A Stitch Open My Eyes spring break interlude for the groceries and coffee crew about process, progress, and research. If you’re a student and need access, send me a message.
I spend a lot of time reading, writing, and thinking about what I’ve read and written. Not as much time as I would like. The Sky Babies might need something last minute (or something that isn’t last minute that I just happened to forget about until the day before school). A student needs a meeting or an intervention. Someone in one of the labs has an urgent issue (last week it was travel back and forth from different places, grown perilous with the introduction of ICE into airports). I think every writer/professor/teacher/scholar/reader says they don’t do enough and really we are doing the best we can. I try to be generous and give myself grace. I beat myself up every single time—just dramatic and unnecessary.
Life that I can’t control already disrupts my research time. So nothing frustrates me more than when I have to spend hours at a time looking through my research folders for a note I need or want.
I’m noticing it happen more often as I move out of the realm of sources that I recognize readily and into new work.
My next book project—on Black women, history, slavery, and family—is finally coming full circle. The research for it took me back to Louisiana, of course, where the eighteenth-century documents feel like friends and old foes—familiar, congenial, saucy. Those are archives I know. They are old lovers.
But this new book also took me to other Souths beyond Louisiana, where the archives are less familiar and the enslaved are closer to my own kin.