In the first year of my Ph.D program I wound up writing an incredibly crappy seminar paper on the problems of native-informant-representation (to paraphrase) in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. I also had to, for the class, take the 22+ page original and grind it down to a 10-page conference paper. The smaller paper was actually a whole lot better, which was interesting, because I suck at revising things generally and I also hate throwing stuff away.
That said, a CFP came up, and so I fired off an abstract to the Midwest MLA Conference in Chicago in 2010 (I think), and they said yes. It was kind of cool, too, because my romantic partner, who’s in the Ph.D Lit program at the University of AZ, also got a paper accepted, so each of us flew into Chicago from our different institutions, and met up, and had a junket together.
Beyond that, though, it was pretty cool…I read my paper, it was well-received, a number of people came up afterward to talk with me about it, some people asked questions during the kind of desultory panel discussion after the presentations. And I actually felt like a real academic, someone who was allowed to and vindicated in being part of the academic/literary conversation, rather than just the lowly grad student that I was (and still am).
So. Send out abstracts. You write a paper, send it out. If you have an idea that you care about looking into, that might fit with a conference that you’ve seen a CFP for, respond to the call for papers and send an abstract out. Even if the paper isn’t written yet, if you have something that you think has legs, do it. It’s a good line on your CV, and it’s also pleasing in a lot of more personal ways, if you do it. Or at least it was for me.
