Deborah Kimmey

Me and a friend from Social Work

The Basics:

I’m a PhD student in U.S. Literature and Culture, specializing in the 19th-century. Born and bred on the East Coast, my education has taken me successively westward. I did my undergraduate work in Chicago at a small liberal arts college. Then, I got a MA in Women’s Studies at Loyola University, Chicago. Now, I’m here in Seattle! And I’ve been here for about five years. Time just flies!

See, the thing with me and writing is …

It’s a double-edged sword: writing is both the source of pleasure and pain with me. I love being able to communicate on behalf of people. Fresh out of college, I started working for a marketing/communications firm in Chicago, where I had my first taste of getting paid to translate big ideas and bigger strategies on behalf of my clients. Added to the challenge (which I truly enjoyed!) of successfully capturing their thoughts was the sheer delight of angling writing to fit its target audience in tone and style. I loved it! Now, I still write on behalf of people – though those people are generally limited to my editing clients (a side-gig that helps me support my grad school life) and my family. Other than that, my writing is just for me — which is where the anguish and anxiety of writing come in. The hard thing about the writing I do for my scholarly research is probably something everyone feels: the ideas are so dymanic and full of potential in my head, but getting them onto paper in a way that respects the integrity of full-dimensional thought is tough. When I get it right, however, it’s an amazing feeling of accomplishment!

My writing habits:

Honestly, with academic writing, I have a hard time working on drafts. I tend to postpone writing until I can spell everything out perfectly! sentence-by-sentence. That means that I’m usually writing for 9 hours one day and 0 hours the next… not the most sustainable writing process. Hopefully I can work on my writing habits this quarter, too!

If I could write like anyone, I’d chose …

For creative writing, I absolutely adore the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. For critical writing, I think Lauren Berlant is brilliant in her rhetorical choices. Here’s a sample of her public writing and her academic writing. And for prose more generally, I really enjoy reading theory that, like a nice bottle of wine, has had some time to age. Marx and Freud blow my mind.