Aliciapalooza

[dr_pretentious]

In the morning, I'm going to a day-long conference the university has organized in honor of my now-retired, much beloved dissertation director. The conference has a long, formal title, but sporos has taken to calling it Aliciapalooza, which is so apt I wish I could take credit for it.

Although the dissertation itself was an agonizing ordeal, I miss my dissertation director terribly. Getting to know her was one of the best things about my decade in academia. It'll be good to see her tomorrow--it's been too long. Two years? Maybe three. While most of my other professors were feeding me fear, she said, "Of course you should go out on a limb. That's where the sweet fruit grows." When many people who meant well were telling me I had gone too far not to finish the Ph.D., and that I had no choice but to trudge to the end, she reminded me that I was free, and that she would far rather see me happy and out than finished and miserable. Is anything more paralyzing than the belief that your own desires no longer matter? Within a year of owning the choice to stay, I had the degree in hand. Whereas most professors in our department abandoned their graduate students at the dissertation stage, she pinned a note to the door of her home library that said, "Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Wrythe" once she realized that I'd taken a wrong turn in my research while she was out of the country, and she never again left me waiting for feedback on my chapters.

After she'd invested her time, attention, and reputation in me for ten years, I confessed to her that all I really wanted in the world was to leave academia and write genre fiction. For ten years, I had lived as a prisoner of my own not-quite-accomplished prestige, and of other people's fears on my behalf. Finally it had become clear to me that it would be far better to work as a barista at Starbucks for the rest of my days, and be free to go home and write books I believed in, than that I should press on for tenure by writing books that I didn't believe in.

And she gave me her blessing. Literally. In so many words. Her blessing.

What I'm dreading about tomorrow is that, although I know I made the right decision, I have not one professional sale to my name, three years after leaving my former field. I feel like I ought to have slain the dragon by now, that I should have a big dragon carcass to haul in as my trophy. Not for Alicia, but for all those other department people who won't get it. Because I haven't proved myself by getting a tenure-track gig somewhere, I'm a nobody in that world. I can't honestly say I'm somebody anywhere else.

She won't care about that. And sporos is coming down from New England with his fancy tenure-track respectability to speak at the conference--it'll be good to see him in the glory he has always deserved. Some people really are meant to be literary critics. I just turned out not to be one of them.

The dissertation took me five years. It weighs in at roughly 100,000 words, I think. Yet I'm more proud of the 25K novella I wrote in three months than I am of the dissertation. There probably isn't a way to say that out loud tomorrow that doesn't devalue what my director gave me, or that doesn't provoke defensiveness in my former colleagues, or sound defensive on my part. But it's true.

Comments

[kistha.livejournal.com]

I'm a nobody in that world. I can't honestly say I'm somebody anywhere else.

You are a somebody in my world.

You are worth more than the 'proofs' of your labors. You are somebody, because you care, because you think, because you are funny, and because people love you.

Don't ever say you are nobody. Publishing is timing, luck and no real mark for ability - just look at the crap that gets published.

Fuck that holier-than-thou-pretentious-bull-shit.

Just say, "Well, it didn't work for me in the end. Pity isn't it. But I'm happy and well, thanks."

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

Weirdly enough, the most awkward moment in the whole day was when a professor I'm fond of who, like me, went into academia with notions of being a writer, told me how he envied me the freedom to write every day. There was so much regret in his voice, I suddenly realized I was in danger of being the unkind person in the picture, myself.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this helps, but there is a fairly predictable "maturation" period post PhD. I only know one person who did anything really outstanding in the five years after they finished their PhD*. What usually happens is that it takes several years for the knowledge and experience to bed down, and then about five years after people start working out what they want to say.






*China Mieville wrote his PhD and two novels at the same time. When I heard that, I decided that second rate was a very comfortable place to be.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

It does help, though I have to wonder how the field ended up, then, with such a mismatch between the maturation process and the tenure clock.

A dissertation and two novels. Hm. I'm with you on this one. Mieville can keep the productivity prize--I'm definitely out of the running.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Qualification inflation naturally. Too many PhDs so you look for something else. I got my first job because I was already churning out articles. I look back at them and they are fine. Because they were all original research, and I write reasonably, they were worth publishing. But it was 2003 before I wrote anything that had any *real* thing to say other than "look what I found!"

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

You can tell them that you're well, you're happy, and you are much loved and respected by those around you. And if they're not impressed... who gives a flying fuck, really? They're not your life any more. You are the Goddess's perfect child, and you are free.

[jeneralist.livejournal.com]

The sounds like a high school or college reunion -- except that it's grad school, and not organized for the purpose of a reunion. The angst is the same.

I went to my 10-year high school reunion. When I arrived at the door, I was a fat dumpy geek with a family that I couldn't really talk about. Then I saw the vibe most of the class "leaders" and popular kids were giving off.

This thick haze the color of despair hung over so many of them! And if I looked with other eyes, I could see the subtitles as they spoke of their careers. "If you offered me a potion from Wonderland, labelled 'Any life but this, any place but here' I would drink it."

They were trapped in others' aspirations.

You aren't.

Have a blast.

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

I've always thought of you as a statuesque geek.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I did have a blast. The people who showed up for the event were all people who were glad to see me happy. Some of them didn't really understand what I was doing, but most of my relatives never understood how grad school worked, so I was used to well-meant incomprehension from intelligent people.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Did you ever watch Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion? Odd movie. Very bad in some ways but absolutely nailed this on the head.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I resisted seeing that film for a long time, mostly because the posters all made it look like a story of vindication for blonde supermodels, who, as a demographic, don't really need more vindication. But then a friend said to me, "Two words, Sarah: fashion geeks." Oh. Well, in that case. And then I could see that it did a lot of things very well.

[sppeterson.livejournal.com]

My feeling is that you've done the writing, stuck to it, and done yet more writing--that's success right there and the pattern of work behavior that shows you're on the road to making writing something you can make a living at. From what I've seen looking around at people starting out, making the transition, and who've made the transition, it's the ability to keep writing new polished and finished works through the long dry spell that you get at the beginning that enables one to turn writing into a career.

One odd bit is that you're considered a remarkably speedy success if you finish your PhD in 5-6 years, but take three years to sell a novel (despite the monstrosity of the no simultaneous submissions rules) and there's all kinds of guilt.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Grad school was good for teaching persistence in the face of delayed gratification, I have to grant it that.

I think what make me especially prone to this odd guilt is that I lived out of Dan's wallet for the nine years it took to finish the degree, and then only had three semesters of good paying work before the university budget crashed. Dan's been incredibly supportive these past three years, but...well, you know how it is.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Don't think in terms of paying Dan back. You can't. Think in terms of supporting someone else, sometime in the future. And it doesn't have to be monetary.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of that going on. One benefit of freelancing is that, when the client load is light, I can be helpful in ways that nine-to-fivers can't.

[tracyandrook.livejournal.com]

YES I KNOW how that is

[(Anonymous)]

I'm a nobody in that world. I can't honestly say I'm somebody anywhere else.

As soon as I read that, I knew what I wanted to say in response to it. Of course, it had already been said (by Kistha).

So I'll just say: ditto! And this is coming from someone who handed in his thesis today (no joke, I really did), and is about to enter academia as a career. But I'm doing it after, as you know, a fair bit of soul-searching. I decided there was something in academia that was worth my time. You decided there wasn't. So what? (Did J ever show you the Chronicle article she has pinned to her door, on how academia is like a cult?)

And you are 'somebody' to so many people... how is that so different, or not as impressive as, from being 'somebody' to a bunch of literary theorists? (If you need anyone to help you completely pull to bits the concept of 'being 'somebody'', give me a call... it's my job, right?)

G.B.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Thank you. And congrats again about the dissertation! I remember the day I handed my document over to the Dean of Rulers. Once she'd measured my margins and weighed my paper and signed my form, I knew that, even if I were hit by a campus bus on my way across College Avenue, I'd die a doctor of philosophy. It's so weird, the things that feel important. So, even though I haven't seen the Chronicle article, yeah, I get it about the cult dynamic.

Most days, the somebody/nobody false dichotomy is not an issue for me. Today, it didn't have to be, because Alicia's conference drew a crowd of people who were, well, like Alicia. But the evening in December when Dan and I went to meet KL, RA, and KA for dinner at the MLA, I got to be reminded how prevalent that dichotomy is in the field I left. Swinging by for a couple of hours didn't do it to me, but if I'd spent the whole day at the MLA, I'd have been just as sickened by it as our friends were. That's what I thought I was in for. Dysfunctions are only a little less contagious than chicken pox.

Is Graduate School a Cult?

[jaime-sama.livejournal.com]

"You fancy-ass punks think you're so smart? You think you know something about hegemony? I got a Ph.D., 50 grand in student loans, and I clocked 20 years as an adjunct. Now I'm here to tell the truth to suckers like you."

http://chronicle.com/jobs/2004/06/2004062801c.htm

Re: Is Graduate School a Cult?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Let's say a mother finds an application to Duke University's Ph.D. program in English under her daughter's mattress. Obviously the mother is devastated. If she does nothing, in a year her daughter will be dressed in black and sneering in obscure jargon at the Thanksgiving turkey and Aunt Sally's cranberry Jell-O mold. Where can a concerned parent turn for help?

To serve this need, former academics could reinvent themselves as counselors; they could coordinate interventions with the friends and loved ones of people who are flirting with graduate school, or who have been enrolled for several years but lack the will to leave, or who are trapped in dead-end adjunct positions.

If I provide my own windowless black van and my own burlap sack to stuff people into, maybe I can hire out as a deprogrammer.

on leaving academia

[jaime-sama.livejournal.com]

This kind of thing has been on my mind recently too, S, unsurprisingly. I've been looking around at the kind of jobs I could be applying for soon, and cringing at the idea of telling my academic contacts about them. There is nothing I'm qualified for at this point that won't look like failure to them. (Or like irrationality. Or like trailing spouse syndrome.)

G and I make an interesting case study these days. We both finished our dissertations this semester in the same prestigious, supportive department, with prominent philosophers on our committees, and advisors that really wanted us to get good academic jobs. He's been on the academic market this year, and there is this tremendous mechanism working on his behalf to help him succeed: mock interviews, advice, networking among the old boys. Besides his dissertation committee, there is a placement director whose *job* it is to get G. an academic job. (G. has just commented that our placement director has answered G's last two emails within one minute of G's sending them. I'm serious. Who outside of academia has a designated job search advisor that drops everything to answer your questions within one minute?)

If you decline the help of this system, everyone is just puzzled as to what to do with you. No huge mechanism leaps into action to help you. You are on your own, kiddo, best of luck. Write if you find work.

However, though they are not helping you at all, they will still quite happily compare you to the people that they spent massive amounts of energy and time helping. But of course you don't have the momentum from that gigantic push. You have to teach yourself how to succeed in your new field, and build your own momentum from scratch.

Re: on leaving academia

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Actually, it was the placement adviser who finally disgusted me enough to drive me out. Everyone who was going on the market had to attend mandatory meetings for brainwashing by this jerk, or the department would refuse to send our references out to any jobs we applied to. All of the faculty members had been instructed that they were not under any circumstances to send reference letters on their own, nor to give students copies of reference letters. Above all, they were not to allow students to use private dossier services. No, it was crucial to keep us in line. We did what he told us to, or we were without recommendations.

At these meetings, the placement advisor had us give updates on everything we had done to further our job searches, naming the positions we were applying for to everyone in the room. He would BOTH insist that we must apply to every job for which we were qualified, no matter how abusive a workload it promised or how undesirable its location, AND make clear that people who worked at anything less than a Research I institution were not to be taken seriously.

When candidates protested that they could not apply for jobs in places where their spouses would not be able to find work, he mocked them. There were several of us who were not inclined to sacrifice for the glory of the department the spouses who had kept food on the table and roofs over our heads while we finished our degrees. He chastised us in front of the group for being insufficiently committed to our careers. The only good thing that can be said of this jerk is that he mocked men and women, straight people and queer people, equally for thinking that their spouses had already sacrificed enough, or for thinking that our spouses were to be preferred over the profession if we had to choose.

This is the guy I very nearly ran over in the crosswalk at the corner of George and Hamilton. I actually found myself pressing the accelerator, while thinking to myself, "brake, brake." If he'd been the only person in the crosswalk, I don't know how that would have ended. Better, no doubt, for the health of the department, considering that, the following year, he seduced a first-year grad student and left his wife for her. Good news for his wife, since we know how little he values spousal bonds, but a calamity for the student, who at least for a while was stuck with him. I have no idea whether they're still together, but either way, her professional reputation is permanently tarnished.

He was high on my list of people I didn't want to see yesterday. I don't know that I could be civil to him. Every time I think of him, I wish I'd run him over.

Re: on leaving academia

[jaime-sama.livejournal.com]

Wow. He sounds appalling.

G. was lucky enough to have a very nice guy this year serving as placement director. Last year's guy was a bit scary, though not nearly as bad as your guy sounds. But one thing that scared me about him was that his wife and kids live in California. He's a Rutgers prof. A permanent, full prof. I guess he's planning to fly back and forth routinely until he retires.

Try explaining to that guy that you don't want to live apart from your partner even for "just a year" for the sake of a job.