The Work (as 2023 winds down)
This writing life has changed dramatically in recent years. Not long ago, I was reading one of my old blog posts titled “The Work,” from June 2015, and back then I was churning out this and that, taking on projects as fast as I could . . . Eight years later, things are quite different.
Last month, I finished the commissioned work Faith. Virtue. Wisdom. about Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School, and for the first time in twenty years, there is no other book project to move into or continue working on. From the time I started interviewing Clark Walker in January 2004 (for I Just Make People Up) until the release of Faith. Virtue. Wisdom. in October 2023, I have had at least one full-length book either in process or being promoted. What has been unusual for me about the Montgomery Catholic book is that it won’t require the traditional kind of promotion that commercial works need: author events, book signings, etc. The book was completed, was printed, and is being distributed by the school for its sesquicentennial. When we sent it to press, I was basically done.
Another significant change to the work has been the decision to close level:deepsouth. This was a tough thing to do, but I think made the right call. I wrote more about that in a post published last month. Its premise was one very close to my heart – growing up Generation X in the South – and the short version of this story is: the project had gone as far as it could go, but that wasn’t far enough. In the South, we have an old saying “You gotta fish or cut bait,” and it was time to cut bait.
However, despite those significant changes, some of the same work is still here: the Southern movies posts, coordinating the Fitzgerald Museum literary contests, and editing Nobody’s Home. For the first of those three ongoing projects, I recently published number 65 about the Civil Rights drama Nothing But a Man. I’ve been writing these posts since 2013, which means that I’ve published about seventy of them (including the samplers) over the last ten years. As for the Fitzgerald Museum’s contests, we just opened things up for submissions to the sixth annual Literary Contest, which accepts English-language submissions from students worldwide, and the fourth annual Zelda Award, which is for Alabama high school students. For the last of the three, I published a new batch of essays in Nobody’s Home in August, which constitutes the third expansion of the anthology. The original compilation was complete in 2021, and these expansions have come in 2022 and 2023. The anthology now has fifty-two essays to offer, and an invitation-only submissions period could add more to the anthology this fall. I also remain open to reading submissions of reviews or interviews year-round.
My teaching life has also changed dramatically. Teaching creative writing and English for nineteen years, while periodically also teaching classes in other settings, I was always writing a syllabus, planning a student project, trying to write a grant or fellowship application, re-reading works for an upcoming class, or grading papers. Since January, when I left our college’s English department to become the Academic Writing Advisor, that kind of work is no longer a mainstay of my time. Though working with students’ writing is still very much part of my job, it is done in a writing-center setting. Additionally, my class load is now comprised of first-year student success efforts. I teach three sections of a one-hour course whose goal is to acclimate new students to college life. There aren’t readings to review, though there is a little writing to grade. In that regard, I have been working with the writing of others for over twenty years, so the fundamentals aspects of my work have not changed. However, the way that I work and the context in which I work are very different.
One thing that remains constant, though, is my role as the advisor to a student-edited literary magazine. This aspect of my work as a writer, editor, and teacher is one that I thoroughly enjoy and had hoped to hold onto as I left a high school creative writing program and moved into a college. Starting in the Spring 2023 semester, I became the faculty advisor for Huntingdon College’s literary magazine The Prelude, which was founded in 1928. We recently got my second issue from press and have organized a staff for the next issue. I am particularly pleased and honored to take on this role, picking up where others have left off to maintain a tradition that has lasted almost a century. The Prelude has had among its past contributors Kathryn Tucker Windham, Harper Lee, Andrew Hudgins, and Jacqueline Trimble.
And with my newfound free time, I’ve been able to do something that vigorous writing and teaching schedules did not allow. I have time to read again! Recently, there have been James D. Kyrilo’s The Catholic Teacher and Jacques Maritain’s Christianity and Democracy. In the summer, I read William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Thomas McGuane’s Ninety-Two in the Shade, and Ernest Gaines’ Of Love and Dust. I’ve also written three book reviews for the Alabama Writers Forum this year: Freedom’s Dominion by historian Jefferson Cowie, Outside from the Inside by poet Anne Whitehouse, and Versions of May by poet Jim Murphy. For most of the last twenty years, my mind has been so wrapped up that there has been less little mental energy to just sit and read and enjoy it. It certainly has been nice.
A few people around me seem to wonder why I’m not interested in starting another book, but there’s nothing to worry about. I set out as a college student in the 1990s to “be a writer,” and as Henry Miller put it in Tropic of Cancer, now I am one. After writing or editing seven of my own books, publishing student-written books, creating a few curriculum guides, putting out more than twenty years’ worth of school literary magazines, helping other writers with various publications, and writing a slew of smaller things, I think it’s OK to take a minute and let it simmer. It’s not like I’m quitting— not hardly. There’s still plenty going on.
