In the world of literary scholarship, we’re always focused on the other guy. We place our opinions, our thoughts, our most cutting critiques onto the works of other writers, and work under an established discourse of criticism and praise. But, we very seldom dare to dabble in creation. Many of us feel that it isn’t our job, that creation is for the artists, the poets, the writers, and we exist only to analyze. There is a notion that to attempt to become the artist is blasphemous, or somehow debasing of one’s intellectualism. Many scholars that do create keep their academic and creative careers separate, or downplay their whimsical pursuits amongst colleagues.

I think this is misguided.

In engaging in the creative, we awaken an empathetic part of our minds, a part more attune to wonder and originality. As literary critics—as cultural caretakers—it is an incredibly helpful exercise to engage in creation. It illuminates a part of our field that we aren’t always in sync with: its origin. It’s easy to criticize something from fifty feet away. It remains opaque, foreign. It’s much harder to dismiss something when you know how much effort went into it, to have attempted the same forms or methods yourself. Working creatively is not just an exercise in becoming a better scholar, it’s an exercise in being a better human.

Today we are mixing things up on the Relevate podcast, and instead of focusing on a scholar’s attempt to analyze another person’s work, we are going right to the source.

Autumn Kepley and Brooke Burris are alumni of UNCW, Autumn graduated last Spring with her MA in English, and Brooke finished the year before with a BA in Business. Together, they have co-authored a collection of poetry titled In a Field of Flowers, which came out earlier this year. Their journey through creation, collaboration, and publication is one that I think we all could learn something from, and their ability to transcend the hierarchy of artist, scholar, and student is nothing short of courageous.

Today we’re going to dive into the creative process, the tumultuous world of traditional publishing, the benefits of self publishing, and where on earth these two found the time to write a book while in college.

In the mid nineteenth century, Louisa May Alcott was a struggling, aspiring writer. She had written a great deal for periodicals, published a few books, and dabbled in sensationalism. Most of these she wrote under her own name, but some she penned under pseudonyms. Nevertheless, despite her attempts on all of these fronts, nothing ever really caught—nothing worked to bring her star fully into the realm of mass popularity.

This frustrated everyone involved. Alcott often complained of her tensions with the publishing industry—that they didn’t appreciate the kind of work she was penning; and in return the industry urged her to write things she didn’t want to write, things they thought were more likely to sell, and so this combative relationship wore on.

But then, in 1868, Alcott gave in. She wrote a story that she thought her publishers would finally be pleased with, with the intention of proving to them that what they wanted was boring, unlikely to succeed, and embarrassingly sentimental. She wrote this story, sent it in, and by year’s end, it was the most popular book in America. That book, was Little Women.

Little Women would continue to live in the zeitgeist uninterrupted for the next 156 years, spawning countless adaptations, reprints, spin-offs, and a fandom that would transcend both era and generation. As Little Women got older, and entered public domain, any limitation to the places and forms that Little Women could go completely dissolved. So, for the last century, Little Women has been anyone’s property—free to reprint, adapt, and engage with however you might see fit. And that has certainly happened, a lot.

Anlie Williams is a graduate student here at UNCW, and she has been examining these varied and disparate versions of Alcott’s most famous novel. She has been looking at how different elements of these renditions affect the original work, and how these versions alter the experience of the reader. She has dedicated her thesis to this project, and her findings speak to both the fine line between ownership and property, and the publishing marketplace, culture, and art.

The world of print media has been ever evolving since its inception in the fifteenth century. Woodblock printing gave way to the Gutenberg press, which gave way to the Rotary press, which gave way to the internet. In just the last few decades, online media has catalyzed the largest change in the discourse of public literacy since the very invention of mass printing. Globalization has given us the ability to share ideas with one another at lightspeed; do art or literature or business in seamless collaboration; and to form meaningful relationships with people we’ve never even met face-to-face.

In all of these interactions, there is language—there is writing. How we communicate with each other is fundamentally altered by the technology available to us at a certain time in history. Our relationship to language, is in part, our relationship to our devices. But, as the tech industry rolls out each yearly update, and each new generation of mechanisms, it becomes harder to keep up with the constant onslaught of technological evolution.

That is precisely why we need people like Dr. Colleen Reilly. Since the beginning of her academic career, she has been examining this strange relationship between man, machine, and language. She has been thinking about how we can best utilize these writing tools that are available to us, and how to better implement them into our classrooms, routines, and lives. She has wondered, how are these tools that we’re utilizing shaping us, and how are we shaping them?