New Projects

How do you know if you have a new project?

Contrary to popular belief, projects do not bang on your consciousness like Marley’s ghost. Sometimes they creep up like a fog.

An anecdote: my forthcoming poetry collection started as one poem. At first, I knew I wanted to study poetry as a poet, so I applied for workshops so I could learn. In my workshop at Colgate, I had lunch with Eduardo Corral (the workshop leader) and he mused about what he understood to be a central conflict in my writing process, if not the writing itself. He saw me struggling to bifurcate my academic self from my poetic self, operating under the (wrong-headed) notion that a witty, clever, and/or analytical poet was not a poet for real for real. You have to bring all of your selves in the room with you. Only then will you write the poems you need. He went on to point out that wit does not exist as separate from feeling. In fact, it is deeply connected to it. After that, I wrote the poem “June, 2018” and revised a poem about The Cosby Show. Both of these are in the forthcoming collection, What Had Happened Was.

For people who think of themselves as intuitive, you might feel a new project the way you see a dim light in the distance. It can hover there – usually feeling out of reach, but present. The question you’re asking or the idea that keeps baking gains more complexity in proportion to your interest in it. You keep mulling. You keep reaching. The dim light grows brighter.

Another anecdote: my second edited collection, Arab American Aesthetics, began its life as a failed article. No one wanted an article that assumed Arab Americans had an aesthetic of their own. In print – in specific kinds of academic journals who reached out to the same pool of anonymous readers – some folks were still arguing about whether Arab American Studies was a field and, if it was, what were its contours? One friend told me that my interest might require some more interlocutors: people who were as deep in the weeds as I was.

Technically, they suggested a panel at an academic conference. But, I heard “edited collection” because of its permanence. There are two lessons here: 1) certain oral/aural fora like academic conferences, symposia, and the like lend themselves easily to specific kinds of written projects; 2) collaboration is an apt way to create a bibliography when folks need one. (For those of you wondering about the timing of Arab American Aesthetics vis-à-vis my edited special issue on Blackness and Disability in African American Review, the two were thought of at the same time but published a year apart.)

For folks less inclined toward intuitive thinking (temporarily or as a matter of course), I’d suggest thinking of a new project as the manifestation of the Baader Meinhof effect. Otherwise known as the frequency illusion, the Baader Meinhof effect happens when you start to see something everywhere. For example, my friend Steve got a burnt orange-colored car, the likes of which I had never seen. Then, once I saw it, I saw burnt orange cars everywhere. Certainly, they had existed before, but I wasn’t paying attention. A new project emerges similarly: once you have a question in your mind, you start seeing its resonances in multiple arenas. If the answers and the questions are interesting to you, then you may have a new project. If they are not, they can be chalked up to someone else’s project.

For my part, new projects occur to me while I am trying to follow my curiosity. I got curious about what it might mean to think of an Arab American literary tradition, rather than a collocation of individuals sharing countries of origin and common cultural mores who also write. It started as an article, then when that article was rejected, it became an edited collection. In this case, I started small: an article or a conference paper tests the waters with regard to an idea. If the questions you get allow you to envision more iterations of the question or the answers, you have something larger.

At the heart of this is curiosity. What are you exploring?

Between you and me, I am interested in expanding Inquiry Editing with a product that might help folks help themselves. Not everyone has access to discretionary funding and not everyone is interested in laying their writing bare for someone else. I get it. But, I am not sure what product you all might need most. Feel free to let me know what you might be interested in!