I’m almost positive at this point that I did not get in to the PhD program at OU, the only school to which I applied this year. I knew already that my chances were slim, but with every day that passes and I hear nothing, it’s more and more likely that I’m going to get a form rejection in the mail in a week or two. I know that the OU faculty usually makes their decisions by the end of February, and I know, also, that if you get in, you hear right away, but if you don’t, you hear much later.

I’m incredibly disappointed. I felt like OU was my best chance to get a PhD, for a number of reasons. If I can’t get in here, I don’t think I can get in anywhere.

So who cares, you might be wondering. It’s not like a PhD would have guaranteed me a tenure-track job. True. But aside from the fact that the main reason I wanted to go back to school was simply because I want to be back in school—I like school—I think the MFA is on its way out as a terminal degree.

Because I’ve been realizing I won’t get in to OU, I’ve been frantically looking for jobs that I can apply for. I should have done this in the fall, but I was so overwhelmed with other things, I just never got around to it. At this point, there are few positions that have yet to be filled. There are some, though, and I’ve been pouring over each one that I find, feeling my heart sink a little bit more each time I see PhD listed as a preferred degree, if not required. Many of these are community college jobs, non-tenure-track. Still, still they prefer candidates to have a PhD.  It doesn’t mean I can’t apply, but it DOES mean it’s unlikely my application will be taken too seriously.

In this job search, I haven’t found a single position that doesn’t at least list a PhD as preferred. Not a single one. In the past, I’ve found a handful, but it’s rare. Colleges and universities, it seems, are considering MFA’s only when they have to anymore. Enough people have PhD’s that they don’t really need to accept a master’s degree as terminal. As much as I’d like to say it isn’t fair, I know that, all other things equal—and they often will be—it makes perfect sense to want to hire the person with the highest level of education.

So I’m finding myself feeling kind of stuck. Even if I find a job now with my MFA, it seems unlikely that I’ll be able to move up to anything more permanent without a PhD. I suspect within five years or so, MFA’s won’t be considered terminal at all. Yet the school I felt I had the best chance of getting into doesn’t want me.

So what do I do? I don’t know. Apply for the few jobs for which I’m qualified, I guess, and hope for the best. And in a few years, when my degree isn’t enough to qualify me for any jobs? I really don’t know yet. I’m going to have to really evaluate my career prospects and figure out the right path, and soon.

I feel like I post a lot complaining about the woes of academia, especially teaching adjunct. This, I promise, will not be one of those times.

For the past three years or so—pretty much ever since I graduated with my MFA and realized that the best job I could hope to get with the degree was part-time, adjunct work that offers no benefits or stability—I’ve been seriously considering switching careers and becoming a librarian. In fact, as recently as this past April, I was talking to some of the professors at the Columbus campus of the Kent State MLIS program and making plans to start in the program with a GA this coming fall.

But. I backed out. Because Columbus is an hour and a half drive from Athens, where I live. Because the GA position would require me to be on campus four days a week. Because it paid even less than teaching adjunct does, and I can’t afford to put Ami into daycare (nor do I really want to, to be honest) as it is.

At least, those are the reasons I told myself at the time. The real reason I changed my mind and instead signed up to teach classes in the fall at the community college where I work is that, somewhere deep down inside me, I’d rather teach.

There are a lot of things that are frustrating about carving out a career for yourself as a college instructor. Teaching adjunct pays abominably and you never know, from semester to semester, how many classes you’ll be offered (or whether the classes you did get will get cancelled due to under-enrollment just before the semester begins). Landing a full-time professor job feels impossible at times. I used to think I just needed to publish a book, but the truth is, even with a book published, I’m still not even getting contacted for interviews, let alone being offered any positions. And even if I did land a full-time job, there are frustrating things about that too. Professors are expected to publish regularly—you know, the “publish or die” mentality we always hear about—and to be honest, trying to get published and dealing with rejection is hard enough without my career hanging in the balance. Plus, I always hear professors objecting to the amount of time they have during the school year to actually write, between classes and committee work and editorial duties for their school’s journal and reading student theses and, and, and . . .

But the truth is, for a writer, teaching is about the best gig I can imagine. Even now, as I teach adjunct, I feel really lucky when I consider the alternative possibilities. Teaching creative writing, for one thing, holds you accountable to be writing yourself—otherwise, you feel like a fraud (Amy Hempl pointed this out when she was here for this year’s Lit Fest. She is so right!). It also makes you feel really inspired. Teaching comp and other English courses also has its benefits. Believe it or not, you learn a lot from your students and from trying to teach them the things you know but sometimes forget to apply to your own work.

Aside from the benefits of teaching itself, being a teacher does afford you a lot of time to write and, in my case, time to be home with your child and be there with her as she grows up. I taught online for the first nine months of Ami’s life. I can’t think of another career that would have allowed me to work entirely from home while I was raising my baby. Starting this summer, I began commuting back to campus one day a week, which I’ll continue doing through the fall. A job that only requires me to physically come in to work one day a week, well that’s pretty awesome, don’t you think?

Teaching three or so classes at a time leaves me with plenty of time to write. Yeah, I get that if I had a full-time job, I’d have a lot of additional demands beyond simply teaching, but even in that case, you get the summers and most of the winters off. Who can reasonably complain about having three months off every single year (and if you have tenure, an entire year off for sabbatical every seven years)? Full-timers have plenty of time to write. You could easily write a full draft of an entire book every summer, if you wanted to. If I was a librarian, I would have to work year-round, and I would have way less time to write, as a result.

So in spite of all my bitching and my “grass is greener” nonsense, I’m really lucky to be in the field I’m in. Teaching is the perfect profession for a writer, at least for me. I hope, of course, to someday land a full-time job, to buy a home with a yard and a swing set for Amalie, to plant ourselves somewhere and just live there, period, but in the meantime, teaching adjunct isn’t so bad. I’m glad I’m a teacher—I’m going to go ahead and say it. And here it is, in writing, so the next time I start getting all wishy washy about what I want to do with my life, someone can point me to this blog post right here and remind me how lucky I truly am.

First of all, some news: my book is now available in Kindle format! I couldn’t be more thrilled that the publisher decided to make it available for Kindle. If nothing else, it allows people who might be somewhat interested in reading the book the chance to read a sample before purchasing it. Plus, the Kindle price is much lower. Readers who might be hesitant about spending $17.95 on a book by an unknown author might be much more willing to take the gamble for $9.99.

Now on to what I want to talk about this week. It’s almost time for summer break here—summer break, for me, means one week between the end of spring quarter and the beginning of summer quarter, during which time I have to prepare the Blackboard course for my summer class—and I’ve been excitedly planning my summer writing projects. I haven’t been able to get anywhere near as much writing done as I would have liked for the past year, but the older Amalie gets, the easier it is to get things done around her. On top of that, I’m only teaching one class over the summer, and it’s a creative writing class. I expect to have plenty of time in which to write, and that’s exactly what I plan to do.

Here are my goals for this summer:

1.      I’m going to complete the first draft of a middle grade children’s novel, of which I currently have about half written. This, I decided, is the main writing project I want to be focusing on right now. I talked a few weeks ago about how leapfrogging from project to project was preventing me from really getting anything done, and how I needed to pick one project to just finish, for cripe’s sake. Well this is the project I’ve settled on.

2.      Once I’ve finished the first draft of that novel, which will probably take me no more than a month, I want to write a first draft of the much shorter children’s book I’m collaborating on with my mom. My mom is a scratchboard artist, and she’s creating the illustrations for a children’s story that I’m going to write. We agreed on this a couple of years ago—but I’ve been slacking in my duties. She’s already completed several scratchboard paintings for the book. I’m going to use the paintings she’s already created as inspiration to write the story. We don’t know if we’ll be able to find a publisher for the book once it’s finished, but it’s an incredibly fun project and worth spending time on, nonetheless. Plus, I sort of think we might be able to do a show in a gallery even if it doesn’t end up getting published, or we can create copies of the book ourselves and sell them as art-chapbooks (I learned how to make those in a workshop while I was getting my MFA).

3.      In addition to those two main projects, I want to work on some stories. I have, at present, five stories I’m sending around. I have three more stories in draft form that I’d like to revise and start sending out, and three more half-written drafts of stories that I feel really excited about and would like to finish. I won’t set a concrete goal in terms of stories, but I will say that by the end of the summer I’d like to have a few more stories in circulation, and ideally, I’d like to have complete drafts of the three half-written stories I believe are so promising.

In the house across the street from mine lives a small family—a mother, a father, and maybe two or three kids. They have a swingset in their yard, and now that the weather is warm and beautiful, you often see one or two girls swinging away. It reminds me of how much I loved to swing when I was a kid—well, I still love swinging, to be honest. When I was little, I’d spend hours, HOURS, on the swingset in our backyard. I used to bring my little portable CD player out with me and listen to music and swing until either A) a bee would come by and scare me back inside, or B) my mom would call me in for dinner.

Now, I am thirty-one years old. My hair is turning white, one long, wispy strand at a time. I am a mother, a wife, a college instructor. Strange though it seems, I am a grown-up. I’m not sure when that happened, but somewhere along the line, when I was looking the other way, I guess, I passed through childhood, through young adulthood, and ended up here.

As you may have noticed from last week’s post, I’ve been feeling a bit depressed lately about my prospects as a writer/college instructor. These things didn’t bother me that much before I had a baby, but now, at times, I’m completely consumed by my desire to publish more, land a decent job, and generally find a bit of stability for myself and my family. I feel frustrated that my daughter won’t get to grow up with a nice backyard and a swingset, like I did. I feel frustrated that every summer, we don’t even make enough money to cover our basic living expenses (true story: the summer I signed my book contract, we DESPERATELY needed the money I got for my advance. I honestly don’t know what we would have done if that bit of luck hadn’t happened at just the right time. We would have emptied out our savings account well before the end of the summer).

I think to some extent, having published my first book a little over a year ago adds to these feelings. When I first found out I was getting the book published, I thought it was going to create a sort of domino effect for my career. I imagined I could use the fact that I was getting one book published as leverage to get an agent and publish another. Then, with two published books and an agent, I would go out and land myself a full time job, which would afford me a stable enough income that I could write more and more books without the distraction of worrying about money all the time or having to work during the summer.

Of course, that isn’t what happened. It’s hard to say whether having a book published already made any difference when I was querying agents last time around. It may have—at least one agent told me my credentials were “impressive”—but I probably got about the same average of manuscript requests as I did when I was querying agents without a published book under my belt, and,  just like before, all of those still ended in eventual rejection.

And the more time that passes since my book’s publication date, the more I think prospective agents, editors, and employers alike are going to ask, “Alright, but what have you done lately?” I have this overwhelming fear that if I don’t publish another book in the next couple of years, having published a book won’t really matter at all anymore—in terms of being a stepping stone for my career, anyway. If you don’t keep steadily climbing higher on the ladder, the rungs get too slippery and you fall clear off.

But who knows? Maybe I’ll be able to pull myself back onto the ladder. I haven’t fallen off yet, I don’t think. Right now, I’m just sort of dangling, looking down and up and back down again, trying to find some way to regain my purchase. I’ve been writing again, and that’s a good first step. I’ve started submitting again, too: ten submissions a month, just like I used to do. I’m very, very seriously considering applying for PhD programs, and I’m even thinking about trying to get a seat in a graduate level workshop at Ohio University (since Damien’s an employee, I can take classes for half-tuition). Whatever happens, I’m going to try not to let these feelings of failure get the better of me. There is still hope, isn’t there? There is always still hope.

Last year, I got back from AWP to find, in my stack of mail, a manuscript request from an agent. His eventual rejection of my novel pointed out that I had “impressive credentials.” This year, I returned from AWP to a form rejection for a job. These facts pretty much sum up the difference between how I felt about having a published book a year ago—hopeful, confident that it somehow mattered—and how I feel about it now.

One rejection from a job isn’t such a big deal, you’re right, but I haven’t even landed a single interview, not even for the jobs I would have otherwise thought I’m well qualified for. I’ve heard that the job market for fiction professors is particularly competitive, that many of the applicants have multiple books published by major presses, have appeared in Best American and the Pushcart anthologies, and have logged a few years of Visiting Writer experience. They are, you see, much farther along in their careers than someone like me, who has only one measly book and has been teaching adjunct at a community college for the past three years.

And the thing is, I know, I guess I’ve known for a while, that the standard route is to apply for Visiting Writer positions (the full year stints) after publishing a first book but before applying for full time jobs. A few years of Visiting Writer gigs allows you to fill out your CV a bit while buying yourself time to get a second or maybe even third book out there. But I have a small child to take care of. I can’t move my family from place to place every year—I want my daughter to grow up in a more stable environment. On top of that, I’m in my freakin’ thirties, for cripe’s sake. I’m starting to feel a bit old to be cobbling together part time work and temporary positions.

So this all raises the question, why am I wasting my time in a field where I’ll be struggling paycheck to paycheck for most of my life? Why am I so keen to stay in a field where an entry level position is a part time job at a lousy salary, a field where it will take years of hard work and perseverance to get to a point where I can actually do more than just scrape by? I get enough rejection from the actual publishing side of being a writer. Do I really want to stay in a career where I get rejected from having a decent job too?

The job prospects for the other field I’m interested in—children’s librarianship—aren’t much better. The children’s librarian at our local library only works part time, too, and when I asked her a while ago for advice on entering into the field, she warned me that the pay is low and the jobs, hard to come by.

Great.

What am I doing with my life?

I don’t know. Maybe I’m asking too much. Damien has a good part time job as the Managing Editor of New Ohio Review. He has benefits, and though he doesn’t make much money, between the two of us, we can teach enough classes as adjuncts to bring in the extra we need to pay the bills and feed our child. Maybe I should just be happy with what we’ve got and feel lucky we’ve got the degrees and experience to have jobs at all, no matter how unreliable.

Still, it’s so depressing to think that our daughter is growing up in a family where neither parent has a full time job. Are we setting a bad example for Amalie? Should we give up and go out and get office jobs? I couldn’t tell you. I really don’t know.

I talked last week about the great MFA/PhD debate, and came to the conclusion that it probably doesn’t make a whole lot of difference in the end, as long as you have a great publication history and lots of teaching experience. I do think that some schools probably lean more towards one degree or the other, and of those schools, there are probably more that lean towards the PhD than the MFA. Still, I don’t believe the two degrees are very different from each other (depending, of course, on the specific requirements of the specific program you attend), and I’d like to give the English professors who make up hiring committees enough credit to assume they’re aware of that and that they don’t put much weight on which degree you have, as long as you have a terminal degree.

However, there is another type of PhD that is a different beast altogether: the lit PhD. Now while a creative writing PhD is not much different than a creative writing MFA (depending, again, on the specific program), a lit PhD, naturally, is very different from both. You have to write a critical dissertation—a lengthy, scholarly work that requires a lot of research and a thorough understanding of the criticism that has been published about your topic prior to your dissertation. (It is, in fact, the difference between dissertations that causes some scholars to doubt the validity of the creative writing PhD. A PhD, in most people’s eyes, is an advanced research degree. If you don’t have to write a dissertation dependent on research, many people feel the degree you earn shouldn’t be called a PhD.)

Now if the question is, What will help me land a job,, a creative PhD or an MFA? I would guess it doesn’t make much difference either way. But if you want to know, What will help me land a job, a creative PhD or MFA, or an MFA and a lit PhD? I’d have to guess that the latter option is going to make you stand way apart from both the MFA and creative PhD job candidates. Yes, if you want to be a creative writing professor, you need a creative writing degree, but if you want to make yourself really marketable, an MFA and a lit PhD is probably the best way to go.

I’ve been noticing as I’ve been perusing AWP’s Job List the past few months that most full-time, English faculty positions—and mind you, I’ve only been looking in the “general creative writing” and “fiction” categories—state that what they really want is someone who can do more than one thing. Some of them want creative writers who are prolific in more than one genre (many specify that they want someone who can teach screenwriting or non-fiction as well as their main genre), while others want somebody who can also teach advanced lit courses (many specify exactly what type of lit they’re looking for, and I was pleased to see that children’s lit, the focus I would want to go for if I ever did decide to try for a PhD, often made the list).

Lots of people have MFA’s and lots of people have creative writing PhD’s; fewer people, I think, have an MFA and a lit PhD. That’s certainly not to say it’s unheard of—in fact, many professors that I’ve met who currently teach in graduate level creative writing programs hold an MFA and a lit PhD. But I think people who hold an MFA and a lit PhD are less common than the droves of job candidates who just have a terminal degree in creative writing, be it MFA or PhD. It makes sense to me that the people who have a terminal degree in creative writing and a terminal degree in lit are going to stand out from the pack.

This is not to say that only having a terminal degree in creative writing is a death sentence (I certainly hope not, since that’s the only degree I’ve got). All I’m saying is that it’s hard out there. It’s really, really competitive. For every one open full-time position, hundreds of qualified people apply. Being able to land a job in this field requires more than just that you meet the base level requirements and are a good teacher. Most everybody applying for the job can say those two things about themselves, so in order to get to the interview stage, you’ve got to find some way to stand out.

Crazy success in the publishing world is the best way to do that; having several years of teaching experience, especially having taught a variety of different courses, also helps. If you don’t have both of those two things, you probably won’t stand a chance of landing a good, full-time job, unless you just happen to get lucky. But assuming you’ve got those first two taken care of, being capable of teaching advanced level lit courses as well as your creative writing genre certainly couldn’t hurt. I’m sure if you’ve got the first two categories and the third, you’ll stand out from the creative writing PhD’s, who have a much broader education in lit with no specialization. Those people can teach lit courses, as can an MFA, but the person with the lit PhD can teach way more advanced and specialized lit courses, and, as a result, has that much more to offer.

The issue of the difference between an MFA and a PhD with a creative dissertation is once again at the front of my mind. Many of my husband Damien’s fellow MA students at Ohio University have decided to go on to PhD programs after they graduate, while Damien has decided to go the MFA route. Having watched me earn my MFA and get a book published shortly thereafter, yet still be in a position where I haven’t found a full time job, Damien finds himself, I think, worrying about the value of the degree once he earns it. Is he making the right choice? Should he, instead, have applied to PhD programs like so many of his colleagues decided to do?

I’ve been looking around at various blogs and articles where people tackle this issue, and I’ve also, in my own quest to find the answer when I was trying to decide whether I should try to earn a PhD, compared degree requirements for specific programs, but a concrete answer to the question sill eludes me. One thing I have noticed for certain is that people who seem really adamant about one side of the issue or the other appear (to me) to be suffering from cognitive dissonance, where they are trying to justify whichever choice they themselves have made.

People who have gone the PhD route, for example, often swear that hiring committees prefer PhD candidates over MFA’s, yet if you look at job postings, hardly any creative writing positions seem to distinguish at all between MFA’s and PhD’s. People who have gone the MFA route, on the other hand, often suggest that MFA’s are more valuable because they are more prestigious (especially if you go to a highly ranked school) and the degree focuses more on writing than on literature, but I’m not sure I buy that, either.

Indeed, both PhD proponents and MFA proponents alike agree that the difference between the two degrees is that a PhD offers you a more scholarly, literature focused education, whereas an MFA is really just about writing. Having earned an MFA myself, I have to say I think this distinction is inaccurate. In my MFA program, we had to take several literature courses, and we had to take a comprehensive exam, as well. In fact, the requirements to earn my MFA degree were pretty much the same as the requirements to earn a PhD at many schools: you take some creative writing courses, tons of lit courses, and a comprehensive exam, and at the end of it you have to have completed a book length work that your committee deems of publishable quality.

There are only three real differences between my MFA and many PhD programs that I can see: most PhD programs require that you write some sort of scholarly supplement to your creative dissertation, most PhD programs require that you are fluent in at least one foreign language, and most PhD programs give you an extra year or two to write your book (while MFA programs require you to do all the coursework, take the exam, and write a full book at the same time, usually in a period of three years). Those differences seem pretty slight to me, and it doesn’t really seem like one degree has much intrinsic value over the other—the question, though, of whether one looks better on your CV than the other doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the two degrees’ intrinsic value, though, so perhaps that’s all beside the point.

However, I think most hiring committees know that there isn’t really much difference between the two degrees, although I’m sure it’s true that some places lean more towards one or the other. In fact, I know that some MFA programs are most interested in having MFA’s teach for them because they don’t want to call their own degree into question. I imagine the same might be true for PhD hiring committees. And some places might figure it just looks better in general to have a doctorate over a master’s degree. Even so, when you look at job postings, creative writing faculty positions—whether for the graduate or undergraduate level—tend to make no clear distinction between the two degrees. What they seem most interested in is years of teaching experience and publication credits. Many of them require that you have at least one book published, whether you have an MFA or a PhD, and many of them are looking for people with a lot of experience teaching college English.

And it’s the experience issue, actually, that I think is causing the confusion over which degree hiring committees are generally looking for. If you compare two job candidates, both who just graduated from their respective programs, there will be a distinct difference in amount of experience between the MFA, who was probably only in school for three years, and the PhD, who probably went through a master’s program for a couple of years first, then spent four or five years in his or her PhD program. That means that if you’re just comparing fresh graduates, the PhD will have six or seven years teaching experience, while the MFA will only have three. That probably is something that will make the committees pay extra attention to the PhD.

However, this is kind of an unfair comparison. The person who earned his or her MFA can just as easily teach adjunct for those extra three or four years to build those teaching credentials, and will probably, at that point, be just as hirable as the new PhD graduate. Time-wise, there was actually no difference; both candidates took six or seven years to build up their CV’s. Financially, one or the other may have been living more comfortably during that extra three or four years, depending on how many classes the post-MFA adjunct was able to land per semester, and depending on what kind of stipend the PhD student earned. Either way, the two options are pretty comparable, if you ask me.

So then the most important factor in who is going to get hired seems to be publication credits, and for that, it really doesn’t matter whether you have an MFA or a PhD. All that matters is that your writing is good, you’re doing a lot of it, and you’re persevering and sending a lot of stuff out there. There are all kinds of other variables, too, which can make or break your chances at getting a job, none of which have anything to do with which degree you earned.

So it seems to me that it just doesn’t matter. Go to the program that seems to suit you the best. Go to the place where the faculty consists of writers you admire, or the place that offers you the best funding, or the place that seems to have the course offering that best matches your interests, or the place where you’ll be able to work for a good literary journal.

Whether you earn an MFA or a PhD, landing a tenure-track job is going to be very difficult. It’s competitive out there, and it seems that what matters more than anything is that you get a lot of teaching experience under your belt and that you publish. A lot. Preferably in big name venues and preferably at least one full book. I would worry way more about those things than which degree to earn. As long as you have a terminal degree, you’ve got the base credentials. Think about it, the degree itself is just one tiny part of your CV, and every single applicant will have one or the other of the two degrees. It’s the rest of your CV, really, that will allow you to set yourself apart from the other applicants.

Since my husband Damien is in the final year of his MA program at Ohio University, his thoughts are turning more and more towards his thesis, while our collective thoughts as a couple are focusing in on what we will do next year, after he graduates. Now that I have a book coming out, my friends and colleagues are urging me to begin applying for full-time teaching positions. After all, when I graduated with my MFA, I told myself that I just needed to teach adjunct for a few years, that once I got a book published I would surely be able to land a full-time job somewhere.

The things is, though, that I didn’t really expect it to happen so soon. I always thought that I would be something like, say, five years out of my MFA program before I finally got a book published, and by then I would have built up five years of experience and miscellaneous CV credits to really make myself a strong candidate for a full-time position. The book contract came so quickly—which is a good thing, don’t get me wrong—but now I don’t really know that I’ll stand much of a chance of landing a full-time job just yet. Right now I’m only one year out of my degree program. I have only one year’s worth of adjunct experience to add to my TA experience. Publication-wise, I think my CV looks pretty good. Otherwise, though . . . I’m not so sure.

And on top of that, I’ve learned a lot about my limitations as a teacher this past year. At the risk of sounding a bit over-confident, I think I’m a pretty good teacher—and I enjoy it—but I also love my writing time and am not willing to give that up in order to have full-time teaching work. I’ve found that my limit is three, or maybe four, courses at a time. I taught four last spring and was overwhelmed with all the grading—I can’t even imagine trying to teach five. And while four was possible—obviously, I managed it just fine—I hardly wrote at all last spring. I was just too busy. I always had several stacks of paper that needed grading, several student emails to respond to.

I do think that four classes on the quarter system is more time consuming than four on the semester system, because the quarter system involves the same amount of work but compresses it down into ten weeks (and then makes you do it three times for every two on the semester system), so I feel certain I could teach up to four classes on the semester system and still find time to write. Four classes maximum, absolutely no more.

Now I know that a lot of teacher/writers simply accept that they won’t have time to write during the school year; instead, they get a lot of work done during the winter and summer. But that’s just not the way I work. I like to keep a steady momentum going. I like to always be working on something, to have at least an hour or so to devote to my writing every single day. And I’ve found from experience that if I’m teaching more than three courses at a time, I have no choice but to push my writing to the side.

And so. What does that mean about my career as a college English instructor? Well, most full-time, creative writing positions don’t require more than two or three classes at a time. They have other requirements, of course, but those don’t bother me. I believe I can easily manage teaching three or four courses, plus all the other faculty duties and still have enough creative energy left in my brain to write every day. Teaching and other duties and creative writing are all different things, and I think I can fit a moderate amount of each on my plate at one time. I don’t think I can fit five classes, plus other faculty duties, plus creative writing on my plate, though. That’s too much.

But. The problem is, many professors had to put in their ten or fifteen years of a five/five comp teaching load before they were competitive as creative writing professors. It’s not that I dislike comp, or that I think I will someday find a job where I don’t have to teach comp (I expect comp will always be required, and I really enjoy the variety of students you get to work with in a comp class). It’s the five/five load that is the problem.

I’ve decided—and I hope this doesn’t sound bratty or naïve—that if my choices are teach a five/five load for ten years before I can finally land a good creative writing, three/three position, or stop being a teacher, my decision is that I will stop being a teacher. I will not continue in a career that forces me to push my creative writing to the back burner for several years as I slave away teaching five classes per semester.

I am going to apply for some full-time jobs for next year. I would love to continue in this field and am hoping that, with my book deal and what CV credits I do have so far, I might get lucky and find a job that affords me time to write on the side. However, as an alternate plan, I’m also going to apply for a few Masters in Library Science programs for next year.

I sat down for a chat with the local children’s librarian here in Athens—I’m interested, particularly, in becoming a children’s librarian if teaching doesn’t work out—and based on what she told me, I think I would absolutely love this field. I’m passionate about children’s literature, about fighting censorship, and about working with kids. Everything about the job seems perfect for me, and I think that, because my day-to-day duties as a librarian would rely on a completely different part of my brain than my creative writing does, I wouldn’t find it very difficult to write on the side.

So that’s where I’m at right now. I want to be a writer primarily, or at least keep writing on the same level as whatever day-job I work. If that means I can be a college English instructor, that will be great. But if I can’t find a teaching position that actually allows me to put equal focus on my career as a writer, then I think I’ll try to be a librarian instead. It’s as simple as that. I will give up teaching before I give up writing.