The Creative Writing PhD and the Job Market

At Ohio University we had a professional development meeting recently and I asked the panel (CW, lit and rhet-comp profs who had all sat on various hiring committees) if the CW Phd was, truthfully, any kind of factor on the university job market.

The first answer was that schools such as Iowa or Michigan only hire writers with an established presence. "A book" isn't enough, and the PhD isn't the criteria either. That NYU hired Jonathan Safran Foer, who doesn't even have an MFA, comes to mind.

But---if the goal is a job at a smaller, liberal arts school then a PhD is a plus, because it gives you flexibility in teaching. (And yes, the CW PhD counts here). OU has placed people in this kind of tenure track job. It was also noted that if quality of life is a consideration, a smaller school might be a happier landing than a shark tank program.

Interesting to me, was how the three English Department fields have different criteria for an attractive resume.

For Rhet-Comp, teaching is critical, and demonstrated ability of administrative experience (by this I mean running a conference, not typing and filing. Althooooo. How else does one run a conference?)

For Lit, an established presence as a scholar is the thing. Too many committees, etc. might even count against an applicant, because he/she might be seen as not being serious about their research.

For us, the ability to help out with the lit mag or run the reading series makes everyone perk up. Because nobody wants to do this stuff. Grant writing ability is also a plus. Because writers never have any money.

The final tip was that grads who want a university job can’t leave the ivory tower. Not after the PhD. Grads have to adjunct or post-doc or whatever to remain in the pool.

Except the rules are always different in the arts, because there aren’t rules. Write a best-selling book that’s also a critical darling---and that NYU gig is yours. And who wouldn't rather be the sexy hire than the paper slave?

Aw, Bozeman, Montana, LMFAO, 1984-esque

In its zeal to conduct background checks on prospective employees, the city of Bozeman, Montana requested that job applicants provide their login credentials for any social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.) they frequented.

Waiting

I have this strange knack for actually achieving goals I write down. I find old notebooks filled with lists and I am amazed. See Paris; Play drums in rock band; Ashtanga yoga; and yes, Creative Writing MFA. This makes me believe I need to up the ante and see what happens. I’ll let you know.

While flipping through old notebooks this morning, I found these three New Year’s resolutions from 2007:

1) NO MORE WAITRESSING
2) Write cleaner sentences
3) Yoga/calm/discipline/stop the frazzled grabby hands

This might seem like a modest list but number one felt huge. After twenty years of restaurant work I wondered if I would ever get out. I couldn’t see it.

On my last visit to Durham, North Carolina, (where I lived and waited tables for 19 of those 20 years) a former industry cohort handed me a copy of Waiter Rant. (One of those blogs turned book deals Laurie posted about yesterday.) My friend had been given the book for Christmas, one of those presents people receive because relatives have confused “previous lives that incurred lasting psychological damage” with “interests.”

“It hasn’t been enough time yet. I can’t read this,” my friend said. She passed the book, eyes averted, as if handing off a removed appendix. She’s less than a year out. I am almost three.

I took the book to be polite but haven’t cracked the spine. I lived Waiter Rant. I am Waiter Rant. No thank you. On the back cover The Waiter describes entering his seventh year. HA. I thought. Boo freaking hoo hoo hoo. I remember that phase. I even remember when I thought I was doing the job so I could write about the experience. Try twenty mofo. Try twenty. Okay, I admit it; I’m mad that wasn’t my book deal. And I'm super jealous Anthony Bourdain wrote a blurb.

At least I’m out. No faking this time. I’m teaching and maybe I made $8,750 last year but the corner is turned. I’m done put a fork in it.

As for cleaner sentences, I am pleased to report a diminished number of prepositional phrases and unnecessary adverbs.

I still wring my hands though. I suspect I lack proper kissing.

2009:

1) PROPER KISSING
2) FAMOUS WRITER

Jobs for MFAs!

Who knew?

For the past three months I've worked for these people. The job is evaluating student essays from around the country, from various community colleges, universities etc. I confess the work is about as fun as reading comparison/contrast papers on cauliflower and broccoli can be, but it did keep me away from black plastic bus tubs this spring. Pay is $10/hr with an BA, $11/hr with an MFA! I believe you get the big increase to $12 with a PhD.

I'm quitting for school but I found the job to be straight up and the people reasonable to work for. One big benefit is the flexibility, you can pick up and trade shifts with ease. So if you need some part time work:

SMARTHINKING FALL 2009 HIRING

As always, Smarthinking hires the bulk of its new tutors over summer in preparation for increased usage in the next academic year. Starting this late May/early June, we’ll be screening applications for new writing tutors to start in Fall 2009. If you know of any interested colleagues or friends qualified to tutor writing online, we’d appreciate the referral! Everyone applies by emailing a resume and cover letter to jobs@smarthinking.com and including Writing in the email subject line. Thanks!

Thanks,

Allyson

J-O-B Update: I Have One

I haven't posted much about my job search because, let's be honest kids, to do so would be indiscrete. This is the Interweb. Anyone can see the smack I'm talking. But now I can unleash the sordid truth about post-MFA job hunting because I shall hunt no more again forever.

I started applying for jobs before I'd even graduated. I was getting phone interviews before I even left Missoula. I was looking into marketing, copywriting, editorial and management positions. And the fact that I was getting calls back convinced me that I wasn't entirely out of my league. Inevitably, the interviews would root out the truth: that although I had two master's degrees under my belt, a way with words, a wicked sense of humor, and all the pluck of a Disney heroine, I haven't had a real professional job in over five years. Which means I haven't had real professional on-the-job experience in over five years. And a lot has happened in five years--in technology, in the job market, in fashion...

It didn't help that I was competing with so many other, more qualified (experience-wise) candidates. The development coordinator position for which I applied back in September drew 140 applications. The editorial position with a fantasy gaming position drew almost 200. I should be pleased that I even snagged interviews for some of these jobs, even if I didn't end up getting the job. But it's hard to shake the feeling that there must be something wrong with my face if I can't close the deal in person. Job hunting foments insecurity like nothing else. You ask yourself silly questions like "Am I really qualified to do anything?" or "Why don't people like me?"

So it came time to reassess. Yes, I was tired of not having enough money at the end of the month to do the things I wanted to do. I was tired of the constant credit card debt I had to accrue to make up the difference between my intake from freelancing and my rent and bills. It's not like I have a huge overhead. I'm not a big shopper. I have, like, three pairs of pants that fit. My shoes are old and worn. My computer is five years old and I won it in a contest. I don't even own an iPod. I don't need a lot of gadgets. I don't even eat out very much any more. I don't take extravagant vacations. I don't need a lot of money. I just want to be able to buy a non-yellow cheese every now and then. I want to eat my non-yellow cheese on nice crackers--not saltines. And, unfortunately, I had a taste of that good life back in the mid-90s, when jobs were plentiful and I got one right out of college. For six years I had a professional editorial position with benefits (back when I was young and healthy and didn't need them) and paid time off. Since it was my first job, of course I took it for granted. I whined and complained about the trivial problems that one will have with any job. The inter-office pettiness, the "low" pay (apparently, at 23, I thought I should be making six figures), the humiliation of working for the man, blah blah blah. Now that I've been spit back out into the job market and seen what it's like, I would give at least one kidney and a good portion of my liver to crawl back into the warm, wet, wonderful womb of that first job.

But the past is the past. And now, after all those months of tailoring cover letters and resumes and going to interviews and wringing my hands, good friend Amy emails to tell me there's an open office assistant position where she works. The hours are flexible. The pay is more than enough to keep me happily cheesed. The employer is a respected institution of higher education. It's temporary (there's a hiring freeze in state agencies) with the potential for permanance (should the hiring freeze be lifted). I would have the time and the mental space to write without having to worry about bills. I might even be able to start saving money again. Really, it's like manna from heaven, dropped in my lap. I had an interview this morning. I start on Wednesday. And I will be the best office assistant who ever office assisted.

The Waiting Game

I haven’t posted in a while because I haven’t had much to report and I haven’t felt passionately responsive to anything (literary, that is. I’ve been caught up in the lunacy of the upcoming election, but that is a subject that is already being done to death in the blogosphere and I doubt that I have anything substantive to add. Just more toxic vitriol that bears a striking resemblance to the toxic vitriol of other thirty-something underemployed artsy liberals).

So here’s the quick and dirty update: I’m engaged, a couple of my poems have been accepted by a couple of journals, I interviewed for a job and didn’t get it, I interviewed for another job and am waiting to hear whether I've made it to the next round of interviews, my aunt gave me a car, we signed our pug up for obedience training, I’m still freelancing and I write occasionally, mostly in response to prompts from my writing group.

I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary poetry. Mostly stuff published in the past five years. To familiarize myself with what’s being published. To see how other writers sequence their books. To get an idea of whether endnotes are a good idea or whether they’re self-indulgent. To figure out if there are publishers out there that might be a particularly good fit for my manuscript. And also to enjoy myself. Because I’m not entirely self-centered and I actually do love poetry and it’s one of the few things that keeps me from ineffectually spinning my wheels about employment and politics and the economy and the environment. As a side note, I totally dug Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s In the Absent Everyday .

But really, it is all about me. And my book. I’ve revised it. I’ve sent it out to a finity of contests. I’ve considered whether sending it out to contests is a waste of time based on recent debates about the pros and cons of the contest system, I’ve researched publishers that hold no-fee open reading periods and found them few, I’ve revised again, I’ve considered formatting (2-inch margins or 3-inch margins? Alternating headers? Leader dots in the TOC or empty space?), I’ve come dangerously close to weeping for no good reason, I’ve considered changing the title of the book to Albatross so I can call it Al and it can be my bodyguard, I’ve shown it to and received feedback from many people—poets and non-poets alike. And now I am dwelling in the space of What now? What more? Mainly, it’s about the waiting. Waiting for responses, rejections. Waiting until my eyes are fresh enough to look at the manuscript again and consider further revisions. Waiting until the next thing grabs me and I can write in a different mode (a different register, a different mind) and produce contenders for the next book.

I’ve never been good at waiting. The magazines in the lobby are never interesting enough to make it feel like you’re being productive with the time. Someone has always reached the puzzles in Highlights before you and marked all over them in ink. Even though it’s ever so important that you get those teeth cleaned, it feels like there’s something else more important that you should be doing...OK, so this metaphor totally doesn’t fly. I’m not sure what gingivitis represents in the process of trying to get a book published, so I’m just going to admit defeat on this one.

So scratch that and let me begin again: I’ve never been good at waiting. But that’s what I’m doing now.

J-O-B Part Deux: The Interviewing Process

Yesterday I had my first telephone interview, which is fantastic because I was truly worried that employers wouldn't give my materials a second look once they saw my nonlocal address. I'm in the process of playing phone tag with another potential employer as we speak. Also, I'm sick--not the cute kind of sick that gives you a mad sexy, throaty phone voice, but rather the kind of sick that makes you a spacy, stuffy mouth-breather. It's probably for the best, then, that I am two states away from Seattle so I can't afflict any potential employers with my ruddy and mucous-filled countenance.

Despite the croup, I'm feeling confident going into this round of interviews. Looking over my resume, I'm proud of the work I've done. Hopefully I will have updates of the positive sort shortly.

On pitching yourself/ pitching forward

While all three of us prepare to give our thesis reading (T-11 days), prepare to format the living daylights out of our manuscripts, and try to call U-Haul for the summer van rental and slam the phone down in horror before the first ring, the hunting continues.

Recent whims in the job-search/grovel (findings usually occur between the hours of 7-10pm, when things feel critical):

1. Should I take an unpaid writing internship with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation in Missoula to increase my editing skills? Dang-- looks like they'd prefer current students, and as interns tend to go, to grant college credits in lieu of monetary compensation.
2. Can I be a field manager for a women's health non-profit in the summer months in Missoula while I wait for the ticking clock that is my lease to run out? We'll see (if I'm qualified).
3. Should I apply for a craiglisted job based in Chicago, but that allows telecommuting, to be a part-time moderator for a message board on a radio-news website (which, by the way, offers an unheard-of-in-Montana rate of pay). Sure. Can't hurt.

Summer after MFA is now filled with attendance to two weddings, a trip to Portland, OR to see more coast, and that daunting U-Haul call I've got to make. Our graduating friends & peers seem to have beautiful and lavish plans for their immediate future. When will they find out I'm the fraud in their midst?

Today's job application curiosity was instigated by Frances McCue's visit to UM to talk to us about, among other things, pitching yourself to....the outside world. Which, very fine advice in itself, placed me in an odd out-of-body mind-wandering state for hours afterwards. The idea of grant-writing and supporting yourself in the nonprofit sector to supplement creative writing led me on this tangent (nevermind how I can use the practical information in the future):

1. McCue's obsession with the trails leading from and to Richard Hugo around the Northwest allowed her talk to capture the value of Hugo's anti-Romantic romanticism in poetry. That is, he's know for writing about the remnants of crumble in an urban or rural-urban landscape, and less about the organic matter of the world and nature-to-beauty ratios.

2. Recent lit crit illuminates the details of another boat-rocker, Walt Whitman, as contributing to specific ideas of Romanticism used by Emerson. Emerson distinguishes between "religion" and "spirituality" in terms of degrees of individualism. Perhaps Whitman and Hugo share a similar poetic ability to seek the spiritual in the grass--or in the bars and barns of the U.S.--and create from this individual spiritual commune with the things plain and crumbling around them a kind of religion, where "...every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

If we keep this in mind, we'll all do just fine. No matter who out there is hiring.

Montana? Spring?

Sure, it's Poetry Month. Yes, there's only 26ish days until all three of us give our thesis readings. But...I keep running around outdoors, hopeful the workload won't find me there. Last week was our beautiful, wise, wondrous Spring Break. I saw the once- 3rd largest dam in America in Hungry Horse...and (another) casino. Weeks prior, I walked around my neighborhood in search of poet epitaphs. This is but a mere sample of what you could find in Montana...


Thoughts:

Teaching. Ushering students toward their cumulative portfolio of writing takes 1) prayers that the overhead projector bulb won't burn out in the computer classroom, 2) heavy reference to the MLA handbook, and 3) patience with revision strategies (their's and mine). I'll see what I can do.
Summer. Temp. job in Missoula? Moving in July? Big-ass yard sale to pay for the U-Haul (or--even better--make it unnecessary)? These are a few of my favorite things.
Thank our lucky stars for funding/traveling. All three of us can, in fact, confirm that funding is there in the school's myriad offices. You just have to uncover it. I was fortunate enough to go to Nicaragua last year (after reaching across the vast departmental divide to the environmental studies realm) and NYC for AWP this year-- the former for graduate credits and the latter with full funding from the President's office.
A "Real" Job. Ah, the application process. The University of Chicago sent an email regarding my recent application for an editorial position. I was not a fit for the position, but considering my personal availability date I provided, I understand. It's just too early for all those jobs out there. All in all, it's good to know UC gives responses either way, so as not to leave applicants in the WhoKnows? abyss.

Internet Job Applications

I just applied for a job. Not just a job, but a job for which I am actually qualified. I couldn't pass it up, even though I had made a deal with myself that I wouldn't apply for real jobs until I had graduated (since I can't really move before August, it seems like a waste of time applying for jobs that are being listed now).

So I should feel good, right? But I don't, and here's why--It was an internet application process. You know the one--where you take your beautifully formatted, agonized and fussed-over resume and turn it into an ugly unformatted text document. You don't even get a chance to write a cover letter, to explain all the interesting quirks in your availability and how you may not live in the city yet but will by the time your potential employers need you. Or how you may have spent the past four years writing poetry, but you really aren't a flake. Really.

It reminds me of a story from a friend about how, when she had her son, she switched to 3/4 time at her job. Unfortunately, the payroll system didn't have an option for this, so it continued to pay her full-time salary. Now she owes thousands of dollars to her employer and has to work out a payment plan.

My point? It's an inhuman world out there in employmentville. Much as I (obviously) love technology, there are some areas of life it can't account for. Or, I should say, that its input operators forget to account for. The cynical part of me thinks that these are purposeful oversights--that employers don't want to deal with anomalies or exceptions, so they blame their inability to do so on the "system". Since my optimistic side is a shriveled-up, dusty old prune, I don't have a positive spin to offer in rebuttal.

The implication here is that we, the (potential) employees, shouldn't create "anomalies." We shouldn't create circumstances where we need to shift to 3/4 time or be gone for a month. And here's where my guilt reflex kicks up a storm--should I even be taking a trip to Prague right now? Isn't that incredibly self-indulgent? Shouldn't I be doing everything I can to get to Seattle, preparing myself to be the perfect job candidate?

But there's the little bit of me that is still naive and hopeful that one can have a job that reflects and allows for the life one wants. There are different ways of looking at this situation that don't place me in the role of supplicant. I am, in fact, a highly skilled, experienced worker and my potential employers are just as much candidates seeking and competing for my skills as I am a candidate seeking and competing for a job. For better or for worse, they'll have to take me with my quirks.

A job right up our alley?

Recently perusing (desperately) the Craig's List Chicago-area writing gigs, I stumbled upon a "creative staffing" organization Creative Circle. C.C. sends you email job opportunities as they arise, according to preferences you set. A temp agency of sorts, they can organize a meeting if you're presently located in their HQ cities: Chicago, L.A., N.Y.C., San Fran., and Seattle. Moving to any of these cities? A recent MFA graduate who secretly loves to copyedit? Then, yes, you should look.

Today I Looked at a Job

One job, for one major Seattle-based corporation. I saw the words "Best-of-Breed Content" and got scared, so I shut my browser.

The Seattle Writergrrls listserv posts jobs quite often. Maybe one will just fall into my inbox.

Stage One: Overwhelmedness

It starts over the long winter break, while we're waiting in the nether regions of our lives for classes to resume while still enjoying watching every HBO series currently on Netflix. Suddenly, you realize cover letters do not write themselves. Recommendations don't send themselves, either.

Things I learned in the last 2 months, a short list:

0. First, I will need to tools and on-line applications to order my life. I cannot proceed without a stable organization method. (This is my firm mantra.) Spreadsheets have served me well in the past. I just bought a heavy-duty drying rack, so droopy just-laundered clothes can no longer distract me in a heap on the floor. I will sit down and figure out that I wouldn't mind doing for 40 hours a week. But I just found out that, yes, dummy, diet soda is terrible for you. What will I drink now?

1. Higher Education Jobs provide comfort and assurance that I can obtain an administrative position of some sort, remaining close to academia, while enjoying enough mental distance from teaching for a year or so. Kelly, what are your academia-related assurances? Can I visit you in academia if I need my fix?

2. Mediabistro provides the same feeling with all the assurance that freelancing (copyediting work from home, ideally) is also an option for the MFAers among us. I purchased The Copyeditor's Handbook (U of California P, 2006) as a primer and instrument to remind me how much I still need to know about style convention. I did confirm that the choice of indefinite article when preceding an acroynm is decided by pronunciation and not spelling. This confirms that I can indeed write "She received an MFA." Trina could have also confirmed this matter, she knows this stuff. She is also available for pro-bono life coaching services on an informal basis.

3. Interfolio document management system provides a very nice service. Less upfront cost than AWP's dossier service, but does not provide any mailings in the annual cost of $15.


So, I've gathered up all of the resources and many of the sheets of paper with important information on them. I've placed them all on my desk. I've filled out job applications with human resources at Northwestern (for I am Chicago-bound this summer), but haven't hit "submit". I am weak. Where is the sunshine in Montana?