This Could Be the Day

Photo: Robyn Hitchcock; used under a CC license

I’m writing a book. Technically, two books.

Piece of cake.

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” George Orwell

I love this, because my writing and my chronic illnesses are closely linked, including both taking place largely in bed, and often between 3 and 7AM. What a friend calls my “Sylvia Plath writing boot camp” hours. Which is funny, but also not.

A few years ago, I discovered that chronic illness is many things: tedious (that’s the chronic part), unpredictable, and sometimes very funny.

An opening to a different part of myself and to a whole new view of the world.

An introduction to a warm and accepting community; a regretful but necessary goodbye to some old friends.

I just sat through one of the saddest meetings of my life, and I am reminded that the dream of accessible higher education in Canada, which should be an intergenerational compact, is giving way to (yet more) austerity measures.

This has me thinking about the ways that my career has always already been marked by post-secondary austerity, from the 1990s OSAP cuts that caused some of my students in Ontario to drop out to the uncannily similar grants’ cuts announced a few weeks ago.

Then there’s the over-reliance on precarious and underpaid contract faculty, which I experienced as an undergrad student, as an overworked grad student, and then through most of my decades of “full-time” teaching. This has had an impact on my health, and I rue it.

Mind you, my full-time was often more than the 2/2 or 2/3 teaching load of research faculty (who also provide research and service).

But teaching 3/3, say, still counted as part-time, while I continued my research and service, gratis, but also because they grew to be be part of the job’s expectations. My academic volunteer job, of sorts, which was required if I wanted to get and keep teaching appointments.

But as Robyn Hitchcock sings, “This could be the day I’ve waited for all my life.”

I’m committed to editing my mystery novel, completing my current dark academia project, and publishing a CNF book on crime fiction. I guess that’s three books, not two, which is even worse. But it’s where I am, at the moment.

Teaching, going forward, will be a thing I do sometimes, and usually with pleasure and for too little remuneration, but it will no longer be my calling.

I’m so sad and worried about colleagues who are at different career stages and who are also facing layoffs and unplanned early retirements. This is hard.

And because I started agonizing about this months ago, when the health effects of workplace reorgs kicked in to add extra fuel to my underlying health issues, I am also deeply, profoundly relieved.

I’ve survived two rounds of layoffs, but each one has cost me.

So hello, I must be going.

But also: I am enjoying skewering higher ed’s sometimes absurd manners and morals in my dark academia project.

A final quotation, because it’s a mantra I’m repeating to myself daily and sometimes hourly, including while I write fiction that is inspired by what Alice Munro calls the “starter dough” of real life.

Anne Lamott: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

Academia, my dear academia, you have behaved very poorly indeed, with no apparent regret.

But this could be the day that I move on.