Month: May 2019

Even Shakespeare did research (probably)

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Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

So there was an article in The Atlantic this month by Elizabeth Winkler about whether the works attributed to William Shakespeare might have actually been written by a woman named Emilia Bassano. It is fascinating. Highly recommended.

Like, I kind of knew that there were some disagreements out there about who might have actually authored Shakespeare’s plays. But I had no idea how many gaps and inconsistencies there were in the historical record that scholars have trouble explaining when they’re defending Shakespeare as the author. The information in this article makes the case in his favor seem surprisingly weak.

But why am I writing about this here? Well, a core piece of the argument against Shakespeare and in Bassano’s favor is related to the amount of research that would have gone into creating these plays and other works.

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10 Books Project: Thoughts on Bird by Bird

ahosier3 Comments

Image by Gerhard Bögner from Pixabay

In the interest of full disclosure, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott has always held a special place on my bookshelf. The copy I own is one I bought for a creative writing class way back when I was an undergrad in a creative writing program. And while there are a couple of books on the list I had read before starting this project, this was the only one I’d read more than once.

Usually when I read this book, it’s because my writing isn’t going as well as I want it to and I need something to make me feel better. This time, I was reading it for much different reasons and I was surprised by what I learned.

Here are some thoughts I had on Bird by Bird.

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Questions from ACRL: Student proficiency versus student confidence

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Image by TeroVesalainen from Pixabay

Last month, I did a webcast for the ACRL virtual conference called “Research is Not a Basic Skill.” It was a great experience (and a great conference!). There were some really interesting questions during the Q&A part of the presentation and I wanted to take some space here to answer some of them a little more fully now that I’ve had some more time to think about them.

So this is the first in what will probably be a series of entries addressing some of the questions I got, starting with one about student proficiency versus student confidence.

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Librarians are failed writers

ahosier2 Comments

Image by vicki4net from Pixabay

I’m not sure at what point in your college career you’re supposed to start seriously thinking about what you want to do for a living after you graduate. I suspect if I asked my students now, they would tell me that this is something they were expected to figure out in high school. That they’ve entered college with an eye toward earning whatever degree is most marketable in whatever field is currently experiencing a lot of growth.

For me, there was never any question about what I wanted to study. I’d known I wanted to be an English major since approximately the sixth grade. But it took until my junior year of college for me to realize that I needed to figure out what, exactly, I wanted to do with that degree once I graduated. So I left it kinda late.

Knowing this, I went to a writing professor of mine for advice. I told him I had looked at a number of possible career paths, including librarianship.

“Don’t become a librarian,” he said. “Librarians are losers. They’re all just failed writers.”

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