Me & Academia & Publishing & Pittsburgh
I’ve just posted the first three chapters of Or Else. I wrote this yesterday in anticipation.
I’m sitting in Mellon Park, in the shade of a big tree, drafting a blog post for tomorrow. Off to my right, I can see the bell tower of East Liberty Presbyterian and the white dome that I’ve always assumed is an athletic facility that either belongs to the park on the other side of Fifth or to the Ellis School for Girls, I’ve never been sure which. In some summer in the late 2000s or early 2010s, I used to cross this park on my way back from Shadyside to the house in Point Breeze where I was staying with family friends. I would stop and sit on a bench and read that week’s edition of City Paper. Some other summer, I lay on the hill in the sun and read P.N. Furbank’s biography of E.M. Forster. Now I am here, again, in 2024, because I chose to be.
Academia insists that you move wherever the job takes you, and since traditional tenure-track (i.e., stable and well-paying) jobs are so horribly hard to get these days, you feel guilty if you’re not grateful for whatever you get, no matter how bad a fit the location is. Or so my friends say. I didn’t get a tenure-track job after getting my PhD in English. I don’t have any real idea how much that was my own fault: whether it was because I stubbornly chose to do an unconventional project; whether I didn’t try hard enough to legitimize my project in my job documents; whether I hadn’t published enough. Maybe I hadn’t worked hard enough. Maybe I wasn’t that strong of a scholar. Or maybe there were just so few jobs to begin with that the academic job market is in large part simply a crapshoot, and I didn’t win.
It’s possible I just didn’t stick it out long enough. I don’t know. But I suspect that when all is said and done, the underlying reasons I am here and not there can be boiled down to two things: (1) I want to make my own choices about what my work looks like and (2) I want to be happy in my own life.
So after I finished my Ph.D., I moved back to Pittsburgh. I love the city—it’s where I went to college, and I’ve missed it ever since leaving—and there are enough schools here I figured I could at least adjunct somewhere. I’m actually getting to teach literature right now, which I love doing and am very grateful for. But I am on no ladders to academic glory.
For the last couple years, however, I’ve been clinging to another possible means of professional success: I could publish the novel I wrote as part of my dissertation. Then I’d be impressive in another way. I queried a number of literary agents, at an inadvisably slow pace, shooting off emails when I could stand the accompanying anxiety. It felt clear, though, that what I was going to need to do to get anywhere serious was network, some of which (workshops, conferences) costs money. And I hate networking and I hate paying money for someone to give my work a chance. I am so cognizant of how many people can’t afford that, and how unfair the whole system can be.
And anyway…I didn’t really want to make my work more marketable. Which is inevitable if you’re going to try and market it.
So I made a different choice, again. To put the novel, the project, on a website of my own. I’m lucky and I am privileged to be able to make this choice—I have a job, for now, that pays enough. I have a safety net in my family and friends. I have a cat but not kids; I have rent but not a mortgage. I have an advanced degree. I can afford to not pin any financial hopes on writing.
Yet it’s hard not to feel like a whole litany of well-meaning teachers and colleagues from over the years are going to be disappointed in me for doing it this way. Or just…disinterested. People who would perk up their ears at a commercially published novel will simply pass by one posted online for free—even if they have good politics generally around capitalism and professionalization. There was only one right answer to the head of my undergraduate drama school’s question, “What are you working on?” and it always involved something that would look good on your resume (and the school’s promotional materials).
Oh well! Here I am! Sorry, everyone: I love amateurism. I love art and writing that people do because they want to. I love fanfiction. I love community theatre. I love zines, I love high school marching bands, I love queer craft fairs. I love adults who rediscover Shrinky-Dinks and polymer clay and make potholders for their friends. I love local book clubs and writing communities on Discord. I love Pittsburgh—I think Pittsburgh’s whole vibe is slightly wonky DIY: faded old signs painted on brick buildings, tree roots pushing up through sidewalks, folding chairs saving parking spots, memories of the Beehive and Garfield’s Nightmare and whatever happened to that one ice cream place that became an illegal banking cooperative or something? Or Else is set in Pittsburgh, at a made-up university I’ve shoved next to Pitt and Carnegie Mellon (who says there’s not room in Oakland), and it’s about people who sort of…make their own worlds, for better or worse, who live one foot in the kind of scrappy imaginary I find so possible in this city. And I am glad to be here, in Mellon Park, writing this, watching a dog with the spindliest legs I have ever seen in my life walking past (sorry Juno), preparing to launch my big little project into the world.
Later update: After I finished writing this post, I walked around the garden in Mellon Park. I was appreciating the Pittsburgh hallmarks I’d just been writing about—bumpy bricks, crumbling walls, etc., and then I tripped on an uneven sidewalk and skinned my knee. I will take this as a reminder that choosing one’s own road comes with obstacles of its own. I am sticking some metaphorical antiseptic into my metaphorical knapsack as I venture down the mysterious path through the woods.