There is no return to normal. There is no going back to what there was before. You have to find new ways of going on. I could be talking about the pandemic here. Yes indeed. But I’m not. I’m actually talking about life post thesis.

I wrote something a long time ago about the post PhD slump. It’s a real thing. It doesn’t happen to everyone, but it is very common. The initial elation of finally reaching your doctoral goal is followed by an almighty anti-climax. Oh no. This is not what you expected.

Working out how to deal with the thesis shaped hole in your life takes time.I recently re-found some helpful writing about post thesis life and I thought it was worth passing on. It comes from Maria Piantanida and Noreen Garman‘s bookThe qualitative dissertation: a guide for students and faculty(2008). Piantanida and Garman…

Good Morning!

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Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers
on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum,
so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in
your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.

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“No black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much.’
Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’. . . No woman
has ever written enough.”

– bell hooks

Howard Zinn (January 1, 2004) – “[A note of explanation: In the spring of 1967, my book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal was published by Beacon Press. It was the first book on the war to call for immediate withdrawal, no conditions. Many liberals were saying: ‘Yes, we should leave Vietnam, but President Johnson can’t just do it; it would be very hard to explain to the American people.’ My response, in the last chapter of my book, was to write a speech for Lyndon Johnson, explaining to the American people why he was ordering the immediate evacuation of American armed forces from Vietnam. No, Johnson did not make that speech, and the war went on. But I am undaunted, and willing to make my second attempt at speech writing. This time, I am writing a speech for whichever candidate emerges as Democratic Party nominee for President. My supposition is…

Belated Thanks to Lawrence Ferlinghetti
by David Bachner

During winter break my freshman year of college
I bought A Coney Island of the Mind.

Reading it, over and over, night after night,
I was carried into a whole new way

of seeing and feeling, a new way
of thinking about poetry.

And still she dances
dances still
and still she comes
at me
with breathing breasts
and secret lips
and (ah)
bright eyes…

In 1969, suffering a doomed graduate school stint
at Berkeley, I would escape across the Bay

to browse in Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore.
I could never summon up the nerve to approach

the store’s famous owner and thank him
for his book’s impact on me.

Then I thought of sending him a letter.
In the end, I did neither.

The volume I bought in 1962 remains, though,
shelved always close to my desk

to read whenever my…

“‘The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people,’ Adrienne Rich wrote in her beautiful 1975 speech on lying and what truth really means, ‘are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.’ Nowhere is this liar’s loss of perspective more damaging to public life, human possibility, and our collective progress than in politics, where complex social, cultural, economic, and psychological forces conspire to make the assault on truth traumatic on a towering scale. Those forces are what Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), one of the most incisive thinkers of the past century, explores in a superb 1971 essay titled ‘Lying in Politics,’ written shortly after the release of the Pentagon Papers and later included in Crises of the Republic (public library) — a…

Henrietta: A Summer Love
by Joe Cottonwood

I do not claim to own this creek
but it flows through my property
and perhaps I own each day’s gurgle
that wakes me, and beds me, alone
after a winter of slow goodbye.

Today, a new sound: splash and thrash.
A salmon the size of an otter
struggles upstream over gravel,
pool to pool where she rests, gathers strength
for the next leap and spurt
driven by a memory she does not remember.

Nine miles from the Pacific she stops
at this dark pool under my footbridge.
In a drought year, no farther. Henrietta,
I christen thee after my favorite aunt
who has your face.

I do not claim to own this fish
but all summer she hovers in shadow,
fins barely moving, facing upstream.
Water enters, water departs
too shallow each way for escape.

At the post office I happen to…

Still Waiting
by Clive Collins

I’m still waiting for time’s tide to turn and run back towards the shore.
Still waiting for all the number 32 buses I ever missed to turn up all at once
like a flock of vanilla-flavoured ice-cream coloured seagulls.
I’m still waiting for the Stones to start singing “I Am Waiting” one more time and Ray Davies
to stop being so tired, so tired of waiting.
I’m still waiting for my father to come home after his funeral, for the telephone I no longer possess, the one with the circular dial, to ring-a-ling-a-ling and hear voices say “hello”.
as in “hello, it’s mam” or Meg or Ray or Mick or David or any of the now accumulating
directory of the dead.
I am still waiting to be less of everything I seem to be—shy, thick, anxious, to be electrified to the quick by—by what I…

Still Waters
by Paul Jones

I am still, waiting
for the one moment
that old Eastern sages
say gives absurdity
an absolute clarity,
the moment multiple
bald monks chant to induce.
They say the Way is
like water. It will work
its wonders at due time,
the way water always
breaks up rocks, turns them
into sand, but will not
be transformed itself.
Being water, it’s
already what it needs
to be. Winter and ice
merely redefine water.
Wind, when it works, only works
on the surface of water
When fire meets water,
water is sent to heaven
but fire just becomes ash.
Water, like saints, returns
to perform its steady work.
Sleet, snow, rain or hail—
even fog—are water’s
temporary bodies.
In time, water will be
all part of one huge sea.
Water will save us all
in time. In time, they say.
In the meantime, be water
as…