No retreat, no surrender

Now it can be told. The new publishing venture that I mentioned in my last infrequent update, the one that Noel is helping to launch (and his first salaried, non-freelance job in decades) is The Dissolve, a new film site from Pitchfork Media. Right now they're just a placeholder site, a Tumblr, and a Twitter account, but the first real content will hit the streets next month. (And notice how cleverly I titled that last post, before the name of the site had officially been announced.)

Noel is energized and feeling creative, both doing administrative thinking like mapping out how the DVD reviews will be assigned and scheduled, and writing essays and reviews that will start appearing when the site goes live. It's a terrific place for him to be in his early forties: starting a new venture that builds on all the experience and expertise he's developed in the past twenty-odd years of critical writing.

And me? Well, I'm almost as happy as he is. Happier, maybe. I set out with some trepidation on my first research trip last month, to Hartford, Connecticut. This was the acid test. Could I find prayer shawl knitters to talk to? Would they want to talk to me, if I found them? Would my questions elicit the kinds of information I needed to know? I was elated by the result. I talked to 15 people in 8 interviews over the course of 6 full days in Hartford -- mostly in the surrounding area: Windsor, South Windsor, Farmington, Stafford Springs, Vernon. They were generous with their time and with their organizational energy, helping me get in touch with other members of their groups. And they seemed to appreciate the questions I asked, both the prosaic ones that allowed them to explain how their ministries worked, and the more unusual ones that asked them to reflect on what it means. I came home with about eleven and a half hours of interview recordings. And with some new ideas, too, about what themes might be present in this subject matter and in these women's experience that I hadn't hypothesized. That's how qualitative research is supposed to work; you continually reshape your hypothesis and redirect your investigation based on what you find as you explore. How relieved I am to find that it's happening here!

In a couple of weeks I head to Seattle for my second research trip, and my calendar for the six full days I'm there is already chock full of interviews. I'm trying to push myself to make maximum use of my time in the field, but I know now from experience that doing these interviews is hard work. I was glad in Hartford for some downtime, an empty morning or afternoon here and there (my evenings were almost all taken), to be alone and rest from the effort of connecting with other human beings. I was glad for flexibility in my driving schedule, so I could head out early if need be to avoid rush hour traffic and the frequent heavy rain that blanketed Connecticut while I was there. Knowing I was not so tightly scheduled was important for my peace of mind.

I've also used my freedom while on sabbatical to think about my mid-life crisis, to examine my reactions to this research activity and to being free of administrative duties, and have some preliminary thoughts about what I want the rest of my academic career to look like. Just preliminary; every time I follow them too far down the road to prospective action I get cold feet. But I'm remembering what led me into this life in the first place, and what fed my fire in those early years. I'm different now, but it's still useful to ask the question of what I would most regret not accomplishing twenty years in the future, based on what I wanted to do when I started out and what I've found that I have to offer along the way.

More to come, of course. Meanwhile. bookmark The Dissolve, and if you're in the Seattle area, let me know so we can cross paths while I'm there.

Dissolve to next scene

Definition of infrequent posting: My last post was in late March, and announced my sabbatical for the summer (actually nearly a month after it was approved). This post, on Mother's Day 2013, contemplates the start of my sabbatical in just two days.

It seems like it's taken at least a full semester since spring break to get to this long-awaited point, even though it's only been seven weeks. April has been a month of intense hard work, with two major service projects in my two classes involving on-campus events coming to fruition. I ended the semester drained; the word that kept coming to mind, frankly, was "defeated." But at least it wasn't an ordinary summer stretching out in front of me. Wonderful as that can be to look forward to, it wasn't going to cut it in my burned-out state.

Because of my sabbatical, I won't be working on anything but my book after Tuesday. Well, I'll have to work on my promotion application, which has made almost no progress since spring break, and will be due shortly after I return from sabbatical. But nothing that has to do with my normal administrative duties. No freshman orientation. No information management. No reports. No strategic planning. No assessment. No curriculum development. No course prep. Nothing but reading, writing, interviewing, and organizing material for my prayer shawl ministry book.

It might sound like I'm already there. But this week, representing the transition from my administrative job to my sabbatical, involves several big tasks.

Here's my to-do list for Monday and Tuesday, my last days at work as associate dean:

• Complete sections of the annual report for which I'm responsible, chiefly reporting on the status of goals from the last year.
• List specifications for computer and A/V purchases for several classrooms, so that they can be ordered by the secretary.
• Brainstorm goals for the upcoming year with administrative team.
• Convert cash donations for service learning fundraisers into checks, write cover letters, and send to the appropriate charities.

And here's my to-do list for Wednesday through Friday, the first days of my sabbatical:

• Familiarize myself with my interview recording setup.
• Ascertain if I need any more equipment or backups.
• Conduct a trial run of my interview outline with a local subject.
• Schedule and confirm interviews in Hartford, Connecticut, where I'm headed next week.
• Make travel plans for my next trip in late June.
• Continue reading and notetaking from my growing stack of research texts.

Noel is in Chicago this upcoming week starting his new job (details on that forthcoming). It's hugely exciting for both of us to be opening the door to new lives in the same week. His change is more permanent; mine is more of an extended vacation from my usual routine. I'm as eager for him to get started as I am to start my own sabbatical. In his absence, I have a few additional items for the ol' to-do list, related to being sole custodial parent this week, including school chauffeuring duties that will shorten my office workdays by a couple of hours (making those Monday-Tuesday to-dos more difficult to achieve without taking work home).

I've been looking forward to this Wednesday, May 15, the first day of my sabbatical, for a long time. I'm nervous about being able to do what I'm setting out to do, and I'm aware that I'll be working just as hard and long on this (if not more so) as I do on my teaching and administrative work normally. I'm already stressing about squeezing all the pre-Hartford sabbatical tasks into just a few days this week before I hop on a plane next Monday. 

But oh, the appeal, the longed-for luxury of turning my attention to Just One Thing rather than trying to squeeze my scholarly work and theological thinking into the odd half-hours left over after the million and one things of my normal job. Sabbatical, here I come.

Taking a break

It's spring break. More accurately, it's the last day of spring break. And it's been a fantastic experience. Every day I've been in the office, mostly all alone (on two days, two different co-workers were also present). Spring break is like a harbinger of summer, with its empty campus and long stretches of unallocated time.

And then the end of the semester rushes back, and it's five weeks of utter chaos before summer actually starts. Usually I think of that chaos as the last gasp of activity before a more leisurely pace for three months. But this year is different.

I applied for and received a sabbatical for the upcoming summer. Most sabbaticals are given for fall or spring semesters, because most faculty don't have regular duties in the summer for which they would need official release. But administrators, like me, can only be granted a sabbatical for the summer, because their administrative functions would (presumably) be more difficult to replace or reassign than the teaching duties of faculty in a normal semester.

This is the first sabbatical I've ever applied for. I'm in my twelfth year of teaching. Prior to a few years ago, when I considered a sabbatical, I didn't have a major project that warranted a request. But now I do -- a book about the theology of prayer shawl ministries, under contract and due next spring.

And the university and the publishing company aren't the only institutions expecting results from my summer off. I have a grant covering some of the travel I need to do for my research and even a course release to give me more time to write this fall. There are another couple of grants still in the pipeline, at least one of which I'm quite hopeful will be funded.

So my sabbatical will be far from relaxing. On the contrary, I'm hoping to travel fully a third of the time. But I'm still looking forward to it as a period of much-needed rest. While I'm not in active crisis like I was a few months ago, I'm still experiencing burnout in my job. I'm still feeling dread about the approaching pressure to step up in administration, and still wondering whether I should instead step aside.

If anything, although my emotional state about it all is more stable, the conditions at work have become harder for me to treat with equanimity. Not that anything overt is wrong, but that the ever-elusive promise of stability and order continues to slip farther and farther into fantasy. I crave work in which I control the pace and the outcome. For scholars, that's research. I'm well aware that it's asking far too much; few human beings ever have the chance of experiencing such control. But those of us in academia usually have some taste of it, and when they're not teaching, faculty typically set aside periods  for it. Right now, that kind of life seems mighty appealing.

So I'm looking forward to throwing myself into research and writing almost full-time for the rest of 2013. It's a test, of sorts, to see whether I get it out of my system and emerge ready to take up the administrative mantle again, or whether I find myself unable to contemplate a life without ample time for scholarly immersion. or something in between.

And when it's over, if all goes as I think it should, my application to be promoted to full professor will be nearing approval. I know my boss will be looking forward to the end of next year as a return to full strength for the department, with sabbaticals for me and another faculty member behind us. But I've long anticipated that moment of promotion as permission to look around and see what other opportunities exist. It's hard to contemplate changing jobs, moving my family, any of those massive disruptions. And I'm not planning on it. But after the freedom to work on my own behalf, on my own project, comes the freedom to see whether that work (and my other experience) can bear more fruit elsewhere than it can here.