Writing for The Conversation

A Reflection

This is a short reflection on a piece I recently published for The Conversation called “Like today’s selfie-takers, Walt Whitman used photography to curate his image—but ended up more lost than found.”

Here is a link to the article: https://theconversation.com/like-todays-selfie-takers-walt-whitman-used-photography-to-curate-his-image-but-ended-up-more-lost-than-found-256195

On the heels of being rejected for an opportunity I thought I was more than qualified for (no need to specify what that was), I decided to approach Chris Schaberg with an idea I had been chewing over for quite some time. For much of the Spring Semester, Chris had been encouraging me to write something for The Conversation, but the previous two proposals I sent out didn’t stick. ‘Onwards,’ Chris instructed me. Perhaps it’s easy to say in hindsight that such simple advice serves one well, but it’s true nonetheless. ‘Onwards’ is nearly always how one should negotiate the disappointments and awkwardness of sending one’s work out for publication.

The first article I had in mind was an attempt to interrogate the notion that hip-hop and poetry were necessarily equivalent art forms. Looking back, although I continue to believe that such an article ought to be written, it’s more of an opinion piece than a short research article, and thus not the sort of thing The Conversation seeks out.

With this in mind, for my next proposal, I tried to be more objective, but instead ended up with something too vague. Having chosen the new 2024 edition of Emily Dickinson’s letters for the poetry and poetics reading group I convene here at WashU, I thought a short piece exploring the significance of reading poets’ letters may work. Yet, while such an exploration isn’t unimportant, it would almost certainly take more than a thousand or so words to develop. Moreover, in my endeavor to be less opinionated, I wound up sacrificing my voice, content with merely providing a platform for exploration rather than offering something concrete of my own.

So, these proposals didn’t pan out. Fine. I decided to return to my dissertation with renewed vigor, mainly because…well…it’s never a bad idea to work hard on one’s chief graduate-school project, but also because Chris had asked me to extract something from my research that I could potentially turn into a public-facing article. My work concerns lyric poetry in Renaissance Italy and nineteenth-century America, so it wasn’t immediately clear to me how I could relate my dissertation topic to contemporary culture in a meaningful way. Petrarch and Walt Whitman, the ins and outs of genre theory and lyric personae, corpuses and the question of self-representation, desire and the lyric present—all too niche, too academic, too wearyingly in the dust and mold of old books and fading ideas.

But ‘onwards.’ Although any writer would tell you that relying on moments of abrupt inspiration is not a sustainable practice, it is simply true that the crux of the article I ended up publishing for The Conversation came to me on a run through Forest Park. Activities meant to clear your head often fill your brain with clearer, more creative ideas. For my research, I was struggling to come up with a word to describe Whitman’s self-oriented poetry. Autobiography wouldn’t work, since the poet refuses to give us a detailed chronicle of his life. So what’s a word that describes a self-centered poetic style that isn’t, however, autobiographical? Suffice to say, ‘selfie’ came to mind.

For a while, ‘selfie’ hung around as a term I would simply employ in my dissertation, but it soon became obvious to me that a word as ubiquitous as ‘selfie’ would require more research on my part. What is the psychology behind taking selfies? Who took the first selfie? Can you be a selfie-taker without necessarily angling the camera at yourself? How can we generalize what it means to be a producer of selfies?

It was with these thoughts in mind that I stumbled into Chris’s office, disappointed about a recent rejection but determined to go ‘onwards’ with another proposal for The Conversation. ‘If you have a specific portrait of Whitman in mind, this would be a great piece for the Picture in 500 words section,’ Chris explained to me. That seemed encouraging—I promptly thought of the famous portrait of a seated Whitman with a butterfly landing on his outreached finger.

Straightaway, I composed the proposal and Chris sent it out on my behalf. Within a few days, Nick Lehr, the Arts + Culture editor at The Conversation, reached out to Chris saying that he thought my idea ‘could work, particularly if we time it for Walt Whitman’s birthday (May 31).’ I hadn’t in mind that Walt’s birthday was around the corner, but yes, that would be a great touch.

Nick and I then scheduled a time to discuss my idea over the phone. In short, our conversation, which hinged on the ‘so what’ of it all, turned into a conversation for The Conversation. That conversation continued through several revisions, which mostly involved cutting out big words and needless details, reordering the flow of the piece, and getting to the point with accessibility and succinctness. Working with Nick taught me so much about the challenges and the joys of engaging with the public as an academic.