Dr Laura Varnam

I read a rather alarming statistic this week- ironically enough, on Instagram- that said that in the modern world, we are distracted every 46 seconds. Blimey. But there was worse to come! When we give into that distraction, it takes at least five minutes to get back on track. (Or something like that, I can’t now remember. I was probably distracted. It may well have been more).

But that really gave me pause. It’s not the giving in to distraction that’s the problem, it’s the impact it has on your concentration and focus afterwards. And let’s face it, who among us does not have problems with concentration and focus these days!

I was thinking about this at the beginning of this week in particular because I needed to ‘lock in,’ as the kids say, and really focus in order to get an overdue essay written. It was an essay to accompany one of my poems and it’s a piece of work that really means a lot to me so I wanted to make sure I did it justice. And in order to do that, I needed to Not Be Distracted.

And I managed it! Eventually! (Both writing the essay and the not-being-distracted bit). That’s the other bit of trivia that I came across on Instagram this week (- yes, I checked in every now and then, I’m not completely cured, haha!), once you break the cycle of distraction, even for a day, it makes a huge difference.

So how did I do this? It really is as simple as putting your phone out of immediate reach and, more importantly, out of your eyeline. I still found myself being prodded by the Old Demon Distraction but I was able- in true mindfulness style- to recognise it and decide not to act on it. And the longer I did that for, the easier it was, and the easier it was, the more work I got done! 

I mean, duh? Right? But often we’re our own worst enemies when it comes to patterns of working and deep down, we do actually know how to get that good, deep work done. But we also have to do that in a way that works for us. And here I’m talking about Process. Trust the Process. And Trust Your Process.

I have ‘Trust the Process’ on a post-it note on my noticeboard in my home office and that’s both as a reassurance- all shall be well!- but also as a reminder about how important process is. It’s one of the Four Ps of the Guild of Medievalist Maker’s ‘Meet a Medievalist Maker’ blogposts (try saying that in a hurry! We adore alliteration in GuMM!). In our blogposts, where our members introduce their Projects by giving us a Peek at their incredible artworks, we are also committed to showcasing Process and Prompts. How do you do your work, as a creative practitioner? Can you provide an example that we can try for ourselves? (We’ve now got fourteen blogposts on our website, highlighting the work of storytellers, linocut artists, cartoonists, poets, zinesters, translators- check them out!)

Process is crucial because it’s in process that play can happen (another key tenet of the Guild’s mission statement!). You never know what might happen when you let your mind loose to just noodle around with ideas! But play also enables that Old Demon Productivity to be resisted. Academic life, and life is general, is often so focused on finished product that all of our energy and focus goes on getting through something, checking it off our list, and moving onto the next thing, and we don’t stop to enjoy the actual doing. We forget that making- whether that’s writing or drawing or knitting- is fun. It’s therapeutic. It’s mindful. We can enter a flow state when we’re deep at work in this way- and that’s when incredible things start to happen!

(And you know what, I’ve been writing this blogpost for twenty minutes straight now and I haven’t even thought about getting Distracted!)

When you invested in the process- give time to it, afford it respect- everything else follows. And this is where Trust Your Process comes in. Not someone else’s process. Not that internet meme about getting up to write at 5am and having your day finished by 10am. (Unless that’s your vibe, in which case go for your life!). But trusting what works best for You As A Writer. And if your best writing happens in your pyjamas, so be it. (Definitely not writing from personal experience here. Not. At. All).

That can, of course, change over time but sometimes we need to simulate conditions that have worked well in the past. You’ll probably remember times as a student when you wrote that great essay in a particular library or you were holed up in your room with paper everywhere. Or conversely, that essay that was the Definition of a Nightmare and you had to go somewhere serious to even have a hope in hell of getting it done. (I wrote a chapter for a book in something like 2011 or 2012 and I was So Terrified about writing it, I had to go to the Upper Reading Room in the Bodleian to get it done. I was scared of the Upper Reading Room when I was a graduate student and to be honest, I still am to this day!). But I know that I have it in my back pocket if things get serious.

When I’m working from home and my other half is in the office, I often work at the kitchen table. Yes, I have a little office at home and yes, all my papers are in there. But the summer we moved into our house, I didn’t have a desk yet and I was writing up My Monograph (yes, it needs caps, read this post to find out why!). And despite the fact that my monograph had felt like my kryptonite for so many years, you know what? That summer, when I wrote the entire thing (or re-typed at least) the entire thing from start to finish at my kitchen table? I bloody loved it. This kitchen table (upon which I’m writing now) has seen some good times.

What I also know about my process- and what I’m sure you know about yours- is the time of day that works for you and the rituals that help you to feel in the zone. I’m a morning person and in an ideal world, I get up and have my breakfast while reading a book-for-pleasure (often when I’m writing, something immersive like a crime novel- escapism, engaging, but not likely to  trip my literary critic switch!) and then I sit down at my desk at around 8.15/8.30am. I think one for reason that time works for me is that I’m not quite awake enough to be distracted yet!! And if I get in the zone early enough, I can work through til 12noon quite happily and productively.

Sometimes I have to encourage myself to really sit still and crack on (especially at home when it’s easy to just put a load of washing on or think about the dinner!). Aside from in the summer when this doesn’t work for obvious reasons, sitting down with a hot water bottle on my knee really helps. (A weighted blanket might also do the trick?) Somehow I associate that sensation with thinking and writing, and I have a hot water bottle in my office for the same reason (and also because I do quite often get cold!!).

Recently I’ve also been listening to music that has really positive associations for me but that I can also use as a kind of background filter. The part of my brain that gets distracted can focus on the music (usually choral music, some opera, that I’ve loved since I was a teen, or the Lord of the Rings soundtrack!! On brand!). I’ve also found music helpful recently because  if you associate certain melodies with a mode of work, playing the music helps you get in the zone somehow!

In terms of my planning process, this week I’ve also been reminded that there’s no shortcuts in my planning- but that’s because the planning is the shortcut!! If I plan properly, the way that works for me, it helps me get writing more quickly because the material is already lodged in my brain. When I’m pretty much ready to write, I usually type up the secondary materials in a separate document so that I have them easily to hand and I tend to make a mind map of the structure of the essay and the key points. I often also have to do some of the close reading and primary text work again, especially if I haven’t worked on the essay recently. The piece I was writing up this week, I wrote for a conference in July last year so it had been a while since I was properly immersed in the details. Doing some searching through an electronic version of my primary text, making lists of examples, all put the material back to the forefront of my mind and then also enabled me to make new connections and start having new ideas. I wasn’t just ‘writing up’ or ‘expanding’ the conference paper, I was using the paper as the springboard for a new piece of writing.

This, I think, is crucial when you’re coming back to work from a good few months ago. I say this to my students too, especially at this time of year when my third years are preparing for their Finals, where they will  be examined on work that they initially began in their second year in Oxford. ‘Revision’ is not about learning the old work and downloading it in the exam, it’s about re-envisaging and re-energising that initial material by having new ideas about it now. Making it work, making it active. What can the you of now- however many months down the line- bring to that project? As soon as the material is ‘working’ in my mind and new things are happening, I know the writing will follow.

What works best for you in terms of process? Make a list of the things that help you to focus and concentrate, and then come back to that list when you need to make the most of your time. I’ll definitely be coming back to this blogpost this summer when I have an essay that I need to write as if from scratch (because it’s been through so many drawn-out peer review nightmares!!). It will need all my concentration and focus and… oh look, a Boromir meme 😉

Thanks for reading!

When I was a kid (in the 80s!), there was a show on kids tv called Stopit and Tidyup and it featured a character called The Big Bad I Said No (plus other characters called Beequiet & Beehave, Eat Your Greens, Don’t Do That… and many more similarly unsubtle ways of getting kids to do as they’re told, as I now realise!!).

We still quote The Big Bad I Said No in my family, partly as a joke but partly as a strategy whenever I tell my Mum that ‘I’ve been asked to do this cool thing…’ and my Mum says, what would The Big Bad I Said No say?! We have this joke because I am terrible at saying no and far too good at saying yes, without thinking through the consequences first! 

Earlier this week I was having a conversation with a graduate student about an opportunity that they were considering and I found myself giving some rather good advice about how to decide whether or not to pursue this opportunity, and the factors to consider if they did, and I realised that a blogpost on this topic might be useful- and not just for grads and ECRs, but also for myself! And, as ever, the good people of Bluesky responded to my bat signal with lots of excellent advice and tips, so huge thanks to them (linked and credited throughout this post).

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The Jurassic Park Test (and Other Tests!)

So, to stick with pop culture for a moment, this meme always springs to mind when I’m considering an opportunity:

Quite often I can do something. I have the knowledge and the ability (usually!), but the key question to ask yourself is whether you have the capacity. And secondly, even if you do have the capacity, is this something that you in particular should take on. There might be someone better placed (and more on that below) and this particular opportunity might not be the best fit for you right now. 

Two other ‘tests’ that I often perform when I’m assessing opportunities is the five years test and the how does it feel test. The five years test is useful for all sorts of things: you just ask yourself hypothetically, ‘will this matter in five years times?’. If you say no to an opportunity, will it matter in five years’ time? This may require some planning about your future (and that’s not always straightforward of course)- but perhaps this opportunity will come round again later, or perhaps it won’t, but how will Future You feel about the fact that you said no (or yes) at this moment? I often find that projecting myself five years hence helps me to assess whether I’m overemphasising the importance of something that is being presented to me as urgent and crucial, but may not be.

The how does it feel test is where you hypothetically imagine ‘how does it feel to have said no.’ If imagining having said no makes you feel enormous relief and like a weight has been lifted, that gives you some information to work with. (Sometimes we do have to say yes to opportunities that still might ‘feel’ difficult- overwhelming, beyond our immediate competencies etc- but if we’re saying yes for a combination of right reasons, those things will hopefully recede or at least be balanced out in the fullness of time!).

Factors to consider when saying no

So here are some practical things that you need to consider when you’re weighing up an opportunity.

What will xyz [this teaching / writing this article / speaking at this conference / doing this administrative or service work] do for me?

In some ways this is a selfish question but we all have to prioritise according to our own individual situations, goals, and values. Sometimes we have to take on certain activities because they are within the remit of our job or are part of our service to our field or communities. But we can also think in terms of expertise, experience, and ethics.

We all need evidence of expertise on our CVs- having taught this course, written an article on this topic, and so on. But we should also be careful about doubling up. If you’re taught/written/spoken on something similar already, this probably won’t give you an extra line for your CV (unless it’s a different format- lecture course rather than seminars, tutorials rather than online etc), so it might be better to pass it on in favour of a different opportunity that will give you new skills.

We can also ask whether this opportunity giving us relevant experience: in related skills, such as, outreach work; or, is it connecting us to a new research community; or, is it getting our name out there amongst a new group of people? One of my favourite pieces of advice from the podcaster Mel Robbins is that ‘confidence comes from building competence’- you have to try to do a thing in order to become confident at it and good at it. Is this an opportunity that will enable you to make that new and exciting move?

Ethics comes in when we think about our values in our work. Perhaps an opportunity has arisen to share our expertise with a charity and so we want to honour that, even if it might be an unpaid opportunity. Perhaps we have certain commitments to outreach work and widening participation (I certainly do when it comes to sharing my knowledge both with potential students for Higher Education from disadvantaged areas but also with the general public when I speak on podcasts or give talks to literary societies).

Prof Niamh NicGhabhann Coleman commented that it’s really important to be ‘clear on your own mission’ and to then plan accordingly. Niamh also suggested that having a limit for each category of your mission or values (i.e. two outreach events a semester, a certain number of peer reviews a year etc) can also really help- if I say yes to this, I may have to say no to other requests later (see below on opportunity cost!).

The Key Thing to Remember: You Can’t Do It All!

I think we’re often guilty, especially in academia, of imagining that we have ever-expanding time. This is both untrue and very damaging!! Not least to our colleagues and students with disabilities, with commitments on the home front, with other jobs to pay the bills, our precarious colleagues, colleagues who are coping with the impact of marginalisation and discrimination… all of these things impact on time and capacity, and we should recognise this both when replying to a request and when making a request of another person. You don’t know what another person is dealing with! But also, be careful not to overload yourself because of a sense of guilt that you should be taking on additional work in order to make things easier for others. We all need to help others by sharing the load (and many of us are additionally burdened with service work, particularly women!) but it’s the old adage about putting your own oxygen mask on first. Burnout is real and academia’s endless productivity cycles are part of the problem!

Relatedly, and this is advice that my Mum always gives me because she knows what happens if I take on too much: do you have a buffer? What will happen if there’s a spanner in the works? If you get ill, if a family member needs help, if you unexpectedly have to step in to help out with something at work? etc. If there’s no buffer space, how will all of this work get done? And don’t forget that this piece of work needs to fit in with your current and forthcoming commitments. There will be a domino effect if something goes wrong!

A key idea here, which I learnt in my Business Studies A Level (if you can believe that!), is opportunity cost. What will this opportunity cost you- what else are you giving up (or may have to say no to later) because you have said yes to this? Dr Hester Lees-Jeffries made the excellent point that you should try to find a way of asking yourself ‘what will I NOT do in order to be able to say yes? If the answer is nothing, that gives pause.’

Relatedly, Hester also suggested having an accountability buddy who you run decisions past, and ideally, someone who understands academia, workload, career progression, and so on. (Or a range of people! Ask a peer, a friend, and a mentor!). There are some more practical tips at the bottom of this post but a great first step is, ask a pal what they think of this opportunity. They are likely to be less invested than you but if they have your back, they will have your best interests at heart and will advise accordingly!

Hester also noted that a key question is do you WANT to do it? Really want to. Not feel obligated to; are too tired to say no; feel guilty about saying no to a friend / more senior colleague / lovely student [delete as applicable!]. John Lyons on Bluesky made a great point about distinguishing between the task and the person who has asked you. I personally find it harder to say no to friends but John had had the opposite experience. Try to imagine the request detached from the requester!

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We also need to think seriously about headspace.

Both in general and also in the period in which you will have to complete the commitment. I try to keep my research ticking over during term time but I find it very difficult to do anything that requires sustained thinking and quality headspace, because during term time, most of my mental capacity is taken up with teaching. And by that I mean: making sure I’m on top of all the topics I need to teach on a weekly basis, all the admin (have I printed the things I need to print? Where are my books for this topic?!), marking, and, crucially, how are all of my students doing? Where are they at? (Intellectually, in terms of workload, on the welfare front). We frequently have to pivot and make changes during a teaching term and I need the space to be able to do that. And that is not the best headspace for writing a research article! (It can be done… but that doesn’t mean it should, eh Jeff?!)

During Covid, when I was teaching online, I found it really challenging because it felt like I had too many tabs open in my brain and it was draining my battery! And I think this can be the case with over-commitment too. If you take on too many things, it’s really hard to give them all the requisite amount of productive headspace! And you don’t want to end up finding something stressful because you just don’t have time to think about it properly. (I should be taking this advice because at the moment my brain feels like a bus station with too many buses queueing up to get in and out at any one time!!)

So then, what does your capacity look like? Dr Kathleen Neal suggested that it’s important to keep records of how much time we spend doing a particular task so that when a request for that kind of work comes in, we know realistically what it might look like (and to be honest, then we should probably double it, if the task involves lots of emailing and organisation!!). In another blogpost on conferences, I’ve talked about my assumption that a conference requires a month of work, especially if it’s to give a new paper on new material (more on that here). Think realistically about how much working time this commitment will require. 

(And that amount of time will naturally shift as you become more experienced- and in fact Dr Renske Janssen on Bluesky suggested that sometimes you can offer an intermediate answer if, for example, you’ve been asked to give a talk. You may not be able to write a new talk but you could repeat or slightly alter one that you already have, perhaps the organisers would be happy with that? This is very relevant to me as I’ve recently been asked to give a talk next month at an event that I would like to speak at- it’s very on brand for me!- but I don’t have time to do something new, but I do have time to refine and reshape something I spoke about last month, and in fact it will give me the opportunity to begin preparing a piece of writing due in a couple of month’s time- so it’s a win win!)

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Saying No by Paying It Forward!

When you’re further on in your career, you often get asked to do things and one of the nicest things about saying no can be passing down an opportunity to a graduate student or early career scholar. And I’m not talking here about offloading work onto more junior folks, of course! This is about lifting other people up and sharing the opportunities. When I was a graduate student, a very, very kind visiting professor was asked to give quite a high profile talk in Oxford and she asked me- a mere graduate student!- if I would like to join her and give half of the talk. It was such a kind opportunity. I learnt a lot from working with her and planning our talk together (and we had an absolute bangin’ powerpoint by the end, I’m not gonna lie). So is there a way that you can suggest someone else who might genuinely benefit from the opportunity? Dr Jo Edge echoed the importance of recommending others, especially scholars who could benefit from the opportunity for their CV.

You should ask yourself if you are the best person for the opportunity– and this is not about letting the imposter syndrome in (hello, inner saboteur!) but about thinking, maybe this one isn’t for me. Sometimes you want to take on something outside your comfort zone or immediate expertise in order to learn- after all, we learn skills from graduate study, not just content! We can do anything we set our mind to (though perhaps not dinosaur science… once again, Jeff is right!). It might be that yes, this opportunity is related enough to your current work but you could also learn from it. But it may be that it would take too much time to acquaint yourself with a new field or area (remember how long things really take!), so it’s better to recommend someone else instead.

A little side note here for those of us doing the asking, with some great advice from Dr Kathleen Neal. When you’re sending a request, think about what you’re really asking. How much time would this realistically take up for a person? Is it fair to ask them? (Check your biases- make sure you’re not exploiting more junior colleagues or offloading work that you just can’t be bothered to do!). Would the opportunity really benefit the person you are asking? And as Kathleen put it, ‘build in off-ramps’ so that it is simple and easy to say no if need be.

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Actually SAYING NO

When it comes to actually saying no, how do you go about it? Dr Megan Cook made the excellent observation on Bluesky that no is a complete sentence, but also that it often helps if you can give a reason. Not to make an excuse but to state why you cannot take on the opportunity. A favourite of mine, and that came up a few times in the Bluesky thread, is ‘I would love to do this but unfortunately I do not have the capacity right now.’ Or a version of that (Megan’s was, ‘I can’t take on new writing commitments until I’ve submitted my book’ or ‘I can’t take on new external service commitments until I’m no longer department chair.’)

The other key piece of advice when replying is don’t reply immediately! Prof Lynneth Miller Renberg said to take 24 hours before saying yes or no. Sleep on it! That is such helpful advice and more likely to lead to clarity. Dr Anna P. Judson also said that you should especially take 24 hours when you want to say yes!! (That’s so wise).

The brilliant academic coach Dr Jo VanEvery passed on some advice from a participant in one of her workshops which was never make a decision in a corridor. Give yourself the time to carefully consider! I love that metaphor!

I often find it helpful to send a holding email (unanswered emails freak me out, haha!). This might say something like ‘this is just a quick email to acknowledge receipt of your kind invitation. I will have a think and get back to you soon.’ That gives you some breathing space to consider.

Finally, the brilliant Dr Elizabeth Boyle mentioned that she keeps a list of the things she says no to. ‘When I am feeling overwhelmed with work, I look at it and think, ‘well, at least I don’t have all this stuff to do too!’’. That really tickled me!! Dr Anna P. Judson also mentioned the ‘Saying No To Things’ punch cards that you can buy on Etsy or make for yourself- say no to eight things, treat yourself to an ice cream or a glass of wine!! (It’s all about the rewards, people!!)

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Finally, to end where I began with pop culture: gonna give the last word to the Queen of Queens, Rupaul.

Don’t say yes or no to please others, and don’t worry about what you think other people will say or think about your decision. Make the right decision for YOU. (Can I get an Amen up in here?!)

Thanks for reading! And as ever, comment below if you have other strategies that have worked for you!

Thank you to everyone who read and responded to my last post on visibility and vulnerability in academia. It means a lot to know that it resonates! (And this week I was absolutely delighted to hear from the dear colleague for whom I wrote the medieval church chapter that I discussed below- she was pleased with it and the corrections at this stage are minimal! Phew! What a relief! I was rather worried I might have jinxed it by blogging about it so soon after submission!)

When I wrote that post I realised that there were lots of events from the last two or three months that I hadn’t recorded on my blog and there are lots of opportunities for medievalists that I am currently involved in, so this is a whistle-stop tour of recent activity, calls for contributions, and future appearances!

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Upcoming opportunities and appearances!

First up, on Wednesday 25th February I am giving an online talk on ‘Poetry as Creative Criticism: A Reading of Beowulf‘ chaired by the Univ Master, Baroness Amos. Sign up is free, the talk will take place on zoom, and anyone can attend! The link is here to register.

I am currently co-editing a special issue of the journal Public Humanities entitled ‘Creating the Medieval Now’ with the wonderful human that is Eleanor Barraclough (if you haven’t read her incredible book Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, you’re in for a treat!).

This special issue is for academic medievalists who are also creative pracitioners to write short essays reflecting on how their creative work has influenced their research. Check out the call for submissions here for the full details (deadline for submissions is 1 May) and the amazing artwork that my brilliant friend Kristen Haas Curtis created for us. Look at all those wonderful Wives of Bath!

Last month we also launched the CFP for the Gender and Medieval Studies conference which I am running in Oxford on 8-10 September 2026. The theme for this year is ‘Gender & Creativity.’ The full details are available via the GMS website here. I am delighted to be welcoming keynote papers from Kristen (whose artwork is the star of the show once again!), brilliant early career scholar Teresa Pilgrim, and the Into the Mystic film-makers Mirabelle Dominé-Walley and Luke Walker. Mirabelle and Luke will be in conversation with myself and my partner-in-crime Laura Kalas about the process of bringing The Book of Margery Kempe to the screen, which I am so excited about! The conference will also involve an exhibition and showcase of creative work, so it’s going to be enormous fun! Abstracts are due by 13 April 2026 to my email address (laura.varnam [at] univ.ox.ac.uk) and any queries let me know. I’m very grateful to the University of Oxford’s John Fell Fund and the University College Overbrook Research Fund for supporting the conference, along with the Gender & Medieval Studies group, and the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship.

Updates: The Guild of Medievalist Makers!

Back in April 2025, myself, Kristen, and dear friend Eleanor Baker launched The Guild of Medievalist Makers. We’ve had a bumper year and you can read all about it on our Year in Review blogpost on our website.

In October, Catherine Clarke and I ran a ‘Creativity in the Classroom’ workshop at the ‘Chaucer Our Contemporary’ event in London (which I wrote up for the Guild blog here, including the prompts for use in the classroom- we hope they will be useful in schools and in university classrooms too!).

In January, both Kristen and myself were invited to give talks at the Creative Medievalisms symposium in Cambridge, organised by Anthony Bale. That was such an incredible couple of days and it was great to connect to other colleagues engaged in creative-critical practice. Thank you so much, Anthony, for inviting us!

Readings and Events

It’s been a bumper few months for poetry events too. As well as reading my poetry at the symposium last month, and in college at the Univ Library’s poetry evening last term in hall, I also popped over to Cambridge last October to talk about my Margery Kempe poetry as part of a seminar series on ‘Staging the Middle Ages: Authenticity, Anachronism, and Adapting The Book of Margery Kempe.’ Thank you to playwright Nadia Lines for inviting me! (And if you get chance to catch Nadia’s stage version of Kempe’s Book, do check it out, it’s fantastic!).

Then in November, my dear friend and fellow Guild member Susie Campbell was kind enough to invite me to join her at Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford for the launch of her extraordinary new poetry collection Wastelands. We had a fantastic time discussing medievalism, modernism, and monstrosity in conversation with Kate McLoughlin.

In October, I was back, back, back again on Backlisted for the Hallowe’en episode, with dear friends Andrew Male, Andy Miller, and Una McCormack, and this time were talking about Wuthering Heights! This was enormous fun (and as you’ll hear, I tried my very best to make it all about Daphne du Maurier too, haha! #sorrynotsorry as the kids say).

So far this term, I’ve had my ‘hosting’ hat on a number of times, co-convening our Medieval English Research Seminar with Dan Wakelin and it’s been a pleasure to introduce papers on medievalism given by Stacie Vos and my dear friend Rachel Moss (medievalists should check out her new research network MATER: Medievalists Against The Extreme Right).

I also invited Catherine Clarke back to Univ to speak to our Shakespeare Society about her wonderful book A History of England in 25 Poems. We had a fantastic conversation together about poetry as time travel, the radical empathy that poetry offers as a mode of creative criticism, and why the public are more enthusiastic than ever about the Middle Ages! Catherine also introduced to me to the brilliant poet Shakespeare Okuni whose new book A Twist of Rotten Silk, or Words to That Effect is an incredible creative response to the works of William Shakespeare. I was lucky enough to have coffee with Shakespeare last week and I’m very inspired by his work! I am sure that more collaborations will be afoot with Catherine and with Shakespeare in due course!

Publications!

It’s been a really exciting time for publications by friends of mine recently! This month, my former Team English student Philly Malicka published her debut novel, a psychological thriller and courtroom drama called In Her Defence. The novel has been chosen by Reese Witherspoon’s book club, which is incredibly exciting! And very well deserved as it’s brilliant! Congratulations to Philly, and we look forward to welcoming her back to Univ soon to talk about the novel! (Watch this space!)

This month also saw the launch event for my dear friend Laura Richmond‘s stunning memoir of maternal mental health, All My Worldly Joy. It was such a pleasure to attend the launch event last night at the Leatherseller’s Company in London and to hear Laura read from her important and beautiful book. I am also over the moon that Laura included a line from one of my poems in the epigraph to one of her chapters! (The line was ‘a giving up is a making room’ and it came from my poem ‘A New Woman at Beowulf’s Funeral Pyre.’) Congratulations, Laura, and thank you! It’s so wonderful to know that my poem connected with you and it’s my honour to have my words within your stunning book.

Before Christmas, my magnificent friend Rob Shearman published two new Doctor Who novelisations, based on his Big Finish audio dramas, Jubilee and The Chimes of Midnight. Rob is an incredible writer- his ‘choose your own adventure’ collection of 101 short stories We All Hear Stories in the Dark is nothing short of a masterpiece!- and of course both Jubilee and Chimes are brilliant. Chimes is especially appealing to the non-Doctor Who fan (I believe such people might exist?!) because it plays so cleverly with the Edwardian ghost story. It also features a minor character whose name you might recognise… a certain Mrs Varnam! (I’m tickled pink to be a teeny, tiny part of the Whoniverse!)

It’s also been a rather exciting month for me on the publication front because I was lucky enough to have three of my Beowulf-inspired poems published in the latest issue of The Rialto (here).

Not only is The Rialto a dream publication for me (-it was the first poetry magazine I subscribed to as a teenager!), but one of the poems that they accepted was written for, and inspired by, the work of my dear friend Teresa Pilgrim, without whose work (and friendship!) this particular poem would never have been written.

Teresa published a wonderful article on ‘Female Masculinity in the Embodied Beowulf Wetlands’ in Medieval Feminist Forum and her theorisation of Grendel’s Mother as ‘unfaest’ (in contrast to oppressive patriarchal ‘faestness’ of the masculine economy of the original poem) was hugely influential as I wrote this queer love poem. Those of you who know the Old English elegy Wulf and Eadwacer will also recognise some of the vocabulary here- geador ‘together’ is the final word of that poem, which has a refrain ungelic is us ‘un-alike is/are us/we’. I’ve always been fascinated by the word ungelic in particular because the –lic suffix means ‘like or relating to’ and the un– prefix expresses negation, so the word embodies both the assertion and refusal of likeness simultaneously. And I thought that was pretty queer and wonderful business!

Teresa has been an invaluable support and sounding board for my poetry, and I am so grateful!

***

Well, that’s all folks!! (Thank goodness!!) Do check out the CFPS for the conference and special issue if you’re a medievalist, and do check out the amazing new books by Susie, Shakespeare, Philly, Laura, and Rob! I’m so lucky to know such talented people!

Thanks for reading!

In January, my dear friend Antonia Taylor was running the ‘Being Seen 2026’ challenge on social media and in her newsletter ‘The Conversation’. Antonia is phenomenal– she runs her own PR company, last year she launched a white paper on women’s visibility and leadership in business, and she’s a brilliant poet. Antonia and I met as a result of both of us being chosen, along with Jade Cuttle, as the winners of the Nine Arches Press ‘Primers’ competition back in 2023 and I’m honoured that my poems sit alongside hers in the volume that came out in 2024. This is an example of just one of the ways in which poetry creates and sustains connection, and I’ve been deeply grateful for Antonia’s feedback on my work as we’ve chatted, and read together at events, since 2023.

I subscribe to Antonia’s newsletter and I was very intrigued by her ‘Being Seen’ challenge for 2026, encouraging women in business to think about what it means to increase their visibility– on social media, as leaders of conversations in the workplace and the wider world, as a way of being more intentional about collaborations, and more. And Antonia has also been thinking about the vulnerabilities that this visibility might bring with it. I was very struck by this quotation from one of Antonia’s collaborators in week 4 of the ‘Being Seen’ challenging, Vicki Knights:

Model the behaviour you’re inviting others into
I don’t teach visibility as a theory. I share my lived experience of showing up publicly, often imperfectly and sometimes vulnerably. I talk openly about confidence wobbling, about not wanting to perform and about inspiration dipping. That modelling gives people permission to show up in a way that feels more human and less exhausting. Leadership visibility isn’t about positioning yourself above your audience. It’s about walking alongside them and showing what’s possible when you stop pretending you’ve got it all figured out. [Vicki Knights]

Giving people ‘permission to show up in a way that feels more human and less exhausting’ really chimed with me, particularly as a motivator for my blogposts about academic life, aimed at graduate students and early career researchers, but also, in many ways, aimed at my own younger self.

When I started my teaching job in Oxford, I was surrounded by wonderful colleagues but they were also significantly more experienced than me and far more advanced in their careers. And while I took to teaching like a duck to water (if I do say so myself!!), I found sustaining a research practice really challenging with so many competing demands on my time (– to which my older, much busier self now says, ‘you sweet summer child’!) but also I was really struggling to achieve ‘success’ in my research.

It took me ten years to publish my monograph (see this post for the gory details of that!) and I had what has to have been one of the worst runs of peer review luck ever. The reviewers did not like my work. No they did not. But because I was young, and junior, and trying to ‘perform’ academic confidence, I found it really difficult to ‘be seen’ in that vulnerability. I was ashamed to tell anyone that I kept getting these awful reviews and so article after article would get rejected and thrust into a deep drawer never to be thought about again. (Blogposts on this topic rejection and resubmission here and on our old friend imposter syndrome here).

But actually, some of those reviews were not only unfair but they were unhelpful and just plain wrong! And once I started to have conversations with mentors and friends, I started to realise that. And thanks to the support of some wonderful senior women, and to increasing collaborations with my peers (in particular my partner-in-crime Laura Kalas!), things were on the up! My writing improved, my success rate with peer-reviewed work sent to journals improved, but I also pushed back against the dreaded ‘Reviewer 2’ when I felt that the criticism was unwarranted or unjustified. And sometimes that worked! I’d do the revisions that seemed reasonable to me and if that wasn’t acceptable, I’d occasionally pull my work and send it somewhere else.

(As a side note, I wish someone had told me that if you got a rejection, you could just take what’s useful from that process, rejig the article, and send it somewhere else asap- the rejection is not the end of the journey! Submitting to poetry magazines has definitely taught me to be more blasé about rejection too– you get rejected far more often than you get accepted, so I just turn that thing around and send it out again!).

So I’ve now ‘got it all figured out’, to go back to Vicki’s comment above, right? Reader, I have not! Let me explain– in particular, with reference to a chapter that I recently wrote for a book, in that lovely quiet period between the end of Christmas and the beginning of term here in Oxford. I had been putting this chapter off for months… or to be absolutely honest (and my apologies to the colleague who asked me to write it) a couple of years! (I know, I know– have I become the annoying senior-ish scholar who holds up the volume?! AITA?!). But let me explain properly.

Writing The Chapter

Before the pandemic, an exciting opportunity came my way to write a chapter about the ‘Church as a Body’ in the Middle Ages. Now this was right up my street in 2020– my monograph (The Church as Sacred Space in Middle English Literature and Culture) had finally been published in 2018, and with the manuscript submitted in 2016, all of this material was fairly fresh in my mind. Roll on to 2022, when we’d experienced a pandemic, my teaching commitments had shifted, various things in my research life (hello poetry and creative criticism!) and personal life had changed in different ways, and… oh dear. I did not feel like ‘An Expert on the Church in the Middle Ages’ any more. And then more stuff came up, and life happened, and there were extensions to the deadline (and I kept thinking, phew, I’ve still got time!), and I had some more miserable peer review feedback and rejections… and then I got myself into a headspace where I just… Could Not. I could not write this chapter. It was beyond me. I did not have the knowledge to write this chapter. I was screwed. (And also I could clearly never see my dear friend and colleague who commissioned the chapter ever again– the only option would be to leave the country!)

But then I had lunch with this lovely colleague and also with my former DPhil supervisor (one of the wisest women I know) and I admitted that I was so embarrassed that I hadn’t written the essay yet and as we started to talk about it, a couple of things happened. Firstly, their encouragement and support made me think that maybe I can do this, and off the top of my head I threw out some ideas that sort of made sense. Huh, maybe I do remember some of this stuff after all!

So I got all the books together that I needed for the chapter, I brainstormed some ideas (there was more than I thought!), and I made a plan of everything that I would need to reread in order to give myself a fighting chance of writing this chapter. I then decided that if I had two clear weeks after Christmas where I could lock myself down and do nothing else, I could at least give it a shot.

And what happened? I wrote it. Yep, I held my nerve and I wrote it. [And then I felt like an idiot for making such a big deal out of it!!!]

The chapter was over the word limit (turns out I didn’t have nothing to say, I had a lot to say!) and while my colleague hasn’t sent me the feedback on it yet (so it could still be rubbish, haha!), but you know what? I will be delighted to revise it because the key thing here is that I did it. I hadn’t forgotten all of this material that I once knew like the back of my hand. If anything, the changes in my academic career and writing life since I finished my monograph in 2016 (ten years ago, OMG) had equipped me with the skills to reevaluate some of the material. I had new ideas! Better ideas! (Apologies, monograph, I love you… but why didn’t I have a chapter on the Eucharist and Christ’s real presence in the church as a result of transubstantiation? We will never know!).

Teachable Moments

So what did I learn from this process and how might it help you, the reader?

• Don’t talk yourself out of something! The more I told myself I couldn’t do it, the more I believed it. And that’s not helpful! Get out of your own way!
• HOLD YOUR NERVE. The excellent advice that I received when I was writing my monograph still works brilliantly today. Just hold your nerve and DO IT.
• Sometimes you do need to ‘lock in’ and ‘lock down.’ Turn off social media, tell some accountability buddies what you’re doing, and ringfence a space in your diary.
• In the course of an academic career, I think it’s natural that your research interests change and develop. You learn new skills, you become interested in new areas, but that doesn’t mean that you ‘lose’ everything you used to know. You will need to remind yourself of it, but it’s still there. (Just like re-teaching a course or topic that you haven’t taught for a couple of years– go back over the material, you’ve got this!). I spent a day and a half carefully rereading my own monograph page by page. And you know what? It’s pretty decent and I enjoyed it! And I got back into the headspace of that work.
• Speaking of headspace, to remind myself of the ‘me who was a church expert,’ I started listening to the classical music that I wrote my DPhil to when I was a grad student. It’s amazing how music enables you to time travel, it really helped!
• I located the baggage by having a couple of really good conversations with family members and friends about where some of the anxiety about this chapter might have been coming from. I had not found the monograph process an easy one, so maybe some of that anxiety was a legacy of the topic. Since 2019 I’d been dealing with some other rather upsetting feedback that I’d internalised and I’d also had a really disappointing peer review experience over the last couple of years where despite rewriting an article twice, the journal rejected it. So it was no wonder I was carrying some baggage into this particular chapter!

And ultimately, I really, really enjoyed getting back to my ‘primary’ field of research. I found some really cool things to write about– texts that hadn’t made their way into my book (I even tackled six lines of Piers Plowman, a text that quite frankly is my Archnemesis, as my students know very well!) and I did a deep dive into the biblical foundations of the idea of the Christian church as the body of Christ (and had, quite honestly, a thrilling New Years eve, making a word document of biblical quotations. Yes, I know how to party!).

I await my colleague’s feedback with bated breath, of course, but I was able to go into this term breathing much more easily knowing that not only had I finally fulfilled my overdue commitment (with many, many apologies! Mea culpa!) but I’d also made some peace with a former version of myself. I’m still here, though changed, and if I can hold my nerve, I can do it.

And I hope that whatever challenge you are facing in your academic writing, or any other kind of writing, at the moment, you can too. Putting yourself out there, being seen, by colleagues, students, the public, even by yourself, is hard. But as Antonia has been modelling for women in business and the wider world, it does give others permission to show up in a way that feels more human, more compassionate, and more real.

Hello everyone! As the new term approaches, I’ve been attending and taking part in some exciting events with historian colleagues. First up, I want to give a big shoutout and a hearty recommendation to my dear friend and colleague Catherine Clarke‘s new book A History of England in 25 Poems, published this month by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin. The cover is just gorgeous! And wait til you hear what’s inside!!

This is from the blurb:

This is the history of England told in a new way: glimpsed through twenty-five remarkable poems written down between the eighth century and today, which connect us directly with the nation’s past, and the experiences, emotions and imaginations of those who lived it.

These poems open windows onto wildly different worlds- from the public to the intimate, the witty to the savage, from the playful to the wistful. They take us onto battlefields, inside royal courts, down coal mines, and below stairs in great houses. Their creators, witnesses to events from the Great Fire of London to the Miners’ Strike, range from the famous to the forgotten, yet each invites us into an immersive encounter with their own time.

I absolutely love the premise of this book, that poems are a ‘portal to the past’ and the book begins with a brilliant example of a real wormhole in a seventeenth century book- a bookworm’s journey through the text!- that becomes a fantastic metaphor for the time travel that takes place when we read poetry. And this is a time travel that doesn’t just take us back, as Catherine writes, ‘to the events of history, but into the experiences, emotions and imaginations of those people living and breathing through it’ (p.ix). Thinking about the emotional experience of historical events is an idea very close to my heart!

Last week I was lucky enough to go to the launch event for Catherine’s book at the Institute of Historical Research in London, where Catherine was in conversation with the amazing poet Hannah Lowe.

It was an absolutely magnificent discussion- so wide-ranging and really inspiring as for a fellow poet! I really liked the way that Catherine talked about the importance of multivocality in her book- this is a history in which lots of different voices from the past are represented (and I love the fact that at the end of the book there are blank pages ‘for any of your own poem choices that you would like to add to this book’, so that the reader can continue to develop the history for themselves!). The importance of diversity and the recovery of marginalised voices is, of course, crucial to my Beowulf project so I was cheering along to this! One of the poems in Catherine’s book (no spoilers!) is in the voice of a child and I was thinking about the voices of medieval children- real, lost, and imagined- back in June when I was writing about the absent presence of Margery Kempe’s fourteen children in her Book.

I also really liked the way in which both Catherine and Hannah talked about time and scale in poetry. Poetry frees us from linear chronology (which makes for a more exciting and experimental kind of history!) and it allows us to think about grand events often through the smallest and most personal of objects (and Hannah shared an image of some wall hangings from her own family history). Hannah also talked about the way in which poetry enables us to write into uncertainty and I think this is a really generative way of thinking about history and the past. In a poem we don’t have to resolve the ambiguities!

Catherine argued really powerfully for the capacity of poetry to model radical empathy, something that is more important than ever in the times we live in, and this is very much a driving force of my work on Grendel’s Mother- who I argue is only a ‘monster’ when read through the patriarchal and misogynistic eyes of the Beowulf-poet!

There was also a really fascinating discussion of poetic form, something I’ve also been thinking about a lot across my various projects- how we might subvert the associations of the sonnet by writing in that form in the present day, for example. (And this is definitely something I’ve taken up in my most recent work- watch this space!)

A huge thank you to Catherine and Hannah for a fantastic event- and do check out Catherine’s book! Available in all good book shops!

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At the end of last week I then attended another event that had stories at its core- a symposium on ‘Stories, Places, Violence’ at St John’s College, Oxford, in association with the (Hi)Stories of Violence at the Tower of London project, a John Fell Funded collaboration between the University of Oxford (run by Hannah Skoda and Catherine Jenkinson) and the Historic Royal Palaces team at the Tower of London.

I was lucky enough to be invited to the Tower back in March this year as part of a discussion group to give feedback on the project’s aims and objectives, thinking about the ways in which creative histories might provide a way to think about the ways in which the Tower’s often bloody history has been narrated and represented from the Middle Ages to the present day. It’s amazing the extent to which public and popular perceptions of the Tower are shaped by the stories of torture, beheadings, and violence, often to the detriment of the other stories that might be told. We discussed the dangers of sensationalism when telling violent histories but also thought about the ethical responsibilities that we have as historians and academics to bear witness to these acts of violence (not least given what is going on in the world at present, such as the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza). I attended the event with my poet hat on and in Trinity Term, Hannah and Catherine then got in touch to tell me about their September symposium and to ask me whether I might like to take part!

I was honoured – and also rather nervous – because they asked me whether I might be able to write a poem for the symposium! I honestly wasn’t sure if I would be able to- I’m not an expert on the Tower and the historical materials that they were focusing on (mostly, although not all, from the early modern period onwards) were quite outside my comfort zone! But both Catherine and Hannah kindly sent me the most wonderful sources and materials (including materials on women and families, and the impact of violences), so I thought I’d give it a go!

And I’m delighted to report that I was able to write a long-ish narrative poem about witnessing violence at the Tower, thinking about the variety of voices that might be heard there and what stories they might tell about their experiences- beyond the usual stories of Anne Boleyn and co! At the symposium, I gave a fifteen minute talk about how we might use creative response as a way of witnessing violence and encouraging exactly the kind of empathy that Catherine Clarke was talking about, and then I read my poem! The audience were very kind and enthusiastic, which was such a relief! So perhaps I might develop this project in the future!

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I have one more thing to flag up before I finish, and that’s a special event that I’m taking part in on 4th October in London, with the brilliant Catherine Clarke, on Chaucer!

‘Chaucer our Contemporary: Teaching, Reading and Rewriting Medieval Literature Today’ is a free event for school teachers who are teaching Chaucer for A level. I will be on a panel with the incredible poet Caroline Bergvall, in conversation with Catherine Clarke, called ‘Creating with Chaucer (and another medieval authors)’ and then Catherine and I will be co-running a workshop on creative activities in the classroom. If you’re an A level teacher, please come along! It should be a really fun day!

Thanks for reading, all! And happy ‘back to school’ September!!

Hello everyone! I thought it was about time I updated my blog as there’s been quite a lot going on!

Firstly, a new Beowulf poem and creative-critical essay!

My poem (‘Against Misdirection’) was written for the wonderful ‘What is Creative Criticism?’ symposium that my Univ colleagues Joe Moshenska and Iris Pearson organised back in June 2024. Joe and Iris write about their vision for the colloquium in their introduction to the symposium report here, but the key task that speakers were set for their presentations was that they should in some way ‘do’ creative criticism. They should not only respond to one of the categories that we were debating (creative criticism, experimental criticism, creative non-fiction, literary non-fiction) but that the content of their presentation should in some way be a ‘doing’ of that category, rather than merely a description of it.

Naturally my primary creative-critical practice is rooted in poetry and so I wrote a new poem for the colloquium that aimed to show how creative writing might be a form of criticism. My poem enacted my response to Beowulf, offering a reading but also, additionally, a rewriting. A resistant and recuperative form of criticism that foregrounded the original poem’s misogyny and the violence that is frequently enacted against women, particularly in the outside world.

You can read my short reflective essay and find my poem, ‘Against Misdirection,’ here. I chose to respond to King Hrothgar’s hostile description of the route to Grendel’s Mother’s mere (which culminates in his declaration, nis þæt heoru stow! ‘that is not a pleasant place!’) by ‘overwriting’ his representation with Grendel’s Mother’s own welcome invitation to join her on the path to her home. The concept of ‘overwriting’ is indebted to Diane Watt’s scholarship (discussed in the article) which points out that women’s voices are frequently ‘overwritten’ by male writers in the Middle Ages, so here I thought it would be appropriate to use the master’s tools against them and have Grendel’s Mother ‘overwrite’ Hrothgar in her turn! (And as you can see from this peek at the poem itself, I literally overwrote the manuscript page upon which Hrothgar’s speech is inscribed! Yes, I was quite pleased with that idea, haha!)

I tried to use all of the details from the Beowulf poet’s original account (in lines 1357-82) but to reinterpret them from the perspective of a woman for whom they form part of her home. I researched the natural world in Old English poetry and the early medieval period, and I became fascinated by the Old English charms, many of which aim to perform a cleansing of space or the body by positioning themselves wið or ‘against’ something. I called my poem ‘Against Misdirection’ because I wanted it to be a charm against King Hrothgar’s misdirection of our understanding of the path to the mere and I was also really inspired by feminist activist movements such as Reclaim the Night, discussed in Finn Mackay’s book Radical Feminism: Feminist Activism in Movement and in the work of Teresa Pilgrim who has written so brilliantly on the wetlands and Grendel’s Mother. Many conversations with Teresa also alerted me to the ways in which women are often deterred from walking in nature because of fears for their safety– and I’ve certainly felt that fear in public space (sadly I’ve yet to meet a woman who hasn’t)– and so I wanted my poem to be a reclamation and a remapping of the route to the mere as a place of healing, memory, playfulness, and joy.

I was also, as the article explains, inspired by the notion of ‘desire lines’, as a geographical term (where people wear new footpaths into public space by walking the quickest route across grass) but also as a mode of poetic practice, particularly feminist poetic practice. If you’re not already aware of Kim Moore’s brilliant book Are You Judging Me Yet? Poetry and Everyday Sexism, get yourself a copy! It’s a superb work of creative criticism, combining prose and poetry, in a ‘choose your own adventure’ style. And recent poems by Ella Frears which included desires lines as a reading practice within an individual poem also contributed to my thinking.

So if that’s whetted your appetite, do pop over and read my post! And also enjoy all the other wonderful creative-critical essays and responses from the colloquium. It’s so nice to see the day’s discussions collated and curated for posterity!

***

Also on the subject of publications, I don’t think I’ve shared on here that I was lucky enough to have one of my Margery Kempe poems published in The Rialto earlier this year! What a treat! The Rialto was my first introduction to the world of poetry when I was a teenager so to have a poem in there is a life goal!!! My poem was in issue 102 for autumn 2024 and here’s the opening:

This poem will form part of my creative-critical work in the book I am currently working on about Margery Kempe in modern medievalism and here I was exploring the ways in which critics and modern adapters have created ‘their’ Kempe and how those representations contrast with ‘my’ Margery.

One of the interesting aspects of criticism on Kempe and her Book is how critics refer to her. We wouldn’t refer to Chaucer as Geoffrey but why is it easy to refer to Kempe as Margery? It’s frustrating to me that women writers are often referred to by their first names but there are caveats here! Margery Kempe’s fellow medieval woman writer is Julian of Norwich and Julian doesn’t have a surname, so ‘Margery & Julian’ are often referred to by their first names.

I also think that Kempe deliberately invites us into a relationship of intimacy and familiarity with her– I still often refer to her as Margery in my own work and that is also a mark of my affection for her and my sense of personal attachment to her! (I also refer to du Maurier as Daphne for similar reasons!). And yet, as feminists we need to be attentive to the impact of naming practices. My own relationship with Margery and her voice will be a major theme of my book, discussed in traditional academic prose and also enacted in my poetry, and I will also be thinking carefully about the way in which Margery refers to herself in her Book as ‘this creature’ (and you can read Ruth Evans’ wonderful essay about this technique, which she calls ‘autobiography in the third person’ in Laura Kalas and mine’s book Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe).

If you’d like to read the other Margery Kempe poems that I’ve published so far, check out this page on my website (I’m especially proud of ‘Margery Kempe in Tesco’!)

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And now for the conferences!

Since term ended in Oxford in the middle of June, I’ve been at two big conferences. First off I attended the Middle Ages in the Modern World conference at King’s College, London, organised by Rebecca Menmuir, Sarah Salih, and Josh Davies.

I was there partly with my Guild of Medievalist Makers hat on, running a stall to advertise the Guild. Eleanor made some wonderful bunting and we also debuted our new postcards and pin badges (with thanks to an Oxford Medieval Studies small grant for the postcards and also assisting up with the operating costs for our website!)

We were talking about the feminist theory that inspires our work and the ways in which we aim to bring more diverse stories and histories to modern audiences interested in the medieval. And we were thinking about the relationships between history, scholarship, and creative work and the responsibilities that we have both to the medieval women whose lives we are retelling (whether real or fictional) and to our modern audiences who are receiving those stories in the present day.

We had a fantastic three days of papers and presentations. It was a particular pleasure to hear Michael Eden’s plenary (check out his amazing artwork inspired by Gawain and the Green Knight!); the Public Chaucers discussions with Mary Flannery, poet Caroline Bergvall, and Euan Roger from the National Archive; and the paper by Mirabelle Dominé-Walley and Luke Walker who are currently making an amazing film about Margery Kempe called Into the Mystic. I’m very excited to hear further updates on that!

***

The week after MAMO I headed down to Canterbury for my favourite conference, the Gender and Medieval Studies conference, which this year had the theme of charity and care. It was wonderfully organised by Diane Heath and there were so many highlights!

Rachel Moss gave an amazing final plenary lecture called How do we build a truly feminist conference when the world is on fire? You can read about it here (and you may need a tissue because it had me in tears in the room, let me tell you!). Daisy Black ran an incredible storytelling workshop that was incredibly generative. There was a generative and inclusive roundtable on Unruly Wombs featuring my medieval besties Laura Kalas, Lucy Allen-Goss, Roberta Magnani, Daisy Black and Rachel Moss. And so much more!

(Speaking of Lucy, if you’re not already a subscriber to her substack, get on it because she’s a brilliant writer! And she kindly wrote a post about my Beowulf poetry a while ago which was so moving).

I spoke on a panel called ‘Care and Creativity in the Medieval Now’ and my paper was entitled ‘For Kepyng of my Chylde: Creative Criticism as Care for The Book of Margery Kempe.’ I was talking about the absent presence of Margery Kempe’s fourteen children in her Book and my paper also included (of course!) a longish narrative poem about the children, which I also hope to feature in my forthcoming book. It was such a pleasure to debut the poem in such a supportive environment and I’m very grateful for the kind feedback that I received.

I also had a particularly nice time at the conference because it was my birthday while I was there (everyone was so sweet to me and spoiled me all day!) and because the weekend after the conference there was an amazing Medieval Pageant and Festival in Canterbury! My other half came down to join the fun and we had a super time trying out different medieval crafts, visiting heritage sites, and seeing the parade which included the Wife of Bath! (She gets everywhere!!)

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So all in all, it’s been a cracking summer so far!! Thank you to all the conference organisers for having me and to all the wonderful colleagues, editors, writers, and friends who have supported my work over the last few months. It really means a lot!

Hello everyone! Last month, my colleagues Kristen Haas Curtis, Eleanor Baker, and I launched the Guild of Medievalist Makers! (Isn’t our logo fantastic?! It was designed by Eleanor and the cord around the edge relates to our key values as an organisation: Community, Outreach, Recognition and Development, CORD!).

GuMM (for short!) is a an organisation for medievalist academics who make things, either as a direct part of their scholarly practice or as an academic-adjacent practice and hobby. Kristen is a cartoonist, Eleanor is a lino-cut artist, and I’m a poet and our organisation aims to bring medievalist makers together for networking, collaboration, and to share knowledge and resources.

You can check out our website here where we are hosting blogposts from our makers: currently myself and Kristen have profiles.

We have a suggested reading page and we are also posting news about our events, including our Making Space events which are online zoom get-togethers to make space for creativity and co-working in our busy schedules. In the future, we will also be hosting and sponsoring events at conferences, including running workshops at the New Chaucer Society conference in Freiburg in 2026. You can follow us on Bluesky and Instagram to find out more and if you’re a medievalist maker who would like to join the Guild, fill out the form on our website here.

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In other news, two of my Grendel’s Mother poems are going to be included in Ana Sampson’s forthcoming anthology A Midnight Treasury of Macabre and Weird Poems (publishing in October 2025).

Doesn’t the cover look fantastic! I’m really grateful to Ana to inviting me to contribute. This is from the blurb:

A handsome tome of dark poetry to feed the fans of all things macabre, gothic, and weird.

The perfect book for fans of Edgar Allan Poe and, more widely, for those who love their dark side with a touch of horror. Poetry’s fascination with the weird and the macabre has a long literary history, and Sampson sates modern appetites with this curated collection of over 300 of the best poems published on the subject.

There is a fine and terrible tradition of poetry of the occult, the macabre, and the sinister, and this anthology will introduce the reader to both celebrated antiheroes like Keats’s serpentine Lamia and Christina Rossetti’s thirsty goblins, and less well-known figures from nightmare, such as Violet Fane’s deadly Victorian siren and Clare Pollard’s ultramodern Reynardine. From the gothic dreamscapes of Edgar Allan Poe to Coleridge’s unhallowed ocean, explore the mind’s dark places with poems that stretch back centuries to the latest terror from today’s bards. The sinister but seductive beauty of illustrators such as Harry Clarke accompany the poems in a volume that will speak to those drawn to the dark.

I can’t wait to receive my copy in the autumn! (One of my poems inspired by the dragon in Beowulf was included in Ana’s Gods & Monsters anthology and there is now a wonderful companion anthology called Heroes and Villains!).

***

I was lucky enough to host and participate in some great events at Univ and beyond in Hilary Term.

Back in February I was the respondent at the online book launch for my dear friend Laura Kalas and Roberta Magnani’s new book Women in Christianity in the Medieval Age 1000-1500 which is published by Routledge.

This is the blurb of the book:

‘This volume offers a comprehensive introduction to and investigation of the multivocality of women’s experience in the Middle Ages. In medieval Europe women saw their role in the Christian Church and society progressively confined to conflicting models of femininity epitomised by the dichotomy of Eve/Mary. Classical views of gender, predicated on misogynistic dichotomies which confined women to matter and the corruption of the flesh, were consolidated in powerful male-dominated clerical institutions and widely disseminated. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, however, women’s corporeality and somatic spirituality contributed to and influenced burgeoning modes of piety centred around the cult of the Virgin Mary and the veneration of the suffering body of Christ on the Cross. This shift in devotional practices afforded women as bodily beings the space for an increased level of self-expression, self-realisation, and authority. Ranging from philosophical and theological enquiry to education and art, as well as medical sciences and popular beliefs, the essays in this collection account for the complexities and richness of the conceptualisations and lived experiences of medieval Christian women. The book will be especially relevant to students and scholars of religion and history with an interest in medieval studies and gender. Whilst expounding the key strands of thinking in the field, it engages with and contributes to some of the latest scholarly research.’

I’ve already made use of the book with my graduate students and I’m sure it will fast become an essential volume for scholars!

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In March, my dear friend Daisy Black, academic and storyteller, came to Univ to perform her latest medieval story, Yde and Olive: A Medieval Lesbian Romance, and to run a ‘storytelling for medievalists’ workshop that was attended by students and academics from across the university. I learned a lot from the workshop myself too!

You can read my write-up on the Univ website here and find out more about Daisy’s performances (including tour dates) on her website here.

Daisy and I are speaking on a panel together at the MAMO conference in July: the Middle Ages in the Modern World. Our panel is called ‘Visibility, Connectivity, Creativity: Honouring Medieval Women’s Stories in the Modern World’ and I’ll be talking about my Beowulf-inspired poetry, focusing on Queen Wealhtheow (my title is ‘Wealhtheow on the Whale-Road and Beyond: Poems for Heorot’s Queen and Reflections on Writing Her Story / Herstory.’) We’ll be joined by graduate student Sheila Passey who will be talking about the novel she is working on inspired by Aethelflaed, Lady of Mercia, and we’ll be talking about feminist adaptation of early medieval women’s stories across different genres.

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Back in March, I visited a local primary school with my Beowulf hat on to talk to the brilliant Year 5 students about the original poem. They’d been studying Beowulf’s fights with Grendel and his Mother in the children’s version by Brian Patten and I spent an hour with the students teaching them some Old English language, reading from the poem in the original, and answering their many wonderful questions! I was so impressed with how engaged they were with the original story and the variety of imaginative questions they askedme. It’s so heartening to see that Beowulf is being taught in schools- thank you to Windmill school and the Year 5 teachers and students for giving me such a warm welcome!

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I had another exciting jolly out of Oxford in March when I was invited to take part in a workshop at the Tower of London held by the project team working on ‘(Hi)stories of Violence: Mythmaking, Imprisonment, and the Cultural Identity of the Tower of London.‘ This is a project funded by Oxford’s John Fell Fund in collaboration with Historic Royal Palaces and it was fascinating to hear about the work they were doing. The research team are exploring ‘how the Tower of London has been conceptualized in the cultural imagination from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century,’ noting that while ‘the Tower was a site of torture for only a small portion of its history, it has come to be associated with oppression and state violence.’

I was fascinated by the research questions under discussion, particularly the role of creative practice and storytelling in modern encounters with the Tower as a visitor:

I look forward to following the work of the project and seeing how it develops!

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Thanks again to all the brilliant people I’ve had the opportunity to work with over the last few months, it’s been a pleasure!

I’m reposting one of my poems on my blog that was previously published by MIR Online a couple of years ago. It’s a poem in the voice of the anonymous Geatish woman who mourns at Beowulf‘s funeral pyre at the end of the poem (but we never hear what she says!)

I’ve also written a second poem inspired by this scene, which was published by Osmosis Press in 2022. You can find it here and I also wrote a blogpost about the two poems and their relationship with Beowulf itself here.

Thank you for reading!

Back in 2023 I published a creative-critical essay and poem in Annie Journal, edited by Charley Barnes and Wendy Allen. I’m resharing the essay as a PDF here on my website.

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Welcome.

That isn’t usually the way that a conversation about Beowulf begins…

To read more about my poetry project for the women of Beowulf, please check out my Beowulf page.

Hello everyone! I’m delighted to be hosting another guest post this week, this time by the brilliant author, teacher, and mentor Anna Vaught (soon to be Dr Vaught, after the viva later this year!). Huge thanks to Anna for writing this piece. The creative writing PhD ‘by published works’ is quite a unique project and I confess that I didn’t entirely know what it was until I followed Anna’s journey! Really grateful to her for writing this post and giving us her top tips!

You can find Anna on social media here: Twitter/X and Instagram.

19.5.25 Edited to add: Dr Vaught successfully defended her thesis and you can now read it here!

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On the PhD by Published Works in Creative Writing. (Contains the immortal phrase, ‘Doing a PhD was my publishing rehab.’)

by Anna Vaught

In June, I submitted a PhD by Published Works in Creative Writing. I would like to tell you about it, in part because it has changed the trajectory of everything I am doing and, as I have said elsewhere, has lit a fire under me. I should tell you that I have no expectations of an academic career, but I will be building my own teaching platform, looking out for the possibility of occasional lectures and writing a book off the back of it. I did it for joy, rebellion – this is manifold; more on which, later – interest and a keen sense of pulling my books together, because there was a discrete thread which was important. 

Here we are: 

‘Go there on a wing in your imagination’: magical realism as therapeutic writing in Saving Lucia and These Envoys of Beauty. A critical and creative approach to exploring the function of magical realism as therapeutic writing in novel Saving Lucia and memoir in-essays, These Envoys of Beauty. Anna Catherine Vaught. Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (by Published Works) York St John University School of Humanities June 2024. 

Why this and why now? This October, my tenth sole-authored book is published and my eleventh next year. I have only been writing for seven years so that is much to get out in the world in that time. I have also written a lot of articles, reviews, features and have had much work included in anthologies. I like to write, and I work quickly. I am also a bookworm and someone who misses writing critically at length, so to put that all together, here we are! I have explored how magical realism is used both directly and indirectly in my work to explore trauma and interrogated, as they say, its therapeutic value. 

Oh okay. So, you wrote a PhD about your own work? Right. 

Not so fast. 

So, the PhD by this means has two routes. You might – although the terms are used interchangeably – write a book as you go, together with a critical component in which you look at the text and your methodology. These two components are then examined, plus there will be a viva, the spoken defence, of course. Or you might travel the retrospective road, as I did. Already published work is written about in a critical component. Length varies, but across the universities I have explored, the critical component is between 10,000 and 25,000 words. My university asked for the upper limit and, while you have seen in the title that I have listed two of my books, these are only the focus. There is careful reference to eight more, so that as well as the thesis, I am submitting ten books as part of the examination. I very much appreciate the person acting as my external examiner here! As I understand it, the retrospective route is more frequently taken by academics in post and across disciplines who have a body of published work behind them, but several universities are open to the likes of me: somebody with a hefty list of publications (though obviously no academic pieces because I have never been an academic). I think the PhD by Published Works in this retrospective model is the most wonderful thing. 

Yes, but you have still written only on your own works. 

Oh no no no. 

The thrust of the critical component is that I needed to situate my books within a literary mode, which here was magical realism. To do this, I had to be able to write of my own methodology but also with expertise on magical realism. Going further, on magical realism, its inception and history, canon, intriguing bits within it – such as García Márquez stating that there was nothing in his books which was not true, or that what we were beholding was, in fact, the energetic workings of the Caribbean imagination, I needed definitions and context, interest and then critical material, which I took from reviews and academic pieces. Everything needed to surround what I said of my own work, and be woven together carefully so we had a sturdy argument. It was essential to offer peer reviews of my work, so I further wove in academic articles and critical reviews; where, particularly with the memoir, these lacked, I solicited them – please be aware you need to have enough self-regard to do this – from academics and PGRs. To show (contemporaneous) peer writing, I had extended sections of close reading on a small selection of magical realist texts, with critical work on this where it existed. 

The next bit is personal, and it may seem odd to readers. You might think, ‘This does not sound academically rigorous or exacting.’ Here was the rub, though. I am a trauma survivor. What I went through over an extended period within a conspiracy of silence had a profound effect on me and influenced the way my brain works, how I think, what I notice and, in the end, how I write. I am telling you about my childhood and adolescence. I live with the fallout of all it now and manage the after-effects of developmental trauma. As a result of it, I have dissociative episodes, particularly in response to stress and threat, and have managed many mental health adventures over the decades. When I was writing the doctorate, I was having specialist trauma therapy with EMDR to help stabilise and retrain me, because my brain is oddly wired. At the same time, I was managing a formal complaint about frankly inhumane hospital treatment for my family, and that was deeply triggering. You must remember that I have experienced much gaslighting from my immediate family and from the medical establishment and I learned to cope, using my imagination, then reading, then writing. Memoir is embedded across my fiction. 

What is going on here? Sounds like an autobiography to me. I have argued that I built a new house here. Across all my books, in different forms and genres, the magical realist mode is embraced and explored. I aimed to show what it might have to do with short fiction and, importantly, with memoir. Why was it the natural mode for me? What was the origin of all this? 

In brief, I thought like a magical realist – there is a section of my doctorate which is titled, ‘I was born a magical realist.’ Are you beginning to see why? I have read and studied a lot on trauma and my heroes here are Judith Herman and Bessel Van der Kolk. Everything I have written explores sustained trauma in one form and another and everything is closest to a magical realist mode because this is where instinct led me. However, this was a Creative Writing PhD and the thing I found hard – the only thing where I felt I was losing my way – was how to compress my learning on mental health, psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience with a trauma specialism so that the topic did not weigh too heavily on the critical component. What I wrote had to be focused on creative writing topics, and this was a tricky balance. I hope I navigated it. Certainly, there was a distinct way in which I had learned, through necessity, to think; I allied that with my reading and in the thesis explained how we thus got to all my books. 

You might know that there is a corpus of work on magical realism and trauma, and usually regarding Latin American literature and postcolonial literature, and one argument is that magical realism is a way of writing indirectly about trauma and intergenerational trauma. I argue that the mode is wonderfully expansive – I agree with leading critics on it that we may regard it as a global and expanding literature – and may also be used as part of direct expression and this I tried to show in discussion of my own writing. Finally, I had a corpus of knowledge about trauma from Freud but also from theorists in trauma studies such as Cathy Caruth: all of that had to be included but with as deft a hand as possible, because it’s such a low word count. At some point, you will be able to see all of this, but not yet as I am waiting for my viva. 

There is one important thing which I could not address in the critical component as much as I would have liked: the notion of the thesis itself as testimony. That had heft. It felt like evidence. In the appendices you will find a dedication to trauma survivors. 

So here are thoughts and pieces of information, the latter points being to do with potential pitfalls. 

If you are thinking of this route, there is a superb article in TEXT by Maggie Butt https://textjournal.scholasticahq.com/article/28309.pdf It’s called, ‘One I Made Earlier’ and I devoured it. In fact, I found it so helpful that, in my own conclusion, I used the conclusion here. Had I done this and how – a wonderful summary of what one might read. 

‘I am a hopeful person. I approach the examination of a PhD with anticipation and optimism. Whether this is a practice-based ‘traditional’ PhD, or a PhD by Publication, I want to read creative work which is fresh and unlike anything I’ve read before. I want to be affected by it, excited by it, haunted by it, and to carry it with me. I want to read critical work which opens a window on why and how that work was produced, what drove it, what makes it cohesive as a body of work, and what other writers might learn. I want to hear a writer talk about their work in a way that sheds new light on some aspect of creative writing, for example craft or theme or style or genre or the psychology or philosophy of writing. I want to come away feeling enlightened and grateful. I want to feel certain that a new house has been built (or at least foundations laid) in the city that is our subject discipline.’ 

Butt looks at both ways of doing this PhD and thinks more broadly – and optimistically – of what she would hope to see, noting that you cannot discuss what you have built or explain how it is fresh, original, a sturdy new contribution to knowledge, without understanding what else there is. 

1. What did I discover? I am going in hard here. My third novel, Saving Lucia, was published at the start of the first lockdown and I felt (tiny in context) that it vanished into obscurity. What I did not know, until I started thinking about the doctorate and then writing it, was that leading Joyce scholars read it. Rumour has it, there was shouting and crying in my house when this was discovered. My work is discussed in two books. I did not know. It was a revelation. May you have happy surprises, too. 
2. Be aware that, for most universities, they will want someone who is a graduate of that university. If you went to a university without a Creative Writing department, they would not take you on as a doctoral student, even if, in my case, some of the leading literary scholars on topic are at that university. It cannot be a Literature department. 
3. How would I get references if I could not get them from a university, you ask? As I understand it, references may be obtained from your publishers. Mine were from universities, not because those were universities I had attended, but where I had done occasional lectures or mentoring and where my books were taught and with whom I had subsequently done a workshop because of that. Entry requirements vary. Some will be first degree, some ask for an MA, but there is flexibility and there are some arguments to be made. Education is a privilege for many and therefore, I applaud those universities who will flex in looking at a substantial body of work. 
4. I know that, sometimes, those studying a Creative Writing PhD where the book is written at the same time, may find it tricky to shift between creative and critical work. If the very thought troubles you, I wonder if this retrospective route could be a good bet? 
5. I have included a lot of work as part of the examination. However, I have read two Creative Writing PhDs by Published Works (different universities) where one published text was used. There will be variation, but a key word tends to be ‘substantial.’ 
6. I have done the whole thing online, with my supervisions on Teams and even my viva will be online. I have also been able to do it on top of working and parenting and then the additional complexities of life for me and for our family. 
7. I did not get funding, but my fees were £2,400 payable in three instalments over a year. 
8. I want to say that it was a joyous and blessed relief to be writing critically. I realised how much I loved it and how I had missed it, and I felt like 25k was nowhere near enough for the close readings I would have liked to do. I do want to say, also, though it is unlikely to make me popular, that I have really struggled with the publishing industry. It is wildly competitive, has a lot to do with luck and truly, I had frequently felt unsupported. Here was a pause. Here was something to work on that felt unfettered and separate from the entanglements of the market and (I have left the country so you cannot find me now: I am in hiding) some of the entanglements of ego that had left me in pieces. Much work needs to be done in publishing to prevent things like this – the bullying, the chaos which result, and it might sound extraordinary, but doing a PhD was my publishing rehab. 
9. Total joys to share! Reading, interviewing the writers whose work I featured (and to whom I felt massively inferior – it is ALL coming out now, but remember my background). The fact I was even considered for this opportunity was amazing. 
10. Something wonderful: the sense of consolidation, of explaining what I had been up to all along – and please understand that I do not just mean in my recent writing career but in the machinations of my thought and imagination all my remembered history – now, that was satisfying. I liked its clarity. 
11. I think that going back to critical work has made me focus on economy and on different modes of expression and I think this has been helpful for the development of my creative writing. I am, you see, inclined to be (coughs) wordy. It is not that I do not appreciate taut, lean writing, but more that when I get hold of words, I want ALL of them. I am greedy for language, and I want ALL the sweeties in the shop. This is, of course, exceptionally poor practice. I am just talking about me, though. I am fine cutting swathes of others’ work. The critical component of the PhD has pushed me back towards constriction, and it is a thrill. My new novel, my work in progress, is different, better, because of it. 
12. If you are thinking of doing a Creative Writing PhD, either route, you need to understand that it is a sustained piece of critical writing. Moreover, you need to know a good deal – expertise is demanded of you – to be able to select what is most germane and know what needs to go. It is as simple as that. Approach it like a scientist. It is granular; forensic. 
13. At the time of writing this, I am considering how I might use the thesis as the basis for a book on magical realism and trauma; something that is accessible and which blends in elements of memoir. I have so much more to say. 
14. Finally – and this is not a target – I have been here twice before. I had a place at Oxford after graduation but could not do it because of being a carer and the state of my health. Then, having been a teacher for some time, I went back, this time to Bristol, and became extremely ill during this period. Unfortunately, there was next to no support: I never went back. Both were traditional PhDs, and both were in literature. I was hard on myself for those events but should not have been: life was hard on me. I will say, though, that I got there in the end. Too low in confidence to write a book, I started in a rage only several years ago and once I started, that was it. I have barely begun. During this period, it was suggested I might look at some point at further study and quite by chance, a fellow author suggested this PhD. I picked it up. Felt unworthy. Put it down. But it nagged at me, I tentatively spoke of it on social media and there was lovely interest: I must commend York St John for extending such a cordial and welcoming hand. The process was wonderful. Statement, application form, title, abstract, whirling around. They helped me clarify it all, I got it all done, two interviews (which felt like genial chats) and once I had applied, everything was processed within a week. A place at a university is a year, but you can submit earlier, and I did it in seven months. I will be honest: it is a monkey off my back! I am proud of what I have done, all 700,000 words of it, including the critical component, my books and separate articles, reviews, anthology pieces and short fiction. And I spoke of rebellion at the beginning of this post. Writing anything at all felt like rebellion and this was the icing on the cake, because I have dared to tell a story within stories and set it all down with the hope of stimulating and consoling others. Also, I am a geek. I loved choosing footnotes, learning MLA convention, and formatting it all. I enjoy structure and order. 
15. When you are first exploring, look after yourself. Naming no names, but I did find it a bit of a knockback to be told that all my work would have to be read first to be able to discern if it was good enough to be studied at PhD level. At another university I was informed that, while my publication record was solid, a PhD by Published Works was really for someone more in the public domain and truly exceptional. Like Rachel Cusk. And you are clearly not Rachel Cusk. OUCH. We would be delighted to talk to you about the traditional route, however. I said no to this because I am a teacher, and I would sooner die than say something like that. There is a university which charges a substantial amount of money to read your material before you apply (details supplied in confidence though I am taking the RC comment to the grave). Remember: this should be a JOY. I want that for you at this point! 
16. Something potentially tricky: you could do this PhD on campus, but if you are online, it can be isolating. There is a Facebook distance PhD group online which is for doctoral students all over the world, but no-one I met here was working by Published Works. A friendly crowd though. At my university, there was also a very lively and active community of postgraduate researchers, but again, I was an outlier because the route is unusual, and I was online. Also, it was only a small part of my time, so I did not feel there was capacity to write papers, as I had a job, books to write, kids and additional care responsibilities. Please be gentle with yourself, while keeping abreast of what is there. 
17. This is a trivial point, but something I have found unsettling is the big gap between submission and viva. I submitted it in June, and we are looking at November at the earliest for viva. It is just a particular combination of circumstances, but I have found that anxiety has crept in so I have begun to worry about whether I will pass or pass with major changes to do. Distraction is key at this point! 

If you have any questions about the PhD by Published Works in Creative Writing, do please ask me! I’m @bookwormvaught across social media (add a 6 at the end for Instagram) and you are welcome to email me on annavaughttuition@gmail.com At some point, my doctorate will be in the British Library, so perhaps we can talk about it then. Finally, have I tried to do something new? I am not one to blow my own trumpet, but in the peculiarities of what I have done and how I have done it all, there is an argument to be made for, ‘Yes.’ 

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Thank you so much, Anna, for this informative, honest, and inspiring post! Check out Anna’s website here (and all her amazing books!!) and do check out my two posts for preparing for your viva (one from the student perspective, a guest post by Dr Teresa Pilgrim, and one with potential questions from an examiners perspective, by me!).