It turns out I went to graduate school to become a writer. It’s so obvious now. I had this fantasy when I was a teenager of living in an RV and driving around the country writing novels and poetry. I discounted the fact I can’t make up a story to save my life. And I ignored the fact I’d read Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie  and found it God-awful boring. I think I thought more would happen out on the road.

Regardless, I knew I was drawn to this this life of thinking and writing and moving.

After earning my bachelor’s degree in business marketing (imagining this to be the more creative of the business majors after I was dissuaded from an English degree by folks who portended I would never get a job), I took a job in a telecom company. It was a good job: upward mobility, steep learning curve, good boss, decent pay. So why did I feel like I was walking through mud everyday on my way to work?  The monotony. I thought it would kill me.

So I quit and went back to school for a master’s in English with the vague hope it would change my life into something more purposeful and interesting.

It turns out it changed my life in ways I never anticipated – nor did I notice them when they were happening. I forgot about the RV, the novels I didn’t know how to write, the joy of putting pen to paper. These aspirations were all supplanted by the idea I should become a professor. If I’d succeeded in landing a tenure-track job, I’m sure my life would have turned out fine. I certainly loved the books, the teaching, and the conversations. But since the whole pursuit ended up being a wild goose chase, it also feels like a distraction.

It took nearly a decade after leaving academe for me to figure this out. This is partly because I was also so busy with raising a family and working as a tutor. I believed in the tutoring work deeply and knew that I made a significant difference in the lives of my students. But I also knew it wouldn’t hold me forever.

After my kids grew out of elementary school, I found time to think beyond the tutoring. That’s when I started this blog. That’s when I really had to do the soul searching that postacs must do to figure out what to do with their lives once they’ve given academe the boot. I just did it many years later than most.

It took a year of suffering through the questions of: What is my purpose? Where have my choices led me? Where do I want to take things from here? It was a midlife crisis on steroids, given the extra confusion of: Why did I get that Ph.D.?

I had so many interests and aspirations swirling around in my head. I had to whittle things down and ask myself, what is the first priority–the number one thing I wanted from my new career.

Then the image of the RV came back to me and I realized: freedom. I also remembered my old aspiration to be a writer. No longer a teenager, I could see through the romanticized notion of driving around in a truck with my dog to more illuminating kernels of self-awareness:

It wasn’t just the work that had driven me mad at my telecom job. It was the confinement. I realized I wanted to be my own boss. I didn’t want to be trapped in a building. I needed to be outside. I had to be creative.

These realizations went a long way toward clarifying my goals. I would try to work from home as a freelance writer/editor. I could do my creative projects on the side. I wrote about the culmination of this decision two years ago in the post: the perfect job: life after academe.

Over the course of the years since, I’ve gradually replaced tutoring clients with writing/editing clients. It turned out I needed that Ph.D. after all (and the tutoring experience too). I write for organizations that produce scholarly information in special education and health. I couldn’t do the work without my experience as a scholar.

No, I don’t get to edit amazing novels by famous authors. I don’t get to spend my days writing poetry in the shade of a friendly tree. But almost no one gets to do those things. And I’m lucky that I believe in the missions of the nonprofits I work for. And I never grow tired of the puzzle that is a new writing assignment: lining the words up in the right order, with the right rhythm & nuance.

I also get to work in my pajamas, get up from my computer and jog around the house like a fool when my Fitbit says I’ve been sitting too long, manage my time so I can ride my bike in the middle of the day, graze in my kitchen at will. I’ve also finished what I hope is the final version of my memoir. And now that I think of it, I do get to work in the shade of a tree–I often move my laptop into the backyard where I sit on our deck and work under the monstrous pine that towers over our house. I only wish it wouldn’t drop needles onto my keyboard where they slip under the keys and threaten to short circuit my livelihood.

All of that and I get paid well too.

It was about a year ago that the balance of my profession tipped definitively away from tutoring toward writing. For many of us, our careers are journeys. Mine has certainly had a number of twists and turns. It was so strange and gratifying the first time someone asked me what I did for a living and I said, “I’m a writer.”

Why didn’t I think of it sooner?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve been actively querying agents, sharing bits of my memoir in this or that required format, so I thought it appropriate to share something here. This is the Prologue. It’s short – just a page. This is something of the end of the story, but it ended up being the beginning of the book thanks to the advice of peers in my writing group.

Thanks for reading!

PROLOGUE

Apostasy: the abandonment or renunciation of a religious or political belief

May 2006

I fidgeted at my office desk where I sat alone, waiting out the final moments of a twelve-year career in academe. Soon, I’d head to class where I’d administer the semester’s final exam. All day I’d felt unwell in a vague way. Pain in my back or my chest, I couldn’t tell. An antsy feeling in my belly as if I drank too much caffeine. It took hours for me to recognize the obvious: it was anxiety.

Exhausted by a tenure-track job search that had come to feel like an exercise in futility, I’d decided to “retire.” Giving up this way of life felt like giving up faith or family. The decision is still the most difficult of my life.

Feeling last rights were in order, I slid the piece of paper with my name on it out of the label holder on the file cabinet drawer next to me. I’d torn this misshapen scrap off a piece of notebook paper and threaded it into the slot with great anticipation two years prior. Now I dropped it into the trash. That made it official—my sendoff nothing more than a hum from the communal printer. The next semester, some other part-timer would sit in my wobbly chair and claim the file drawer as their own.

At 7:10 pm, I grabbed my bag and made my way down four flights of stairs. At the exit, I saw rain pounding the sidewalk outside. Perfect, I thought. I opened my umbrella and marched out into the storm.

Next May, it will have been 10 years since I last stood in front of a room full of college students to share my thoughts about books. In July 2006, a few months after I taught my last class, I published a short piece about quitting academe in The Chronicle of Higher Education called Not Slinking Away. I saw the piece as the end of a memoir I was writing about my experience as an adjunct professor of English. I couldn’t yet see it was actually the beginning. Since then, I have made a version of that article into the Prologue of my book.

That July nine years go, I imagined I would take a year to shape and polish my many notes and journal entries into a well-crafted memoir. I planned to begin querying agents in the summer of 2007.

That I might still be fiddling with an unpublished draft nine years later never occurred to me. And a good thing too–because I can see now it was the idea of the book, the idea of sharing my story in the near term, that carried me through those first years. After investing ten years on an academic career that didn’t pan out, I would have had no patience with idea it would take another ten to write a book about that failure.

But now that I’m almost on the other side of that decade, I’m glad. Coincidentally, as I’ve been thinking about how time and reflection have improved my narrative, a story appeared in the New York Times about memoir: Should There Be a Minimum Age for Writing a Memoir? Oddly, the title focuses on the age of the writer rather than the distance from the events. I think the question the writers grapple with isn’t how old you are, but whether you’ve had time to reflect on what you’re writing about.

So what’s enough time?

The answer depends on the purpose of the writing. A friend of mine wrote a memoir of early grief called Rare Bird, about the loss of her 12-year-old son in a drowning accident. She published the book just a few years after her son’s death. And she did a beautiful job. I’m sure her telling of these events will change over the coming years, but her point in writing the book so soon was to tell the raw story of how she saw her experiences in the moment–before the years had a chance to pass. And it works. It works because parents have a desire to know how a mother or father survives, day by day, during those first terrible years of loss. We are terrified by the idea of it, and yet we cannot fathom it. Rare Bird works because it draws back the curtain for us, letting us see what our worst fear looks like without slipping into hopelessness on one hand, but without the amelioration of time on the other.

My book, on yet another hand, was not working in its original form–the one written in the immediacy of my post-academic moment. One of the authors of the New York Times articles says, “I believe we tell our stories when we need to tell them.” I agree. But not every story is ready to be heard in the moment when it needed to be told. Mine was one of those. And it has taken some excellent readers in the past two years to show me that.

Unlike Rare Bird, my story needed time to soften its corners, the way wind and water will wear away the jagged edges of a mountainside. In the art of complaining: an adjunct’s dilemma, I wrote on this blog about my struggle to tell an angry story without alienating readers with an angry narrator. I didn’t know how to make my narrator likable without taking the bite out of my story. I think the condition of adjuncting (working part-time as a professor for a quarter of the pay tenure-track professors make with no job security, little or no benefits, and little or no opportunity for improvement) is one that promotes bitterness. I thought readers should see how my job changed me into a spiteful person I hadn’t been before. But how to be spiteful and sympathetic too?

The answer, I discovered, was in this blog. Over the past two years, many readers have offered words of encouragement about my book, telling me they couldn’t wait for it to come out. Reading those comments I felt sure my blog readers would be disappointed with the book, but I couldn’t figure out why. Eventually, I realized it was because of the difference between the person who writes this blog and the person who wrote the memoir. While readers might like me here, I understood they would not like me there.

Because my narrator had no distance.

My narrator hadn’t learned anything yet.

It’s not that I suddenly have all the answers about why crappy things happen to us. It’s just that I no longer feel as angry as I did in 2006. So in the last year, I’ve converted my memoir into the past tense and told my story with this current voice, the one softened by ten years of wind and rain. The experience has been transformative, for me and for the book.

Of course it’s not done (are you tired of hearing me say that?) but it is close – at least in this latest iteration. So while I’m glad I didn’t know it would take so long to finish this book when I started it in 2006, I’m glad it did. Since then, public awareness about the condition of adjuncts and the problem of contingent labor at colleges and universities has grown. Adjuncts have banded together online, students have become more aware of their professors’ working conditions, and articles like this one and this one have made it into the main stream news.

I hope with that changed landscape and my changed perspective, this story I’ve needed to tell for a decade is ready to be heard.

Now if I could just finish it already!

 

 

 

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

Faulkner said it. All writers know it. But can we do it? My academic self struggled more with the cutting than my creative self does. During grad school, it seemed each turn of phrase contained the key to my future: another brilliant conclusion, another bit of evidence to prove my scholarly worthiness, another before-unseen truth my readers might discuss over the elongated table in our English department conference room. I couldn’t quite get over how deliciously clever I was.

During those days, I couldn’t kill anything at all, let alone my darlings. So instead of deleting the extraneous turns of phrase, I cut and pasted them into a file labeled “scraps.” And then I saved them.

For what?

For all time.

Every seminar paper, dissertation chapter, and journal article had a “scraps” file. Each time revisions required I sheer a darling from its roots, I tucked it away for “later.” Over the years, the collection grew—like a pile of broken china dolls stashed in an attic trunk, waiting for the day I’d come to my senses and realize the truth: these babies had a rightful place in the world of necessary all along.

When I first began making scraps files, I actually believed I would find a later use for all those extra words. I promised myself I’d be back to collect them, even labeling paragraphs in bold so I could find content more easily when the need arose.

These days, I don’t feel anywhere near as attached to my writing as I did in academe. But my habit persists. I save most major cuts, despite the fact that in all the years of writing, I have never gone back–have never once opened a scraps file intending to do anything but dump more darlings in.

It turns out, even if you can’t kill your darlings, you can kill your love for them.

And that’s the key.

So if you too have trouble letting go, don’t. Save yourself the internal debate over whether a given string of words should die. Instead of killing those babies, stick them alone in a room with the promise you’ll return. Then leave them there until you can’t remember why they mattered so much.

If you never feel compelled to go back for them, you’ll know you did the right thing.

Check out this important new study on contingent faculty at George Mason University. I got my M.A. at GMU and worked there as an adjunct after getting my Ph.D. years ago, so for me, this reads like it came right out of my memoir: too many hours, too little pay, no opportunity for recognition or advancement etc. etc. etc. If you’ve ever been an adjunct, you know the routine, but we need more studies like this to move us past the anecdotal.

I was also pleased to see “Pay Equity between contingent and tenure track faculty of similar rank” as the first recommended action for GMU, among other important things related to benefits and job security.

I’m tempted to keep writing/summarizing but really, you should go to the horse’s mouth:

Indispensable but Invisible: A Report on the Working Climate of Non-Tenure Track Faculty at George Mason University

Thanks to the authors:
Marisa Allison
Randy Lynn
Victoria Hoverman
Doctoral Students
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
George Mason University

I tweeted this a.m. that I paid off my student loan yesterday. Since I’ve been making monthly payments on that thing for 10 years, I felt celebratory. But after tweeting, I sort of regretted it. The twitter account, @Debt_Free_2day favorited and retweeted me (presumably because I am an inspiration for having closed out a loan). Confirming this idea, someone else tweeted that my news made them “seriously emotional,” adding #ItCanBeDone. Others congratulated me.

Here’s the thing. I feel happy to have closed out this loan, but no one should be inspired by it–and I’m sorry my tweet misled people. What I didn’t think to say was that my loan was for $6,200. The idea it takes a comfortable middle class person 10 years to pay off a $6,200 loan when others face boulders of debt in the range of $100K, coupled with the fact I could be looking at these same kinds of numbers after my kids go to college (starting next year!), is not inspiring. It is daunting. Horrifying.

How did I get away with just $6,200 in debt anyway?

I started graduate school twenty years ago, in 1994. While that feels like a blink to me, college tuition rates tell a different story: surely only the passing of a century can account for the snowballing 3.7-4.2% average increase we’ve seen in tuition every year since then?

Even in the golden olden days of 1994, we thought higher education was an expensive luxury. I paid for my master’s degree with $5,000 I inherited when my grandmother passed. Neither of my grandparents went to college, and both placed a high value on education. This inheritance was a huge windfall to me, and I felt obligated to spend it wisely. Confident my grandparents would have approved of my choice, I put the money in a separate bank account and drew from it only to pay for school expenses. When I graduated with my master’s degree in 1996, I had exactly $30 left. At the time, I thought, “Wow, I can’t believe it took almost every penny!” Even at the more modest rates of the past, I viewed graduate school as an expensive luxury that I only afforded with this unexpected gift.

Then I wanted to get my Ph.D.

By now it was 1997. Tuition rates were increasing at a rate of 3.7% each year, my doctoral program would be out of state, and my acceptance to the program did not come with funding. My tuition jumped from about $130/credit hour for the master’s, to about $350/credit hour for the Ph.D. (still a pittance by today’s standards, I know). This is when I borrowed the $6,200–to pay for my first year of doctoral work. The year prior, my husband and I had struck a ludicrous deal: I would stay home with the kids we hoped to have if he would support me while I got my Ph.D. (the repercussions of our naiveté in this decision are in part the subject of my memoir). But still, Steve’s support meant I did not have to pay room and board, so my $6K was not the $20K that my friends borrowed.

The next year, I got funding. Honestly, I may have dropped out if I hadn’t. Not just because of the money, but because no funding also meant no teaching. I knew with no teaching I had no chance of getting a job (if only I’d known I had so little chance of getting a job anyway!). Three years of teaching/funding paid my tuition and provided a small stipend that helped Steve and I with our bills. By the time the funding ran out, I was dissertating. Then I only had to pay for 1 credit-hour per semester, an approximate $400 expense that we scraped together twice a year without loans.

And there you have it. With a little luck, I managed only $6,200 in debt for a Ph.D. Meanwhile, my nephew just borrowed $4,200 to pay for one college-level class–his last one. I don’t know how much he owes in total, but I do know it’s the kind of number that sits in your gut like a rock.

In a great irony, I’ve paid off my debt just in time to incur more. My son will follow his cousin to college next year. We have actually managed to save enough money to pay for two years of his schooling (because he is an athlete, we already know he will attend a public school in our state–but don’t even think scholarship). At our current pace of inflation, those final two years will cost about $25K each. How will he (or us? we haven’t crossed that bridge yet) pay off $50K in loans?

And then my daughter will go to college as well. After years of responsible saving, will we still find ourselves at the end of our lives worthy only of debtor’s prison?

The latest financial advice for people like us is that we must not take on our kids’ college debt because we won’t live long enough to pay it off. We must leave it to our kids while we focus our resources on retirement. Either way, our kids inherit the burden: they can pay their own college loans or pay for our nursing home.

In another irony, my son is enrolled in a required high school class called Personal Finance this year. He is learning about checking and savings accounts, debit cards, credit cards and the like. Most importantly, he is learning about the imperatives of avoiding and managing debt. Yet, quite possibly, the first thing he will do after high school graduation is incur a debt so insurmountable it could take his entire adult life to pay it off.

Should I tell him not to worry? After all, it only took me 10 years to meet my miniscule obligation. Of course, times have changed since I went to school. While I couldn’t find a job in my field, my son can count on the benefit of a free internship after graduation to help him dig himself out!

And what of the person who tweeted #ItCanBeDone this morning? Do I write them and tell them it can’t? No. For who am I to say? Besides, I’m holding out the same hope for my kids, and their cousins too.

A worthy cause(s): (seeing Rebecca pretend to sing, and petitioning for a federal investigation of university labor conditions)!

Please check it out and sign!