Monday, Monday

Sing with me: bah dah, bah dadadah…

Did I get that song in your head? #sorrynotsorry

Josh Dolezal, aka The Recovering Academic, is posting the prologue to my memoir on his Substack tomorrow. It’s my 50th birthday that day and I must say, what a nice birthday present that is, giving me new readers and all (Thanks, Josh)! So I thought, in lieu of my normal Monday musings, I’d give you a little rundown on what you can expect to read there tomorrow, and maybe a little teaser, as a treat. Because you deserve nice things. 

I first came across Josh’s work in the Chronicle of Higher Education and from there, connected through a Facebook group called ‘The Professor is Out’. If you’ve read his stuff as well as mine, you can see that we’ve got many shared nodes in our journey out of oppressive academia. And since I’ve written in much detail about these issues in my memoir, and am trying to shop it out for publishing as we speak, he/we thought it would be a cool idea to do a little bit of cross-pollination between our Substacks. I hope that expanding my reach on Josh’s newsletter will help not only my own endeavors, but will bring my story to more people out there that are going through something similar, and could really appreciate hearing it.

This is one of those lovely anti-suicide sign systems attached to bridges. I don’t remember which bridge this is, or where I yoinked the image from, but it’s been in my phone’s image collection for a while. It’s funny—each time I tell someone the premise of my memoir, it inspires them to make some huge change in their life. I wonder if my book has saved lives before it’s even been published…

Next Time

My memoir is called Next Time—a Strong Woman Under the Gaslight, and it was coached into final draft form by the excellent Herb Childress, of Adjunct Underclass fame, the last chapter of which was inspiration for my book. In Next Time, I show how my career as adjunct faculty was equally abusive as my marriage to a gaslighting narcissist. I also parallel these two oppressions to my career in theatre. The title Next Time refers to what a gaslighting abuser will do: expect you to give everything, with only the empty promise of a better next time in return. Academia, theatre, and human narcissists all do these things. 

The section of Next Time you’ll see tomorrow on The Recovering Academic is the Prologue, called “Monday at the Meeting.” In it, I describe how I quit my adjuncting job at a university, after nearly 20 years of good, innovative work. What happened, and the very reasons I made the choice to quit in the first place, showed me clearly how valued I really was at that institution. (Spoiler: it’s not at all.)

What Happens Next (Time)

I’ll post a little easement of its ending here on my own Substack sometime soon—the Prologue ends on something of a cliffhanger note, as I mean to hook my reader into wanting to know more, as soon as possible. The Epilogue lands at the very end of the book, and it gives some of the story of what happened next. Look for that snippet here sometime soon.

And while you’re at it, go on over to The Recovering Academic and check out Josh’s work. He’s a terrific writer, and if you’re interested in my recovery from academia, you’ll definitely jive with his. He’s also got a few beautiful personal essays on there that aren’t about this issue, which are all good reads too. Here’s the article, though, which first made me want to follow him. It’s about an issue very close to my heart, of course—a phenomenon called The Big Quit.

Cheers! Watch this space for more.