Kim Andrews
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kqandrews.bsky.social
Kim Andrews
@kqandrews.bsky.social
1.7K followers 810 following 1.1K posts
“poetry person,” university of ottawa. displaced pennsylvanian. www.kqandrews.com.
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kqandrews.bsky.social
The vicissitudes of the publishing “industry” such as it is in this genre means that I’m talking about this thing while trying to place another book and finishing a draft of yet another; woe betide my confusing overflow of Pomes
December 4, 2025 at 7:37 PM
kqandrews.bsky.social
It ALSO gets perfectly right the causality of our equally embarrassing discourse about our own expertise. I mean!!!
Although academic writing was not the source of the job-market crash I experienced, my writing carried a disproportionate affective burden for what it meant to me. Academic writing was not the academy or the job market, but because writing was a practical means by which an academic job was (or in my case, was not) earned, my feelings about the academic-job market shifted, through a kind of emotional alchemy, onto my feelings about academic writing. My personal sense of failure and grief attached to a norm of prose, a strategy for publication. My fellowship meant that I had time to write. I couldn't use it. When I sat down to my in-progress monograph, I felt the collapse of the job market at the level of the sentence. Academic writing gets a lot of grief for being "bad." I don't think it is. I think it's good. But it can definitely feel bad to produce, sentence by sentence, a piece of writing that needs to not only describe its object but also defend your ideas and your intelligence, your financial security and the value of your expertise — in the largest sense, to make the case that humanities expertise itself is worth having. Here, too, we find a collision of scales. Although no one sentence can push back the tides of neoliberalism as they press into the university, or the university's own hierarchies, every sentence can feel burdened with such out-of-proportion tasks. Even when the sentences produced under these conditions are good to read, they're often terrible to write.
November 25, 2025 at 1:52 PM
kqandrews.bsky.social
“Accidentally”
November 23, 2025 at 1:27 PM
kqandrews.bsky.social
Oh I absolutely think that some people have a type of special talent for this stuff, sure — but that kind of just proves my point (and/but also, speaking as a creative writing professor: we can’t start ceding ground on the “teachability” front lol)
November 14, 2025 at 12:16 AM
kqandrews.bsky.social
Yeah I think history might actually be the best (by which I mean most challenging) test case for this theory
November 13, 2025 at 3:51 PM
kqandrews.bsky.social
This has I think something to do with whether a discipline is fundamentally empirical or rhetorical, and I don’t think you can turn the latter into the former just by force of conviction.
November 13, 2025 at 3:47 PM
kqandrews.bsky.social
Anyway, I know the discourse is going to be fully about sex pests for the foreseeable future; I’m just having some silly thoughts over here
November 13, 2025 at 3:35 PM