Maybe we can keep things separate

Throughout my forays into creative writing, I have, for a number of reasons, kept my writing and academic selves in separate boxes.

First of all, academic and creative writing are rather different animals, with distinct sets of rules and freedoms (or lack thereof). My academic writing sometimes skews a bit loose, not because it lacks rigor or I’ve not done my research, but rather because, as one stuffy older (male) colleague once told me at a conference, I was having “a bit too much fun.” I have yet to understand why enjoying one’s research should be a bad thing, though I suspect it had something to do with me poking fun at elderly French kings…which, admittedly, may lack the serious, allegedly objective tone usually associated with academic writing.

The reverse is also true. Thanks to that strong set of research skills, I invariably have more information than I can ever hope to include in my creative work, whether fiction or non-fiction. I don’t have to expound upon all I have learned about the Atlantic hurricane season, dam removal, or climate change. The research should support my voice, my story. It’s not supposed to overwhelm it.

Neither of those factors, however, fully explains why I prefer to separate my academic and creative work. The real, deep reason is that academia has become a hard place, and it gets harder with each passing year, especially for those of us with one foot mired in administrative tasks. At the end of a hard day or a harder week, my creative practice has become my refuge, my respite.

That’s not to say I don’t still enjoy my work—the students especially inspire me to show up each day, despite the fact that thanks to COVID, LLMs, and myriad other factors, they seem each year more unprepared to enter the hallowed halls in which I’ve shaped my career. And yet I live for those lightbulb moments when they learn something about language or about themselves—sometimes both—that I know will stay with them long after my class, maybe even after graduation.

My gift, I think, is that of making space for these emerging adults to show up as their whole selves, whichever accents they have in whichever languages they happen to speak. So many are concerned about their “country” or “foreign” accents or that they simply won’t sound good in French or Spanish, the languages I teach. That’s when I call attention to my own U.S. accent, one that might sometimes sound more “standard” (whatever that means), but in fact can sound equally out of place…if I let it, which I am learning not to do. In the 75 minutes they’re in my class, I hope they can learn that too.

Which brings me back to writing and the illusion of separateness. I can hold my creative practice and my paid work each in its own time and place, but they are all part of the package that is me. The farm girl is the student is the professor is the department chair is the mother is the Mimi is the writer who shows up on this Substack most weeks. She also happens to be Ruth Dennis’s granddaughter.1

This is one of five dates from 1998 for which I do not have a copy of Ruth’s column. And so I’m making the rest of this a paid post, with a preview of the opening of a hermit crab essay in which I use the five “W” questions posed by journalists to take a closer look at my grandmother’s work on Hurricane Agnes and the aftermath.

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