Dear Reader,
This week's newsletter features an author interview with Dr. Collie Fulford, whose new book, Insiders, Outliers: Centering Adult Student Writers at an HBCU, comes out this month from Rutgers University Press. I first met Collie when she reached out a few years ago to let me know that with the help of The Book Proposal Book and my Perfect-Fit Publisher Challenge, she had received positive responses from all three presses she sent her book proposal to (yay!). Last summer, with her own book under contract, Collie served as a very helpful beta reader for Make Your Manuscript Work, using my manuscript development method to get her text into final shape before it went into production. Finally, Collie's book is here, and I'm delighted to have her share her author experience with you. Enjoy!
Laura Portwood-Stacer: Who do you hope will read this book?
Collie Fulford: I often tell students that you cannot reach every audience with a project, so be as specific as possible about who is the core readership. Yet here I am promoting my book’s relevance to readers in two major fields—higher education studies and writing studies—and at different stages in their careers.
I hope the book appeals to faculty and administrators who want to understand the adult student writers at their institutions. Insiders, Outliers gives these readers a glimpse of the complex writing experiences and educational histories of adults who return to college or who first attempt it once they already have full adult lives. I wrote the book to encourage these readers to take a hard look at their own campuses and classrooms in light of the findings. I hope to move them to improve adult-inclusivity on their campuses, from adopting teaching and research practices that amplify the powers of mixed age student groups to co-developing policies, services, and advocacy with adult learners.
I also aim to reach graduate students in research methods classes. For these readers, I am deliberately transparent about the methodologies I blended for this book, and why I made the choices I did. That includes discussing the dynamics of research across racial difference. I write about times when I made significant missteps and had to rethink my approaches. I do this because I want less experienced scholars to have models of why and when redesign may be necessary in order to do ethical research.
It is also important to me that the kinds of people this book is about recognize themselves in the cases and the analysis. I gave a talk recently based on one of the cases. A member of my field came up to me afterward and said, Collie, your work is about me. She had not previously seen her experiences represented in our scholarship, so that felt really good.
LPS: What are you doing or planning to do to promote the book when it’s released?
CF: A friend of mine, Dave Alff, talks about book promotion as idea-promotion more than self-promotion. As a former shy person, I can get behind that. I absolutely want potential readers to know about Insiders, Outliers so that adult students in higher education become much more legible to them as writers and makers of knowledge across the breadth of their life activities. The best way I know how to do that is by amplifying these students’ perspectives. I figure the book promotion method needs to match the book’s content and its research approaches.
With that in mind, I’m planning an event back in North Carolina where the participants are from. It would be antithetical to the book’s ethos for me to just do a straight-up reading. Instead, I plan to organize a roundtable of alumni who were either named participants or research partners on the study. I will encourage the alumni I invite to bring all the people who are part of their higher education stories. I picture their grandkids, cousins, friends, and professors coming to hear these former students talk about their writing and educational experiences. It’ll be a book promotion event, sure, but even more so it will be a celebration and thank you to these folks whose stories, insights, and labor contributed to the book.
LPS: That sounds like a wonderful idea! What do you think you might do differently the next time you publish a book (or what do you wish you had done differently this time around)?
CF: I was so driven. This is the book I needed for my tenure case at an R1. I had previously earned tenure at a teaching oriented university where there was neither the expectation of nor in-house mentorship for writing a monograph, although that is where this research originated. After my career change, I had to adapt to the R1’s pressure to publish at an aggressive pace. I was also steered toward a narrow interpretation of what counts in terms of the prestige of the press and solo authorship.
I don’t expect that I will need to drive quite so hard on the pace of my next book. With tenure, too, comes more ability to define other aspects of the work. For instance, I generally prefer the ethics, results, and process of co-research and co-writing, and so the next book is likely to be jointly authored. I’m also interested in writing for public audiences—such as aspiring adult students—so I anticipate that the publishers my team seeks, the styles we write in, and the coauthoring practices will all differ next time.
LPS: What were the most helpful sources of support you received in the process of writing and publishing this book?
CF: There were so many different people who encouraged me, read early drafts, gave me new knowledge, or offered accountability at different phases of this long writing process. Most important among these are the student researchers who worked with me and without whom there would not be this book. Adrienne Long, Stuart Parrish, Yaseen Abdul-Malik, and Thomas Kelly are now alumni of North Carolina Central University who were among the indispensable research partners on this project while they were adult undergraduates.
While translating the research into a manuscript, I got involved in writing groups of all kinds, sizes and durations. The largest was the Writers Hour that convenes a global community of writers every day for synchronous writing sessions. They sustained me during periods when I needed to meet critical deadlines. For instance, I recall a rugged 100-day writing challenge they sponsored that got me to the finish line of my first full draft. I also am in several more intimate groups affiliated with the Duke Faculty Write Program which is led by the Jennifer Ahern-Dodson, a relentless advocate for academic writers to have the conditions they need to write deeply.
Both the Writers Hour and Duke’s program are primarily show-up-and-write groups. That’s something that helps me stay on track, but sometimes I’ve also needed readers. Fortunately, at key points, several generous colleagues have basically said, don’t worry about exchanging drafts, just let me read your proposal or a chapter because the stakes are high for you right now. That was such a gift. Of all these readers, Lauren Rosenberg and Anne Rita Napoleone pushed me the hardest to make this work as strong as I could. These two friends I’ve known since graduate school read most of the chapters at their least readable stages. They consistently encouraged me to write with guts. Through the hardest revisions, they applied disciplinary precision and the kind of friendship that tolerates no weak ideas. My acquisitions editor at Rutgers, Peggy Solic, further helped me realize the broader impact my ideas might have if I envisioned the book for audiences beyond my field.
I sought other kinds of publishing expertise at different stages, too. For instance, your book proposal resources and (years later) your developmental editing workshop helped me reshape the work with publication criteria in mind. I also had the luxury of research funding that could cover such workshops, plus writing retreats and an indexer, among other aids to finishing. I’ve benefited from financial support for research through three institutions – North Carolina Central University, Duke University, and University at Buffalo. This certainly makes book writing more feasible than without it. I don’t take that access to funding for granted.
LPS: Is there anything else you want to share that you think aspiring book authors should know?
CF: The manuscript took a really long time. It was about eight years from the first research grant to publication. Part of that slow pace was because for the first few years, I was hesitant about whether I was authorized to write about the research. It’s not the classic imposter syndrome, but more of a racial reckoning: Who was I, a white professor, to write about a group of students at a historically Black university? Between the ethics and the optics, I felt there were surely more fitting authors for this sort of research. But when I spoke about what I was learning about adult students at conferences, with HBCU colleagues, and with students themselves, I was challenged to “stop apologizing” and just do the work. Because it needs doing. They helped me acknowledge that limitations are something to be transparent about rather than to justify shutting a project down. Of course what I can represent about adult student writers at an HBCU is partial. The inevitable gaps in my work are invitations to other scholars to conduct related studies from their own standpoints. That’s how we make knowledge faceted.
In relation to this, several early readers pushed me to put myself into the writing. I thought the way to lift up the experiences of the participants was to erase myself from the narrative, really place them first. But readers said they needed to understand my motivations and history as an adult student and teacher to understand my reasons for writing the book. I’m a feminist researcher, so articulating positionality should be second nature. Yet it took me an embarrassingly long time before I was ready to write my own story into this book, to make it partially autoethnographic. That’s certainly not what I had planned.
What I hope aspiring book authors can take away from my experience is that writing a book sometimes (often) feels risky, but the bigger risk lies in not sharing our knowledge. Books bring a kind of gravitas to ideas that exceeds what articles can do. Completing a book represents our commitment to fully developing our best thinking at a particular point in time so others might grapple with those ideas in their own ways.
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If you’d like to get a copy of Insiders, Outliers by Collie Fulford, you can order directly from Rutgers University Press.
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This newsletter is coming to you from Laura Portwood-Stacer, PhD, professional developmental editor and publishing consultant. I help scholarly writers navigate the book publishing process with more ease and agency.
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