The Recovering Academic in 2023

And a taste of what 2024 has in store

Photo by Ethan Wiese on Unsplash

Friends,

It is hard to start this letter at the end of last year, because the story I’ve been telling on

The Recovering Academic

begins in December, 2021, when I resigned a tenured faculty position in Iowa and moved with my family to central Pennsylvania. That was a time filled with hope and not a little fear, because I had no other job in hand. The plan was to play a different role in my family, to be there for the kids at the end of the school day, to be present throughout the week, rather than prepping for class every night and disappearing with a stack of papers to grade every other weekend.

The rest of the days were for writing. I had a novel to pitch and an idea for a fatherhood memoir. I thought I might turn out an essay a week, ply the lit mags, and grind away at agent queries. Publishing is increasingly a numbers game.

But almost immediately after academe’s door swung shut behind me, an icy wave of grief followed. The mourning had actually started earlier that year, when I lost my grandfather to natural causes, then my grandmother to Bulbar ALS, then my cousin to COVID. I was the one who voluntarily resigned my job, but I also felt that it had left me, that the work I loved had been leaving me for years. And so the emotional refrain was loss, the words that my graduate school mentor said the last time I saw her, as she lay dying of cancer. “It’s too soon. Too soon.”

Grief is isolating. There’s no way but through that dark forest, and no matter how present others try to be, you must walk most of that road alone. Americans are also notoriously bad at it. As

Cheryl Strayed

writes of her mother's death, “We are not allowed this. We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or Buddhism, or Star Trek, or jazz, but we are not allowed to be deeply sad. Grief is a thing that we are encouraged to ‘let go of,’ to ‘move on from,’ and we are told specifically how this should be done.” I’ve often felt that this is doubly true of men, that women are granted more latitude to feel deeply, but Strayed reminds me that my own isolation was universal enough.

If we don’t turn the page, and soon, even the closest friends might begin to protect themselves from our sadness. Or they try too hard to relate, which is one form of minimizing our struggle.

Here’s Strayed again:

What was there to do with me? What did those around me do? They did what I would have done — what we all do when faced with the prospect of someone else’s sorrow: they tried to talk me out of it, neutralize it, tamp it down, make it relative and therefore not so bad. We narrate our own lesser stories of loss in an attempt to demonstrate that the sufferer is not really so alone. We make grossly inexact comparisons and hope that they will do. In short, we insist on ignoring the precise nature of deep loss because there is nothing we can do to change it, and by doing so we strip it of its meaning, its weight, its own fiercely original power.

We never put ourselves back together in the same shape again. Healing means discovering the new person living in our skin. For Strayed that meant looking for love outside her marriage, then hiking more than a thousand miles along the Pacific Crest Trail.

For me it meant starting this Substack.

All I knew was that I couldn’t keep writing into a void, waiting six months, a year, sometimes more, to hear back from editors. When the acceptances came, they felt like Strayed’s brief affairs — sudden bursts of pleasure that took the edge off, but that lapsed quickly back into silence. I discovered that I didn’t need a list of publication credits anymore. I needed community.

One day I wrote in the journal I keep for essay ideas, “Make grief the story. Lean into your vulnerability. Write honestly about the loss of identity and purpose.” That was the genesis of this series.

Reader, I veered from that purpose at times this year. I got caught up in the business angle, tried to monetize a podcast and then an interview series, hired a consultant who suggested that I try live workshops, and listened to others who said that the secret to success was to narrow my purpose, offer a service that readers would keep coming back for, forget about content that doesn’t sell, like poetry and literary history.

But I am notoriously bad at squeezing myself into a niche. I could never say what I loved teaching more — creative writing, American literature, medical humanities, podcasting, sustainability? And I’ve published peer-reviewed scholarship on subjects as various as environmental activism, Hawthorne’s Roger Chillingworth as a palimpsest of medical history, writing pedagogy, and Willa Cather’s anticipation of neuroscience. I never offered a narrow service to my colleagues and students. I offered my whole self as a gardener, wilderness ranger, former college athlete, writer, teacher, and scholar.

And so it is unsurprising that the projects from 2023 that feel most successful are those that most authentically express who I am, who I want to continue to be.

• In February, I launched a collaborative site with

  <Mary L. Tabor>
  and
  Sam Kahn
  called
  Inner Life
  . Nearly 40 other writers have contributed to that series. It hasn’t made us a dime — it’s free.

• I was honored to join

  Lyle McKeany
  ,
  Latham Turner
  ,
  Bowen Dwelle
  ,
  Dee Rambeau
  , and
  Michael Mohr
  in two collaborative series: one on fatherhood and another on what recovery means to each of us.

• I have interviewed more than 20 guests about the writing life and career transitions.

  Alison Acheson
  and
  david roberts
  helped me experiment with a variation on interviewing with curated email exchanges (Alison and I even recorded our segments to simulate a podcast). Some say that interviews don’t drive subscriptions. But I know few greater pleasures than longform conversation. 2024 is about following those instincts.

• I’ve begun sharing poetry more frequently on Fridays. One reader wrote of “The Skier,” a poem about a friend suffering from abuse, “It's not even the heartrending loss you describe, which shakes me, but that someone would love another so much to recognize that, to see that loss.” If I can help someone else feel seen in their grief, that is success. “Autumn Birthdays” spoke to many readers, who told me so privately. But “The Olympian” might be my sentimental favorite.

So what is my plan for 2024? I’m going to keep telling the story that I set out to share when I launched

The Recovering Academic

two years ago: the tale of putting myself back together after loss, discovering the new person living in my skin. And just as I could not teach authentically without bringing my whole self to my work, I must remain true to my wide-ranging interests for this series to hold its integrity.

That means:

• More thought pieces on higher ed. I can’t stop caring about my former profession; in some ways I care even more about it now as a father of three. These pieces typically begin with an itch I must scratch, such as the irritation of listening to Michael D. Smith discuss his new book, The Abundant University, with Steve Levitt on the Freakonomics podcast. As usual, two professors at elite universities think they can diagnose what ails higher ed by ignoring the reality at many tuition-dependent schools, such as regional universities, non-selective private institutions, and community colleges. I believe they miss the mark widely and will explain why.

• More collaboration. The single most rewarding part of writing on Substack has been building community. Not surprisingly, community has also been the most effective part of my recovery. So watch for more themed series with my writing group, more email exchanges, and whatever other collaborative experiments come along.

• More original memoir and poetry. I’m still chipping away at my fatherhood project and will share some of that work, but I have another essay in the works about fitness culture — how gendered a space the gym was in the 1980s and 90s, how blessedly more inclusive it has become, how my own relationship with exercise has evolved. And, yes, many Fridays will continue to be reserved for poetry. I intend to protect a portion of my newsletter as my creative sandbox, whether or not that work relates in any obvious way to academe, grief, or recovery.

• More interviews. I’m curious about other people’s lives and want to share that curiosity with you. Some of these interviews will offer practical advice for those transitioning out of academe into other careers. Others will dive back into the writing life or craft. One of my friends is now going the other way, embracing a lectureship as a retirement gig after a long corporate career. I’ve joked with him that I’m a rat who fled the sinking ship, and he is a seagull perched on the hull while it’s still floating. But in many ways his story reflects broader trends in the profession, such as the outsourcing of essential services like teaching to part-time or non-tenured professionals. I’ll keep experimenting with how to deliver interviews to you in textual, audio, and video forms, but the unifying theme will be interesting life stories.

Like anyone on this platform, I’m hoping to grow my base of paying subscribers. What will you get if you upgrade? You’ll get access to 40-50% more of my exclusive interviews, essays, poems, and opinion pieces than free subscribers will. You’ll be part of my community. And you’ll support me in my journey. Many of you on the free plan already do that, and if you’re OK with hitting the paywall every other post, then I’m still happy to have you on board.

I’ve lifted the paywall on much of my archive, if you’d like to explore. I’m also offering a 20% discount on annual subscriptions through December 31. If you are already a paying member, you have my deepest gratitude. I’m always indebted to those who restack posts on the Substack app or refer others to

The Recovering Academic

privately. Another way to support my series is to purchase a gift subscription for someone else or buy a T-shirt or hoodie.

I’m excited about the path ahead. Much of what I feared most about torpedoing my career and moving to a place where I didn’t know anyone other than my ex’s family has, in fact, come to pass. I don’t think of myself as a victim in this — I made the best decisions I could given what I knew then. I still honor those choices, because I made them with my kids top of mind. And I cannot see, looking back, any other way the past year (or two) could have played out.

There is freedom in feeling that the worst is past. Like Cheryl Strayed twenty years ago, I’m doing my best to keep pressing forward through the dark forest. I’ll be moving into a new home in a few days, where the kids will each have their own room for the weeks they stay with me, and where the previous owner kindly prepared more than a thousand square feet of garden beds. There’s even a greenhouse (see photos below). I’m already dog-earing seed catalogs, dreaming of the beautiful things I’ll grow this spring.

For the first time in forever, I’m facing the future with more anticipation than fear. And that is also true of this series. No more squeezing myself into other people’s molds. I’ll make it as me or not at all.

Thank you for sharing this road with me.

Josh

Half of my new gardening space (left), and a greenhouse that is the objective correlative of my mindset now -- a little battered, but still built tightly, and ready to be filled with light. Photos by Joshua Doležal.