When I was writing my first academic book, Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire (University of California Press, Atelier Series), my wife, Ro, was heavily pregnant with our son and the deadlines––the publisher’s and her due-date––loomed. Day after day I sat at my desk trying to find a way to translate what I had produced in my dissertation, written five years earlier, to a book which would find a new, and public, audience.
My series editor, Kevin, and I talked on the phone one day as my wife lay heaped on the couch, her swollen feet soothed by a bucket of ice. “Write it in scene,” he advised when I told him how I was struggling with the first chapter. I was trying to theorize the shifts in American militarism, but the prose felt dense, as well as distant. “Take us where you went,” he urged. “Let us follow the epiphanies.”
Shifting my lens, I drew on the tools that I had been trained in during my MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in Creative Writing. I rendered more of what I had witnessed in the military training camps in the forests of the southern US states in scene, bringing to the ethnography more of the sensory details, actions and dialogue I had witnessed. As I reworked the prose, I saw that it was possible to embed a conceptual arc in the scenes, to let the reader co-experience my own surprise, then synthesis. Describing the simulations in mock Middle Eastern villages, I pared away more of the exposition and layers of explanation. I wrote new scenes about the hired role-players’ laughter as they acted out war. As the prose gathered heat and the scenes took shape, I could feel them more sharply crystallizing both the military fantasies but also their breaking points. My writing was better, my analysis had a new vitality, and the theoretical lens felt sharper. It was fun.
I realized that this was no longer a document that would serve to get me my doctorate, which it had done, or simply a monograph that would earn me tenure, which it also went on to do. Rather, it was a book which could be read by people far and wide and therefore had to read as such. The book I eventually turned into the publisher won four prizes: first prize in the American Anthropological Association’s Middle East Studies Prize; winner of the Association for Middle East Anthropology Award; Honorable Mention in the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Prize; and the Gold Medal in the category of Politics/Economics in the Independent Press Award (IPPYs).
Our son is now five. Over the last few years, I have reflected on that hard journey from dissertation to first book. What I learned laid the foundation of the class I will teach starting on September 8th. The four-week class is designed for early-career academics across the social sciences and humanities, who are both working to get tenure and also want to write the book they dream of writing: unique, theoretically-lively, beautifully-written.
In my First Book class, we will study excerpts of first books by Lisa Stevenson, Angela Garcia, Munira Khayyat, Fatima Mojaddedi, and many others. We will strengthen our ability to create a vital and engaging voice, to embody arguments through scene alongside theory, and consider which threads of concept, narrative, and description cross the arc of the book, all in balance with scholarly representational forms and methods. As always, we offer both reduced rates for academics without departmental support, and block-bookings to university departments.
If you’d like to learn more about this course, please get in touch.