I’ll tell you a secret about my novel-in-progress.
For more than a year now, I’ve been living in and with this book, before I got sick and then had to switch gears and edit my next novel under contract. A writing career is like that, jumping from story to story like stones in a river. You get used to all the splashing.
This new book is also on my mind because I’m teaching this week. And my work-in-progress? It’s an academic novel.
Yes, someone with a PhD and years of teaching, from prestigious Ivies and small liberal arts colleges to large state universities, is finally writing about academia.
Darkly.
That’s not exactly what I’m doing this week. I’m teaching teenagers, my favorite age group, in a pre-college, camp-like creative writing program where I’ve taught for years. As part of the events, I’ll also be doing a reading, which anyone can attend this Monday 6/26. Maybe I’ll read from the new book?
These days, since I work full-time as a writer, this is the only real teaching I get to do. And that’s a shame. Because I love being in a classroom. I trained for it and I do feel called to it. Teaching as a practice, though, is really different from academia: the man, the myth, the institution. My more than a decade in academia wasn’t always happy, safe, or right, an experience I know is shared by many others. I haven’t ever talked about everything.
I thought it was time to write it.
Some nights I wonder—worry, on the sleepless ones—if my decision to finally write about academia, even in what is very much a work of fiction, is a decision to burn all bridges.
Or, maybe burn this one particular bridge, so big it can seem like everything. It's a stone bridge. It's very white, but it's stained with years of soot and creeping moss. And it's crumbling. Sometimes I think it will be knocked down.
Maybe, washed away.
It's hard to love something but hate the structure that enables it. It’s hard to love something but be rejected, used, and abused by it, your labor devalued and exploited. It was a funny story I used to tell at parties, that I had 12 interviews for tenure track teaching jobs and the positions all went to men without a single published book between them. It became less funny, and then it became common, for my friends and former classmates trying to teach too. So many similar stories of queer folk, disabled folk like me passed over.
So many of us have left teaching now. Wonderful, creative, smart writer-teachers. They teach no more. Or, they teach, like I do, not within the constraints (and cushion) of a university teaching job.
Some have asked me: How can I make the transition to journalism? That's a hard path too, but the job doesn't hurt you in the same way—and prolificness, in my experience, is rewarded in full-time writing career, as opposed to in academia, where it is frowned upon.
Don’t publish too much.
Don’t be too much of an artist.
Don’t be you.
Despite my career in writing, I still love teaching, though. I always have, and this week will be exhausting but also rewarding. Inspiring. This is why I write. This is who I write for. A benefit of teaching outside of academia is that I don’t have to hide who I am, what I do, all that I am capable of, fight for, and believe in.
Don't dim your light for anyone, especially not students, young or new to writing, who need a path illuminated, who need to know there's a way. And maybe that relates to telling the truth, something I try to do with my fiction.
It’s funny. In order to tell that truth, I have to lie to myself: that no one is reading me, no one is listening to me, no one will know me. Only then can I give it all, which is also the way I teach.
So glad you’re writing this and I really look forward to that bridge-burning novel--it’s bound to build some kind of new bridge, too.