The Job Search: Some Pre-AWP Navel-Gazing

I was asked yesterday, via Facebook message, if I had set up any job interviews during the upcoming AWP conference in Chicago.  I wrote back, “No, I mean I’m only just at the very beginning of the PhD program at OU.  Isn’t it a little early for job interviews?”  No, said the reply, and referenced this article in the The Chronicle of Higher Education.

I’m more than a little daunted by the idea that I should already be looking for a job when I’ve only just started the four to five year journey toward earning my degree.  (And I don’t actually think the article is suggesting that I should be interviewing for one yet, only that I should be “networking”–an ambiguous phrase that smacks of falsity and opportunism–and taking care to tend my future desirability as a tenure track faculty member.)  Here is a scary number from the article: only four tenure track positions in creative writing were added to MLA’s job list last year.  And here is another scary number: only twenty  new positions were added to that list last year.  But maybe the scariest number of all?  I will be fifty when I complete the program.  Fifty.  Is it even possible to compete for tenure track jobs at that age?  I don’t know. But I do know that means I don’t have the time to, as one person in the article did, wait twelve years for the right job to come along.

So, really, this blog post is an open question: How should I be using my time at AWP to limit the risk that I’ll be stuck permanently adjuncting?  What should I be certain that I don’t do?  (Besides the obvious. I have a friend–in a different field–who killed off several promising job leads by getting really drunk and expounding loudly on his theory that the hard work was behind him because tenure track faculty get published by listing themselves as first author on work that’s really all been done by their graduate assistants. One of the good things about being old is that I’ve already learned certain lessons.  Too often, the hard way.)  For those of you who have already successfully found tenure track positions, what if any place did these conferences have in your landing such a job?  For those of you who, like me, aren’t yet looking, what are your strategies? (Even the word “strategy” here seems a little icky to me… a little lawyer-hanging-out-at-an-accident-scene-looking-to-hand-out-my-card… but I understand that is a squeamishness I probably need to overcome.)

Last year, I treated AWP primarily as an opportunity to meet editors I’d known only by email and other writers whose work I admired, and was much more focused on the writing community than on the academic community.  But this year, when some of the doom and gloom about the academic employment landscape has finally made an impression on me, I’m wondering if that should change?

Your thoughts, friends and colleagues, would be gratefully appreciated.

The Night Before the PhD Program

My niece Sidney started Kindergarten this week.  Her brother Emory started Preschool.  There was, for each, a book about the night before.  We read them when I last visited, and we all agreed that there should be a book for “The Night Before the PhD Program.”  But there isn’t.

What would a book about the night before entering a PhD Program say?  The Night Before Preschool talks about taking a favorite stuffed animal for naptime, so perhaps The Night Before the PhD Program should talk about being separated from your lover and learning to sleep alone, about renting yet another crummy grad student apartment, finding the cheap restaurants and a market that sells good tofu in a new town.

The Night Before Kindergarten talks about the anxiety of entering big-kid school, where there is no more nap time and the activities are more academic.  The Night Before the PhD Program should talk about the anxieties of moving to a smaller pond with bigger fish, taking out student loans to get a degree that is becoming less and less likely to lead to a tenure track position, and what it means to commit five years of your life to something?

It should also be a lot like The Night Before Junior High, though such a book doesn’t exist.  Worrying about whether or not you have the right clothes, read the right books and literary journals,  if you will be (as I was when I first started the MFA program at WVU) marginalized as a dilettante housewife who writes as a hobby.  What if nobody likes you?

And then there are the worries that are peculiar to getting a PhD in Creative Writing.  Will you be the only person who finds Kristeva completely incomprehensible?  Will everybody else glibly quote Derrida in the French, talk about their summers at Breadloaf, throw fabulous parties to celebrate the publication of their third, fourth, or fifth book while your book still keeps coming back from publishers and agents who think it’s too quiet and that the brilliant homeless man who fascinated you isn’t really very interesting to anybody else?  What if nobody likes you?

What if, in fact, everybody thinks you’re sort of a hack and isn’t exactly certain how someone so untalented, so unhip, and so clealry middle-of-the-pack made it into the program at all?

What then?

Want to Kill Your Blog?

Promise to write a post about the difference that winning a Pushcart Prize has made to your writing life.  Everything you write will sound pretentious and awful, and after a few weeks, it will just be easier to decide you’re not writing that particular blog any longer.

The insightful and kind Brian Kornell from Ninth Letter got me over that block by asking the same question in an interview.  You can find it here:

http://ninthletter.blogspot.com/2011/06/5-or-so-questions-with-sarah-einstein.html

Thank you, Brian and Ninth Letter!

It’s been a banner week or so.  The annual Redstone Science Fiction contest is underway.  You can read my introductory essay here:

http://redstonesciencefiction.com/2011/06/einstein-essay-june2011/

…and then my defense of the contest here:

http://www.butifandthat.com/why-i-sci-fi/.

I’m excited that the summer isn’t, as my summers tend to do, passing by without my getting anything done.

Notes from My Thesis Year: Part 1

I’m now almost at the midpoint of my final year in WVU’s MFA program.  Everyone, it seems, is busy weighing in on the value of the degree I’m about to earn.  Are MFA programs killing writing as we know it, turning out “Raymond Carver clones?” (And why is everyone so sure that it’s Ramen Carver clones?  Around here, I think you’re a lot more likely to run into an Alice Monro knock-off, though even those are more rare than you might expect.)  There is also great gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands over the future earning potential, or publishing potential, of MFA students.  Will we have to spawn even more MFA programs to feed our greedy selves on the fat of academia?  (And where is that fat?  Also around here, it sure looks like even the tenured faculty are living pretty lean.)  Will we ever publish books that will later be made into movies so that we can live fabulous lives full of Hollywood parties and New York meetings?  Really, other people, you’re much too angst-ridden about all of this.  We’ll find jobs.  Some of us in academia, some of us at advertising agencies, some of us as technical writers, and some of us in food service.  Same as it ever was.  These are the things writers do, with or without a degree.

There seems to be, in particular, a lot of concern about how we will repay the imagined debt we’ve aquired funding our education.  Uhm… except that most of us haven’t actually aquired all that much debt.  Again, “around here,” most of us are fully funded.  We teach freshman and sophmore composition in return for a pretty generous stipend and a tuition waver.  There are programs that don’t fund their MFAs.  Don’t go to one unless you have a sizeable trust fund.  Because yes, if you need to borrow enough money to both live in New York (even Brooklyn) and pay tuition, you’re probably making a bad financial decision.  And maybe also a bad academic one, as well.  Because I have learned at least as much from teaching basic undergraduate writing classes as I have from workshop and theory courses.

Which leads me to this list, which is the real meat of this first “Notes from my Thesis Year” post:

Ten Really Important Things I’ve Learned During My Three Years as an MFA Student:

1. Writing is a lot harder than it looks, particularly on the level of the sentence. A shocking number of my English 101 and 102 students are unable to consistantly produce meaningful sentences.    They have no idea how to use a comma, when to end a paragraph, and they constantly use the plural pronoun “they” as a gender-neutral, singular pronoun.  And, you know what?   I made those same mistakes when I started teaching these classes.  My Appalachian high school didn’t teach grammar.  It didn’t teach rhetoric.  It sort of taught literature, but with a wink and a nod to the reality that, while we were required to read Shakespeare, we couldn’t possibly understand him.  What little I have learned about formal structure, I have learned by grading the papers of people whose skills are even more abysmal than my own.  And this has been invaluable.  Don’t go to an MFA program that doens’t let you teach.  You’ll learn more from correcting student papers than you could ever learn from workshop.
2. Publishing changes nothing. I used to think that publishing something would suddenly make me “a writer.”  It didn’t.  Neither did publishing three things.  Or five.  Probably, you’ll spend your whole writing career feeling like a hack who got lucky.  If you’re smart, when people ask you “what you do,” you’ll say something like “I teach English” or “I’m between jobs.”  You won’t say “I’m a writer.”  Because that just opens you up to all sorts of weirdness.  Unless you’re Junot Diaz or Michael Chabon, in which case they shouldn’t be asking.
3. MFAs are no longer terminal degrees. If you want to be an academic, assume you’re going to need a Ph.D.
4. Prizes count. Publishing, even in seriously aspirational journals, didn’t make any difference in how I thought of myself, or in how other people thought of me. Winning a Pushcart Prize did.  The next post will be all about what it’s like, post-Pushcart.  For now, I’ll just say it’s weird.  Seriously , life-alteringly weird.
5. Work that sucks can, in fact, become work that doesn’t suck if you’re open to the workshop process. Workshop seems to be at the center of the “you’re ruining literature, you bad MFA students!” angstiness.  That’s crap.  Workshop is your best chance to interact with readers.  It’s the most direct feedback you’ll ever get.  Do you really want to hear that your prose is stilted and awkard from the New York Times–where your high school crush, mother, and that English professor you slept with as an undergrad will also hear it–instead of from a group of fellow writers?  I thought not.  Think of your workshop as a defense against public mockery.
6. Don’t listen to writers who can’t write. Only pay attention to the workshop comments from writers you admire.   You can’t please everybody.
7. It’s both what you know AND who you know. Yes, it’s a closed circle.  Yes, writers nominate their friends for awards because that’s the work they know.  Yes, journal editors publish pieces by people they know because they believe in them.  It’s not a clique, but it is a community.  Cultivate contacts.  Attend conferences.  Submit papers.  It does make a difference.  Which leads us to…
8. Be a good literary citizen. Pimp your compadres on your blog.  Repost classmates’ publications on Facebook.  Write reviews, but don’t feel the need to be scathing.  If you hated a work, assume you didn’t get it and review something else.  Volunteer for writing programs at the local elementary school, read at local bookstores, bring proteins to the inevitable MFA potlucks.  We’re all in this together.
9. Sometimes, editors are idiots. Don’t let rejection deter you.  My piece that won a Puschart was rejected by three editors who felt the need to tell me they found my work “exploitive,” “liberal clap-trap,” and “exemplary of the self-indulgence that defines bad creative nonfiction.”  Don’t stop sending your work out until it’s been rejected by at least fifteen places. Then you might want to consider revision.
10. All you need is love. Don’t put your writing above your relationships.  This is, in the end, a lonely thing to do. You’re going to spend a ridiculous amount of time in a locked battle with your work, staring at the blinking cursor on your computer screen.  Don’t expect emotional gratification from your readers; find it in friends and lovers who you support through their own crazy projects.

Next week:  Life After the Puschart

On Blog Rot…

So, it’s been a long time since I posted anything… and even longer since I posted anything that wasn’t meant to win me a free CD. (Thanks, le R!) But I thought I’d go through the short list, at least, of what’s been happening. So here is my life in bullet points:

Got a divorce

Won a Pushcart Prize

Got a boyfriend

Got short-listed by Best American Essays

Managed to hold on to the boyfriend for more than three months, which I hear isn’t really supposed to happen with the first person you date after a divorce, so I’m counting it as an accomplishment–though it’s probably more his accomplishment than my own…

Learned to ride a bike

Did not manage to actually get out and ride the bike often enough to get good, or even comfortable at it (I guess I’m logging failures, too, in the interest of balance more than honesty)

Had two essays published in one month in aspirational journals, Fringe and Pank

Finally finished reading Gravity’s Rainbow…which I started reading in 1983

And there you have it, friends… the highlights. And now, back to blogging. Because I’ve missed it. And you.

On Form Rejections…

It’s true, I’ve let this blog stagnate for a good long while. And I’m not back out of some pent-up need to write, or because something of import has happened that I want to share with you. Nope. I’m back because The Rejectionist is giving away mix CDs to five people who write blog posts on the topic “What Form Rejection Means to Me” and, well, I’m a sucker for a mix CD. (Yes, shut up, I’m pandering. If you don’t like it, go start your own pander-free blog.)

My favorite rejection of all times was a form rejection, though of course it wasn’t just any old form rejection. No, it came from one of the most prestigious journals in Creative Nonfiction (big giant hint right there, since usually I say I write memoir) and was for a piece that I had been invited to submit, although with substantial changes–in fact, I had to shave three thousand words off of it first, which required two weeks of pretty painful editing.

The first correspondence I got from this journal was an email entitled “About Your Essay.” It had nothing whatsoever to do with my essay, of course, it was just a form offer to subscribe. I was a little put off by the tricky subject line, but like any hopeful writer, I expect journals to treat me badly and to get bitch-slapped by apologists if I complain about it. Heck, I have even heard poets defending The Paris Review’s recent decision to “unaccept” a bunch of poems. We know where we are on the food chain: at the bottom.

Still, I was surprised when I got a form rejection of only two lines on a poorly-cut 1/6 of a page of typing paper, tucked into an envelope with–of course–a large, glossy page urging me to subscribe. I don’t remember what the rejection said, but it wasn’t the wording that made it so spectacular. It was the blood.

The thing had obviously been cut from a sheet of similar rejection slips using one of those machete-on-a-block-of-wood paper cutters, and some hapless intern had cut herself on the blade. A streak of dried blood two inches long and 1/4 of an inch across ran right through the “does not meet our needs at this time” boiler-plate rejection.

And I thought, “You know, it sucks to be a writer sometimes, but it must suck to be an intern at a journal like this all the time.” So I put the three thousand words back into my essay and sent it out again. Eventually, Ninth Letter took the piece, it was awarded a Pushcart Prize, and it will be listed as a “Notable Essay” in the 2010 edition of Best American Essays.

Was it the magic vodou power of intern blood that blessed the piece? Maybe. I hear it’s some pretty powerful stuff.

S

Listen to Ethel Morgan Smith

My great friend, and an even greater writer, at a recent Valentine’s Day reading of the MFA faculty.

http://clc.sitespace.wvu.edu/resources/444/1266433766.mp3

Worth the listen!