Stories+Tells=???

A story is like the wind: it comes from a far off place, and you feel it.
—proverb of the Kalahari Bushmen (one I first heard from Terry Tempest Williams)

What makes a story? I spent a lot of time as an undergrad trying to answer that question. I read epic poems, novels, myths…I probably should have spent some quality time with Joseph Campbell, but he was so much in the air that I was satisfied with the commonplaces. I read Bakhtin. I tried hard to learn from the “mistakes” of others—mostly the authors we read (and sometimes picked to pieces) in my literature seminars. I worried about how to tell stories right, rather than how to tell stories well. I felt a constant tension between what I knew about reading critically and what I knew about writing.

That tension is especially obvious in my honors project, The Storyteller, for narrator and orchestra. Musically, the piece has all the flaws one could ask of a first orchestral work: it’s over-written, full of bits that muddy the overall sound and make it occasionally impossible to hear the narrator. After hearing the orchestra read-through, it was obvious that I needed to dramatically strip down the score to fit it more smoothly with the text. That text, though? It has some great moments. It also has moments that make me cringe—bits of faux-beatnik and occasional flings with exoticism. I started with the idea of re-parsing epic poems. Now, we’d call it a mashup, but this was the early Aughts and YouTube didn’t exist yet. (One of the earliest images, for example, was Beowulf’s Grendel emerging from the Trojan Horse.) The poem ended up being about storytelling itself, about the anxiety of influence and how hard it felt to tell stories that hadn’t already been told. In my notes and brainstorming, there’s a constant back and forth between the academicism of my references and my desire to write from the gut.

I’m dealing with some of the same questions here: how do I balance commentary and storytelling? I have to remind myself of John Cage’s words: “Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes.” In terms of storytelling, writing a blog can be like “writing” a TV reality show. So many of the things that happen every day aren’t that interesting to me, never mind to you. Some interesting things that happen still don’t fit here. This has become particularly true as a few of my posts—notably Of Dreams…—have been distributed around the internet by others. That’s cool. On the other hand, it’s forced me to consider my audience in ways that I hadn’t when planning this blog. How do I keep the analysis out of the creation?

And what makes a story for me, now? I think that the Kalahari proverb is probably the best answer I know. To keep you coming back—and, more importantly, to keep me coming back—I need to write things that we feel. This story, the story of Walking Ledges, isn’t out of its prologue yet. There is so much more to do and to write and to figure out. It is the story of leaving academia, but also the story of a 33 year-old taking a chance on a 16 year-old’s dreams. It’s the story of me letting myself dive back into the world of stories, to think again about how we write and read, how we tell. “Tell” is so much more vital than “write” or “say.” It’s a declaration, but also something that’s not entirely under one’s own control. A tell at the poker table is the unintentional betrayal of a secret. Good stories are the same way. They hint at secrets, tell us more than their plots and words do. I hope that the tells here will be worthwhile for all of us.

I could have picked a few different lines from The Storyteller to close with, but this is one from the middle of the piece that I particularly like:

“Tell the wind. Tell games. Tell journeys. Tell motion and tell the future. Never tell emptiness.”

You can find my honors project in the Macalester College library in St. Paul, Minnesota (http://macalester.worldcat.org/title/storyteller/oclc/52113087).
I’ve added the complete poetic text to the new “Works” page. 

Good Wil Wheaton

I struggled with many questions. Was I ready to admit defeat? Was I ready to admit that I’d given it my best shot, but I really was a washed up has-been? Was I willing to say out loud that I was . . . That Guy?
—Wil Wheaton. Just a Geek (Kindle Locations 3050-3052)

That passage comes near the end of Wheaton’s Just a Geek, as he ponders accepting the infomercial job that would, he believed, kill the acting career he’d been chasing since childhood. He needs the money. His family needs the money. That struggle—between dreams and realities—is the constant, beautiful thread through Wheaton’s book. A mixture of reflections and selections from the original wilwheaton.net, Just a Geek is a Bildungsroman without the “roman,” a story about a grownup working hard at growing. Wheaton’s got a remarkable ability to take his raw early blog posts and turn them into the foundation for a compelling narrative of what Neil Gaiman calls “creat[ing] his own second act.”

I have a lot of future blog posts penciled in about my favorite writers, about what they’ve meant to me and why I admire their writing and storytelling. Wil Wheaton is not exactly one of my favorite writers, but I don’t think I’d be doing this blog without Just a Geek. I stumbled across it in a Humble Bundle shortly after I received my last batch of rejection letters for academic jobs. It was the first book in the bundle I read, and I devoured it in one of those clock-defying binges word-lovers know well.

The book works for many reasons, but I think the vital one is Wheaton’s ability to get through the heaviest moments with a light touch that isn’t simply crying coming back around to laughter. There’s funny throughout the book, don’t get me wrong. But when Wheaton (I’m still too much an academic to call him ‘Wil’) talks about the bad times, he doesn’t let himself become self-indulgent. He’s unflinchingly self-critical and leavens stories of his past self-indulgence with gentle self-mockery. He lets us know how bad things were without just telling us how bad things were. All of this is a fancy way of saying that I liked the book as a book, even if it fell my way because Wheaton has carved himself out a space as a geek culture hero.

I’m posting about it, though, because it’s as close as anything is ever likely to get to the intersection of my two previous posts. I didn’t have anything like Stand by Me or Star Trek: The Next Generation in my background to “live up to” or “grow beyond,” but I did have 30 years of people telling me I was awesome and could be whatever I wanted to be. I was really good at school. I paid attention to my work and, whether in front of a keyboard or a classroom full of undergrads, I believed I belonged. I had a long way to go, but I knew my craft and consistently worked to improve it. I was supposed to be serious business.

Of course, all of my friends were also serious business. The bigger problem was that institutions of higher learning were even more serious about conducting a certain kind of business. They didn’t want me for that one. As with Wheaton’s string of unsuccessful auditions, good work was an imperfect defense against rejection. After my lightning read through Just a Geek, one of the anecdotes that stuck with me was Wheaton’s story of meeting Sean Astin at an audition. They’d been friends but fallen out of touch, and they happily caught up with each other in the waiting room. And they were competing for the same job. Neither of them got it. Welcome to every academic conference in the fall hiring season. No matter how happy you are to see your friends, you’re all on the hustle to meet the right people, try and be memorable (good memorable!) to anybody who might be on a hiring committee or a reviewer for a journal. There’s no more money in being an underemployed academic than an underemployed actor.

Wheaton took the infomercial job. He put his family ahead of the ambitions that had led him to quit TNG in the first place. That dream had stalled out, and he had others that were going somewhere. Slowly, through his writing, he was finding other ways to be the person he wanted to be. And as this was happening, he was also finally coming to terms with what TNG meant to him. He allowed himself to be comfortable with it, to take joy in the friends he’d made and the work he’d done. He let himself geek out about the things he wanted to geek out about. That’s worked pretty well for him—in the nine years since Just a Geek came out, he’s been featured everywhere from The Big Bang Theory to The Guild to more webcomics than I can count. He’s become that guy, but not the one he dreaded when he pondered that infomercial.

I knew him as that guy when I read Just a Geek, but it didn’t matter as much as it should have. It was easy to put Wheaton’s subsequent success aside and see the reality of his struggles. That is why the book means something to me, something important. I don’t feel like my struggles are so different as I let go of something I’ve wanted for years to keep my family fed and housed, to do the things I feel I should be doing. I didn’t need Wil Wheaton’s permission to do this, and there isn’t anything in Just a Geek that says “go out and make art.” It isn’t a self-consciously “inspirational” book, which is what makes it inspiring.

Trouble shared is trouble diminished. Reading about Wil’s struggles (and here I’ll break tone and go to the first name), knowing what he’s accomplished since—it made the darkness a little less dark. So thank you, Wil Wheaton, for writing a book that’s meaningful for me, for coming to peace with Star Trek, for sending Aeofel into a pit of acid in the name of role-playing. Thank you.

You can keep up to date on Wil Wheaton’s geek career at http://wilwheaton.net. If you’re interested in his more formal writing, you can find his digital works—including Just a Geek—at http://wilwheatonbooks.com/. Go check it out. 

People/ Gamers

“There are people who game, and gamers who people.”
          —a certain stupid college first year

As a college freshman, I was in an odd spot. I’d spent the last two years at a school on the other side of the Atlantic. Home was 1500 miles away from Macalester, but that was 3000 miles closer than I had been a few months earlier. I’d already been through the whole “leave home and reinvent yourself” thing. I had a beard. People mistook me for a senior and constantly asked me for directions I didn’t know how to give them. The way my courses shook out in my first semester made things even easier; most of the academic ground I had to cover was familiar.

Despite all this head start (or perhaps because of it), I fell into an odd spot socially. I engaged in the usual whirl of activities freshman try on at a selective liberal arts college: I was active in the International Organization, the Mac Weekly, band…I was still playing basketball and just becoming obsessed with ultimate frisbee. It didn’t feel like trying things on, though, because I’d already been through trying things on. I was pretty convinced that I just had a wide variety of interests and was such a damn hotshot that I could pursue all of them. That put me in the middle of a very messy social Venn diagram, one in which I had slight overlap with half a dozen different social circles.

The most awkward one for me, though, was with the college’s population of “gamers.” This was 1998. Console games didn’t really have anything to do with being a gamer yet. None of them connected to the still fairly-rough-cut internet. Being a gamer meant playing role-playing games, maybe computer games and the occasional board game. (Catan, anyone?) Mac’s gamers pretty much owned a particularly long set of tables in the dining hall. I’d eat there occasionally. I met my first serious girlfriend at that table.

Still, though, it didn’t really fit for me. The gamers were weird. It was enormously hypocritical of me to think that, given the ways that I’d cultivated my own weirdness. They were socially off-kilter and their humor went to odd places. I felt kind of like I should fit. I ran a Spelljammer game on band trips. I’d run the RPG group at my high school in Wales. I had brought a few of my gaming books to college with me to take up precious space in my dorm room. Tellingly, those books stayed in a dark corner. I pitched but never started a D&D game for the people on my floor—other dabblers in gaming.

That quote above—mine, obviously—became an excuse both to feel better about myself and to keep my distance from some great people. The gamers were bad at being people, I was saying, because they were too gamery. It was too central to their identity. Their awkwardness was going to stick to them because they just didn’t do enough other things. (Truth: I was too nervous and/or condescending to ask them about their other interests. A decade later, they’ve all proven to have many.) I, on the other hand, could game as much as I wanted because I was a person who occasionally gamed. I did so many other cool things that gaming oughtn’t hold me back.

We all know that even smart people are stupid, right? I’ve said a lot of idiotically pretentious things over the years, but that “gamers who people” thing might make my top ten. Certainly the “things said outside a graduate seminar” top ten.

So much has changed in the last fifteen years. Games have invaded everything. The geeks were right. Famous funny people have publicly—proudly—admitted being geeks. You walk into the toy section at Target, you see board games marked “as featured on Tabletop”—a show, on the internet, co-created by Wil Farking Wheaton. I am so late to the party on this.

There’s no doubt that my coming to peace with my gamer-ness has been assisted by all the social and technological change. It’s also been a consequence of my slow outgrowing of high school ideas of what’s cool. Those ideas are stupidly persistent. In grad school, though, I ran into other challenges. As a writer and reader, I’ve always maintained that the best of “genre fiction” can stand alongside the books I had to read as an English major. That insistence somehow didn’t extend to intellectual credibility. A gamer who treasures Adorno’s Minima Moralia? Seriously? How can you put THAC0 and Adorno in the same head? The upshot was that as much as I might ‘fess up to being a gamer (and even played a session with my fellow grad students), those gaming books still tended to stay on a shelf in the spare room.

Don't hate me for owning 4e!

We have many shelves, but this one is the most “me.” Except for LIFE.

About a year ago, they made it out onto the “real” shelving in rooms people actually use. In the new place, they’re in the same unit as my academic books and (“serious”) literature. They’re still on the bottom shelf, because they’re mostly pretty damn heavy and will threaten the quality Swedish particleboard if they’re put any higher. I don’t feel like I have anything to prove any more. That’s one of the flip sides of the last, heavy post: letting go is hard, but it lightens you up. Gamers are people, people are gamers. Whatever. I’m okay being both now. People are people, and even the most awkward of us deserve better than restrictive labels…even when cultural changes have made it comfortable for us to re/claim them.

Of Dreams, Carrots, and Towers

If it wasn’t for disappointment/I wouldn’t have any appointments
—They Might Be Giants, “Snowball in Hell”

Sometimes I miss being asked about my research. Not many people have asked since I defended my dissertation and earned the right to start signing my e-mails with “Dr.” The reason I don’t get asked very often is tied to another question: “did you apply for {insert tenure-track musicology job}?” Last year, the answer to that second question was almost always “yes,” with the exception of a few searches whose early deadlines I missed. This year, my answer will be “no.” When I was finishing my undergraduate work, I thought that professors had the best job ever: flexible schedules, the chance to work with smart young people, the vague but appealing “life of the mind.” I went to a small, selective liberal arts college and my idea of “adjunct faculty” began and ended with the applied instrumental teachers who held down performing jobs and usually had studios at several of the local colleges.

Ten years later, I know a hell of a lot more about adjunct faculty. I’ve been one of the now-ubiquitous adjuncts. Most of the academic workforce in higher education operates off the tenure track. Even so, the tenure-track job I dreamed about when I began graduate school is still dangled before graduate students and contingent faculty like the carrot before the donkey. With a little luck, the right shift in the winds, and a precisely-timed lunge, the donkey can snatch the carrot. The smartest, hardest-working donkeys have a slightly better chance at the carrot than the rest, but only slightly. You have to be a pretty smart, hard-working donkey to get through a doctoral program in the first place.

The chase for the carrot goes on. My friends and I compare notes on which programs write the most respectful rejection letters. We do our best to cheer each other’s successes. With conferences and publications, that’s easy. As a generation of scholars, I think we’re doing fascinating, worthwhile work. When it comes to jobs, though, it’s harder to be earnestly enthusiastic about friends’ success. The odds are good that you applied for the same position, the same fellowship, the same grant. When that happens, you have to be a better person than I am to avoid shading happiness at a friend’s success with hints of jealousy and disappointment. Living in academia is like living in a small town: everybody knows everybody, and even friends step on each other’s toes for want of space to move.

I was more desperate to get out of the actual small town I grew up in than to get out of this metaphorical small town of academia. Like a small town, academia can be comfortable, familiar. My dream lived there. I walked around Minneapolis feeling dissatisfied that my coursework was filled with Continental theorists. I would, I was sure, develop ideas that could elbow their way into the western body of thought alongside Deleuze and Bourdieu and Adorno. I’d use my work in comparative studies to beef up my credentials for musicology positions. I’d make time in my schedule for my kids, even if it meant staying up late and getting up early.

Eventually, nobody had to dangle a carrot in front of me, because I’d made my own carrot, held the stick in my own hands. Although it was much more miserable, it wasn’t that different from my teenage internet romance, where I’d been in love with the idea of being in love rather than with the person I was exchanging letters and books and cassettes with. As I trudged through my dissertation, I had to sell myself on the idea of being done with my dissertation. I finished it in part to spite my only intermittently-supportive institution, in part because I’d already sunk years into my PhD, and in part because I’d sold myself on that idea of being done. Being done would make everything better.

Being done did not make everything better.

I graduated in December. Because of some quirks of academic scheduling and a particularly odd adjunct position I’d taken, I wasn’t teaching in the spring. I took care of my daughter and sat on my hands and waited for something, anything, to come back from the applications I’d spent October and November sending all over the country. I was miserable. I had begun to understand some of the consequences of my mutually laissez-faire relationship with my advisor. My CV was far too thin to insulate me from the chilly job market. I told myself that I’d chase the one-year positions that begin to be announced in the spring. I told myself that I’d get an interview invitation any day now…

…I told myself that I was worthless, that I’d thrown away seven years of my life chasing a degree that was going to get me something between jack and squat. After a decade in graduate school, I was somehow even less employable than I would have been straight out of undergrad. I’d made my wife work full time through our kids’ preschool years, made her live 1200 miles from her family. I was convinced I was failing my family. Late one night it got so bad that I cried for an hour, great wracking sobs that I couldn’t stop. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d been alone. My wife helped me get through that night, and the days that came after.

In March, I went to a conference, hoping it might renew my enthusiasm (and because I had a paper to present). I heard more interesting papers than I’d heard at any previous conference. The society members were supportive. They understood my research and some were excited about the way it fit in with their own work. It was the best conference experience I’d ever had. A week later, I was more convinced than ever that leaving academia was the right next step for me. My peers at the conference were all gunning for the same jobs I was. None of us were optimistic about our immediate futures. The early career professionals committee meeting was filled with too-familiar laments, even though my fellow scholars were excited by and committed to their work.

I admire and respect my friends who are staying inside. They are doing fantastic things in the classroom and in their research. I wish they didn’t have to fight the system so hard to do them. It is inspiring to me that they can draw so much strength from the love of their work, even when they’re shoved on yet another committee or have their course load jerked around for the umpteenth time. I’ve realized I don’t love the work enough to put up with all the rest of it.

Giving up a dream is hard. It’s hard even when you know that giving it up is the right thing to do. It’s hard even when you know the dream isn’t really your dream anymore. Graduate school gets inside you like any other sixty or seventy-hour-a-week job does. It becomes a huge part of who you are. It had become a part of me that I didn’t like, but I couldn’t just cut it away. There are parts of academic life that I enjoy, parts that I’m good at. Ultimately, though, they’re not enough. The calculus of happiness is all wrong. (The financial calculus isn’t any better.) When I was busy sliding down the post-defense slope, none of the things that slowed me down came from the work I had done or thought I wanted to do. That dream of my favorite professor’s life was the thing pulling me down, even though it had shrunk from teaching at my ideal program to teaching anywhere with a reasonable salary and benefits. To get out of my hole, I had to let that dream go.

It would be a better story if this revelation had come in a cinematic beam of light, or while playing with my kids, or while noodling around on the piano. It has been slower than that, an ongoing process without any narrative tidiness. I want to make my life with my words, which is good. Writing is satisfying, and it feels right to me in ways that academic work never quite has. Starting over was, I think, the right choice. But it is still starting over. I apply for entry-level positions while keeping my eyes open for those elusive jobs outside academia where my degrees might help. The doubts don’t go away.

I’ve got dreams to chase again, though, and I like my new doubts better than my old certainties.

Heimweh (On Writing and Place)

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.
          —Robert Frost

When I was 16, I had lived in two houses, one of them for fifteen years. By the time I was 25, I had lived in three dorms, three basements, four apartments, and—briefly—on a porch. Then I managed to live in one apartment in North Minneapolis for seven years. In that apartment, I started and finished a PhD, spent sleepless nights with two infants and watched them grow. I cooked a lot of meals in the kitchen with the floral-print wallpaper. Yesterday, I put the fourth set of license plates on my trusty, rusty Dodge: Texas (following, from most recent to oldest: Minnesota, Ohio and Idaho). For the first time in a long while, I’m a newcomer.

Place grounds writing. It might allow you, as Frost suggests, to be “a little ungrammatical.” Even a few generations into mass media’s flattening of regional accents, changing places changes the sounds of the language around you. (Never mind moving far enough to land in a different language.) If, like me, you write fiction, you have to pay attention to dialogue. The story of a torrid Miami Beach affair should not feature the linguistic cadences and quirks of North Dakota.

Writing and place intersect in more profound ways than dialect, though. The intersection is also about landscapes—the real and the imaginary. When I moved from Idaho to Wales, my stories filled up with fragile cliffs and dramatic tides. In Minnesota, I was suddenly writing about trees a lot more. Summit Avenue in St. Paul is lined with wonderfully big, old trees, and they seeped into my work. Characters climbed trees, or stared at them, or marked out the seasons by their leaves. I wrote about snow, of course, and snow still occupies a prominent place in my mind, the way it can be a blanket, an obstacle, a coat of paint…

Imaginary landscapes are just as important—in high school, I went to a writing workshop in the same part of Idaho that Hemingway had once called home. That mattered just as much as the dry hills and hidden streams. Summit Avenue? It had big, old, expensive houses to go along with the big, old, trees, especially going up towards the Cathedral. It was the place where F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up, and what led to much of his bitterness about the rich. The Idaho of my youth was all sage brush and cowboys. I knew a few when I was a kid, old hands who’d been on horses since the Jazz Age was happening on the other side of the country. Sometimes it felt like there were more animals around than people. In Wales, it was not hard to populate the fog and the rolling hills with bits of Arthurian legend or the Mabinogion, to read omens into the flight of a crow. Places wear their stories.

So that’s one way writing ties to place: it supplies you with a mental geography. There’s another thing, though, that has really affected my writing over the years: the places I actually do it. I’ve done a lot of writing in coffee shops. True to type, right? But coffee shops are all a bit different. In Bowling Green there’s a combined coffee shop and used book store called Grounds for Thought. They do their own roasting and the coffee is great. Working there usually combined the best aspects of coffee shops and libraries. It was pretty quiet, there were books all around, the light wasn’t too bad…and, like I said, great coffee. There was another coffee shop, though, whose name I’ve forgotten. It was a few blocks closer to my apartment. The coffee wasn’t as good. The lights were brighter than I liked. Usually, there was Christian Rock playing too loud, too. There were times when I needed to go there to work, even though I didn’t “like” it as much as Grounds for Thought. I needed a place that was a bit abrasive to force me to focus. The distractions were just unpleasant enough to make me shut them out. I composed a lot of music in that coffee shop.

I wrote most of my dissertation in two Minneapolis coffee shops a few blocks apart. Sometimes the shops’ hours would decide which one I went to, other times I’d decide on the painfully mundane basis of whether I wanted better coffee or better pastries. (Once in a great while, I could legitimately base my decision on picking the coffee shop with the faster wi-fi.) Over the years, those two coffee shops became almost too familiar for me, and I had to cast further afield to find the right place to write. In the last phases of my dissertation, I’d bike across the river and down towards campus, spending the whole day writing and revising in a coffee shop that I don’t think I ever visited recreationally.

How does all this tie into the post’s title? Heimweh is the German word for homesickness. “Heim” translates to its cognate “home” pretty smoothly, but “weh” is less about illness than about ache. “Heimweh” is as much nostalgia (which has its linguistic roots in the pain of coming home) as it is homesickness. I’ve been feeling a lot of that with the move to Texas. I miss my old haunts, miss my old real and imaginary landscapes. When December comes and there’s no snow on the ground, I expect to be jealous of my friends in Minnesota complaining about windchill and snow emergencies. Thinking about where I am now, I cannot help thinking about all the places I’ve been before. When I get tired—especially when the things that have worn me out are the hassles inherent in 1200 miles’ worth of relocation—I just want to be back there with my familiar joys and concerns.

In the last few days, though, launching this blog and committing myself to writing, I’ve remembered something: from my earliest days as an aspiring writer, I’ve always written on trips. That’s the flip side to Heimweh, Fernweh—the ache to be traveling. (“Wanderlust” can also be translated to and from German as…”Wanderlust.”) The first big text I completed was a travelogue of my adventures taking trains through Europe. Even on shorter, busier trips, I usually keep a notebook and jot things down in it.  An academic conference in New Orleans, for example, inspired key points of the novel I’m writing. Even though there’s cliche in the thought, Texas is a big place. It’s not precisely another country, but it likes to think of itself as one. Along with the Heimweh comes the opportunity to explore this new landscape, to write in new places…and to find new favorite coffee shops.

I think I’ll get by.

What about you, my pioneering handful of readers? Any thoughts to share on how place has affected the content of your work? Or the process of creating it?

If You Build It…

“If you build it, they will come.”

The whispers of Kevin Costner’s cornfield ghosts are not pearls of secret wisdom: if you build it, they might come. They might not. Especially if you don’t tell anybody about it. To get to the truth in those whispers, season them with some negatives: if you don’t build it, they can’t come. You will never get anything published if you do not complete your manuscript. You will never get in better shape without actually doing the exercise.

All the to-do lists in the world won’t change that.

Seventeen years ago, in a rental car somewhere in Appalachia, I told my grandmother I wanted to be a writer. That was my plan. I went to college with that plan, happy to be an English major and mix creative writing with literature courses. I wrote for the school weekly. I put (my) poems up on the wall outside my dorm room. I wore a lot of black.

And then I signed up for a second semester of music theory to secure reduced-price trombone lessons. Even though I kept wearing black, I was soon spending most of my time in the music department. I still took my English courses, and I still enjoyed them. The intersection between words and music fascinated me. I concocted an honors project that involved writing a piece for orchestra, accompanied by a longish narrative poem. I hadn’t given up on being a writer, but I was busy being a composer.

If I had been a little less confident in my writing, things might have been different. As it was, I convinced myself that pursuing graduate work in English was wrong. I hated picking apart literary works; it felt like vivisecting a bird and being dismayed that it no longer flew. I did not think I would get much from an MFA beyond the time to simply write. (Never mind that I was and continue to be interested in the kind of writing usually dismissed as genre fiction, which was not exactly popular in the academy.) No, if I was going to learn something, it would be by pursuing further study in music composition.

That lasted about six weeks. I missed writing papers. I found the pragmatic questions composers asked about music shallow. (I was 22. I thought a lot of things were shallow.) I switched from composition to a dual degree in composition and music history. I got to write papers again. I got to research the esoteric questions that interested me. Meanwhile, I kept composing. I wrote some music that I still like almost ten years later. I was not writing a lot of prose, though, and poetry had pretty much fallen out of my life until I had to concoct a libretto for my thesis composition. By the time I started my doctorate, my work was about performance and theory and sociology, not about words.

I became a scholar, and that conversation in the rental car fell away.

I have spent most of the last seven years of my life taking care of my kids and working on a Ph.D. in musicology. The former gave me perspective on the latter. Maybe a little too much perspective, because I could not make myself obsessed with my research. (I eventually managed to foster an obsession with getting it done, which proved much more fruitful.)

The writing never went away, not really. I’ve written constantly for games, started but not finished a pair of novels, and continued to live with words. Academics live with words a bit differently, but I think that I am mostly finished with being an academic. I’m ready to get back to writing, really writing…writing the stories I care about, the poems that catch in my mind’s ear, about the way that favorite authors have kept me going.

So here I am trying to build something. Thanks for coming. I hope I do my job well enough to draw you back.