Papermen

"William Bartram walked through the Georgia woods in April of 1773, shattered timber skeletons already underfoot in a place that the Georgia Trustees told their settlers was pristine, like a garden waiting to be planted."

And with that, my dissertation has become a real animal, an entity, with function and form. I've avoided posting anything here about my academic work in large part because I feared giving it metaphorical bones and blood. I've spent four years dancing around this document, talking about its fabled conception in conference rooms, over beers, on countless porches. Coursework and comps (and even the proposal process) have allowed me, until now, to feel still a bit disconnected from its execution.

It seems to me that you can tell a lot about a person these days in relation to the organization of their digital documents. It's too easy to give anything a label now; I have calendars in five digital places, but even the one staring me in the face on my Blackberry screen stays haphazard. I feel accomplished when I plug something in, give an event or a task a name, but the execution, again, is a completely different matter. I spent four hours this morning cleaning up my digital life--streamlining calendars, condensing Word documents, erasing fanciful folders that held nothing but miniature pipe dreams. I suppose in the digital age, I can have a digital catharsis.

The second important step was pulling all the wayward diss passages into a single document. Right now the sentence above is the first of the introduction. That might change, but my feelings won't. I won't call myself a revelator. This needed to happen for quite sometime. But I do feel like I'm finally moving forward again. The title is "Papermen," but the project is no longer a straw-man.

It's in the seventies today here in Athens--sunny, perhaps even more hot that warm (and particularly after this unusually frigid winter), busy with the noises of joggers and strollers and beer clanking, not so much restless as on the cusp. I just signed on for a trip to Italy in May (again with the digital life--funny how an email confirmation can rock your socks off). And now here I sit, on the back porch with iced coffee and an increased heart rate, finally ready to committ to this research-baby I've been fostering for five years.

It was a day not so much unlike this one, five years ago, when I stood in a field full of pine skeletons, a camera in one hand and a file folder in another. Inside it were the names of the paper mill workers who would change my perspective on everything about work. The slowness of life in the piney woods of North Louisiana felt oppressive, but I was just about to discover that a place can look bland but be vibrant, and that the folks that history almost forgot to remember have the most beautiful stories.

So...cheers to the real work, and to writing a dissertation that both honors those that have helped and changed me AND speaks relevantly to the struggles of workers and the land they labor on.