I’m gonna be straight with you, having a tenure track job as a writer/academic is different than you think it’s gonna be. It’s impossible to imagine how busy you’ll be, but as a baby-faced assistant professor (one of the benefits of being part Japanese I guess), I have so many meetings to go to now: department meetings, BFA curricular revision meetings, MFA program meetings, first-year faculty fellowship meetings, official faculty mentoring coffee “dates,” unofficial faculty mentor coffee “dates,” MFA and PhD panel discussions for professional development, committee on diversity & equity colloquium logistics, new faculty readings, the timeless Michael Martone reading and after-party, and then of course, there are office hours, run-ins in the hallway with colleagues, students, prospective students, exponential emails by students, the college of Arts & Sciences, the grad school, the department, even the dean.
And while often it’s a exciting kind of busy that leads to interesting and often engaging conversations with smart, generous, articulate, and interesting people every single day, the scary thing is I’m not even doing committee work this year. Just imagine how busy I’ll be next year when I’m teaching a full course load and fulfilling my service responsibilities, advising MFA and BFA theses, and possibly serving on MFA, MA, and PhD committees as affiliated faculty. That thought is kinda terrifying. Yo, a least I’m being honest.
One thing I’ve been told by tenured faculty who’ve been in this game for a while now and who are—by all observable metrics—thriving in this system, is that I need to protect my writing/research projects because if I don’t, they’ll be the first thing to go in my busy schedule and the last thing to be brought back into my daily rotation. And I’ve gotta say, they’re fucking right. Part of the reason I don’t get to write as often I’d like to is because I can’t say fuck it when it comes to teaching. I love teaching, I love my students, I love the learning dialectic inside the classroom, I love evolving as a critic, writer, and academic, and I love what I teach too, so I just don’t know how to NOT give a shit.
Another part is that I’d spent my entire summer packing and unpacking up our life and working out the moving logistics from LA to Ann Arbor, which was further complicated because LB and I were driving an EV across the country and we needed to find recharging stations too, which was its own type of labor, so I didn’t have time to read ahead of and prepare for my classes for this semester, so I’m often reading either along with my students or just before them, which means I’m even busier than normal. Sometimes, I feel like a grad student again, but then I walk into my MFA workshop and I realize that I’m the professor, and that shit feels absolutely insane, but also kinda good after being a lecturer for four years.
So, my goal for the next year is to find ways to write, revise, and submit my work every week to literary journals and indie presses. I don’t care if it’s just for an hour every day or for thirty minutes between office hours and class. I don’t care whether I just write mostly on my days off campus. I don’t care whether I spend some days just revising (which is form of writing) or whether I get one honest paragraph out of my writing session. It’s my job now to find ways to prioritize my writing because ironically, my success as a writer is the thing that will help me get tenure but it’s my responsibilities as an academic that demand my immediate and daily attention. Learning to say no to people and learning to say yes to my writing are two skills I will have to cultivate in the following year.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, I’m just growing up. I love my job so far, love my department, love my students, and I love the continuous interplay of the writing life, the lit seminar, the art class, the research project, and the role of communication that takes places every single day in my life and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.