From English M.A. Thesis to Peer-Reviewed Publication

I finished my graduate thesis in the summer of 2021 in a vacant apartment off Adams Street. My own apartment was having issues: cockroaches ruled the kitchen, the refrigerator started scat singing bebop at odd hours, and screaming from the neighbors cut right through the thick layer of flaking lead paint on the walls. The oven was broken, so Macomb Rentals sent someone over to look at it; he wasn’t able to fix the oven, but he did somehow manage to rupture the water main behind it, so now the apartment had no running water along with everything else. Macomb Rentals let us use one of their vacant apartments with unruptured pipes so that we could have some kind of water access. For weeks, I could be spotted sloshing a red bucket across the road so that my fiancé Katya and I could drink, flush the toilet, and take sponge baths.

If you got up early enough, you might instead spot me moving through the muggy morning with a kitchen chair, computer bag, and books on interlibrary loan. I was taking advantage of the empty apartment to try to get some work done. The apartment was unfurnished and smelled faintly of mildew, but it was cool, roach-free, and quiet, and I needed as much quiet as I could get to focus on wrangling my thesis.

I was writing on Samuel Delany’s postmodern science-fiction novel Dhalgren, a book that William Gibson once described as “a riddle never meant to be solved.” After a year of wrestling with the project, I was about ready to believe him. It was like the novel was fractally complex; every time I thought I was getting close to a coherent analysis of some part, I would uncover another crucial aspect of the work that needed to be fully researched and explored before anything substantive could be said. I wanted to talk about Dhalgren as New Wave Science Fiction, but that quickly bled into Dhalgren as mythology, and of course talking about Dhalgren as mythology meant talking about Dhalgren and race, and Dhalgren and race could not possibly be unpacked without going into Dhalgren and city space…Dhalgren, Dhalgren, Dhalgren . . . Grendal, Grendal, Grendal . . . it felt like I couldn’t write a sentence without huge sinkholes opening up between the lines of my manuscript and demanding to be filled by copious research.

The project kept growing and growing, and by the time I started hauling my chair into the vacant apartment, I had a nearly 30,000-word mess on my hands. My goal was to just pull it together into some kind of shape to defend. The thesis was full of loose ends, but I didn’t have the time or the peace of mind to fully figure out all the connections between them: my grandmother had just died, and my father’s family was on the brink of civil war over her estate. Katya and I were negotiating with the university for full-time teaching positions, and it looked like we might have to jump up our wedding by a few months because only Katya got an offer with health insurance. And on top of everything else, I hadn’t had a proper shower since our water main broke.

I just needed to defend.

I went to my thesis committee with a 32,593-word beast complete with footnotes and about fifty entries in the works cited. I stammered through a lot of the defense, trying and failing to keep my answers short, lost in Delanyland. It was enough to get me through the defense and earn me my MA, but I left the program with a lingering residue of frustration. For all the time I had sunk into the project, I hadn’t managed to articulate what I really wanted to say about Dhalgren. But I had a wedding and a new job to worry about and no time for a completed project. I submitted my thesis to ProQuest and left it to gather dust in the stacks of Malpass.

…

 I wasn’t able to return to my thesis while I still lived in the old apartment. I knew there was something there worth going back to—occasionally I’d salvaged short sections from it and presented them at conferences to good effect—but every time I tried to work over the thing as a whole, I’d quickly get overwhelmed. I was still too close to the project; it was like the writing had come to embody the chaos of summer 2021, and I couldn’t see the way to make it all come together.

 Katya and I finally got chased out of our old apartment when the ceiling started to fall out in heavy square chunks of plaster and insulation. We started renting with Aspen Court, and the new place was like paradise compared to our old slum: no cockroaches, central AC, quiet neighbors, and a refrigerator with absolutely no aspirations beyond its day job. My life had stabilized in other ways as well: I was creeping up on my one-year wedding anniversary, and getting accepted for a second year teaching full-time with the university meant I was no longer considered an adjunct, meaning no more gaming with the university for healthcare.

 A couple months after moving into the new apartment, I sat down in bed with a cup of lemony tea and read through my thesis again, and an amazing thing happened: I finally realized what this damn project was all about.

 I spent the first couple weeks of 2023 chopping my thesis down to size. I wanted to submit it to Science Fiction Studies (SFS), the best academic journal for the genre, and their upper limit on submissions was 15,000 words. Dr. Banash, my thesis advisor, recommended I just send them one of the two chapters, but that wasn’t really possible given how intertwined they were. And besides, I had a vision: when I had written the thesis, I found I kept digressing from discussing literary genres to discussing city space and vice versa. I realized that the reason for this was because Delany himself views literature itself as a kind of city space. I cut together a new article from my thesis focused around this central insight and worked together with Katya to polish and edit it. I sent off my new 14,300-word article to SFS, feeling quite brilliant and confident that SFS would think so as well.

I received an enthusiastic revise-and-resubmit.

Over the course of the next eight months, I went through three grueling rounds of revision. The first round was with the journal’s in-house editors, the second with two outside, expert readers for blind peer- review, and the third with an SFS editor again. All three rounds called for cutting. It was almost the exact opposite of my experience writing the original thesis, where I had to read through the entirety of Dhalgren’s reception history, half of Delany’s oeuvre, and any book or article that I thought might give me some direction for the project. I think during the whole revision process, I only ended up finding an additional two sources on top of the ones already present in my thesis. Instead, the work was on revising and refocusing the project and removing all material that my reviewers deemed extraneous. I had to cut more than 3,000 words on top of the 18,000 I’d already removed, a process that felt like textual bulimia. Sometimes I had to delete pages I remembered sweating whole days to write. It wasn’t just cutting for cutting’s sake, though. The structure of the project was clarified, the prose tightened, and the readings sharpened. I got to watch my article turn into a fine-tuned machine.

 Finally, on September 17th, 2023, more than three years since I started my thesis, I got my article accepted for publication. “Samuel R. Delany as Genre Flaneur: Encountering Science Fiction in Dhalgren” appeared this March in Volume 51, Part 1 of Science Fiction Studies. It is one of the most difficult things I’ve written in my life, and it’s also one of the most satisfying. Writing the article was like diving into chaos and learning how to swim. I emerged with a set of new concepts for understanding literature and the world, and, in my opinion, there is no greater joy in intellectual life.