I know what to do about it—my relentless preparations for the future. I meditate. I use an app for a guided breathing exercise. I do yoga. I play with my dog and other dogs in a nearby field. I stay in the moment when I can.

It doesn’t help that so many things work on a years-long schedule. My son has one year of secondary school left. Two years of college. Three to four years of university. I have three more years of my PhD. I have books coming out certain years and not others, which means there are different expectations for editing, readings, and conferences during those years.

We also have a trip booked for next summer. And in my head I know that we have to head back to the States for a visit at some point. I know that we have to go to Argentina at some point. I have to save money for all of these things. Nothing can be last minute.

I feel like Prufrock with my life measured out, but coffee spoons seem too small. Someone is taking big, heaping cups of flour out of my life and asking me to account for them all and make the right cakes with them. And then something happens when I retire if I have done the right things with the cakes?

It’s okay if the metaphors don’t make sense.

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Onto the newsletter… The PhD programs in the UK function differently than those in the US. You have to have a Masters degree to apply to one. You have to pitch professors a project that is very well thought through, and one has to agree to being your supervisor. It’s only after you find a supervisor that you should apply to a program. Once you’re in, the program is mostly remote and self-driven. I learned all of this last year.

What I learned this year is that PhD programs in the UK also function differently from each other. I’m funded through an organization that works with nine universities, and I get to participate in conferences and workshops with students from all of them. As a group of us approached the end of our first year, some had to hand in extensive literature reviews that reflected the reading that they had done, summarized the articles/books, and highlighted gaps in the research.

My university required something called The Upgrade, which sounds like a term from a sci-fi story (The Turning from my own Clean Air, The Joining from Pluribus, etc.). Here it’s in reference to being upgraded from an MPhil to a PhD. Mostly you are already considered a PhD candidate, but this makes it official. And there is a chance that you can be told that you are not doing PhD-level work. It feels a little scary, like you could stumble and it could take a while to recover as you get back on track. But it also feels like everyone wants you to pass.

The Upgrade is a 15-minute presentation followed by a 45-minute discussion. An internal reviewer, who was previously unfamiliar with your work, poses questions, and you have to explain the choices you’ve made. It’s supposed to resemble your viva, short for viva voce and often referred to as a defense, which takes place at the very end of the degree. At the end of the degree, there are two reviewers, one internal and one external, and they’re given copies of the entire thesis/dissertation. For the upgrade, the reviewer is given your upgrade report.

The upgrade report is comprised of many sections—your abstract, methodology, research framework, anticipated contribution to knowledge, action plan, and then samples of work. For creative writing, many of these sections are a bit complicated, as you have two parts of your thesis that are working in tandem (the creative and the critical). But I’d love to share what each of these things mean, practically, as some of these were terms that I only vaguely understood before this process of writing and revising this upgrade report many times.

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First one on the list: vacuuming. When work is too much, I can’t keep up with it. Almost everything else is okay, but the vacuuming seems impossible to fit in. I think it’s because it’s not just the vacuuming. I know that I’ll get so sweaty that I’ll need a shower. The vacuum will undoubtedly be full, and I’ll have to empty it so I don’t crush future-me just as I begin the same vacuuming journey. As I go, I will see things that need to be vacuumed with a different attachment that I’ll have to go get, and this will involve multiple runs up and down the stairs with varying levels of difficulty. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s enough to keep putting it off, and then the little flecks of dirt and lint in the carpeting bother me more and more as the days pass.

My dog seems overwhelming when I’m overwhelmed. I know most people find their dog soothing as things whirl around them, but he stresses me out. He likes to be in contact with me 90% of the time. I can’t lie in bed or sit on the couch without him touching some part of my body. It’s amazing when I’m sick, when I know I can’t pass him whatever virus I’m battling, and when I can’t do anything even if I want to. But if I have a lot on my plate, he feels like a liquid that’s poured on to fill up every remaining nook and cranny.

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(I’m also going to include some writing exercises that can help students, but also that a writer at any stage of their writing life might enjoy!)

The Vague

What it is: The Vague is just what you’d expect—the writing is vague and unclear. It’s not that the writing doesn’t make sense (it’s not that kind of unclear), but more that the author’s intention is unclear. In a student’s mind, the writing is mysterious or open to interpretation. They usually justify it by saying how they’re appealing to a larger audience by leaving room for any interpretation. I counter this by reminding them that a reader comes to a particular writer’s piece to hear from that writer. This often has to do with reminding a student that their voice has value. Saying something is nothing to fear.

Another way to counter the students’ attraction to the Vague is using the workshop. An extremely important part of the workshop is to let a few students state, clearly and without judgement, what they think the poem is about. A teacher can also point to specific moments and ask a student (or a few) to say what they think is happening at that moment. That’s an opportunity for the writer to hear what is/isn’t coming through in their work, and they might feel an urge to better capture what it is that they want to say.

A Prompt: To combat the vague through a prompt you can try this one. Take a poem that you like and explain it in a short sentence, and then overexplain it. Take each line or image and expand on it. Be absurd, repetitive, add similes, whatever you want to do. Discuss (as a group) or notice (on your own) where the strengths and weaknesses ended up. Discuss/notice where clarity was lost or gained and what effect that had. Notice what you were drawn to as a writer—what moments, what images, what words in the original piece, and what techniques energized your writing when you expanded on those moments. A lot of writers love to add similes. Did that happen for you?

The Cliché

What it is: The Cliché is the most difficult for a beginning writer to spot. They are sure that what they’ve written is unique. And it is similarly difficult for a teacher to teach writers how to spot cliché. Even when a teacher tries to identify clichés for them, writers tend to be defensive. The main thing is that beginning writers need to read. A lot. It’s even a good idea for them to read mediocre writing, because clichés aren’t avoided and edited out in mediocre writing, and then it becomes more clear to beginning writers that those are indeed clichés. Sometimes I would joke with my fiction students that they weren’t allowed to bring me any plot lines that I’d seen in a Law & Order: SVU episode, but it also wasn’t a joke! Watching TV can be as helpful as reading when we’re discussing plotlines.

This is also another place where the workshop comes into play. I once had a whole classroom erupt into feedback about how a story was too similar to a The Walking Dead episode. And the funniest thing about it was that the writer didn’t watch the The Walking Dead! No one believed him but me. I believed him because I know how cliché plotlines are through various TV shows. The other students weren’t just noticing similarities to The Walking Dead; they were noticing clichés throughout our media.

Similar to The Vague, students need to value what they bring to the table, but to tackle The Cliché, they also need to figure out what they bring to the table. That’s very tricky to do. I didn’t write fiction until I was 32, and that was because I didn’t think I had anything to offer that genre. I was okay waiting it out, but there are other ways to find what you can offer.

A Prompt: Write clichés, and then write past them. A good place to start is with a simile from Shakespeare, like “as cold as ice” or “dead as a doornail,” or a simile from a fairy tale, “lips red as the rose, hair black as ebony, skin white as snow.” Any would work! First, you have to allow yourself to write a few more clichés as you work out from the original. You’re not going to instantly come to original language. We have a lot of common associations built into words, and it’s okay to acknowledge that. If we start with “as cold as ice,” we might move to “as cold as snow,” “as cold as winter.” To push past those, we might get more specific, “as cold as the first time I put my hand in a bowl of ice water—my mother had prepared it for me, told me to leave my hand there for ten minutes, thirty even, because I’d burned myself and a blister was forming.” Or we might lean toward the absurd, “as cold as the lake if all of the fish had turned to ice. I could see them bobbing to the surface until every inch of it was covered.” I might even have students try both for a lot of clichés. The important thing is, once you have a lot of new images, see what it is that defines your images. Do you work towards first person (the way I’ve done)? Do you prefer writing into the stranger images? Do you like to write into the past? Do you like to write about animals? You can learn so much about yourself as a writer by observing where it is that you naturally drift when you’re writing an image, when you’re not trying to write a whole poem or story. Knowing what it is that makes your writing yours can help guide your writing moving forward.

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My first thought about writing about this conference is: why did I say I would write about it??? Maybe I thought the conference would be much more exciting than it was. It was, instead, lackluster. The practical bits weren’t as practical as I thought they would be. The presentations were difficult to engage with. The alumni panel left me less than confident with how a PhD influences one’s future.

There has been so much stress on networking throughout the start of my degree, but it’s all been talk. There have been no opportunities for networking. We still just cluster with the people we know. At one lunch, I sat at a table with two groups of people, sort of merging the gap between them, and I tried talking to each group. It went okay, but I think that used up all my social boldness for the conference during that one lunch.

I sent a few ideas in for future networking events, and there’s another conference in the summer, so we’ll see. I think what I’m missing most is the focus on writing. But! I do want to embrace the various studies going on in this group of PhD students!

I feel like the conference is being so careful to appeal to everyone that the panels are leaning toward the bland. There must be a better way to learn about and celebrate these different kinds of research. I would be excited to go to a panel about how being a painter/dancer/sculptor/photographer/interior designer works as research and also just works as a career path. Even if nothing was applicable to me, it would be interesting.

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One of my favorite examples is from Japan, which Michael Dylan Foster wrote about in his essay ‘Haunting Modernity: Tanuki, Trains, and Transformation in Japan’. Trains came to Japan in 1872, and by 1907, there were almost five thousand miles of track (p. 337). The trains destroyed the discreteness of the villages, but it also created the sense of a national identity that couldn’t have existed before the trains. Around the new trains formed stories of phantom trains. These phantom trains threatened the real trains, sounding as if collisions were about to occur, but ultimately the phantom trains were ignored by the engineers, and they traveled on. This suggested that the modernization of Japan was the winning force—winning and inevitable. (This essay is in The Monster Theory Reader from 2020. I also recommend Foster’s book, The Book of Yōkai, if you’re interested in Japanese monsters.)

So let’s look at the anxieties surrounding the The Haunting of Hill House. The series came out in 2018, after being bought by Netflix in April 2017 off of a pitch. Then the screenplays for the episodes were written by a team of writers shortly after April 2017. For the writers and the audience, the story comes on the heels of some difficult years. Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, America elected Donald Trump for President in 2016, and North Korea conducted nuclear tests in 2016 (and 2017, too, but in September, after the sale of TV show). It was a time of divisiveness, unrest, and deep-seated xenophobia.

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Barbara Creed is a scholar who wrote a book called The Monstrous Feminine in 1993, and the second edition came out in 2023. In these books, she outlines archetypes of The Monstrous Feminine as they appear in horror films. For my PhD, I’m connecting her archetypes to the princess in Sleeping Beauty, as she appears in similar tales across many centuries. For this newsletter, I’m connecting her archetypes to the women monsters in The Haunting of Hill House (the TV show).

Given that I don’t want to write something horrendously long, I’ll try to do this as concisely as I can. I’ll outline the relevant archetypes first, and then I’ll say which characters inhabit which archetypes.

Sentient Zombie—an archetype added in the second edition—“Living, yet dead, and possessing an unnerving sense of right and wrong, the uncanny figure of the female zombie stands in stark contrast to the living human subjects, inviting us to re-think the meaning of the ‘human’” (213).

Vampire—“The female vampire is a figure who came to prominence in vampire films of the 1970s. During this period, the vampire film began to explore openly the explicit relationship between sex, violence and death” (58).

Witch—“She is usually depicted as a monstrous figure with supernatural powers and a desire for evil…She is thought to be dangerous and wily, capable of drawing on her evil powers to wreak destruction on the community. The witch sets out to unsettled boundaries between the rational and irrational, symbolic and imaginary. Her evil powers are seen as part of her ‘feminine’ nature” (75).

Possessed Monster—This one is hard to capture in just one quote. The idea of possession, especially demonic possession, is easy to grasp, from its appearance in the 14th century, when witches were conspiring with the devil, all the way up to present day, with shows like Jujutsu Kaisen, where Yuji Itadori is a vessel for the King of Curses, Ryomen Sukuna. But the monstrous feminine’s interaction with the possessed monster needs a bit more disentangling.

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The first thing I have to say—there will be spoilers for the TV series of The Haunting of Hill House. If you haven’t watched it yet, I wouldn’t recommend reading further!

The Haunting of Hill House is based on a book by Shirley Jackson (most famous for her short story, The Lottery). I haven’t read the book but I have read that the TV series is very different. So again, even if you’ve read the book, and you think I can’t spoil the TV series for you, I totally can.

Here we go!

The Haunting of Hill House is the story of the Crain family—a father, a mother, two sons, and three daughters—who move into a giant, gorgeous house with the intent to flip it and make enough money to build a house for themselves that they call “the dream house.” The mother is an architect, the father is an all around handyman, and they have no concerns about flipping Hill House.

But quickly, the children start seeing ghosts, hearing banging on the walls, and having other strange experiences. The parents try to explain these things away as nightmares, or sometimes the wind, though by the end of the family’s time in the house, even the parents see the ghosts.

While there are many monsters in this story (mostly ghoulish ghosts who are gray and decaying), they don’t tend to push the story forward. Instead they scare the children and build a divide between the children and their parents, as the children don’t feel that their parents believe them.

However there are three monsters in the story who are necessary to the plot. The first is a ghost named Poppy, who appears as gray and decaying sometimes, but in most occurrences, is seen as a beautiful young lady. The second is the mother of the family, Olivia. The third is “The Bent-Neck Lady,” who is a ghost only seen (and named) by the youngest daughter in the family, Nellie.

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When we moved to the UK, graduate school was only an option if I could pay international fees. I would have to wait three years before I could pay the more reasonable UK fees. Even then, it wouldn’t be the same as when I went to grad school in the States, where my fees were covered and I was paid a stipend.

After living here for three years, I started looking into funding opportunities. The first I found and applied for was in psychology, to study the life of artist Mary Barnes. It was an unusual and specific project, and I hadn’t come up with it. Still, I was enthusiastic about it, and even when I didn’t get it, I ordered a few books about Mary Barnes to learn more about her.

Then I found out about the Techne foundation. They work with nine different universities in and around London, and they fund studies in the humanities. Now I could design my own project, but the process of applying would be so different from the States. First, I had to pitch the project to professors, trying to find a supervisor for it. I basically had to cold-email professors at the nine universities, picking which ones to email based on their profiles on various websites, comparing their research interests to mine.

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JUDITH MAGAZINE

You, Who Make Us Holy

Editor’s Note: Enjoy Sarah Blake’s haunting short story about a ghost in a bomb shelter —David Michael Slater…

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a year ago · 15 likes · 3 comments · David Michael Slater

Now for the post! For years now we’ve been making small changes that make a big impact on how I feel about the amount of trash we make. I know the changes we make at home can’t compete with the changes that need to be made at an industry level, but I still want to make changes that help me feel better.

I’m going to leave this as a free post because whenever I’m looking into products like these, I’m always trying to find reviews that don’t read like they were written by a computer. I hope this will be helpful to some! I’ll include links to everything. Next month we’ll be back to the more normal coverage of writing and travel and living abroad!

For deodorant, lip balm, and body wash, we use Wild. Things are refillable, compostable, and nice products, but let me talk about each separately. I’ve been using their deodorant for so long that they’ve since redesigned the cases and changed their formulas, and now the deodorant doesn’t fit as nicely in my case as it does in my husband’s newer case. There have been times when a batch of deodorant is more crumbly than it should be. There have been times when I didn’t use it soon enough, and it yellowed, and then it stained some of my clothes yellow. But none of these gripes have made me want to switch. Right now, the batch we have is so silky smooth. It smells nice, feels nice, doesn’t mark up my clothes, and it doesn’t keep me from sweating, but it does keep me from smelling. And I like not worrying about what I’m putting on my skin.

Regarding the Wild lip balm, it’s nice and smells like my mother’s lip sticks from when I was a kid. I bet it would be good enough in many parts of the world, but it’s not good enough being in the UK. The only thing that keeps my lips from getting chapped here and splitting in the corners is O’Keeffe’s Lip Repair. I’d love if that came in not-plastic!

The Wild body wash has been the most successful. We try different scents. The bottle is nice. The inserts are compostable, but they still hold up as we store them and use them. Body wash is a simpler ask, and they’ve delivered.

The annoyance with Wild products is how many you have to order through their website, but I’ve recently found the body wash at Tesco. And I’ve seen the deodorant in Sainsbury’s I think. So hopefully you can find them around instead of ordering from the site.

Okay, onto some other companies! We have used Faith in Nature here and there. My husband uses their shampoo bar, in paper packaging, and wildly available. I’ve tried some of their liquid shampoos and conditioners, and there’s a store in town (and a stall at the weekly market) that lets you refill your bottles instead of buying new plastic, but they made my hair flat, they weren’t always easy to get refilled, and they weren’t great for the zany colors in my hair. I have to try the shampoo bar still, but I like the color-saving shampoo and conditioner that I’ve found for now.

Though I did just check their website to write this post and they’re switching to aluminum packaging, and they sell the large refills, too (though not sure where we’d store them!).

My husband uses Kalamazoo (“gentle beard wash and facial exfoliant”) from Lush, and the nice thing about them is that you can bring your plastic tub back in and they’ll refill it for you.

For toothbrushes, I’m the only one not using an electric toothbrush and throwing away just a little toothbrush head every time it wears out. But now they’re finally making regular toothbrushes that work like this! So I’ve finally switched to a Colgate handheld where you keep the handle and just switch out the head. Sadly, it’s not great. I don’t love the shape of the toothbrush heads, and the handle doesn’t stand easily on a countertop as you’re switching things around or storing it. Still, I prefer it to throwing whole toothbrushes away. (I tried a bamboo toothbrush and could NOT handle how that felt, but I’m glad some people can!)

For toilet cleaning and dishwasher tablets, we use Ecover, which is a brand I like. The Ecover dish tablets come in little plastic wrappers, which I’m not thrilled about. But they’re in a cardboard box. I don’t know. We can definitely still make changes!

We use Method Sweet Water hand soap and their refills. I loved Method in the States, but this is the only one of their products that seems to be over here. I’m slightly disappointed with how everything is plastic, but I have a lot of trouble finding soaps that don’t irritate my skin and with scents that I’m not allergic to, so I’m probably sticking with it for now.

For coffee (and Belgian chocolates!), we’ve been ordering from Wonky Coffee. They’re a company that collects coffee that would have been thrown away, and they make a blend and send it out to subscribers. My husband is the coffee drinker and he says the quality is great! The chocolates are something they just started, and they’re not always available, but we’ve gotten them twice. The chocolates, similarly, would have been discarded, so sometimes the drizzle is missing or there are air bubbles in the chocolate, and they’re so, so delicious. Highly recommend!

For toilet paper (or loo roll, to be British about it), we’ve been using Bumboo, which is, as you might’ve guessed, made out of bamboo. It’s also wrapped in paper and shipped in a cardboard box. It’s the softest option I’ve found in the UK.

For wipes, if you use those flushable ones, we’ve switched to Wype. It turns toilet paper into wipes, and it’s way less irritating on the skin, and it’s less to store around the toilet, and the whole things is just a nicer experience. You also don’t find that you left the wipes slightly open and the whole pack is now dried out and a waste of money. Win win.

This is probably the one that people will find the strangest. For toothpaste, we’ve switched to Smyle, which is toothpaste as tablets. You put it in your mouth, chew it up, wet your toothbrush, and brush like normal. I was skeptical at first, but I’ve been using it for years now and my dentist says my teeth look good. I haven’t had any new cavities. I don’t have any sensitivity. It does what it’s supposed to do. (I still floss and use a fluoride mouthwash as well, for which there don’t seem to be eco-friendly options.)

So the UK is the land of blister packs. Advil, Tylenol, prescription medication from the pharmacy—all of it comes in blister packs. It’s bonkers. And because most are plastic on the bottom and a thin foil on top, you can’t recycle them. Luckily, I found a company that does recycle them. ZeroWaste. You have to buy a bag and then mail it in filled with a particular type of waste, and it is pricey. I waited until a holiday sale brought it down to a price I could afford, but eventually I bought the small bag and it lasted through six months of blister packs. It feels so good not to throw these things out. (I will say, they offer recycling for things that can be recycled for free, so I wouldn’t recommend them for everything. If you have any questions about recycling, feel free to ask me! I went to a recycling plant last year as part of a school field trip and I learned a ton.)

For our laundry detergent, we’ve been using EarthBreeze, which is detergent that comes in paper-like sheets that are mailed in paper envelopes. It washes nicely, is easy to use, and it feels like one of the least wasteful things in the house.

My husband prefers Smol, which is another great company, and they do dish washer detergent, laundry detergent, and many more products now. But! It failed us in a crappy washing machine at our old apartment, leaving goop all over the clothes, and I can’t get over it. One day, Smol.

For hand sanitizer, I use The Cheeky Panda’s biodegradable wipes. I probably could find something better, but these are so helpful. They’re also another one of those companies that have a ton of products.

We just bought Seep sponges, scrubbers, and a pair of gloves because their products are made from bamboo, copper, and more responsibly sourced rubber. But I haven’t actually gotten to use the stuff yet so I don’t know! I’m just glad these things exist.

This is getting so long! I’ll mention a few things quickly. Kleenex doesn’t have plastic in their boxes anymore or their packaging (at least from where we order them). I love my lightweight steel water bottle. It does dent easily, and mostly that’s been fine, but I did know a kid at school who had one that leaked because of where it had dented. For grocery bags, it’s the culture here to have a bunch of reusable bags. I have one that’s expandable and lovely, and I would link to it but I can’t find it anywhere online!

Some of these things feel expensive, because they are more expensive than some of the alternatives, but one trick I’ve learned is to go to a product’s website, sign up for their newsletter or something, start placing an order, and then leave before finishing it. You will get a coupon in the next days, if not hours, to encourage you to finish your order. Maybe everyone knows this, but I didn’t realize!

If I had to pick what’s made the biggest impact, I think it’s been not throwing away toothpaste tubes anymore. I love that.

And that’s my brief foray into random house choices we’ve made over the years!

Next time: Graduate School

Updates: I have a flash fiction piece coming out in mid-June in Lost Balloon!

Current read: The Monstrous-Feminine by Barbara Creed

Current watch: Severence, Love It or List It (UK), and a rewatch of Person of Interest. Next up is the final season of You, and I’m so excited for it.

Thank you for reading!

It began with a staff meeting with my department, and they’re the most extraordinary group of people. They gave me cards and gifts and made me feel loved and appreciated. When the students saw me with a bag of gifts, they asked if it was my birthday. “No,” I told them, “it’s my last day.”

I’ve been telling the students one by one that I’d be leaving, but I’d only told the students who I thought would care. It turns out a few more students cared. Some of the toughest boys started saying, “No, miss, you can’t leave. That’s dead. Are you really leaving? Why, miss? That’s dead. That’s dead.” I thought that’s dead meant that’s boring, but I think it’s more like another version of that’s not on.

They’ll be fine, but it was nice of them to make a fuss.

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