readywriting

My swimmers had an amazing meet this past weekend. They all got at least one best time, and most of them got at least one cut time (which is ultimately meaningless, but goal

I wish I could remember why I chose Lyle Odelein as my favorite player on the Canadiens. He was an old-school defenceman, tough and reliable, with many, many penalty minutes each season, but

This is a post that first appeared as a part of Digital Writing Month in 2012. Since it only exists it in the Internet Archive and I was recently haunted by the memory

I'm sitting in my new office overlooking the Potomac, at my new job, at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Nine years ago, I was getting ready to move across

From I Tried Leaving Facebook...But I Couldn't: Facebook had replaced much of the emotional labor of social networking that consumed previous generations. We have forgotten (or perhaps never noticed) how many hours

I wrote myself into existence, literally, from early journaling to what you see here #WhyIWrite— Lee Skallerup Bessette makes zero magic (@readywriting) October 20, 2015 I have written a version of this

These are my prepared remarks for MLA18 Panel 202: Anxious Pedagogies - Negotiating Precarity and Insecurity in the Classroom. Please join us if you're in NYC on Friday morning, bright and early! I

Looking back, incompletely, at 2017.

I work with a pretty smart data science guy. In the past, when the MLA Conference program hit online, I would enter in words like "teaching" and "pedagogy" and

Why is quitting seen as failure?

Thinking about my history in sports, in academia, and how abuse is normalized.

I started my second season coaching swimming last week. Well, it’s not my second season ever. I’ve been coaching swimming off and on since I was a teenager. But my second

I want every academic to ask themselves: is what I’m writing about important? If so, write a book accessible to more than 100 people. — Sara Goldrick-Rab (@saragoldrickrab) July 30, 2017 I wrote

When I left IHE and started this new “blogging” space, one of the things I wanted to get away from was the reactionary hot-takes post that had fueled my writing for so long.

While #Digciz is over, I want to put this out to share. This blog post is about making and breaking friendships and the intimacy of swimming and social media, and where I call

*I was invited to Georgetown University to give a talk on my experience with and vision for Digital Learning. You can find the slideshow at http://bit.ly/DigLearnHelp and the text, mildly

I don’t remember last Spring. I don’t remember noticing the change in the weather, the grass turning green, the trees blooming, and the leaves coming out. What I do remember is

We’re deep into our “Learn to Code” module in Applied Digital Studies. The students have all chosen a language (HTML/CSS, Python, JavaScript are the top choices), and chosen a platform (Codecademy

In DGST 395, we’re dabbling in coding. I wrote about the experience taking the course and “learning to code” last semester, and this semester, I decided to take a different approach. While

This semester, I’m teaching DGST 395: Applied Digital Studies. It’s an upper-division required course for Communication and Digital Studies majors. It’s the first time I’ve ever taught this course,

“I think I do overshare,” Fisher says. “It’s my way of trying to understand myself. … It creates community when you talk about private things.” I wasn’t going to write another post

I have a strange relationship with the MLA, especially now that I am in an alt-ac position that doesn’t have anything to do (not really) with my original research and PhD. But

I’ve written this post, variations and fragments, bit and pieces, stops and starts, in my head over the past week. And when I open up the text box, it all melts away.

When I advocated for this Design Sprint over the summer to be a part of our Digital Liberal Arts series, I envisioned the opportunity to bring in Fine Arts faculty to describe and

*This is a lightly edited version of a talk I gave at MLA 14 that is still seems relevant. * In 2014 (or rather, in 2010 when I first created this project), doing a