#30: something to write about

Dear Readers:

Each month, you will receive an email from me containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory, but you didn’t receive one last month and this one actually isn’t organized into boredom, horror, and glory. It is the thirtieth one, however.

What I’m trying to write here I’m still figuring out. That’s why I took last month off, which very I’m sorry about. I just can’t figure out a way to write about this. The only real reason you don’t write or can’t write or avoid writing, I’ve decided, is that you have something to write about.

I am struggling with…I guess, like, how to present myself, or represent myself, to the audience of my newsletter, you, now that I’m not a professor anymore. Like why would you care now what I have to say about literature or anything? Not that I thought it was so wonderful that I was a professor—or that I thought you thought that. It’s more like…

I don’t know,

###############

something about all my struggles with academe and, especially, professors.

Something about bragging; pride/embarrassment. I could tell the whole “story” of my life in academia through scenes of embarrassment. I’ve noticed that academics are talking a lot about vulnerability lately, painting the embarrassment and shame they induce and produce with a pretty face.

Something about authority, how practitioners of academic humanities pretend to question authority, to pull the signifier away from the signified, when really the whole system is designed to screw them together tighter, so that every name of a writer, theorist, professor, applicant, student, college, journal, editor, press, title, and center has its own distinct special exchange value assigned to it.

Something about the idea of being trained.

Something about quit lit, the genre of personal essays about leaving the academy, which I am not writing here. I will not—not ever—write one of those essays. Ew. I feel sorry for these quitlit authors, but also annoyed/embarrassed by them. Coal miners fill a town hall and yell and vote for someone who’s lying to them; academics publish articles in Vox about how many awards they won but they still can’t get a job and how it’s not fair. Writing a quitlit essay is like squeezing one last ounce of embarrassment/pride/prestige out of this job. And it is a job—that’s the thing these essays, and everyone else, hides. I should know: unlike many professors, I’ve had many actual jobs, years and years, coming through the door eleven minutes late on a Tuesday and hoping no one notices.

My tenure-track job was an actual job—a 40-hour-a-week, long commute, boss-looking-over-your-shoulder-at-your-computer job. (Who wouldn’t want to work from home, if it means someone won’t be looking over your shoulder at your computer? Wouldn’t you make almost any compromise to get to that kind of situation?)

###############

I don’t know if I’ll ever directly write about when I left/got kicked out of/left the University of Michigan’s Creative Writing MFA program, because the embarrassment of it was so powerful that it changed my life. It was also exactly what I knew in the back of my mind would happen to a girl like me. It also happened to Walter Benjamin, my then-boyfriend said several dozen times. The topic of me leaving my job as a professor touches what happened at Michigan, like stubbing the toe you broke several years ago. It’s like, I knew, I knew it. I know someone like me couldn’t do this.

But I did! I pushed beyond the embarrassment of Michigan! I got my Ph.D.! I got a job!: I was a tenure track professor. Saying that feels exactly like saying, “I went to Michigan.” It was sad to finally get my MFA from George Mason, because I knew there was no longer any reason to say I went to Michigan. But there had never been a reason to bring it up. I was so embarrassed about Michigan. But I couldn’t stop telling people about it! I wanted to embarrass myself. No, I was proud. It had a .68 percent acceptance rate, and I got in! Me. I was embarrassed and proud, I couldn’t stop bringing it up.

And I’m doing it again, walking around saying, well yes I have this job now, but I was a tenure track professor! I sometimes say I was two years from tenure, just in case someone thinks I didn’t get tenure and that’s why I now have a different job. That’s not why! I was definitely on track to get tenure! Actually, I think I was more like three years from tenure…but who’s counting? No one, anymore! Why am I even talking about this to people? Because I’m so proud I was a tenure track professor, and so embarrassed. Embarrassed that I did this decade-long fool’s errand and proud that I did it, I did it. Embarrassed that I didn’t do it, none of it counts, I didn’t stick around for tenure, I couldn’t do it, I knew I never could, a woman like me. Embarrassed of how proud I had been to walk around saying I’m a professor. Proud! Everyone said it was impossible to get a tenure-track job but I knew that was another one of their self-affirming lies! And I was right! I knew it!

###############

Another reason I didn’t write last month is that my new job is really exhausting. I don’t mean that I’m more tired. I mean it exhausts my writing self in a way that being a professor didn’t. My new job is “Writing Specialist,” which you have to explain when you tell people. I’m the person who staffs the Writer’s Center at the private high school I attended in Chicago.

The thing I’m still getting used to, and still even trying to find the pathways to perceive, is that I don’t have to do anything when I’m not at work. They’re not lying and saying that I don’t have to do anything but secretly expecting me to do lots of stuff, and planning to anxiously ask me if I was productive over the weekend. I forgot that a job can be like this.

One of the many ways the students at my new job dazzle me is that they do the thing I and everyone always say to do: show your writing to other people throughout the drafting process. I find that nearly impossible to do. You’re being vulnerable, asking for help, showing undeniable proof of how bad your writing can be…that’s so hard! But I saw how my students’ writing improved over the past months by doing this. It’s one thing to know it works, but to see it in action is quite humbling. Not like, I won an award and I’m humbled; I mean really humbling. They had the strength to do this thing that then worked so well—and all I do is tell other people do to it. Anyway, that’s what I’m doing here. Showing you my draft. Next part of the draft next month.

Sincerely,

Lucy