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Momentary Reprieves
When I accepted this job, the DH and I had some idea of what we were getting into. After all, we both spent some time growing up here and met at a college in southern Minnesota. Neither of us were surprised things started getting cold at the end of September; certainly, we weren’t happy about it, but we remembered enough to expect it. What we had forgotten, however, was one of the best things about fall in the North. The unexpectedly warm up. After a couple of weeks with highs barely in the 60s, grey skies, and occasional freeze warnings.
Before the freeze
We’ve been blessed with a gorgeous, sunny, 80 degree weekend. Granted my ability to appreciate this weekend has been somewhat limited. My head really hates these kinds of sudden changes in the weather, and lets me know that with terrible headaches. Whenever the Advil kicks in, though, I have made it a point to get outside to do something. I mowed the lawn one last time, and played some catch with Bradley. Anything I could do to enjoy this reprieve from the cold, dark winter I know is coming. Yes. I said it. Winter is coming.
It wasn’t until last night, when the tightness in my neck and shoulder returned after dinner, that a different reprieve ended. I remembered: how I’d been sick at the beginning of the semester, how I’d been sneezing frequently and with a lot of force for the last week; how I have been pretty stressed about my new job; how all of those things are slightly different, but very much the same way I’d been feeling seven years ago. As those things dawned on me, I realized the date, and that for the first time I’d completely forgotten Stroke Day.
Seven years ago, on October 4th, I suffered an stroke, specifically an arterial dissection in an artery on the right side of my neck.
I was just 35, so it surprised everyone from my family to the doctors, who took 13 hours to diagnose me. To this day no one really knows what caused it. Since then, I have always found a way to “celebrate” stroke day. Nothing big, so maybe commemorate is a better word than celebrate. This is the first year that Stroke Day passed completely unnoticed by me, until I started thinking about my headache that is.
That I could forget Stroke Day this year is remarkable, since a good friend of mine, who suffered a brain aneurysm has spent the month blogging about her story and preparing for a fundraising 5k. I have, for reasons you can probably imagine, avoided reading Niki’s story. Seeing her posts promoted on Facebook and her race photos, however, probably should have put Stroke Day on my radar. Once I remembered however, I had to work pretty hard not to worry excessively about my headache.
Having a stroke, learning to walk again, writing and teaching again for the first time, those are things that you don’t really forget. More importantly, they are things your friends and family do not easily forget. One thing I have always maintained is that my friends and family were much more deeply scarred by my stroke than I was. I couldn’t see myself getting a spinal tap in the ER; in and out of consciousness in intensive care. The doctors weren’t tell me all the worst case scenarios possible: I would never wake up, never walk, never be the same. When I finally “woke up,” and began my recovery, I felt normal. Yes, I had obstacles and things to do, but I dealt with them the same way I do everything, I just did it. (One foot in front of the other, remember.) I couldn’t see the differences in my personality, in the way I moved. One result of this has been that I am typically able to worry much less about my health. Maybe a better way to describe it is that I am able to treat my health much more normally than my friends and family. For me a cough is just a cough, and a pain is just a pain.
For a long time, every sneeze, cough, or mention of pain meant the DH would ask, “Are you okay?” in a particular tone, then hover over me until I was back to normal. Intellectually, I understood his concern; emotionally, it was stifling and felt like I could never fully recover until everyone would start treating me normally. For the longest time, I just refused to talk about my health. If I had a headache, I took some Advil and Tylenol and did my best not to mention it. My reprieve, my ability to forget stroke day, and then my realization in conjunction with my headache, actually helped me to understand the DH’s worry a little better. I knew my headache was just a headache, but once memories of the stroke began it was almost impossible to get them to stop.
My friend Niki, who made it through her brain aneurysm, talks a lot about celebrating her “Life Day,” the day she had her successful operation. I think she like, a lot of people, sees my insistence on remembering Stroke Day as somewhat morbid and negative. I don’t see it that way at all. Remembering Stroke Day, or this year forgetting it, for me is about recognizing my own vulnerability, recognizing my ability to get up and keep going, and recognizing the strength of everyone who went through that experience with me. 
After Umpqua Community College
October 1, 2015
The first thing I read that day was a thread from a professional listserv. A professor asking advice from colleagues about how to deal, and help her class deal, with the shooting of a student.
The first thing I wrote that day was a conference proposal about the ethics of writing center sessions, and their connection to diversity and inclusivity
Because I had several writing tasks that day, I kept myself away from social media and news sites. It wasn’t until after lunch that I heard about the massacre at Umpqua Community College.
The Pacific Northwest is a large place. Physically, I am not from anywhere near Umpqua Community College. I did, however, begin my educational career at a community college in the Pacific Northwest; perhaps, that is why this particular incident of school violence feels different to me.
Grays Harbor College entry, Aberdeen, WA USA
Image from here, couldn’t find appropriate credit.
Though I went to community college in Washington and perhaps things are different in Oregon, the community college mission is so closely tied to region and place that I feel comfortable generalizing a little bit from my own experience. With the caveat that I am only speaking from my experience as a student: Community colleges in the Pacific Northwest are different than I have seen elsewhere, because, though they provide technical support and programs, they function more like junior colleges preparing students for transfer to four year schools.
I do not joke, or exaggerate, when I say that the best part of my education happen at that community college. I learned how to think; In a 10 week quarter learning community, I did nearly as much writing as I would do for my dissertation. Most importantly, my time in the community college classroom introduced to the importance of diversity of all kinds in the classroom. My community college classroom included traditional students fresh out of high school, recent returners, like me, with a year or two of “real world” experience, grown men and women forced into retraining by the declining industries in our area. Throughout my studies there I learned to work with people of different faiths, races, sexuality, and abilities. Was I always the best friend and all I could be, no; I was naive, and I was learning.
Cardiac Lane stairs at Grays Harbor College
Of course, I wasn’t able to articulate the importance of my experience in that Northwest community college until I left it. Until I sat in an undergraduate classroom where everyone there looked the same, and though I couldn’t articulate it, I knew we were missing important perspectives. Until I moved south where I could really learn about race, racism, and how my silence and support was sometimes better than my best intentions. Until I taught at a community college where technical programs were valued over liberal and general education courses.
Certainly, my image of my community college is tinted in the rosy glow of nostalgia, but even so I would never have called it an idyll or safe space. I was pushed, challenged, and yes … sometimes it was uncomfortable, but I was never afraid. Having been away, having my own new perspective, it was that little difference; my confidence in my physical safety, that allowed me to accept the push, the challenge, and the discomfort of my community college education. That is the little difference, the confidence in their physical safety, that the students of Umpqua Community College, and many other community colleges lost yesterday. As I grieve for the lives lost, the lives irrevocably altered, I also grieve for that lost confidence, the lost element that enabled so much of my own learning.
One of the posters to that thread on the professional listserv reminded everyone of “the question from Mary Rose O’Reilly that Claude Mark Hurlbert put before us at IUP: “Is it possible to teach English so that people stop killing each other?””
Perhaps, I am not the English teacher I thought I would be when I was at the community college. Heck, I am not even the English teacher I thought I would be in grad school. As of October 1, 2105 though, I am an English teacher ready to wrestle with this question; to do everything in my power to “teach English so that people stop killing each other.”
Spurred to Action
There’s really nothing like an email that says “End of Year Blog Report” in the subject line to make you think about just how neglectful you’ve been of your blog. It has certainly been entirely too long.
Perhaps my lovely new PlannerPad will help me be better about capturing ideas and posting. 
Isn’t it pretty? I have a suspicion it is going to work out well for me, but I’ll save the full review for later when I’ve had a change to use it.
Christmas was fun this year, full of sentimental presents like this one.
It is a jigsaw puzzle of one of Ceausescu’s palaces. No, I’ve never been to Romania, nor do I have a particular fondness for the Communist Party, but Le Premiere Chat is named Ceausescu.
Clearly his new environment is not up to his standards.
Each year the DH and I try to get each other something fun, the result is that I often get coffee mugs of some sort. Trust me, I am not complaining. You know how much I love my serial killer mug collection. Last year, it was a mug covered in Shakespearean insults. This year the DH dug a little deeper and ordered me this little beauty. 
Okay, so my Gilmore Girls obsession has cooled in recent years, but he did pay attention at some point, and he had to brave the wild internet to get this for me. Trust me, this is not his territory.
It was a wonderful effort, but I do think I stumbled onto Christmas gold with this $7 beauty from Walmart.
Yes. It does say Poo Dough. It comes with a mold, two tubs of brown dough, and the truly brilliant element a small container of yellow dough. Yellow dough is essential for creating your very own kernels of corn, or peanuts if you want to get extra creative. Yep. I won Christmas with this one. How do I know?
My mother in law sent me a text asking where I found the Poo Dough because all of the DH’s family wants some. It is exactly their sense of humor.
Goals and Aspirations …
About this time each year, possibly because it represents the beginning of the new academic year or maybe that it also happens to be my birthday, I find myself thinking about goals. What might surprise you about this is the fact that I HATE setting goals, seriously hate it with the fire of a thousand suns.
Mostly, this can be attributed to my closet Virgo nature (i.e. I LOVE putting things in order; yet, I’m ABYSMAL at keeping them that way). This tendency means I have long track record of making plans, but not necessarily following all the way through with them, which just makes me feel like I fail at a lot of things. In my mind goal setting = setting myself up for failure.
Funny, then, that I would end up in a position that requires a lot of goal setting for me, and the program. As I think I’ve written before, I’ve figured out a way to deal with this at a personal development level. Each year at this job, instead of setting a concrete goal I assign myself a word for that year.
The yearly word, or words, operates almost like a meditative intention. I set the word and let it influence all I do. For example, my second year here my word was “Indepence.” Those of you who know me might find it amusing that I would feel the need to consciously cultivate independence (it’s pretty much mapped into my DNA); however, the first year of this position threw me for a loop for a variety of reasons, so the second year I needed to re-establish for myself and the new people around me this part of myself.
Last year I chose two words: visibility and vulnerability. Making my program and myself more visible on campus would require me to get out of my comfort zone and make myself vulerable. Given the number of partnerships I’m currently working on and/or developing, and my presence on division wide committees, I’d call the year of visibility and vulnerability a success.
In fact, it was enough of a success that I don’t want to give it up. Hot mess might not be the best way to describe my life right now, but steady simmer is fairly accurate. Change isn’t happening at this moment, but the groundwork is being laid and it could end up significant. (No, that is not just a vague metaphor for the academic job market.) Visibility and vulnerability will be essential parts of anything that happens for me this year, but they won’t be the only essential element.
At the risk of diffusing my intention with too many words, I’ve decided to add one more for this year.
From the Merriam-Webster full definition: confidence of mind or manner: easy freedom from self-doubt or uncertainty. The definition continues on to include – excessive self-confidence, but I think the visibility and vulnerability parts of my intentions will help me stop short of the negative connotations of the word.
Sending Advice Upstream
All the “Advice for Job Seekers/Interviewees” columns that pop up during this ‘waiting for the new joblist’ time of year (actually all year) made me start thinking seriously about my parting shot the other day “write better ads, ask better questions.” A quick Google search, not exactly exhaustive research, revealed that there are many articles in the business world about how to write a good job ad and/or attract good candidates, but in academia the advice is all pointed at the job seeker. As you might have noticed from the last post, I’m a little tired of it all. After some serious consideration, here is what I have to offer, some advice from the other side of the table for everyone currently getting ready to post ads.
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Reversing the Advice …
Today’s advice at Vitae – Don’t Dodge the Diversity Question – stuck a nerve with me. There’s nothing wrong with Nicole Matos’s advice, in fact I think you could call the heart of it common sense; as long as the question does not cross any legal boundaries, answer it.
For me, the problem isn’t necessarily people dodging the “diversity question,” the problem is the question. In the opening paragraph of her column Matos paraphrases the diversity question as “one that goes something like — Describe your experiences with diversity in and/or outside the classroom.” As someone who has been doing what I call “baby searches” for the past four years, I have one very big question of my own: “What the hell does this question even mean?”
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Changes
You might notice that I’ve made some changes around here, added a few pages, and things. I really hated having my CV just copied and pasted to a single page. It was just too much text for one page, so I broke up the sections into individual pages. I even included sub-pages with my teaching and administrative philosophies, not that anyone would really want to read them. In general, I like this new organization, and I think it will make it easy for me to keep everything updated. In the future I imagine a reversal of process where I cut and paste from my website to update and create a new CV.
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Full Speed Ahead
After an entire day of travel (thanks to a 3 hour layover in Atlanta), last night I finally made it home after a working vacation. A week ago the DH and I flew up to spend some time with his family (Sat – Wed) for me. He flew home early Thursday morning. I stayed in the Cities for a conference. (Vacation pictures will be posted later. They are all still stuck on my phone.)
I wasn’t sure what to expect from this conference. Typically, when I go to a conference I have a built in cadre of friends to keep me company. At this conference, however, I was presenting with colleagues at a conference for their field, not mine. (At least, that is what I thought.) None of my friends were going to be there, and I expected to wander the conference halls embodying my childhood nickname, “Orphan.” Nothing is ever what we really expect. The conference was amazing, and I came home with more ideas than I can process, inspired about my own scholarship, and even new friends.
The best part of this conference was the fact that our panel presented during the first session. I’ve done that at two conferences now, and I LOVE that. There is very little time for nerves, and then you can spend the rest of the time seeing panels without rehearsing a presentation in the back of your mind.
The most surprising thing for me was just how many writing center people I met at this conference. I swear this conference was better in terms of meeting new writing center directors and exchanging ideas than an actual writing center conference. It seemed like every session there was something for me to see, and it was particularly gratifying for me to see how many other people are interested in graduate writing support, and hospitality.
At a conference there are always people you end up seeing over and over in panels, in the halls, etc. This conference I made my new friend in bathroom lines and hallways. We both stayed in the dorms, and it felt like we couldn’t leave our rooms without running into each other; and, yes, she is a writing center director/coordinator like me, for now. It was fun, amusing, and now I have two friends in St. Louis.
As fun as everything was, I am glad that I took the early flight home, since I think many people had a hard time getting flights home because of the weather. I had been away too long, and it was good to sleep in my own bed with the dogs.
Tribal Meetings
As the state rep to our regional writing center association my job, among other things, is to hold events in the state. Since I inherited this job from the fabulous Dr. Phoenix, there was already an established pattern of spring professional development events for directors, and fall events that include tutors. This spring our director’s event had to be postponed, so last Friday a few writing center directors from around the state gathered at our school. We had each read either Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers by Jackie Grutsch-McKinney, or Building Writing Center Assessments that Matter by Ellen Schendel and William J. Macauley Jr. For the morning we split up into small groups to discuss the books, and then after lunch we all gathered together to share our small group discussions with each other. Throughout the conversation I was struck by two things: the isolation of the work we do, and the way these two texts complimented each other.
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Back on the Horse …
Things were quiet here for a while because my academic job search had heated up, which meant there a lot I wanted to say, and not a lot I dared to say. As with many other searches I’ve done, this time I got so close … just not close enough. Apparently, I look really good on paper, over the phone, and then someone else looks better in person. It is frustrating, and I won’t lie this last one hurt. Even with this last one, however, by the time I’d received the official rejection I had pretty much come to the conclusion that the fit maybe wasn’t quite right. I might not send personal note cards to everyone thanking them for the visit, but I am sincere in my final email where I wish them all the best with their new hire.
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D5 Creation
