A little backpedaling

[I edited this when I realized I had missed an entire person!]

I was at dim sum on Sunday with a bunch of Wellesley alums, most of whom were fairly recently graduated. And I start going into my bitter spiel about "don't go to graduate school, it just drains your twenties away and leaves you no better off, etc etc..."

Which, in many ways, was true for me.  But was that graduate school, or me?

On Homes and Grading and California

Early this morning, I entered the grades for my second set of classes taught at the Fall Program or Freshmen. Done!

My course is focused on writing about place and how we connect to it, which resonates with these students who are often leaving home for the first time, though the typical freshmen experience doesn't really apply to Berkeley freshmen -- at least,  not the ones in my classrooms.

A Cautionary Tale? Or an Inspiration? Both?

I was asked to discuss my career path by the career center at my undergraduate institution.  Since I feel like a scrambler more than a planner at this point, I found that quite funny, but tried to answer their questions truthfully (if optimistically).

Here's the result! 

Fall: The Academic Job Season

I let my MLA membership lapse this year, stopped going to conferences a year ago, quit pursuing academic publications in favor of writing ones for places that paid. I gave the job market three tries, and never even got a request for an interview. Which, looking back, makes plenty of sense -- despite the importance of doing so, I never published a peer-reviewed article. What was I thinking? But in the end, that pushed me back out into a life that might turn out to be a better fit.

I got a new job that I love, as associate editor for the literary magazine and eponymous press Two Lines (look how pretty our covers are!). How lucky is that? What a dream opportunity to work with incredibly well-read colleagues who genuinely care about poetry and avant-garde literature. I'm working out this life that's part reading and writing, part editing, part adjuncting for the best program on the planet for adjuncts: the Fall Program for Freshmen, run by UC Berkeley Extension for spring admit Berkeley freshmen. Teaching smart kids, editing literature, writing for fun and money -- all good. I even teach and hold office hours in Wheeler Hall, which is also the home of the English dept at Berkeley.

Then I opened an email a month ago about local jobs in higher ed .

My goal for 2014: Write and Submit Weekly

In order to challenge myself to write, and set deadlines, and then abide by them, I am using stickk.com to hold me to my promises, as well as friends in charge of checking on me.

One of my goals is to write and submit SOMETHING every week. I need a fire lit under my butt, and I also need to get my confidence back. And the fun I used to have writing.

So I decided to give Medium a try (despite my reservations), to see what happens, after a fun writing prompt asked for flash fiction and I came up with a raging set of lies about journalist Joel Stein. 

See the 1500 word story (7 minute read, according to Medium) here! It was too long to submit to the contest, but I am going to try to go shorter and sweeter for the next one, due in three days.

[ETA: So yeah, only wrote the one, but it was chosen as an editor's pick! Got the taste of what 1.5K views feels like. "Exposure," they say these days, when you ask folks what they pay for material, but I can see the lure of that kind of attention. Almost feels like money.]

There's also a flash fiction writing contest at To The Best of Our Knowledge asking for "Three Minute Futures" -- short hard sci-fi. I'd like to try my hand at that!

Writing for Free, Reading for Free: The Economics of Academia and Publishing Today

Academics entering the media world tend to move from one exploitative arena (low-wage academic work) to another (unpaid freelance writing). But writing must never be an act of charity to a corporation. Ask for what you are worth—and do not accept that you are worth nothing. Insisting on payment for your labor is not a sign of entitlement. It is a right to which you are entitled.

-Sarah Kendzior, "Should Academics Write for Free?" 

Medium -- a new iteration of publishing/sharing writing/writing for free. Medium offers us all an audience because praise should be pay enough (though now, apparently, they are paying some writers decently). Medium was founded by Evan Williams (also, a liquor), who also founded Blogger (write for free -- for yourself and your friends), and has been in charge (possibly a founder? multiple stories abound) of Twitter (write for free, briefly, to the world, your friends, and clients). On Here and Now recently, Williams was asked about his new venture, and he described the year-old platform as providing journalism and stories to a wide audience who just can't find it elsewhere, apparently. He also emphasized the ability to share one's writing with the world, which writers just can't do elsewhere, apparently. Those darn editors and gate-keepers -- I thought that the internet was supposed to have knocked them down already? Williams evaded the interviewer's question of what void he was trying to fill, explaining that, really, this was a longer twitter. However, what he is actually replacing is the curated, edited magazine.

Where I am today

I finished my dissertation at 10 AM on March 28th, 2013. I was so worn out by the end that I am not sure that finishing was either a relief or a moment for celebration. It was more of a "This? This is what I had to do? All those years of paralysis and confusion and all I had to do was this?"

I felt let down by myself and, to be perfectly honest, by my advisors. I'm very proud of three of my chapters and I am glad I finished the last one and the intro. But, I am disappointed that despite my grand, ambitious ideas for the shape of the dissertation, it ended up being 200 pages, intro + 4 single author chapters. What a yawn. I don't want to know how many errors were in the bibliography. I still feel like as much of an impostor as I did throughout the process, only now I have a degree I feel like I earned through sheer forbearance rather than skill or knowledge. I don't think I know more now than I did six months ago, I just finally put my thoughts on paper. I feel like I wandered blindly for so long and spent so long worrying about their responses that I wasted years. One of my committee members apparently did not know when the submission deadline was and gave me feedback to totally revise my intro three days after I had submitted the document. I don't blame him at all -- I hadn't given him much time in the end to respond.

One of the unconscious reasons behind procrastination, for me, is that by cutting down on the time given to my advisors, and limiting the time I had left, I knew that they couldn't ask me to do huge revisions. Even if that would have been better for the scholarship. There simply wouldn't be time, so we band-aided the poor diss and shuffled it off stage.

I decided to embargo my dissertation for the maximum time allowed, two years, partially because I am telling myself that I will publish better versions of my chapters, and partially because I am deeply ashamed that it isn't better. I had the chance to really study under my advisors, and I never took it because I was too afraid of their criticism and felt too stupid to engage them in real, deep conversations about poetry, literature, and theory. I never even read half the books I wanted to, and what is a sadder take away from eight years of graduate study of literature?

I hope to revise my intro over this summer, and maybe tack on that last conclusion I intended to write, and correct any glaring typos or bibliographic problems. I also would like to turn some of the lost material into articles -- the chapter on the state of the poetry-publishing industry in Ireland and my Heaney/Boland chapter that never materialized.

I want to apply for academic jobs this fall, even though I got nowhere last year. But my current editorial job is looking shaky -- the publisher is in some financial straits, and I'm not sure my direct boss is going to stick it out. I feel very nervous, and I need to find some work immediately in case everything goes pear-shaped, which is pretty hard to do when you are new-ish to both an area and an industry.  We'll see.

Three Weeks to Go

All of February, and the first five days of March, I was working on a chapter about the elusive, creative  Irish poet Catherine Walsh. I find her asyntactic, paratactic writing to be extraordinarily challenging to make an argument about, because to me, it could be so easy to prove wrong. This, I've realized has been a huge problem of mine in grad school: I can always see the holes in my own argument, and that not only paralyzes me, but I keep inserting caveats and undermining my own claims. In high school I was an attorney in our Mock Trial program for  three years. I was very good at it, but partly because I always felt that I was lying because I could see all the holes and gaps in my argument and the strengths of the oppositions, so I frantically tried to fill those gaps in as much as possible. Yet, the feeling of telling half-truths was always there.

But, in any case, I finished writing 40 pages. I sent it off, despite the fact that I knew there were huge problems in it (like.... not having a convincing argument), but I had to move on, so I let it go. I promptly received feedback from one of my committee members to the effect that he loved my close-readings, but did not perceive a strong structure holding it together, and wants me to rewrite/revise. Which I expected. I didn't expect the praise for the readings, nor for him to get back to me so quickly!

I'm trying to move forward to writing the intro now. At this point, sans intro, I believe I would estimate my dissertation to be about 140 pp. A bit light, but that doesn't include the interviews I'll be including. I've been looking at tons of intros -- they vary from 15-50 pages, and I've even heard of a 95 page one! I am just hoping mine will be 30. I am excited about it, partially because it requires mostly a literature review and historical background for the project. I think it should be a matter of positioning myself among the other scholars.  My dissertation is light on footnotes, especially this most recently chapter, which I am afraid might be symptomatic of a lack of deep contextualizing reading. Hopefully I'll have the opportunity to make it up in the intro.

I am taking time off from work to finish this project -- thank goodness my boss is OK with that. Only 1 more week, though, and then I'm back. That means 7 days to write the intro, then, as quickly as possible, address issues with the first  chapter, add another 10 pp to turn 1 chapter into 2 shorter ones, and rewrite my 3rd chapter. I hope the latter Herculean tasks can be accomplished in 10 days.

Simultaneously, I am trying to oversee production, acquisition, editing, etc for the publishing company, Right now, I am taking a backseat, but that doesn't stop the publisher complaining to me of costs (maybe he shouldn't have an amateur do the typesetting and maybe he should pay his printers) and the authors complaining to me about missing checks. The only thing I can do abut either of those is nag the people with money.

I joined a website called Versatile Ph.D. recently. Great forums and support for making a career outside of academia. My only concern is how many of the English Ph.D.s are now either dissertation editors (perpetuating the very system that they left) or are freelance editors. Both seem like unsavory choices, to me, but maybe I only see the instability of freelance work and not its upsides.

OK: I need to get a page or two written today, and then I will be on the right track! 5 pages every day for the next 7 days will sort me out!

Woman Meets Perfume: Life after grad school

I was stopped by a stunning book jacket in Pegasus Books today:

Isn't that gorgeous?

I literally was only paying attention to the jacket and title page design (which was a flawless interpretation of the jacket) as an example of the way in which the typeface on the title page should echo that of the cover (well done Random-Penguin)....

.... but it turns out Harad's book is the story of a UT Austin Ph.D. in English who takes a bow and whisks herself off the academic stage to another life! I am inspired! After the million books on lyric, Irish politics, and publishing I have to read, and the towering pile of MSS, this is next on the list.