Dr. Julie Bates might just be the busiest person I’ve ever met.

Additionally, she might just be the most well-balanced person I’ve ever met.

Her life at Millikin is more than many could handle. Currently, she serves as an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the School of Writing, Languages, and Cultures. She spends her days at Millikin helping students, advocating for faculty, and organizing schedules for English classes. I’m sure I’m missing quite a few details in her extremely busy days.

“I feel like my whole life is changes of pace,” Bates said. “I’m hopping around so much from one thing to another. I’m really just running around like a chicken with my head cut off, more than I did before.”

This is the best way to describe her time spent on Millikin’s campus this year and throughout her career. She is constantly on the move, ensuring that the students and faculty she oversees are taken care of and supported.

“Mondays are my only full day where I’m on campus, from first thing in the morning until meetings are over at 5:30-ish,” she said. “It’s Millikin all day. But even then, it’s a little director work, teaching a couple of classes, meetings with students, and meetings with fellow directors. It’s a variety of things.”

So, if she’s so busy at Millikin, how is it possible that she is only on campus for one full day each week? Where else could she possibly be spending time with all the responsibilities that await her here in Decatur?

The answer is obvious. She’s in her bookstore, of course.

Located at 125 N Kickapoo Street in downtown Lincoln, Illinois, is Ink & Imprint Books, Bates’ self-described happy place. 

If you’ve ever been in Bates’ office, you can picture exactly how her bookstore would look. The vast array of books is much more intentionally placed in the store, of course, but there is a certain calming feel of organized chaos, exactly how a bookstore should feel.

Dr. Stephen Frech, a former Professor of English and a former colleague of Bates, visited the bookstore, and he enjoyed his experience.

“It’s lovely,” Frech said. “I stopped in unannounced, and she was not in when I was there, but I did go in. My son and I bought a couple of books while we were there. It’s a beautiful, long storefront with very high windows and great light in this beautiful old building right off the downtown square.”

Much like in her office, she has signs posted on the store’s walls, many bearing sayings like, “Just one more chapter,” or “So many books, so little time.”

This last catchphrase captures exactly Bates’ experience running the bookstore. Interestingly enough, she has found that she actually has less time to read than before she opened the store around Thanksgiving of last year.

“I want to read everything,” she said. “It’s really hard. People always come in, and they’re like, ‘Have you read this?’ and I’m just like, ‘No, I haven’t, because I don’t have a lot of time to read.’ I had heard a lot of people say that when you open a bookstore, you have less time to read. You love books so much, but you just don’t always have time.”

Opening a bookstore isn’t something that just happened overnight for Bates, either. Ink & Imprint is truly the product of many laborious years at school and work. Being busy isn’t something that Bates learned to adapt to when she arrived at Millikin. Being busy is what she’s always done, and that started with her childhood in the Black Hills of Wyoming.

“We lived out in the country,” she said. “My grandpa was an actual rodeo cowboy. He sold cars to fund his rodeo habit, and I had horses when I was growing up that he had given me. I rode horses until I got to high school and did sports and didn’t have time.”

Bates’ small town size played a huge role in her participation in several sports, including basketball, golf, and the dance team when she wasn’t playing basketball.

“The beauty of going to a place like that is that you get to do everything,” she said. “I started on the basketball team for four years, varsity and everything. I’d play a basketball game and then be on the dance team at halftime at the boys’ game. You truly did everything.”

Many of the extracurriculars she was part of involved writing, something that Bates’ parents played a huge role in.

“The school was K-12,” she said. “My mom [taught] first grade, and my dad [taught] junior high and high school. We were all in the same building. My mom’s expertise was literacy. You can sort of see where it came naturally. They’ve always been avid readers, and learning was just something that was built in. But my sister didn’t love reading in the same way growing up. So, it wasn’t just our parents’ influence. It was me, too.”

Her tiny town and even tinier class size played a huge role in Bates learning how to involve herself in every extracurricular possible, all while learning to balance them. This is definitely a skill she has brought to Millikin.

“It was a small town,” she said. “The population was around 409 people. My class was 23 students, so I was [the] Class President, and I played every sport I wanted. In high school, we didn’t have a student newspaper, so I basically convinced one of the teachers to let me do what I wanted and start one.”

Through her experience running the paper, she figured out along the way that journalism and professional writing are what she wanted to do as a career.

“I did an internship when I was in high school,” she said. “The nearest actual newspaper from us was in a town around 45 minutes from us. So, I did an internship with them at the time when they were just moving from hand-typed settings to computer designing newspapers. I learned a lot from that, and then I decided to go to college for journalism and English.”

Bates chose Drake University as her first stop in college, where she got her first degree.

“Journalism and Mass Communications was my first major,” she said. “Then, I got an English major as well.”

Bates, of course, was involved in many more extracurriculars while at college and was able to explore some amazing opportunities while at Drake.

“I was one of the first apprentices, where I spent my junior year interning at Better Homes and Gardens,” she said. “I got to work in all the different areas, and they even let me write some. Then, my senior year, I had an internship with a small publishing company. But I started freelance writing and editing even when I was still in college. I wrote a couple articles for Better Homes and Gardens, and one for National Geographic Traveler after.”

Bates would go on to meet her husband while she was in college, and the two would move back to Lincoln together, where he is from.

“I met my husband while we were in college, and he went to law school, and then he moved back to Lincoln to work in the family law firm,” she said. “I kept my job and worked remotely at a time when remote work wasn’t really a thing that people did. It was great, but it was a little isolating.”

This isolation would lead Bates to teach for the first time. 

“Lincoln College was still open then, and I had a chance to teach a writing class,” she said. “And I thought, ‘I’ll just try it to see if I like it.’ And I did. Then, I decided I wanted to go back to grad school, just for something to do, just trying to figure things out.”

So, Bates would attend her second university, this time settling in at Springfield, Illinois.

“I went to the University of Illinois at Springfield,” she said. “In my second year of my master’s, I did freelancing and went full time. So, I did my masters in Environmental Studies and Communication. I created lots of publications that focused on green living and environmental topics.”

Bates would put this master’s degree to good use right away.

“Right when I graduated, Lincoln Land Community College had a job opening for a sustainability director,” she said. “Due to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, community colleges got all of this funding to push green jobs and make campuses more sustainable, and teach environmental education. So, I did that for a few years, and it was really fun, because I created the Green Center from scratch and we did school gardens in the elementary schools in Springfield.”

After running this post and freelancing on the side, Bates realized something was still missing. This something, of course, was teaching.

“I realized that I really did love teaching, and maybe that I wanted a job where I could do more of that,” she said. “So, I spent a year freelancing and teaching as an adjunct here [at Millikin]. Later, I taught at Lincoln College, [Millikin], and UIS at the same time. So, I was commuting to three different towns and institutions. I really loved teaching here [at Millikin], and I had applied for a job, but they were like, ‘We need someone with a PhD so we don’t lose our line.’”

Bates knew she wanted a job at Millikin, and just like the other opportunities in her life, she fully went for it.

“I just decided after teaching at all those places for a year that Millikin is what I wanted to do,” she said. “And Dr. (Stephen) Frech actually wrote me a letter of recommendation to go to grad school. So, I completely left. I went full time to grad school at Illinois State University.”

Frech was one of the main influences that played a crucial part in ensuring that Bates went through with her goals.

“Looking back, I think breaking into higher ed, particularly in a tenure track job, without a PhD, is nigh impossible,” he said. “I encouraged her because it was evident to me how talented she was, and how good she is at so many things.”

Although he knew that Bates would likely require a PhD to get the Millikin post, he was sad to see her leave because of how valuable she already was.

“I was sad when she left, but I knew it was the right thing for her,” he said. “I knew what she wanted to do. It was pretty clear when we met her the first time she came to Millikin, that she had sort of made up her mind about what she wanted her career path to look like. At that time, I knew that for her to have what she wanted, she needed to go to grad school.”

This would be Bates’ third and final stop at a university, and, towards the end of grad school at ISU, she would reapply for the position at Millikin in hopes of getting the job she had applied for earlier. It’s safe to say that it all worked out.

“The job opened up here, and I was like, ‘Well, I’m a little late, and I’m not quite done. Should I still apply?’” she said. “And Dr. Frech was the Chair (of the Department of English), and he encouraged me to apply. So, I ended up getting this job while I was still finishing my PhD. In my first year, plus a little more, I had to teach an instructor load. So, I taught five classes per semester, and then I wrote my dissertation at night and on the weekends.”

Frech remembers this time quite well, and he was extremely excited to see Bates officially step into her new teaching role. Additionally, he is not surprised to see the leadership roles that she now has.

“It doesn’t surprise me that she has the leadership roles she has, because of the range and variety she has,” Frech said. “She has a broad vision, and at the same time, a mind for logistics and details. That’s a really rare combination. She’s able to dream big and still have the logistical mind to pull it off.”

If you haven’t noticed it, there is clearly a common theme to Bates’ life experiences so far. No matter how much she has to work at something, she is always willing to help start something new.

“I really like coming up with ideas,” she said. “I’m kind of an idea person. I also really like the details, the detail-oriented stuff. There’s something about the excitement of taking on something new. Part of it is my life as a lifelong learner. I promised I’d never go back [for] any more degrees, but I’m always looking for new ways to learn.”

Learning is exactly what Bates had to do when she opened up Ink & Imprint last year. Although she has already spent nearly her entire career at or around a university, she was more than willing to learn everything about running a bookstore.

However, there was a time when the Ink & Imprint seemed like a far-off dream. 

“For years, in the back of my head, I’ve been like, ‘Someday it would be really cool to own a bookstore,’” she said. “Like, ‘That’s my someday thing I’m gonna do. That was a couple of years ago.”

The someday process started last year, when Bates set out to make her dream a reality.

“I got a little more interested in it and started learning a little bit more about what was involved,” she said. “There’s this podcast called ‘Bookstore Explorer,’ and I don’t know how many episodes there are, maybe 40 or more. I started listening to it on my commute to Millikin, and I listened to almost every single episode of that podcast, and every single episode was him interviewing someone who owns a bookstore.”

This podcast would eventually lead Bates to take an online class on operating a bookstore.

“There [are] a lot of things that are specific to the bookstore industry, that, even if you understand retail, you’re like, ‘How do you source books? Where do you get the right kinds of shelves?’ There’s just so much to learn. So, I did a class on my own time, just because I wanted to learn and file it away for someday.”

However, after a building right off the downtown square in Lincoln opened up, Bates knew that she couldn’t pass up such an incredible space for her bookstore to reside in.

“I called the landlord, and he was like, ‘I don’t know if that space is going to be ready for awhile, but it’s a data company that does a lot of work with Microsoft,’” she said. “They own this huge building downtown, just off the square. During COVID, they ended up with so many remote workers that they didn’t need the first floor of the building anymore.”

Bates’ hand in renting the space was forced by the upcoming Christmas season, but this only helped push her to create her store.

“[The landlord] said, ‘I think someone’s gonna want [the building] to be open for the Christmas shopping season,’ so he was talking about a few months later,” she said. “I was like, ‘If I don’t take this space, someone else will do it, and it could be years or even never before there’s a space. If I don’t take it, I could regret it for the rest of my life.’ So, we talked about it as a family that weekend, started brainstorming names and logos, and we just decided to do it.”

Fast forward to the present, and Ink & Imprint is one of the most popular shops in downtown Lincoln. Additionally, it is a place for the Bates family to spend time together, whenever they can find time. This, of course, includes Bates’ daughter Emma creating her own line of candles, known as Emma’s Apothecary.

“My daughter started making her own candle business, and she sells her candles in the bookstore,” Bates said. “Emma spends a lot of time with me at the bookstore. She runs the cash register. She gives me input on things I should get for the store. She already talks about when she’s going to take over the bookstore.”

Ink & Imprint has already made a significant impact in the Lincoln community. As I sat and watched customers walk around and eventually exit, all of them made sure to tell Bates how appreciative they were of her store.

Looking back on her experience of making her dream a reality, she understands that all she had to do was say, “yes.”

“[I would tell myself to] trust your instincts,” she said. “I was so nervous that I was doing everything wrong, and I agonized so much over my initial book orders. I was so worried about everything. After all the things that I stressed about and lost sleep over for so many months, I would just tell myself, ‘Trust your instincts. You’ll be fine.’”

Bates will continue to be one of the most involved professors in the lives of students at Millikin, and she will continue to play one of the most incredible balancing acts I’ve ever seen. Bates is performance learning personified, and every college student has something to learn from her life experiences.

“It’s that combination of thinking big and getting really excited about an idea, but I also like the implementation of it, and actually making something happen. I still like to keep going and figuring out how to make something better,” she said.