In Defense of Eels

A re-introduction

In her essay collection Any Person Is the Only Self, Elisa Gabbert writes of a theory her husband has: people are either squids or eels. She writes, “Baby squids are born as perfectly formed but teeny versions of their later selves. Eels go through radical changes over the course of one lifetime, to the degree that scientists used to think eels at different life stages were totally different types of eel.” Gabbert identifies as a squid, noting the consistency of her interests, her commitment to them over decades. Me? I’m an eel.

In my early 20s, I was thrilled to apply and then enroll to pursue a master’s in library and information studies. The job that I had for most of my time as an undergraduate was working for the university’s interlibrary loan department, where I searched databases for articles, but mostly the Wisconsin Historical Society’s stacks for books to send to or scan for out-of-town patrons. I loved a lot about that job: the independent work, being in physical library spaces, being a part of making information accessible for people. Working in media fresh out of college, I developed an interest in archiving and digital asset management and started my M.A. program with media archiving in mind for my future career.

Ever the eel, though, I changed my mind approximately three times in two years about what I wanted out of that degree, out of my life; I pivoted to studying linked data and semantic annotation (with pursuing a PhD in this area in mind), then digital scholarship and academic librarianship, only to realize during my last semester that I didn’t want to be in a library and information studies program after all; I wanted to be in a PhD program, studying, broadly, how we relate to the world, whether through landscape, urban design, or the mediated tourist experience. All of these changes could be interpreted as flighty, or confused, behavior. And they are, to an extent; it’s also pretty classic behavior for a 25-year-old: I was trying things out and seeing what resonated. There was growth and development in my rejection of certain ideas, as well as in my exploration of topics and spaces that did resonate. During my last semester of my M.A., feeling like I’d exhausted the coursework I was interested in from my program, I turned my sights toward the geography department to enroll in cartography and GIS classes. I refused to ignore the restlessness that I felt in my library studies program; it demanded that I shift gears and orient my attention elsewhere.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I’ve been seemingly slipping from one field or career into another. Sometimes it seems schizophrenic and haphazard; sometimes it all makes perfect sense to me. These shifts have felt less like floundering than they’ve felt like a process of finding my place. For me, thinking about place, in the geographic sense of meaning-making with our surroundings, has been my throughline.

I started this newsletter over two years ago as a way to get back into the practice of writing: I wanted to think through what I was doing, and why. I was a year into working in a bakery, a decision that surprised a lot of people, myself included. I turned to pen and paper to make more sense of a string of significant changes in my life: I was writing to process my father’s death, and I was writing to understand my identity as a baker, something that had shifted from being a hobby to being my profession and that was inextricably connected to my grief.

Now, I’ve returned to school, for a PhD in environmental studies (from a humanities perspective, I tell people who assume I’m studying contemporary sustainability initiatives or climate change; that’s not to diss on studying those things — they’re very important topics — but there’s much more to environmental studies!). I’m interested in studying the history of growing grains — specifically rye — in Wisconsin, questioning the immigrant settler traditions that made the upper Midwest of the U.S. so known for grain and milling and their creation of a regional agrarian identity that aided the erasure of Tribal traditions and practices. What I share via this newsletter will reflect this shift back into academia.

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I read Marguerite Duras’ Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (The Ravishing of Lol Stein) as a senior in college, for my French major. It’s the book that I come back to, time and again, as my personal compass, as something that other interests of mine feel like tendrils of. Reading Lol V. Stein expanded my mind of the forms that geographic and environmental thinking and writing can take: reading the book for the first time utterly pulled me into Duras’ deft weaving of the themes of love, memory and psychological trauma, and identity that she explicitly ties to place. The story calls into question what we know about those around us, our surroundings, and ourselves. The book ends with Lol lying in a rye field, a scene that made me wonder, as a student 10 years ago, what is it about the rye?

It’s a coincidence that I wondered about the meaning of rye in a 20^th century French novel 10 years ago and that rye is what I’ve returned to as the subject of my research. But, for a coincidence, to me it’s a poignant one (Jung might say that it’s not a coincidence at all). It’s part of the line that holds my meandering interests together, refuting the idea that at different stages of life, I’ve been an entirely different person, like eels were once thought to be.