Envy

I guess there is no way that these next two applications, which are both due Oct. 31, are going out today–not with two classes to teach.  Okay.  Saturday, perhaps.  Or Monday, since I’ll have to Express-Mail them anyway.  There are many things I miss about my last full-time job; a small but significant one is having carte blanche to use their UPS account for Second-Day and the occasional Next-Day Air shipment. 

So there’s still time to answer this question about whether I can leave 2YC off the c.v., if you like.  That’s not the part I’m puzzling over; it’s more that both of these applications require an element that I haven’t had to develop before.  One is a particularly specific way of demonstrating past teaching success, and one is a “one-page description of your work.”  Really?  I mean, for the dissertation, I would understand; it’s called an abstract, right?  But an abstract of one’s creative work?  Not, I take it, a synopsis of one book, but a page about one’s work as a whole.  Are they not planning to read the writing sample unless this page gets them interested in it?  I would have thought a paragraph in the cover letter would be enough to do that.  Are they looking for the ability to talk to nonspecialists about one’s work?  And/or did this line get carried over from the last job ad they wrote?  Fortunately, I have a couple of grant applications I can probably cannibalize for descriptions of my published work and my work in progress.

Which is not so much in progress at the moment, honestly.  And that made me extremely cranky for a while after I heard about the Whiting Writers’ Awards this week.  The Whiting is a terrific award with, from everything I can tell, an exemplary selection process.  They have a great track record of choosing excellent writers who aren’t totally obvious choices–occasionally even before they’ve published a first book, but more frequently after a first book has come out and the writer can really use the money (which is now up to $50,000, according to their website; it was $40,000 for the last few years) to work on the next one. 

And, as I said about the MacArthur, money is time–and time is what I don’t have very much of right now.  Or, rather, too much of my time is being put into teaching.  And now that all three institutions are going full bore, I am just not finding time in a typical week to work on book #2. 

So I envy the Whiting recipients.  And in a corner of my heart, I feel happy for them, too, because I know what a life-changing thing a good-sized award can be.  (No friends among this year’s recipients, but also no enemies–not that I have many enemies, but I do have a writer who is my bête noire, for reasons that might be interesting to discuss in another post, and if he got one, I’d take it personally.)

And I also feel ashamed of not having gotten more done with the grants I’ve had.  I’ve been lucky enough to get a couple of good ones, and there’s no question that they’ve made a difference, but now that the money’s spent (and a sizeable chunk of it, I ruefully reflect, spent on the Great Plumbing Disaster of ’05), of course I feel that I didn’t use the time wisely enough.  I’d probably feel that in any case–most people seem to–but at the moment the feeling is especially piercing.

Envy has often been a great motivator for me, though.  My first publication in a literary magazine, twelve years ago, was a direct result of envying a writer I’d known in college, who brought a first book out indecently early, and being spurred to start sending my work out seriously.  At other times, envy has helped me propel myself into the scrum of writers applying for grants and prizes.  I’ve never recognized envy as a motivator for actually writing–I don’t seem to need a lot of external motivations for that–but it’s helped me recognize what I wanted and helped me to believe I deserved it (“if a joker like that could get prize X, why not me?”).  So right now, perhaps I need to look at writers who are cashing their first $25,000 Whiting check and recognize that, damnit, I want what they have: more time.  Heck, maybe this will give me the extra shove I need to admit that I need to stop teaching at 2YC.  And if it puts a little extra zing into these two job applications, all the better.