I don't care if you like this post or not

My husband is not a writer and most of the time I’m thankful for this. Many famous writer couples have made it work (I guess?), but as it is, I have enough angst for the both of us. His job (along with editing duties as needed) is to listen patiently while I pour out all my latest writer angst.

Well, technically, it’s not writer angst. It’s publishing angst. Two very different things. Over and over again, he urges me to draw a hard line between my writing and publishing. Writing is life-saving. Publishing is soul-destroying. I’ve written about this repeatedly here. It is a lesson that I am very slow to learn. It is a hard lesson to learn. But I’m getting there, bit by bit.

I’ve been thinking lately about a series of essays I want to write looking back at my life as a professor. If all goes according to plan (fingers crossed), I’ll be walking away from full-time teaching in four years at the tender age of 53. Thinking of this timeline is sustaining to me in the moments when my job as a college professor is increasingly unpleasant. That unpleasantness isn’t the teaching part. The students are lovely people and it’s a joy to spend so much of my life talking to young people.

But it is very hard to stay focused on the classroom when the building around me is crumbling. Sometimes literally. Sometimes figuratively. Literally, our buildings are in bad repair. The air conditioning goes out and pipes freeze and there’s flooding. Figuratively, higher education is in a period of contraction and chaos. It’s harder and harder to recruit students and harder and harder to convince those students that there’s any point to taking classes that don’t appear directly connected to a job. Like, you know, sociology.

It's a big mess and it’s both sad and infuriating to watch. My husband is in his last year of teaching (he’s a tiny bit older than me) and that’s also incentive to get out faster. It’d be nice to be retired-ish together and sooner rather than later.

What all of this means is that in some ways, I’m beginning my first-year all over again. For almost thirty years I’ve spent most of my life on college campuses and in four years, I’ll finally be graduating.

It’s a lot to process and I find myself wanting to write about it. Something like the diary of a forever first-year. In fact, I’ve already started writing about it. It’s very much about processing my own feelings about higher education and where it is right now and what it might mean to leave it all behind.

I have no idea if anyone would be interested in reading such a thing. I find I don’t really care. This feels like progress.

Every now and then I re-read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. It’s one of those books that always get me fired me up about writing. It reminds me what the hell it is I’m doing. What I’m not doing is building a platform, for fuck’s sake. There is nothing magic about building a platform. There is a lot of magic in turning myself into a conduit for some amazing stuff in the universe and trying to wrap words around it. “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it,” Mary Oliver said. There’s a lot of magic there.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott talks about audience and all the different sizes an audience can be. You can, of course, write solely for yourself. An audience of one. You don’t have to share your writing with anyone. You can print out the pages and then set them on fire in your backyard. The very thought fills me with a rebellious sort of delight.

You can write for your family. I’ve written poems for my parents and my husband. A poem I wrote about my father as the Grinch hangs in my parent’s house every Christmas. You can write letters to your friends and you can say whatever you want and they can be incredible works of artistic genius.

You can write for your community, whatever that looks like. I think of fan fiction, which is a love letter to a work of art and directed to the other people who also love that thing. The short stories I’ve been working on for the last year or so are for the town where I live. I write a lot to that specific community. Here’s a love letter to the place I live. I want people to see themselves in the stories and feel good about that.

These college essays are mostly for me. Writing them is my own way of easing away from a job that’s been central to my identity for most of my life. Who will I be when I “graduate”? What will it be like to leave that behind? What has it meant to who I am to do this job? How does my own story reflect what’s happening to higher education in general?

I would also hope that some of my colleagues might find some comfort or humor in the essays. As the college has faced its most recent crisis, it’s brought out a lot of voices who have been feeling the same things I’ve been feeling. Dispirited. Demoralized. Devalued. Pissed off about the fact that the chalkboards never get cleaned. It’s comforting to know I’m not the only one. I’d like these essays to be that for other folks at my institution or in higher education in general.

Our chalkboards are like this, but worse. Photo by Noita Digital on Unsplash

So maybe some people would be interested in reading these essays. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter. I want to write these essays. I want to create a record of these next four years. It feels necessary and important, so it’s what I’m going to do. To say that feels like an incredible victory. To work towards a place where I don’t really care if you like this post or not.

If you want to follow along as I work toward graduation, cool. You’re set. If you’d rather not get those posts, you can always go to your subscription management page and uncheck the box marked “Forever First-Year.”

I’ve been reading through my author copy of Playing Authors: An Anthology, the first book from Old Iron Press and, friends, it is awesome. An amazing essay by

Barbara Shoup

and another about who’s the “author” of the Eerie Canal and a creepy Poe-inspired story. It is jam-packed with deliciousness so order your copy now, here and sign up to attend the launch event at Tomorrow Bookstore on November 11 at 7:30, here.

The Louisville Book Festival is shaping up to be a very cool two days of books and book talk. It’s November 10th and 11th from 10-6 at the Kentucky International Exposition Center. I’ll be giving a talk on Saturday at 12:00. Come see me if you’re in the area.