The first thing I think I might need to circulate about my project—and about this class in general—is that I need to be comfortable with the fact that I’m a novice.  Certainly, this is difficult, considering the fact that I’m thirty-five, have an MFA (thus, supposedly, competent in the realm of fiction), and have taught others to research in Freshman Composition, but—I’ve realized after a wonderful chat with Dr. Snead—the professionalism, authority, and knowledge I hope to otherwise exude has to be left at the door.  Not only are we forced to start from the ground up, we’re expected to.  It’s ok that we don’t know the best methods or academic journals or all the criticism out there.  This course was designed to inform us.  Despite this understanding, however, you still have to engage your project with authority and confidence (particularly in the writing) even though you aren’t yet and expert in whatever topic or field you’re engaging.  I liken this approach to those first stories I composed in my first graduate workshop where I wrote like I knew all the rules and possible perspectives people could take to my work only to find later—post workshop—that my knowledge—though expansive—did have limitations.  Now, I realize I just have to be more conscious of this process, that’s all.  Anyway, this realization came with some relief, and I thought I would share with the rest of the class.

As for the research, also in my meeting with Dr. Snead I finally gained a comprehensive perspective of the project I hope to do in research methods and how I can tie my work and research into the critical issues I’m already facing as an author.  Before we begin, it seems—at least to me—that at this stage we should be looking at issues and not individual works or authors.  Maps after all contain many destinations, and, if want to generate a good one, we should allow for variety of routes between each of them.  Anyway, the time of post-graduate academic study where one picks an author and focuses on them is long gone (I got my BA in English and Philosophy in 2000).  It is all about an intersection of various fields or disciplines working within literature than a constellation of two or three different thinkers/writers.  Or so it seems to me.  Anyway, in my case, writing as I do about Kentucky, I find it problematic that the only literature that gets published out of this region has a rural—sometimes gothic—flare.  When I say I’m a Kentucky author, I realize typically all the lit. mags will expect me to write in this fashion.  Never mind that Louisville is a diverse metropolis with over 600,000 people, or that Hazard (where my mother is from) has a severe prescription drug problem.  They want blood on the farm or in the woods or comely, wise tales praising the ways of the land or the sages that occupy this old wisdom.  This is a cheap cutout for sure, but the problem is that Kentucky (and much of the rest of the south) isn’t even remotely the place it was thirty years ago.    I didn’t grow up with religion (another hallmark of the Kentucky brand is some sort of biblical inflection) and have instead posited the natural world as the source of my mythos and, in many ways, magical realism has much more to say to me than the Gospel.  Kentucky is a knobby jungle—at least the part I like to write about—crawling with vines and briar and bugs of all kinds of biting sorts.  In my opinion, nature is obscure and wondrous enough to encompass/accommodate the robust, metaphysical mysteries that religion previously (and this is in my case) imbued.  Similarly, I remember attending a reading with a prominent Kentucky author where he said that he can’t even write about the Kentucky of today, but instead engages a forgotten, almost mythical past that seems more real to his idea of the Bluegrass state than its present incarnation.  This only further corroborated my intimation that The South isn’t what people want to believe that it is. Not anymore.  Accordingly, it seems my major preoccupation is how do we engage this current Kentucky—in my case the Kentucky that attributes to The South—in our creative writing? 

Ultimately, no matter what direction or topic I take up in my research, it will always return to this idea of cultural identity and how we define ourselves against the institutions and systems of our past.  In my opinion, the contrast between how southerners (and Kentuckians) want to consider themselves has never been more disparate from how they actually are.  The south is more urban, (more people live now in cities than on the countryside) diverse, and—though it has taken much time—less patriarchic.  The interstate cities have more economic opportunities and the remote, satellite towns like Hazard are threatened—beyond their drug issues—with economic extinction.   

In terms of this research guide, it seems it’s best to put the broadest terms first and then work your way in, trusting that those broader categories to include other prevalent topics (like maybe race, class, and gender).

So my criteria might look like:

1.  20^th Century American Lit.

2. Regionalism.

3. Southern Lit and Culture.

4. Eco-Criticism

5. (Whiteness studies.)   

Again I think it’s best to work your way down from the broadest to most specific.  Again, since I’m interested in how the South has changed over the last forty or fifty years, I think 20^th Century American Lit. represents a broad enough platform in which to start.  Each subsequent stage becomes more focused.  Anyway, the main idea is to engage this research realizing that my central contradiction/dilemma lies between the misconceived South of today and prototypical South propagated through the articles/texts/ and narratives of the past.