Wrapping up another semester; beginning something new

I have about a week left of the semester, so I've been doing a lot of reading/commenting on student work recently. I have a draft of my blog post on Yang Tsui's book about her grandfather, Yang Kui, but it's not in any shape yet to meet its public. Maybe I'll have some time to work on it tomorrow.

Some good news is that my application for a Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Fellowship (a one-semester leave--a "sabbatical" by any other name) was approved, so I'll be spending the fall reading and (hopefully) writing a lot about comparative rhetoric and Taiwan history, literature, rhetoric, in order to work on an article and design a comparative rhetoric course. By coincidence, in my first-year writing course this afternoon we were doing some reflective writing about this past semester for the sake of a final reflective piece I'm asking them to write--a letter to their future selves giving themselves advice, warning, encouragement for future writing tasks. I was doing "loop writing" (focused freewriting) on some prompts provided by Elbow and Belanoff in their 1989 book, A Community of Writers. One of the prompts was about the physical aspects of writing, and I wrote this:

Physical: One of the things I’m going to have to think about as I work this summer and into next semester is how I’m going to do the physical work of writing. I’m always taken by Jonathan Spence’s acknowledgements in The Search for Modern China where he thanks the staff of a pizza place near Yale, where he would work on his book. I wonder how he did it. There was a Twitter thread that mentioned that he wrote on legal pads, but I also wonder if he brought books or archival photocopies, etc. with him. I remember when I was working on my dissertation, sometimes I would bring photocopies of archival documents with me to McDonald’s or Starbucks or Dante [a café] or wherever, and I would have a spiral-ring notebook in which I’d write ideas down, sometimes just copying stuff from the archival docs. I used different colors for the quotes vs. for my own ideas. At some point I suppose that I probably would then copy some of that stuff to my computer. Nowadays I don’t imagine doing that kind of thing, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to try that out. I have a lot of books that I have to read for this “sabbatical.” Maybe some of the days when I go out to work (whether it be a coffee shop or a library), I can just take one or two of the books I want to work on and a notebook in which I can take notes and write out my ideas longhand. I haven’t done that in so long. I don’t think I’ve done that kind of work since I finished my dissertation back in 2011. I don’t necessarily have to do this every time I go out (I didn’t do it every time back then, even), but maybe some days I can ditch the computer. (Wish I could ditch my cellphone too, but that doesn’t sound like a good idea.) The purpose for this would be, hopefully, to get me to concentrate on my reading and writing rather than spending a lot of energy fighting the urge to check my email or Twitter or something else or to look up something on the internet that ends up taking me down a rabbit hole. ... Yeah. I guess I’ll invest in notebook and try this out.

So I am copying this here in part to remind myself of this and to ask all of my reader to remind me about this idea: try writing longhand sometimes. Get away from the computer. (Here's a link to my post about Jonathan Spence's acknowledgements.)