August 2025

Proofs in August: A Cycladic Finale

August has always held a peculiar stillness—between the heat of high summer and the promise of return. This year, I found myself again on my beloved Cycladic island, surrounded by whitewashed contours, piercing light, and the rhythmic hush of wind over stone. It was here, in this strange blend of clarity and elemental disarray, that I worked through the final proofs of Numbers and Narratives: A Feminist Genealogy of Automathographies.

There’s something both exhilarating and unnerving about receiving the typeset manuscript. The words, now fixed in their final layout, appear somehow more definite—less pliable than the fluid Word documents I had lived with for so long. These were no longer drafts. They were pages. They carried weight.

Reading the proofs was not a rereading of content, but a heightened form of listening. Every line became a tuning fork. Were the quotations exact? Did the rhythm of the sentences hold? Were the citations accurate, the foreign words correctly typeset, the voices of the women mathematicians—Émilie Du Châtelet, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Sophie Germain, Mary Somerville, Ada Lovelace, Sofia Kovalevskaya and Wang Zhenyi—preserved in their fine grain and fragile force?

The process was slow. I moved between paper and screen, sometimes under the shade of a tent, sometimes at a table with the salt still drying on my skin. The wind lifted the corners of the pages as if to question my every note. I made careful corrections, annotated inconsistencies, flagged misalignments in footnotes, caught a few elusive typos that had hidden themselves in previous rounds. The work felt both minute and immense—assembling fragments, checking translations, adjusting punctuation, attending to the materiality of text in its final passage toward becoming a book.

But beyond the editorial precision, there was something else: a sense of rhythm—of alignment between the act of proofing and the temporalities I explore in the book itself. This project has always been about time: narrative time, archival time, the recursive loops of memory and desire in automathographical writing. In the quiet Cycladic mornings, with the cicadas vibrating at a pitch just below thought, the archival traces I had spent years following seemed to breathe differently. They had found form.

There was something poetic in doing this final, invisible labour in a place shaped by wind, sea, and white light. The island’s silence was not empty but resonant. I thought of the fragments I had followed through this research: letters interrupted, notebooks lost, marginalia scrawled in haste. Finalising the book here made me feel close to those absences—not to resolve them, but to allow them to persist, carefully framed.

As I clicked “send” on the final corrections—uploading the annotated proofs to the production portal—I felt something settle. Not closure, exactly, but emergence. The assemblage was ready to enter the world. The feminist genealogies it traces, the epistemic experiments it enacts, the voices it gathers and listens to—they now have their form, shaped in part by the rhythm of August wind and the quiet insistence of an island that knows how to hold time differently.

There is a silence particular to the Cyclades—not an absence of sound, but a kind of suspension. Wind moving through dry stone walls, a distant bell, the soft unrest of fig leaves. It was within this elemental quiet that the final gestures of the book took place: one last proofing, one final correction, the clicking of “send.”

This was not the triumphant end of a long project, nor its dramatic culmination. It was something subtler, more attuned to the rhythms I had been tracing all along. Like the letters and marginalia of the women mathematicians whose voices I followed, the process closed not with fanfare but with quiet insistence. The text, now complete, carried their traces—not resolved, but held.

A Cycladic finale, then: spare, luminous, edged with salt. A landscape where time folds, and where thought can scatter like seeds on wind-smoothed terraces. I could not have imagined a more fitting place to finish Numbers and Narratives. It felt not like ending, but like an echo of an old school academic writing and being.

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