from the #precarity tales draft vault. a 2015 (ex) #adjunct #quitlit story: “nine years and counting” by professor never, an ex-academic alive in the real world (plus updated follow up below).

Next May, it will have been 10 years since I last stood in front of a room full of college students to share my thoughts about books. In July 2006, a few months after I taught my last class, I published a short piece about quitting academe in The Chronicle of Higher Education called Not Slinking Away. I saw the piece as the end of a memoir I was writing about my experience as an adjunct professor of English. I couldn’t yet see it was actually the beginning. Since then, I have made a version of that article into the Prologue of my book....That I might still be fiddling with an unpublished draft nine years later never occurred to me

....So what’s enough time? How does this story end? And why publish it now? 

The blog, last updated November 2016 with an enigmatic post that seemed to have a ring of finality about it, could hold answers to the first two questions: ”just finish it already!” appeared September 2014, a page about the quitlit memoir -- with links to excerpts explains explains more, and then ”a writer” September 2016.

It turns out I went to graduate school to become a writer. It’s so obvious now.... I would try to work from home as a freelance writer/editor. I could do my creative projects on the side. I wrote about the culmination of this decision two years ago in the post: the perfect job: life after academe....Over the course of the years since, I’ve gradually replaced tutoring clients with writing/editing clients. It turned out I needed that Ph.D. after all (and the tutoring experience too). I write for organizations that produce scholarly information in special education and health. I couldn’t do the work without my experience as a scholar....All of that and I get paid well too.

It takes as long and as many steps as it takes. Why now? Because it “spoke” to me when I saw it in drafts, but perhaps even more because I am going through steps of my own. Not leaving academia: been there, done that. My own blogging and social media activity has been moving away from a formerly, near exclusive adjunct focus. I don’t want to stop blogging but need to find my own voice again.