Recently I decided to take early retirement from my job teaching creative writing at Massey University.
Why? I’d spent thirty years in the tertiary sector, first five years as an English tutor at the University of Auckland, then ten years tutoring Academic Writing at Massey’s Auckland campus, then a further fifteen years there as a Lecturer (then Senior Lecturer) in Creative Writing.
I used to think that long stretch of time working as a tutor marked me out as a bit of a loser – in Academic terms, at any rate. After all, the real achievers tend to get appointed straight out of graduate school. But now I’m not so sure.
All those years of classroom teaching, going over the same curriculum again and again, definitely taught me more than any of the students. I learned patience, for one thing: trying endlessly to find inventive ways of getting through to particular individuals.
It also revealed to me just how much I enjoyed meeting new people in such a context: a situation where we were all working together towards a common goal, and where the students were encouraged to express and expand upon their own ideas as fully and clearly as they could.
That’s the advantage of concentrating on process rather than content. It wasn’t up to me to teach them facts or opinions: just how to channel their own body of knowledge and present it in an intellectually cogent way.
And, of course, it had the by-product of forcing me to learn the same lesson. Up to then, I’d written much like other Academics: footnotes, jargon, more-or-less futile (or fertile) digressions … all the usual hallmarks. For the first time, after teaching writing courses for a living, I was forced to acknowledge just how unreadable most of what I’d been churning out actually was.
The shift up to lecturer came at a cost. I still did some classroom teaching, but increasingly less and less. Instead, my energies went largely into course and curriculum design.
There were a couple of major events during this period at Massey. First of all, the umbrella school which had covered most of the Humanities disciplines on our Auckland campus was dissolved into a series of splinter groups, each one linked to its parent school at Palmerston North.
In the case of English, this meant that for the first time I had actual colleagues, other people specialising in the Creative Writing discipline. This was a huge plus, and I’m still grateful that it came when it did, so early in my career as a lecturer.
Secondly, a rather arbitrary vote was taken one day at senior level to restrict the number of courses which could be offered in any particular BA major. This struck English hard, as we had vastly more courses than were allowed for in the new curriculum.
The solution we finally came up with, after much debate, was to split the subject of English down the middle into an ‘English Studies’ major and a ‘Creative Writing’ major, accompanied by two minors in Theatre and Rhetoric studies.
This bureaucratically driven decision created an opportunity for the four permanent Creative Writing staff (one in Auckland, two in Palmerston North, and one in Wellington) to construct a whole new major in our own discipline.
Such opportunities are rare, and – while obviously a good deal of horse trading had to take place to get any personal initiatives past the group as a whole – it was an immensely fruitful time, as we made plans which would affect our teaching for years to come.
I ended up designing a new
Advanced Fiction paper, while continuing to teach
Travel Writing and introductory
Creative Writing (Fiction and Poetry). It was really quite exciting, especially when combined with our growing graduate programme at Masters and Doctoral level.
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So why did I give it all up?
I remember once, when I was in the middle of planning a series of publications based on the collections in the
Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, which I’d helped Jan Kemp and a number of others compile in the early 2000s, taking a walk on North Head with poet (and fellow academic) Michele Leggott.
She listened to my tale of woe about the increasing amounts of acrimony and discord involved in the project, then outlined her theory of the lustrum.
A lustrum is the period of five years preceding a census in Ancient Rome. Michele thought that that should be about the effective length of a creative project. Sometimes they have to be renewed for another five years, but it’s best to concentrate on the limits in everything.
I’ve thought of that conversation often: a certain amount of time spent
translating Paul Celan; a certain amount of time working on
New Zealand Science Fiction; a certain period of time spent editing
Poetry New Zealand (after similar stints working on
brief,
the pander,
Spin, and various other journals).
These projects worked well for me because they were bounded. I could happily lavish the whole of my energy on them because I knew that it wasn’t forever, that there was a solid substratum of day-to-day work on reading and writing poetry, fiction and essays, which would continue for me in any case.
Those core activities were sometimes compromised by the demands of these projects, but (by and large) shifting from one project to another has a way of helping you with both in the long run.
I suppose, in a nutshell, that was my reason for quitting Academia. I was no longer doing much of the face-to-face teaching which was my favourite part, and the fascinating work of curriculum design was now largely complete. Now it just remained to keep on teaching the same courses over and over again – with as many tweaks and rewrites as could be conveniently shoehorned into summer vacation.
If I’d aspired to move higher in the hierarchy, to shape the way the University and College themselves were going, it might have been different. But that is, I’m afraid, not my bliss. What I really like is to sit as I’m doing now, tapping away on a keyboard, and trying to get closer to that elusive meaning hovering behind each screen of words.
somehow never wrote something to go back to.[1]
That was Robert Lowell’s late verdict on his own body of work. Naturally I don’t agree with him. I keep going back to his certain of his poems and books again and again, but I can understand why he thought so.
The point is that he kept on writing. That last book of his,
Day by Day, is one that grows on you. It evades the – in retrospect, shallower – rhetorical triumphs of much of his earlier work in favour of a deliberately downbeat, unresonant sadness.
Is it his best work? Who can say? You could almost make a rule that your best work is always the next one, the one still in prospect, because it hasn’t yet taken shape, because it still possesses so many possibilities, before being condemned into actual existence.
I’ll never regret spending so much time in Academia, but a whole pile of lustra have come and gone since I started there (especially if you count a decade of undergraduate and graduate study), and I find now that I want to change gear, lose that slightly absurd air of authority you’re forced to assume while teaching, in favour of sitting here alone with nothing solid to guide me.
It feels terrifying. That’s why I know it’s probably right.
Notes:
1. Robert Lowell, ‘Reading Myself.’ In
Collected Poems. Ed. Frank Bidart & David Gewanter, with DeSales Harrison (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003): 591.
