The New Work of Composing

“Although I haven’t seen him in more than ten years I know I’ll miss him forever. I never had any friends like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anybody?” (Bruce Evans & Raymond Gideon, 1986, n.p.)

One of the more ironic things about our profession, I think, is that it sets us up to be disconnected from the people who might understand us most. We develop networks as graduate students—coming together in small classes that focus on conversation, creating common keywords and terms to facilitate that sharing and building of ideas. Then, we go “on the market,” often competing with our co-creators, and land, sprawled across the country, in different kinds of departments, placed on a tenure clock that often devalues our collaborations, even when we explain that co-authoring is more work, not less, than authoring alone.

Too often we are complicit in this scheme. We accept the fact that we should move halfway across the country for a job that may end after three or six years. We accept that teaching gets separated from scholarship. We accept that administration is better left to those who have political clout and/or tenure. We accept that we must wait until after tenure to do the real work—collaborative, digital, feminist, radical—we set out to do as graduate students. Isolation plays a huge role in our complicity; it separates and divides us both from our support networks and from our families/friends.

“Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant” (Evans & Gideon, 1986, n.p.)

It takes time to develop networks and friendships. If we’re lucky, we do this as graduate students. And then we get plonked down somewhere during the busiest times of our lives and we try to make a go of jobs and families. You’ll pardon us then if we try to stay connected with the people we feel most comfortable with, by any means necessary.