bits and pieces

Well.  I generally feel like it's bad form to write blog posts about how you haven't been posting, so naturally, I'm going to do it.

You may have noticed things grinding to a crawl around here. I admit my time for blogging has dwindled. It's not for lack of interest, rather, for something much better: greed. Or perhaps I should just say: money.  This fall, I decided to pursue editing and writing projects that pay. Of course, when you try to make your hobby into your living, the hobby inevitably suffers.  That doesn't mean I don't plan to write here anymore--I do!--it just means I've had less time. 

And that will change.

It will change because the real drain on my time has been my book. What book, you say?  Ahh, yes.  That is the problem:

What book. 

I started a memoir almost 8 years ago when I quit my adjunct professor work.  The book traces my professional life from corporate ladder climber, to grad student, to my work as an adjunct English professor.  It culminates with my decision to leave academia (woops.  I guess I should have given you a spoiler alert!).  I've worked on this project for years in, you guessed it, bits and pieces, only carving out time when I wasn't child-rearing, grant writing, tutoring and/or cooking.  You can see why it's taken so long.  I hope.

But now, the time to publish is ripe.  The working conditions and employment prospects in academe have sunk to new lows and more people are speaking out.  While I'm participating in that conversation through twitter and on my other blog, Professor Never, publishing my memoir and telling my story would give me closure on that part of my life. I have a real sense of urgency about finishing.

So I've been working on it A LOT.  I can be a "bit" monomaniacal about writing projects. I have trouble drawing boundaries around the work, forgetting to drink water, cook dinner, or to go to bed.

The same thing happened with my dissertation.

The consequence? Everything around me crumbles into bits and pieces.

This blog, with a post here and a post there, looks as neglected as the parsnips that have languished in bits and pieces in my vegetable drawer since the last co-op delivery in November! 

And what's up with those parsnips anyway?!  And the turnips. And the butternut squash--these remnants of fresh stuff I've neglected nag at my conscience. Don't worry, we haven't resorted to McDonald's every night (or ever), but my meal planning is more haphazard, and my plans less ambitious.  I've been falling back on the greens I pre-cut and froze in October, or the almost-ready-to-eat beans I canned in September. I "forget" about the squash and turnips that need to be washed and chopped--egad.

At the same time, stores of other winter foods have dwindled to their own meager collection of bits and pieces: white potatoes, garlic and apples are in short supply from our co-op.  I could supplement with trips to the winter market, but I've reduced even those trips to bits and pieces as well, with late Friday nights and cold Saturday mornings collaborating to keep me home.

My herbs, which are way ready for the jar, still hang from my pan rack and other sundry places about the kitchen, begging me to bottle them up by dropping bits of themselves onto my counters in despair.  I sweep them up and wonder, should the pieces go into the compost, or our dinner? Who will know?

Even my primary paying job: tutoring, has grown sporadic.  I've cut back on my students to make time for freelance writing/editing jobs that I can do while the kids are at school.  But in the transition to finding new work, I have felt the spaces open up between appointments. Whether that's good or bad, shouldn't it at least mean I have more time to do the things I always used to manage anyway? You'd think.  But exercise, meditation, email maintenance (what a drag that's a thing now), laundry and Christmas thank-you notes (I've written only one) occur in smatterings. What good is just a "bit" of exercise or one clean "piece" of laundry?

It all gets sacrificed to the book.

Still, I have managed to step away from the memoir to write a few other related "pieces." I  published an article in Inside Higher Ed a few weeks ago. You can see that here if you want to read my post-academic rantings about the perils of seeking a humanities Ph.D.  I also submitted an excerpt from the memoir to a literary magazine back in October.  That rejection should arrive in my inbox any day, so I hate to even mention it.  But no worries. I will not crumble into bits and pieces when I get the news.  Like most writers, I'm an old hand at taking rejection. 

In the coming weeks, I will continue to make my book revisions a priority, but I will also try not to be such a stranger around here.  I miss this blog, the ideas it generated for me, and the small community that grew up around it (that's you if you're still out there!). You know I have bits and pieces of a zillion different posts floating around in my head. Writing here more regularly would clear my mind and hopefully help me to see the minutia of life that lies littered around me not as evidence of my neglect, but of my industry!

it's a fart, it's a bird, it's a blogaversary! a (trying to be) writer reflects

I remember writing my first post.  Butterflies of anxiety flapped around in my belly--as if the internet would light up and sing when I hit "publish," drawing hoards of readers to my page like hungry bees on flowery honey.  I almost hoped they wouldn't come.  In some respects, the blogging train had left years before, chugging out of the station while I was buying a coffee at the student union.   How humiliating, I thought, to have a blog with just one post, let alone in the tardy year of 2011!   For months, my little archive taunted me, screaming "newbie!" with its meager list of writings.

Perhaps because of those anxieties, I kept my blog a secret--even from Steve.  It took months for me to share my writing with people I knew.  And while I wrote about our family, I shared little about me. 

I'm still a newbie, but after a year, I suppose I'm veteran enough that I don't worry about that stuff anymore.  Instead, it seems like a good time for a reckoning.

What am I doing? How did I get here?  My profile is vague and elusive, if you ask me. 

So today, the skinny: 

I suppose I embarked on this it's-not-a-career back in my twenties when I gave up a lucrative and successful job in business because of the boredom.  I wanted to pull every one of my very fine and numerous hairs out of my head so that I could count them during the long and tedious afternoons.  I needed creative work.  I wanted to write.

I went to graduate school--thinking if I wanted to write, I should study the masters.  Naively, Steve and I figured I'd be out of work for a year or so.   Two kids, a Ph.D. and a mere 10 years later, there I was, looking for a tenure track job as an English professor.  I had changed my life, raised my babies, published academic papers, and earned my degree.  After years of chasing toddlers  around the house while academic demands chased me around the clock, I anticipated the relative rest of raising elementary-aged kids while working a mere 40-hour week. 

I know.  I know it wouldn't have been just 40 hours.  I know it wouldn't have been easy.  But to me it seemed perfect nonetheless. 

Except there were no jobs.  

While looking for a position on the tenure-track, I worked as a part-time adjunct professor (1/4 the pay of a tenured professor, no job security, no benefits, no respect).  After two years of that, I could see the writing on the wall (literally: it said "This dump sucks" in faint yellow highlighter on my communal office wall at the university). 

So I quit the search and quit the job and became a tutor for dyslexic learners (Gareth has dyslexia),  wrote grants for a local non-profit, and wrote a book about all that stuff I just summarized in a few paragraphs. 

Geez - I'll never get it published now that I've given everything away!

If you have a creative impulse, then you already know that creativity is like gas.  You can't hold it in.  If you try, it just explodes uncomfortably inside you until you're bloated and cranky and needing to lie down.  Sorry folks, but you just gotta let it out.

So when I finished the book, I started this blog.  If we want to run with my unsavory analogy, then I suppose blog posts are like farts.  Aren't you glad you stopped by?  I hate that word, but it's true.  Writing this relieves the pressure, so to speak.  It makes me really happy.

Except there is a difference between a blogger and a writer.  Can you guess what it is?

Yup.  Money.

Unless you're dooce or The Blogess or some other such sickeningly successful scribe (the alliteration was unintentional until i threw that last word in on purpose), you don't make a dime as a blogger.  That's really ok with me, actually.  I mean, should I get paid just because I'm feeling flatulent? 

Which gets me, at long last, to the point of this post. 

Who am I? 

I'm a (trying to be) writer.  Which means I hope someone will someday publish my book.  And the next one.  And the next.  Which means when I'm not tutoring or mothering, I spend a lot of time querying agents and writing proposals, and editing, and formulating the next project, and reminding myself to stay the course. 

As a (trying to be) writer, I have to believe in myself everyday, despite the rejection letters that come in the mail like torpedoes aimed at the bare-naked hull of my confidence. 

It's hard.

With not enough respect and no income, (trying to be) writers resemble stay-at-home moms.  We birth words like they're babies, love them like we're mothers, and nurture them to maturity in hopes they will fly free of us and make a name for themselves in the world. 

So if you (like me) don't savor the idea that I'm farting on you when I post, think of these writings as hatchlings, teetering on the edge of the nest with untested wings at the ready.  Whether they soar, or fall flat, I want to thank everyone who has taken time to hang out in the canopy and cheer.

THANK YOU for a super fun year! ☺

 

where are all the feminists?

I’ve been perusing a lot of blogs lately – mingling at the party, so to speak, to see who’s out there.  In casually leafing through the nearly 8,000 blogs about family and childrearing on BlogHer, I noticed that only 1,000 self-identify as feminist.

Hmmm…

What’s up chickies? 

I am a sort-of-stay-at-home mom—a SOSAHM so to speak.   In that capacity, I help my kids with homework, schlep them to soccer and swim practice, and happily cook for them every day (from scratch if that sways you).  Despite all those domestic endeavors, I am a FEMINIST through and through.

The thing is, I bet you are too. 

Isn’t blogging the most badass feminist thing you can do?  After all, it wasn't too long ago when women were sequestered in their homes with NO VOICE, struggling to be heard in their families, in the press, at the polls.  If they had an opinion, it was a talk to the hand sort of situation. 

Of course, we are dripping with gobs of gripping feminist writings (300 years’ worth!) by women who managed, with mountains of determination, a little luck, and an occasional male pseudonym, to be heard.  But they were exceptional.  And they carried the burden of speaking for all of their silenced contemporaries.  Now, we need not be exceptional!—convenient, huh?  No matter who we are, we can simply get on line in all of our celebrated mediocreness, start a blog and: voila!        

And look at the kick-ass feminist result! A huge community of big-mouthed, chattering, rambling, clucking and yammering women sharing, supporting and debating…about motherhood.   In a public space.  I love it!  That, my friends, is a feminist venture if I’ve ever seen one. 

And that’s something to be happy about, proud of!  We should be busting around with our chests all puffed out like a Fem Foghorn Leghorn!    

So…don’t let my use of the big F-word send you aflee.  Stick around at least until we can talk about what that scary word even means.

With that, I guess it’s about that time:  time to post.  Funny that this feels so much more public than past purges, delivered under safe cover of leather and flowery fabric, where I knew my words might offend or inspire no one.  Despite the possibility of an audience, however, this writing differs little, right?  After all, who in the world reads a bloggers first post?!