After a year and half off from teaching to write, I am now back in the classroom and find myself morphing from my writer self to that other professional identity: English Professor. I worked so hard for so many years to be a good teacher and successful professor, to get the tenure-track job, to get tenure, to get promotion, to get the scholarly…
Recently, my mom stayed with us so that I could get some writing done. We joked that she would be my “wife” for a week, and she was more or less. She kept the kitchen clean and my daughter fed and occupied while I worked from 6:00 am until lunchtime. When she left, I missed her. Not just because the dishes began to…
I wrote a couple of months ago about searching for an appropriate way to end Woolson’s biography, so I should be done with the manuscript, right? Not exactly. This summer, I have reached a new stage in my writing that is anything but the end. In some ways it feels like starting over. But really it is all just part of the process,…