Do you ever read 'quit-lit'?
For the past few years, essays written by someone who has left academic employment about why they did so have resonated with me. I work in a university but am not on a research or teaching contract, which sometimes matters not at all and sometimes matters very much. Sometimes I am grateful that my work still allows me access to a number of resources I can use to write history, sometimes I am frustrated that I don't have access to some of the resources, time, and respect I took for granted as a PhD student.
I am one of the lucky ones. A month before submitting my PhD, in September 2016, I moved to my current city because my then-partner got a job here. After a year of putting together part-time jobs as a library assistant, associate lecturer (British for TA) at two universities, short-term early career researcher, part-time research administrator, in September 2017, I was simultaneously offered a permanent job as an academic librarian, and a one-year postdoc researching late antique saints. I chose the permanent job and three years later, with the world gone to hell, I am still here.
For the first year and a half, I didn't appreciate my good fortune. The other side of academic libraries was and is an eye-opening experience, and so too was the response of most academics: oh, they said, are you able to make time for your research and writing during your work day? (As though being a librarian was a job they could not imagine actually taking eight hours a day.) The fact that I have a PhD, and not an MLS/MLIS, was similarly baffling to many librarians. At one of the first library conferences I ever went to, a fellow attendee introduced herself to me by demanding to know where I went to library school. Finding Chris Bourg's blog post on feral librarianship was an immense help with my feelings of being, as the saying goes, neither fish nor fowl.
Plus, I was actively applying for the academic jobs and early career research grants, to the point where that was all the writing I did, outside of preparing conference papers. I had a number of interviews, but none resulted in an academic job. In between a few of the more devastating rejections, I came across Dr Erin Bartram's essay on her experience of leaving academia. I read the following paragraphs and finally found words for something I had been feeling but unable to articulate:
Quit-lit exists to soothe the person leaving, or provide them with an outlet for their sorrow or rage, or to allow them to make an argument about what needs to change. Those left behind, or, as we usually think of them, those who “succeeded”, don’t often write about what it means to lose friends and colleagues. To do so would be to acknowledge not only the magnitude of the loss but also that it was a loss at all. If we don’t see the loss of all of these scholars as an actual loss to the field, let alone as the loss of so many years of people’s lives, is it any wonder I felt I had no right to grieve? Why should I be sad about what has happened when the field itself won’t be?
Even in our supportive responses to those leaving, we don’t want to face what’s being lost, so we try to find ways to tell people it hasn’t all been in vain. One response is to tell the person that this doesn’t mean they’re not a historian, that they can still publish, and that they should. “You can still be part of the conversation!” Some of you may be thinking that right now.
To that I say: “Why should I?”
Being a scholar isn’t my vocation, nor am I curing cancer with my research on 19th century Catholic women. But more importantly, no one is owed my work. People say “But you should still write your book – you just have to.” I know they mean well, but actually, no, I don’t. I don’t owe anyone this book, or any other books, or anything else that’s in my head.
“But your work is so valuable,” people say. “It would be a shame not to find a way to publish it.”
Valuable to whom? To whom would the value of my labor accrue? And not to be too petty, but if it were so valuable, then why wouldn’t anyone pay me a stable living wage to do it?
I don’t say this to knock any of my many colleagues who write and publish off the tenure-track in a variety of ways that they find fulfilling. I just want us to be honest with ourselves about who exactly we’re trying to comfort when we offer people this advice and what we’re actually asking of those people when we offer it.
Dr Bartram goes on to write about the fact that a PhD in History trains those who earn it to be a history professor and nothing else. My own PhD programme only started running events where alumni came and talked about their careers, let alone talks on how to apply for academic jobs, in the last year I studied there--and even the careers events were tailored towards academic work. (Professors' biographies and departmental webpages list former students who have gained academic jobs, but no other alumni.) Even PhDs don't know what else you do with a PhD...
Even with all the stars aligned to keep writing: a stable job, healthcare, good internet, a safe place to live, decent (but not great) access to paywall-protected academic databases and journals, and excellent alumni library access through one of my former universities, I struggled with the question Dr Bartram asks. If producing academic writing is not part of my employment--and there is an excellent piece, here, about the fact that historians don't typically make money for this sort of writing--why do it? If you want to be a writer who specialises in history, you don't need a degree that trains you to be a history professor. Most trade nonfiction about the past is not written by authors with history PhDs; and a doctorate doesn't typically train its recipients to write well.
I moved halfway around the world to become a historian, I didn't earn a PhD so I could write (unpaid) in my spare time. The degree was my entry ticket into the profession, neither a hobby project nor the sum total of my life (shout-out here to everyone who advised, in my first two years of librarianship, that I should spend my evenings and weekends writing in order to maximize my chances of academic employment). When I read Fobazi Ettarh's article on vocational awe in librarianship, it felt like I finally had the words to express some of what I saw and felt about academic work--the emphasis on teaching and research as a calling, the framing of the academic community as a sacred space, the endless job-creep of publishing expectations and student satisfaction, and more.
The fact that I have chosen to resurrect this blog and produce academic and hopefully other kinds of writing, seems to fly in the face of all that I have just written. Quit lit, after all, is about quitting. Being done. Finished.
And yet.
No one is owed my work. I used to find the W.H. Auden quote 'You owe it to us all to get on with what you're good at' a source of inspiration when I was working on job applications. Now, thinking these things through, it grates. No one is owed my work.
I am uneasy with the idea that I am writing for my own fulfillment--once more for the folks at the back, I did my PhD as a professional degree. And I struggle with the idea of my writing as a historian being useful to myself or anyone else, a question the following poem raised for me when I stumbled across it.
To be of use
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
~ Marge Piercy
From Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1982). Available online at the Poetry Foundation, here
For now, the only answer I have come to is that I owe it to myself to keep writing, and I owe it to others to keep learning, and extend help and welcome however I can.
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