Breathing into a Paper Bag
Well, gentle readers, I'm excited and nervous about the fact that LAM (Lovely Agent Mitchell) sent out the manuscript of THE DESIRE PROJECTS to publishers on Thursday, along with a glowing submission letter and lots of high hopes. I'm going to check with him next week about how many of the details I can divulge here, because it's a completely different and fascinating world, and I'd love to keep you updated as the process unfolds. But I'm not sure what's done and not done in that regard.
Let me just say for now, as vaguely and discreetly as possible, that the editors and publishing houses he sent it to are dreamy. Since Thursday, I've been burning copal, lighting candles, asking the ancestors, slaughtering chickens, you name it.
Congratulations to Pine Manor's Solstice MFA program, where I loved teaching, on being ranked #14 out of 50 low-residency creative writing programs by Poets & Writers. And it's not even five years old yet!
In the meantime, to keep following up on the issue of tenure and why the cost of higher education is rising at weird rates, here's a new article that ascribes the skyrocketing fees to athletic teams (629 institutions have football teams; only 14 of those teams make money), thickening layers of highly paid administrators, and the paychecks of full professors, who're the ones at the top of the faculty food chain. (For the non-academic: assistant professors, usually years 1-6, are untenured, though they have their terminal degrees, teach full-time, and are expected--required--to publish regularly; associate professors, which is what I am, have tenure but have not been promoted further--this usually lasts a minimum of another 7 years; full professors have tenure, the highest rank, and the biggest salaries.) Thanks, Emily, for the link.
But even most full professors don't enjoy the kind of sinecure that some people mistakenly imagine tenure to be. My long-time mentor, former chair, and general sweetheart Warren Rosenberg, author of the excellent book Legacy of Rage: Jewish Masculinity, Violence, and Culture and beloved role model to generations of Wabash College students, posted in response to my initial blog about this topic. His rundown of his typical duties, as a full professor, is genuinely illuminating. It's so valuable. It's exactly the kind of story I hope professors will tell about tenure. I don't want Warren's story to get lost in the shuffle, so you can click directly to it here. (And if you scroll up, Cindy left a great comment about the delusional tenure=Wall Street equation.)
With poverty rates so high, as new Census figures painfully reveal, and US educational achievement rates so low, we really need to rethink. Athletics and administrators are nice to have, sure. And as a working writer who longs for more time to write, I would never decline a position that gave me more free time, so I can understand the choices of those full professors who do have sweet gigs.
But we need a major audit of higher ed that actually puts education first (not the thinly veiled agendas of culture warriors).
My hunch is that, if all the accounting were transparent, it's not the heads of tenured professors we'd see roll.
Let me just say for now, as vaguely and discreetly as possible, that the editors and publishing houses he sent it to are dreamy. Since Thursday, I've been burning copal, lighting candles, asking the ancestors, slaughtering chickens, you name it.
Congratulations to Pine Manor's Solstice MFA program, where I loved teaching, on being ranked #14 out of 50 low-residency creative writing programs by Poets & Writers. And it's not even five years old yet!
In the meantime, to keep following up on the issue of tenure and why the cost of higher education is rising at weird rates, here's a new article that ascribes the skyrocketing fees to athletic teams (629 institutions have football teams; only 14 of those teams make money), thickening layers of highly paid administrators, and the paychecks of full professors, who're the ones at the top of the faculty food chain. (For the non-academic: assistant professors, usually years 1-6, are untenured, though they have their terminal degrees, teach full-time, and are expected--required--to publish regularly; associate professors, which is what I am, have tenure but have not been promoted further--this usually lasts a minimum of another 7 years; full professors have tenure, the highest rank, and the biggest salaries.) Thanks, Emily, for the link.
But even most full professors don't enjoy the kind of sinecure that some people mistakenly imagine tenure to be. My long-time mentor, former chair, and general sweetheart Warren Rosenberg, author of the excellent book Legacy of Rage: Jewish Masculinity, Violence, and Culture and beloved role model to generations of Wabash College students, posted in response to my initial blog about this topic. His rundown of his typical duties, as a full professor, is genuinely illuminating. It's so valuable. It's exactly the kind of story I hope professors will tell about tenure. I don't want Warren's story to get lost in the shuffle, so you can click directly to it here. (And if you scroll up, Cindy left a great comment about the delusional tenure=Wall Street equation.)
With poverty rates so high, as new Census figures painfully reveal, and US educational achievement rates so low, we really need to rethink. Athletics and administrators are nice to have, sure. And as a working writer who longs for more time to write, I would never decline a position that gave me more free time, so I can understand the choices of those full professors who do have sweet gigs.
But we need a major audit of higher ed that actually puts education first (not the thinly veiled agendas of culture warriors).
My hunch is that, if all the accounting were transparent, it's not the heads of tenured professors we'd see roll.
fayepoet said:
It'll happen--you're such a good writer & with such grasp of the human condition & the elements of story. Besides, you can breath into a paper bag only so long! Keep the faith.
Yeah,Solstice!I'm one proud alumni.I especially appreciated the cross genre faculty and your encouragement to dig deep into poetry & fiction writing even though I was enrolled as a nonfiction candidate.
September 24, 2010 4:01 AM