all hail the Queen

Congratulations, Dr. Mary Queen!

The Queen successfully defended her dissertation yesterday. Thanks, Jen, for calling to let me know that it was all good.

Haven't been writing lately and I don't really have any good reason except that I hate the month of April.

Here's a meaningful thing I figured out by writing the autobiographical essay for my graduate Authorship course: everything I do, all of my scholarly interests converge on the concept of belief. Authorship: what makes some writers authors and others not? Autobiography: why we write: to produce belief for both ourselves and our readers. Plagiarism: how is disbelief produced? Trauma: the dialectic between denial denial denial and the need to be believed. Not just to be heard, but to be believed. Rhetoric of fear: at its simplest, the study of the production of belief.

I've always believed that each of us does the scholarly work we do for very personal reasons, that scholarship is in this way intensely autobiographical. The root of all of this: never having been believed as a child. And still: not quite believing that I'm a grown-up. Even that term, "grown-up" is a childish word. Adult.

Sometimes.