This blog hasn’t been much about me being an academic, or even an educator. That dominated my first blog, fresh off a year on the tenure-track, but now (at first) underemployed with two kids under the age of two in the house, and then as a contingent faculty member, still holding out hope that I…

One of the things I love about my current job is teaching in our Learning, Design, and Technology MA program. Not only are the students brilliant, but I get to teach about Domains and creating their professional digital identity through their final portfolio and beyond. I really enjoy working with the students on helping them…

March 2020 marked the 10-year anniversary of my being online. I spent a lot of January and February writing a year-by-year reflection, as well as curating and creating two self-published books that collected some of my extensive online writing from the past decade. All but one of those posts still sits in draft format, unpublished….

This post originally appeared on my tinyletter, Where is my Mind? It’s the end of the year, and so of course my timelines are flooded with “best of” lists, and as an academic, particularly full of best of books lists. I have a friend whose book is (rightfully) on many of those lists. It’s been…

This post originally appeared on my tinyletter, Where is my Mind? I’m on a mini-writing retreat at the house I grew up in. My mom took the kids to a cottage, leaving me home alone, without any responsibilities, not really, except for the dog, and so I have a week to just write. Today was…

I jinxed myself. Last week, I made the observation on Twitter that I usually write about 1k words a day, and if I don’t, it feels strange, like my day isn’t complete. They could be words written for work, words written for my research/books/publications, or words written for me. I write here, I write for…

This post originally appeared on my tinyletter, Where is my Mind? I’m writing another memoir of sorts. No, it’s a memoir. It’s about growing up where I grew up when I grew up and how that shaped and continues to share my identity. It’s about language and race and class and culture and identity. I’ve…

This post originally appeared on my tinyletter, Where is my Mind? My daughter got her ADHD diagnosis. It was a relief, for her, just to know. We’re still working on finding the right medication, but we’re moving in the right direction, getting where we need to be. She’s started writing. Really writing. It started with…

I took a break from writing over the month of December. I mean, I still wrote things for work and I still tweeted and I still wrote FB posts and I still wrote emails (so many emails) but I didn’t write anything here or on my tinyletter or for Popula or work on my manuscripts…

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 a player that could be relied on. He wasn’t flashy, although he did score a hat-trick once which absolutely delighted me. Somehow…

This post originally appeared on my tinyletter, Where is my Mind? I’ve got two manuscripts that are in various stages of being edited, by me. One of them will come out in 2019, the other in 2020. The one that is coming out next year is almost ready. The one with another two years needs…

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 of writing it, I’m re-posting it here. I can’t believe it’s been almost six year since I wrote this. Obviously, I’ve written…

This post originally appeared on my tinyletter, Where is my Mind? I got an email the other day from a reader who had found some of my posts and wrote to tell me how much they resonated with them. They are also a writer and thinking of graduate school and wanted to know how I…

This post originally appeared on my tinyletter, Where is my Mind? I am writing two manuscripts right now, both memoirs of sort. The first one, which is largely complete, is a collection of my blog posts over the past 8 years that fall under the umbrella of Bad Female Academic. A number of people are…

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 tweet a couple of times on Twitter, and it has been my pinned tweet for a while now. I meant this in a…

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 some pretty strong words last week about putting both the alternative and academic in alt-ac. Now I’m living with the reality of putting…

My kids are on the swim team this summer, for the first time in their relatively short lives. They both love the water, and have taken swimming lessons occasionally on our various stops to here, alongside my attempts at teaching them how to swim (a total failure, despite my continued instance that I USED TO…

You know, I made my name blogging everything and anything. It brought me joy. Don’t know why I don’t go back to that.— Lee Skallerup (@readywriting) May 30, 2016 Years ago, when I had just started blogging, unemployed, trying to start a business, taking care of two kids under the age of three, in a…

Dany Laferrière has a new book out. It’s a(nother) retelling, another version of his arrival in Montreal as a young man, fleeing Haiti and dictatorship, in 1976. I have been fascinated by his constant and continual revising of his life story through varying levels of autobiographical fiction. I also just love his writing. I sat…