Those who can't do
This semester I’m teaching an undergraduate intermediate fiction workshop and I’m trying to be more like a real teacher, writing things on the board and talking about “story threads” and planning assignments weeks in advance. In the hopes of being seen as more serious and scholarly I didn’t ask what anyone’s astrological sign was in the first class. Then I called a student by the wrong name and immediately said “Fuck, that’s like the worst thing I could have done,” and I could tell my credibility was reset at 0. Oh well. My goal is to get really comfortable teaching a handful of stories, so that I can repurpose this syllabus in the future. In general I am finally getting a sense of what works. Sometimes it feels great and other times I am overcome with the futility of these efforts. I don’t mean because writing short stories doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. I’m sure it matters just as much as any other kind of work that isn’t “solving climate change” or “finding a cure for childhood cancers.” I mean futility in the sense that it doesn’t get me any closer to having a career, as far as I can tell. It’s very unlikely that I will get a staff teaching job, because I haven’t spent the last 15 years making my C.V. that of a person who gets hired for a staff teaching job. Instead I spent the last 15 years doing all these weird dead end things, such as host an online cooking show and write hundreds of blog posts and thousands of fucking TWEETS and cofound a feminist ebook store/book club/publishing enterprise that even at one point had an app?? When all that time if I’d actually wanted to be a college writing professor, I should have been getting an MFA and submitting short stories to Zyzzyva. Apart from when I was an undergraduate myself, I have never written a short story.
(inaccurate bio, but sure, I’ll take it!)
If at any point, by the way, you’re reading this and thinking, Emily how dare you complain about your career, you have accomplished x y and z and also you have x y and z structural advantages I would like to call your attention to the name of this free newsletter, which is meant to be ironic.
So yes, adjuncting: I am not the first to observe that it’s a mindfuck, a simultaneous ego boost and ego blow. On the one hand, it can make you feel powerful, having 15 people trapped in a room, forced to allow you to control their conversation for two hours. On the other hand, you get paid $6,500 per semester, which works out to about $3.75 an hour including grading, schlepping and thinking about it, which would be an ok base salary in a service job if the students all tipped 20%. Plus you have to carry your breast pump and computer and folder and notebook around in a cat-furred Everlane backpack which you leave on a chair in someone else’s actual office so you don’t have to haul it around all day as you make your copies and eat your soggy salad et cetera.
Unfortunately I am coming to realize that I really enjoy teaching, or at least, that there are a lot of things about it I enjoy. I love hearing my students’ thoughts and reading their work, which is often funny and insightful and shockingly accomplished. I like being forced to read and reread stories and find new ways to talk about them. I like finding ways to make drafts better. I like the feeling of discovery I get alongside them when they discover something new to love or hate, or a new trick to try.
A few weeks ago before class I met up with a friend, a woman who is also married to a great (male) writer, who works as a doula. She told me some fascinating and harrowing stories of the doula trade, which she absolutely loves and which she took up after a prior career as a screenwriter. She told me about a moment, years earlier, when her kids were much younger and before she’d discovered her passion for doula-ing. She was sitting with her husband and two of his colleagues, their friends, also writers, and the writers were all talking about their favorite nooks at MacDowell (or someplace like that) and, my friend said, “I felt a door close in my heart.”
I knew exactly what she meant.
She talked about how her job, as a doula, is to create the conditions that are necessary for the birth to happen, to follow her instincts about what the person who’s in labor needs (in the story she told, the person needed trashbags, water and dates, which she wisely thought to grab on the way out the door, which all came in handy on the traffic-clogged ride to the hospital.)
For a while now I have been thinking about how much of the work I do is also in this realm of “creating the conditions” for other people’s creative work to flourish. I read drafts, I pep talk, I promote and celebrate and interlocute like it’s my paying, full-time job, but it never technically has been — not yet, anyway. I have been feeling so resentful about that (obviously) but maybe I should be feeling good about it instead? It is a skill, albeit a tough one to get paid for. I inch closer to figuring out what to do with this skill every day. On some days I inch further away.
It might be that my life’s work is to help other people figure out how to do their work and that my own work is a distraction from that. It might be that helping other people is a distraction from my life’s work. It might be that it’s ok to do different things at different moments in a life. But increasingly my impulse is to find a way to finally get paid for what I’ve been doing all this time anyway: becoming a doula of books and writing, as well as a mother of my own.