What are you working on?
My new curiosity is medieval tree diagrams, ways of visually organizing larger concepts or even ways of organizing one’s marginal thoughts within a work. I sit on the Editorial Committee of the University of Chicago Press, where I work, and I became aware of a book we are publishing this spring, Lines of Thought: Branching Diagrams and the Medieval Mind by Ayelet Even-Ezra. It immediately intrigued me, both as a lapsed medievalist and as someone who once very happily diagrammed every sentence she could find. I am currently experimenting with adapting the form of a branch diagram to a poem, which brings its own new challenges of having to work by hand and wishing I had somewhere to lay out some very large paper. I don’t yet know in the end how these will translate to the page—or if they really can—or if they will just be a way for me to reshape my own thoughts and approach to the poems themselves. Time will tell, and I work very slowly these days.
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