methods. She is the author of Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning (2017), Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (2012), and Silence Is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (2007). Šukys holds a PhD in English from the University of Toronto.
Šukys applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Artifact: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives, with the following results:
Page 99 of Artifact lays out the background for Amy Bishop’s tenure denial. That denial was the reason Bishop opened fire on her colleagues during a faculty meeting, killing three colleagues. As part of my research, I interviewed Bishop’s former department chair. We talked about Bishop’s career trajectory. “Amy wasn’t stupid or incapable of receiving tenure,” said Debra Moriarity in the interview. “It’s just that her timing was bad and that she spent too much time developing the [cell] incubator and not enough producing the kind of scholarship that would have secured her position at the university.” Page 99 then takes us through the kind of research activity that would have earned Bishop tenure: ‘“at least two papers a year,’ that is, ten papers before tenure (which usually comes in Year 6 of an academic appointment as assistant professor),” plus a solid record of grantsmanship. The final paragraph introduces the issue of gender, and whether or how institutional structures played a role in Bishop’s professional struggles.Visit Julija Šukys's website.
Page 99 of Artifact isn’t a terrible representation of the book’s concerns, but it has the disadvantage of falling mid-weeds, so to speak. I write in an incrementally, so each paragraph, section, and chapter builds on the last. To enter the book at this point in the Amy Bishop story feels like walking into a documentary film 1/3 of the way through. It’s not disastrous, but you’ve got to work quite hard to catch up.
The idea to write this book grew out of those three events. One was a shooting in a writing classroom. That occurred at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. The event shook me because that could have been my classroom—I too teach writing. Then came the second event: a law professor at the University of Missouri sued the university administration for the right to carry his weapon with him on campus. Finally, within two weeks of that lawsuit, there was a third event, this time at the University of Northern Arizona, a couple of students shot one another at a fraternity house.
That third shooting happened shortly before I was about to travel to Flagstaff, Arizona, to attend a large nonfiction writers’ conference. Suddenly our writing community was talking about this event on social media. There was talk of whether we, as a community of writers, should address this violence at the conference. I remember reading a passing comment: “Somebody should write about this.” That’s when the idea went ding, ding, ding in my head. Maybe this was a way to deal with the discomfort, disquiet, and fear I’d been carrying while on campus.
I ended up traveling to and writing about five different campuses where shootings occurred. I’m an archival researcher by nature, so, as is my habit, I arrived on each campus and then headed out to see what its archives held. I tracked the story the archives told me about each shooting. Every archive told me something different. Slowly, the book began to take shape.
In the end, Artifact became a text about what institutions collectively choose to remember, about what they willingly forget, what they silence, what they keep, what they trash. The book is also about my love for the university. It’s about the ways the university grows increasingly broken. And it’s about my beloved profession, that is, being a professor.
--Marshal Zeringue
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