The Recovering Academic In 2024

And a glimpse into 2025

My grandmother’s desk after its restoration. Photo by Joshua Doležal.

Friends,

When I wrote to you at this time last year, I had just finished a flurry of last-minute negotiations that finally ensured equal custody of my children. The very day that agreement was reached, I offered on the house I’m living in now. After a brief exchange with the sellers, the deal was done, and that evening I was signing the papers in my realtor’s office.

As Vivian Bearing says of her death in Wit, it came so quickly after taking so long.

Let me not gloss over it: this was another death. Grief alone is not why my marriage ended, but there’s no doubt that the stress of losing three family members and two dear friends during a move across the country compounded the strain. It’s taken a while to touch bottom.

Divorce was a rebirth, too. I joked rather darkly, when the first waves of freedom hit, that I finally understood Kate Chopin. Right at the beginning, I felt something like Louise Mallard’s reaction in “The Story of an Hour” after learning that her husband had been killed in a train crash.¹ This is what she feels at her open window:

There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air. Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will…. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.

For a few days it felt just like that — like blood rushing into a numbed limb. The horizon opened up. A visceral sense of integrity restored. But I would not risk losing my children. So the gridlock resumed until that final flurry of the year.

I took ownership of the new place on January 2, and in a week it was move-in ready for the kids. A college buddy I hadn’t seen in almost thirty years drove up from North Carolina to help me assemble bed frames, install blinds and shower curtains, and shop for desks, table lamps, and nightstands.

That, in miniature, has been the past year. Reunions, rebuilding, trying to get back to that feeling at the open window.

Searching for a quiet center

Moving in was not without its setbacks. My grandmother asked me, a few years before she died, if I would like her maple rolltop. It had been her father’s desk at his John Deere dealership in North Dakota. She leaned against my shoulder and cried a little when I gratefully said yes, but I expected her to keep balancing her checkbook there for another ten years at least. And the desk was the furthest thing from my mind when she drew her last breath. All I could think about was how to live in a world without her in it.

Many months passed before my parents packed the desk in their Toyota Highlander and drove it across the country to me. But there was no place for it in the house I shared with my ex, where the trim was all white and the rolltop would have cast a strange profile over the windows that filled every wall. So I set it up against the cement blocks next to the furnace, which felt like the only place I fit, too.

When the time came to move out, I was in a terrible rush, and I tried to cut corners by moving the desk in one piece. A friend helped me hoist it into the moving truck, and we wrestled it into my new garage just fine. But midway up the stairs the tacks and glue holding the base together gave way.

It was hard not to take that to heart as a sign that I was still in freefall, an imposter in my own life. But I picked up those pieces, stacked them in the garage, and found a woodworker who specialized in restoration. Within a month he’d repaired the cracks and tightened the joints with fresh screws. He claimed it was stronger than it had been brand new. I took that to heart, too.

This time I carried the desk upstairs in parts and reassembled it carefully. Every morning since, I’ve sat down to write beneath a skylight with maple trim that matches the desk perfectly. On sunny days when I can look straight through my roof and see nothing but blue, I can feel those words pulsing in my chest. Free, free, free.

The desk last week, now properly cluttered. Photo by Joshua Doležal.

Reclaiming my creative life

For too long, despite my best intentions, I’ve allowed external metrics to dominate not only my thoughts but also my creative practice. Nearly everything that pushed me out of academe is baked into publishing and, yes, into the Substack platform itself. I’ve been battling those gremlins ever since I launched.

It’s hard to move into a neighborhood or office and then say you don’t care what any of your neighbors or coworkers think. Substack is a mix of the two. It’s a place that many writers are coming to see as their home base, a space where non-transactional friendships are forged. But it’s also haunted by perpetual talk of growth, earnings, and ambition. If the neighbor two doors down razes the ranch house and builds a McMansion that turns out to be a brothel, you’d be justified in wondering why you’re still living there, no matter how many lovely friends visit you for tea. Just as you can’t *not* care that the trust fund kid is suddenly a VP after two weeks with the company, when you’ve been punching in for two decades or more.

Midway through the year I felt an internal revolt against all this. Sure, one solution could be to leave, take myself completely offline. But I felt like I’d built something that was worth defending. Maybe it was time to stop ruling books out because there was no market for them. Time to stop being acted upon and take more action of my own.

I kept remembering lines from Adrienne Rich’s essay “Claiming an Education,” which was originally delivered as a convocation address to women at Douglass College. Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you. The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference.²

That last line seems more germane than ever. What is the endless scroll but passive drifting and a dispersal of energy? A tool is designed to help you build something, travel somewhere, bake something delicious. I never spend any time staring at my KitchenAid, just letting it run, after I’ve mixed my bread dough for the week. Same for my road bike, running shoes, and guitar. A friend noted recently how much his reading habits have changed, how he reads fewer books now, spends more time at the screen. Something is seriously wrong when the artist realizes that their time and attention, even their most ambitious goals, have been turned into tools for someone else.

I resolved to do one thing for my creative life by the end of the year, and that was to take Someday Johnson Creek off the shelf. For too long I’d let others decide that it wasn’t ready, that it wasn’t even a book. But the magic of that summer, when I preserved my last year as a wilderness ranger in poems, came back as I worked on the cover design and interior. Even the copyright page brought me back to the cabin where the first drafts took shape. The list of credits conjured the desks where I polished those poems over the years.

Last week the messages kept pouring in — friends were gifting the book to their spouses and siblings, strangers were thanking me for holding the poems to the light. I couldn’t have asked for a better holiday gift. Whatever the future holds, I want more of that.

The road ahead

All this was a potent reminder that I had a writing life before Substack, that the vast majority of that practice took place offline, and that I spent those hours deep in the craft, oblivious to the numbers game. If it seems strange that I’d have forgotten the old way so soon, take a moment to reflect on how much has changed in your world since 2021, even if you didn’t quit your job, move across the country, and get divorced.

As Amory Blaine says in This Side of Paradise, “Modern life changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before.” But unlike Amory, I have no wish to quicken the pace.

My goal for 2025 is simple: I aim to finish the fatherhood memoir that I’ve nibbled at for the past five years. It’s quite possible that no publisher is waiting for this book from a writer like me. I’m no parenting pioneer. But sometimes weakness is the memoirist’s greatest strength.

I never set out to be a father. For a time in high school I dreamed of a large family like those celebrated by my religious community. But as a young man I didn’t think I had what it took. I feared becoming my own father, absenting myself emotionally, turning nurture into a power struggle. And academe encouraged a view of children as time thieves. I don’t recall any conversations about children before my wedding day. The decision came abruptly, while watching Netflix, and less because I came around than because my reasons against starting a family felt flimsy by then. I still didn’t feel ready, adequate, up to the task.

That all changed when I watched my daughter’s face emerge, squinting and frowning in the light. My whole center shifted in an instant, and even though I was told for many years that I was doing it wrong, that my best was not good enough, I knew my true north pointed unwaveringly toward my kids.

I’ve not been able to finish this story for many reasons: lack of a quiet center, insufficient distance from the events, uncertainty about what the long arcs should be. I agree with Annie Dillard: no memoir should simply air grievances, no matter how potent the rage. Revenge and redemption serve the writer, not the reader, and I’ve been stuck in that defensive crouch. Even so, the personal is also political for men, so serenity strikes a false note. Finding the right footing, the right tone of voice, has been exceedingly hard.

Why does the world need this book from me? That is the essential question, and I’ll keep grappling with it. But I think there’s a void here to fill. I’ve lived the exact reverse of the mom-moirs I’ve read, not only in steadily taking on more domestic work to the point where I’m doing it all myself every other week, but also in feeling my identity shift so thoroughly that I feel rudderless when my kids are away. If you told me as a young man that by mid-life I’d have sacrificed everything to be near my kids (that I’d even have kids), I’d have thought you were nuts. Yet fatherhood hasn’t been a trap or an oppressive weight to shake. It’s become the core of who I am, flaws and all. The unexpected challenge and delight of my life.

I don’t know that I’ve settled on the right timbre or pitch, but I think I now know how this story ends. It’s not what I ever hoped for, and I’m taking no victory laps, but after a year as a single dad, I’ve found a quiet faith in myself and my life with my kids. That will be the anchor for the new year. By next December, the first draft of the book will be complete.

To get there, I’m changing a few things. First, I’m adapting Amanda B. Hinton’s idea of dividing posts into tiers to allow myself and you, my readers, a more sustainable pace. Green is for short posts, yellow for intermediate length, and I’ll allow myself just one “red” or longform essay each month. Fatherhood is capacious: nearly everything I’ve written about thus far (gardening, fitness, higher ed, art) fits inside. The difference is that I have an end goal for the year.

The 2025 series will center on the new book. Prompts and craft ideas will flow from the kinks I have to work out in my own process, and I’ll review books and essays that shape the WIP. Instead of a haphazard slate of interviews, you can expect conversations more like Eleanor Anstruther’s 8 Questions, only focused on style and technique — how serious writers know good work when they see it, how we keep our standards high in a time of hot takes.

This is how I hope to leverage Substack as a tool for my practice, rather than allowing the numbers tail to keep wagging my output each week.

How will all this impact you?

I say it often: it is an honor to write for you. I’ve also admired how some of my friends have leveraged their earnings to support others in need. For instance, Antonia Malchik donates 5% of her paid subscriptions to a Montana non-profit each quarter. Antonia even posts her donation receipts, as I plan to do.

The Recovering Academic earned about $3,000 in 2024. I invested all of that in my new coaching website, which was a necessary step in rebuilding this year (thank you!). I’m now ready to incorporate giving into my plan for 2025. In Q1, I’ll donate 5% of all paid subscriptions to Out of the Cold Centre County, a low-barrier shelter and resource center in my local community. In Q2 I’ll do the same for Centre Volunteers in Medicine, a free clinic for those with no health insurance and annual income under $38K (individual) or $78K (family of four). Q3 will go to the State College Food Bank and Q4 to Centre County PAWS, a no-kill shelter focusing on adoption, education, and community assistance. PAWS holds a special place in my kids’ hearts, because we adopted our two cats, Iona and Charlotte, there last spring.

Our pretty kitties. Photo by Joshua Doležal.

I won’t be breaking any records with these donations, but I’m playing a long game here, and I intend to share my progress as it comes.

Most craft resources and about half of the interviews and reviews will be free. The main value for a full membership will be access to new chapters of the book (see also a preview of my paywalled archive). You can lock in an annual membership for $30 before midnight (a forever discount). Starting Jan 1, the annual rate will be $40, and the founding membership will remain at $150. The list of founders is short, so that group might even find a bottle of homemade hot sauce headed their way.

If you can’t afford a paid subscription, I’ll take your word for it and comp you for the year, no questions asked. But if you can support my writing as a full member, by gifting a subscription, by reposting my writing, or by reviewing my books on Amazon, it would mean the world.

Thank you for walking this road with me.

Josh

Right where I need to be. Photo by Rebecca Arnold Desmarais, My R.A.D Pics.

1. In fact, he had been mistakenly included in the list of fatalities and arrived home shortly after. Read that dramatic finish.

2. If you find it curious that so many of my references are feminists, consider that I’m a working class guy whose favorite author was a conservative lesbian. But also that feminism, as I understand it and taught it for years, is always concerned with who has power and who feels powerless. If the promise of equality is true, the future isn’t male or female or ___. I think we’ve made progress, and Rich’s words ringing true for me is proof.