Another Opening, Another Show…
Welcome to Next Time. Again.
Next Time–a strong woman under the gaslight
by Jenn Zuko
*
You’ll have heard, if you’ve been following Saturday Morning Serial since the first iteration, how I fell into this crazy project that is a full blown memoir. In Quit Lit, I described how, after discovering Herb Childress’ book The Adjunct Underclass, I was introduced to him and proceeded into the process of constructing this braided story under his expert coaching. Once I quit the school which I’ve renamed Subway University, in the middle of a faculty meeting, that event became the bookending prologue and epilogue of this book. It happened in May of 2022, and so was the end of the memoir project. At least, the construction phase of it. Next, it needed to be published. But how?
My interviews with Sarah Haas (published in the Boulder Weekly) and Caitlin Rockett (fell through the cracks, unfortunately, and never published), made me realize how much my life story resonates in the ears of other people. It makes others not only feel inspired by my personal weirdness and accomplishments, but gives them hope and even ideas for plans to shake themselves free of their own personal narcissists—my story of being gaslighted is already saving lives (as well as just being interesting). Though I still haven’t completely gotten used to that idea, the more time distances me from the events of this particular series of stories, the more I can treat it as just another interesting piece of creative nonfiction, one that I’d use in my university writing courses, not as much an intense nugget of my real life. Now, it is still a memoir*—it’s still all true stories, but I feel a lot less like these wounds are opening up again each time I look at it, but more like I can scry from the scar patterns left behind.
*Or is it a series of personal essays? I can’t decide which it is; I did begin the project with the idea that I wanted to include research amid my personal tales, and I have, but I’m not sure which one it is, now it’s done. Then again: to this day, as many times as I’ve written personal work since then, as many grad-level courses in creative nonfiction, personal essay, and memoir, I’m still admittedly unclear what the big difference is. Or maybe there’s not a big difference, only a little one. What do you think?
As an academic (even a recovering one), I love stuff like having little stacks of books interspersed with xeroxed articles as bookmarks piled nearby to help with a project.** I love a footnote, or a gloss or a side by side analysis. I love me some annotations and marginalia. I love it when an old text has half the page filled with the work itself and half footnotes on same. A translation on the right side of the page spread, the original on the left? I get giddy. And so I’ve decided to treat my memoir like a real live piece of literature: As I reshare each chapter with you, I’m gonna also compose a gloss on each one. Both will be landing in your inboxes on Saturday mornings, at a time when in the past you might have been sitting in front of some cartoons with your bowl of cereal.
Gloss? I hardly know, boss…
What’s a gloss?
Welp, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia definition goes into the history of the literary gloss, and then defines the practice threefold, thus:
‘The gloss can be seen as subsidiary to the main text, as a crucial adjunct to it, or as a sign of the plenitude of interpretive possibility. A gloss’ presence foregrounds literary authority, hierarchies of knowledge, and processes of meaning-making. The reader of a glossed text is placed within the creative community surrounding the work and offered a heightened sense of the temporality of reading. Recent scholarship on this form has emerged from the fields of book and reading history, but owing to the marginal status of the gloss, this scholarship also has particular affinities with structuralist and poststructuralist thought.’ (from the Summary)
Yeesh, am I a poststructuralist now?…eh, okay. Why fight it.
Gloss Onion
Previous paratextual pieces I’ve produced surrounding Next Time include several layers: comments on comments on commentary. That is a form of 21st century gloss, after all, and I’ll include this practice in this new series as well. One was a response to a very generous and in depth (and long) comment, which I discussed in Halfway Point. The other was closer to what I predict will come out in this new glossy take, the 7th Inning Stretch, which was a series of comment responses after a particularly rough-to-read chapter, as a sorbet of sorts. Hey, let’s do this again, real quick, to conclude this Introduction Redux:
Kaitlyn Elizabeth (on Chapter One): This line in particular really struck something in me: “I’ve been forced into unimaginably small spaces.”
It made me think of how small we can feel when being invisible is the safest option and how little space there can be for anything else when we have to be that small.
It’s kind of ballsy of me, it seems to me, to claim smallness when I’m in fact so big in so many ways. I don’t know where I get this shame from—is it a Gen X thing? That sort of buck up and take it, buttercup, attitude? Or is it a growing up as a woman thing? Women are expected to make themselves smaller and smaller, thin to oblivion and with a sweet smile. The more pop culture joviality I see online about the feral childhood of us literally lead-poisoned Gen Xers, the more I consider how much of my toughness comes from systemic trauma. But it’s still to this day (arguably even more today than in my teenhood) only socially acceptable for women to take up as little space as possible. To take up no space at all, if possible.
Martha Nichols (on Chapter Two) : Sigh. On point in so many ways. One of the underlying problems here is the power hierarchy in academic institutions - that hierarchy also exists in other media organizations such as book and magazine publishing. In the case of adjuncts or grad students teaching Freshman Comp, students absorb all too well that such a core course doesn’t matter beyond a graduation requirement - so the basics of effective writing at the college level are devalued from the start.
I’ve been mulling this over a lot in connection with the hype about generative AI being able to do the writing for you - total bs, especially if you understand that Freshman Comp is often the place students learn critical thinking, media literacy, and how to communicate with other human beings. Those fundamental skills are more crucial than ever now, yet they’ve been relegated to the equivalent of low-status service workers who can be “let go” at any time. Talk about gaslighting, from the likes of Sam Altman to department heads who only listen to “ladder faculty” (that term says it all) to an administrator who parrots like a bot, “it’s the rules.”
It’s funny, isn’t it, to watch the anti-intellectual, anti-expertise waves spread and crash over more and more of the wider culture. And to see how much the lack of critical thinking and close reading has spread toxins throughout all branches of society. Even in only the couple years since I finished Next Time, the animosity towards the well-educated and knowledgeable has exploded, as has the hot mess of the higher ed system as a whole. The Ivory Tower is looking a lot like the Tower card in tarot, innit. (And by ‘funny’ to watch, I mean morbidly compelling, like watching a train slowly derail itself while its caboose catches fire. While riding on it.)
Anyway, to conclude: Yay gloss! I was just thinking about this: I often get a gloss on my hair after I get it dyed: it adds a sparkle and shine to it after it’s done. Maybe this gloss will do the same for my memoir.
**Hence, my weekly mini-bibliography within these new glossy pieces. Here’s today’s:
TODAY’S BIBLIOGRAPHY:
DeSalvo, Louise. Writing as a Way of Healing. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 1999.
Nichols, Martha. Inside Reader. Available: https://open.substack.com/pub/marthanichols?r=1fslzq&utm_medium=ios
Stenner, Rachel. ‘Gloss.’ Oxford Research Encyclopedias (online), 28 September 2020. Available: (permalink)