In other words, the binge writing (up all night, against deadline pressure) we learned to do in college doesn’t work in the long run.

The ventilation file allows you to incorporate your writing resistance into your writing process, and it gives you a way to identify and respond to the writing myths that may be standing in your way.

I’ve tried to do without a project box, but I find that my writing starts to seem like an intrusive heap of loose ends and false starts. With a project box, the chaos of my intellectual work is corralled into organized sections, and those sections seem to be waiting patiently for me to return to them every time I open the lid.

While surely carpen-ters and gardeners can also struggle with self- doubt and frustration, my guess is that we academics are far more insecure about our abil-ities, because we want so much to be perceived as “already” experts.

The craftsman attitude lets us imagine ourselves more humbly and effectively, which helps us both think and write more effectively.

This is the opposite of the craftsman attitude, which involves instead an honest commitment to learning how to do better and better work.

Academics can be uncomfortable with the craftsman metaphor. Perhaps because being a successful student (and professor) requires looking and sounding smart, we learn how to offer impressive intel-lectual performances while hiding our clumsiness and ineptitude.

When you re tellmg truths, true self. The o • · 1£ 1 · y • d. t carry out a dramatic se -ana ysis. ou re you're not preten mg o putting truths down and watching where they go

t's good to let the unconscious do its spontaneous, often brilliant, job and later let the conscious self do it s rational, logical job if needed.

hats ~ot a · · fi d" but we were surprised to realize that the writers surpnsmg n mg, . who achie-ved strong effects through rhythm or other tec~mques of sound had usually achieved them unconsciously. ~hen prai~ed for an artistic effect they frequently said, "What?" and listened with amaze-ment to what they had written.

When you write truths freely you'll find that in small and large ways you use the strategies of professional writers, without thinking of them.

When you write freely, losing yourself in trying to tell truths, you'll often find yourself and others. But if you allow yourself to play the game of trying to look good, you'll probably write junk, like this:

they unwittingly imply that their readers can never themselves become authorities.

Textbooks fail even to hint that the discoverers — those knowledgeable ones — are human and that this failure has damaging consequences.

sensed what I was producing — not a textbook but a context‐book. Suddenly I knew that most textbooks are fatally lacking. They misrepresent. They tell less than half‐truths.

yet historians often grasp more about the context and meaning of those lives than can the actors themselves

if I live till another ! ummer

I was very glad to hear from you. It had been so long, she added, that it began to worry me to know what so long a silence could mean.

A piece of correspondence took so long to arrive, it took so long to answer, and return mail could be so slow that the wounds of misinterpretation had weeks or months to fester.

we could nor write you because we did not know where you was."

ime stolen, supplies gathered, sentences composed: After chat, an u_nreliable postal service could render all such efforts in vain.

When I feel lonesome and bad as if I must see you, I set down and write, then the next day burn them up.

Books like How to Write: A Pocket Manual of Composition and Letter-Writing, published at midcentury, were directed toward the middle classes, and even if Eunice and her family had skimmed such pages, they would soon have found the rules impossible to follow (choose ((the best white letter paper" and leave "a broad margin on the left-hand side")

s for the content of the letters, all writers are influenced by what they read, and working-class men and women in Eunice's day con-sumed poe,ular fiction in the f9~ oL dime n~l~ cl1:_d serialized sto-ries marked by sentimentality and seill a~ionalism.

0 Mother there are so many things I want to say to you, but how can I? Eunice wondered, echoing countless letter writers across rime. If_! could see you I cou!d talk so yo1£.J:!!2uld understand me better.

Every letter left unwritt c f h en ror wane o an hour, a candle, a s eet, or a pen ed ed Eunice's family closer to silence and invisibili , for only with time and l' h --· supp ies at t e ready could one compose a ~ecord of a day or a week, of a successful or failed endeavor, an important opinion a pre · . . • . , ssmg sentiment.

Indeed, the Civil War years became a historical moment in which families and friends wrote unprecedented numb~ of letters-

writing a letter often became the sole means of maintaining intimacy.

Her unusual experi-ences make clear just how mercurial racial categories could be in the nineteenth century, but her life also proves just how much power those mercurial markers could exert to confine-or transform-a person's life.

What makes Eunice's version of that tale unusual is that she was a white woman who re~cued herself from destitution .... by marrying across the color line.

Studying the Civil War, labor history, the history of women and gender, and African American and African Caribbean history also filled in the contours of Eunice's life

Like hundreds of thousands of working-class women in the ninetee~ntury, Eunice rarely appears in formal historical records -beyond the most commonplace documents: a birth cert~cate, a marriage registration, a census listing.

That day, she traded the letters for cash

I discovered Eunice in a box full of letters.