research – Children's Literature in Newcastle

Just take it slow: how to beat pandemic burnout

In July 2020, Emily Murphy was invited, by the Literature Speaker Series within the School for English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle, to run a seminar on ‘Reinventing Your Work in Lockdown’. Emily workshopped ideas with a group of PGRs within the CLU before running her seminar. What followed was a series of honest, challenging and hopeful conversations about how to move forward in a field of work that has, just like everything else, been deeply affected by our current pandemic. This is the first of a series of reflections from different members of the CLU, born out of these conversations in July. The subsequent reflections will follow as we move into autumn.

Emily Murphy

Let me provide full disclosure: I have a very energetic two-year old who hasn’t been to nursery since March. Nearly six months post-lockdown and I’ll admit that my research is intermittent, nowhere near what it was earlier in the semester before everything closed down in the UK. My situation is hardly unique and many of us are facing our own challenges caused by the coronavirus pandemic. While I’ve certainly practiced selfcare, including indulging in an afternoon nap or Netflix binge when needed, I also want to get back to the projects I started before lockdown. So how do you manage when your mind is actively turning back to your research and yet you still feel exhausted from the emotional stress caused by the pandemic or the extra workload in either your personal or work life?

Take…it…slow.

Having recently picked up running like so many others during lockdown (thanks, NHS, for the nifty Couch to 5k programme), it strikes me that research is a lot like running. Many of us have taken a long break from research out of necessity, and to try to work in the way we did pre-lockdown is just not feasible. If you suffered a knee or ankle injury and took four months off of running, you wouldn’t just step out your door and start running a 10k. No, you’d do gentle exercise, perhaps even walking, and radically increase your mileage and pace as you eased back into your normal routine.

Even in running circles, the benefits of taking it slow are advocated.

The same should go for our research. Just like exercise, daily research and writing is a habit that we have to build, and it’s perfectly possible for our ‘mental muscles’ to atrophy a bit during a long break. I don’t mean that we’re less capable of this work, but it may be hard to sustain the same kind of focus that we once did. So, while pre-lockdown you may have been happy to read for two hours and write for an additional two, you may want to cut that down to just twenty to thirty minutes to start out. By slowly building up and seeing the progress in your research project, you can then add more time as you feel ready. (For running, it’s 10% per week and we might equally apply rules of building back up to our research intensity as scholars).

Similarly, we need to be attentive to our “burnout threshold.” In building back up to a more intense research capacity, we also have to be honest about what we can manage to do. Five minutes once a day while you take a shower? Great! 10 minutes to jot down a few sentences or two? Sure, that’s still more than what you had written yesterday! As newspaper headlines continue to remind us, we’re still in a “new normal,” meaning that work life is anything but the same with many of us dealing with much higher workloads to meet the demands of changes in the higher education sector. In such a situation, slow-paced research makes good sense as a way of protecting our mental health and avoiding burnout, and in fact is a method that some of the most active and respected children’s literature scholars I know practice (because let’s face it, time for research is never easy to find). Pre- or post-lockdown, taking it slow just works.

So the next time you feel guilty about not working, just repeat the mantra, ‘Take it slow. Take…it…slow.’ We’ve all got our own needs, and there’s no shame in working at a pace that enables you to be happy and healthy, and that will allow you to maintain your research agenda for the long-term. Happy writing!

Banner image by Green Chameleon on Unsplash

CLUGG in Lockdown

Compiled by Lauren Aspery

Despite the current situation, there is still plenty of exciting research going on in the children’s literature department here at Newcastle University. While everyone is adjusting to new ways of working, a few CLUGG members have shared their tips and tricks for managing research during lockdown.

Lauren Aspery – MLitt Student

Lauren is currently researching late twentieth-century British children’s poetry. She is especially fascinated by processes of canonisation and the Signal Poetry Award. Some of her favourite children’s writers include Michael Rosen, Patrice Lawrence and Julia Donaldson. When Lauren isn’t busy researching, she enjoys baking, organised fun and writing poetry.

A selection of Lauren’s favourite recipe books.

Lauren’s Lockdown Advice:

“Keep a realistic daily to-do list. Never promise yourself a vague 1000 words that you’ll have to rush through or can’t achieve, but 200 words about something specific. As well as your academic goals, include things like watering the plants, taking a walk or organising your bookshelf. Ticking off those little victories can really improve your mood during these difficult times.”

Megan Ayres – MA Student

Megan is currently researching contemporary Young Adult literature with a focus on performance theory and ideas of adolescent ‘voice’. Some of her favourite YA and children’s books are those from Patrick Ness, Neil Gaiman, and anything slightly spooky. When Megan isn’t researching, she enjoys sewing, gardening, and trying to stop her dog Rosie laying in the vegetable patch.

Megan’s Lockdown Advice:

“Working from home can be unsettling if it’s a far cry from your usual working environment and, like me, you don’t have a desk. Set up a space with everything you need and keep your work within that space. This means that at the end of the workday, or during a break, you can move yourself away from any stress. I’ve set up my dining room table with a printer, the books I need, my notes and stationery, and, of course, a cup of tea. I also make sure to tidy it during lunch and at the end of the day. Even though it’s tempting to lie in bed and do some reading for work, try not to do this as it’s proven to disrupt sleep patterns. Keeping a specific, tidy area should help keep a firm boundary between work & life, even in these difficult circumstances.”

Helen King – Doctoral Candidate

Helen is in her second year of a PhD project on the work and archive of Beverley Naidoo, with a focus on representations of displaced and activist children. In her free time she enjoys painting, cycling, climbing walls (although only in the metaphorical sense during lockdown), and bothering the cat.

Helen’s Lockdown Advice:

“Find what works for you and don’t let comparison creep in. I’ve found I write best first thing in the morning, and then again in the late afternoon, so I use the middle of the day for other things (reading/editing/snacking). The best way to be disciplined is to give your mind and body what they need – I like to reward myself with something nice after a chunk of work to keep me motivated, with a walk, a phone conversation, a bath, etc.”

Stephanie Lyttle – PhD Student

Stephanie is a creative writing student who researches representations of bisexuality in 21st century YA fantasy. She is also writing a YA fantasy novel. Her current favourite children’s book is The Velveteen Rabbit.

Stephanie’s lockdown advice:

“In this creativity-sapping time of constant anxiety, writers may feel that they should exclusively funnel what creative energy they do have into their “serious” work. However, I’ve found that taking time out to work on other, low-stakes personal writing projects (in my case, poetry) actually helps the words flow more easily when I go back to my PhD novel. Let yourself write “for fun”, without judgement! It’s not a waste of time.

This advice can be broadened out for researchers in any field – take time to write a nice note to a friend, or a thank-you email, or a diary entry. Give yourself space to produce writing that doesn’t have to be perfect.”

Lucy Stone – Doctoral Candidate

Lucy is writing up her thesis, is writing up her thesis, a case study of the juvenilia children’s author-illustrators Judith Kerr (1923 – 2019) and Tomi Ungerer (1931 – 2019) [https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/childrensliteratureinnewcastle/far-out-isnt-far-enough-remembering-tomi-ungerer-1931-2019/] made in exile in the Nazi era. When not at her desk, Lucy is taking (online) ballet classes, tending her sourdough starter, or baking cakes, should the tiger come to tea, although apparently he’s more after loo rolls these days…

Some of Lucy’s sourdough goodies (fennel seed crackers and a chocolate pear cake). It’s quite remarkable how a bit of flour and water (and a few other ingredients) can yield such tasty writing snacks.

Lucy’s Lockdown Advice:

“Everyone works differently and needs to find a way of working that suits them. I’m finding it helpful to take one day at a time. I work the best I can each day, but even if I have a bad day, I stop at 5 pm or there about and take the evening off. It’s particularly important at the moment to maintain a balance and take care of yourself.”

The Other Side of the Archive: Cataloguing the Laura Cecil Collection

The Children’s Literature Unit has a close working partnership with Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books, an organisation committed to fostering academic research into its archive. As well as working with Newcastle University, Seven Stories also has a strategic partnership with Northern Bridge, the Arts and Humanities Research Council consortium of universities in the North East and Northern Ireland. This partnership connects doctoral researchers with the Seven Stories collections. Here, Durham University PhD candidate Antonia Perna talks about her Northern Bridge placement at Seven Stories.

The purpose of Northern Bridge placements is to provide PhD students with opportunities for professional development outside the academy, to develop new skills and to apply our academic skills in a new setting. From March to May 2019, I undertook a placement at Seven Stories, where I worked on cataloguing the Laura Cecil collection. My own research focuses on childhood in Revolutionary France, and I explore in particular how schoolbooks and children’s literature versed young French people in republican politics and civic conduct. In this way, I have worked with children’s literature for my academic work, and this is what sparked my interest in Seven Stories. However, although there is some foreign-language material at Seven Stories, most of the collection is in English, pertaining to British children’s books, and dates from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I was intrigued to learn more about such books, and also to find out what an archive looks like from the other side.

Most academics in the arts and humanities have at least some experience of working with archival material, and we all know how much difference a comprehensive catalogue can make! Cataloguing the Laura Cecil Collection at Seven Stories has given me a window onto the process of compiling a catalogue, and insight into the kinds of considerations a cataloguer is faced with—and thus into what happens before a researcher opens the catalogue.

The Laura Cecil Collection on the shelves at Seven Stories; © Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books

The Laura Cecil Collection contains over forty boxes of material from Cecil’s career as a literary agent. The first agent to specialise in children’s literature, Cecil worked with several well-known children’s authors and illustrators, including Robert Westall, Diana Wynne Jones and Edward Ardizzone. Upon her retirement in 2017, she donated her files to Seven Stories; they consist primarily of correspondence with and relating to her clients, c. 1970-2009.

Having been instructed to provide a description for each file, I was faced with the challenge of deciding what information to include. How do you decide what is significant, in a file that could contain any number of documents? How do you predict what might be pertinent to a research project that is, as yet, hypothetical? After an overview of each file, I selected letters and documents of note according to how they were distinct from others in the file, or how they contribute to our understanding of a particular book, perhaps in terms of its editorial process or reception. When uploading this to the catalogue, I also cross-referenced related documents in other Seven Stories collections to aid research across the archive. As an academic, my instinct was to address all possible lines of enquiry that the documents could be used for; I had to accept, however, that I could not anticipate every possible research project.

Similarly, as a researcher, I was drawn to arrange material in a logical order, to facilitate locating and retrieving files. Specifically as a historian, however, I wanted to maintain the files’ original order, as this is part of the collection’s history. Generally, it is considered good archival practice to maintain the original arrangement and structure of a collection, and so I tried to respect this. Where I could not discern any order to the arrangement of files, I highlighted this in the catalogue, and, in the case of the Robert Westall correspondence, I did re-arrange files chronologically. The pressure to make the right decision here, and not to make a mistake that was irreversible, was rather daunting. Although I had worked with archival material many times in my academic work, I had never given much thought to how material was arranged, and suddenly I felt an overwhelming responsibility to get it right! I hope I did!

Another challenge I faced was the need to remain impartial. Of course most academics try to write in an objective tone most of the time, but we nevertheless analyse and interpret our sources, working them into an intellectual argument. As a cataloguer, my task was simply to report what was in the box. I could try to anticipate and respond to academic enquiries to an extent, but I could not pursue them, nor could I make emotional or moral judgements on the material. Having read five years’ regular, amicable correspondence between Laura Cecil and Robert Westall, I felt some shock at Westall’s sudden death (in 1993), and I held back empathetic tears as I wrote, simply, ‘notable documents include… a note with costs for his memorial service (manuscript)’. The cataloguer sees and knows every document in a file; she observes and records, but her tone must remain detached.

The Laura Cecil Collection complements existing collections at Seven Stories, such as this original artwork for Sarah Garland’s book Going Swimming. SG/01/01. © Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books

Nevertheless, getting to know a collection can be an exciting process—not least because some boxes contain hidden treasures! For instance, I was fascinated to discover a mock-up for an unpublished book by C. Walter Hodges, with original artwork, and to see how Sarah Garland illustrated her letters to Laura Cecil. On the other hand, there can be disappointments too. After half an hour engrossed in a draft of Robert Westall’s novella, The Duplicator, I was left with a cliff-hanger when I realised the text was unfinished! I have since emphasised in the catalogue that this story is both unpublished and unfinished, so that researchers will not make the same mistake!

After three months at Seven Stories, I would say that cataloguing a collection is something every academic should have a go at, if interested in archival research. My experience on this placement encouraged me to explore a collection as a whole, making links between individual documents, and to think more about the provenance of material. It also highlighted the value of an open-minded approach to research, where research questions may not yet be defined, and may be shaped by the material discovered. Of course, as academics, we know these things, but often practicalities and time constraints compel us to pre-select material and not to widen our parameters. Sometimes, though, the most useful document is in the box you might not have opened… Sometimes it might not be specifically highlighted in the catalogue—despite the cataloguer’s best efforts to predict your project!

Banner image: A selection of material by C. Walter Hodges, within the Laura Cecil Collection. LC/01/07/01. © Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books.