I spent most of my first year or so working at St. John’s here once or twice a week, in the New York Public Library reading room. Great spot to work on a dissertation. You don’t have to buy anything, they have every book ever printed (not really exaggerating here), and it’s just not-quiet enough to concentrate. Plus, there aren’t many distractions such as deep cleaning the kitchen or reorganizing your towels to help you not work.

I haven’t worked in here in a while as my flow was interrupted in going regularly by the modernization/abatement and work they had to do in here the last few years. I just now started going back again as it’s a great summer office. Most of the time I just go here to write a lot, and my output is quite good per hour here. I haven’t used it for research too much as our university library has come a long way in digital resources, so often I don’t even need to walk down to campus to get something.

I have a few projects now that the 2 things are done for summer part 1. Now I have a big R&R to do by the end of July that is pretty massive. I’m also working on trying to figure out why public speaking, as a core requirement, wasn’t just folded into the whole writing center movement. It makes such little sense that all of that wouldn’t be together, or at least thought about, when the big push was happening. It’s rather obvious that NCA scholars and other speech comm types would happily toss public speaking to anyone else without a second thought – they are not interested in the pedagogy of it as a general rule. Surely it’s not a hard argument to say that public speaking is a composition course? There has to be some history to contextualize this so I’m chasing that down.

Also working on a formal piece about declamation, what I’m always obsessed with. And also doing some reading on debate pedagogy, in particular debate teaching juuuuust prior to world war two. Gotta finish my paper about German debaters in the 1930s touring the US and I want to do a deeper piece on Elton Abernathy, a somewhat overlooked character involved in speech and debate pedagogy. I think he’s only considered overlooked unless you are lurking around San Marcos, TX.

There’s also video to shoot for my online courses, and some prep to do on the new Blackboard which will be fun as there are some new features to play with.

So now that summer is opening up for me I hope to spend some more time writing in the summer spot.