{"id":18061,"date":"2011-12-11T11:23:07","date_gmt":"2011-12-11T16:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=18061"},"modified":"2011-12-11T11:28:53","modified_gmt":"2011-12-11T16:28:53","slug":"history-of-a-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2011\/12\/history-of-a-book\/","title":{"rendered":"History of a book"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>So I wrote a book. Not a Mormon book, but one in my academic field. I\u2019ve been working on the book since just before my youngest daughter was born. She started first grade in September, and the book was published last week. The idea for the book came to me in 2005, while I was in a visiting position at the College of Charleston, about a year after I had finished my Ph.D., and not long after I started reading and commenting at Times and Seasons, which was the catalyst for several realizations that led, in one way or another, to the idea for the book.<\/p>\n

When I started reading Times and Seasons in 2004, some of the posts I enjoyed the most addressed the intellectual aspects of Mormonism and the cultural issues of Mormon grad students and academics. These posts were the trigger for my first realization: I was a Mormon\u2026and a scholar\u2026which made me – ack! – a Mormon scholar<\/em>. Not a bad thing to be, but not anything I had ever planned on.<\/p>\n

Sometime that fall, while I was in the middle of a crosswalk on Calhoun Street in Charleston on the way to teach class, it occurred to me for the first time that my career was not an accident. A year earlier, I would have claimed that it was all due to a bug in some high school scheduling software in 1982. A glitch put my older brother into a class he hadn\u2019t wanted (he had tried to sign up for French), but scheduling complications kept him from switching classes, and I continued in his footsteps. A foreign mission followed, and then a bachelor\u2019s degree, then grad school and a Ph.D., all because (I would have told you with a straight face) I didn\u2019t know when to stop. I had thought I would figure out my career plans during my mission or in college, but I never did (I told myself), so I ended up with a Ph.D. in the humanities instead. It\u2019s not a very convincing story, I admit, but I believed it for nearly a decade.<\/p>\n

That day in Charleston, it finally occurred to me that most missionaries do not check out Stefan Sonderegger\u2019s Grundz\u00fcge deutscher Sprachgeschichte<\/em> for language study, or Einar Haugen\u2019s Die skandinavischen Sprachen<\/em>, or Thomas Mann\u2019s S<\/em>\u00e4mtliche Erz\u00e4hlungen<\/em>. I am a bit slow on the uptake. Only then did I understand that the choices I had made as a missionary, in response to my deepest interests and the environment that my mission put me in, had put me on a path that had brought me to where I was at that moment.<\/p>\n

I went back and checked my journal. Here\u2019s what I wrote on day ten in the MTC: \u201cI want to be a professor.\u201d On the last day of my mission, my mission president advised me to get a Ph.D. in something. Then I boarded a plane in D\u00fcsseldorf and flew home, still believing that I had failed to figure out my career plans, and that I had never received any guidance about them during my a mission.<\/p>\n

The third thing that I recognized in 2004 and early 2005, as another round of job applications was meeting with no more success than earlier ones, was this: I was not in some transitional phase while I waited for my career to start. This – the heavy teaching load for a modest salary in a position that came with an expiration date – this was<\/em> my career, and I had better make the most of it while it lasted. If I only had nine or six or three more months as a full-time academic, I was going to start off at the top of my list of professional goals and work down as far as I could before the clock ran out.<\/p>\n

These were the thoughts at the back of my mind in early 2005 when a professor I had come to know while doing doctoral research abroad wrote to me and encouraged me to apply for a postdoctoral research fellowship. All I had to do was come up with a topic that would convince the fellowship selection committee.<\/p>\n

I decided I couldn’t flee from who I was, and recognized instead that I was being offered the rare opportunity to work on a book that only I could write. I had written a dissertation on a fifteenth-century printed book, so early printing became one element of the proposal. I had earlier written a master\u2019s thesis about Hildegard of Bingen, and I was still interested in what kind of communicative expectations and demands were raised by listening to a prophet\u2019s voice – which was, not coincidentally, something I did semi-annually. And so the idea of looking into prophetic texts in the context of early print was born. When I first started working on the proposal, I had no idea if there would be anything to write about. I had no idea yet that the earliest vernacular printed book was the Sibyl\u2019s Prophecy<\/em>, or that there were over a thousand relevant editions from the first century of printing.<\/p>\n

Nate Oman once wrote, somewhere on this blog or in an e-mail, that the maturing of Mormonism as an intellectual tradition would involve using Mormonism to critique other fields on inquiry, rather than making it only the object of inquiry. I did not write that kind of a book. It\u2019s just another academic monograph with no relevance for Mormon studies. Even the book\u2019s working definition of prophecy is very general rather than specifically Mormon. There are no hidden messages for Mormons in the audience. It\u2019s simply a book written by a Mormon thinking Mormon thoughts and inspired by the events in a Mormon life, a book that was made possible in no small part by a not inconsiderable number of kind and helpful Mormons. Thank you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I wrote a book. Not a Mormon book, but one in my academic field. I\u2019ve been working on the book since just before my youngest daughter was born. She started first grade in September, and the book was published last week. The idea for the book came to me in 2005,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18061"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18066,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18061\/revisions\/18066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}