"The reformer's blood and the student's blood have always had an uncomfortable time of it, together in my veins." -Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters from a Life (1896)
I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Granville thinking of how much I love scones and my life. It is the coffee shop where my writing group met my senior year. Dr. Baker would buy us coffee and we would workshop our poems. All my energy was focused on getting into graduate school and I felt like I was changing the world by going to Amnesty and Women's Emphasis meetings and discussing politics with the other students.
It is five years later, and I still meet with a writing group to workshop our dissertations. In some ways, my life has not changed very much. In other ways, I feel like a completely different person. It is becoming harder and harder to reconcile the work I do in the academy with the material needs of people in my neighborhood. I still believe so strongly in the power of literature to change perspectives and make people more compassionate, and see those social justice oriented meetings I attended as necessary, but am increasingly unsure about how to bridge the gap between Franklinton and the university. So instead, I spend too much time thinking about this instead of writing my dissertation or actually working in the community.
This tension is why I love Phelps, even though I am having such a hard time writing about her in my diss! She was passionate about both literature and social justice, and saw her work as an attempt to create a better society. One line in her most famous work, The Story of Avis (1877), always sticks with me. The female artist visits a tenement house and realizes that she "had to be a little color blind to misery for beauty's sake." It is a line I am still trying to figure out.
In a couple hours I will talk about my graduate school experiences with the English majors at Denison. I hope I can convey that being given time to study and teach is beautiful, but a privilege that should not blind them to the rest of the world. Then I will keep working to figure out Phelps and Franklinton!
I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Granville thinking of how much I love scones and my life. It is the coffee shop where my writing group met my senior year. Dr. Baker would buy us coffee and we would workshop our poems. All my energy was focused on getting into graduate school and I felt like I was changing the world by going to Amnesty and Women's Emphasis meetings and discussing politics with the other students.
It is five years later, and I still meet with a writing group to workshop our dissertations. In some ways, my life has not changed very much. In other ways, I feel like a completely different person. It is becoming harder and harder to reconcile the work I do in the academy with the material needs of people in my neighborhood. I still believe so strongly in the power of literature to change perspectives and make people more compassionate, and see those social justice oriented meetings I attended as necessary, but am increasingly unsure about how to bridge the gap between Franklinton and the university. So instead, I spend too much time thinking about this instead of writing my dissertation or actually working in the community.
This tension is why I love Phelps, even though I am having such a hard time writing about her in my diss! She was passionate about both literature and social justice, and saw her work as an attempt to create a better society. One line in her most famous work, The Story of Avis (1877), always sticks with me. The female artist visits a tenement house and realizes that she "had to be a little color blind to misery for beauty's sake." It is a line I am still trying to figure out.
In a couple hours I will talk about my graduate school experiences with the English majors at Denison. I hope I can convey that being given time to study and teach is beautiful, but a privilege that should not blind them to the rest of the world. Then I will keep working to figure out Phelps and Franklinton!
