One Year of Diva Drivel

One year ago, I first shared Diva Drivel with the world (or rather, a small circle of friends and family who cared to read it), and there have been many developments in my life since then: I presented my research to a community of musical theatre scholars for the first time. I finished my master’s degree in English. I moved to New York. Most exciting of all, I started a PhD in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Needless to say, my life has been busy, which is part of why I’ve neglected this blog for the last several months. But it’s not the only reason—I’ve been dealing with some good, old-fashioned writer’s block. It was only in the last few weeks that I realized that writer’s block was the root of my writing problems because I’ve always associated it with creative writing.

It’s thanks to one of the first readings I was assigned in graduate school—Robert Boice’s Professors as Writers—that I finally made the connection. I’m a perfectionist, so I edit my writing before I even put pen to paper so that it will sometimes take me fifteen minutes to write a single sentence. I often do research to support my ideas for my Diva Drivel posts, but I become obsessed with gathering as much information as possible, so that I never move on from researching to writing.

I hope following Boice’s suggestions from Professors as Writers will help me get back into my flow with writing, but I also want to adopt a new attitude toward the writing I post here. About a week ago, I attended an excellent symposium organized by Stacy Wolf and Catherine M. Young from Princeton University called “Reactivating Memory, Shuffle Along and the Tulsa Race Massacre.” I learned a lot about both the musical and the Tulsa Race Massacre, but I also latched on to something scholar Eric M. Glover said before answering an audience question—he said that he was speaking “in draft.” For my graduate study work, I write in an academic style, and that training sometimes influences the character of the writing I post here. But attempting to make my blog posts as rigorous as a peer-reviewed journal article is both unnecessary and not the best use of my time right now. So, I’d like to move forward with the idea of writing “in draft” in mind, which is not to say that I won’t make my blog posts as polished as possible, but that this blog can be a forum for playing with new ideas that may not yet be fully formed.

I will post again here soon, and as often as my studies allow, but for now I hope you can appreciate the fact that I’m not giving up on this blog yet!