** This post was originally written for Hikma. An adaptation of this post is under review in the University of Michigan Press as a book chapter in an edited volume tentatively titled The PhD in Progress.

My Life Was One Thing, My Story Another

On my first all-American road trip from Massachusetts to Montana, I took a slim novel by Ruth Ozeki called My Year of Meats. It is a black comedy, environmental expose, travelogue, and an Asian Diaspora narrative sizzled into one juicy story. A perfect companion for: the empty, burning road with a rattly old van with the broken A/C; an Asian gal dropped like an anomalous pin on a whiteboard; the beefy air carrying the acrid smell from an abandoned coal mine; and the breathtaking canyons that looked illusively pristine even when its ground was soaked with Indigenous blood. 

I was the only Asian in the vicinity when swallowing Ozeki’s lines under the 38℃100℉ Dakota sun. In that awesome and brutal plain, Ozeki’s descriptions of its environmental and historical whirlwinds made perfect sense and were shudderingly savory. The “North American environmentalism” and “Pan-Pacific East Asian lives,” thrown together in a pan, made an oddly smart dish of complicated yet hopeful transnational, environmental camaraderie. Oh, the taste of them.  

All photos by Nayoung Kim 

Back in Massachusetts, I sat down with a blank Word doc giddy with the impressions, thoughts, stirrings, and thrills. 

Yet, each time I tried to organize them into scholarly sentences, they sounded forced, even fake. Perplexed, I brought the draft to an article publication workshop. That article perished halfway. It was terrifying to witness the vivid insights wither away when I meant to capture their vitality. 

I struggled to decipher what this impasse meant for a full year. Until it was time to write a dissertation. 

“A Sensory Map of Transpacific Ecologies: Contemporary Literary Visions.” 

That was the initial title of my dissertation. My prospectus with the same title started with “1. Introduction.” The section explained what I meant by “sensory map” and “transpacific ecologies,” following the scholarly trajectories of environmental and diaspora studies. 

I ended up not using this title. 

Instead, the title has become “Novels of Ocean-Crossing: A Homage to Vibrant Lives Across the Oceans.” There is no neatly sectioned “Introduction.” There is no 300-page PDF. 

This dissertation is a website and a variegated one (prismaticreader.com). There is no “Abstract” but a video with me and my then-1.5-year-old baby. Instead of extensive literature reviews, a collage of trivia (“why I started taking daily cold showers”), a deep dive into texts (“those cold showers have a lot to do with Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose”), and images that some people would call evocative and others random. 

In place of a doctoral scholar with a diamond-sharp intellect, the dissertation belongs to a Pacific-crosser who experiences the world through a swirl of words, images, sounds, and touches.

Wow, this is selfish.

My first impression of reading the new prospectus. There were so many “me” and “my” experiences, not in a smart, distilled manner but with personal impurities including messy memories, anxieties, and pleasures. I had never done that in my entire academic life.    

For many of us researchers, our inclinations, identities, and life experiences inform our work. I, for one, can pick up and amplify tiny sensory stimulations; I am acutely aware that I am a young, non-American, East Asian woman and that this heavily shapes my encounters with things and people on the other side of the Pacific. So when it came to choosing my field, it seemed logical that I gravitated toward environmental studies to understand why the sensory and relationships moved me. I sought out, naturally, novels pondering the experiences of migration. 

Putting “Me” Back in the Story 

It couldn’t be that I was not invested in my topic or the chosen critical perspective. I was, with my whole body and accumulated memories. 

That was the issue.

My insights were sensuous and mnemonic—the qualities directly informed and matured by being a crosser of the Pacific Ocean. So, to properly represent those insights, their qualities must be kept alive along with the presence of their generator/storyteller: me.

These two elements were exactly what were left out in the unfinished journal article.

I was trying to mold a personal and prismatically sensuous insight into impersonal academic prose in a black-and-white text. 

The problem wasn’t my commitment to critical endeavor. It was how I represented and talked about its findings. 

The problem was that the traditional academic prose was not the best mode, or “medium,” to communicate the distinctive textures of my insight.

I had to find a different medium. I closed the laptop on the desk. Sitting on my tiny bed crammed with cushions, I started scribbling with a pencil on a notepad.

I made a mindmap of all the past “signs” that suggested I needed an alternative medium to academic writing. The entries included: 

• Coming up with images intuitively when reading striking passages in novels and critical theories

: I was reading Ling Ma’s short story about a man who buried himself to be reborn from the dirt to wipe his saturated but dull life clean. David Wojnarowicz’s photograph Face in Dirt and an enflamed phoenix rising from ashes floated to mind, side by side. From the cold/gray/scraggy to hot/bloody/smooth, death/birth wish, and the tragedy that they will repeat without an end—instantly palpable.   

• Storing sensory memories intact + replaying them when I want to

: It was that crisp, pellucid Massachusetts fall day when the breeze clinked against the skin. Walking, I thought of the same fall day last year in Seoul. The sky was mercury gray and the moist air gave my exposed arms goosebumps. In Cambridge, I was walking on the other side of the Pacific.     

• Experiencing knowledge or insight as a collage

: A critical insight comes to me in its fullest form when I process it in a combination of words, images, and lived experiences. I was able to consume Ozeki’s environmentalism to its full flavor because I had her words as the main ingredients, images gathered from the road trip as the elevating spices, and my memories of crossing the Pacific and the continental US as the personalizing condiments (and the Northwestern heat that cook all together).

In about 30 minutes, two pages filled up. 

The message was clear.

Talk in the way you experience insights with all chaotic senses and memories. 

The two pages of scribbles changed the entire process of my dissertation creation. And how I talk to the world as a scholar.

How to Talk Like You

The following guide is for you if you detect similar “signs” in your research life as mine. But do not replicate these steps literally. It sounds like a worn disclaimer in a self-help guide but this is crucial. You want to be perceptive to how you process insights, which will come more easily in a setting and with a medium that you feel most comfortable with. So, please use this guide as a big framework or a beacon on a dark, open ocean. 

1. Detect the “Signs” 

Gather the past impressions, symptoms, thoughts, and reactions that will help you understand how you experience and process things in your critical work and life. This is the most important step because you are finding what medium of communication is a good fit for you. If you absorb things well through sounds, record yourself and listen to the signs. If you find clarity by talking with other people, ask your family, friends, and colleagues about how you talk about something new or deliver information. Do I use a metaphor or imagery? Do I break things down into logical components and explicate each one? Do I talk about my first impression? Do I draw on napkins? (People still do this.)

2. Play, Revise, Refine

After the detection stage, I decided to try multimedia essays because they mirrored my multisensory way of processing insights. The essays were to live online as a website to be accessed simultaneously on both sides of the Pacific to reflect the condition where my critical perspective was born. So, “online multimedia essays” became my medium. 

But this final decision came after multiple trials of putting this new medium to the test by translating/recreating my academic writings in it. 

Let’s say your medium is “evocative images + short keywords.” Then your transcreation could look like this:

excerpts from my visual essay (full version here)

Please keep in mind that this is the version after 5 trials. Do not rush through your trials. You’re switching to ballet after 10 years of bodybuilding. The first few trials will look and read awful and your mental joints will hurt. Notice what bothers you. Is it the flow of the story? Try switching scenes #3 and #4. Is it the cluster of images? Try cutting some of them out.

Tackle one element at a time to see how it affects the story and not overwhelm yourself. These small and targeted trials will build you a solid core. And in time, you’ll be able to do more agile movements such as fine-tuning which part of your story works best with which element of your medium. 

3. Simulate (you’ll be surprised)    

Remember that final article that ended up entirely different from the first draft? Expect a change tenfold with a new medium. I was constantly struck by the inherent narrative breadth of a multimedia essay that I didn’t foresee when brainstorming on paper. The harmonious array of words and images on a notepad would look too clunky or cluttered on a webpage. A “compact” introductory text required too much scrolling, losing its juice halfway. The website needed an even more condensed introduction in terms of both the length and physical space it occupied—like a video. 

Here lies the necessity and fun of simulating your story in a new medium. It is simply impossible to tell what is or isn’t working before you try. It can be nerve-wracking but also exhilarating. 

When reviewing your simulations, do not brush off a gut feeling that says “this doesn’t sound right.” A new medium needs a likewise different approach from academic prose during revisions as during the initial creation of a story. Value your intuition as much as your logic.    

Your Life Changes, So Does Your Story 

Your perspective, values, and even core sensory receptors change as you move through life. Here lies the beauty of talking like you experience. Your storytelling medium evolves with you in a way that best serves you in this moment in life. It never loses its vibrance.  

So, don’t be alarmed if the medium that worked beautifully last year seems off-kilter. It’s a “sign” that you are experiencing things differently now. Start over the medium-detecting process. You will find something new.  

It takes a very specific physical effort to walk away from a worn/wrong medium. It then takes a frustratingly long time to talk like yourself, to be a “selfish” storyteller. It took me a full year since that first road trip just to find out the nature of the issue, before I even began to think about dissertation. And all this happens even before you convince your committees that your unconventional critical insights can be equally rigorous scholarly endeavors as the traditional ones, just channeled toward a slightly different goal.

We are committed to producing fresh and meaningful insights. That commitment simply (or not so simply?) recognizes that our contributions follow multiple routes that endow them with specific qualities. We want to expand the breadth of knowledge by capturing the “inconsequential” vibrations that fall through the cerebral net of academic prose.   

Not all institutions and committees would be familiar with or willing to support an alternative outlook on being a scholar. Do not let the presumed unenthusiasm and skepticism stop you from initiating the conversation. Regardless of the outcome, you will gain clarity on what your next step as a scholar should be. It can be seeking venues other than a dissertation to test your story, such as public-facing online publications or podcasts. Or, you may decide to recruit support from other institutions and fellow researchers championing your cause (i.e. My alma mater Brandeis University is actively creating new frameworks and conversations around this topic. You may also find helpful this detailed repository of alternative dissertations by University of Pittsburgh). Either way, you are being a scholar on your own terms. 

Blossom in a strange soil rather than stay alive in an adverse one. Your new-found fragrance will astound you. 

References 

Kim, Nayoung. “Novels of Ocean-Crossing: A Homage to Vibrant Lives Across the Oceans.” PhD diss. Brandeis University, 2024. https://prismaticreader.com/stories

Ozeki, Ruth L. My Year of Meats. Penguin, 1998.

About the author 

Nayoung (“Nai”) Kim is a researcher and a Korean-English storyteller who produces slow and intentional online content on contemporary world art and novels for aesthetically and intellectually curious people. As a storytelling consultant, she works with galleries and artists to produce resonating and accessible introductions and essays on the client’s artistic world, crossing cultures and languages. She holds a PhD in English and a weird dissertation under her belt. She is also a helpless romantic who still believes that beauty and kindness can save the world. Her latest venture is a YouTube channel on art and novels serving fellow romantics.  

Instagram: @nayoung.nai.kim
LinkedIn: @naikim

Website: https://prismaticreader.com/stories