Welcome back, my fellow creatives!

After covering the arrival of Autism in our lives and struggling to help my daughter find her own balance between creativity and job stuff, it’s time to saunter on over to the land of Academia, the world of my own career.

For a long time, I was but a mere adjunct, doing what I could to help Bo support our kids. Working part-time gave me the chance to work on my novels and build my work here with you; in the end, I needed to start teaching full-time for my family’s sake. Yup, I’m slowly finding my way back to balancing life in the Creative Realm and life in Academia…for Academia is not always an easy place to be.

Sure, there is a wealth of different perspectives to listen to and explore. I’ve got some amazing colleagues all over the country because I teach online, which is sweet. Some also enjoy creative pursuits, like photography and poetry. My department chair has even written a couple creative nonfiction books.

But if there’s one thing I hear too often–that I say all too often–is that it’s a struggle to write on top of teaching.

Fellow indie writer and WWII author Anne Clare and I have discussed this as well. Anne teaches elementary school while also raising her family. “I just find more and more that my creativity goes into my teaching,” she said while we watched our kids chase each other with Transformers and hedgehogs. “I used to stay up and research, but dagnabit, I gotta sleep if I’m going to handle a room full of little goofballs.”

I nodded. Of course I nodded. My kids are exhausting enough, and this woman’s handling over a dozen six-year-olds for several hours a day. Heck, I’m amazed she had the energy for our visit.

For those of us in university, creativity is needed for our live classes, our supplements, our committee work, our scholarship, our conference presentations, etc etc etc. Soooooo much of this is research, and writing, and revising, and more research and writing and revising, etc ditto jinx ibid.

Take last November–I presented at a national conference of English teachers with some colleagues on the importance of accessible learning platforms and outreach for neurodivergent students. We are obligated to provide a regular amount of academic output, whether it’s academic publications, presentations, collaborations. Failure to fulfill that output can put one’s teaching career into a negative spotlight. We see the pressures of such output boil over every time a professor is accused of plagiarism, just as such pressures on a student can lead the student to cut corners and use work that’s not their own.

Yeah, I don’t get to teach the ins and outs about sacrificing to some ancient spirit or a hidden race of magical creatures, but I am constantly trying to help students discover the power of their own words so that they want to share their own efforts and not cut those corners. In a time where folks are barraged by ads about letting AI programs like Grammarly do the writing for you, this is a seriously big challenge, especially when many students aren’t even ready for college-level reading. But that’s a post for another day.

To my school’s credit, a handful of fellow creatives and I maintain an online journal and literary festival–I’ve even shared some of my work from past festivals on this site. It’s exciting to see what inspires others far more learned than myself, whether that’s a beloved book or natural space. We do our collective best to carve out those precious moments every year so that we can transcend beyond the Academic, if only briefly, to be Completely, Utterly Creative.

It’s bloody hard, keeping that kind of imagination alive.

But as I write here to you, my friends, I can feel that this return, this chance to find the footing between the classroom and creativity, is worth every stumble.

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!