Least help of all, my parents' compromised, plodding choice. Teaching was
an even better job than working at the phone company, with summers off.
And an exta-good job for women: if I didn't marry, I'd have the certificate
like a Serta mattress behind me. And if I did, why, once I went back to work
I'd get home at the same time as the little Rochesters, never mind the mad
horse in the paddock. There is a break in my life at the point where I turned
away from a teaching degree and started my long, floundering, rogue trail.
It took me decades to realize teaching might actually have been a better
path than the one I took, littered with dead-ended relationships and aborted
writing projects.
All through my young twenties and dangerously into my thirties, when I
might have been manifesting, I was a nervous, sweating horse still. I
dropped acid, slept with whoever interested me, gave up child custody, lived
in a commune, quit any number of jobs, some of them actually good. The
second I felt any bridle on me, I kicked over the traces again. I found lots of
companions expatriated from success. Real Life I learned is full of people
scared of their creative daemons, people scribbling in secret, showing it to a
few admiring friends or encouraging teachers, many of whom admire the
sheer words on paper as much as what they say. If the scribblers were to
send it out, if it came back invalidated, they would have failed, and could no
longer write in secret even in their heads. People who shy off the Good Job
but never manifest the winning run: I have been their kind. I could write
best, sometimes only write, late at night, on stolen weekends, in between
day jobs until the money ran out. I was still on the island, waiting for
homecoming and transformation.
This is how teaching had to sneak up on me: one day I ran into a writer pal
with whom I'd organized a couple of private workshops for the hell of it, at
the laundromat next door to the collective house where I lived. While our
clothes spun, she said she was leaving her teaching gig - did I want it? I
shrugged. Outlaw teaching, part-time. Guess so.
Reading to the Black's fan club, I'm a doctoral graduate assistant, leading
freshmen through comp like a writing sherpa and wallowing in fiction classes.
A new theory of jobs: Good & Crazy. Mama said to me on the phone, "We
didn't think you'd be able to get work doing that," so I knew I was on the
right track. Rhetoric - That's where all the jobs are! - I knew was the garden
path to hell. The most tortured academics I've met are the ones who don't
even teach what they love, double whammied by Real Life.
***
I once did a therapy exercise in which I rewrote my family's lives. I made
mama a realtor to get her out of the house, use up her energy, and put her
in the upscale environments she craved. My dad and I wrote a western
novel together that my sister illustrated. She drew rearing horses that
looked a lot like the Black. That's the transformed family I'll never have. I
live with a quiet, focused scholar who like my previous partners sometimes is
disturbed by the violent, snorting animus that rears in me.
The Black Stallion is not a savvy runner. He always loses the first
opportunities, the ones the other horses and jockeys use to advantage.
He's injured in the starting gate, he gets boxed in on the rail, he has to carry
much more weight. He gets so far behind it looks impossible, and then, and
only then, does he get going. The shadow of the Black means refusal of
rules and games. It's the long look over the shoulder, hoof stamping in fury
at all this nonsense. Writing about Farley, I'm at mid-life. During the 80s,
when the rich mostly get richer, I top out at fourteen thou. I own a lot of
books and a Selectric. I'm way, way back, lengths and lengths from the
pack. I can't even see their tails. I arrive in grad school with a mangled
ankle (a manifestation!) and limp through the first year. Everybody knows
me: I'm the one on crutches. I limp down one long stack aisle after another,
eventually looking for material on Walter Farley.
Some say teaching is a shadow life, the way my dad advised future farmers.
I say it's a coming out that lets us see what we know as we teach it. It's for
us, not all those hopeful students lost in daydreams, unless they also need
to teach it, and not as a good job. Teaching is Alec for a change, not the
wild horse that might get shot by a cop or kill somebody, striking out. Lets
us see a middle range between broken and plodding, and plunging crazy
free. Some say so many writers have become teachers because the market
is so bad, that it's a cop-out, that we should all be accountants who write on
the side. I say many of us grew up in realism universes and the book worlds
carried our souls. Any bridge we can find between them is the one to take.
So I have a teaching career, full-time, tenured even, and offer Alec-advice to
students whose hope is alive enough to take a writing class, even though
they're mostly majoring in criminal justice like self-jailors or swallowing the
pill of the pharmacy program. There is enough Alec manifested in me now
that I can advise them decently well. It's not that the king horse of lost time
has calmed down or listened to the voice of reason. Picture a large equine
snorting in your face as he stamps on your foot. I'm a maverick professor,
teaching wack classes like story writing and horror literature. I turn my
grades in, but I read mystery novels at lunch. I meet my classes, but we
pool our still-alive dreams.
Somewhere in this Good & Crazy job track I stopped being so afraid of it.
Not so afraid. When my colleagues start working on me to stand for
department chair - well, first I plunge so hard and so far into a sabbatical
that it might be the end of the world. I drive four thousand miles by myself
and write much of an autobiography in paragraphs. I research more than I
did during grad school. And in between the two, attend my dad's last days.
Maybe his death broke the family mold. Maybe I just felt far enough behind
at last.
When people ask me about chairing, I say I'm doing it for my sins, and we all
laugh. Only I know I mean the sins of coward choices visited on me, the time
lost to fear and betrayal, to mind run wild against the death of hope. May it
not be so for you. May you practice what you love, for no one can fully
manifest the daemon horse without also manifesting Alec: the steady hand
on the hot, quivering neck, the whispered word of love that commands, the
bare heels dug in that say run now, run now.
Alec never even attempts to tame the Black, far from it. After years of
winning races, he and his horse get so bored they skip out in search of
wilder adventures.
Here I go --
an even better job than working at the phone company, with summers off.
And an exta-good job for women: if I didn't marry, I'd have the certificate
like a Serta mattress behind me. And if I did, why, once I went back to work
I'd get home at the same time as the little Rochesters, never mind the mad
horse in the paddock. There is a break in my life at the point where I turned
away from a teaching degree and started my long, floundering, rogue trail.
It took me decades to realize teaching might actually have been a better
path than the one I took, littered with dead-ended relationships and aborted
writing projects.
All through my young twenties and dangerously into my thirties, when I
might have been manifesting, I was a nervous, sweating horse still. I
dropped acid, slept with whoever interested me, gave up child custody, lived
in a commune, quit any number of jobs, some of them actually good. The
second I felt any bridle on me, I kicked over the traces again. I found lots of
companions expatriated from success. Real Life I learned is full of people
scared of their creative daemons, people scribbling in secret, showing it to a
few admiring friends or encouraging teachers, many of whom admire the
sheer words on paper as much as what they say. If the scribblers were to
send it out, if it came back invalidated, they would have failed, and could no
longer write in secret even in their heads. People who shy off the Good Job
but never manifest the winning run: I have been their kind. I could write
best, sometimes only write, late at night, on stolen weekends, in between
day jobs until the money ran out. I was still on the island, waiting for
homecoming and transformation.
This is how teaching had to sneak up on me: one day I ran into a writer pal
with whom I'd organized a couple of private workshops for the hell of it, at
the laundromat next door to the collective house where I lived. While our
clothes spun, she said she was leaving her teaching gig - did I want it? I
shrugged. Outlaw teaching, part-time. Guess so.
Reading to the Black's fan club, I'm a doctoral graduate assistant, leading
freshmen through comp like a writing sherpa and wallowing in fiction classes.
A new theory of jobs: Good & Crazy. Mama said to me on the phone, "We
didn't think you'd be able to get work doing that," so I knew I was on the
right track. Rhetoric - That's where all the jobs are! - I knew was the garden
path to hell. The most tortured academics I've met are the ones who don't
even teach what they love, double whammied by Real Life.
***
I once did a therapy exercise in which I rewrote my family's lives. I made
mama a realtor to get her out of the house, use up her energy, and put her
in the upscale environments she craved. My dad and I wrote a western
novel together that my sister illustrated. She drew rearing horses that
looked a lot like the Black. That's the transformed family I'll never have. I
live with a quiet, focused scholar who like my previous partners sometimes is
disturbed by the violent, snorting animus that rears in me.
The Black Stallion is not a savvy runner. He always loses the first
opportunities, the ones the other horses and jockeys use to advantage.
He's injured in the starting gate, he gets boxed in on the rail, he has to carry
much more weight. He gets so far behind it looks impossible, and then, and
only then, does he get going. The shadow of the Black means refusal of
rules and games. It's the long look over the shoulder, hoof stamping in fury
at all this nonsense. Writing about Farley, I'm at mid-life. During the 80s,
when the rich mostly get richer, I top out at fourteen thou. I own a lot of
books and a Selectric. I'm way, way back, lengths and lengths from the
pack. I can't even see their tails. I arrive in grad school with a mangled
ankle (a manifestation!) and limp through the first year. Everybody knows
me: I'm the one on crutches. I limp down one long stack aisle after another,
eventually looking for material on Walter Farley.
Some say teaching is a shadow life, the way my dad advised future farmers.
I say it's a coming out that lets us see what we know as we teach it. It's for
us, not all those hopeful students lost in daydreams, unless they also need
to teach it, and not as a good job. Teaching is Alec for a change, not the
wild horse that might get shot by a cop or kill somebody, striking out. Lets
us see a middle range between broken and plodding, and plunging crazy
free. Some say so many writers have become teachers because the market
is so bad, that it's a cop-out, that we should all be accountants who write on
the side. I say many of us grew up in realism universes and the book worlds
carried our souls. Any bridge we can find between them is the one to take.
So I have a teaching career, full-time, tenured even, and offer Alec-advice to
students whose hope is alive enough to take a writing class, even though
they're mostly majoring in criminal justice like self-jailors or swallowing the
pill of the pharmacy program. There is enough Alec manifested in me now
that I can advise them decently well. It's not that the king horse of lost time
has calmed down or listened to the voice of reason. Picture a large equine
snorting in your face as he stamps on your foot. I'm a maverick professor,
teaching wack classes like story writing and horror literature. I turn my
grades in, but I read mystery novels at lunch. I meet my classes, but we
pool our still-alive dreams.
Somewhere in this Good & Crazy job track I stopped being so afraid of it.
Not so afraid. When my colleagues start working on me to stand for
department chair - well, first I plunge so hard and so far into a sabbatical
that it might be the end of the world. I drive four thousand miles by myself
and write much of an autobiography in paragraphs. I research more than I
did during grad school. And in between the two, attend my dad's last days.
Maybe his death broke the family mold. Maybe I just felt far enough behind
at last.
When people ask me about chairing, I say I'm doing it for my sins, and we all
laugh. Only I know I mean the sins of coward choices visited on me, the time
lost to fear and betrayal, to mind run wild against the death of hope. May it
not be so for you. May you practice what you love, for no one can fully
manifest the daemon horse without also manifesting Alec: the steady hand
on the hot, quivering neck, the whispered word of love that commands, the
bare heels dug in that say run now, run now.
Alec never even attempts to tame the Black, far from it. After years of
winning races, he and his horse get so bored they skip out in search of
wilder adventures.
Here I go --
lost time page two