In addition to the academic work I’ve done and might yet post to this webspace, as I’ve noted, I’ve spent a fair bit of time writing less formal essays and poetry in other venues. I’ve also tried my hand at serial narration in this webspace, though that has not gone nearly as well as I would have liked. (There are reasons I abandoned the projects when and where I did. Some of them are even good ones.) I keep them in other places for reasons that must remain private for the moment, but I do toy with the idea, now and again, of sending them out for formal publication. I do still flirt with the idea of seeing my name in print, on the spines of books that other people read, even if there is much in me that hesitates to send ideas out into the world in ways they might actually be rejected.

I am a coward, I know. The worst that can happen with a rejection is the rejection; it’s not money out of my pocket, in the main, and it’s certainly not a punch in the face or a kick to the ribs–or lower yet. I’ve suffered such any number of times, sometimes even undeservedly so, so I ought to be glad of a simple “no” instead of a more emphatic iteration. Still, the “no” scares me more than it ought to, and I seem less able to move past it than ought to be the case. I expect my students to persevere; I ought to demand no less of myself. And I’ve knocked until my knuckles have bled before…

I can easily come up with reasons not to send things out. Some of them would even sound good. But they would be excuses, ultimately, ways to talk myself out of making an attempt that might not succeed. The idea of being rejected is an uncomfortable one, even if it is one I know I must contend with (again; I’ve had papers handed back with “nos” of varying friendliness). I try to avoid it; not being rejected has occupied more of my time than actually doing something that might be rejected–or accepted. But as long as I am not told “no,” I do not have to confront the idea that I have somehow failed (again; it would not be the first time I’ve failed, as I think has been made abundantly clear in this webspace and elsewhere). I do not have to face evidence of my own unworth.

Really, though, I need to get over myself. I cannot not write the words; I am compelled to it, and I grow even more irritable than I normally am when I do not heed that compulsion. And since I am going to write them, and since I put enough of them where others can see them anyway, why would I not see about gathering enough of them together (and there are enough such out in the world) and trying to make a sale of some of them?

Help a writer out?

One of the things I missed about the Texas Hill Country while I lived away from it was wildflower season. I had spent my undergraduate years commuting back and forth between Kerrville and San Antonio, going in around sunrise and coming home around sunset many days. During a good wildflower year, the pinks and golds and reds of the brightening or darkening skies would be mirrored by the ribbons of highway medians and the patches of open pasture amid the oak and cedar and mesquite, such that where the ground might stop and the sky begin was not always clear, and I traveled surrounded by beauty.

Now, the swampy lands of southwestern Louisiana have their charms, the solemn cypresses standing stern and point-decked pines reaching up. The cement and steel and sheets of glass of New York City offer testament to drive and grit and stubbornness. (Wind-swept plains bespoke in song fall short of their promises.) But always, in the spring, I would think of the blues and reds and yellows and purples that spring from the thin and stony soil unbidden in the lands where I grew up, and I would nearly weep at both the remembered joy and my absence from it. Even as I write this now, I–even I–feel tears upwelling, mawkish and overly sentimental though such may show me to be.

So far, this has been a pretty good wildflower year ’round here. I still drive to San Antonio, still drive to Fredericksburg and occasionally other ways, still get to see the layered ribbons of flowers threading among the hills and the patches of open pasture that erupt in color. I see the small stands of springtime flowers in people’s front yards and along the sidewalks in my hometown, whence I once fled and where I live again. Seeing, I–even I–cannot help but smile, and I wonder if, in years to come, my daughter will feel as I do. I wonder if she will look and see and smile and, when away and thinking on such things, feel tears well up in her eyes at the beauty of the thing and the wonder of living in a world that has such things in it.

For now, I will work to let her see, to help her have it in memory so that, even if she departs and does not return, as I had meant not to return in days when I was more prideful than I now am and far less equipped to earn it, she will have beauty in her mind always. And perhaps she will learn sooner than I did the lesson that such beauty teaches; I can hope she will be a better student than I too often have been, not in the classroom but outside it, where the teaching never truly ends unless it is made to do so.

Help me buy gas to go on a wildflower drive?

Today is, of course, Tax Day in the United States. I have no doubt that, even as this piece finds its way to the part of the Internet where it can be easily seen, people are rushing to get materials together so that they can rush through tax programs and hope they do not end up being audited or so that they can speed down to one tax preparation office or another and pass the task off onto another. (Full disclosure: I do work for one such, Liberty Tax Service in Kerrville, Texas. I do their social media work and the occasional odd job.) All the while, they are like to complain about both the burden of filing taxes and actually paying them; I like to think myself removed from that, as I do not mind paying my fair share of things, and I would rather do or have the work done myself than trust revenuers to be diligent with such things.

I do not mind paying my portion because I enjoy many of the things I get and have gotten from doing so and from being among others who do so. I believe I’ve noted here that my father has been an employee of the US government for decades, now; his salary comes from tax money, and I’d not have been able to eat without that salary, so I appreciate it and its sources. I’ve been an employee of more than one state, working in each for an agency that is funded in large part through federal taxes (and, to a lesser extent, from state taxes); my own pay has come from such, and I have appreciated getting paid. The same has been true for my wife. And we both had our higher educations subsidized through tax-funded programs; I feel I ought to pay into a system from which I have benefited.

This is not to say that I approve of all the things to which my tax money goes. I would like to get more value out of the salaries I help pay to the legislators who get into office (too often above my objections, but still…) and the executives at levels ranging to the highest. I would like to see institutionalized discrimination based on inborn characteristics be stopped. I would like to see more devoted to education and rehabilitation that punishment and belligerence. And there are more things about which I could comment at length and with no small fervor–but I doubt it will be of much help or new insight.

There is this, at least: I do not expect to benefit without paying in. And there is this, too: I do not begrudge those whose needs are greater than mine having those needs met. There will come a time when I have need, or when some for whom I care have it. I can hope that they will be able to find it–but I know they will not if it is not there, and this day helps make sure that it might actually be there for them.

Care to see if you can get me into a higher tax bracket next time?

Old-style publishing.
Image from Giphy.com.

It is clear to me, as I have attested in more places than I care to relate, that I will never have the kind of job I once envisioned myself having. I will never be a full-time professor, whether of the “cool” variety or of the traditional tweed-and-pipe type. (I gave up my pipe once I learned I would be a father. I miss it sometimes, but not as much as I love my kid.) While I continue to do part-time teaching, and I still putter about with research, neither gets to be my professional focus anymore. Not that I did a good job at either when they ought to have been, as I have noted elsewhere in places I do not care to find at the moment; I am not bewailing my circumstances–I have earned them, in part, and I have been lucky to have them in other ways.

What happens, though, is that the work that I would otherwise be trying to place with academic journals, or that I should have been doing for them, does not have the same urgency to find a home in such venues. And, indeed, I have the inkling that most of the journals where I might publish as an academic expatriate would not look quite so kindly on someone with a lack of institutional affiliation. I might claim that of the school where I still teach part-time, of course, which would address that particular issue–but I do not know that I want to tie myself to it in such a way. The job might always end; I might have to go to some putative home from my visit on its faculty. (That’s part of why I keep so much of my teaching material here, in fact; it’s a sort of suitcase when I need it.)

Yet I have done a fair bit of academic writing. Some of it, I’m proud of having done. I don’t know that I want it to languish unseen in the gathered files where I currently have it. (Yes, I’ve collected all or most of my writing not already released. I am vain enough to think it a good idea–clearly so, else I’d not keep several blogs as I do.) Yet I don’t think it would necessarily do well to send it to publishers; popular presses seldom want such things, and academic presses, as I’ve noted, are not like to accept work from outside academe. Too, my job is not contingent upon my research, but I know many whose jobs are, and I would feel poorly about getting in the way of their attempts to keep and retain jobs that I know now and learned too late are not for me.

There is an obvious solution, of course. I have access to several webspaces, after all, including this one. It would be a simple matter for me to post my papers here, those I would like to see receive some attention. (Not all fall under that rubric.) They are not peer reviewed in this forum, of course, but I do hold a doctorate in English language and literature; my observations would not be without merit. They might even be worth reading by those outside the field, which is a pleasant thought.

Care to support a subvention or something like it?