The Recovering Academic in 2025 will feature craft resources for writers, reviews and interviews, and new chapters from a book in progress. Read my 2024 year-end post for more details about my plans for this year.
Paying subscribers get access to:
Craft resources for writers of all levels
Longform essays from a memoir in progress
Founding members get all this plus signed copies of my memoir and poetry collection and one 60-min coaching session (a $100 value).
Free subscribers get access to public posts and previews.
Coaching and editing
Do you have a manuscript that you want to take to the next level? Or an idea for a project, but you don't know where to start? Let’s set up a free consultation to see if we’re a good fit. Founding members get a full coaching session free.
I specialize in literary memoir, but I also help clients with personal statements for graduate school and op-eds for popular and academic magazines.
About me
I am a writer and award-winning teacher with 20 years of experience in publishing and editing. My mentor was Ted Kooser, former Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner. My work has appeared in more than 40 magazines, including these.
My memoir Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging was shortlisted for the 2016 William Saroyan International Prize. Debra Marquart writes, “From a mountaintop childhood of baseball, the Bible, huckleberry picking, and revival meetings, Joshua Doležal narrates his story of outmigration. Yet, even as he recounts his escape, the high rugged home lives irrevocably inside Doležal, just as it will haunt the reader after experiencing this lush, transporting, and heartfelt memoir.”
My poetry collection, Someday Johnson Creek, traces one summer as a ranger in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of north Idaho, where trail maintenance provides a touchstone for childhood, American history, and masculinity. The book takes its name from a real place and also honors Connie Saylor Johnson, who devoted more than forty years to wilderness conservation. Read why it took 20 years to publish this book.
I am also father to three fantastic kiddos, who sometimes humor me with backcountry adventures and help me plan each year’s garden. In the hours before breakfast, you can usually find me running the back roads in central Pennsylvania or pumping iron with the other early birds.
If you belong to the recovering academic community or know someone who has left academe, check out my tees or hoodies!
