Today I'm visiting the article publication workshop run by the English department at UMich to talk about my experience with journals and peer review. I thought I'd take the opportunity to type up my thoughts here in case they're helpful for anyone else. (Thread)

I think one of the areas where I got the most divergent advice in graduate school was publishing. Don't publish anything immature, but don't wait too long to start trying. Don't publish too much from your dissertation, but you may need 2+ peer-reviewed articles for the market.

I felt caught between conventional wisdom (as one scholar put it, publishing one well-placed article from your diss to prepare the audience for your book) and the seeming realities of hiring (where many candidates for entry-level jobs already have book contracts and 3+ articles).

Getting so much advice was confusing, but also made me feel like there must be a "right" or "better" way to publish. I wanted to have the right number of pieces in the right places at the right times.

My perfectionism meant that even some early successes (like a piece in an edited collection) feel qualified. And it made my first big set-back (rejection of an invited piece for a special issue, complete with an incredibly nasty review) agonizing and existentially upsetting.

After this rejection, I got quite disoriented. I wrote and rewrote the same piece, asked eight different people to read it, and each time it felt less helpful. Because I had changed my goal to "get accepted" rather than "communicate what I think is true and important."

That piece did eventually find a home (though not necessarily the best of all possible homes at the best of all possible times), and I hope it's helped me get a little bit more distance from the Nasty Review. But truly I will probably lose and refind my bearings many times more.

I have practical advice I could give (ask a trusted friend/mentor to sort through reviewer reports with you; special issues move faster; sign up for Muse alerts from journals), but my bigger advice is less concrete. Develop a practice for relocating your reasons for writing.

When you find you've shifted your objective to things out of your control (get published, win an award, get a job), take up practices that recenter what matters most to you: what problems do you want to solve, what questions bother you, what communities do you want to support?

It's a bit mystical, but it's what has allowed me to sort through all the good, practical, contradictory advice. None of us (even those with tenure lines) know how long we get to do this. So what do we want most to say while we're here?

If there's anything freeing for me about the state of the market, it is this: you can do everything "right" and still end up without the permanent job you wanted. So I try every day, in little ways, to let go of "the best way" and hang onto "what is true."