(Locked Patreon post is here.)
After various backings and forthings, it’s final: I’ll be doing a phased retirement from KU. On the plus side, I now have health insurance for the next little while and I can help the current wave of grad students through. On the negative side, I had a lot of reasons to feel that KU was an unhealthy environment for me, and does this really change with a change in my status? I’m not sure, but I’ll be interested to find out, and if it’s still horrible, I can change course again. Weirdly, ever since me leaving became public in the department, more people have been nicer than ever before (while a few are giving me the cut direct, but those are the people who have done so for years now, so it’s hardly wounding). Why not earlier? I am going to guess they just didn’t know that I was feeling isolated and dismissed. Everyone in the department is struggling with something urgent and critical, either departmental, administrative, university, academia-wide, personal, interpersonal, physical, or something else. We are all struggling, and we all have different resources to address it. I feel very grateful that I can try something new.
…and new it is! It looks as though consulting work will manifest (details when it’s more certain), and I have barely started to look around myself. During spring break I will be reaching out for other possibilities. And I am excited to be getting new patrons over on my Patreon! I appreciate it, so much. I am rethinking what I will be offering over there, though I plan to write more essays about my writing process, and once I start 250s again (on 3/20, if not before), I’ll have strange little words and worlds to share.
This spring will be spent finishing a bunch of KU stuff: a lot of honors papers, MFA theses, and PhDs finishing up, several of which I am the director for. And I will be resetting myself back to more serious writing — and to seeing myself as a writer first and an employee second. To this end I am reading the Tove Jansson biography and Lynda Barry’s creativity books, Syllabus and What It Is. I have a new little list of what I want to achieve in the next while. No surprises here, but sometimes it helps to write it down:
- Fun/play
- Health/well-being
- Connections/compassion
- Right livelihood/writing/the making of art
- Paying the bills
One thing I am noticing is how easy it would be to replace KU time and effort (and perhaps stress) with novel, exciting, new things that are also time-consuming, hard work, and perhaps stressful — all fine if they’re in quest of my new goals, less so if they distract me. Anyway, more next time! Sunday morning is also “skype with friends” time.
I’m sorry to hear that you weren’t cherished and nurtured the way I would’ve hoped for you at KU. I miss our chance meetings and hugs in Lawrence and hope we can meet up again sometime
I’m not leaving Lawrence yet! So I’ll be around. 🙂