pep talk from the professoressa
Sunday 1 April 2007 | someone left a cookie
It was in my last year at the Posh Women’s College, and I don’t remember what we were talking about but I do remember what she said last—quite simply: “You already know all this. But if you need me to remind you of it for the rest of our lives, I don’t mind doing that.”
So with my brain tied into a tight slipless knot, I called her to be reminded once more. We talked for an hour and a half, with lots of laughing and me half in tears more than once, and she kept her old promise, reminding me of who I am, making the crooked straight and the rough places plain.
“It’s not like you’re 19 and we’re talking about what you could be,” she said practically. “You’re 38 and you know what you are. All you have to do is honor that. And now I’m going to do what I shouldn’t do, and be directive—”
“Please,” I begged her.
“—and say that you’re a writer. A real writer. And the point of your going back to grad school, as I understand it, is to have health insurance and time to write. Now I wanted you to go to Hawaii at first, because I wanted to come visit and sleep on your floor—”
“Yeah, everyone’s been saying that.”
“—but frankly, the thought of you teaching two sections of comp a semester makes my hair curl.”
“Mine too. And we look much better with straight hair.”
“From what you’ve told me, Hawaii is training people to be academics, and not just any kind of academic—they’re training people to run the first-year writing center. And we need that desperately. But that’s not what you are.”
“I wish I were that.”
“NO, you DON’T.” Pause during which she removes some of the sharpness from her voice. “Why do you want a PhD anyway?”
“Um, would you buy, it’ll give me a spurious legitimacy?”
“But what do you really want to do afterward?”
“Go back to freelancing—but be more successful at it. Be able to do it from Mexico. Travel. I don’t really want to teach—I’m horrified at the thought of those MLA revolving-hotel-door interviews, competing just so I can land a job as the head of rhetoric at Midwestern State.”
“You think the MLA interviews would be the end of it? That would just be the beginning. Then there’s tenure—you’d be jumping through hoops until you turned 50.” We’re silent for a moment, contemplating the jarring truth of this statement.
“You’ve always been on the fringes of the academy,” she began again, more slowly. “And you always will be. That’s a tricky place to be. But it’s your place.”
“I wouldn’t mind teaching for a year at a time, poet-in-residence kind of thing.”
“Exactly, but you might not ever be on a faculty. And even if you do, an MFA is fine. Bonnie has an MFA. Margo has an MFA. I don’t know what Mary Jo has—”
“Mary Jo has what I have, the Cambridge MA.”
“And Brad has a law degree, for crying out loud. So an MFA is fine.”
“And also, I want to learn how to write a certain kind of poem I don’t even know how to read, much less write.”
“What kind is that?”
“I guess—non-narrative? or language? I mean, I was trained in new formalism before I even knew what—and at Boston, all we ever studied was the poem where the story was as important or more important than the language. I can’t understand half of what I read now and I don’t want to have that avenue closed off to me. Maybe I’d just go back to writing narrative poems, but I’d at least like to understand the other kind, really understand them. It’s like there’s a whole register of the piano where I don’t know how to play.”
We pore over this animatedly for half-an-hour, with reference to the Parisienne (”and I can’t even give her feedback any more because I don’t know what the poems are trying to do—it’s like they’re reptilian or insectoid, not mammalian, they have no limbic system, and their motives and goals are in an alien language, and I can’t even understand it much less help, and I feel so limited”) and her former partner (”I always used to be her first reader, and now I tell her, you started writing poetry for other poets and stopped writing for people like me, poetry’s about communicating something, and she says no, poetry’s only about expressing something”) until eventually we subside.
“So health insurance, time to write—and a smart person with whom you can study this.”
I name the professors at Hawaii, at Tucson. “I don’t know who’s at the State School.”
“If you’re in Arizona, you’re only an hour from the border—you could spend all your breaks in Mexico working on your Spanish. One problem with Hawaii is that it takes a lot of money to leave, once you’re there. It can be kind of claustrophobic.”
Suddenly I feel a surge of attraction toward Arizona so strong I think I’ll weep. “But I can’t get Tucson to make me an offer!”
“So first sit down with a piece of paper and be realistic. Figure out how much you need to live on, and whether Hawaii’s offer will give you enough to get by anyway. I told C. how much they offered you and the first thing she said was, ‘She’ll starve.’ Then figure out how much or how little you’d need to live in Arizona and think about whether you can get that out of them. You have to have at least a tuition waiver, and they’ll want you to do something for that. Find out what it is—some teaching is okay, maybe a class a semester. The problem with Hawaii is that the balance is wrong—they want you doing stuff for them about two-thirds of the time, and working on your writing only about one-third. It should be the other way around! Stall with them—just don’t tell them anything. If this time next week, Tucson still hasn’t made you an offer, then you can rethink all this.”
I feel like wringing her hands with gratitude. “P., I don’t know what to say.”
She laughs on the other end of the line. “I’m just thrilled that you have these options, that you got into so many places—five out of seven. Tee-hee! And it was all my letter of reference—it was a magnificent letter, the best I’ve ever written.” She beams quietly to herself for a moment, musing happily on her epistolary tour de force. “When you finally pick your school, I’ll send it to you and you can frame it.”
We go on to other topics—the book manuscript she’s finishing, which she as usual won’t show to anyone; whether I’ll be her literary executor; and whether her hundreds of journals should be burnt or go to the Posh Women’s College when she dies (”Archives. Definitely.” “—You said that too fast!”) and we laugh and laugh, me with undisguised relief, her with the natural sunniness she’s achieved with years of practice.
And now I wonder—to what lengths should I go to extract a TA from Tucson? An emergency drive to Arizona? I could sit in the department hallway and say, I will not let thee go except thou bless me. Or should I just take the State School’s offer and hope that one or two of their highly, shall we say, eccentric poets has something s/he can teach me about how to read and write that poem? Maybe a visit there would help too, to check the faculty out in person.
Anyone want to go on a hasty midweek road trip?
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Oh how I wish I could. For all the time I’ve spent in Arizona…but vacation time is tight in these parts and I don’t think my immediate family would be happy to see me leave again quite so soon after returning from MA. I am (once more) so glad you have the P; the lady talks a lot of sense.