Month: November 2022

On NaNoWriMo

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about NaNoWriMo. If you’re not familiar, NaNoWriMo is an affectionate nickname for National Novel Writing Month, a sort of annual creative writing event where participants attempt to write a 50,000 word manuscript between the beginning and end of November. A lot of libraries will plan events around NaNoWriMo, like reserving space for anyone who wants to gather and work on their writing together. It’s fun and challenging and if you’re successful, you get a cute little downloadable certificate at the end.

I used to participate in NaNoWriMo every year. I don’t quite remember when or why I dropped off, but if memory serves, I probably did it somewhere between 5 and 7 times and even though some years it was definitely a big struggle, I managed to meet the set goal each time. I actually still have some of the certificates I got for “winning” hanging up in my office (if you ever talk to me on Zoom, you can see them in the background if you squint).

I thought about taking it up again this year but even though I always enjoyed it when I did in the past, I decided against it partly because of the way my relationship to writing and productivity has changed since my original run with it.

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Determining a path forward in a time of change

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Image by Joe from Pixabay

I mentioned not too long ago that part of the reason I haven’t been publishing quite as much as I normally do in the past few months is because right now my institution generally and my library specifically are going through a time of change. It can be hard to know what to say about change while you’re still in the middle of it, especially when the exact plan for what change might look like keeps, well, changing.

One change that seems pretty certain at this point is a particularly tough one for me and the folks in my department. Basically, the credit-bearing information literacy courses that we teach are being discontinued. As of fall 2023, they will no longer be offered.(1)

Obviously, this is a huge bummer. Teaching those courses, which include a general information literacy course plus a few sections that are focused on specific subject areas, has been a significant part of our department’s identity within the library since long before I started working here as a grad student way back in 2009. For many of us in the department, the courses also represent an important part of our professional and scholarly activities. The prospect of losing them has left us all looking at each other, wondering what we do now.

As a first-time manager, dealing with this question on a department level has been the biggest challenge of my first six  or so months on the job and I’m sure it will continue to be so for a long time to come.  The good news is that though losing the courses has left a pretty big vacuum in our department’s work, we are still a department (at least so far) and it’s been left largely to us to decide our own path forward. To that end, we have a tentative plan in place but with so much constantly changing around us and (especially) above us, it’s hard to make progress. I feel a bit frozen to the spot.

So all of that is still a work in progress that I can’t necessarily speak to at the moment, at least not with any real confidence. But what I can speak to—or at least try—is my thoughts on what my own path forward might look like.

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