phd preparation diaries: journal prompts for the starts of journeys in the humanities

if your primary text was a fruit, what fruit would it be?

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Don’t worry — this isn’t another post about notebooks. I think I might have finally reached the amount I have to say about notebooks at this time and I won’t subject you to another diary piece about stationery. This one is just a wee bit related; it’s about the relationship between journaling and the start of a humanities PhD. It’s going to be a slightly shorter post than usual because I’m getting ready for my first ever Really Big Conference and there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get my paper and slide deck finished, do my full time job, go through the conference programme working out everything I want to attend and who I want to talk to, queue essays for my lovely substack friends for next week AND recover from the many horrifying injuries I sustained falling flat on my face in a car park yesterday.

Re: falling flat on my face in a car park, it was cinematic and it was horrifying. I arrived at an important meeting for my job late, hyperventilating and with blood running down my body to pool into my shoes. I just wanted to tell you all that in case there’s anyone with a parasocial relationship with me who would benefit from this knowledge for your edits and collages. So today I’m very swollen, I have two limbs that don’t want to bend, a hand where it hurts to wiggle my fingers, and my neck doesn’t move much. I’m writing this in my lunch hour before heading out to an important dinner with senior people from my work, so I guess we’ll see how that goes. I guess the universe looked at me trying to work my job, write this paper and prepare for the biggest academic event I’ve ever been to, and get some essays in the bank for substack next week and went, ‘nope this all looks easy, we have to level this week up for her, make her neck stop working’. And I love that.

The closer we get to the PhD starting, the more thoughts I have. I want to sort through them somewhere, somewhere just for me. Right now, somehow, it’s July. I’m three quarters of the way through my academic year of rest and relaxation between the MA and the PhD. I’m excited to be here, obviously, and when it starts, I’ll be excited to be there. But more comes up the closer I get, and I don’t think it’s good for anyone for me to consider all these questions in real time in front of an internet audience. We’ve definitely talked about my relationship with food enough for this decade on here, in front of people, but I’m not done thinking about it.

So I started my new journal and I’m pretty excited about it. That’s not just from the point of view of being able to interact with beautiful stationery and fountain pen inks. Writing on substack has taught me that I feel best and most confident and most sure of what I’m doing day to day when I’m writing a lot, and I’m really excited to keep that going through the PhD. But I lso want to put some of that energy somewhere else for my eyes only — my current eyes and my future eyes. I’m really hopeful that every step of this PhD journey is going to be something I look back on with pride and nostalgia one day. You know, when I’ve successfully become J.R.R. Tolkien and I’m safely esconced in my ivory tower.

There are a few different pages that come up on google when you search terms like ‘PhD journal prompts’ and ‘grad school journal prompts’. A lot of it is really good but I can’t find much that’s specific to the beginning of embarking on this — a lot seems to be aimed at people midway through. There’s also quite little specific to the humanities, where the challenges are somewhat different to laboratory-based sciences. And a lot of it seems to be posted by Americans — and while a lot of this is applicable to anyone studying anything anywhere, a good amount of it isn’t. A UK PhD in the humanities is a very different size and shape from an American PhD in the sciences.

This set of journal prompts by Jordan A. McCray is really thoughtful and the prompts are nested within a fascinating blog post/personal essay about the decision to leave grad school and the role that journaling played in understanding both sides of the decision to leave. I’ve written responses to a couple of these in my journal and I got a lot of out of doing it. I recommend this page for everyone, but particularly for people from demographic groups not well-represented in the academy, as McCray has a lot of interesting stuff to say about the reality of being the only Black person in their research field. The one weakness with these from the point of view of someone just about to start the PhD is that it’s a bit bleak to consider reasons for unhappiness and reasons to leave this much this early in the process. Maybe they’ll all become relevant at some point as the stress gets in and I find the culture does or doesn’t work for me, but at this point I’m feeling a lot of enthusiasm and I’m working to cultivate that love into something lasting and long term. These journal prompts are fantastic but they don’t offer that.

There’s also this post from A Happy PhD about effective journaling through grad school. It’s nicely written and constains a lot of material, but it has less in the way of actual prompt questions and more on types of journal entries and how to think through them in ways that will benefit you. I think it’s really neat but I’m not sure it asks any questions more relevant to PhD life than general life on earth.

I found this reddit thread that’s pretty neat, though I’m afraid of reddit and don’t find it an easy format to document and come back to.

So I thought about the questions I’d want to ask and answer and I decided to write them down. I never like to get into ‘my subject is better than your subject’ territory, and I don’t think there’s anything extra special or clever about doing a research degree in literature, but I do think every discipline has its own characteristics that deserve consideration and resources in their own right. I play Dungeons and Dragons with a postdoc physicist every week and I think we both find, when we ask each other how study/research is going while someone’s in the bathroom, that our subject areas exist in different universes governed by different rules. We have to ask each other the most basic questions like ‘where does funding come from for literature research?’ and ‘how does one get a laboratory?’. There are probably some questions relevant to ask for people on his pathway and on my pathway, but it’s hard to think of many of them outside the very general ‘How does doing a PhD make you feel? Are you scared of your supervisor? What pens do you like?’. To be honest, I don’t even know if physicists use pens.

The target audience for these questions is, well, me. But it might also be you. I know I have readers either currently in grad school for the humanities or investigating/aspiring in that direction. If anyone ever uses any of these, I’ll be overwhelmed with joy, and if they don’t, I’m all the audience I need.

1. When did you first start aspiring to do a PhD? Is there a way you can honour those original dreams, even if they were inaccurate or impractical? For example, I can’t bodily become J.R.R. Tolkien, but I can play the Lord of the Rings soundtrack on a difficult work day and remind myself I’m doing the Tolkien plan in the way I could manage.

2. How can you set up your work environment to make marathon reading sessions as enjoyable and productive as possible? What factors can help me look after my concentration, memory, and spine?

3. What literary critic (or whoever in whatever discipline) do you most wish you could write like? What part of their writing style do you most want? How would it serve your project and the kinds of things you want to write?

4. If you were going to write about your primary texts in another form or genre (novel, tabletop RPG, avant-garde one woman show), what would that look like?

5. How do you think your academic literature interests and your personal-time, non-productive literature interests fit together and talk to each other? What parts of your personality and life experience make you love both? Where do they overlap and how do they differ?

6. How does the thought of someone reading your half-finished writing that you’re not that confident about yet make you feel? Is there anything you reckon you could do to make yourself more confident about that?

7. In an award-winning movie about you doing this PhD, who would play you? Why? What would the soundtrack to this movie be? The colour palette?

8. Be honest with yourself — what purchases are worth making or not worth making at this point in your PhD career? What do you know you’ll need? What do you think you might need but you can’t be sure yet? What is a nice idea but actually not necessary? For example, I really genuinely immediately needed a bigger backpack that would keep my back functioning. I’d really like to buy an insulated coffee cup with a lid that creates a cooling zone for very hot coffee like this one, but I don’t know what the coffee situation on campus is going to be so I’m not going to buy it now, and I really want to buy a large variety of ferris wheel press fountain pen inks, but it’s not actually necessary in any way on any planet.

9. When you’ve worked too much and your eyes, hands and heart need a break, what do you want to do for a break and a change? The answer may not be scrolling aimlessly while hunched over in the dark.

10. If your primary text was a fruit, what fruit would it be?