A Loss to The Conversation

A few years ago, a friend and I were talking about some of the truly great scholars in our field, and what it is that makes truly great scholarship. We were both touched by the friendliness and openness that had been shown to us by these stars of the discipline, even when we were just starry-eyed graduate students and young scholars first finding our way. We developed a theory that great scholarship and kind natures are connected – that the very generosity of spirit through which these people had reached out to us and others could be the impetus behind their wonderful and paradigm-changing work. Perhaps, we thought, the kind heart that causes a luminary to start a conversation with an unknown young scholar is the same heart that creates broad-reaching, inclusively-written criticism or an accessible, useful edition.

It is the reach towards others, the desire to connect, which distinguishes scholarship that changes things and lasts for years. Scholarship is, after all, a discourse. A conversation. Someone who works above all else to be a helpful contributor to the conversation is almost certain to make the conversation a better experience for everyone else in it. I am reminded of a mantra shared with me by a wonderful actor that the most important work in a scene isn’t figuring out how to do what you’re going to do, it’s figuring out how to make it easier for the others in the scene to do what they’re going to do. Great scholarship is not soliloquy; it is part of a dialogue.

Acknowledgements from Charlotte
Scott's Shakespeare's Nature. Just
the first one I picked up. 

One of those luminaries my friend and I spoke of has left the conversation, much too early and to the great detriment of all of us. The loss is stunning. I did not know Russ McDonald well. I knew him, as we say in the South, “to speak to.” I feel terribly cheated that I will not have a chance to know him better. His family and friends and colleagues and students must be devastated at a level I cannot fathom. I will tell you what I do know. He was one of the most gracious people I ever met. He asked me about my work, congratulated me on a recent publication, encouraged me to keep at it when I found myself stuck on a difficult question. I know he dropped everything to support his friends. I saw him do it. He loved theatre – LOVED theatre – and when I said I couldn’t live in London and get anything done because I’d be at the theatre every night, he laughed and expressed bewilderment about people he knew there who never went to the theatre. Can you imagine? he asked. Can you imagine living here and not seeing all these wonderful plays? I could go broke on theatre tickets. I know he loved his students and that he meant a great deal to them. I know he was a sounding board and valued pair of critical eyes to his friends and colleagues. Read the acknowledgements of scholarly books and you’ll be amazed how many of them mention Russ.

He contributed thoughtful, accessible scholarship. He contributed his attention to others and a friendly, kind spirit. If you are looking for a model of what kind of scholar to be, you cannot do much better than Russ McDonald.

The conversation will always have what he has contributed to it. I wish so much that we could have had more.

Accepting the Artsy Athlete Hybridity, by guestblogger Annloyd Dorris

note from the Garden Variety Academic: I promised some guest blogs while I'm on sabbatical, and here is the first. Enjoy! 

Accepting the Artsy Athlete Hybridity

            Hello, my name is Ann Dorris and I went through my undergrad as a frighteningly passionate collegiate athlete and a full time lover of all things literature and creative writing. A rare breed, I know. To my teammates I was a “hipster—weirdy, English person,” while to my classmates I was an “ESPN-watching, run-too-much, scary and intense jock.” While one day I am explaining to my English professors my need to miss class for a game, another day I am explaining to my coach that I need to miss practice for Shakespeare or in the name of poetry. I am what you might call a hybrid. I am an outcast to both of my passions because the other half of me seems to conflict. I live and die for the NBA Finals just as much as I live and die for Mark Strand or Virginia Woolf. I am here to tell the other rare breeds, reading Villette in the locker room before practice or showing up to a poetry reading still sweaty and out of breath from preseason workouts, there are others like you and there is a way to make these seemingly opposite identities work (which I can say confidently as a graduate student getting her MA in English and an Assistant Coach of a collegiate women’s basketball program). In order to ease your doubts, here are a handful of helpful tips to keep you sane along the way:

Accept Both Sides of Yourself

            At some point early on in the self-identification process, you need to sit down and just accept that you have two very different passions that in most eyes directly conflict. Just give yourself a nice big hug because there will be a million (slight hyperbole) times when you are going to have to convince the athletes that you love being an athlete and the artsy academics that you love artsy academia. Your teammates will be confused by this love for poetry or literature and your fellow poets and scholars will be confused as to why you physically exhaust yourself day in and day out for a “game.” That is why it is crucial to have this self-reflecting sit down and accept the natural hybridity. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO CHOOSE. Yes, you will feel like an outcast sometimes, but that does not mean you have to give up one passion to feel devoted to your other. There were so many times when I would be sitting in a poetry workshop or watching a Shakespeare play amidst peers who devote every waking hour to reading and writing with no distractions, and thinking to myself that I will never reach my potential in academics or creative writing because my love for basketball takes away too much time. Likewise, there were plenty of times when I knew I should be putting extra shots up in the gym or watching extra game film, but simply couldn’t because I had three novels to read and still needed to find time to write. There is a scary fallacy that is waiting to eat the souls of Englishy/Artsy athletes, and that is the invention in the mind of a potential that cannot be reached unless you give up one of your passions. Don’t do it. Have this sit down, hug yourself, joke with your friends that you are a freak, and go on reciting lines of Howl during water breaks of practice.

Not All Friends Will Mix

            For as long as I can remember, I have had two completely separate groups of friends with a very, very occasional floater who goes in between. I have my “English friends” whose Friday night consists of writing lines of poetry on the back of a bar receipt or violent arguments about Literary Theory and the flaws in the literary canon. Then, I have my “jock friends” whose Friday night consists of hours of one-on-one or violent arguments about whether Lebron is better than MJ (which he isn’t). There is only one night in the year that I force these two friend groups to blend, and that is on my birthday. Though both groups are wonderfully kind to each other on this one night, the simple fact is that they do not understand each other at all. Blame it on different jargons or perhaps different hobbies, if you want, but none of that changes anything. You just have to accept that just because you can fit in with both groups, doesn’t mean they can fit with each other. I’m not saying that there will never be a collective group of friends that contains the Artsy/English type and the jock type because I do believe that when the earth is at the right point in its revolution and the planets are perfectly aligned, a friend group with this mixture can be found. However, for the rest of the time, it is just much simpler to accept that not all of your friends are going to mix. But hey, that just means more friends for you.

Read Everywhere, Run Everywhere

            Beware of the lies that kind people tell you such as, “no no, there is plenty of time for both.” There is only time for both if you make time for both. By make time, I mean you must read everywhere and run everywhere. I was the girl sitting in a laundry basket (unnecessary detail) reading novels in the locker room before practice or games because there simply was no other way I was going to get through 3-5 novels a week and practice and extra workouts and games and writing creatively and writing scholarly and reading theoretical articles. Therefore, while my teammates were power napping before the game, I was reading and writing. While my classmates were on their fifth draft of a paper, I was doing track workouts and getting shots up in the gym. The fact of the matter is: if you love both things you’re oddly enjoying the quiet death of managing them without slacking on either. I’m telling you now, there isn’t “plenty of time” to do both, but there is so much reward in getting to be immersed in two completely different passions, while many other people only get to fully enjoy one.

Every Experience is a Lesson, Which is Fuel

            Even though an undergrad major or a masters in English may look like a waste of space on a coaching résumé and four years of a collegiate sport may look like a waste of space on a doctoral application, neither of them are a waste of anything. Both collegiate athletics and a degree (or two, or three) in English give you countless experiences and lessons, which inherently fuel both careers. Being a collegiate athlete teaches you the difference between working and working hard, and how only one of those will bring you a feeling of success. It teaches you how to survive and lead completely surrounded by other humans with just as big of a will and personality as you. Most importantly, it teaches you how to fight for something you want and not let anybody else take it from you. All of which can fuel you to reach whatever goals you have whether they have anything to do with sports or not. Likewise, getting a degree (or two, or three) in English will give you a peek into the lives of people all around the world, so that when you feel like you are having a hard day and nobody else will ever go through what you have to go through, you can think about Pip from Great Expectations who spent his whole life madly in love with a girl that was reared to hate the existence of the male population. All the sudden, you realize that everyone in this world is fighting to survive and understand their place in life and it would all go much smoother if we just worked together rather than against each other. Getting degrees in English gives you the necessary tools to take something you feel strongly about and mold those thoughts and emotions into intelligent and coherent writing so that you can get that job, or convince that congress(wo)man, or create that best-selling novel that will change the life of someone you have never met. Finally, the artsy/humanities English degree will give you the ability to think and analyze in a way that no other degree will be able to do. I mean, in a way you will have seen life through the eyes of hundreds of different people in different cultures and times. Then, you will be able to think deeply about the internal lives of each and how they came to be. So when you hit your identity crisis or your friend, coworker, etc. hits his or her identity crisis, you will be able to really think about what has formed and molded you or another into the person that they have become. Thus, how is it that an athletic director or dean of the English department turn down such a rare breed? They can’t. Unless, you turn down yourself first.

Ann Dorris

M.A English student, Lynchburg College

As You Begin Your Master's at Auburn...

* For E. K. *

This fall, for the second time, a brilliant student of mine finds herself starting graduate school at the place where I did my PhD. Remembering my own startled transition from the small school where I did my MEd to overwhelming, gorgeous, enormous Auburn, I wrote some advice. I didn't think to save what I wrote for the first student a few years ago. But this time around, with the student's permission, I have adapted the advice for my blog. I post it here for anyone starting graduate school, but mostly those going from a smaller school to a big research university.

ON YOUR MOVE TO AUBURN:

You chose Auburn in part because you love many fields and you don’t want to have to choose yet. Hold on to that. You’ll meet people who make you feel like you have to choose right away one thing over another, that your career even might depend upon doing so. Do. Not. Let. Them. Sway. You. In every field, there are purists, people whose passion for what they study and teach is so powerful that they see other fields as distractions from the true path, perhaps even think those other fields are potentially harmful to the pure study of whatever their field is. These people are often highly-accomplished and are to be admired, and you can learn a great deal from them. But if they are dismissive of your other interests, or when they even push you to disregard another interest because they tell you it is irreconcilable with what they are teaching you, respectfully decline to do so. With everything in academia, you have to balance trusting your advisors and trusting your own judgment.

Beware of camps or factions. Larger schools have more scholars, and therefore proportionally more purists, and those purists can band together to use their collective weight to achieve things. Often this is done with the most altruistic of motives. They are true believers who are trying to accomplish something good. Sometimes it can get really ugly. If this happens, be neutral. Be Switzerland (minus the keeping-Nazi-treasure part). Factions fight battles all the time – over resources, over direction and mission, over who is in the leadership – and sometimes one faction wins the battle, but no one ever wins the war. My attitude has always been: it’s better to get marched across than to engage in fights that distract from our true work, which is researching and teaching. For the most part, I’ve always been able to stay friends with pretty much everybody, although doing so has sometimes required directly asking people to leave me out of the conflict. It is unlikely you’ll get pulled into anything like this during your Master’s, but life is long and you might choose a career in academia, and these battles crop up from time to time on every campus, so I thought I’d share it now.  

Many deep, theoretical conversations began with "Okay,
I need to read you what I just wrote, and you tell me
if it sounds crazy or stupid." This is how besties are made.

Meet everyone you possibly can, and be on the lookout for someone who can be your academic ally. I have Kat. Kat is amazing and is still my best academic bud in the world. We got each other through some really tough times, when the competition around us was intense and people were ready to take each other out while competing for fellowships, leadership positions, and even favored attention from faculty. We met right away but became allies at the end of our first semester together. We swore an oath to each other to be fair and supportive, even when we were competing for the same things. We have held true to that oath, all these years. There may be some back-biting in the students when you’re there. You’ll be around some very competitive people. In fact, you’ll be around some of the most high-strung people you’ve ever met in your life. Every once in a while, a grad program can become a snake-pit, with students getting nasty in their competitiveness (stealing research ideas, checking out books that other people need, etc.). That happened for a couple years while I was at Auburn, but Kat and I could trust each other and so we just stuck together and didn’t engage with it, and we did just fine. And had a great time to boot. After a while, the snakeyness subsided. Most people sort out into little pairs, and then those pairs hang out, and develop groups. Some of my favorite memories are of Kat and me hanging with another pair, Julie and Jessica, over bottles of Bardolino at Provino’s. 

Alabama Nights:
Hanging at the Ponds with some friends from Fisheries

Go out of your way to meet grad students in other programs. I am still friends with folks from Fisheries. It’s fun to hang out with brilliant people in other disciplines. You’ll learn a lot, and have a great time. You’ll see sides of campus you would never see otherwise, and you’ll make friends with whom you need never be in competition. They're smart as hell, so you can have a conversation about just about anything, and you can explain your work to each other, which is useful to both. And if they’re in Fisheries, you can help them polish off the by-products of their research 

(Crawfish boil, FTW).

Study hard and work hard, but also go clubbing. Our little school doesn’t have a bar scene, but Auburn does. Go to clubs and bars and dance and have a blast. Yes, it can be weird when you run into one of your Comp students at SkyBar, but whatever. Smile and say hello and then rejoin your friends. Don’t let the undergrad boys hit on you – put them in their place when they do. Go ahead and join at The War Eagle Supper Club.

Don’t be afraid of teaching. You could end up with a terrific lead teacher who preps you well and gives you an appropriate amount of work to do when you’re ready for it. You could end up with a lead teacher who doesn’t give a shit and just throws you in there unprepared for way more work that your contract says you should be doing. Either way, take a deep breath and dive in to teaching. Trust me when I tell you this: of all the things that are intimidating in graduate school, the one where you stand up in front of people and talk about words is the one that, when you just trust your instincts, will come the most naturally. Oh, you’ll make mistakes. Huge, embarrassing mistakes. You can’t say that many words in a day in front of other people without a certain percentage of those words being the wrong ones. Backtrack only if you really, truly need to in order to accomplish something important (like when you mistakenly announce the wrong due date or parameters for an assignment). Do it matter-of-factly and then move on to something else. If you realize after class that you accidentally said that Shakespeare wrote 27 plays instead of saying 37, forget it ever happened. They won’t remember it later, anyway. Nobody gets everything right. If a little of your misinformation becomes their misinformation, it’s okay. Try to avoid it, but when you can’t, get over it. 

A city in itself. And when class is in session, a wild mass of
people. But find the little quiet spaces. They're there.

When you walk from Haley Center to the library, stroll through the courtyard between the Quad Center and Cater Hall. It was a favorite walk of mine. That courtyard is also a lovely place to sit and read when you need some fresh air. Find your favorite spaces on campus. Also, get to know your librarian, the one assigned to English. She knows where everything is and will go out of her way for you. Be prepared for library resources you never imagined possible.

Take every opportunity to be a research assistant that you possibly can. The grunt work of a research assistant is the best skill-building you will find in academia. I can find just about anything, and it’s because in my Master’s (at Georgia Southwestern State U) I worked as a research assistant to a playwright in residence who sent me on crazy chases for things like jokes officers in the Union army might have told each other in Confederate POW camps, the list of AKC registered dogs in 1957, or the typical cost of a Model T Ford in a small town in the South in 1921. Doing this, I learned to chase something down until I found it or I could prove that it couldn’t be found. It has meant everything to the rest of my career.

Go to everything that you possibly can. Our school is serious about its lecture series, so you’re already used to there being something to go to all the time. But you’ll have other opportunities now as well. Go to lectures, go to social events, go to parties. Join the English graduate organization and go to meetings. Some grad students either skip these events, or they slip in and out without staying and talking to people. They are missing networking opportunities, and fun. Also food.  Go to everything that has food. Take a purse. Wait until the end of the gathering when it’s clear that any remaining food is about to be carried off and put in the trash. Wrap cookies and crackers in napkins, and stash fruit in a plastic cup with a napkin and another cup over it to cover it. That way they won’t mess up the inside of your purse.

Last of all, trust yourself. You belong there. You’ll do great work. You’ll work harder than you knew you could, and produce work that is better than you thought you were capable of. If you feel like your head is exploding, you’re doing it right. You are ready for this.

WAR EAGLE, MY DEAR.

We called this The Mothership. I could look down into it from my window in HC8023.

Note: Also for KMG, former student and friend for life. And for so many others, most especially PH, LV, & AD. 

Life Lessons From College Theatre

I promised to write this one some time ago, and I believe I should like to celebrate the onset of my sabbatical/research leave with a post of a lighter tone, so this one seems appropriate.


We talk a good game in liberal arts colleges about how the lessons from college are more than just the ones in the classroom. But while vague platitudes about the journey being more important than the destination make for nice tee shirts and bumper stickers, they don't really deliver the message. My liberal arts education came from an excellent state university, where I majored in theatre.* I don't know if I can quantify the importance in my life of the lessons I learned in college theatre, but I can probably at least list some of those lessons. I'm not talking about what I learned in class, although I can definitely still design sets and costumes, and probably build them pretty well. I can block a scene and I can endow the shit out of some props. But theatre is like few other majors in the intensity of the life ones leads in it. We were a community, a company, and when our classes were done our shows were just getting started. My life was forever changed by what I learned in those "off" hours. Here are a few of the lessons I'm aware of on a nearly-daily basis.

Stress Is Created When the Brain Says "No, I Can't Possibly" But the Mouth Says "Yes, I'll Be Glad To.": (Thank you, Susan). My advisor, Susan, had a plaque in her office with this on it. She made me recite it sometimes. I was always overcommitted and exhausted. I wanted to do everything and be in everything. I am a Yes person. I say Yes to too many things. I am truly flattered and grateful every time I'm asked to do something, to contribute my time or talents, to any project anyone is doing. Yes, I say, even though I have just complained that I have no time for myself. You want ME? You want my help? Yes, I'll be glad to!! And before I know it, I'm on every committee and in every project and I have no time for myself or my family. I still need to work on this one, but I am getting better, a little bit all the time, at getting my mouth to say No. No, I wish so much I could help you with that, and I'm genuinely flattered that you asked me, but I cannot participate/serve/contribute.

Maybe Crazy Will Work. Try It and Find Out: (Thank you, Linda). Some of my favorite projects in class and out were the ones focused on performance of literature, the performance of prose and poems as drama. Turning a poem into a play is not remotely like just getting up and reading a poem, as I discovered, and I really struggled with the creative, abstract thinking required to visualize a whole new medium for a work of literature. It was my professor Linda who encouraged me to try things several different ways to see what I liked best. This seems intuitive now, but as a teenager educated in a stripped-down public school system that didn't have a lot of room for experimentation, the freedom to experiment was liberating and life-changing for me. I was wringing my hands over committing to what I thought was a crazy solution when Linda said, "Maybe it will work. Try it and find out." That particular crazy idea didn't work, but I got to try it and know for sure. The next crazy idea did work. I learned to like crazy ideas. Since then, I've learned to trust things that come out of left field. Sometimes they don't work. Sometimes they do. It's trusting that the time you take to try them out is worth it that makes the difference.

Time Is Happening. You Can Manage It, Or It Can Get Past You - Those Are Your Options:
There are 24 hours in a day, and you really need to be sleeping for 8 of them, or eventually some bad shit can go down. But it is hard to keep it all straight with 5 or 6 courses and your shows and your friends' shows. Schools provide daybooks with school holidays and such already printed in them, but many students don't bother using them. A few of my non-theatre friends kept a daybook. And of those friends, some even wrote down like homework assignments and stuff on them, as well as vacation plans and phone numbers in the contacts section in the back. But most of my theatre friends had serious daybooks, with every day scheduled down to the minute. We just had to. Every day had a slightly different schedule, and if you didn't manage your time properly, and keep track of it, you could end up confusing Tuesday's schedule (French I, Acting II, lunch with ΑΨΩ little brother, Directing I, backstage from 2-5, rehearsal for Julie's one-act, rehearsal for your Directing project, dinner snack from vending machine, rehearsal for Ed's show) with Wednesdsay's schedule (Tennis, Theatre Mgt, lunch with boyfriend, American Lit II, backstage from 2-5, rehearsal for Julie's one-act, a real dinner for once, rehearsal for Ed's show). Notice the time for homework in there? Yeah, homework happens 9-12 pm, or it doesn't happen. And this isn't even counting that job you might have waiting tables or working retail. You stay on top of your time, or it is just gone and you have no idea where it went. I learned to get organized in college theatre, and I've never again been comfortable without a calendar and a to-do list nearby.

Fun Is Great But Getting Work Done Is Satisfying: It was a Friday night and I was House Manager for a show, closing up the theatre and thinking about the paper due for an English class on Monday. I am not a good last-minute writer (my first attempts are always sloppy and weird and need at least 2 thorough revisions) and it was hard to see all my friends heading to Legends to see a band. I really wanted to go, but I really wanted to turn in a decent paper, and I was starting to learn that if I went out I'd sleep late the next day and lose half the day, and I needed the whole day to draft my essay. Charley and Mike teased me mercilessly about ditching my friends to go home and study on a Friday night, all the way down to picking me up by my arms and legs and carrying me a dozen yards towards Legends. Laughing, I finally got them to put me down, and tempted though I was, I said goodbye and went home to work on my essay. I got an A on it, btw. Not sure if I'd let Charley and Mike persuade me to go out instead of going home, that this would be one of my favorite memories from college.

I had not been a very disciplined student before college theatre. I learned that discipline in rehearsal. Some of our most fun moments from rehearsal are when things go off the rails, when we're laughing so hard we can't breathe, when we start exploring and we ride the tangent train to wherever it's going. But those moments, fun as they are and as great as they are for company bonding (very important, which is why we let the moments happen), they don't build the show. So at some point we have to stop giggling and get ourselves together and actually focus our attention on the task at hand. Exploring and goofing off can even help you (see above re: trying out crazy ideas), so I entertain the silly for as long as I can, but eventually, I have learned, the time comes to cut off the phone, turn off the Facebook, and just work.

Rejection Will Not Actually Kill You, So Show Up and Try: You walk up, nod to the accompanist, and start belting out the song you've been practicing for weeks. After 30 seconds in, you hear "Thank You!" from one of three people sitting in the middle row. You step down and the next person steps up to sing. You get a call back. You are cast in the chorus. The next week are auditions for the mainstage production. You audition, you don't get a call back. The next day, an audition notice is posted for the Directing I projects... The hardest thing in the world sometimes is getting up the nerve to keep trying. But trying your best and still not succeeding isn't actually the end of the world. Sometimes it brings results, even small ones, and those are worth everything. Sometimes it brings only the result of knowing that trying and failing doesn't actually make you stop breathing, even though you feel like it might. So you go to the auditions for the Directing I projects. And you give it everything you've got. I got my first college role in a 10 minute play for a Directing I project called "Exeunt O'Brien and Krasnov." It wasn't grand but it was a lot of fun. And I was cast in other things, down the road, and I was not cast in other things down the road, even ones that I knocked myself out for. You win some and you lose some, and learning how to walk off the stage with dignity with those three people in the middle row looking down at their notes and their unintentionally curt "Thank You" mingling in the air with the last line of your song, just as the accompanist gears up for the next one, is important. It will be a metaphor for a lot of things that are coming later in life, moments when you're reeling from the force of Your Desire slamming into the Hard Wall of that thing you wanted going to someone else.

Like other former theatre kids, I handle rejection like a champ. We don't like it, and we get our feelings hurt just as quickly as anyone else does. But we bounce back, because we know it isn't personal. We really probably weren't right for that part, but you have to be in the director's position to know that. And we've been in that director's position and auditioned our friends and cast someone else. It's hard, but you learn to get over it. As a result, we are less afraid of risk. I have applied for every job I ever thought I might like, even if it may have been "out of my league." They are probably going to turn me down. But damnit, if they're going to, I'm going to make them do it. I am not going to save them the trouble. I've gotten turned down for so many things that I could wallpaper my house with the rejection letters, for jobs, fellowships, journal submissions... But I've gotten published, and I've gotten a job I adore in a town I love, and I've gotten fellowships that I'm proud of, all because I figured the tiny chance of success was worth the risk of the pain of rejection. It so is. It SO is.

Lateness = Selfishness: Some people really do think that a few minutes is no big deal. You learn differently in college theatre, when every single person you're working on a show with might be in a position to determine whether you get cast in the next show you audition for. When there are lots of student-directed shows, and when those shows are where you demonstrate what you can do that might get you cast in a mainstage production, every show counts and every person you work with on a show counts. And their time counts. And they caught an earlier bus or scrambled from class or cut a meeting short so they could be there when rehearsal started at 5, and where are you? Ambling in a 5:10 like 10 minutes isn't a big deal. When everyone is working on 4 shows on top of a full course load, everyone's time is precious. Yours and theirs. They might be your friends, and they'll be your friends for life and you can all party together when the shows are over, but develop a reputation for not taking their shows seriously, and watch how fast your college theatre career starts to stall out.

I'm not going to suggest that I'm never late for anything. But I leave early and rush and do whatever I can to get places on time, and if I am late, I am authentically sorry. And I say so. People can tell when you respect their time, and they'll usually return the favor.

Suck It Up, Because Your Job Is More Important Than Your Feelings: I could work with Attila the Hun if I had to. I learned more in college theatre about getting over my personal feelings and getting my work done than I could have done anywhere else. At the beginning of the children's theatre tour, the boy playing my romantic interest was my boyfriend. A month into the children's theatre tour, he was my ex-boyfriend. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we and our fellow company members toured schools with our show, riding across western NC packed tight into a van with our set, and we gave every performance everything we had. In a show like that, there are already lots of little grumps and bickerings that we all had to take a deep breath to set aside. And then there was the Big Breakup between the boy and me. I was heartbroken. It was awkward. But not only did we have a duty to our audience to give the best show possible, we had a duty to our castmates to keep the awkwardness to a minimum, and we did the best we could. It helped that he had a passionately-held moral code about one's responsibility to the show, and so he tried to make it easy for me. So I tried to make it easy for him. And the show was amazing and a tremendous experience for everyone in it. He and I, had we let our personal grievances and heartaches get in the way, could have ruined the show and the whole tour for everyone. We didn't. This was maybe the greatest lesson in professionalism I ever learned.

Since that time, I have sat on committees with people I loathe, I have worked every day with people I neither like as people nor respect as colleagues, I have exchanged token pleasantries in the hallway with people I would like to punch in the face. I have done it with a smile, or at least without a frown. I am less interested in sparing them than I am in keeping a polite, decent work environment for everyone else and in getting my job done the best I possibly can. For one thing, I figure you never know what might motivate them to be the way they are, and I like to abide by the principle that everyone you see is fighting a battle you know nothing about. For another, I figure it's nicer for everyone else to work in a place that doesn't have a toxic atmosphere of anger. I've worked in those atmospheres, created by others who couldn't keep their feelings to themselves. It's awful. It's hard to get your work done when your colleagues are sniping at each other, or even giving each other the cold shoulder. Also, sometimes you and the person you can't stand work things out and it turns out well in the end. The boy? We learned to be friends, because we never gave ourselves a chance to become enemies. We could trust each other not to turn nasty, and we were able to work together again. My most heartfelt thanks, to that boy and to that whole company (if you read this you'll know who you are), for your patience and for that lesson.

You Can Do Your Own Best Work When You Are Generous: The best actors I worked with in college theatre were not the ones who gave all their energy for their own best performance. The best actors I worked with in college were the ones who paid attention to the other actors in the scene, who tried to give the other people on stage a chance to do their own best work. I watched as Chrissy and Marc, struggling through how to best perform ridiculously bratty mother and child, tried to deliver lines in ways that gave the other person something to respond to. I figured out my own impossible moment when Anna turned to me while we worked, yet again, a scene that we couldn't make sense of, and asked me, "What do you need from me here?" We compromised on the moment that something needed to happen, and suddenly the whole thing clicked into place, beautifully. It really is in giving that we receive. Of the many great paradoxes of life, this one might be the most important day-to-day lesson. Want to do your best work? Give some time to helping others do their best work.

A scholar friend and I have a theory that the greatest scholars are marked not just by their brilliance but by their generosity. Listing the scholars whose work we most admire, we realized that these are the same scholars who most nurture the work of others. We theorized that their approach makes its way into their own actual scholarship, that their work is directed to others and is engaging and inclusive. This approach has taught  me a way out of my own writer's block/scholar paralysis when I am stuck on where to go next - instead of "what do I need to do next?" I think "what would a reader need me to do next?" Assuming that one's work exists to help others go forward with their own work makes all the difference in the world.

                                                                                     *****

There are far more lessons that I could list, but I'm more interested in leaving room here for the lessons others' learned. Do feel free to comment with a lesson or a story of what you learned from college theatre, or any life lesson from college.

And have a wonderful rest-of-the-summer. I'll be posting from time to time as I explore the ups and downs of a sabbatical leave devoted to cranking out a large project in a small amount of time. I'll also be inviting guest-bloggers to offer voices from other perspectives in academia (Let me know if you're interested!).



______________________________________

* Go Apps!!  I minored in English, and then switched to a life in English in grad school. Still focus on dramatic lit, though.

Adjuncts, Tenure Track, and Administrators in a Sad, Academic Version of Decks on the Titanic

Jack is a talented artist, but he is from steerage...

...and he will freeze to death in the icy water.

If academia were an early 20th century ocean liner, adjuncts would be the immigrants in steerage, full-time instructors and tenure-track faculty would be middle class folk (too uninteresting to make it into movie plots), and administrators would be strolling the upper decks with John Jacob Astor and the unsinkable Molly Brown. It took the Titanic going down with over 3,000 souls behind locked gates trapping them in the lower decks before society cared about that particular system. The news stories about academic adjuncts drowning in impossible lives are only just beginning to surface.

There are adjuncts who find their way to tenure track. It does happen. There are also a lot more working actors and musicians making a living than you might imagine, but that doesn't make entertainment an industry I'd point to as an example of job security. The adjuncts who make it to tenure track are the ones who, when they apply for a listed tenure track job, will have all the qualifications (current research and conference presentation, etc.), PLUS the teaching experience from being an adjunct. And they're able to move anywhere in the country for the job. This typically needs to happen within the first several years after finishing the PhD, while the person still has some energy to stay on top of research and writing. Nearly every instance I know of in which an adjunct is stuck being an adjunct is someone who, in those first years after the PhD, was bound in some way to a particular geographic area and couldn't move to wherever the jobs were. They get mired down in the teaching and stop publishing. Then they stop going to conferences. And then the only jobs they can qualify for are ad hoc courses as adjuncts. 1 at this school, 2 at a school on the other side of town, 1 at the community college nearby, 1 at a school an hour away. The joke among adjuncts is that you know you're an adjunct when you're eating your dinner in your car in a college parking lot in between classes.

This is not an industry that, as a whole, goes out of its way to reward loyalty. If you're teaching as an adjunct at a research institution and all you're doing is teaching then you have no chance - NO CHANCE - of ever getting a tenure track job at that school. It is not going to happen. No one at an R1 is ever going to just convert you to tenure track because you're awesome. Even if every single one of them knows you are awesome. Even if every one of your students tells the administration that you're awesome. And when the school does finally list a tenure track job in your field (if that ever happens), they will do a national search for it. The expectations for a tenure track job applicant haven't lost anything since you first finished your degree. In fact, they require even more now. More research, more service, more teaching experience. Which of those does the overworked adjunct have? Exactly. Teaching: the one they always care the least about at an R1. Not going to happen for you there. You are going to have to go somewhere else to find the tenure track job.

If you want to avoid the adjunct machine, your best bet is a smaller school. Yes, small schools have adjuncts, but they are seldom used like slave labor the way they can be at other places. At my college, we mostly hire adjuncts to pick up those rare, spare sections of Gen Ed that had to be opened up over summer to accommodate a class enrollment that was greater than expected when the schedule was first set. It's unusual for a smaller school to pull the nasty trick that larger schools will: 8 new sections of Composition have to get covered, so they hire 8 adjuncts to teach 1 section each at $3k per section (for a total cost to the school of $24k), instead of hiring 2 of those people to teach for that semester as full-time instructors (for a cost to the school of $24k each, plus the cost of benefits).

Some of you may say that the school has to save money however they can, because tuition is so expensive and so forth. I will remind you that the rising costs of higher education do not come from the cost of instruction, but the cost of administrators, as has been clearly demonstrated (1), despite the best efforts of some to depict faculty as greedy money-grubbers impoverishing students for their own monetary gain. The schools that cut costs by exploiting adjunct labor are the same ones that routinely pay their presidents over $600k per year, their vice presidents nearly that, and often pay their coaches more than $1m per year. Anyone in academia who cites as a good business model hiring adjuncts as slave labor while administrators are paid ever-skyrocketing salaries needs to drop by the Business department for an intro course.

If you're living in a mansion and driving a luxury car but your income isn't enough to cover your lifestyle, you don't save money by giving up your daily Starbucks or switching to a cheaper gasoline, you downsize the big stuff. Any financial advisor will tell you that. You can't improve a school by impoverishing the people who do the teaching. Yet that is exactly the tactic taken by administrators at more and more schools. In some states, the problem is endemic, and entire school systems have adjusted their budgeting over the years so that they are now reliant on adjunct labor just to keep the current budget model going, and the adjuncts are so destabilized that they are not in a position to advocate for their own best working conditions. Protests of this model fall on deaf ears, and are becoming increasingly drastic as a result. (2)

If, btw, anyone reading this is ginning up an argument that schools need those huge salaries so they can "attract the best talent" in administrators, I would say get out of my face before I slap yours. If you think you can run a school with the best talent in administrators but NOT the best talent in teachers, I would ask you to tell me the name of the most inspiring administrator who changed your life in college. No? It was teachers who made an impact on your life? Think about how many times a day at your job you use what you learned from your college administrators. You probably never met them. If you did find your college president inspiring, chances are you were at a smaller college where you could actually meet him or her and have a conversation, where the president actually interacts regularly with the students. At smaller schools like that, the pay disparity between the president and the faculty is nothing like what it is at a school like Duquesne, where an adjunct who died last year in humiliating poverty made $10k that year, while the president made over $700k. The average tenured associate professor there makes $82.3k, but they range from $56.2k to $131.2k (according to chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-data-2012/131431#id=212106,) And the Duquesne president turns out to be on the low end of the presidential sweet life. A new Chronicle of Higher Education table pulls together the top presidential salaries at public colleges and universities (paid by taxes, mind you) and the salaries are staggering. Ohio State University paid its president over 6 million dollars in 2013.(3)

The pay disparity is absurd between administrators and adjuncts. It's bad, too, between the upper and middle decks. Although not quite as shocking as what is happening in academic steerage, the stagnant salaries among tenure-track and non-tenure track full time faculty is not even keeping up with inflation. Don't be fooled by the averages. Many estimates of academic pay are based on medical school faculty and law school faculty, rather than, say, liberal arts school faculty. There are other considerations as well. Men make more than women. Like, blatantly. And some departments pay way more than others. Look at the Chronicle of Higher Ed's Table of Faculty salaries (chronicle.com/article/2013-aaup-survey-table/138291) and you'll see averages for a school, but look more closely for details and it starts to get interesting. The average for my rank at my school shows way more than I'll ever make, because the top salary at my rank is a man in Business or the sciences, and I'm a woman in the humanities. (4)  That average salary you see listed  is the number in the middle of his salary and mine. I will not discuss here or anywhere what my salary is, but I'll tell you that, according to some estimates I've seen, I make roughly the same as subway operator or a telecom technician. I would add that the entry level requirements for my job begin with a degree that takes 7 years of graduate school and includes job experience and publications. Getting tenure and promotion takes even more. And I have it way, way better than adjuncts. Money is tight and my student loan payments suck, but I have a house and a car and a decent health savings account.

Adjuncts also often have student loans from both undergrad and graduate school. If they default on those loans, their alma maters will freeze their transcripts. (5) Since all academic jobs require official transcripts at some point in the application process, this means that adjuncts who have defaulted on their loans are unable to find the work that would give them the money to pay the loans. Yet another trap awaiting the adjunct trying to hold it together out there. The water is rising and the stairs to the upper decks end in locked iron grates.

Adjuncts work their asses off. They are stretched so thin it's hard to believe they can have anything left to actually care about their students, but they do. They care. And they inspire their students. Personally, I'd like it if they could all just walk off the job and see which institutions sink. The schools left standing would be the schools with a genuinely healthy business model, schools that have smart, long-term, sustainable programs. Systems built on the misery of the many might be able to cover up their inequities for a while, but look at history and tell me what happens to top-heavy systems. The system we have cannot continue. The people in academic steerage are drowning, and the public is starting to take notice.

coda: If you are not an academic and you're horrified by what is happening but don't know what you can do about it, don't despair. You can help by asking questions. Know a college administrator? Ask him or her what adjuncts make at that institution. Taking your kid to look at college campuses? Ask the tour guide, the admissions counselor, and anyone else you meet about the use of adjuncts at that school - in particular, ask what percentage of general education courses are taught by tenure-track faculty. And hold your state elected officials accountable for the way faculty are treated at state-funded schools. Know any adjuncts? Hug them, feed them, and tell them that they deserve better than they're getting.



(1) Bloomberg News, "Bureaucrats Paid $250,000 Feed Outcry Over College Costs," Nov 24, 2012: www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-14/bureaucrats-paid-250-000-feed-outcry-over-college-costs.html

Inside Higher Ed, "It's Not Faculty Salaries," Feb 5, 2014: www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/05/college-work-forces-grew-not-fast-enrollment#sthash.vzaCjDSj.dpbs

The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Administrator Hiring Drove 28% Boom In Higher Ed Work Force - Report Says," Feb 5, 2014: chronicle.com/article/Administrator-Hiring-Drove-28-/144519/

The Street, "Higher College Tuition? Look At Administrative Bloat," Feb 25, 2014: www.thestreet.com/story/12442038/1/higher-college-tuition-look-at-administrative-bloat.html

US News and World Report, "The Surprising Causes of Those College Tuition Hikes," Jan 15, 2009: www.usnews.com/education/articles/2009/01/15/the-surprising-causes-of-those-college-tuition-hikes

Wall Street Journal, "Deans List: Hiring Spree Fattens College Bureaucracy - And Tuition," Dec. 28 2012: online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323316804578161490716042814

Washington Monthly, "Administrators Ate My Tuition," Sept/Oct 2011: www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/administrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all

(2) Inside HigherEd, "Adjunct Continues Hunger Strike After Hospital Visit," 15 May, 2014:
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/05/15/adjunct-continues-hunger-strike-after-hospital-visit#sthash.3AC57hfp.dpbs

(3) Executive Compensation at Public Colleges, 2013 fiscal year: http://chronicle.com/article/Executive-Compensation-at/146519/#id=table

(4) In fact, I make less than the average salary the Chronicle has listed for the rank below mine, which means that despite the massive effort of tenure and promotion I'm still making less faculty with less experience, fewer publications, and less service to the school. The system sucks.

(5) This, by the way, is a COMPLETE outrage. The rationale is that the schools own the academic records and can refuse to share them if they aren't paid. But the loans already paid the school. The School Has Been Paid. It's the loan company that isn't getting the payment. The school is just helping the loan company punish the graduate who can't pay. It is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong and the people responsible for this should remember that God is watching.

Backwards and Forwards

or
Your College Education Is a Flotation Device
or
Mi Ritrovai

Commencement. The ceremony that pulls you backwards (all those medieval robes, the old marches played as everyone processes and recesses, the story-telling in conversation and by speakers about life in the last four years) and the ceremony that launches you forwards (all the advice about how to handle what comes next, the questions about what comes next, the weird feeling that whatever comes next is like a suit that you haven't grown into yet).

Graduation is a great day, but it is a confusing day for many because it is a ceremony that pulls us in two directions. I think it's supposed to.

I remember my own graduation very clearly. Afterwards is a blur of goodbyes and packing and heading to the beach with friends, but I remember everything leading up to it with the clarity of a pirate captive walking the plank. Don't misunderstand, I was thrilled to be graduating, I just wasn't done being in college. I wasn't ready to leave.

That's me in the middle, happy... and terrified. 

My unreadiness for life after college was the direct cause of everything that came crashing down in the months after graduation. I went to my graduation elated to have accomplished a degree, but with the feeling that we were partying at the edge of a precipice and I was going to fall off any second. And fall off I did. I had a summer job but nothing after. My grad school plans fell through and jobs were nowhere to be found (1). I waited tables while I figured out what to do, in what would turn out to be a time in my life I remember with passionate gratitude for the space it gave me to learn how to grow up, to manage money, to try multiple paths until I found the right one for me. It was the early- to mid-90's. If I could distill those years into a single image it would be of me eating my shift meal and drinking a Red Stripe in the afternoon light coming through the bar windows, filling out my deposit slip for my tips, with Pearl Jam coming over the speakers. Here is another: in jeans, boots, and a flannel shirt over a v-neck undershirt, at the Caribbean Cafe working my way through an imported beer list (2), learning to play darts and listening to STP "Plush."(3) Not the typical image associated with completion of a college degree. I was most parents' nightmare: a college graduate waiting tables and living in a rat-hole apartment. I think I gave my parents several ulcers in those years. I nearly gave myself one. It wasn't stress-free. I developed TMJ. It is hard living close to the bone. It was the best life lesson I could have ever gotten. I often felt, in those years, that I had somehow wasted my college degree, or even that it was a waste. I was floating.

But I was floating deliberately, and I was using my education in ways that I couldn't perceive at the time because once you know things and develop skills they feel natural to you and you can forget that you had to learn them. There is a difference between just floating because you don't care about having an anchor, and giving yourself permission to float because it gives you a decent view and you're still choosing your horizon. A book by clinical psychologist Meg Jay, The Defining Decade, seeks to understand the function of the 20's in an era in which that decade is now held up to young people as years in which they are nearly expected to float around. I think everyone in the whole entire world should read this book, even if your defining decade was decades ago. Jay doesn't have a problem with people figuring out what to do with their lives in their early twenties; she's concerned when they're still in their late twenties and they haven't made any meaningful moves towards a life that can make sense in their late thirties. The floating is supposed to lead somewhere. And what you learned in college is helping you. I promise it is. When you're doing work you never thought you'd do, wandering in ways that seem to have nothing to do with your college degree, you will be very tempted to think that you could be floating in the same way without that degree. But what you learned in those years is with you, is in you, giving you the resources to float high enough to make good decisions about how to spend your life and whom to spend it with.

I didn't feel sure about my direction at age 21, so I gave myself time to figure it out. I went backwards, to Boone, the place where I had gotten that college degree that didn't seem to be getting me anywhere. The place where I last remembered being happy. While I waited tables there, I tried other side jobs, I even took a real estate class, I studied graduate school options, and I took a good, hard look around to see what I wanted. It wasn't until I was talking with a coworker about a poem he was reading for his English class that I realized what I wanted to do. I realized that I could make a living explaining poetry to people (4). So I started making moves towards being an English professor and a few months later I was sitting in Literary Criticism and Bibliography and wondering what I'd write my master's thesis on. I was back in school, going forwards. If I hadn't given myself permission to wander, I couldn't have wandered into this profession that I love so much.

To go through life from moment to moment with  perfect direction and planning is probably the tidiest, most efficient way. Those who do will not waste anything or get lost, ever. And that is fine for them. It probably doesn't have any fear in it, or messiness. But it is not for me, in the same way that a tour in which a guide carefully shepherds the tourists from site to site is not for me. I couldn't do it if I tried. I'd see some interesting view I wanted to get closer to and I'd wander off and get lost and miss the bus and have to find my way back to the hotel by myself.  Sometimes we have to backtrack to understand where we are. Sometimes we have to launch forward into things we don't understand yet with the faith that we can handle them. Sometimes we have to get lost to find our path.

A college degree, even one that isn't in the field you end up in (5), prepares you for a life of uncertainty. And life is uncertain. Tour buses break down, and you may find yourself walking back to your hotel anyway. You might find yourself floating at any time, suddenly and even horrifically detached from the tethers that you thought you could count on like you count on the sun coming up in the morning. You can deal with it, because you have resources. Dante opens The Divine Comedy with a stanza that translates to:  "In the middle of the journey of my life, I found myself to be in a dark wood, for the straight path was lost." The original Italian, mi ritrovai, is an interesting choice because Dante deliberately uses words that mean to discover oneself and also find oneself at the opening of a long story about having to go literally through hell before being able to find one's way back home.

Dante is lost and scared, but it's going to be okay because Virgil is going to show up in a minute to help guide him.
(Symbolic??? I think so. Your education will show up to guide you, too).
image by Gustav Dore, nicked from nybooks.com

I could make sense of the backwardness and forwardness in my own life because I had Dante in my heart, because my college education put it there. I also had Shakespeare and Tennyson and history and philosophy and, yes, some math, and biology and lots and lots of theatre (6). I even had some recreational dance, a class that took care of a phys ed requirement, and it's a good thing, too, because it turns out you never know when you may need to foxtrot.

I had the tools to make floating meaningful and useful. I could rise up and see the many paths, the opportunities, the horizons available to me, and  make sense of them for myself. I had the ability to grab the thing I wanted and make a life of it.

So don't be afraid of going backwards, because it might be your way home. Don't be afraid to float, because you can float meaningfully and come down when you're ready.






(1) It was 1993. My coworkers at the first restaurant where I worked included people with graduate degrees from Ivy League schools. It was a brutal time.
(2) That imported beer list took me two years, and in the process I learned to be a beer snob. See? Everything in life teaches you something. I also still have the mug I earned.
(3) "Plush" still puts me immediately into a zen mode.
(4) The poem was Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" and that moment was so earth-shaking for me that I could still, 18 years later, reconstruct it in its entirety in perfect detail, down to what time of day it was and where we were standing and what we were wearing.
(5) i.e. Theatre, in my case.
(6) Forthcoming, on this blog, a study of how my theatre training made me a stronger and better person.

The Not-Lost-After-All Art of Gratitude

subtitle: Cultural Materialism/Actor-Network Theory for Real Life


Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Words said so often they might seem to be rendered meaningless. Words often left unsaid. Who among us hasn't brushed over these words without thinking about what it takes to stop for a moment and express gratitude? "Oh, you're welcome." "It was nothing." "Don't mention it."  Who among us has not wished for an expression of gratitude that never arrived? "All that work and I all wanted was a little recognition."

I am fortunate to work in an industry I adore. I do adore academia. I love that there are places where people can gather to think and talk and figure out problems the rest of the world doesn't have time to stop and consider but which inform our very existence as human beings. I loved being in college, and I love being around people who are in college. I love being on a college campus for my day-to-day work. It is a place of a lot of stresses, but also a great deal of joy. A few years ago, I was walking by a spot in our lovely Dell that dips significantly, a spot which was filled nearly level with the rest of the Dell with leaves piled high by the grounds crew, when a student took a running leap (backpack and all, arms spread wide) into the pile of leaves with a wild, wonderful cry. I laughed and thought "I can't believe I get to do what I do for a living." I am grateful, every day, for the place I work and the people I work with.

A small note makes a big difference.

But some days I am just worn out with it. I have been feeling worn thin lately. Tired, yes. But not the kind of tired I've been at the end of a semester before. More like fabric where the fibers are thin and stretched, like jeans where they're worn out on the knees or the butt. I think if you held a scholarly article up behind me you could read through me. Some days my skin feels less substantial. I am tired.* Some days I wonder if anyone notices that I'm knocking myself out. Yesterday, on her way out the door, a student left me a handmade thank you note telling me how much my class meant to her and how much she appreciates all my work for my students. I didn't know how much I needed it until I got it. It changed my whole perspective. You're welcome, you absolute darling. My pleasure. Seriously. You are why I do this work. I am reminded how much the words mean. Thank you. If you tried to read that article through me today it would be a little harder to make out the words.

The best stuff in the world has to be gratitude for helping someone who got the thing. Sometimes these have gifts attached! I've gotten food and even gift cards for Starbucks or other restaurants, for writing recommendation letters or for helping with a tenure portfolio. I like the gifts, don't get me wrong. The biscotti is great and the gift card is greatly appreciated, but the greatest thing of all is the note. It takes time to write a note. It takes thought. I keep the notes forever. It's so easy to forget to be grateful when exciting things are happening. It's easy to forget that we didn't do it all by ourselves.

Months later, I still have one of these things. 

But I am wrong. The best stuff in the world has to be gratitude for helping someone who DIDN'T get the thing, because we all know it takes a little more character to feel grateful when we're disappointed. It frustrates me when students ask for reference letters but then don't tell me how it turned out. Did you get in? What are your plans now? Can I help in any way? I didn't get some fellowships I applied for this year. (Damnit, damnit, damnit - I tried so hard for them!) I wanted to just shrink into a little hole and not talk about my disappointment to anyone. But remembering how it feels when I'm the one who helped, I sent thank you emails to those lovely souls who wrote recommendations for me, because writing a recommendation letter might seem small until you have to write lots of them, and these people took time and effort to read my application materials and craft the best letter they could. They deserved to know that I am grateful, even if it was hard for me to tell them that I'd failed.

Gratitude matters. Experiencing gratitude makes us better people. Read Paradise Lost and tell me that humility isn't the difference between good and evil. Expressing gratitude makes other people feel better. Years ago, not long after my book had come out, I was chatting with a writer-in-residence who mocked me for having an acknowledgements page. He said "You're the one who wrote it, why would you thank anyone? I never thank anyone." This guy was one huge jackass, too. He allowed himself to be unaware of the forces in his life that made his life possible.** None of us acts alone, really. Proponents of something called Actor-Network Theory argue that nothing in nature, including humans in our own works of innovation, ever acts alone - that all things are contingent on the forces around them to make what they are doing possible. The actor is dependent upon the network in order to act. In other words, Copernicus didn't discover the truth of the Ptolemaic, heliocentric cosmos all on his very own; because we're all influenced by the lives we lead and all that is around us, there were forces at work on his consciousness that even he himself could not, perhaps, have recognized. It's at work at every level. Those butternut squash seeds that sprouted today in my little egg carton planters? Not all by themselves. Indescribable forces were at work to make that happen, networks of soil and nutrients and moisture, including me sticking the seeds in the dirt. You're welcome, butternut squash sprouts.

Shakespeare in Love - an entire movie plot based on cultural materialism. 

In the study of cultural products like literature and art, this is called Cultural Materialism, or just Materialism now. It's the understanding that Shakespeare didn't just up and write Hamlet one day, his imagination was impacted by forces all around him including cultural tensions and drama among people in his community and the sights and smells and sounds of life around him.

I am a Cultural Materialist in my own literary research because I truly believe that what we do comes from what is around us. I am myself, and I have my own personality traits and gifts and talents that I was no doubt born with. But my gifts were nurtured by people around me. My interests were mocked by some, and so I have some issues of self-consciousness that I wish I could shed more successfully. I am me, but the me that I am is inflected by the people and the events and the forces in the life I am fortunate to lead.

A little note from a stranger can make that check seem worth it.

It doesn't take much to show appreciation for that. What people really want is words. Recognition. Acknowledgement. Yesterday, the Annual Fund at LC set up a table for students and faculty to write thank you notes to donors to the college. Because when people write a check, however large or small, they are happy to do it as long as they feel that it is appreciated. I was pleased to see how many notes were in the collection basket.

And today is Teacher Appreciation Day. So, in honor of that, I post this blog entry. And in it, I want to say thank you to the phenomenal teachers in my own life. Carol Moore, the first teacher to tell me I was good at something (7th grade, and it was English). That is one of the moments on which my life pivoted. All my theatre professors at Appalachian State, you amazing crew of Sages. I am who I am because of you. Constance Relihan, my mentor at Auburn and my friend today, whose "And then what?" questions drove me into territory I hadn't known I was capable of reaching. The teachers I work with every day at LC, who work themselves to pieces for students they love.

Also, thank you to LC for working to help me be the teacher and scholar I want to be. It's not very trendy right now to be grateful to one's institution. We're supposed to be cynical and snide about how unappreciated we are and to cite statistics about pay differentials and point out that life for academics used to be so much better. And I'm working on an entry about pay differentials, for another time. Today I want to say thank you for professional development money that will help me with my research travel when I didn't get those fellowships. I want to say thank you for investing in your faculty when other schools are cutting entire departments and dropping contributions to retirement accounts. I'll come back from my fall sabbatical with a book draft and with skin so substantial that you won't be able to read a damn thing through me.








*  Since I arrived at LC six years ago, I have taught over 15 new preps (most in the first few years). I have done all the research I can, work I love but seldom have time for. A conference paper is a monumental effort on my teaching load, with advising and other service added in. I love the teaching, but it's hard to not resent how it can eat away at everything else that I am supposed to be doing (and yes, I am supposed to be doing these other things, too - I was not hired to be a teaching martyr, I was hired to be an academic, which means contributing to my scholarly field).


** For example, he had no idea that he should be grateful that I didn't throw my drink in his face when he complimented me on my ass. I do not expect to appear in an acknowledgements page for that, but it would be nice: "My grateful thanks to that Shakespeare prof I was a jerk to for not throwing her drink in my face."