Imaginative Teaching, considerable planning

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

This the eighth installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer. Note: Just over two months ago, my co-editors and I submitted the full manuscript of the book described below. It will be out in the spring of 2021.

My sabbatical began, not with writing the fiction that would define the time away, but with two academic projects. For specifics on the first, check out next Wednesday’s post. The larger of the two, however, stretched across the entire time I was away and is still in progress as I write this.

But that is excellent news as I am under contract and co-editing my third collection for Bloomsbury Academic, a new and exciting take on teaching creative writing through and beyond all of the perceived limitations to doing so at the secondary level.

The book is called Imaginative Teaching and puts the ideas of creative writing theorists and secondary teachers in conversation over a long form for, really, the first time. To say I’m excited would be an understatement given I’ve taught at both levels and truly believe in the power of creative writing in inspiring the most important forms of learning we need to do as humans.

To say I was not excited by the back and forth of the proposal process and how often I was balancing it and my attempts to write my novel in the time I’d been given is also very, very true. The outcome—a contract and firm publication schedule—is, of course, what I’d hoped for.

But the amount of revisions and response in the process of working our way from proposal to contract made for some tricky maneuvers on the narrow surface of the time-management balance beam.

Given that this is not my first time through the process, in general and with Bloomsbury, this was not new or surprising. But against the backdrop of my “wide open” sabbatical calendar, it felt so much more restrictive than it had in the past, something so counterintuitive it’s hard to type it without feeling like I’m whining.

But, just as excitement or love can expand to consume the attention of the person experiencing them, so too it is with work regardless of the busyness surrounding it.

And somehow, I feel like that’s an important lesson. There is no such thing as free time when that freedom is contingent on seeing it as such. 

Maybe free time, like meaning, is more a by-product of our choices along the way and less an item we can place on the calendar and access when we arrive at the prescribed time.