The summer’s moving on. I’m back from Japan, and this month I’ve been trying to put my academic house in order by finishing revisions to two scholarly papers. My hope is to keep exercising these intellectual muscles as I move into a new disciplinary area, with the dream that work on counselling, the study of narrative, and other forms of writing will somehow begin to coalesce into something new, in a form that I’ve yet to imagine. We’ll see. In the meantime, this scholarly work at least keeps me honest – it forces me to ask difficult questions about what I read, and think deeply.

In the first seven months of the year, I realise, I’ve still carried out many of the intellectual activities I did while I was a faculty member, albeit at a slower pace and as a peripheral, rather than central, part of my life. I’ve researched and written academic papers for publication, digesting and responding to readers’ reports. I’ve written a reader’s report myself. I’ve written a book review, delivered an academic paper for a scholarly audience, and participated in a manuscript workshop. And because of the peripheral nature of this work, I’ve been able to detach myself and look critically at it in a way that I wasn’t able to do when I was working full-time. This estrangement from something that became very familiar for me over the twenty-five years I was a university faculty member has also got me thinking about how difficult it was to enter this world as a graduate student and then as a junior faculty member: I’m thinking back to my first conference paper, and my first published article.

I remember my first conference paper quite well. It was in 1986, at the Popular Culture Association in Atlanta, Georgia – online research tells me it was in April. I received a small supporting grant from the University of Florida, where I was completing my M.A., and flew up the short distance from Gainesville in a tiny turboprop plane. I think I applied for the conference because it was nearby, and I didn’t stay at the conference hotel: I may possibly even have returned on the same day to save money. I presented a paper from a Southern women’s writing class taught by Anne Jones, my favorite graduate class at UF. The experience was, I remember, odd. We were in a big hotel in Atlanta with one of those with a massive atrium that extended up many floors, something like the Regent or Mandarin Oriental in Singapore, but with one side covered in glass so that there was a view of the city. Inside it was cool: we wore formal office wear, or in my case something that approximated to it. Outside in the heat workers, mostly black, hung from harnesses to clean the windows. I was on a panel with two other presenters whose topics were unrelated to mine. The audience as very small – maybe ten to fifteen. I was nervous, but I managed to read the paper fairly smoothly. There were a few questions, or rather statements, from the audience. I do remember one rather kind comment from an older academic, who suggested that I read the work of Michel Foucault and apply it to the novel I was talking about. And that was it. Was I missing something? A couple of months later, as president of my union chapter, I gave a speech on divestment from South Africa to an audience of a thousand delegates at the NEA Annual Meeting in Louisville, Kentucky. The paper I gave in Atlanta was also about labour organisation, about novels depicting the mill trikes in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929. That was art: the Louisville speech was life, and I was quite sure that I would not be going back to graduate study. I was wrong, of course. Three years later I began my doctorate at UBC, in Canada.

The first time I published an academic journal article was in September 1992, just as I left for Taiwan to learn Mandarin and take a one-year break in my graduate studies. I published an article on a Somerset Maugham short story in a now-defunct journal called Studies in Short Fiction. I don’t remember much about the acceptance process, although I do remember that I chose the journal because its articles, like its subject matter, were short – I felt it would be easy to structure a 3000-word essay that a 6000-word essay. And I remember being bemused by the offprints that were sent to me when the article was published – what should I do with them? I put them away in a drawer. In 1994, they must have still been very precious to me, because I brought them with me to Singapore. I discovered them while cleaning my office out a quarter of a century later, their staples now rusted, the paper turned from white through yellow to murky brown. And this time I did, finally, throw them away.

Looking back, what strikes me is how difficult these genres were to learn, or at least to come to feel at ease with. I never felt fully comfortable with conference papers, although I could perform them quite well, and came to realise that the most valuable elements of conferences often came either in other formats, or the interactions that happened outside of formal conference events. The structure of academic papers is now second nature to me, and in formal terms I can write them with some flair. The problems I now have with them are twofold. The first is content, with literary studies modes of analysis that I am now questioning. As I draw back, I’m not sure whether I have a wider view with greater insight, or whether everything just gets blurred. In a smaller way, I’m a bit like the nuclear physicist grandfather of whom Veronique Greenwood writes, “caught in a purgatory of being unable to put [an] idea into the world and being unable to leave it alone.” The second challenge is how to break the form of the academic essay, to write in a more self-reflexive mode, or for a wider audience while still maintaining scholarly depth. And above all, looking from outside back in, you realise the arbitrariness of formal conventions.

I have a space now in which — bar requests that will inevitably come and a conference in December in Singapore — I will be turning away from literary studies to counselling. Despite my peer counselling volunteer work, I’ve found it difficult to cross over – I guess habits of analysis and thinking are engrained enough to persist, and scholarly work in literary studies has become a default mode. Come September, I’m looking forward to being pulled out of this world I still inabit.