by Keagan Wheat ||

I’m juggling a few different, very time-consuming literary projects at once. I’m a poetry editor at Defunkt Magazine and a reviews/interviews editor at Glass Mountain, doing an undergraduate honors thesis (an original poetry manuscript), and participating in a Writers in the Schools fellowship to train emerging writers to teach creative writing (entails trainings and forming lesson plans). I am often struggling to keep up with my workload, and know many other students losing meals and sleep to similar workloads. Here are some suggestions to manage the load:

1. Take classes related to other work

A creative writing workshop can be endlessly helpful to getting the most done at once. I can generate new poems toward my thesis and do revisions for credit. The work counts as participation, and I get useful revisions. I even get people who know almost nothing about my topic to read my work, which helps to gage how accessible my poems are.

Workshopping allows me to more readily see what I tend to like in poetry as a poetry editor. Knowing what I really like, I can go through the slush piles a little more quickly. For both of my editor positions, I advertise for submissions. I don’t exactly seek out people, but I might ask people to submit, and I can make general announcements in class.

Literature classes have been really useful. I can sometimes use the readings for a Gay and Lesbian literature class as research for my thesis. I read Borderlands by Gloria Anzaldúa in my Women Writers literature class, which opens my thesis into ideas of embodiment of borders and language. At times, I’ve found essays that are near the heart of my topic. Often, I hear about writers who speak to my topic in other ways even if only tangentially. Without much spare time, I get meaningful suggestions without wading through all the search results in library databases to find one or two resources.

I also talk to the other students in my literature classes about submitting essays or reviews to the literary journals. I might even get one or two people to join the staff.

For my WITS fellowship, I get ideas for lessons from my college classes. Texts from literature classes spark lessons. After reading George Washington Gomez by Americo Paredes, I formulated a lesson about how names can be used for characterization.

Journal Practicum is useful for doing my work as a reviews/interviews editor, because staff meetings for that journal are during class meetings.

2. Attend events

Since I have a thesis focusing on transgender identity, any event with a transgender reader will be helpful. Even if I have moments of disagreement with the speaker, I still have new topics or arguments to write.

Since Defunkt Magazine holds events, my attendance is doing my job. Some creative writing classes require me to attend readings, and I can attend as the poetry editor for Defunkt Magazine.

 A less tangible use of events is taking a break. I get to hang out with the friends I’ve made in the literary community, and I’m not craning my neck over a complicated theory book.

3. Use audiobooks

If you’re reading a book that isn’t something you need a lot of notes on, an audiobook can be a life saver. You can get all the content you need for class, while you do other things like folding laundry or eating. This tip does not apply so well to theory texts, which I find impossible to learn anything from when listening (no matter how much I love theory). The first and last time I tried to listen to a theory book I had to stop and rewind so many times I should’ve just read the book.

4. Find people who offer useful critiques

I’ve had the experience in workshop multiple times of getting a critique that takes away from the real meaning of my poem. This seems to happen when my poems deal with less normative content. For instance, straight people may miss the queer meanings in my work. I think this is sort of difficult to avoid in the academic workshop, but I think one can find useful critiques. (I don’t think you should throw out critiques wholesale every time.) I find useful critiques by reading other people’s work and talking to them about theories related to my work. When I can have a long discussion about queer theory with someone, I can trust their critiques. Sometimes it’s been useful to know exactly how elusive the queerness in a poem is to non-queer readers.

5. Read selectively

I don’t have time for every detail of every assignment. I can’t read every word of every text I’m assigned. I learned this the hard way last semester when I kept bombing reading quizzes for one class due to an assignment pile up in another class. After one too many terrible grades, I gave in and started reading summaries (lit chart especially). I would read summaries to get good grades on plot quizzes. While reading summaries, I would find interesting scenes in books to read entirely for deeper analysis. My quiz grades improved immediately. When final papers came around, I  had a good enough grasp of the books to pick one to read and analyze.

This can also be really helpful in research. I found someone’s thesis that initially seemed to discuss the concepts of my thesis. Even the abstract pointed toward my work. I started reading this hundred-something page thesis, and stopped when the topic seemed to shift drastically. I skimmed the table of contents and  found parts relevant to my research. I have stopped reading full theory essays, no matter how useful the abstract seems. I skim through first for key ideas to see if I really need to study the entire thing.

I plan to continue literary and creative writing studies in academic spaces for (hopefully) my whole life. My plan to handle these demanding schedules is always shifting and working to accommodate everything. As I continue on to grad school, I hope to pick up all the tricks that magically make it possible to read thousands of pages in a week with some understanding of it.