Someone recently asked you — and people are always asking this in the academic world — “what are you working on next?” It’s the grown-up variation of “what are you going to do with that major?” or “what are you going to do when you graduate?” or “how’s the thesis or dissertation going?” It’s also a small talk type of question like, “how are you?” You know there is a proper, shallow, unengaged answer, but more often than not you hear it as a sincere question demanding a sincere answer and it agitates you as you struggle for the right answer for the situation. In this particular instance, you didn’t bullshit. You just said, “I have an official answer, which is something having to do with nostalgia and Little House on the Prairie, and the real answer, which is I’m working on figuring out what I’m working on.” You were kind of joking — kidding on the square — but, then decided to embrace the idea. You are just going to work on figuring out what next. You are just going to bleed words until they start to flow in a direction. You are beholden to no one.

You keep thinking about being alienated from history and wondering about the reasons you followed history and came back to history. You wonder about how your different pieces fit together constructively, rather than as a narrative of survival and escape. You actually do blame Laura Ingalls Wilder. When you got into those books (and, yes, it was the 1970s and you were a Southern White Girl in first and second grade so had no clue about the problems inherent in the books), you became fascinated with that world so different from your own and fascinated with the fact that the person who wrote the books was also the character in the books. Identifying with the character led to identifying with the author, which led to asking yourself if you might not write books yourself. So, at the age of nine, you picked up a notebook and a pencil and began to write a story. Not an original one. You drew elements from everything you read. You illustrated them, too, just like in young people’s fiction.

Then you encountered Star Wars. It was just Star Wars then. One film, no sequels or prequels or expanded universes or anything else. There was a novelization, which consoled you when you were only allowed to see the film once, long after half the world had seen it at least twice. (You lucked out and were able to see it two more times because a co-worker of your dad had a nerdy son who pestered her as much as I pestered my parents to see it, so they decided to shut us both up. Maybe they had romantic ideas, too, for two ten-year-olds who had no interest in one another, just in seeing STAR WARS.) The whole world seemed enchanted by Star Wars, and only in recent years has the particular importance of Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia on little girls received due appreciation. A sassy, sarcastic princess with political power, a sense of right, AND brown hair and eyes in a world of passive blond-haired, blue-eyed, Disney princesses? Plus, her name resembled yours. She was your entire personality for fifth grade. So, you moved from writing what you suppose would be historical fiction into space fantasy by sixth and seventh grade.

One of the things that you loved about the Little House books was the meticulous detail with which they describe the clothes, the processes, the houses, the landscape, and everything about their world. When you started writing, the illustration part of your process served the same purpose, and you also tried to describe in similar detail the settings you created. As you moved into space fantasy, you no longer illustrated the stories, but you did create what you suppose would be appendices with drawing of clothes, spaceships, houses, maps of planets — they were like an encyclopedia of this world you created, including belief systems and a history of the conflict driving the story. The same happened when you moved into found worlds. Wow! You feel the thrill of doing that now, just remembering it, how it consumed those moments of boredom, when people thought you were daydreaming (and you were, about this), how everything became fodder to add to the world.

People classified you as a “genius” for doing this. You now wish they had not, because you also were very very bad at math. They didn’t know what dyscalculia was at the time, so this cause you so much pain, and being expected to be a genius while also failing, and therefore being berated and punished and mocked, and feeling like a fraud — all the fun things! — did nothing for your mental health over the years. At least, for a few years in middle school, there was a space where you had a class that allowed you to do this world building and storytelling. High school was just an intellectual beatdown. The stories dried up, for some reason.

Which was the reason you turned to history. You look back now and see that world-building urge was there all along. Your attraction to history was there in your attraction to Little House and its details; but it was also in the fun you had going to Colonial Williamsburg during those same years around the Bicentennial. The living history of it, the immersive experience, and seeing the old crafts like candle-making, paper-making, the way that they dyed the endpapers for books with the swirled colors, the glass blowing and pottery (that was actually at Jamestown), and everything else. You loved going to places where things happened. Where they did thing like “they” did in the “olden times.” You didn’t know, when you went to college or grad school, that this was a whole field called “public history.” In fact, where you went, “public history” seemed to be writing the history of businesses and this type of material history was mocked by — well, now you see that that person was a jackass in soooooo many ways.

Anyway, two years in, when you had to teach Killer Angels, to a discussion section, when both you and they had no idea how to envision the Battle of Gettysburg, so you had to do some old school military history to explain it, you became curious as to how the actual place looked. You got a wild idea to take a road trip from Houston to Gettysburg and to take the long way. The long way took you to Florida, Charleston, Williamsburg — well, long story less long, you learned that the physical place made all the difference in understanding the events that took place in that place.

When you took to writing your dissertation, you fortunately had a new advisor who believed that “you should always walk the ground that your subject walked.” (Imagine that in a Trinidadian accent.) He helped you go to South Carolina and Philadelphia to see where your subject was born, grew up, wrote, and enslaved people. You could read in the documents all day, then on the weekends and evening, walk to the places that they described. You aren’t certain if that affected your writing, but you kept the lesson.

When you wrote the third book, you realized that, to understand how some of the relationships worked or did not work, to gain perspective of people whose perspective had not previously been considered, you had to go to the sites. You gradually began to reconstruct the physical space with as much accuracy as you could. This allowed you to reconsider other historians’ interpretations and point out, in some cases, that they were either impossible or made your shared subject a monster.

By the fourth book, the physical space became integral to the interpretation since all you really had was the negative space around your subject. You had to create a virtual reality of her world. You were back to your childhood: world-building. That’s really your favorite part of the whole research endeavor, you realized. You love reconstructing their world. What were their houses like, what work did they do, how much energy did it take, how did they see at night, what did the world sound like, what did it look like?

Somewhere along the line you came across the late Hilary Mantel’s Reith Lectures. She wrote about becoming a novelist because she didn’t think that she was important or smart enough to become a historian. Yet, her discussions of rebuilding the world of Thomas Cromwell impressed and inspired you with their attention to detail both as a novelist and historian. “You don’t have your characters say things that they wouldn’t because you don’t have them think things that they wouldn’t,” (or something to that effect) she said, in response to ahistorical attitudes in Tudor-era and other historical fiction. The same applies to biography. Quotes mean nothing unless you place them in their context, which means building the world in which they were spoken.

You digress.

So, you don’t think you are alienated from that part of history. You didn’t have a political or social justice mission driving you in studying history. You wish you did because you might feel like you have a purpose when you teach, the part of your job that has been the bane of your existence (not as much a committee work, but on that count you have managed to quiet quit very effectively, which is another story for another time). At the same time, it wasn’t all survival and escape; or if it was, it had a creative element to surviving and escaping by building these worlds, simulacrums of a past in order to better understand these individuals and tell their story. Doing that was exciting!

Instead of being alienated from world-building, you just haven’t decided which new world to build yet.