Closing time

Sunset on the sabbatical.

This the fifteenth installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

At the end of the sabbatical, what did I really accomplish? Well, there are a couple ways I can go about totaling that up.

I mean, I kept a tally of all the work I did. Here what it looks like:

Projects in Progress

Novel “Breached” Progress:  31,000 words in manuscript file/60,000 written

Academic Collection Innovative Teaching – under contract as of August 15 with April 1,

2020 delivery deadline

Essay Collection “Grafted” Progress: 15,000 words written/Four essays draft complete

In Progress – “Hamstring Nemesis” (working title), “Bill Cosby and My Herniated Childhood” (working title), “Submersibles” (working title) with (4,000 words)

Short Story “The Sun in Not Ours to Hold”: 1,000 words written and edited

Novel “Coast Highway 101” 90s revise: not started

Completed

Short Story Collection Grip Complete/48,200 words in manuscript

Editing: two articles for Journal of Creative Writing Studies — completed January

Novel Concept (Rough) – Billy Florence in China (basketball novel from my short story “Crossover”)

Blog – Six Sabbatical Posts (4 Top Shots, One Short Story Reflect, “Coaching Small”) –

2,400 words

28 Post Sabbatical Posts – 13,000 words

Editing Black Was Not a Label: content edits for Pronto Press – Oct. 18 publication            

Putting a title on a long-form project for the first time in years was a bit daunting.

Publications

“Shakespeare’s Dogfish.” Academic essay in Thinking Creative Writing (Routledge) —

May 7

“The Best Thing” short story: in Bull & Cross journal — May 21

“One Perfect Episode: CHiPs ‘Roller Disco 1&2.’” Pop culture column in Drunk

Monkeys —August 15

“One Perfect Episode: Lock, Stock, Some Smoking Barrels and Burton Guster’s Goblets

of Fire.” Pop column in Drunk Monkeys — November

“Toward Disruptive Creation in Digital Literature Instruction.” Academic essay in

Journal of Creative Writing Studies — September 25

My essay “Eulogies for Those Who Haven’t Left” was republished in The Other Journal’s print edition.

Submissions

“Towards Creative Disruption.” Journal of Creative Writing Studies — January 15, 2019

(Accepted)

“Innovative Teaching” – Bloomsbury Academic, March 1, 2019…Resub June 1, 2019

(Accepted)

CNF Essay “Signal to Noise Ratio”: The Rumpus, May 9, 2019 - Rejected

Pop Culture Essay “One Perfect Episode: CHiPs ‘Roller Disco 1&2’”: Drunk Monkeys

            May 14, 2019 - Accepted

Flash Fiction “The Sun Is Not Ours to Hold”: The Master’s Review May 29 - Rejected

Short Story “Francis the Shards”: Barrel House June 30 – Rejected

Black Was Not a Label Book Edit – Pronto Publications, August 15, 2019 (published)      

Projects Ready for Submission

Collection “Grip” (submitted and under consideration)

Short Story “The Sun in Not Ours to Hold” (submitted)

CNF Essay “Subsidence” (submitted)

CNF Essay “Signal to Noise Ratio” (published)

CNF Essay “Precautionary Tales” (published)

But the final products, as always and in every circumstance, don’t really do a good job of conveying the work that went into their creation.

I could, of course, point you back to the more than 13,000 words of blog posts I wrote about my sabbatical work. I’ve tried, for a number of reasons, to encapsulate the experience for myself and for anyone who might be interested. But even that is a selected set of reflections that in no way captures the scope of it all.

Speaking of the scope of it all, one of the most rewarding projects of my sabbatical was coaching a team of 6-8 year old basketball players. They were phenomenal and I, despite my misgivings about working with kids that young, drew so much joy from the experience.

I could take an aerial view and say that, like always, I got a lot but done but not near as much as I would have liked. That is the perpetual state of being of the species academic.

So maybe it’s best summed up in this way: I’ve already started the clock on the seven years I have to wait before I have the chance at another sabbatical. I’m sure I’ll find things to keep me busy in the interim.

The downside of down time

This the fourteenth installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

Turns out this joke photo I posted at the beginning of sabbatical is actually the way some people assumed the time would go for me. It’s like they don’t know me at all…

“So, you’ve got, like, a half year to just hang out? Really?”

No, not really. Sabbatical is designed to produce rest and recharging, but it is not a vacation. Add to that my Type A tendencies and nascent-but-still-present workaholism and no, I was not lying around…

…except when my depression flared and kept me from writing or researching or doing, well, anything much meaningful in terms of all the projects I’d given myself and the ones that presented themselves along the way.

I took this picture in the middle of the worst of that season. Looking at it now, it shows.

Days lost to bone-deep fatigue and crushing self-doubt piled up in the early portion of my time away. This was supposed to be when I could focus, when I could swipe away all the distractions that truly do get in the way during my busy semesters.

Depression, it seems, doesn’t hold much concern for my hopes and dreams. As it settled in, I was paralyzed and piling on, chastising myself for being lazy even as I know that I was working harder to stay level than I would when the words were flying from my fingertips to the screen.

Early sabbatical was a gray period, inside and out. The view from where I did most of my writing.

The lowest lows are manual labor of the soul and no one is equipped for that work alone. Fortunately, Heather kept checking my negativity. Kept reminding me that on my good days I could be very very good, so the bad ones weren’t just a loss. Kept reminding me that staving off burnout was one of the reasons we’d needed me to have this time so badly.

And then it passed and I was working. Writing. Exercising. Actually sleeping at night. Shoulda known it was too good.

Soon enough, a weird and persistent calf injury sidelined me for most of the spring and early summer, eliminating my ability to do the work on my health I’d wanted to. Which led to more depression. Which led to more missed days of writing.

Writing this here is part of this process for me,

And yet, I kept going. What’s the alternative?

And then the end of my sabbatical rose on the horizon and I was not where I wanted to be on my primary projects. It was bad. But Heather was better.

She pointed to what I had completed. The people I’d helped with their studies and texts. The book I’d edited without expecting the project in the first place. The friendships I’d reengaged.

Life is like that. Never all we want, but maybe all we can give and that should be enough. For ourselves and for everyone else in our lives.

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.

One project fails, another begins

This the fifth installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

I had a few projects I hoped would last through the entirety of my entire time out of the classroom that fell away over the sabbatical. Some of that change happened because unexpected opportunities popped up for me at various points along the way. Other projects just felt less important once I got into the rhythm of working on my novel first and everything else second. And a couple of projects morphed into something else entirely.

One such project was a series of blog posts I called Top Shots, a planned weekly roundup of some pictures I took on my phone simply to slow myself down and pay attention to the physical world in images the way I tend to in my head with words.

And for a while, I did just that, as you can see in the pictures below.

You may recognize this picture from the front page of my blog. This is facing west toward Mission Bay in the end, the sun piercing the clouds in the same moments a long bout of depression lifted for me.

San Diego’s 163 Freeway, in a rare moment of open road.

The view from Sunset Cliffs. To think, I used to drive past this view almost daily on the way home from work.

Street art meets commerce on University in Hillcrest.

But, as Frost put it, way lead on to way and I just couldn’t find the space for the space I was trying to make there. 

To say this was frustrating is an understatement, even as the project was supposed to be light and really just for me. But, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I really don’t have an off-switch for feeling bad about letting projects go. Even the light ones.

Sometime in the summer, as I grudgingly started thinking about going back to the classroom, it occurred to me that I had not been back to the Top Shots well in some time and I started scrolling my Instagram feed for shots I might include in a new post. It was only at this moment that I realized what the issue was.

I was platforming these pictures on the wrong medium. Fifteen minutes later, I had created an author account on IG with the same handle as my Twitter account and have since been posting all my writing-related content there, including what I might have called Top Shots before. It’s been really helpful.

Something about posting things one at a time as they come to me—Bird by Bird-style—just makes more sense. Maybe it will for you too. Give the account a look and a follow either here or via the widget at the bottom of the page.

You mean I HAVE to go to San Diego for research?

As far as locations that need to be studied go, the hometown is not half bad.

This the third installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

A lot of the work that I was able to accomplish toward my novel was doing extended research on a number of subjects I needed to have pulled together in my mind in order to finally push the story (and the stories that make it up) forward. 

Sometime about halfway through May, a friend asked me what I was spending my time learning about and after I listed several of the subjects in my browser tabs and the books I’d read, she looked at me like I was spouting gibberish. I stopped and thought about it outside of the context of my novel and had to laugh.

My research for the novel includes delving into:

·      Postal network art;

·      Suicide as performance art;

·      Podcast production;

·      Terminology connected with the creation of eight separate forms of art;

·      Security procedures at a decommissioned nuclear reactor;

·      Military supply clerking norms and duties;

·      Portable barricade technology;

·      Police investigative procedure;

·      The history of the Hillcrest neighborhood in San Diego;

·      Ray Johnson;

·      The relative differences between various forms of suicide bombs;

·      Remittances;

·      Marine recruitment procedures;

·      Crime scene photography;

·      Currency markets and trading;

·      About 30 other topics…

This doesn’t include the trips I took to San Diego so I could walk routes and take pictures of where the characters in my story exist in the moments I depict them. Add to this the overlay of the cultural, spiritual, moral, and regional frameworks of it all as my characters range from a day trader to a high school dropout-turned Marine recruit to a journalist just to name a few. To say there are a lot of moving parts in my head would be a massive understatement.  

A key location in my manuscript, in reflection.

Part of a Hillcrest mural that made it onto the page in a later draft.

To combat the near-constant sense of overwhelmedness I felt, I started charting and mapping my storylines, trying to figure out where all of this was taking me. As you can see in the pictures included with this post, even exerting that level of external on it all left a lot to deal with.

With 12 separate first-person perspectives and a shared narrative that absents it’s central figure, some of those charts got complicated pretty quickly.

An early map of the neighborhood where most of the story takes place. Sure, I could have used Maps and dropped pins in various locations. Sure, most of these details have changed. Sure, this is evidence of why I’m not a visual artist. But I wanted a sense of co-creation in these notes.

Graphing paper was really helpful in picturing the exact size and spacing of an important location in the story. This is one of 24 charts of the space I made.

But this work also began to clarify matters I hadn’t been able to get at before. And while I can’t claim I see it all yet, I can see where I’m headed…at least until the next unexpected divergence in the road…

From one of my walking tours of the neighborhood, this seemed like the cliched thing to do.

A novel concept that needs to be a novel

This the second installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

One of many charts and diagrams I’ve created over the years trying to get an handle on this novel.

The whole point of my sabbatical, on paper anyway, was completing a novel that has been eluding me for close to eight years now. The problem: the sabbatical application that goal was written down on committed me to actually finishing the thing.

About that…

I first had the idea for the story when I was teaching in San Diego. It’s sprawling and complicated.

• Twelve independent voices collectively telling the story without the main character every getting her own chance to do so. 

• A major incident around which the entire story is built, but that never gets expressed directly on the page.

• A secondary story that may or may not draw all the threads—material and metaphysical—together as a coherent singular.

• The small question of why bad things happen and whether or not that is even a possible outcome in asking questions about those bad things in the first place.

• And doing justice to my hometown that is so often invisible on the literary landscape.

No pressure. But I had six months and a mandate…yeah…no pressure at all.

And in the end, is it done? Of course not. It’s drafted, mostly, and the rest of the stories that aren’t quite there are in process. I think it might actually happen if the sprint that is teaching my classes doesn’t completely derail my progress…which it might. *Narrator’s Voice* It did indeed derail that progress.

I needed the sabbatical because of that barrier in the first place. The problem, though, was that other barriers, good and bad, sprang up in my time away and I’m not where I wanted to be on the story. It’s not ready for others to read what I’ve come up with so I can refine it and get serious about looking for a publisher.

But I’m close. Closer than I’ve ever been with this story. I have hope. Maybe that was the best possible outcome of the sabbatical because before I took it, I was starting to lose any sense of every getting this book done. 

Or the three other ideas I have behind it.    

“So you got want you wanted…”

At the beginning of my sabbatical, I laid out this daily calendar and filled my days with plans for what would do. Let’s just say that was a touch optimistic.

This the first installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

Traditionally, academics are eligible for sabbaticals every seven years or so. The practice, ostensibly, is to set aside a time for scholars to renew their studies, pursue projects that teaching does not allow them to focus on solely, and to recharge for their work in the classroom.

Put another way, it’s not a vacation. It’s a time for the work that’s usually fit in around the edges of the myriad shifting commitments be teaching and facilitating the business of the academy.

It’s also a phenomenal opportunity to choose what you want to work on along with how and when you will do that work. It is, as I said when I received my confirmation letter, the Golden Ticket. Truly, it’s something most writers never get and not a privilege I take lightly.

Which means it’s also a lot of pressure.

When I applied for the time away, I said I wanted to finish a novel that has been eluding me for eight years. I was also “encouraged” to complete an academic task of creating an annotated bibliography regarding literacies in digital literature, a field I find myself increasingly working within.

Spoiler alert: neither of those projects is done.

Double spoiler: I’m totally fine with that, even with the fact that the bibliography will likely never be done at all.

Completion just wasn’t the theme of my sabbatical, even as I completed a ton of work. Wrote more than 100,000 words and finally—maybe—figured out that novel.

No, the point of my solo hike through my own interests was to see just how estranged I’d become from what matters to me in the day-to-day of my teaching. When I slowed down and looked around, I realized I wasn’t doing what makes me a better than decent instructor. I wasn’t doing.

This isn’t to say that the lack of total progress didn’t (or doesn’t) bother me at all. I actually had to wait closer to nine years for my first chance at sabbatical, so I felt extra pressure to perform, feelings exacerbated by my Type-A tendencies toward workaholism.

Factor in some bouts of depression and a number of unplanned but unexpectedly great projects landing in my lap over that time and there was a lot of being forced to adjust my expectations, not just for what I would accomplish on sabbatical, but in how I need to live now that I’m back. How I need to appreciate what I do complete. What I need to cut loose from my perceived load of responsibilities.

That last part is a work in progress, but the change is set in me, and I believe that is for the best.

The following series of posts, then, is an accounting of the specifics of that season—delayed six months by the trivial matter of a global pandemic—and the changes it created. It’s not a justification, though. I’ve done enough of that in my life.

Like everything else I’m interested in, it’s a story and one that needs telling, if only for my own clarity and to serve as a reminder that I’ll be doing this thing differently from here on out.