Ep. 96 - How to Write Prolifically (with Dr. Abbie Goldberg)

In this episode, Leslie talks with Dr. Abbie E. Goldberg—Professor of Clinical Psychology at Clark University and a leading scholar on LGBTQ+ families—about writing, research, and staying motivated when academic life feels overwhelming. Abbie reflects on how she came to see research as a form of storytelling and why life transitions for more than two decades.

They dive into the realities of academic writing: how to decide when a project no longer fits, why setting something aside isn’t failure, and how focusing on process rather than product can create more sustainable careers. The conversation also explores collaboration—what makes it work, what makes it painful, and how to spot mismatches early.

Despite all of the burnout and uncertainty in higher education, Abbie's thoughtful strategies for maintaining curiosity and finding hope through writing provide much-needed inspiration!

Transcript

EP 96 with Dr. Abbie E. Goldberg

Leslie: 

I am so excited to welcome Abbie Goldberg onto the podcast today! Abbie Goldberg is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Clark University and a visiting distinguished scholar at the Williams Institute. For over two decades, she has conducted research on LGBTQ+ parent families, including some of the earliest research on the transition to parenthood for same-sex couples.

She's also the lead investigator of a 20-year longitudinal study of adoptive families. Abbie has authored over 160 peer-reviewed articles and four books, as well as served as the editor of five books. She's currently working on an edited book on family secrets and a sole-authored book on LGBTQ families.

And finally, she's also written a number of policy briefs, op-eds, and other articles for the general public about her research. So impressive. So, Abbie and I know each other because we did some coaching work together on one of her book projects, which she decided to set aside for the time being, which is something we're going to get into.

And the reason I invited her on is to talk about how to write prolifically, but I also want to pick her brain about how to keep writing and stay motivated to keep doing your own research during this time of incredible overwhelm and burnout. So, Abbie, thank you so much for being here. 

Abbie:

Oh, thank you so much for having me!

Leslie:

So tell us about your journey through academia and about your research and teaching interests. 

Abbie: 

Yeah, so I started— I did my PhD in clinical psychology. I didn't really know if I would become a face-to-face therapist or if I would go into research. I discovered during graduate school that I really loved research, and I had always loved writing.

So I think as I got more deeply into the clinical work with families and adolescents and children, I loved it. But I realized that on a day-to-day basis, I didn't see myself just sitting across from people one-to-one, but I wanted to do work that really spoke to more people. And then integrated some of my interests in research and analysis and storytelling, because I was always so interested in people's stories and people's lives, and research was a great way to not only hear about people's lives, but tell people's lives. So it really spoke to me as a way of being able to be a mouthpiece for people and for people's lives and stories in a way that I found really compelling. Especially because some people don't really get the chance to tell their own stories. 

Leslie: 

Mm-hmm. You have all these different research interests, so can you talk a bit about those before we move into the writing piece? 

Abbie: 

Yeah, so I guess I'll start by just saying that when I was in graduate school, I worked with a professor who's still very dear to me, who did research on working-class couples' transition to parenthood. She was very interested in “how do families make it work?” Balancing work and family, becoming parents when you, at the time, you know, this was the late ‘90s, both partners had to make a combined income of I think $50,000. And neither partner could have a college education. So they were in this position of really not getting to benefit from certain family policies and really struggling to work and parent. How do folks do that?

And I was really interested in women's mental health and gender and power. Social class. But as I got deeper into this, the literature on the transition of parenthood, I realized that not only was my mentor filling this gap, there was no research on working-class couples and their transition of parenthood. But I started realizing that there was actually no research on queer couples' transition to parenthood. No research on same-sex couples and what they experienced when they became parents for the first time. 

And anyone who's become a parent knows it's a huge transition. It's life-changing. It can go in a lot of different directions. And your life is really never the same. So I became really compelled by that. And I did the first study of the transition to parenthood for lesbian couples. And I interviewed lesbian couples, biological and nonbiological mothers, before and after they had children. 

And then I became really interested in, what about adoption? So there was no research on the transition to adoptive parenthood or heterosexual or same sex couples, actually. And there was like one study out of Israel in the ‘90s that looked at heterosexual couples only. Which I found shocking, and I guess it's because it's hard research to do. Adoption is very unpredictable. You don't know when you're going to be placed with a child. Sometimes I had to wait five years to do the second interview with folks because it took so long for them to be placed with a child. 

So that's really where I was, so interested in transitions and change and stories of kind of struggle and resilience, and adoption was something that was of deep interest to me. And again, stories that just had not been told. So I thought, why would I limit myself to same- sex couples? I should include these heterosexual couples, too, who had never really been included. And so that started this 20-year longitudinal study, which, of course, I never anticipated would be that long.

But then I started getting curious. Okay, what about the transition to school? What about the transition to puberty? What about the transition to divorce for some of these people? So I just kept following them and following them through these core transition periods in their lives, and in the blink of an eye, their kids are now emerging adults, and I get to interview them and survey them. So that's a big, full-circle privilege that I have, just with a few extra gray hairs. But it's a real joy to be able to be a part of these families' lives for so long. 

Leslie: 

That's super cool. So would you say that with your many different kinds of projects you've done, the thing linking them is an interest in how people make these transitions in their lives and stories of struggle and resistance as opposed to the actual topic?

Abbie: 

Yeah. And then increasingly against the backdrop of a changing social context. So, although I'm a clinical psychologist by training, I was actually trained by a human development and family studies scholar. So all of my training there was really an infusion of the importance of context, so I always say, I'm not really a typical psychologist. I'm so interested in the way that context affects and is affected by individuals. Their school, their family, their neighborhood, their community, the legal and social policy context. 

And so as we continue to see our country, the United States, move through some pretty major shifts, my families were experiencing those shifts. And so I would ask them about those shifts and how they affected their families. Their hopes and their dreams. So yes, definitely interest in transitions and the interplay of the family and their broader social context is always the thing that keeps me fascinated.

Leslie: 

Yeah. And so maybe this opens us up into a little bit of a discussion about the project that we were working on together, and why you decided to set it aside or potentially walk away from it. I just think it will be so useful for people to hear how you make that assessment for yourself.

What's that line at which you're like, I've invested enough and now I'm not going to move forward?

Abbie: 

Yeah, and I haven't decided if this project is resting or on its deathbed, because ultimately I think it's really important. But when the election happened, the nature of what I was really interested in studying and saying really changed.

And I didn't really know how to write about it in the current context. And I think for me it was really about assessing a couple of things. Relevance. A lot of the interviews that I had done were pre-election, and I didn't know how relevant those messages and those stories would be in the current context, and they just didn't feel as relevant. They felt like whatever people had told me would inevitably have shifted after the election. So I would've had to start from scratch. So there's relevance. 

There was time. That was my own emotional and mental energy. And also the feeling that things were moving in such an unpredictable direction that I couldn't be certain that any energy I put in now would even be worthwhile, or the output that I would generate would even be relevant in a year.

So this feeling of being in something. Writing about something as it's happening felt really exhausting to me. And I wasn't sure how beneficial it would be for others. So I felt like I needed to live through this period and let my participants live through this period, and then maybe come back to it at a place where we could be in a more reflective space rather than processing.

And trying to survive and trying to thrive, the writing and the walking at the same time seemed a little too hard for me. 

Leslie: 

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I've talked openly before about how I was writing a third book, and I had gotten all the way to the stage where I'd gotten reviews back on my proposal, and that's when I decided to walk away from it.

Because I think you have to really not fall into the sunk cost fallacy around, “I've put in so much already into this, I have to finish,” when you're not really that close to the finish. 

Abbie: 

Yes. And I think part of my own development, just as a scholar and as a person, because those are too connected, is that I think more about process now than product. And I would say that at earlier stages in my career, it was flipped. I was inevitably for necessity, focused more on product, right? I'm doing this, and this will result in a book, a manuscript, something. And because I believed in it and I felt it was important to share with the world, and I have recently done some things that I've just purely been interested in, and I'm not sure what the product will be, I'm trying to stay focused on the process. 

Maybe those interviews won't ever get published, but they'll lead me to something else, or I'll have some understanding that will inform. So for folks who are like, “but I've already put in all this effort,” all that effort could just be the foundation for something else. It's the invisible foundation. No one may ever see it, but it's still something that led you to something else. 

Leslie: 

Absolutely. I think everything is really building blocks, right, and it's not a mistake. There are lessons to be learned and probably things that are applicable in different ways. 

Abbie: 

Yeah. I try to think about that and some of my less successful endeavors, collaborations or papers that never really made it, they taught me something, right? And then I got something out of it, and it manifested in some way. Or maybe I just learned frustration tolerance. 

Leslie: 

Yeah. No, I think that there's a variety of ways to reframe what's happening, and sometimes it's just a lesson, and I'm not going to do that again.

Abbie: 

Right. Yeah. “That doesn't work for me.” Yes, most of my collaborations have been wonderful, but I've had a few where I learned a lot, and I learned what was important for me not to have in a collaborative relationship, right? These are the important ingredients that I need for collaboration to feel successful and meaningful. And this one that didn't work taught me something about what I need. 

Leslie: 

Yeah. So tell me, what do you need for a successful collaboration? 

Abbie: 

Well, it's funny because I've collaborated with so many folks, but there are a few collaborators I've been involved with and have worked with for over 20 years. Obviously, those are relationships that work well, so I've thought a lot about why do those work so well. I love working with people. I also love working alone. It really depends on the project, but I think collaborations work when people are honest and clear about their work style. Are you a person that gets things back within a week?

Are you a person that likes to sit with them for a while? Are you a person that's on email a lot? What's the best way to collaborate? Is it Google Sheets or Word documents? Like these, actually very specific things, like what programming do you use? Are you a Mac person, can actually make a difference because if one person is unwilling to use or learn a different form of technology, that can set up some challenges.

Understanding who's taking the lead on different parts of a particular project. Otherwise, there can be bumping of heads, right? Sometimes not a great idea to partner with somebody who likes to do all the things, same things as you. Because then you're like, I love to write lit reviews, but no one likes to write the discussion, or no one likes to create survey questions, or both people hate doing interviews.

You want some complementarity in those abilities. And I think a respect and an appreciation for what the other person brings. And that kind of knowledge of their working style and their writing style, like does your writing, if you're writing together, does it mesh well together? For me, I like people who are organized. I don't want to feel like I have to manage somebody else, but that they can manage themselves. I want to feel like we're a team and that they're making substantive contributions and that they're invested and interested. I don't need anyone to edit my work. I don't need anyone to tell me to cut a sentence here or there.

I mean, that's fine and it's nice, but it's not what I seek out in a collaboration. So it's the doing and it's the thinking. I recently had a colleague email me who said, “Hey, I'd like your advice. I was offered this opportunity to co-edit a book with somebody else in my professional organization. You've edited a bunch of books. What do you think?” And I was like, well, who is this person? What do you know about them? Have you ever met them? Have you ever written with them? The idea of just being paired with a stranger sounded not great to me, right? And I said, “I would do a little more digging and maybe have a preliminary meeting with this person to figure out if it's even possible.”

And so a couple of things led this colleague to not pursue this, but one was they'd never worked together before. This other person only had maybe one publication, so that didn't give her great confidence that this would be an equal writing partner. And then also this other person had some beliefs about this topic at hand that she felt were non-negotiable. So, how could they write together about this issue if they disagreed about some fundamental issues related to some sensitive topics? 

Leslie: 

Yeah. I mean, I've coached a number of junior scholars through ending collaborations that they've been a part of. Because I do think everything you've said makes so much sense, but it's also, there's a maturity level in there of sometimes people just don't know what their style is yet, or they don't know how to ask somebody else what their style is.

And then years into it, they haven't produced anything, and yet they're meeting like every week. And then it can feel really... there's the sunk cost thing, but also like, “I don't want to offend this person.” Maybe they're senior to me. So how do you have these conversations early on to get at, do I really think we're compatible? I mean, it's a little bit like dating. 

Abbie: 

Yes. That's why I think starting out with a low-energy, low-commitment collaboration with somebody, like if you put together a symposium at a conference. And that went really well, and you really love the way you worked with somebody. That's maybe an indication of how it might be to work on a bigger project, a journal article, or a book chapter together, or a book. But you wouldn't just start by saying, “Let's write a book together,” right? So maybe giving people some opportunities to test out those waters might be a good way to say, “well, that was great, and we're going to go our separate ways now.”

Or, “ow, that was such an interesting learning experience. We worked so well together.” Because I hear you. I've had collaborations where I realized, in retrospect, I had made a lot of assumptions about what I thought my role was, what I thought their role was, what we thought each other were committing to. And wow, boy was I wrong. And that led to frustration on probably someone's or both people's parts. And that can be painful too, because. Sometimes there are personal relationships involved, and when you suddenly realize, “Wow, this person's expecting something of me that I'm not able to deliver, or I'm expecting something of them that they're not able to deliver,” then it requires that conversation of, “I don't think this is working, do you?”

Or, “I'm not sure that this is going to be the product that we had initially envisioned, and I want to keep our relationship solid. So I'm wondering if we can figure out a way to put this project aside. For you to find a new partner in this project?” 

Leslie: 

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's interesting because in my coaching work, the way I get around all of this stuff is by having a contract, right? Where I lay out the terms, I'm like, “these are the expectations. This is what I offer you, but I'm meeting you halfway. And I don't guarantee you results. You have to do the work too.” And sometimes it doesn't pan out. But for the folks that it does, at least those expectations are clear from the beginning.

Abbie: 

I know you've talked about this, the idea that your investment, you know, you only have a certain amount of time of energy, of just mental fortitude. At any given time, where are you going to put this? And for me, I don't want to put it in some vaguely conceived, unclear project with no clear outcome or output or timeline with somebody I have never worked with before.

I really would rather invest in, if not a sure thing, someone or something that feels hopeful and promising. I have graduate students that I work with, so my job is to invest in them and be very open to the fact that our collaboration could take a year or two years, or three years; their dissertation could be published or not be published. It's all fine. So that's not the same thing as an equal collaborative relationship. With those, I want to feel like you said, ideally, there is a kind of implicit contract that we're both showing up and agreeing to something, and that there's some agreed-upon outcome at some point.

Leslie: 

Yeah. So maybe just being really open. 

Abbie: 

Yeah. 

Leslie: 

From the get-go. 

Abbie: 

And knowing your own strengths and your own weaknesses is huge. I don't like to wait till the very last minute for things. It stresses me out. And so if I know I have something that's due, I want to get a head start on it in advance, so it never feels burdensome.

It always feels, ideally, somewhat pleasurable. I'm not driving myself crazy unnecessarily at the end, but I've worked with people who are very happy to wait till three days before the manuscript is due. And then they want to go all in. And I'm like, “I can't do that.” The three days before that thing is due, I have things to do. 

Leslie: 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can assure you, they are not happy when they're doing that. 

Abbie: 

No. What? I don't—

Leslie: 

It's very stressful for them, too. 

Abbie: 

Right. I don't want to put myself in that mental and like physical space, so I'm trying to set up ways to not end up there. 

Leslie: 

Yeah. Yeah. Intentionality.

So, how is it different when you are writing things on your own? 

Abbie: 

Well, it's the burden and the joy that you're doing everything yourself. So you can set your own deadlines, and you have to be accountable to yourself. And that means you can move those goalposts without anyone being angry with you except for yourself, but it also means it's on you.

And so having some amount of structure balanced with flexibility is important. And also just because it's just you and you're writing yourself doesn't mean you can't lean on other people for input and ideas. Even just talking to other people about my ideas sometimes is helpful. Talking about it in a way that other people would find in interesting or help them engage with the topic.

Then I figure out what's interesting about it. It's like we can all get lost in our topics, and then when we start talking to somebody who knows nothing about it, we realize, “Oh, this is what outsiders really want to know, right?” So that can be just helpful from a process perspective and keep you energized during a long project, just talking to people and you can shift direction, which is nice, and you can spend more time on the things that you're really interested in. But it's hard. You know it's lonely. And you don't have until you send it out for review or you have other people weighing in, you don't really have a sense of how it's resonating for other people. 

And you can have moments of being like, “maybe this is amazing, and maybe it's horrible. I don't know anymore.” So having a couple of trusted colleagues who you read their work, and they read your work, can always be helpful. And I hate burdening people in that way, like asking them to read my work when they're not an author. But what I found is that people are generally, if not overjoyed, very pleased to be asked and to be given an opportunity to offer feedback. 

Leslie: 

Yeah. And also knowing that it will likely become a reciprocal relationship. And they would love to get your eyes on something as well. Because I think that in a lot of my coaching work, it's really about how do we build in some external accountability because the internal only goes so far, and there are many, many folks where the internal accountability is very low just by nature.

So then it has to be a lot of external, so that means lots of sending your stuff out to other people. Lots of communicating with non-experts as well, about what you're doing to shine some light. 

Abbie: 

Yeah, I have an editor that I just will, I've worked with him in the past. This is not the first book I've done with this publisher. And I've told him “I may just end up sending you my drafts that you don't have to look at. But I just have it in my calendar that I'll send them to you. And you can glance at them or not. But I just have this intermediary phase where I need to send you something.” And he's fine with that. He's not committing to read them at that stage, but he knows that they're just going to get in his inbox.

And for me, I've built that in as my accountability, and I have students who do the same thing with me. So I'm just going to send you something. 

Leslie: 

Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's a great strategy, right? It's just knowing that someone is expecting something. That's much of the reason why my clients make progress, because they don't want to get to a meeting and be like, “I don't have anything.”

Yeah. Because then we have to coach around “why don't you have anything?” They'd rather have something. 

Abbie: 

Right. Right. I mean, most of us and my scholarly friends who are experts on motivation would say we benefit from a mixture of structure and autonomy, right? What that balance looks like for any given person might be different.

I'm learning, and as I become more senior, I guess that my need for autonomy is now greater than my need for structure. But it used to be the reverse. So I used to want more structure. I wanted more containers, more deadlines, more, “you gotta do this by this time now.” Maybe I've just built up my internal reserve where I kind of trust that it will come. So I really need autonomy, I don't like too much structure, and very little autonomy. 

Leslie: 

Yeah. I mean, who likes that? Well, I don't know any academics that would like that, but yeah. That's interesting to think about how it shifts over the course of a career as well, because you've proven to yourself many hundreds of times, I'm going to do it right.

This is going to reach a finish line. So let's talk a little bit more about motivation then. Because I feel like right now it's a time of just extreme demotivation, demoralization, dejection, really in higher ed for reasons that are both internal to what was already happening and now external with this administration.

And there's a lot of crises and a lot of emergencies and a lot of fires to put out that feel very urgent and actually are very urgent. So people are falling off when it comes to their own writing their own projects. Are there certain strategies you can recommend to help folks get back on track, and how do they keep committing to their own writing over the long haul?

Abbie: 

Yeah, I think it helps to remember that nothing will work for everybody, but if I think about what has worked for me, I am a curious person. I have to stay engaged in order to be motivated, to pick up the pen or to get on the computer; there has to be a reason. And so our writing time is often so precious and so crowded out by so many other obligations, responsibilities, things that we may enjoy to varying degrees, and writing has to feel, if not like a treat, something that we're at least interested in.

And so at different stages I have to spend, certainly during the pandemic, I experienced this where I said, “I need to write about something I'm excited by”. Even if it's silly, or even if it's not going to be groundbreaking research, I want to write something that's interesting to me. So I did pick up some projects that I just was genuinely interested in.

So, for me, it's a balance of, “does this have innate interest? Do I want to be reading articles about this? Do I want to be learning about it? Do I want to be writing about it? And does it feel important to the world? Is this something that I think needs to be out there?” So balancing those two things with, again, our own mental state at any given time.

We shouldn't sacrifice our own mental health, but I think it's important to remember that right now, people are struggling to have the energy to get up in the morning. To get out the door, to put on a cheerful, interested face for their kids at the end of the day and ask them about their day. It's hard. Things are hard, and so writing will probably feel hard too, but anything you can do to make it feel joyful or even more fun.

The other day, I was writing, and I just pulled up a blank document and just did some free writing purely. Personal reflections, and then I just saved it where I save all these little snippets and then went back to the more academic writing I was doing. So sometimes it's about doing just those little bursts of enjoyable writing, that they're more about your mental state than your actual product. So maybe you can think of them as the thing that you need to keep going on, those things that you need to push out. 

I personally like writing more auto-ethnographic work. So I've taken on some of those projects over the last few years to keep myself engaged. As you mentioned, I'm editing a book on family secrets. It's been great fun and really interesting to read people's chapters because they combine autoethnography writing about their own lives with the actual research on the given family secret they're writing about.

So I decided to co-edit this book with one of my favorite co-editors because it's interesting to me. I think it's interesting and important to other people, and that combination is engaging enough, and I'm writing my own chapter as well, so just that curiosity, what is sparking curiosity and engagement, feels so key.

Leslie: 

No, absolutely. I love that! And I also think part of the not-so-funness of academic writing is that people don't lean into stories. It's almost like they have to be reminded or give themselves permission even when what they're studying is human behavior. Which I find so ironic, right? But it's almost like the juice has been sucked out of it, and now it's this dry bone, and it's not fun to go back to day after day.

So I think part of it is re-injecting the life force of people's experiences, their words. What story really encapsulates what's so interesting to you about it, versus what concept? I think allowing yourself to have a curious child kind of energy about it and write like that. 

Abbie: 

Yes. I always think, never do I think in terms of variables, right? I think in terms of experiences, and I will tell you, they do mixed methods work. When I assign work to students, when I ask them what their favorite pieces from the semester were, it's always the qualitative pieces. It's always the stories. That's what sticks with them. They certainly learn from the solely quantitative pieces. That's not what sticks with them. 

They're learning just like I'm learning. We learn through stories. And so even when you can inject that into a quantitative piece, it's great. I have seen people do really interesting things where they have a case study before they present their quantitative results. It's a way of exemplifying or exhibiting or bringing to life the threads that they're connecting in the quantitative work. 

Leslie: 

Yeah, and that's also an example of permission-giving because you have to present that to reviewers who may not be that cool with it, and have the confidence to do that because it makes it a better piece.

But absolutely, stories are sticky. We are wired for stories. So this gets into some of the writing that you've done for public audiences, and I always like to chat with people about. Why? Why do you write various kinds of op-ed or policy pieces or that sort of thing? It's a different kind of writing. Why is this important to you? 

Abbie: 

Yeah. For me, it's so important because I've always been troubled and felt this tension in academia that the work that I do feels very important and it has policy relevance, and yet it's going in a journal article. And now with open access, fortunately, people can access a lot of research more easily.

But still, no one can say that people are more likely to read an article that I published in a top-tier journal than if I write an op ed in the LA Times, or I write a piece in The Conversation that then gets picked up by five different major media outlets. Or even if I'm quoted in the New York Times and I have what's the equivalent of three paragraphs of commentary about my research.

People are going to read those popular press articles. So it's an opportunity to dilute, simplify, and repackage what we know and what we can share and offer with a much broader audience. It's a privilege. And I've always been willing to talk to the media when many of my colleagues who study similar issues were very wary to, and I knew that there were risks. There's always the potential that what I say could be taken out of context. 

But it feels really important to me. It feels like a privilege that I get to do this work, and now I have an obligation to share it with somebody who's asking for an expert on this topic. 

Leslie: 

Yeah, and I definitely hear a lot of your values coming through in this conversation. So thinking about relevance, thinking about impact, right? And also the ways you're defining that as not only being through academic publications, right? 

Abbie: 

Absolutely. Yeah. If you're a public scholar, that's a way you can define yourself. And I don't know that I defined myself that way because I think it was not as convenient of a term. But I increasingly see the worth of seeing yourself that way because it opens up a lot of doors. 

Leslie: 

Yeah. And doors that hopefully academia will start valuing more as well. 

Abbie: 

I mean, I will say, I think it helps to legitimize yourself a little bit with the academy sometimes before you start speaking as an expert outside of it. Only because it's easier for folks to punch down and find holes if you've only published two papers. And to say, “who's this person writing an op-ed? They've only written two papers!” But as you feel more confident, or if you're the only person studying your particular topic, then you have a voice and you have an important voice.

And research isn't the only thing that you can draw from. You can draw from your personal experience or policy. Or analysis of secondary data. There are many ways that you can use your platform and your expertise, and it's not just dependent on the number of journal articles you have, but do you have something to say? 

Leslie: 

I think part of it is the structure of academia, making, I think, junior scholars in particular feel like they don't have a platform. They're still building and building and building to be able to say something. As opposed to, “you are already a leading scholar on this topic in the world. You know more about this than 99.99% of people in the world.”

But I think part of it is just people believing that they have something to say even earlier on in their careers. 

Abbie: 

Oh gosh. Yeah. And I can relate to that personally because I chose to study topics that were more marginalized. And because of that, I certainly felt that I really needed to have a lot of confidence and a lot of empirical support underneath me before I could speak about those things, because they were more vulnerable to attack.

And the consequences of that were bigger than me. So I felt a responsibility to the human beings that I was speaking about, not to speak too soon. But I think most junior scholars, particularly more marginalized scholars, really need to be encouraged to find their voice earlier rather than later. So speaking up maybe even before they feel completely ready. 

Leslie: 

Yeah. Yeah. Because that may not come. Tenure might not guarantee that. 

Abbie: 

Absolutely. And there'll always be some other benchmark, and perfectionism is real. Just waiting to feel like, “well, when am I going to know? Am I going to have made it, or won enough awards, or have proven myself?” And as you said, it may never come. 

Leslie: 

Yeah. Yeah. So do it now, everybody. 

Abbie: 

Yeah! 

Leslie: 

Awesome. So last question, with everyone feeling like things are really hard right now, because they are. What is giving you hope, either about your work or anything else? 

Abbie: 

What's really giving me hope is how many people are committed to embodying their values in their work without any guarantee. So the process, it's really back to this idea of process versus product, and I'm thinking about the attorneys that I know and work with–my research involves the intersection of psychology and law–who are out fighting, putting all of their energy into these legal fights without knowing what the consequence will be, without knowing if there'll be a payoff. 

So we are all working, I think, without real knowledge of whether, you know, sounds sort of hopeless, but it's really not. It's actually very hopeful. We don't know what the payoff will be. We don't know if there will be a payoff, but what gives me hope is that people are out there.

They're out there, they're trying, they're working, they're collaborating. They're believing, if not in themselves, in something bigger and in each other, and they're uplifting each other in ways that feel really meaningful. And when I see people who are, mentally and emotionally and physically exhausted, helping or being kind to somebody else, just being a generous scholar, being a collaborative person, that's very inspiring to me. Engaging our feminist collaborative sensibilities to uplift other people and uplift ourselves. I think that feels very hopeful. 

Leslie: 

Wow. That is such a wonderful articulation of what is also happening, right? And that's how change happens. Collective movements, collaboration. 

So Abbie, thank you so much for being here today. What are the best ways for listeners to find you or connect with you? 

Abbie: 

I am on Instagram. I had to check, uh, Dr. Abbie Goldberg because I never remember. So it's just Dr. Abbie Goldberg, is my handle. I'm now off of Twitter. I think I may have some profile lingering around there, but I'm not actually active on it.

And then my email, so I'm at Clark University, so it's just agoldberg@clarku.edu. Anyone can reach out. 

Leslie: 

Okay. You have a website too? 

Abbie: 

I do. Yeah. abbiegoldberg.com. 

Leslie: 

Yes. So go to abbiegoldberg.com and you can find all the other stuff too. So thank you again for taking the time to share your insights today, Abbie!

And it's super inspiring to hear about just your general approach, how your values are really being articulated through the work that you do, and how writing and all this work continues to be personally meaningful for you. I think listeners are going to get so much from that. 

Abbie: 

Thank you so much. Your listeners are welcome to reach out to me, and I really appreciate the work that you do.

Leslie: 

Amazing. All right, well, that's it for today. Talk to you all again soon.