I'm not against good old healthy competition and I believe it motivates us to work harder and to engage with the academic community in a more concrete way - and more often, for that matter. However, the world of a creative writer - one who can certainly teach academic writing quite well (and we do!) but who's focus is more on creative writing and who most likely holds an M.F.A. is a different world than that of a Ph.D. candidate in rhetoric and composition. Publishing is an important aspect
of being part of the academic community.
For me, however, it has always been creative. I have had mentors encouraging me to publish
in literary journals and to apply for creative grants that require creative
publications for years. I have focused
on The Paris Review, The New Yorker,
Fence. My graduate thesis is an 80
page long collection of poetry that I am constantly revising and sending to
publishers and presses. I have participated in workshops, Summer programs,
applied for grants and fellowships, all based on poetry. And now, after years of learning how to teach
writing, years of working as an adjunct at several different universities in
one semester, years of fighting for the full time lecturer position I have now,
I am competing against people with academic dissertations who get to be called
“Doctor” and get paid more than me because their terminal degree is apparently
more accepted than my terminal degree.
And somehow, I have to publish.
And I’m talking in the scholarly world, which is apparently, to use an
overused metaphor, a whole different ball game.
The wonderful part of this is, I am embracing the challenge. I am researching, writing, looking at the issues that my writing students face analytically, using APA format. I am becoming the scholar that I only touched upon in graduate school in between poems. My question is, how do other contingent faculty members deal with the expectations, the competition, the divide between creative and academic?
