Earlier this week I got great news: I’ve been accepted into the doctoral programme at the University of Turku. I’m incredibly happy I’m getting to do a PhD, as continuing in academia has been my goal ever since I got my MA two years ago. Now it’s going to happen for real: I get to work on Middle English, concentrating on contemporaneous evidence in the form of manuscripts. A fizz of academic creativity is building up in me as I think about all the interesting stuff I’m going to study and do!<\/p>\n
I hope that concentrating on academia will also help me with my creative writing. Quite a lot of my poems\/stories are inspired by the stuff I come across in my research: history just has so much weird and wonderful detail begging to be elaborated on or twisted into fantasy worlds. And of course, compared to a 9-to-5 job, the self-made schedules of academia will leave a lot more leeway for integrating creative writing with the rest of my life. Yay!<\/p>\n
On the other hand, it’s going to be busy. Things always are (with me, at least). So, I’m going to have to teach myself new ways of self-discipline and how to balance academic work with my creative writing. Both are important to me, but I don’t want to become overwhelmed. <\/p>\n
Brandi Schillace<\/a> wrote a really inspiring post<\/a> related to this topic over at Magical Words<\/em>. I read this post back in April when it was published, but it’s even more useful now that I know I’ll actually be doing this PhD thing. Brandi has some sound advice for overachievers regardless of whether you’re working in academia or not – a really good read. Being “good enough” is so hard for people like me who tend towards perfectionism, but it’s essential to learn (and re-learn). <\/p>\n This is something I especially want to keep in mind (from the blog post):<\/p>\n Balancing academic, work, and writing life isn\u2019t about roguish daring and a willingness to burn the candle at both ends. It requires re-seeing, a new vision of what balance means. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n Starting this autumn, I’ll have to find out what that balance is for me. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Earlier this week I got great news: I’ve been accepted into the doctoral programme at the University of Turku. I’m incredibly happy I’m getting to do a PhD, as continuing in academia has been my goal ever since I got my MA two years ago. Now it’s going to happen for real: I get to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,30,10,65],"tags":[40,12],"class_list":["post-464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discussion","category-linkage","category-personal-babble","category-scholarly-meets-writerly","tag-magical-words","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/snuu.kapsi.fi\/saranorja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}