Wisdom from the comics about writing, 3

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Wisdom from the comics about writing, 2

Wisdom from the comics about writing, 1

 

 

You know me, Al

Over at Dean Dad’s, a reader finishing a dissertation in Islamic Studies asks for advice on landing the first adjunct job.  As usual, DD’s readers had a lot of excellent things to say, including the first thing that came to my mind, which was that the writer was starting way too early for a Fall 2009 position.  What you want is to be the CV that lands on the department chair’s desk fifteen minutes before or after she discovers that one of her most reliable adjuncts is suddenly leaving the state. 

But one thing I don’t think anyone touched on is the usefulness of knowing someone in the institution where you want to adjunct.  In this sense, the hiring process for adjuncts is less like hiring to the tenure track and much more like hiring in the world outside academia.  Jim, who works at Starbucks, says to his manager, “My friend Joan is applying for a job.  I think you’d like her: she’s smart, learns fast and gets along with everyone.”  If Jim himself is a good employee, Jim’s manager will at least take a look at Joan, right? 

Here’s how I got each one of the adjunct, part-time, or limited-term jobs I have held:

1. I had a lectureship at a university where I’d previously been a student and worked in an area studies program (and was therefore already a known quantity).
2. I applied to the two-year proprietary college known here as 2YC after seeing an ad on, believe it or not, Craigslist.  After I sent in my application, I said to my in-laws, “Doesn’t your friend Jennie work there?”  They immediately got on the phone to Jennie, who works in 2YC’s admissions office.  “Admissions office?”  you say.  “What do they have to do with faculty hiring?”  Well, at two-year colleges there are generally fewer bulwarks between departments and offices.  This is probably even more true at a proprietary college, where everyone is united, on some level, behind the goal of making the joint turn a profit.  Jennie trotted upstairs to the Dean of Education’s office, rummaged through the pile of CV’s on her desk, remembered that I use a different last name than Stubb (could’ve blown the whole thing right there), located my CV and handed it to the Dean.  The Dean, who needed someone to hit the ground running in two weeks, called me, and I came in for an interview that turned into a briefing meeting on the two classes of comp they hired me to teach.  I don’t think she even called anyone else.  After I’d worked there for a while, I sent her a guy I knew from undergrad (comp, public speaking, critical thinking) and a woman who dated Stubb’s friend (history of art).  She was glad to get them both.
3. The dean of the small liberal-arts college I’ve called BAC, where I taught occasional undergraduate general-education writing classes, interviewed and subsequently hired me on the suggestion of a writer friend who was teaching in their graduate program.  I like BAC a lot, but the commute from where I live is brutal.
4. My friend EJB, who’s commented here a couple of times, suggested I write to the chair of the English department at NCC, whom she knew casually (EJB teaches at a different CC in the same system).  It was from EJB that I learned about the panicked search for adjuncts in August.  (Why don’t departments look in their files for the letters from people who sent their CV’s in March?  Well, even if the departments keep the materials–and can find them–those people may have moved or found other work.  It’s safer to start with the people who wrote last week.)  FLS, who also comments here, has a friend who works in the physical plant office at NCC and teaches an occasional art course there.  This friend is a big NCC booster and in our occasional chats at FLS’s parties had suggested I look for work there, so in my cover letter I mentioned, without thinking too hard about it, that I’d heard wonderful things about NCC from a neighbor who was studying nursing there and from FLS’s friend.  The department chair knew FLS from a committee they’d both sat on, so she called her up.  Fortunately, even without warning (which I should have given her), FLS’s friend remembered me and was able to say something like “Yeah, she’s a good sort.”  That, plus EJB’s name (plus, I’m sure, my by now extensive teaching resume), was enough to get me hired over the telephone at the community college closest to my house.  Really, if I hadn’t begun at Starfleet Academy, I’d still be teaching there, and I’d be within a semester of qualifying for part-timer health insurance, too.  I still feel wistful whenever I drive past, and I’ve tried to leave the door open for future work there–you never know.
5. A writer I know who teaches in the English department at New RU (which really needs a new name) suggested I send my CV to the graduate program in creative writing and put a good word in for me.  The program was making various changes and they happened to have a course open up that fit well with my teaching experience in CW.  I don’t think this will ever change to a full-time position, for reasons having to do with the structure of the program, but I’m fine with that.  It is a fabulous part-time gig–good (adult!) students, good pay, and I get to teach the stuff closest to my heart and speak about it as a writer–and they seem interested in continuing to hire me. 
6. Strictly speaking, Starfleet Academy is not an adjunct gig–it’s a regular, full-time job, albeit an at-will situation with no issue of tenure, just like in most of the world.  But I do think it’s worth mentioning that I entered into conversations about the job after I visited to talk to the students about writing.  Then the possibility of the mid-year replacement came up and everything got accelerated.  But they’d had a chance to see me in action first.  And why did I go there in the first place?  Because one of my distant relatives has a kid there.

And note that none of these stories has any grim arm-twisting going on.  What, the staff member from the physical plant is going to force the English department chair to hire me?  But the fact is that said staff member, FLS’s friend, is a smart person and a good college citizen (she’s also a former lawyer, but that’s beside the point).  If she’d said “Yuck, no,” I don’t think I would have gotten a second look.  Once I did get the second look, the gig was mine.  And I have always gotten rehired, so I don’t think any of those people feel that hiring me in the first place was a mistake.

This it’s-who-you-know thing has never worked for me on the conventional TT job market.  Another friend of my in-laws is a major Dean at another big RU in these parts, and this helped me not at all when I applied for an actual TT job at the RU–I wasn’t what they were looking for, and I didn’t even get an interview.  But on the hunt for adjunct work, I don’t think it has ever failed.  So, in sum, here’s what I think Dean Dad’s questioner should do with the next twelve months: tell everyone you know that you would love to have a course to teach at Local Community College.  Someone you know knows someone who works there.  Find out who.

The other side of the mountain

So Starfleet Academy has a college-application intensive in mid-August for rising seniors, and they asked some of the English teachers to run essay-writing workshops.  This was easy to agree to do back in May, but as the actual events approached, I think we were all kicking ourselves for giving up three days of vacation (okay, it was really only 2-3 hours a day, and we did get paid).  I certainly was.

But as it happened, I rather enjoyed the experience.  I didn’t know any of the students, since they are all rising seniors, and it was nice to see what some of the older high-schoolers are like.  They were a little appalled, too, about having agreed to show up at 9 AM three days in a row, but they were pretty good sports.  We did some exercises that borrowed heavily from things I’ve done in creative-writing classes and workshops, which are usually at least somewhat fun to do.  The groups were small, so I was able to meet individually with everyone, and each student left with at least one good draft, sometimes two.

Meeting individually, I was struck once again by how much more agreeable it is to work with people on their writing when you are not the one grading it in the end–how much more congenial the atmosphere is.  For some of these students, this is the closest thing to professional writing they’ll ever do–writing for an audience they’ll never see but hoping to craft something that will touch those readers and remain with them.  (At least to the point at which one of them says, “Remember the girl who wrote the essay about restoring the ’69 Camaro with her dad?  Let’s take her!”)

I also liked having the afternoons on my own.  I did make my work area usable again, which makes me very happy.  And I finally bought a couch!  A startlingly reasonable one at Big Lots.  It’s supposed to be delivered today.  After Stubb gets home, we’re also going to adopt another couch, from the Snork Maiden’s friend Xavier’s family–this is one that the previous owners of their house left behind.  It’s in pretty good condition, and it has just been sitting patiently in their garage for the last couple of years. 

So I need to run out and do a couple of errands and then return to await the couch.  This will also be when I declutter the living-room area and start packing for Stubbville again (I leave in the morning, so I really hope there are no snafus with the couch this afternoon).  See you from Stubb State!

Great books

Starfleet Academy has a pretty serious English curriculum, I tell ya.  Students must read many cubic feet of Important Works of Western Literature on the path to graduation.  (I had to read Njal’s Saga in high school, but that still left The Odyssey, Moby-Dick, Paradise Lost and Beowulf, among many others, for college.) And I believe that from fourth grade on, there’s a Shakespeare play every year, which means that students who go from fourth to twelfth grade will have read almost a quarter of the undisputed Shakespeare canon. 

I was thinking recently that there might be interest in the high school in a club for reading all the remaining plays over four years–meeting to read the plays aloud, watching videos, going to live performances, maybe even having the occasional guest speaker.  If students began in, say, seventh grade, we’d have to cover four or five plays a year in order to finish by graduation.  I suppose we could designate summer break, winter break, and spring break as times to read one play, leaving one or two more for the rest of the school year.  Over a six-year cycle, we’d read all 37, then begin again–students could start at any point in the cycle. 

Am I crazy to think there would be a handful of kids who would really get a kick out of doing this?

The color purple

During the break, one of the Starfleet Academy students I worked with today asked me what my favorite book is.  I never know how to answer that question–I don’t think I have a favorite.  I have books I reread all the time, and books that were just the right thing for me to read when I read them, and books that I press on my friends, but a favorite book, period?  So I told him that, and added, “Were you looking for a recommendation for something good to read?”  No, he said, he was just curious.  Later he asked me what my favorite color is.  “Blue,” I said without hesitation–and then I said, “That one was easy for me.  But you wouldn’t ask a painter what her favorite color was, would you?  I imagine painters wouldn’t have one.”  Maybe favorites are for areas in which you don’t have much depth of feeling or knowledge–the way my favorite opera is La Bohème ?

Out of the silent planet

OK, I’ve settled down.  Last night I emptied a basket of miscellaneous stuff that had been sitting in the living room for a while.  I boldly discarded a bunch of paper related to NCC (adjunct handbook, etc.) on the theory that if I do go back at some point, they’ll give me updated versions of all those things.  I recycled a stack of papers from one of last year’s 2YC classes, reshelved a bunch of books, and now I have another laundry basket.  Whee.  Today, after Starfleet Academy, I’m going to start in on the workspace.

Stubb and the Snork Maiden are doing fine.  Yesterday was a fairly rushed day–he had to work and she had to tag along–but today should be calmer and more fun.  I was impatient with myself for being so unsettled about being apart from them, given that I have plenty to do and usually love spending time alone, but I suppose that’s wasted impatience (is there any other kind?).

A swiftly tilting planet

I’m back, and it is really, really strange to be at home without Stubb or the Snork Maiden.  I could pretty much list every night I’ve slept under a different roof from the Snork Maiden, and there haven’t been that many of them.  It’s not as weird for Stubb to be away–heck, after this long absence, it’ll be weird to have him back–but I miss them both, a lot.

I do have Big Plans while I’m here on my own, mostly involving a major reorganization of my work area during those hours I am not occupied at Starfleet Academy.  And I had been looking forward to the stretches of uninterrupted time.  Really.  Not sure why I’m feeling quite so thrown by this.

Bisy backson

Taking the Snork Maiden to meet up with Stubb in Las Vegas, where hotel rooms are pretty reasonable in August.  He’ll have Sunday off, so we’ll have a day to frolic (translation: mostly just hang around the hotel) before the Snork Maiden returns with him to Work City for a few days and I come back here to do some Starfleet Academy-related work.  The Snork Maiden and I have been joined at the hip for much of the summer (and have rarely been apart overnight anyway), so this is going to feel weird, but I’m glad the two of them will have some time together and I’m also looking forward to a few days on my own.