Carolina QuotesI have got to say, I’ve struggled more with the process stuff than anything else in my career. I feel like I restart and come up with a new process every year, but I think I’ve done better over the last couple of years, in part, because I now respect and acknowledge some of the work I do that is less obvious. For example, I used to say, “Oh, I don’t have time to read everything. I just have to pick up something here and there.” But now I think of those 15 or 20 minutes of reading as being absolutely part of my formal research process and creative process. I value those little bits and less obvious forms of work.
Tressie McMillan Cottom Connected to the Carolinas
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“I have got to say, I’ve struggled more with the process stuf…” Tressie McMillan Cottom. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-F892A9562E. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/f892a9562e
More from Tressie McMillan Cottom
One of the things I like to say to people is that we think that broadening access in any realm — we do this with everything, by the way. It’s such an American way to approach the world. We think that broadening access will broaden access on the terms of the people who have benefited from it being narrowed, which is just so counterintuitive. Broadening access doesn’t mean that everybody has the experience that I, privileged person, had in the discourse. Broadening it means that we are all equally uncomfortable, right? That’s actually what pluralism and plurality is. It isn’t that everybody is going to come in and have the same comforts that privilege and exclusion had extended to a small group of people. It’s that now everybody sits at the table, and nobody knows the exact right thing to say about the other people.
As I said earlier, there’s a point in my process where I just basically start over, from scratch — that is, re-seeing the work and rethinking it. I don’t think it’s a natural stage for anybody, by the way. I think we all had to learn it, but what happens in formal schooling these days is that there’s almost no leeway in teaching that process to most students. So by the time they come to me, many of our students have just never, ever approached revising as part of the thinking process.
I always believed that if I was willing to defend the veracity of my work and if I was willing to hold that work up for evaluation — for critique and judgment — then who I was when I was doing the work would eventually matter less. And that took time. And I took hits. But I do think that that is ultimately what happened.