Never delete your dreams

Yesterday, something exciting happened:

Now, I don’t expect you to actually read the piece. It’s full of vague nods to bad research and dry humor about toxic colleagues that could only tickle someone who bears the scars of academia. But perhaps you’ll stay with me for this brief story of how the piece got published.

This is a story of the long winding road from idea to publication. This is a story of how things happen both so slowly that you might give up on them, and then so fast that you can hardly catch your breath.

Photo by Jacob Kiesow on Unsplash

Six years ago, I had some vague delusions of grandeur, and jotted down the following lofty goal:

I want to write an op-ed on how survival - or lack thereof - in the academic workforce intersects with mental illness. I will argue that people who are predisposed/at risk of mental illness are caught in the net of academia, but are set up for failure and triggered into flare-ups of their symptoms, which leads to rejection, mistreatment and, ultimately, getting discarded by the academy. Moreover, I will argue that certain disordered states such as mania and ADD are actively encouraged in academia, while their true manifestations as mental illnesses are rejected. Only narcissism remains as the fully accommodated condition.

I didn’t write that op-ed. Instead, I decided I would fictionalize the account of what happened to me in academia, and make it funny. I didn’t quite have the word for it at the time, but I was planning a form of autofiction, i.e., fiction closely mirroring events that happened in my life. I mapped out all chapters of this satirical novel, and even “sold” (for a $0 advance) it to a publisher. The cover got designed, and if I told you the title, you’d be able to Google it and find the hyperbolic blurb about how HILARIOUS this book was supposed to be.

The book had this clever if gimmicky set-up: the whole thing was going to be written up as a fake scientific paper, as though I had been experimenting upon my academic department while also serving as one of the participants. Then the part about what actually happened - the satirical bit about the toxic colleagues and the drama and why I, with my mental illnesses, couldn’t hack it - would make up the results section. It was a book within a book, a satire within a satire.

I didn’t write that book. Instead, I jumped head first into the pandemic response, and pushed my writing aside for years. Then I changed my name. At some point during those transitions, the editor stopped writing to check in about the book’s progress, and I tore the pages I had written by hand out of my notebook so that I could repurpose it for journaling. But I didn’t throw them away.

Fast forward to last week. On Monday, June 9th 20205, the

Sub Club

published the following as one of 84 recently opened submission calls:

Journal of Astrological Big Data Ecology → “The Journal of Astrological Big Data Ecology is a satirical research paper looking for authors to blend humor, science, math, and satire in the form of a research paper.”

And suddenly…

Picture from Pinterest

The perfect home for that ridiculous idea of a satirical research paper emerged. I dusted off the pages. I frantically typed, edited, and formatted the article. I added a picture of my kitten, because the editor of the journal suggests doing so and I LOVE MY KITTEN. A couple of hours later, I had sent the paper off for submission.

Dear reader, it took the editor FIVE HOURS to accept my satirical paper for publication. All of that thinking half a decade ago. Then a couple of hours of frantic typing, and then a week later - boom, my second ever piece of non-academic writing, published (here’s about the first).

As I was writing this, I came across this Note from

Marisa Walz

:

Friends, don’t do that. Never delete your dreams. You never know where they’ll eventually find a home.