Hello!

I’m writing this as I head into the last week of the semester here, end of term papers, projects, and portfolios are starting to be turned in, and summer break is just over the horizon. Wishing the best of luck to all of my fellow teachers in this final push.

Julia Kolchinsky is a fantastic poet, nonfiction writer, teacher, and person. I first met her at AWP in D.C. through some mutual friends and then had the good luck to be able to publish some of her work as editor of Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts.

Being able to spend time with someone’s work as a reader of theirs over several years brings with it such a rich reading experience. I’ve seen Kolchinsky’s work stay true to her investigation of (and skill with) form, line, and sound, while watching her pay attention to how familial, personal, and political histories overlap, conflict, and allow her to search in new directions.

This particular poem of hers has stuck with me since it was published in Poetry as have her other poems like it which engage what a child can raise without realizing, how a parent confronts themselves and their world (in ways both expected and, often, not) in the attentive-in-their-own-ways eyes of their children. Kolchinsky’s work often has me thinking about my own three-year-old daughter and the questions she raises (just this week, the unexpected topic in my house was: “Dad, are there bad guys like there are in movies in real life?”). When I look at my daughter, I see how she is so much still in a child’s version of the world but also exists in the same world I do, so much herself but also so much her family: my sister’s determined, birthmarked forehead, my cousin Zeke’s laughter, pictures I’ve seen of my mother standing tall in a child’s body, the same facial expression my grandmother used to have when she was lost in thought. History and the present come through when we least expect it and the child-like in each of us speaks back in ways we can’t anticipate. Have we not all wanted, as Kolchinsky writes, “simple math” or watched a child want it? Have we not all felt all that comes with witnessing that desire in ourselves or others and all that comes with the realities we simultaneously see?

This poem is in Kolchinsky’s newest book Parallax, which came out just this spring, but if you haven’t yet read her previous collections they’re all more than worth your time and attention: The Many Names for Mother, Don’t Touch the Bones, and 40 Weeks.

Academic Work, Expectations, and Coming Attractions

Since I wrote to you last, I found out I received tenure and promotion and a sabbatical for this coming fall semester. I’m excited about all of it but perhaps most excited to have some time to focus more on my writing, research, and new projects.

As any of you who’ve worked at small liberal arts colleges (SLAC) know, teaching at a SLAC brings with it so many great things: mentoring students one-on-one, teaching them multiple times before they graduate and getting to really see their growth, and getting to teach across different kinds of classes and have a lot of creativity and ownership with what we teach. But it also brings with it some tensions: low pay, high workload, a constant eye on how stable or unstable schools like your own are across the country. I teach four classes, four preps, each semester, with independent studies, thesis students, summer or winter courses, student clubs, and campus events on top of that baseline, and as the only creative writer on my campus a lot of those extra things, excitedly but also overwhelmingly, come my way. And while teaching remains the focus, a high amount of service is always expected, with multiple committees at once the norm, including being in charge of them whether tenured or not.

For myself, one of the main things I’ve had to navigate since moving to Missouri has been my relationship to research and writing. As I imagine is the case for many teaching artists, my expectations for myself are high in terms of how I’m making progress on my various writing projects, what I’d like to improve in my teaching, how I want to help my students and fellow teachers, my work as an editor, building relationships with other writers and artists in my region, and so many other things. At the same time, my job values teaching and other campus-based work far more than the writing and research that are central to me and central to connecting me with others in my field.

The result then of devoting time to what my job values is sometimes feeling that while I’m succeeding in some respects I’m also not living up to my own goals: finishing the next manuscript, publishing the book, completing the essay, etc. I’m aware no one’s looking over my shoulder to make sure I do more or differently than I’m already doing. But I am.

There’s a lot to be said under the surface here, and that I’ll probably be writing about for a long time to come in various formats, about anxiety, being a teacher, being a writer, my country’s and my family’s relationships with work, but I say all of this to say that this sabbatical already feels like a bit of time to connect further with the part of myself I know and value but that gets pushed aside from time to time by all the other aspects of my day to day.

Even on sabbatical, I will have to be attentive to work things while “away,” (finishing up paperwork on expanding offerings in my department, mentoring a couple thesis students, and hopefully hiring a new colleague,) but day to day my focus will be able to be elsewhere more often: on writing and submitting my creative work, digging in further and pitching my scholarly projects, taking a couple quick online courses to learn and be a bit of a student again, bringing to fruition the first parts of my new publishing project, and reading widely for the first time in a long time.

And I’m also planning on supporting the other parts of who I am, too: going to concerts, visiting with family, cooking new things, hiking more frequently, being as engaged and present of a parent as I can be, supporting Ellen in the first months of her new job (more on that once I can share the good news!), and more.

I’m sure I’ll accomplish both more than I realize and less than I hope as that always seems to be the way these things go, but I’m grateful to get the chance to go deeper with things important to me. I’ll be sure to keep you all updated as I go.

A New Publication

Thanks to Appalachian Journal and its editor Jessica Cory for giving this poem a home in their recent issue on Appalachian Visual Art. This one, like the last I shared, came from a visit to the Knoxville Museum of Art when I lived nearby. I’d seen plenty of Ansel Adams photographs before but I’d always associated his work with the West and not with the Smoky Mountains. I took in this photograph of his in a different way when I was living and writing about a region he was also trying to see, and looking alongside the ways he looked eventually made its way into this poem.

A Prompt

Think of a place important to you, and then try to find a piece of visual art of that place. Write a poem in response to the piece of visual art you find. Alternatively, especially if you can’t find a work of art about the place you have in mind, make one yourself and then write a poem in response to your own visual piece.

I really appreciate all of you who’ve signed up, and I look forward to writing again soon. Please leave a comment, reply to this email, share it with people you think would enjoy it, or send me a note in some other way just to say hi (hi!)

Wishing you all the best things.

-Jeremy