Member-only story
Lessons from Sabbatical: Reading
Why I’m Upping my Reading Game this Year
I was lucky enough to have a sabbatical last year, a perk of earning tenure. When I’d imagined earning sabbatical as a new professor, I couldn’t help but imagine a giant vacation, even though I knew I’d have to be working on a project. In reality, and because of sabbatical’s link to tenure, by the time mine came around I was totally burned out and having a good, old-fashioned mid life crisis. After all, It felt like I’d worked my entire life toward tenure. Now that I had it, what the hell else was I supposed to do?
What followed was an incredibly productive year that changed how I sit in the world. Yes, I got a lot of writing done, which fulfilled my sabbatical proposal. More importantly, however, I had to come to Jesus about a lot of my own bullshit. I’ll be writing about what I learned during sabbatical in this series, and I’ll start by talking about what I learned about the importance of reading to me as a writer, a person who wants to do better, and a person who wants to be better.
I have always been a voracious reader, but my relationship to reading has not always been straightforward. I went from reading everything and anything I could get my hands on as a child, to being someone who read from syllabi in college, and for research as a graduate student. Then I…
