Category: process

Ranting

personby Gillian Polack
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I wrote a rant on Facebook. I want to copy it here because the cause of it affects so many people and I think it would be good to find it again. Let me explain first, though.

My ethnohistorian self looks at what happens in the world around us as evidence of human lives. I’m always looking for patterns. Right now, finding patterns and interpreting them well is more important than it’s ever been for me, because of the level and nature of antisemitism in Australia. I keep an eye on what our Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is doing, and I find it has its own patterns and, at this point, it doesn’t see the rest of Australia clearly. It only sees what it’s shown, and some of the interpretation is done through the lens of groups who are part of the problem. Cross-questioning should not be up to 66% led by groups that are known for their antisemitism, but on some days it is. That affects the picture we all see. I make my own analyses, then, to keep what the RC does in perspective. I keep my own analysis in perspective using a truckload of tools. I watch some of the top ten shows on TV so that I’m in tune with the stories others see and hear. I keep an eye on social media. I make sure I’m part of events when I can. Last Saturday I was on a stall at Geek Expo. I wore nothing to indicate I’m Jewish (I don’t like tempting fate) but I watched and listened and I talked to many people. I’m beginning to learn the pattern and shape of antisemitism in this country.
What I wrote on FB just now was about one of the trails of hate spread so liberally across social media. I used several search terms to bring up people talking specifically about that topic, and I also looked at the new and at commentaries on the news, on the timelines of people who are known to be Jewish (eg a certain film director), and also with some of the major figures who talk politics in Australia. One thing I didn’t do this time was look at commentary by noted Jewish social media folks, so this doesn’t include the comments on their posts.
As much as anything, today’s post is about how I see the world, which is always as a writer (everything contains stories) and as an historian (everything contains evidence). it’s also an insight into what it’s like being a Jewish Australian at the place where 5 different branches of Australian antisemitism hit, but that’s not something to talk about today.

 

There is a pattern. If it’s Monday evening in east coast Australia, then the new wave of antisemitism hits social media. Sometimes it lasts until the weekend and sometimes it fades in a couple of days. Today’s wave is fairly precise. It’s an old one, revisited, and it riffs on one of last week’s waves.
That wave said, “If Israel was only completely obliterated, there would be no problems in the Middle East.” None of those pushing this line asked what would happen to Jews in Israel, but I asked a couple of people (who do not know to block me yet, obviously) and they explained that, since no-one in the Arab world hates Jews or has ever killed a Jew, they do not know why it’s even a question.
Some of them also say that there’s no antisemitism in Australia. I followed a little thread where someone asked how Bondi fitted into the ‘no antisemitism in Australia’ notion, and the person who asked was blocked, but the ‘no antisemitism’ person took that same thought elsewhere. They know there is antisemitism, but they’re in denial for their own reasons. Others (who I didn’t talk to because… not so safe) said that the world would be better with no Jews. That’s the old thread. It is not simple and it is unkind.
The new one (which is also an old one, but present in so many places this evening) is more polite. The new wave of hate says that Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism. It’s an evil thing that touts supremacy and includes murder. The actual history of Zionism is irrelevant here (though the history of carefully cultivated antisemitism is not) – and if you want to see the range of definitions of Zionism from a snapshot I did a while back, let me know and I’ll share the links again.
The big thing is that I don’t know anyone Jewish who uses this definition. I know a couple of people who might, but they’re not people who talk to me. Those couple of people are both quite far left.
Why is the use by Jews so important? Because the same people who have this curious definition of Zionism also have a potted definition of Judaism. We’re a religion, simply, with no links to the ancient Levant and only modern culture. Excuse me while I take a break to sing Shir Ha’Maalot, which is appropriate at this point for so many reasons.
I’m finished singing.
How do most of these people use those definitions? They find comments made by obvious Jews (especially famous ones) and correct their self descriptions.
It’s very Orwellian. Reshape everyone’s thoughts on a subject by using the same words and phrases and correcting people over and over again. It’s Jewsplaining, but with intent to create 1984.
I am going to strongly suggest that if you don’t know how a Jewish friend sees themselves and describes themselves, you ask them. You’ll get our answers, not a single standard ‘this is the only way of saying it’ except from those of us who like shaping the world with straightforward constructions. This comes down to how a person sees themselves in the world, so that is what you should put ahead of most other things if you want to actually talk to Jews and defend our right to exist as Jews. You don’t have to like any given person’s self-definition. But you do need to accept it as their self-definition ahead of the carefully crafted definitions applied by bigots.
Within Jewish culture, each self-definition plays a part. There are concepts we share, and concepts we craft by creating a complex composition. We’re all voices in a choir. Some choirs walk a little bit to the side and create their own mix, but they’re still part of Am Yisrael.
The thing about Judaism is that it doesn’t force one simple view. We argue and discuss and even have an approved rabbinic method of shelving impossible arguments so that we can move on to possible ones.
Redefinition by someone imbued with Jew hate is not just going to change the public way others see Jews, it’s going to chip at who we are by not letting us be ourselves outside closed communities. The choir is being pelted with rocks for not singing the right song in the right way… and that song and that right way may not have anything to do with what the choir was singing or why the choir was singing or who the choir was singing for.
This is an old trick. It shuts down Jewish voices. Every time someone tells someone else who they are without checking with them first, to find out how they see themselves, they’re saying “Who you are is unimportant. You are a lesser human being than I am.”

An addendum:
Miss Manners needs to intervene. If you’ve been shouting politics, your politics might have made your Jewish friends aware that you are not safe to speak with about certain subjects. Check with them before you ask them questions. They may not want to answer because they may not be as trusting (or as safe) as they were a few years ago.
I understand that everyone’s politics is important, but left wing politics in Australia have led to a lot of Jew hate. Otherwise good people are being treated with caution, even if they don’t know it, because they shouted “Globalise the intifada” but never asked Aussie Jewish friends whether we were OK after Bondi. I dropped many hints about ‘talking to your friends’ in the last 3 years, but most people didn’t. If you didn’t (thought nice thoughts but never called or had a cuppa) then think twice before suddenly invading a friend’s life with “How do you self-define.” Explain why you didn’t talk to them, perhaps, then ask if it’s possible to talk?

Down the Rabbit Hole

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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A white rabbit wearing a coat, standing on its hind legs and staring at a watch. Painting by John Tenniel from an early edition of Alice in Wonderland.

It is common, in my circles, to speak of “going down the rabbit hole.” Writers, of course, are notorious for starting to research some minor point and emerging hours later having chased down one idea only to find another sort-of-related point that must also be investigated and so on.

My partner, who only writes when he has to, does the same thing just for the hell of it – and then bemoans the fact that he stayed up too late chasing down ideas on his screen. He complains he spends too much time staring at a screen, but of course what he’s doing there is reading something interesting that leads to something else interesting, which I don’t think is the real problem with too much screen time.

I mean, people like me and my partner and most of the writers I know would be doing the same thing without the internet. We’d just be doing it with dictionaries, almanacs, encyclopedias, various other books around the house and – once we’d exhausted those sources – the nearest library.

Going down rabbit holes is part of what makes life worth living.

Funny, though, when I looked the phrase up online – to determine if, in fact, it does come from Alice in Wonderland (it apparently does) – I saw a few comments that implied that it’s not a positive thing.

For example, the Wikipedia entry says:

It has come to mean that someone has become interested in something, usually by accident; and often the subject does not deserve the amount of attention that a person gives.

I say “bah.”

The reason I am writing about this is because I read a piece in The New York Times by neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff entitled “We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask.” (gift link). In this essay, which among other things critiques the use of so-called AI, she observes:

Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation — these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information. They emerge from periods of undirected exploration, when people follow questions further than they need to and find things they weren’t expecting.

That resonated with me deeply. I love undirected exploration. I’m very inefficient at research. And more than anything else, I love connecting things from very different points of view, things that might not seem connected to anyone else. Continue reading “Down the Rabbit Hole”…

John Warner’s More Than Words

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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cover of the book More Than WordsI’ve subscribed to John Warner’s newsletter, “The Biblioracle Recommends,” for some time now. It’s all about reading and writing, a thoughtful source for ideas on how to teach writing and for clear criticism of so-called AI.

He publishes every Sunday and I set aside time to read his essay carefully because he always gives me something to chew on. With that in mind, I checked his latest book More Than Words out of my library.

I was not disappointed.

Warner writes lyrically about writing in ways that will make perfect sense to all writers. For me, reading this book put a name to many things about writing that I knew but had never put into words.

For example, he says:

If we consider writing as the fully embodied practice that it is, words and sentences are not the basics or base units of writing. To start writing, first you need an idea.

Then he adds, after having spent some time thinking about what he just wrote:

It’s not even a full-fledged idea that’s the base unit of writing. It’s something smaller. Let’s call it a “notion.” If an idea is the atom, the true building block of writing matter, consider the notion a subatomic particle, perhaps along with the “inkling,” “sense,” “suspicion,” and “hunch.”

He also quotes from other good writers.

I often feel that I don’t think hard enough about things until I have to write about them.
—Rebecca Solnit

 A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
—Thomas Mann 

Continue reading “John Warner’s More Than Words“…

Decisions, decisions

personby Gillian Polack
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It’s really hard to decide on what I should post about today. I have diversions.

The first is that I’m in the final throes of revising my thesis to meet the examiners’ comments. I thought it would be a much bigger task than it was. I’ve sent my revisions and comments to my supervisors and then I send the final in and, hopefully, by the end of the week it will be done and dusted save for graduation. I submitted the thesis over a year ago – even for Australia this is slow. I don’t know why it was so slow, but career-wise it doesn’t matter to me (this is not my first PhD and I’m in my sixties) so it’s better the admin slowness doesn’t apply to young students than it does apply to me. Also, between submission and graduation, my first PhD took 3 years. It was not my fault, but it cost me my first career. By me a drink and I’ll tell you the story.

It’s rather nice that lateness doesn’t always carry such costs.

The second is that the submission period for the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion closed yesterday. Many of us are a bit overwhelmed. On 4 June (10 days before submissions closed) there were over 14,000 submissions, which was a record for Royal Commissions. No-one knows the final number yet.

The staff serving the Royal Commissioner is obligated to read every single one of them. And those of us keeping track are wondering what this means. That Jewish Australia matters? That haters have put in many thoughts? We know that haters have oput in some thoughts. We also know that Palestinian Australia put in a 259 page submission. I’ve seen the outline and need to read it because I cannot make sense of it. Or rather, I can make sense of it in and of itself, but not how it helps Australia handle antisemitism. It seems to be arguing that we’re making things up. This is why I have to check. I’ve been told by quite a few people this last week that antisemitism is fictional, but there are so many incidents right now that this is not a claim so much as a misdirection. I need to know why APAN feels the need to spend 259 pages backing that misdirection if that is, indeed what they’re doing.

What I’m supposed to be doing is writing fiction. I lay in bed last night working out things that needed working out, but today have only written a couple of hundred words. We’re in a weather trap and my bones hurt and I keep procrastinating and worrying about Jewish Australia and other groups being confined by wagon trains circling hate.

Let me leave you and go back to my big writing decision for this week: Lincoln or London in the twelfth century for a section of the novel. I want both, but I don’t think both will fit. I also want Cologne and Speyer. Both! Actually, writing this out has made me think: people travelled in the Middle Ages. Why don’t I have someone travelling to Cologne from Speyer? That would give me the words for Lincoln and London. I just need to check concepts and characters and plot and… all the things… except the history. I have most of the research for that at my fingertips because of the non-fiction I was working on recently and that still has no home. All this research pays.

The Physical Act of Writing

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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A friend on Facebook pointed to a study that said writing by hand used more of the brain than using a keyboard. As someone who prefers keyboards to writing by hand and has since I learned to type at 16, I was a little skeptical.

I looked up the study and not only found it, but found a significant critique of it published in the same journal.

When I read over the study, I discovered that the participants did the “writing by hand” using a digital pen on a screen, while they did the typing using only their right index finger – that is, the equivalent of “hunt and peck” typing, which is not the way that people generally type on a keyboard. They limited it to right-handed people as well.

According to the study, they did this because using both hands would make it hard to interpret the results. The critique noted the one-finger typing as a problem, as well as looking at other things from the perspective of researchers and finding it wanting.

And I came away deciding they hadn’t really proved anything about the difference between keyboard use and writing by hand.

I suspect there is some value in learning to write by hand – the study points to the understanding of how each letter is constructed, which makes sense to me. But if you want to convince me that it’s better than using a keyboard, you’re going to need to study people using pen on paper and typing with both hands on a keyboard.

I am assuming that most people who spend time using a computer keyboard use it with both hands and know the QWERTY layout in their fingers. If a large number of people are actually doing some form of hunt and peck while staring at the keyboard rather than the screen, the bigger question is why aren’t the kids learning to use a keyboard properly.

I have seen all kinds of arguments about whether kids should still learn cursive. There are those who argue that learning to print is enough. Perhaps it is, but printing was always harder for me than longhand. So I’m inclined to go for teaching all those things – printing, cursive, and typing – and letting people decide which to use when.

Lately teachers have taken to requiring students to write by hand in blue books in class to keep them from using LLMs (“AI”) to write their essays, so they need to be able to print or write longhand. A friend of mine tutors a high school student who is finding the physical act of writing difficult because he wasn’t taught it well when he was younger.

I take notes by hand out of the books I read in my morning reading practice and have noticed a slightly different need for paying attention when writing by hand. But here’s the thing: once I learned to type, I vastly preferred writing on a keyboard where I could see what I was turning out much more easily.

manual typewriterNow mind you, I learned on an actual typewriter back before the personal computer existed. In typing class we used electric IBMs – not the correcting ones that I lusted after as a college student, but still fine machines. At home and for my school assignments, I used an old style manual typewriter, one of the ones that takes effort to punch.

Despite what the research implied, typing is a physical act. Using a keyboard is embodied in my physical self. And while computer keyboards don’t require as much effort as the old fashioned manual machine, the physicality is similar.

I put my fingers on the keyboard, think of what I want to say, and it comes out. I don’t have to think about the individual letters unless I use a word that I’m not sure how to spell.

I like writing this way much more than I like writing by hand, because writing by hand requires more concentration on the physical act of writing – making the letters clear enough, staying within the lines, and so forth.

I pay more attention to the idea when typing, and that’s what I want to pay attention to. Continue reading “The Physical Act of Writing”…

Doing the Work for the Sake of the Work

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Elizabeth Spiers did a recent piece in The Nation on the anti-intellectualism of the broligarch crowd. It’s worth a read for its own sake, but she started it with a quote that got me to thinking about why people make art:

On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.dime) who has dedicated his account to “posting an insane thing an AI executive said every day in 2026.” I can’t stop thinking about his entry for Day 15, quoting the CEO of a company called Suno, Mikey Shulman, as he claimed that musicians hate the process of making music. “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” he said. “It takes a lot of time, a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think a majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

I mean, has this guy ever spent time around musicians? All they want to do is mess around with their instruments or their songs or jam with others. My own experience of music is mostly from marching band and church choir, places where you spend a lot of time in practice and don’t get paid.

And even the people who do it for a living also do it for fun. One of my favorite musicians, Joe Ely, passed recently, and almost every one of the many appreciations I’ve seen of his life and work talks about what a good time he had performing.

It’s obvious if you hang out with writers or artists or musicians or a lot of other people that many, many human beings love to do things that take a lot of work before you get good. And many of those things aren’t financially remunerative even if you get spectacularly good.

The only people using the predictive software labeled AI to do those things are people who want money more than they want to create. I don’t understand this myself. If you want to make money, go into finance. You’ll get a lot richer than 99 percent of artists and a hell of a lot richer than doing scam books.

I mean, take the guy who used a chatbot to write a paid book review for The New York Times. Getting paid to write book reviews for a prestigious publication is the gold standard for reviewers – who often work for free these days – and he didn’t even care about the gig enough to do the work. And got caught, since the predictive software plagierized the Guardian’s review of the book.

(The chatbot can’t read, so it didn’t read the book. I suspect the reviewer didn’t read the book either.)

The things I value most in my life are precisely those things that require the work. Continue reading “Doing the Work for the Sake of the Work”…

Pocket universes and super heroes

personby Gillian Polack
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Eight years ago I spent ten days in Amiens. I had great aims and ambitions. I wanted to explore how World War I changed the people and the landscape. I did a lot of research in Australia early on, which was just as well, because my body was beginning to ache at the seams and I could only do half the research. I did that half, and I also did the related research for a novel. That novel is timely now, for all the wrong reasons.

It’s about the Green Children. There are medieval tales of the Green Children of Woolwich, and they are oddly consistent. I wanted to add a pocket universe to the story and turn it into fantasy with a little bit of scientific underlay. The best place to do this wasn’t in England, where the story came from. It was in the Zone Rouge in France.

I wanted to understand how Jewish superheroes would create themselves if they weren’t strangers in a world full of hate, but refugees in a tiny universe where they were the majority. I wanted to see the stupidity that comes with confidence and being the centre of things, and to put a non-Jewish superhero at the heart of the story, showing how she saw the world around her and how she dealt with some really bad cards. In other words, I wanted to reverse some of our assumptions.

Part of this was asking, “What would our world be like with magic?” I’m an historian and for me there is not one simple type of magic, but complex systems that interact and that change over time. In my novel I used some historical systems and some less historical, and added a couple that only belong in that other world. If there are many systems and if they’re not simplified for ease of tale-telling then they leave more chaos in their wake when they’re abused. Also, how would magic be regulated? I used the UK for the regulation of magic, because I could bring important and old families into the story. Also because it means I could play in the wonderful sandpit of alternate history in London. Imagine a history of England where Jews were brought back in the 15th century? I wrote a short story to explain a part of this, and it was a finalist in the Sidewise Awards, which means… it’s Alternate History, even though it has magic. I rather like this. The story is in Other Covenants.

I lived in London and I lived in Paris for a little, many years ago, and, historically, London is a lot more fun for the type of story I wanted to tell. Pop-up history, small churches with pits to hell… I needed to know that terrain. I know the church in question (and its history) and I know the streets in question. This is not just due to having lived there for a little, many years ago.  It’s because I used to teach students about medieval London at the Australian National University, and because I spent a whole day walking the whole of Cheapside because the maps of it showing it in the Middle Ages did not fit the modern maps. I took photos that document how and why Cheapside changed and can explain what this means to the wider City of London. I looked at the difference between Old Jewry, the newer Jewry where my family came from, and Golders’ Green. I walked all these places an took pictures, at various times.

A small US imprint published my novel as their first book. I never got to do a slide show of all the places and explain how the Somme and how London and Paris came together and how I used my historian-self to furnish the novel. Before the novel came out, I talked with a writers’ group about the layers of history in landscape and how war changed everything, using the Somme as a case study. Then COVID hit. Most novels published in the first two years of COVID are lesser-known. This doesn’t change the fact that my world-building for The Green Children Help Out was amazing fun.

What book should I introduce next week? Time-travel, magic in Canberra, non-fiction? I’m open to suggestions.

Some Thoughts on Cultural Exclusion

personby Gillian Polack
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This is a post from my blog, from 9 years ago. I’ve very mildly edited it. There are two reasons for sharing it with you.

The first is that I have an intermittent fever and that my body feels as if someone is attacking it with a sledgehammer. The illness will be gone in a couple of days, but today I’m not up to much.

The second is that sometimes it helps to see the paths our current problems have travelled. I’ve been dealing with some of the current issues all my life, and yet those who have not tell me it’s all Israel’s fault and our society has nothing to do with the discrimination it carries nor the hate embedded deeply. This is a snapshot of my Australia in 2017, when Australia was adapting some of the positions that dominate today. Most of those who saw me as painted now exclude me because I’m Jewish, for instance. Almost the whole Left (where I used to belong) tells me what I am and ushes me aside or, in some cases, do things that are much worse.  I was never given the academic support to sort everything out properly (I came close), but I have moved a lot further towards understanding. I may talk more about this when I explain my books. I’ve already been explaining what those 9 years have led to, for Jews – today you see one single aspect of how it came to be.

Next week I will try to return to talking about my own books, including the one that led to this post. First, however, I need to be less ill.

 

Right now, the results of my research force me to reassess the world around me. This reassessment shows remarkably clear indications of how perfectly nice and thoughtful people help set up a complex culture from which bigots can source hate. Now that I know a bit more about where it comes from, I need to take a pause in my research and digest it.

I’ve written a summary of key aspects of my latest findings for those who want, and that summary has tentatively been accepted for publication. Watch social media, for I will announce it when it emerges. Beyond those findings, the project might have to wait for years. This post is a bit about the project and a bit about why it’s delayed. And how I’m living the life… but not in the way anyone expected.

Quite simply, if I get the right kind of job then I can do the full academic shebang and hit the subject hard and sort it out. I know what I’m doing and how to turn it into a book. If I don’t get the right kind of job, then slow and gentle is all I can manage, with occasional reports like this one and very occasional conference papers. I’ll be able to teach from it, and each course will be exciting and amazingly useful. That’s all, though. No book. Very few articles.

For those who have seen my work so far and have said “But this is important”, I’m sorry, but I can’t do that kind of research in my current situation. Income matters. At the very least, some of my results will appear in my fiction, for my fiction continues without money. More slowly than if I had money, but it continues.

This knowledge is based on experience. Putting other peoples’ intellectual wishes first has not helped me get enough money to live on, so I now put my own needs first in my big life decisions.

There’s another reason for putting my own needs first in those big life decisions. My research has pointed to a bunch of narratives that set up society to exclude perfectly good people and to nurture bigots. I’m right now observing how it hits the disabled and the cultural and religious minority and gender minorities. I’ve now realised how much my own life in Canberra is affected by this.

It’s complicated, but there are two main outcomes.

The first is that many Canberrans exclude me by making decisions for me regarding what activities they expect from me in my life. Some of the reasons are probably excellent. I don’t know. I don’t know what those reasons are. I am to them sufficiently lower in status to not need an explanation or consultation.

The second is related. One of the most annoying aspects of being minority right now is that earned status is difficult to retain unless one is the token representative of that minority. So in Canberra (but certainly not in all other places) I often have to negotiate work as if I were new to the workforce. And I’m one of the lucky people in my lack of seniority, for who else at my level of the hierarchy has two PhDs and whose short list of publications is four pages long? (there is no long list – I dumped it when my short non-fiction hit the 500 mark, which was while ago) And I have friends, who help. And patrons. And I’ve managed to get to several conferences this year, despite living on around $20,000 annually.

Usually these two factors lead to both exclusion and silencing. I keep pointing out that other people who are excluded are silenced more effectively. I can be left off this list or that, but I still get invitations to write and I still have things to say. This is one of my privileges. (and now I’ve used loads of current jargon – such virtue!)

Taking things back to my research for a moment, I’m talking about these issues today because I found a gap in my knowing. I need to find out if that same gap is present elsewhere, especially in my interpretation of how wider culture affects story. I need to look at who is allowed in a group and who isn’t in novels and other long stories.

I noticed something interesting in The 100 today. Skin colour counts in US tales. This isn’t new. This isn’t what I noticed. What I noticed is that focussing on US definitions of racism and silencing and exclusion to assess who got killed under what circumstances made me miss something else.

In our fiction, our central characters have certain types of personalities. It’s as if they come from a range of action or emotional figurines. We take them out of the box and play with them. Those who lack those characteristics are painted figures on the back of the box. They don’t get full lives. Most people define themselves as the figurines when they place themselves in story, as people with full lives. What I think I’m seeing is how people define those who are merely figures. And I’m seeing the circumstances when I am a figure, left behind when the figurine is brought out to play but considered to be part of the backdrop. I’m not seen as excluded because of my painted role, but my role is limited to being in the backdrop of the lives of others.

Like all of us, I carry my own prejudices and see other people as active in my life (figurines) or as backdrop (painted figures). My personal need is to find out who I see as painted figures and give them the dignity of full lives if I’ve excluded them due to prejudices I bear. I also have to accept that a lot of people who were once close to me have, in the change of culture, shifted me to the painted figure category. They want me on the back of their box to illuminate their life, but they don’t want to have dinner with me. I need to accept that some of this is due to prejudice.

As ever, this is a simplification. I needed a quick and dirty overview so that I could start to think how we do what we do.

I wanted to use the circles shutting people out that are described in Joan G Robinson’s When Marnie Was There. Anna was excluded by these invisible circles and, re-reading the book today, they felt very familiar. The subjective feeling of being excluded by invisible circles, however, rests on whatever draws those circles. In my childhood, it was a primary school child whose name I mentioned the other day to my oldest friend. She laughed and remembered, with equal irony.

This is our old way of seeing it. It works when we move from circles to circles and when we see individuals as having to deal with being alone but assign them equal status as human beings. It’s well encoded and very well described. This means that it’s a part of what’s happening culturally right now. A part. Not the whole thing. For culture is changing. We need to encode the changes. That’s what I’m doing here, but it’s a rough sketch. I need something better than toy figurines and the drawing on the box.

This means it’s back to novels. We encode cultures in the nice straightforward framework of the novel. This means that I can find out a lot about what’s happening around me by looking closely at how we depict ourselves and what we write into a story without knowing. The most worrying discovery so far is the one I explained in my Helsinki paper. The Helsinki paper isn’t for publication yet. This isn’t because it’s bad research. It’s because that paper encapsulated the moment when I realised just how big the thing is that I’m doing and how large its ramifications.

I wish I had that fulltime academic job. I wish that researching this didn’t have to come at the end of the month, after everything else. I only do the amount I do because I’m efficient at it. I can’t spend large amounts of time in archives and libraries right now for I simply need to spend that time earning grocery money. That’s my lifestyle problem.

My scholarly problem right now is that, with this strange lifestyle, I’m carrying too much baggage. I can’t do the research partly because I need income, but the lower status lifestyle gets in my intellectual way. The life carries emotions with it. Every time I’m excluded I feel them come to the surface, for I need to explain them.

Those emotions are why I’m not making as much sense as I’d like tonight. I’m in the middle of big things, intellectually, and my life echoes them.

 

 

Language and Writing

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The Japanese edition of The Fall of Language in the Age of English
This is the Japanese edition. I am reading the English translation, not this version.

One of the (many) reasons to browse bookstores is that you stumble across books that you never heard of and would not have known to look for because it would never have occurred to you that you wanted to read a book about that particular thing until you stumbled across it.

Right now my morning book is one that fits that description. It’s called The Fall of Language in the Age of English, by Japanese writer Minae Mizumura (translated by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter). I’m sure I bought it at East Bay Booksellers, because they sell a lot of small press and academic books and are a very likely place to run across the books you didn’t know you wanted until you picked them up.

I’m not 100% sure I bought it there because I’ve had it awhile and just got around to reading it. (Yes, I do that all the time. Doesn’t everybody?) It is a perfect book for my daily reading practice, which requires books that are best read a few pages at a time because they give you something to chew on.

(I should note that this daily practice of reading for about 15 minutes in the morning is far from the only reading I do. It is in a way of reading akin to meditation, which is very different from diving into the world of a novel.)

This book is about writing in national languages (and what constitutes a national language) when so much of the world’s written work is written and published in English, which is a universal language in much the same way that Latin was a few centuries back. But it makes its points slowly, clearly discussing important points along the way.

The whole book is fascinating, but here’s the concept that got to me on a personal and gut level as a writer:

The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one’s bidding.

This, I think, is the essence of being a writer, the combination of having something you want to convey – be it a story, a philosophical approach, an understanding of the world – and struggling to find the right words for expressing it.

(The term “fine literature” makes me, as a science fiction writer, uneasy, since it is often used to exclude many pieces of writing I consider very fine indeed, but I define it more broadly as work that aspires to more than basic communication.)

This is in no way the same as learning how to apply the rules of grammar, though understanding them is one of the underpinnings of writing. It does, however, require a deep and abiding familiarity with the written language you use.

You certainly cannot write effectively in a language unless you have read in it deeply and thoroughly. Continue reading “Language and Writing”…

Reprint: How Writing Builds Resilience

personby Deborah J. Ross
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As a writer, I find this to be doubly true for fiction. Except for the part about writing by hand. I think it’s fine to compose stories, especially novels, on a keyboard.

Writing builds resilience by changing your brain, helping you face everyday challenges

Writing is a way of thinking and doing.
AscentXmedia/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Emily Ronay Johnston, University of California, Merced

Ordinary and universal, the act of writing changes the brain. From dashing off a heated text message to composing an op-ed, writing allows you to, at once, name your pain and create distance from it. Writing can shift your mental state from overwhelm and despair to grounded clarity — a shift that reflects resilience.

Psychology, the media and the wellness industry shape public perceptions of resilience: Social scientists study it, journalists celebrate it, and wellness brands sell it.

They all tell a similar story: Resilience is an individual quality that people can strengthen with effort. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as an ongoing process of personal growth through life’s challenges. News headlines routinely praise individuals who refuse to give up or find silver linings in times of hardship. The wellness industry promotes relentless self-improvement as the path to resilience.

In my work as a professor of writing studies, I research how people use writing to navigate trauma and practice resilience. I have witnessed thousands of students turn to the written word to work through emotions and find a sense of belonging. Their writing habits suggest that writing fosters resilience. Insights from psychology and neuroscience can help explain how.

Writing rewires the brain

In the 1980s, psychologist James Pennebaker developed a therapeutic technique called expressive writing to help patients process trauma and psychological challenges. With this technique, continuously journaling about something painful helps create mental distance from the experience and eases its cognitive load.

In other words, externalizing emotional distress through writing fosters safety. Expressive writing turns pain into a metaphorical book on a shelf, ready to be reopened with intention. It signals the brain, “You don’t need to carry this anymore.”

Person sitting at a table writing in a notebook
Sometimes you can write your way through difficult emotions.
Grace Cary/Moment via Getty Images

Translating emotions and thoughts into words on paper is a complex mental task. It involves retrieving memories and planning what to do with them, engaging brain areas associated with memory and decision-making. It also involves putting those memories into language, activating the brain’s visual and motor systems.

Writing things down supports memory consolidation — the brain’s conversion of short-term memories into long-term ones. The process of integration makes it possible for people to reframe painful experiences and manage their emotions. In essence, writing can help free the mind to be in the here and now.

Taking action through writing

The state of presence that writing can elicit is not just an abstract feeling; it reflects complex activity in the nervous system.

Brain imaging studies show that putting feelings into words helps regulate emotions. Labeling emotions — whether through expletives and emojis or carefully chosen words — has multiple benefits. It calms the amygdala, a cluster of neurons that detects threat and triggers the fear response: fight, flight, freeze or fawn. It also engages the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that supports goal-setting and problem-solving.

In other words, the simple act of naming your emotions can help you shift from reaction to response. Instead of identifying with your feelings and mistaking them for facts, writing can help you simply become aware of what’s arising and prepare for deliberate action.

Even mundane writing tasks like making a to-do list stimulate parts of the brain involved in reasoning and decision-making, helping you regain focus.

Making meaning through writing

Choosing to write is also choosing to make meaning. Studies suggest that having a sense of agency is both a prerequisite for, and an outcome of, writing.

Researchers have long documented how writing is a cognitive activity — one that people use to communicate, yes, but also to understand the human experience. As many in the field of writing studies recognize, writing is a form of thinking — a practice that people never stop learning. With that, writing has the potential to continually reshape the mind. Writing not only expresses but actively creates identity.

Writing also regulates your psychological state. And the words you write are themselves proof of regulation — the evidence of resilience.

Popular coverage of human resilience often presents it as extraordinary endurance. News coverage of natural disasters implies that the more severe the trauma, the greater the personal growth. Pop psychology often equates resilience with unwavering optimism. Such representations can obscure ordinary forms of adaptation. Strategies people already use to cope with everyday life — from rage-texting to drafting a resignation letter — signify transformation.

Building resilience through writing

These research-backed tips can help you develop a writing practice conducive to resilience:

1. Write by hand whenever possible. In contrast to typing or tapping on a device, handwriting requires greater cognitive coordination. It slows your thinking, allowing you to process information, form connections and make meaning.

2. Write daily. Start small and make it regular. Even jotting brief notes about your day — what happened, what you’re feeling, what you’re planning or intending — can help you get thoughts out of your head and ease rumination.

3. Write before reacting. When strong feelings surge, write them down first. Keep a notebook within reach and make it a habit to write it before you say it. Doing so can support reflective thinking, helping you act with purpose and clarity.

4. Write a letter you never send. Don’t just write down your feelings — address them to the person or situation that’s troubling you. Even writing a letter to yourself can provide a safe space for release without the pressure of someone else’s reaction.

5. Treat writing as a process. Any time you draft something and ask for feedback on it, you practice stepping back to consider alternative perspectives. Applying that feedback through revision can strengthen self-awareness and build confidence.

Resilience may be as ordinary as the journal entries people scribble, the emails they exchange, the task lists they create — even the essays students pound out for professors.

The act of writing is adaptation in progress.The Conversation

Emily Ronay Johnston, Assistant Teaching Professor of Global Arts, Media and Writing Studies, University of California, Merced

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “Reprint: How Writing Builds Resilience”…