Roxani Krystalli: the (academic) writer
Dr Roxani Krystalli is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the University of St Andrews School of International Relations. Her research and teaching focus on feminist peace and conflict studies, as well as on the politics of nature and place. A key question animating Roxani's work within and beyond the academy is how people reimagine worlds in the wake of loss.
Do you see yourself as a writer?
I sometimes tell myself angsty stories about who a writer is. These stories inevitably conclude with my imagining that other people are writers, and I am not. I am trying to put less stock in the identity of ‘writer’ and more effort into the action itself. I write. I write in different registers, for different audiences, in different voices, with different hopes and fears. A question that animates my life and writing is how people imagine and enact worlds in the wake of loss. I am also increasingly drawn to its corollary question: Which practices, ideas, and relationships sustain life?
Within academia, my writing in response to these questions sometimes conforms to—and, more frequently, seeks to challenge—particular expectations about citation, voice, and ideas about sources of knowledge and authority.
When I used to work primarily as a practitioner in the fields of humanitarian action and peacebuilding, versions of these same questions about life and loss underpinned my work, but the writing that emerged about them addressed policymakers, decision-makers and professionals in conflict-affected areas around the world. The format and tone of writing differed, even if there were crumbs you could follow that would link this storytelling to the themes I care about.
Alongside my writing in academia, policy, and practice, I write essays that reflect on the themes of memory, home, and place. Though all these pursuits stem from the same person, and are animated by similar sources, the storytelling that emerges is different in tone and audience. Writing in different registers can both enhance and dilute one’s sense of being a writer.
Much of the time, I love to write—just as I love to teach and to garden and to dance. I do not expect myself to be ‘a dancer’ to allow myself to dance. My hope, moving forward, is that I can allow myself to take action, to participate in activities (such as writing!), and to derive joy from them, without necessarily feeling constrained by or attached to the identity that may correspond to them.
What’s the hardest part of writing for you?
I rarely set out to write with a clear sense of what “my point is.” Writing is my process for figuring out what I think and how I feel. I am increasingly drawn to writing that reflects and preserves a sense of uncertainty, rather than making a singular Point.
In practice, this means I often start out writing without a clear sense of where I am going. I am a bit of a blind rat on the page, stumbling in the dark. Trusting that this is part of my process – and that I will later know which of these early attempts at meaning to edit, cut, or keep – remains hard each time.
What do you do when you get stuck?
One of my father’s favourite sayings—and he was a man of many sayings!—was “when in doubt, take a walk”. I need to move my body and get out of my own head when stuck—or, at the very least, stay in my head, but in the company of different surroundings. For the past few years, I have lived by Scottish rivers, first the Allan water in Dunblane and now the river Eden in Fife. Walking beside these rivers sets a rhythm to my day. These walks are reliable. They happen whether I am having a good writing day or a terrible one. That reliability lends a cadence to my days. Both my writing and my life overall are served by having a cadence that does not depend on a particular outcome, on achievement or performance.
Is there any writing software you use?
It depends on the nature of the project. For essays, I prefer to write first drafts by hand in my notebook. I like to think at the pace of handwriting. For bigger projects, such as my PhD thesis or my forthcoming book, Good Victims, I tend to rely on Scrivener for the first draft. I like that I can work on different bits of the project without having to move between documents, and the interface suits me.
Conversations on software can feel arbitrary, as they depend so much on aesthetic preferences or ways of working. What one person finds intuitive and helpful, another finds incomprehensibly frustrating. I also try not to romanticise routine or software. I could have all the perfectly sharpened pencils and favourite notebooks lined up, and if the ideas are not there, or the sentences are clunky, the tools and software will be of little help. (Does this stop me from buying stationery with reckless abandon? It absolutely does not.)
How do you fit writing into your schedule?
Different kinds of writing make different emotional and logistical demands on me. One of the habits I am trying to unlearn is that I tend to think I need a “long runway” for big writing projects: a chunk of hours in the day when I can focus, ideally over many days. If I have even one call scheduled (let alone in-person meetings or teaching or other commitments), I struggle to settle into a writing rhythm. This is less a question of time, and more of attention.
Over the years, for reasons having to do with caregiving responsibilities, illness, and other factors that have shaped my life, I have tried to release my attachment to the Big Uninterrupted Block of Time and to, instead, write whatever I can in smaller chunks. This is more possible for some kinds of writing than others, such as making revisions to a piece I have already drafted, as opposed to creating something new.
During the teaching semester, most of my words go to emails, lectures, or Track Changes on other people’s work. I relish these interactions, and want to be careful not to treat these parts of my life as though they threaten the existence of writing. I love thinking with my students, and I love accompanying their own thoughts. I became an academic in large part due to my love of and belief in teaching. To the extent that the modern university makes it challenging to carry out these commitments I care about side-by-side, it is because of unreasonable and inadequately compensated workloads. Staff on contingent (fixed-term) or precarious contracts especially feel these pressures. As such, it is not the teaching or the students who threaten the writing time and process; rather, as trade union actions around the world are drawing attention to, extractive management models of labour management are leaving staff depleted and demoralised.
What does this mean in practice? I write when I can, as much as I can, and I try to find ways to live with the frustration of the words not written, or the words poured into email. I feel those frustrations most keenly when I have to write in many registers: Even if there is still time left in the day or the week, if I have to work on a policy report, I struggle to write a personal essay alongside it because switching between voices is dizzying. I am working on prioritising the registers I wish to write in, and on letting some demands wait.
Are there any tips you have for writing or editing your writing?
It depends on the type of writing! When I read fiction, personal essays, or creative non-fiction, I treasure subtlety. I do not love it, for example, when a writer “argues that …” in a novel. Novels have and make arguments, of course, but they do so through story, through characters and setting and relationships and tensions, and I prefer writing that relies on story to do that work, rather than on a loud declaration.
In much academic writing, by contrast, “I argue that…” is often the expectation. One of my hopes for the next phase of my life and writing is to think about how to soften the argumentative voice and how to move in less declarative directions, acknowledging that my preferences for fiction can apply to the academy too, and that the barriers between genres and forms need not be as rigid or as fixed as I have imagined and experienced them to be.
In terms of specific tips: When university students share their work with me for feedback, I often find myself writing “active voice, active voice, active voice” in the margins. This is not just a stylistic preference, but a sense that the passive voice often hides power. Who are the actors behind the actions you are describing and what are their effects? If that is a question that is difficult to answer, that is analytically interesting and potentially politically important too.
I feel similarly about ‘we’ – who is the ‘we’ you are referring to? I think back to Adrienne Rich’s essay “Notes toward a politics of location”, in which she writes “the problem was that we did not know whom we meant when we said ‘we’”. This is not to say there is no room for the first-person plural or for collectivities in writing; rather, it is to encourage writers to be specific about who makes up the ‘we’. That specificity also allows the ‘we’ to be necessarily more partial, more fractured, and more tenuous than it initially appears.
Are there any books on writers or writing that you have particularly enjoyed and would recommend?
So many! In terms of books on writers and writing, I love Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings and Elena Ferrante’s In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing. The prologue to Zadie Smith’s essay collection Feel Free speaks to me in its framing of writing from experience, as does the rest of that collection, and Zadie Smith’s recent craft talk at the St Louis Literary Award is excellent as well. (Really, I love all of Zadie Smith all of the time). Hearing Ada Limón talk with David Naimon on the Between the Covers podcast about where poems come from and how they take shape is stirring, even for those who may not consider themselves writers or readers of poetry. Though not strictly ‘about’ writing, the work of Deborah Levy (especially Real Estate) and Annie Ernaux (especially The Years, translated by Alison Strayer) moves me deeply. Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks is about teaching, yes, but it is also about clarity and ambiguity in thinking and writing too. There is a theme here: I think reading widely in the genre you wish to write in and beyond it is perhaps more generative than reading strictly ‘about’ writing.