Academia is a Privileged Institution I am Grateful to Be in & What it Takes to Write a Book
I’m imagining I can write about this topic better than a john, not that he did not do a fine job encapsulating the struggles of being part-time faculty and trying to write a book. But I am, as Janelle Monáe so remarkably captured it in her short story collection The Memory Librarian and Other Stories, a Dirty Computer after all. Our fearless leader Alice in her psychic renderings understood perhaps all too well how they try to cure us of our radical leanings and anything out of the norm of society by wiping our memories and reprogramming us for new and very specific roles and purposes as suited to their society as a shining example of what happens to Dirty Computers.
While the john argues for a more privileged position, his current position as a self-employed writer is very anti-capitalist in leaning. Self-employment requires a network, a community of care—a support system. It requires collaboration and opportunity.
I have a few inside scoops on academia, though I have just surpassed my 5 years of service mark in Minnesota. Having done this amount of time, I can tell you that you are not valued the way you might be in other community service positions. It is not just that the work is not guaranteed from semester to semester, but also that your identity and experience go questioned by your own peers around you. Sometimes, it is a breeding ground for paranoia between administrators and faculty, between faculty and each other.
But I am not here to talk about that. I am here to write about writing 3 books while working full-time. It takes discipline. Even to write this blog right now before my full-time courier job, I must be up at 4:30am scribbling first in a notebook to get my thoughts down fresh. Then, I type it up and edit it in a Word doc and choose graphics. I may not have time to publish before work.
Similarly, while working on Bodies in Transition, and also my chapbook Tender One actually, I woke up at around 4:30am to write and revise. Some days I pushed myself to write more than one poem a day, though not all of them made it into the collection. I had to decide on what story I was telling for the narrative structure. I included older material. I hired an editor. It took around a year to complete and independently publish a full-length poetry collection. (Tender One, which was published by Finishing Line Press, was mostly written in 2015-2016 and edited in 2022, then contracted in 2023, and published in 2024.)
Typewriters are like fingerprints
Since then, I have roughly finished another poetry collection Azaleas & Other Edible Flowers and a fiction novel I’m tentatively calling Storyteller. While Storyteller contains some older materials (also from 2016-2017), it was largely written in the past 2 years. Azaleas has all new poetry. I wrote them while cafe lounging for the most part because, although I worked overload this past year, I conveniently had the schedule where I did not start until late afternoons. So, I wrote in the mornings, taught in the afternoons, and graded and did prep work in the evenings and on weekends. When summer came and I was no longer employed by the school, I started a full-time courier position but was still able to squeeze in 1-2 poems a week and roughly 1000-1500 words of fiction. Most of this writing was completed on the weekends. I excitedly met my goal of completing my fiction novel this summer!
Two tips for you:
Good writing takes mental stamina. Find that space in your week where you can carve out more than a couple hours of time for yourself because good writing takes more than an hour. If all you have is a 30-minute lunch break, write a 3-word poem and come back to it later.
Don’t worry about crossing out or deleting poems or scenes or starting all over because you are not quite getting them right or don’t like how they are turning out. That’s why I use a notebook and pen first. Not everything that crosses your mind is going to come out the way you want it to at first and sometimes you are not even going to be sure what the poem or scene is going to be at first. The imagination is a very wild place.