Scholar, writer, editor

Author: michelle (Page 9 of 13)

Roaming like a Roman: Some thoughts from off the wall

This piece was originally published on 27 July 2018 at the CRCLC blog.

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Catherine Olver and Michelle Anya Anjirbag are both doing PhDs at the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Cambridge (CRCLC). Catherine, a second year, is looking at depictions of the five senses in fantasy for young adults through an ecocritical lens. Michelle, a first year, is looking at depictions of diversity in Disney’s fairy tale adaptations. They think at roughly three miles an hour, but tend to talk faster.

From July 9 through July 17, members of the CRCLC traveled to and walked Hadrian’s Wall from Newburn to Carlisle before returning to Cambridge. Though it only took nine days total, this walking seminar and trip along the wall has been on both our minds for several months now. 72 miles and many conversations later, we interviewed each other about the experience while taking the trip home (a decidedly simultaneously shorter and longer journey when done by train, with fewer stinging nettles and broody cows).

Children’s Literature are off the wall! #hadrianschildren#hadrianswall #childrensliterature #yalit#universityofcambridge #cambridge#CRCLC #lookatthoseviews #landscape#countryside #countrysummer #romanwall

MAA: Catherine, you were the one who persuaded me to do this. Why did you want to walk Hadrian’s Wall?

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CO: For me, the wall is a monument to human relationships with nature. It marks the Romans’ determination to protect the land and people they had conquered and ‘civilised’ from the resiliently ‘barbaric’ and wild tribes in the North. On a map, it’s obvious that the planners picked a narrow section of Britain and, in true Roman fashion, drew the straightest line they could (as they did with its short-lived sibling the Antonine Wall, started twenty years later in 142 AD, which stretched from the Firth of Forth to the Firth of Clyde). But when we started walking, it became apparent just how much the builders adjusted Hadrian’s wall in response to natural features of the landscape and climate — zig-zagging to incorporate the natural defences of crags or adding tiled roofs to the milecastles so the sentries didn’t get too grumpy keeping watch in the rain. Treading a cross-section of the country helps you understand in an embodied way (not just from a geography lesson) the different affordances these landscapes offer: the rivers that enabled the bustling cities of Newcastle and Carlisle, the farmland that continues to supply them, and the beautiful windy Pennines (nicknamed the backbone of England) to climb across for two days in the middle. It’s a mysterious and magical place up there, and it lives up to its representation in Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series (1995–2016), which made me determined to experience the mystery of the Wall firsthand.

And after a brief lunch stop, they continued westward through the end of the Walltown Crags and into the Walltown Quarry #hadrianschildren #hadrianswall #childrensliterature #yalit #universityofcambridge #cambridge#CRCLC #landscape #romanwall #countryside #countrysummer #childrensbooks #kidlit #walkingseminar #countryviews

CO: What did you find mysterious and magical about the Wall?

MAA: I think what struck me most — and this may be the influence of reading both Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and Robert MacFarlane’s The Old Ways while walking — was the idea of the wall as a border but also a liminal space in the landscape. Through every terrain we walked it was possible to read the stories and folklore and legends about Britain that have persisted, about dragons in the hills, or doorways to other worlds tucked into hills and fences and the wall itself. Like in Stardust, people on both sides of the wall have told stories of what might be happening on the other side. This remains true in contemporary fantasy literature, as in Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom books mentioned above. Walls, gaps, and mounds have also been a part of the fabric of the many intertwined bits of British history and folklore, both on local and national scales through different periods of conquest, national mythologising, and folklore revivalism. Additionally, the wall acted as a time portal, something real and tangible and of contemporary experience, but also inextricably connected to an age gone by that is itself committed to both history and legends, which I have worked with in the format of adaptation and appropriation, not only as a children’s literature scholar, but prior as a medievalist and folklorist.

Through the door and off to fairyland… #hadrianschildren #hadrianswall #walkingseminar #crclc #tinydoor #universityofcambridge #childrensliterature #yalit

MAA: Speaking of books, you read The Eagle of the Ninth before walking the wall, because it was an example of the wall being used in specifically children’s literature. Did it make you feel more Roman?

CO: Yes, it did. The 1954 children’s classic by Rosemary Sutcliff was one of my mother’s favourites, so it has always been on the shelf, and it was nice to finally read it because of my own interest in literature grounded in actual-world geography. Sutcliff’s story is about a son who follows his father’s footsteps through the wilds of Britannia chasing a lost Roman aquila (the eagle standard carried by each legion of the Roman army) and in the process comes to feel at home in Britain. Our own standard, Irving the Flying Hedgehog, came dangerously close to mimicking the plot when he lost his wings. Fortunately they hadn’t been stolen and swept down a stream, but the march did for several days involve a side quest to find more glue. It was worth it. Irving garnered much admiration from fellow walkers and proved a practical and morale-raising walking stick for Vera (a.k.a. Claudia, due to her blister-induced limp). Carrying him proudly as we joined forces with several groups of school children certainly helped me feel like a Roman. The experience confirmed for me how fiction can enrich our engagement with place, because relevant scenes from the novel animated the landscape as I walked through it.

O captain, my captain, lead us over the wall! #hadrianschildren #hadrianswall #walkingseminar #CRCLC #universityofcambridge #cambridge #kidlit #childrensliterature #childrensbooks #yalit #romanwall

CO: I had fun teaching the children about aquilae, but mainly we were learning from one another. What would you say you learned from our seven days of walking seminar?

MAA: I learned a lot about stories and storytelling, which was sure to happen walking with people who teach and write in different ways. Rachel’s seminar on how landscape evokes legend helped me to think about the ways I might consider emplacement when it is deconstructed in a global media-scape, especially considering postcolonial constructs, as seen in Moana (2016). I also learned that you never know when certain random-feeling skills that may have been acquired in another life are going to become very useful, from first aid to orienteering, so to me it was very much an argument in favour of learning everything and being flexible, and truly, adventurous, in one’s acquisition of knowledge. On that note, and in a very practical-academic sense, I’ve learned that I need to be better about changing my academic routine even when I’m not able to be physically away from my work space. Especially when the time came to organise things, or teach my own seminar at the end of a day, I was made very aware of how much mental fatigue I’ve become used to ignoring, and it suddenly wasn’t possible to ignore it when compounded with the physical fatigue. So that was a very useful piece of knowledge and awareness that came out of this walking seminar for me.

No stony faces today! #hadrianschildren #hadrianswall #kidlit #YAlit #childrensliterature #CRCLC #universityofcambridge #phd #walkingseminar #cambridge #childrensbooks #romanwall

MAA: What about you, did this experience teach you anything unexpected?

CO: It was fascinating to see how places along the route mythologised their local histories through the embodied media of food and drink, both for the tourists and to create a sense of identity for the community. We saw this most through the names of inns where we stopped at the end of each day, and through their offerings. After spending last term thinking about taste it wouldn’t have been forgivable to pass up the opportunity to sample local beers along the route: from The Tyneside Brown through the Northumbrian Gold and Sycamore Gap (at the Twice Brewed Inn in the town of Once Brewed) to the Belted Will, named after Lord William Howard (1563–1640) who — after a degree at the University of Cambridge, obviously — lived at nearby Naworth Castle and restored order in the area, and later appeared in Robert Scott’s ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’ (1805). However, the prize for most interesting taste experience goes to the Hadrian’s Wall gin, infused with pimento, chamomile, coriander, bay leaves, garden mint and other botanicals favoured by the Romans. Historians of the senses work hard to dispel the assumption that the past smelled bad; this was certainly a different kind of aroma, but it was wonderful.

The start of the seminar? An experiment in smell and taste led by @the_wordwoods #hadrianschildren

CO: On the subject of how we think about the past, what will you remember about this trip?

MAA: I am going to remember the people we did this with, because they were a big part of why I wanted to have this experience in the first place. We get so used to seeing people in certain settings with certain rules, but the disruption of settings and rules led to learning a lot about different people and how they see and imagine the world, but also opportunities to feel comfortable sharing unfinished thoughts and unfinished work in a less formal setting. I found our last writing exercise before leaving Carlisle incredibly pertinent to this experience. It was interesting to see how when writing the same landscape from both an omniscient narrator’s and a character’s viewpoint, my experience as a journalist made me more comfortable with the narrator’s view, while your poetry writing made the embodied character’s experience more natural for you. I’m also going to remember a lot of what I saw and heard — cattle, sheep, learning what a stinging nettle was the hard way, and the spiny beauty of thistles in the green against a grey foggy morning.

A beautiful lake and quarry just past Milecastle 42, one of the largest we’ve seen so far #hadrianschildren #hadrianswall #childrensliterature #yalit #universityofcambridge #cambridge #CRCLC #landscape #romanwall #countryside #countrysummer #childrensbooks #kidlit #walkingseminar #lakedays

For more on the seminars and writing experience, don’t forget to read Nic and Vera’s post on the trip, Escaping the Desk: Reflections on a Walking Seminar along Hadrian’s Wall.

To check out more photos from our adventures, search #hadrianschildren on both Facebook and Instagram.

Reading YA Fiction: A first conference experience (and a couple tips for next time)

This piece was originally published on 1 June 2018 on the CRCLC blog.

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Michelle Anya Anjirbag is a first year PhD student at the Children’s Literature Research Centre at the University of Cambridge.

It took a better part of the first year of the PhD for me to work up the courage to start presenting my research, but I finally ripped off the Band-aid (TM) and gave my first full presentation at the Reading YA Fiction conference hosted by the Centre of Contemporary Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham

(Full disclosure: I have presented academic work previously, once in an completely overwhelming massive US regional conference while floating about between academic programs as an independent scholar trying desperately to maintain my legitimacy, and once in a five minute presentation on the subject of intergenerational solidarity in the context of my own research here at the university, which I found terrifying anyways for many reasons).

The conference itself was fascinating, with lively panels that explored topics from violence and empathy in stories featuring child murderers, to a look at the carnivalesque and the paranormal in relation to queer identities in YA fiction. The discussions probed subjects such as the use of the term “diverse” and what we mean by it, and what it means when it is commercialized, and even, how do we classify “YA literature” — is it dependent on the age of the intended audience? The age of the protagonist? The plot structure, as keynote Professor Maria Nikolajeva suggests? — and is it something new? Personally, though I recognize that in Anglo-centric fiction YA has witnessed a bit of an explosion over the past decade or so, I also recognize that this kind of fiction has been written in other languages and in other parts of the world since about the 1960s, and would problematize the assertion that “YA fiction” is some brand-new phenomenon; such a stance requires an ethnocentric and linguistically-centralized view of literature to be true rather than a transcultural one, but that is a discussion that might need to wait for another blog post…

Even more important than the information garnered through being present, for me, was the opportunity to test what I thought I knew about myself and my ability to speak coherently in front of a group of my peers. Learning to present research is just as important for apprentice-academics as learning to write chapters, or, dare I mention it, the PhD itself. And while I theoretically knew this going into this conference, I didn’t realize how shaky and underqualified I would feel in that room. And granted, not everyone will feel that way; different people are just more comfortable at different kinds of public speaking — and some people hate it altogether, which is fine, too. But when it is something that will be part of one’s job, indefinitely, it cannot be avoided just because it is disliked, or discomfiting. With that in mind, here are three lessons I learned that I will keep in mind for the next conference:

Go Short

I had, of course, timed everything out and thought I had given myself a little extra wiggle room. However, I underestimated how much I tend to ad lib, filling in all of the extra information that I had originally taken out. Two alternatives; control the nervous babble (probably unlikely without practice), or maybe plan on shortening my actual paper in order to give myself time to adjust and respond to the papers I had heard prior to mine. Also, though I had read through the paper many times, I didn’t remember to actually practice it with the PowerPoint, which, combined with the ad-libbing affected my use of time and the smoothness of the presentation.

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A Conference Paper is not A Dissertation

It should go without saying, but there we are. As much as we all have a lot of amazing thoughts about all the things that we are interested in, we cannot actually fit them into a 20-minute talk. A complete, single point with multiple examples is possibly stronger than a complex point. I need to remember that while the logic makes sense to me, not everyone has been immersed in my topic to the extent I am.

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Body Fuel is Brain Fuel
I mentioned that academic public speaking makes me nervous. Well, so does travel. As a result, I was simultaneously wired and exhausted heading to Birmingham. What makes exhaustion and nerves even better? Not being hungry when you’re nervous. The result? Five cups of coffee and a small plate of potato salad before speaking. It’s really not a recipe for success. The jittering was out of control; academic brains can’t work without food any more than athletes‘ bodies can. Eat breakfast. And lunch. Or by the time the keynote comes around, you’re going to not be able to take the intelligent notes or ask the intelligent questions that you want to.

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This is far from a comprehensive guide to surviving conferences; just a few thoughts about what I would do the next time around based on the this first experience.

My #PhDshelfie: Michelle

This piece was originally published on 30 January 2018 at the FERSA University of Cambridge blog.

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As the intellectual cousin of the word selfie, a shelfie is a photograph of someone’s bookshelf. In July 2017, FERSA started a #PhDshelfie initiative on social media, encouraging PhD students to share photos of, and reflections about, important books on their bookshelf. In this blog post, Michelle Anya Anjirbag shares her “fend-off-the-burnout” PhD shelfie, reflecting upon a selection of books that she uses as a “balm for a too-often overtired mind.”

Hi, my name is Michelle and if I have any special talent it is approaching burnout and staying on the brink of it for far too long. For those who don’t know, “burnout” is a term coined in the 1970s by the American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger, to describe the effects of severe stress and high ideals in “helping” professions, such as doctors and nurses. Today it is used to refer to the phenomenon in professions across the board, with main signs and symptoms falling into three main categories: exhaustion, alienation from work-related activities, and reduced performance. These signs can be both physical and emotional and are starting to be more recognized as a problem within academia.

Burnout is something I have a close, complex, and personal relationship with. The background on my phone reads, “Don’t stop when you are tired, stop when you’re done.” I treat my work like an endurance sport; it’s a long-term race that doesn’t end. I am bad at moderation; I am really good at finding the absolute edge of my limits, and then crashing. This is not a good thing to be good at generally speaking, but especially not as a first year PhD student. Pursuing a PhD is supposed to set oneself up for a longer career, not consume the burgeoning academic before they have a chance to really start their life-long work. Because of this, when I was planning my transatlantic move and really being forced to think about what kinds of books might come with me, and later how I would build my library here, I largely ignored academic texts. When packing, I chose books — and films — that would be a reminder of home, but also things that that would remind me why I chose to pursue this career. My hope was that I would become better at stepping back from the work and into a literary space that remained enjoyable and could act as a balm for a too-often overtired mind.

While my bookshelf is clearly filled with many texts related to my topics, which include children’s literature, fantasy, fairy tales, and adaptations, it is the left two quadrants that are the most important to me. Books from the Cambridge Central Library — currently limited to the two most recent Cassandra Clare novels — sit in the top, and my personal copies take up the bottom. Public libraries are a big part of how I keep the burnout at bay. I grew up in a New England state that has more public libraries than it has towns, and we tend to fight to keep them. They aren’t places that just hold books; they are community centers where retirees come to read the newspaper and chat, new parents bring their little ones to learn how to start being part of the town, and teens find their own space to hang out that isn’t school or under the eyes of their parents. They host public readings, invite authors to chat, and generally provide the space for community life to happen. In comparison, PhDs are a lonely business; it is easy to forget that reading and the sharing of literature and knowledge is not only an erudite pursuit, but a way we build our communities. Browsing the shelves of a public library versus those of university or college libraries, simply being around other people and participating in that part of community life helps me feel connected to something more than just my work in what is still a new place for me.

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My shelfie picks are united by that idea of connection as well, to either places or people who have meant a lot to me in my life. Three of the books I brought with me are by one of my former professors. Mr. Pickering was one of the few professors who could convince 30 to 40 undergraduates that the one place they wanted to be at 8 a.m. on a winter morning was in his classroom. In his classroom, we never knew that we were being taught how to write; rather, we were being taught how to see, more, how to listen. Turning to his essays, whether in DreamtimeA Happy Vagrancy, or Edinburgh Days, I have a moment where I can go back to that classroom. I go back to a place where I can take a breath and wander through sentences remembering why I love the written word.

My Penguin Little Black Classics edition of excerpts from the essays of Michel de Montaigne also helps me with this; in many ways, Montaigne can be considered the first essayist, one of the first to weave together the observations from his daily life with larger meditations on more esoteric topics. When I need a little break, How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing provides a wonderful step away from my work.

I read the Cambridge Companion to The Arthurian Legend for fun because at one point, I thought I was going to be a medievalist. I fell in love with reading because of the Arthurian legend and Robin Hood, and I still like reading criticism about the topic. When I was picking up research texts at the Cambridge University Press bookstore, I couldn’t resist getting this too.

I brought East by Edith Pattou from home because it is my favorite retelling of East of the Sun, West of the Moon, and one of the reasons I fell into wanting to work on adaptations, fairy tales, and folklore, and not stay firmly a medievalist. A paper I wrote in college compared this to other retellings of disambiguations of Cupid and Psyche, and whether we call it that, or East of the Sun, West of the MoonBeauty and the Beast, or Aarne-Thompson-Uther Tale Type 425C, it remains my favorite series of tales in folklore.

The Little Prince is always a cathartic read; I remember the first time I read the line, “You are responsible forever for what you have tamed,” and it remains full of lessons for how we love and treat others, too. Sometimes things that make me cry are good — which is also why I brought Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium with me. It’s a beautiful story about a magical toy store and growing through loss, and I definitely watch it when I’m feeling down or exhausted.

I hadn’t read, or even heard of, The Little White Horse until recently. I borrowed this when I went to my boyfriend’s parents’ house for the first time, because his mom was shocked I hadn’t come across it. Literature is better shared, and sharing it is a way of showing care for someone — which is certainly what I felt in that moment.

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Last but not least, the Slytherin (hey, no judgement, Merlin was a Slytherin, too) cover version of the 20-year anniversary edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I haven’t actually read this; being American, I know this properly as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, but I was not able to bring all my own copies with me. When I moved to Cambridge, my family visited the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio Tour, and my sister bought me a copy so here could feel like home, too.

That’s my fend-off-the-burnout shelfie. It shows me the people I love and the people who made me, and who I am outside of a PhD student. What about yours?

Recommended reads from Michelle’s Shelf:

  • Sam Pickering, Edinburgh Days, or Doing What I Want to Do
  • Michel de Montaigne, How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing
  • Bonus text if you like falling into beautifully used language: Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood, unfortunately un-pictured as it was hiding next to my teacup
  • J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
  • Sam Pickering, Dreamtime: A Happy Book
  • The Cambridge Companion to The Arthurian Legend
  • Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
  • Elizabeth Goudge, The Little White Horse
  • Edith Pattou, East (sold in the UK as North Child)
  • Magorium’s Wonder Emporium
  • Sam Pickering, Happy Vagrancy

Michelle Anya Anjirbag is in her first year of a PhD in Children’s Literature through the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. She is a member of Clare Hall, and her dissertation will be on depictions of diversity in fairy tale adaptations in children’s and young adult media. Her interests include adaptations of folklore and fairy tales, fantasy literature and film, censorship and propaganda, global corporate consumer media constructs, and the ties between multiplicities of identity, agency and expression, culture, and storytelling, and social media and the construction of metanarratives. Follow her on Twitter: @anjirbaguette, Instagram: @michelle_anya, Medium: @michelle.anjirbag, and WordPress: manjirbag.wordpress.com.

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