Our Journey, Day 61
It's two months now since I was advised by the president of my faculty union that my position at Bemidji State was being eliminated. Since then it has taken me some time to decide what I'd really like to do next. I think I have a pretty good idea now. Some of those things involve other people agreeing with me, so the best thing I can do is make my case and then wait and see if they agree. In the meantime, I'm trying to continue working on other things I want to do. If I have a whole set of things and I sort of set them in motion in a fairly quick series, then whether one or the other pans out, I'll still have something to do.
One of the things I've been thinking about for a really long time, but this situation has reminded me of it, is the idea that I should be talking to the world via the web. Not just to my students in classrooms or online "course shells". One of the things that actually preceded my interest in Open Ed and free textbooks was self-publishing. This probably began partly as an outsider's reaction to being ignored by the gatekeepers. Yes, I ultimately did get the Yale University Press to publish my book. And I like Peppermint Kings, although I'd like it better with the images in it that the Press wouldn't include without a type of permission I was unable to get. But the real issue for me is, I think my work before and after the project that got published was equally good. And I don't think that many more people have read it because it's part of that prestigious Agrarian Studies Series. So although I'm happy PK exists, I'm more focused on finding audiences myself.
One of the places I've been testing out is Substack. A couple of hundred people have found my stuff. I have a few thousand subs on YouTube. I've just begun a website of my own and a Medium account, which I haven't put much into yet. I've been putting a variety of different kinds of content up, so I'm also trying to discover what types of things interest people in these different venues. And I've been reading and watching other people, to try to see what attracts readers. More to discover whether I should invest time in these venues than to try to alter my stuff to make it more attractive. My hope is that I'll do exactly what interests me and find an audience that is interested too.
This is an ongoing process. I'll probably change things occasionally, and see what happens. One thing I did last week is I moved the archive of my Substack posts behind the subscription wall. Everything I post is still free for everybody to read and watch, for a month. Then contributors get to keep seeing it but free subs don't. I think this is a reasonable way to give something to people who support my work. I may add something else soon. Maybe a monthly chat or AMA-type discussion (that's "ask me anything"). What I'm not planning to do is to pretend to be "making history" content but really just reading the newsfeed back from a partisan perspective. Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn had a discussion in last week's podcast (American This Week #58) in which they bumped into the issue of historians' guilt in either erasing a lot of important insights about the past or failing at their job of making sense of the present with the help of a complicated, nuanced past filled with diverse perspectives. The Canadian Parliament's apparent failure to recall that during World War II Russia was an ally seems to be a jarring reminder of this. I can't help thinking that people who pretend they're doing history online when all they're really doing is partisan propaganda share some of the blame for regular people giving up and saying it's all BS so let's just ignore it and keep our heads down.