Just what the heck is a bad female academic?  It’s what Dr. Lee Skallerup (sometimes) calls herself.  She’s also a mother with a PhD in Comparative Literature who writes about peer driven learning, teaching composition, and other issues related to higher education.  I’d be more apt to call her “Super Woman.”  Lee also co-founded a regular Wednesday night TweetChat where writing teachers come together via the hashtag #FYCCHAT.  It’s on Wednesday nights at nine o’clock if you’d ever like to check it out.   Lee recently joined me for a podcast discussion and also took the time to answer some of my questions about her teaching and writing process.  You can also access the podcast on iTunes by searching for “digital book club.”  My questions for Lee are given in italics and her answers follow.

Can you take me through the highlights of the writing of your
“Peer Driven Learning: Success!” post?  To what degree did you take
notes throughout the semester?  What’s different about writing a
reflection as opposed to the other sorts of posts you write?

I knew that as soon I started blogging about my peer-driven learning
experience (see an archive of the posts here:
http://collegereadywriting.blogspot.com/p/peer-driven-learning.html)
that I would have to/want to write a post that looked back on the
entire process at the end of the semester. One of the things about
keeping a running blog/commentary during the semester, it showed me how
much the term ebbed and flowed and how things changed and evolved as
we worked through the uncertain process. I hoped that the title of the
post would be “Success!” but there were points in the semester where I
wasn’t sure. I don’t take written notes during the semester, instead
relying on mental notes and distinct memories both good and bad. I
have to say that the class did leave some pretty distinct impressions
on me, so it was easy to call on those impressions while writing.
Reflections, for me, are much easier to write (in fact, one could
argue that almost all my posts are reflections) because I’m free to
record my thoughts and impressions as they come to me, rather than
have a thesis, evidence, etc, etc, etc. I think that blogging lends
itself quite well to reflection-type writing.

Sometimes I have my posts planned out in advance, sometimes I have an
incomplete idea that I write down and I think about it until the idea
comes together for a post. Other times, I’ll read something or
something will happen that makes me want to write about it
immediately. But possibly the biggest exception to that was my series
of Bad Female Academic posts
(http://collegereadywriting.blogspot.com/p/bad-female-academic.html)
that I wrote over the summer. I had been reading and thinking about
the intersection of class, gender, and professional expectations from
higher education and I suddenly got this idea of exploring all the
ways I (and, from the reaction I got from the posts, many, many
others) don’t seem to fit into the higher education mold. I try not
to write out of a place of anger (but I will write from a place of
frustration) and these posts were my way of working through that
anger, that feeling of not fitting in. They were the most fun,
frustrating, liberating, and ultimately rewarding posts that I wrote
and they really helped me to try new things and write about tough
issues on my blog. It also really solidified a virtual community for
me. I’m still getting emails from academics and PhDs for whom the
posts resonate. It’s really been a great thing and I’m glad that I took
the chance to write them,

How I write is a little odd. It’s left over from the bad, bad habits I
had a student, which was to write everything at the last minute, which
means I’m really good at “word vomit,” I write fast and I write a lot.
But, I do spend an awful lot of time preparing to write and thinking
about what I am going to write. I read, a lot. This is so important
for students to remember; often they have trouble writing because they
have nothing to say. Reading a lot helps with that. Then, I think. I
tweet out ideas, see what the response is. When I was an undergrad and
a graduate student, I was a terrible insomniac, so I would lie awake
at night basically writing my essays. Now, I start to write once I
have an idea of where I want to go in the post and I just let the
writing take me where it wants to go. More often than not, I have an
epiphany part-way through the post and it’s a fantastic revelation
(for me, in any case). This will often happen when I’m writing papers
now, too. I am, however, absolutely horrible at proofreading my own
work. It’s one skill that I try really hard to teach my students
because it’s so valuable and it’s also really difficult.

I think of myself as an efficient writer; I write fast and I write
well enough. If you need something quickly, I’m perfect. My writing
has gotten better, especially in terms of me being able to find (or,
perhaps more accurately, rediscover) my own voice, and that just came
through practice. I love writing and I’ve always written, from the
moment I knew how. I was very stubborn and very attached to my writing
and that’s something that I’ve slowly improved on. I’ve also gotten a
lot better at adapting my writing to different audiences and purposes,
and this is another lesson I try to get my students to understand.
But, it just comes with a lot of practice and some good feedback from
people. But also developing a critical eye. It’s something I’m still
working on. I let/force my husband to read my work and give me some
good feedback.

English, at least in high school, was my worst subject. But I wrote
and read all the time. I read just about anything I could get my hands
on and I wrote stories, poems, essays, and kept a journal (not to
mention pages and pages of notes to my group of best friends, as this
was pre-texting). I also wrote for the school newspaper and wrote
press releases for my swim team for the local papers. I initially
wanted to be a journalist, but I can still clearly remember in a
literature class where the light finally went on that maybe I could
do/write about literature. I compared “The Rhyme of the Ancient
Mariner” and “Frankenstein.” Something clicked, and at that moment, I
knew that when I wrote essays, I had to include some sort of “new”
insight that I had come up with, and that I could, in fact, do that. I
trained as a technical writer and journalist, which made me learn how
to be brief and concise. Then, I went into grad school, which taught
me how not to be. I’ve always struggled with the “academic” voice.
When I started blogging about higher education, it was like a perfect
merging of all of my training as a writer. I’ll admit here that I also
still try my hand at writing fiction, but it isn’t very good.

Lee Writes at Inside Higher Ed

Tell me about the audience for your blog.  What effect do you think it’s had on your writing?  Do you see your writing as having evolved since the first posts?

It’s really funny that you ask that. I was reading a blog a while back
(http://www.selloutyoursoul.com/2011/10/28/how-to-create-a-blog-that-people-actually-read/)
and point number 7 was “To be the voice of a group” and the author
pointed to my blog as an excellent example of that particular piece of
advice. I think I speak for those of us who are off the tenure-track,
trying to navigate our way in (and out) of higher education despite
our tenuous positions. The audience tends to be other people in higher
education, although (at least at my old blog) I had some posts that
helped students in their writing. I also write for other people who
are trying to teach writing. My writing has definitely evolved as I am
less afraid of what topics to write about, as well as gaining
confidence in my voice. I’ve been working on that as my blog moved to
Inside Higher Ed, meaning that my audience was, in theory, much larger
than it was before at my old blog. But, I’ve figured out that I’m just
better off being myself, although I’ve also decided that I am going to
use the bigger platform to promote people, causes, and issues that I
think are important.

Just keep at it. It might take a while to find your voice, and it
certainly takes a while to find an audience, but it’s worth the
trouble. But I would tell bloggers to write about what you are
passionate about and what you either already know or are really,
really passionate about learning more about. I tried blogging about
kids’ TV shows and about swimming, but both of them faded away, as I
wasn’t completely interested in the topics (I thought they’d be catchy
and have a niche audience). It was only until I started to write about
higher education that blogging made sense for me and got “easy.” I
used to keep track of ideas for my blogs as drafts to be written
later. I also just use good, old-fashioned pen and paper beside my
computer.

What do you read?  I mean blogs or otherwise.

What don’t I read? I read newspapers (online), local news, blogs on
higher education, on teaching, on writing, on politics, on
entertainment, on pop culture, on just about anything. I also ready
novels (or, I try to read novels) in both French and English,
particularly science fiction and speculative fiction. I love
dystopias.

At night, after the kids go to bed, on my laptop, with the TV on.
Sometimes, I’ll write them in the afternoon but mostly I use that
quiet time to write and grade for my “day job.” My email is open, my
phone is on, and so is the TV. But once I get into writing a post,
none of that matters. I’m in the moment, writing.