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I was well into my sabbatical leave before I began to meditate on the impressively long history of the term "sabbatical" and to appreciate not only its historical claim but the wisdom of the idea. I also came to realize the fact that, in Genesis at least, the sabbath was mandated! Sabbath or sabbatical time--time to reflect, be silent, look inward, digest ideas--is necessary, not optional. This was my first sabbatical, and I learned how productive and creative that time could be. So I can report that for the first two months of my sabbatical I gardened, read, made lists, and rested. I found that it took some period of time just to cleanse my system of old worries, conflicts, concerns--the day-to-day fare of university teaching. Such diurnal concerns also drain energy and reduce perspective, and I needed to rest from that worry. Perhaps fortunately for me, I already had in the works a textbook under contract, being written with co-authors Judith Arnold and Katie Witek. Contracts mean deadlines, and in September the deadlines began to hit, so that the fall part of my sabbatical was chiefly a matter of editing, writing, and re-writing Research Writing in the Information Age, which appeared in December in its first advance copies to us from our publishers, Allyn and Bacon. January was spent in large part writing the textbook's teaching manual, a term, by the way, that we resisted mightily, since it sounds like the booklet that comes with the lawn mower or microwave. Our pleas to the publisher were in vain, however, and we had to content ourselves with making the "manual" into a "resource" or "guide" without being able to label it as such. The second project for my sabbatical was Evelyn Underhill, 20th century writer on mysticism. Underhill is known as the author of the still-definitive work Mysticism, first published in 1911, but few people knew that she had begun her career as a novelist and poet. She was a close friend of May Sinclair, Arthur Machen, and, later, T.S. Eliot. Moreover, she was the author of 39 full-length books and nearly 500 articles. Simply reading the oeuvre was a matter that took a significant amount of time. By spring I had concluded that a reasonable and workable project would be an edition of her letters. The first (and only) edition had been published in 1945, a mere four years after her death, and the editor, Charles Williams, simply could not have collected all the letters is such a short time, war-time at that. The summer portion of my sabbatical leave, therefore, saw me in England and Scotland, searching out letters at King's College and St. Andrews University, respectively. I also chased down some letters at Trinity College, Cambridge, home of Shakespeare folios and the most august library I have ever seen. Keeping Virginia Woolf in mind all the while, I eagerly entered that Oxbridge terrain and, unlike Woolf, was treated with deference and utmost civility. After working in the British Isles, in August I joined Katie Witek in Bordeaux, France, where we presented a paper to NCTE's Third Global Conference on Literacy. Our paper was called "Taming the World Wide Web" and dwelt on practical ways to introduce web research into the research writing process. The session was well-attended and the questions were interesting, especially because the participants came from other countries where computer access is a big issue. And, finally, Katie and I got a chance to buy French linen and china, to tour St. Emilion vineyards, and, with our husbands, to indulge in several wonderful French meals where we toasted home and friends. What a way to end a sabbatical!
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