Category: Author Interview

For our first graduate student interview, we sat down with Ryan Ramsey, a third-year PhD student in Religion. Ryan studies World Christianity and Pentecostalism. He holds a Master of Arts in Religion from Yale Divinity School (’19) and a BA from Lee University (’14). He is also a fellow with Baylor’s Academy for Teaching and Learning. Before coming to graduate school, Ryan taught middle school. Ryan is husband to the lovely Ellie and father to the precocious Penelope. In his free time, he loves hiking, roasting coffee, and basketball. Ryan also gives a defense of Dichotomy, contra a previous post from BearTracks about the pros and cons of Waco coffee shops. Thanks so much for taking the time to tell us about your writing habits and coffee principles, Ryan!

 

BearTracks

So where do you like to write? I know you said this tends to be a lot of places, but, like, an office, home, coffee shops, outside? Where do you tend to cycle through?

Ryan Ramsey

I like to write in my backyard. I like to write, um, I have a writing group, we meet up in in the GRC, and I can usually get stuff done there. I write in the GRC a good bit, using the breakout rooms. If I have editing work to do, I will oftentimes go to coffee shops, like Dichotomy. Usually just Dichotomy. I don’t go to Pinewood because there are too many undergrads there.

BT

Yes, which is an unfortunate recent development. So it sounds like when you are in the creative mode you need more silence or less people-distraction, but when you’re in the editing mode you can have more of the buzz in the background?

RR

Yes.

BT

That makes sense. So this question is maybe for, well, I’m doing a mix of talking to grad students and professors, but do you find you still acquire a lot of books at this point in your career or has the pace slowed somewhat as you’ve gone along in your PhD?

RR

That’s a strangely relevant question because I do, I have found when I was in seminary I frequented any free bin and would take anything remotely pertaining. You know I only got books for Christmas, things like that, but I think since COVID, I have been more interested in finding digital resources and books that are available online through the library.

BT

So what would you say are the best times and places for you to write? We already kind of covered places.

RR

In the morning, probably between 8 and 11.

BT

Is that when your writing group meets as well, is that a morning group?

RR

Yeah it is. I can’t write, I’m usually fried by the afternoon. I try not work in the evenings unless I have to. Usually the earlier, my brain is better.

BT

The perk of having a family in grad school. It means better boundaries, sometimes.

RR

Yeah, yeah. If I have to do editing, I can do editing in the afternoon, but…

BT

Not the creative process?

RR

Yeah.

BT

That’s fair! How do you capture your research? Are you a notecard or journal person, do you do it on the computer?

RR

I do it on my laptop, and I try as best as I can, to either copy full quotes and keep lists of quote sheets or I just write prose, as if I’m writing something that, theoretically, I could copy and paste. Usually with full citations, and that makes that a lot easier in the long run.

BT

Do you immediately start writing on the computer, or do you have any portion of your writing process that you do longhand?

RR

Uh, no, but occasionally, if I am somewhere away from my computer and an idea comes to me and I have something to write on, I will sketch out ideas, I might jot handwritten notes down.

BT

Are you a marginalia person in your physical books, or no?

RR

Oh yes.

BT

I think you kind of have to be as a scholar. Are you a detailed marginalia person? Because I find I have become less talkative with my books. I do a ton of underlining and starring things and bracketing things, but do you “talk” to your books in the margins?

RR

Occasionally. I more often make brief, one sentence, one word notes to highlight, say, “prophecy” in the margins, so when I go back through….

BT

I think you answered this earlier, but do you read digital books and what are your feelings on digital books?

RR

Yeah, I’ll say this. I read digital books and I listen to digital books using text-to-speech as a way to, A) give my eyes a break, and B) allow me to do other stuff while I’m reading, like washing dishes usually.

BT

Out of personal curiosity, is there a program you use for the text-to-speech, or do a lot of the books just automatically have that feature? How do you get the books to talk to you!?

RR

Well, if it’s a PDF, I’ll just highlight the text and use the program on my Mac, but if you use any books on Archive.org, which is a really great resource and has many books, that has an automatic with your account; you just hit the audio button and it automatically plays, but you do have to watch out because it will read the footnotes to you in unhelpful ways.

BT

That’s helpful. What is some good advice you’ve received on writing?

RR

Keep editing your work. Edit, edit, edit. That’s kind of general.

BT

What stage, do you do the Anne Lamott “sh***y first draft” and then edit, or are you an edit-as-you-go person?

RR

It depends. It depends most on the amount of research and footnotes I’m doing and the section or paragraph. I usually find the more I spend fiddling with footnotes, the more polished that paragraph tends to be, and the more I just plop it out, like it’s the first draft, the more likely I am to cut it entirely.

BT

What do you think is your best piece of written work at this point in your career? What are you most proud of? It also doesn’t have to be academic, I know people write other things.

RR

I mean I have a published article that I like a lot of, and I’m fairly proud of portions of it, especially the introductory framing.

BT

Okay, what was the article on and where was it published?

RR

It’s called “Christ in Yaqui Garb.” It’s about Teresa Urrea, who’s a figure I study. It’s published in an open-access journal called Religions. And then some of my other work, I’ve got a work that I’m presenting at the Conference on Faith and History, again on her [Teresa Urrea], that’s like a gender analysis about perceptions of her in popular U.S. newspapers, and I’m really happy with the analysis of that.

BT

So name a few favorite authors from your field of study. Who are the people who, when you read their stuff, you’re like, “Ugh, I wish I had written this”?

RR

I think Betsy Flowers is a fantastic writer. Theologian Miroslav Volf is a fantastic writer, and he’s someone that edits, edits, edits, and edits. I really like reading Robert Orsi. One of the people who’s written a lot of Teresa Urrea, who I study, is Luis Urrea who is a novelist. And so he writes novels on her.

BT

Is he any relation to her?

RR

He is! He’s like a kinda distant great-grand nephew. He’s just a fantastic writer, so I really enjoy reading him. That’s not really in my discipline, but it’s something I read for my discipline.

BT

That’s great, cool. Okay, finally, what’s a book you should have read by now but haven’t? And you can interpret that as you will. It could be in your field or literature in general or…

RR

Oooh. I don’t know.

BT

The Bible? Just kidding.

RR

I need to think, just then I have to include what books do I say I’ve read, but I haven’t actually read them! Haha.

BT

Haha. Grad-school “read” them?

RR

Yeah. I mean there’s a lot. And the fact that I have comps studying right now doesn’t help.

BT

Is there one you’re most embarrassed to admit? We ask real gritty questions here.

RR

That’s the problem. What would I admit that I haven’t read?

BT

This is a candid interview Ryan, you can be honest here.

RR

I know, I know. I don’t think I ever made it though Mere Christianity.

BT

For the addendum, I understand you took umbrage with BearTrack’s piece on Dichotomy, and we want to give you an opportunity to give a defense of Dichotomy.

RR

Okay. The important thing to know about Dichotomy is that you have to order the right thing.

BT

Okay, getting the good stuff here.

RR

I am well aware that their drip coffee and pour overs are not what they need to be – they don’t dial in their machines well enough to get the right ratios for that, so it ends up being a little watered down. Their espresso, though, is fantastic. You have to order espresso. When I moved here, before moving here I looked on Sprudge; it’s a really hip, weird coffee website. It writes news stories on coffee shops and stuff like that, and Dichotomy was the one featured. And so Dichotomy was a place that I knew about coming in and was excited about and not disappointed with! And the only time i’m ever disappointed there is when I order drip coffee. But anyway. I’ve got a lot of good memories there. Before COVID, our little history of theology cohort would go there. And that’s a place where, when out daughter was born, that’s where Ellie and I went out to get drinks when my mom offered to babysit for two hours. And when my in-laws lived with us for two and a half weeks before Penelope was born, because Pen was ten days late, my father-in-law and I went there do get out of the house, so he could do his crosswords and I could write my papers. So, all that to say, I have lots of good memories there, but the crux of it is you have to order the espresso.

BT

Okay, we will make due notice of this and put an asterisk in the original post and say “Since publishing this, we have heard from readership that…” haha.

RR

That sounds good.

 

This post was originally published on Baylor’s Graduate School blog, BearTracks, and can be read here.

For our first installment of the “How and Where I Write” series, BearTracks sat down with Dr. Richard Rankin Russell, professor of English and the English Graduate Program Director. Dr. Russell’s areas of expertise include Modern and Contemporary Irish literature, though he began his graduate career studying the literature of the American South. Dr. Russell earned his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has been on the faculty at Baylor since 2001. He has published numerous books and articles, most recently his book Seamus Heaney:  A Critical Introduction, published in 2016, but he has a new book entitled James Joyce and Samaritan Hospitality coming out in November 2022 through the University of Edinburgh Press. It was a pleasure to converse with Dr. Russell about his writing habits and wisdom; we hope you enjoy as well!

BearTracks

Where do you like to write? Your office, at home, coffee shops, outside? Where is your chosen place to write?

Dr. Richard Rankin Russell

I cannot write at coffee shops and not usually in my office. I can edit, and I’m doing edits now on a book in my office, but I have a study at home. And I write on my grandfather’s desk from the furniture store that my family had started in Paris, Tennessee where I grew up.

BT

That’s really special.

RRR

I write there, and it’s usually late at night into the early morning, just as I did as a graduate student with my dissertation, and now with kids, that’s when the house is quiet.

BT

So you’re a total-silence-when-you-write person?

RRR

Yeah, or maybe classical music in the background, but yeah.

BT

I’ve recently discovered, I think, Miles Davis is going to be my go-to writing music.

RRR

Miles is good. I’ve got on repeat a five-album series by Wynton Marsalis, just instrumental jazz; it’s really good and bluesy.

BT

Yeah, something about the rhythms just kind of keeps the energy up; it’s good. Do you still acquire lots of books as your career has progressed or has the pace slowed somewhat as you’ve gone on?

RRR

I’d say the pace has slowed somewhat. I’ve been really consciously trying to give books away lately. I’ve got a lot of books in here, except for Irish literature, which takes up close to this much at home in my study. I’ve slowed down some on book acquisition, because I think I have enough but still like to get authors I like.

BT

How do you capture your research? Are you a notecard person, a journal? Do you keep a document on the computer? How does that process work for you?

RRR

I mark sections in books in pencil and with bookmarks, and I have those piled around me. I write directly to Word documents now and edit as I go, but I definitely have scattered written notes around me in those books.

BT

Do you immediately start writing on the computer or do you do anything beginning with longhand, just to get thoughts down?

RRR

I try to do a little bit of that. Maybe on a legal pad, a little bit of flow, but I’ve also done that directly to the Word file, and then I just go. I’m kind of a spur, or jag, or streak writer. I don’t believe in the hour-a-day writing thing, because when I write, I really write, and I’ll go for four or five hours at a stretch. That’s the only way I can get anything done. That’s why I have to carve out that time at night, and that’s harder than it used to be, to stay up until one or two.

BT

I take it you’re a marginalia person?

RRR

Oh yeah, absolutely! And I do write in library books – in pencil!

BT

I told that to someone once, I also dog-ear library books, and they were appalled; it was like I had just denied the divinity of Christ or something. I see it as a gift for future readers, but maybe I have too high an opinion of myself!

RRR

Haha! Yeah, absolutely, exactly! They’ll be interested in our marginalia, I’m sure they will!

BT

Do you ever read digital books?

RRR

No. The only time I ever read them was after back surgery when [my wife] had The Hunger Games trilogy on her Kindle. And I read the whole thing. It was very odd, let me tell you.

BT

What is some good advice you’ve received on writing?

RRR

Hmmm. One piece that comes to mind comes from my dear friend Dr. Fulton, down the hall, who, when I came here, said, “I know you want to get your dissertation published but try to think several books ahead.” I was like, What? That sounds impossible. I think, if you’re in a research position, you want to get your dissertation published, and you don’t think how that book is going to connect to your whole intellectual profile, but you should. And his saying that one time, in his Fulton-esque way, helped me to think that way, and I feel like my career has had some intellectual integrity because of that, and it’s arisen organically because of that comment.

BT

Do you feel like that also took some of the pressure off of individual works in a certain way because there was that holistic viewpoint?

RRR

I think so. And it also stems for an unfortunate bad habit I have, which is whatever the written version of logorrhea is. I tend to write too much, so this book here that I’m doing revisions on, this book on Brian Friel, that was a dissertation chapter originally. And I took that and got an article or two out of it, and then, I just really loved Friel, I ended up working it into a book. So the advantage of writing too much is that then you can send signals to yourself in a given project, “There needs to be work done on this!” And then you can do that work later.

The second [good piece of advice I’ve received], I had a friend in graduate school – I’ve never forgotten what she said – she said, “Think about you’re writing to an intelligent but ignorant child.” Ignorant, you know in the best sense of the word, meaning not knowing the field, but intelligent. So that’s been helpful to me to think about audience in that sense.

BT

What do you think your best piece of written work so far, or perhaps the piece of work you’re most proud of?

RRR

That’s a good question. I really like this book, the Seamus Heaney Region’s book, that won the Cleanth Brooks-Robert Penn Warren prize. I really felt like I got a lot in there.

But I’m maybe most pleased with a piece a lot of people don’t know about, which was a piece in Five Points on the Emmett Till lynching in my father’s home county. So I worked up a piece that’s part memoir, part literary criticism. Long story, but these photographs [in the piece] are from a friend of mine, Maude Schuyler Clay. His body [Emmett Till’s] washed up on her family land. I got to know her when this was done. I loved doing the literary criticism with the Hughes poems and the blues, and thinking about what it was like for my dad growing up where we go now every summer, learning about this horrible thing. But then, when I got to meet Maude, I realized that her first book of photographs ended with this, which is to his [Till’s] memory, and then, fairly early on as we talked, I realized that my grandmother was her beautician, her mom’s beautician, and her grandmother’s beautician. My grandmother ran a beauty shop in my dad’s house where he grew in the Delta. And she retired when she was 87, so she ran a beauty shop for over 60 years, so all the women in the Delta came around. So it’s not a straight academic piece, but that I think is an important for me, thinking about my family history, thinking about literature as power to remember such atrocities, but it’s hopeful too, because the Hughes poems are Christian, and there’s a lot of good things that have come out of that. So that’s been really important to me.

But I’m really excited about the Joyce and Good Samaritan book that’s coming out.

BT

Congratulations on that! I saw your email yesterday.

RRR

Thank you. That’s been important for me thinking about how literature is not some ivory tower pursuit, but it’s generative, and it can include us all as potential readers and rescuers of others.

BT

Very nicely, succinctly put. Would you name a few favorite authors from your field of study?

RRR

Oh my goodness. I’d have to put Yeats and Joyce up there near the top – and Heaney, for sure. Goodness. I love Virginia Woolf. I love George MacKay Brown. There’s so many.

BT

How about critics?

RRR

Oh. I really like Rita Felski. I really liked Denis Donoghue’s work. Those two are great. I’ve really been influenced by Helen Vendler, I think she’s one of our great living critics, and then I’d say Christopher Ricks as well. Also one of our great living critics. The biggest of all would be my own advisor, Weldon Thornton, who passed away last year on July 15th. I love that combination of rigor and close reading, but also reaching outside the text at hand.

BT

Okay, final question. And this one’s the mean one. What is a book you should have read by now but haven’t?

RRR

That’s a good question. It would have been, before this year, Dante, but I’ve read two thirds of it now. Oh goodness, there’s so many. Oh, let’s put The Aeneid. That’s a big omission on my part; everyone’s got them. People used to play that game, like, literary critics, and there’s a story that went around. Someone finally said, “Hamlet, I haven’t read Hamlet.” They laughed him out of the group.

 

This interview was originally published on Baylor’s Graduate School blog, BearTracks, and can be read here.