So, a little while ago, I said that I wanted to go paw through the Knopf rejection letters.

I went into work the next day and my boss asked me (and another intern) to — you guessed it — paw through the Knopf rejection letters. We’re putting together a mini-exhibit to highlight the NY Times article, which means that we’ve looked at the letters and records Oshinsky mentioned and picked the ones that’ll work best on display. The exhibit will probably be up by the end of the week.

Have I mentioned that I love my new job? I love my new job.

Not long before I began my new HRC job, I discovered (thanks to my father’s internet sleuthing) that the HRC held a query letter from my grandmother to the Alfred A. Knopf publishing company. She wrote to them in the mid-1950s to ask if they’d want to publish a novel based on her life — a kind of “female Tom Sawyer story,” as she put it. They didn’t. Twenty-five years later she wrote the memoir manuscript I’m currently adapting; twenty-five years after that, I got the HRC internship.

On our first day of orientation, I had just enough time to glance at the letter and to laugh a little at how Louise-ish it is, how her style hadn’t really changed much in twenty-five years. The rejection letters are filed in a different set of manuscript boxes and are uncataloged. There’s a binder in the reading room, I think, that lists their contents. I’m planning to look for their response to Louise soon, though if it was a form letter, it may not have been saved, I suppose.

This morning the NY Times Book Review ran a story (by a UT professor) about the rejection letters and reader reports in the Knopf collection. Now I just want to sit down and look through all of them.

I had good intentions this summer, I swear. I was going write regularly here and talk in some depth about the memoir project, maybe about my academic work. Instead I wrote three-plus chapters of the memoir and rewrote one conference paper into an article-length piece; I thought about my dissertation project; I read seven hundred pages of Clarissa and a fair number of other books both academic and non-; I picked raspberries and blueberries and strawberries in my family’s back garden; I washed a lot of dishes. Now the semester’s begun and tomorrow is my first full day of work at the HRC.

It’s strange not to be teaching, especially since my classmates are all preparing for their own classes. I feel a bit like I’m getting away with something, even though I’ll be working twenty hours a week at the HRC and four at the Undergraduate Writing Center. I hope I will have the chance to teach my planned class on the rhetoric of popular fiction some time, but I’ll have plenty to do this semester, between my dissertation reading and my exciting new French class. I’m a complete beginner with French, though it’s the fifth language I’ve studied. So far, I can say sophisticated things like “Look at the window” and “Susie is wearing a red blouse,” and I sound like an idiot when I try to make the guttural R, but I still love it (even the funny numbers). I do have to stop thinking “wo” when I mean “je,” though. Zhongwen =/= Français, though in a perfect world I’d be studying both right now.

I still have way too much to do today, considering that it’s the last day of a three-day weekend, so I’m off to work. (”Work” here includes studying French, thankfully.) But I will try to be better about writing here this semester.