In this week’s episode of the Love, Academic Writing podcast, the Love Doctors, Allison and Lee, talk about this week’s writing but: BUT WRITER’S BLOCK!

Click here to get your buts therapized for free on the podcast! 

Lee takes you through their latest bout of so-called block (turns out, it was just a bunch of excuses!) and some strategies for getting unblocked:

1. not beating the shit out of yourself for not writing

2. celebrating the small wins, and

3. creating minimum baselines. So minimum you can't not meet them. 

Plz plz plz rate and review the show so that other writers can find it! The struggle is real.

Connect with Allison @postphdtheblog or at allisonharbin.com

Connect with Lee @rhetoriclee or leempierce.com

Read the show transcript at: https://loveacademicwriting.podbean.com/writersblock01

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit loveacademicwriting.substack.com

In the inaugural episode of the Love, Academic Writing podcast, the Love Doctors, Allison and Lee, talk about this week’s writing but: BUT WRITER’S BLOCK!

Click here to get your buts therapized for free on the podcast! 

“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” ~James Baldwin

Plz plz plz rate and review the show so that other writers can find it! The struggle is real.

Is writer’s block real? What exactly is the “block”? Did you put it there or did someone else? Is the block depression, in which case maybe you need a break. Or is it just that you aren’t sure of your argument, in which case you need to write. Are you in Jesus’s cave or Plato’s? If you asked Eve Sedgwick or Audre Lorde if they had writer’s block while they were dying of cancer they probably would have said, “I have writer’s block all the time, that’s the whole reason I write.”

When you’re thinking (or bitching to someone else), that you have writer’s block, think about what you actually mean: 

• I don’t know what I’m trying to say


• This essay is a mess


• I’m never going to figure this out


• Nobody cares about this


• I don’t have enough theory. 

Connect with Allison @postphdtheblog or at allisonharbin.com

Connect with Lee @rhetoriclee or leempierce.com

Read the show transcript at: 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit loveacademicwriting.substack.com

Get ready for the Love Academic Writing (and hopefully other kinds of writing too) podcast! Hosted by Dr. Lee Pierce, assistant professor and rhetorical scholar, and Dr. Allison Harbin, academic-exile, freelance writer, blogger, and dev editor. Together, they are the Love Writing Doctors! (It’s funny because they ARE doctors). They are here to help you stop whining and start writing…through a LOT of bitching.

Click here to get your buts therapized for free on the podcast! 

Each episode tackles a different writing excuse. But I don’t have time. But all the emailz. But neoliberalism. Some of them are entitled bullshit. And some of them are for real, like, “but my depression” and “but black mold in my apartment.” We’ll cover them all…eventually…

Plz plz plz rate and review the show so that other writers can find it! The struggle is real.

Whether you’re an academic exile freelancing Ph.D. or a tenure track faculty at a cutthroat R1, if you need to get more words on the page, this is the podcast for you. So hit subscribe and look for the first episodes coming your way in late summer 2022.

In the meantime, you can connect with us on social media. You can even sign up now to get your writing buts therapized for free. Therapy for yer butts. It’s all in the show notes. 

Connect with Allison @postphdtheblog or at allisonharbin.com

Connect with Lee @rhetoriclee or leempierce.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit loveacademicwriting.substack.com

A reading of an excerpt from the introduction of my now defunct book manuscript, ”When Black Women Speak: The Politics of White Listening.”A

Jargon is inclusive and expands our collective understanding of the world when it is used carefully, defined, in tons of examples, and solves a problem by bringing a different awareness than other words in its orbit. However.....

A reading of a recent piece by Amanda Montell for Sunday Edit titled ”Language Lowdown: Why Phrases Like ”I Feel Like” and ”If That Makes Sense” Aren’t Actually Bad.”

looks at corruption in the courts from judges through dark money anti-democratic far-Right donors, and RhetoricLee Speaking, banishing banality one speech at a time. Your co-hosts, Mary and Lee, look at censorship, free speech vs. hate speech, and counter speech.

not only does it NOT address the more implicit racism of feeling entitled to say the word when there’s no one around “to be offended,” but it also begs the very people to transgress that you’re trying to get to stop transgressing because most people--especially people who fancy themselves edgy intellectuals or truth tellers or the last stalwarts of free speech against woke liberal scolds--when they hear a prohibition, their first instinct is to violate it.

I chatted recently with Nadeje of the Unleashed Unapologetically podcast about thought work, rhetoric, tension, cliches, and internal debate. The episode is called ”The Thoughts About the Thoughts.” Click on the link below to listen.

Black women remain subjects who must recite power to have any power even though the power of the reciter is never the power of the subject who originates the lines to be recited.