel like a lot of it has to do with who is not already feeling some of the angst of not belonging in the field. And hence, the criticism makes it harder to bounce back from that. when you're getting reviewer number two saying like, take out one of the key terms of your argument. You'll say like, moving on, I think I'll just go to a different journal or book editor. Yeah. I mean, on that topic of feedback, but getting more specific, I wonder if I can post you a question. 
We've heard from listeners, which is how you respond to those readers' reports, either in the journal article or or from a book, there's some uncertainty I know among a lot of listeners about, do I need to address everything? How much do I need to sound like, oh, you're absolutely right? What level of confidence about, actually, I do want to stick with some of these things that one of the reviewers had issues with. How do you know how to respond to those? First of all, I feel like I often workshop the feedback I get with the people in my writing group because they often will help. And we, other people do that too in the writing group because there's, again, I feel like there's, except for the rare occasions where they're like, love it, take it, which I'm trying to remember when the last time that was that happened. 
Like never quite works that way. Mm-hmm. that there are those stages of anger, disbelief, denial that you go through when you get the feedback because it's something you loved and you cared about and they clearly didn't understand the glory that is. Right? So it's clearly their fault and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I, like everybody else, goes through those stages, right? And I feel like giving myself a little time and then getting the other people who usually have read it before I submitted it to say like, yeah, that's clearly dumb. don't listen to that. So like one of the people in our group who works on the Caribbean, one of the reviewers is like, you apparently don't know that Suriname's not in the Caribbean. 
And we're all like, okay, Suriname is in the Caribbean. So totally don't even listen to that. Like that's baloney, like throw that away. So I think it is helpful to have that, those other people who can support you through the mourning process of figuring out what things need to be attended to. But one of the most helpful things beyond that, that some journals have required, and now I just make standard that I do whether it's a journal article or a book, is to write a table that lists all the comments by the reviewers. If the reviewers have the same ones, then it will say reviewer one, this, reviewer two, right in the same little box. And then I have a column where I put whether I agreed or disagreed. 
And if I disagreed, I have to explain why, for example, Suriname is in the Caribbean. See, you know, all the scholarship from the dawn of time. And or in the like column description, that's next to it, if I'm making a change, then I will explain where I made the change and what I changed to fix it. And for me, that often helps me get around some of the like, why can I not understand the glory that I wrote with my whole heart. And so that definitely both, I think it's helpful for me, but my experience as a reviewer, It's really helpful when somebody wants you to see something again that somebody's revised to see what they've changed and what they decided to change. 
And if they didn't want to change it, why did they not want to change it? Then you can be like, okay, so that was where I wanted to have this go forward and what I would have done, but you do you and it's not wrong for you not to be me. So that does, I think, help in multiple ways to have that kind of table that you're making. So you actually include that table in your response then? Oh, yeah, that seems great. I mean, it's such an objective kind of representation of what you receive. Yeah, and again, as somebody like when I've, particularly for books where you don't want to hunt and peck if you're the reviewer who's seeing a manuscript again, but it needs to go back out and say, like, did they do these things? 
It's really helpful as the reviewer to have them include that table. So I love it when journals or publishers share for books, ask the authors to include that when they're sending it back to me, super helpful. I just feel like that's the one thing that I wish everybody would train their graduate students to do is to write those sort of tables explaining the feedback, particularly for first books and whatnot, so that it's not just like, I hated them, I hated them, I hated them. It's often my first response. And it's more like why I don't think this works. And sometimes in the course of doing that, I'll figure out like, okay, I didn't appreciate the way they gave me that feedback. They were kind of rude. 
But point taken, in the end, it probably would help for me to either explain why this is not applicable in my article or to do something along the lines of what was suggested. That's a great idea. Yeah, I've never done that in replying, but it does. I like that idea. Yeah. There's a couple of questions that we ask all guests, and one of them is about something that you wish you had known about writing or publishing earlier in your career. Well, I feel like we talked a lot about that because I'm like, oh, you know, I think probably the thing that I wish I had understood early on in my career beyond all the Wendy Belcher stuff and like get some friends and have a have a community is really that when, except for maybe in rare occasions, but most of the time, the editors of 
journals, when they're sending back the feedback, it's not because they're evil and sadistic. They want to make the article the best that it could be for their publication. And in that sense, the feedback we're getting from people, irritating as it sometimes is, is designed to help make it a stronger, better article. And the same thing for books too, right? That there's things where they may not be something that you want to do, but they're trying to explain like, this is what would bring it up level. So even when I think back to the person who was reviewer number two early on for the Messianism book, and I didn't do all of the things in the 12 pages, but there were certain things that that person said that really stuck with me. 
They didn't like the fact that I didn't have article, they didn't have primary sources by women about going to the ritual bath. And I'm like, dude, if those existed, I would have included them. It's not that I'm withholding them. They're not out there. But that whole issue of like, how do we get more of women's voices and perspectives, really mulling it over for years became sort of the art of the Jewish family. So I think in that sense, like even things that I may not be able to process at the time, really trying to take seriously how that might help me like think about pushing either this particular piece forward or impact my scholarship going forward, that there is a real gift that people are giving their time 
and giving feedback to try and ideally make your work stronger. Again, sometimes they don't always express it in ways that make that easy to hear, but usually that's where a little bit of time and distance could help. Yeah, I was also just at a conference this weekend and had that feeling when I was getting feedback, you know, sort of live, and I was feeling I'm not going to be able to give you a good response, but I'm so grateful because for the attention. And I know this is going to stay with me and I'm going to be processing it. So you're right. It sometimes happens later on. Our other question is about a writing practice or a habit that's working for you. I think this is something we've talked about a little bit, but a writing practice that's been, again, just sort of completely changed the way I do things. 
Well, I'll give you two things. One that we've talked about a little bit and one that's new. Really is that writing a little bit each day so I don't fetishize what's happening. And I usually at the end of that day, will make some notes to future me of what you should be working on the next day. So I don't have that big of a lead in. So rather than waiting for genius to strike or the right mood, or for suddenly nobody else to have things they want me to do to write, I really am just like carving out little bits each day. And that really chipping away at things that I hold on that if I do that, it will eventually lead to something coming into fruition, even if it's 
farther down the road. So I do start things very early. But the other thing that I haven't talked about that really, for me at least, for these longer projects is so helpful is having a software that manages what my research is. So I use Zotero. Other people use other kinds of software. It allows me to work, for example, with a research assistant and and they can go off and find things and we can kind of collaborate on them. I've had a number of articles published that were co-authored with students and really the Zotero of allowing me to take notes along the way and have them all in one place and be linked to the original document. All those times where you're writing something and you're like, somewhere I read something about this, and then I'll never be able to find it again. 
It really helps with that. So because I am in my mind, a slow writer that I write little by little over time, that being able to go back and look and see my notes. And often if I've taken notes on something, I'll Xerox a couple of pages and I'll make an attachment. So I'm like, here's the part that I need to look at. Just super, super helpful to have that as opposed to needing to reinvent the wheel. Since you mentioned the writing every day, and I, by the way, am a writing almost every day kind of person, but the But in all honesty, it's not every day. It did make me think, I think you observe the Sabbath. And so I wonder if that means how that break in your work week works for your writing. 
Thank you so much for bringing that up, because I feel like it's something that sometimes I don't talk about, but I think has been really crucial. And I do remember very early on in my career, somebody who kept the Sabbath saying to me, oh, I would never have made it as far as I had. It was somebody who was quite prolific at reading. Steve Wasser showed me saying, like, keeping the Sabbath is what keeps me sane. And I was like, huh, okay, good to know. Like, it's not in conflict with being able to get work done. It actually supports it. And I, however many years later, totally agree with that, that having that downtime every week where you're unplugged, where you're not having to attend to all the millions of emails and whatnot is just so helpful. 
And so I... So I say I write every day, but I don't usually write on Saturdays. I mean, obviously not during the Sabbath, but occasionally I'll have projects where like if I'm under an extreme deadline, I'll write after the Sabbath ends. But I don't actually find that to be a productive time for me to be writing. So I usually give myself a free pass for writing on Saturdays and don't worry about it and don't beat myself up with it. Just look at it as my job for this day is really to rejuvenate and that that's what's going to make me a better writer next week. if I actually have that rest time. And I do think that it's hard to imagine surviving the sort of long run of being an academic without sabbaticals. 
And in the same sort of way, it's hard to imagine it without, for me, having the Sabbath, because just like sabbaticals give you that time to breathe again and think and to engage your higher brain function and not be so stressed out all the time, that Sabbath too, I find is a way to like escape from the reptile brain that may have taken over and really get into a more creative space and a more thinky space for the next week. Yeah. Thank you so much, Laura. This was really great to get to talk to you. Appreciate your making time for us. Thanks for inviting me. Our pleasure. 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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