20131209.0719

I got some good news this morning as I read my email: publication!  My poem, "By the Crawl-Space Door," was accepted as part of the One Image: One Hundred Voices Flash Fiction, Poetry & Creative Non-Fiction Global Writing Project, and I am quite excited.  It is the first poem I have had published, other than the snippets of verse in this webspace, in some time, and I cannot deny that I am happy to be validated in some small way as a creative writer.  The curator of the project (if that is the word) is far from inexpert, and her approval of my work is a bit of praise from someone who knows how to offer it.

That the commendation is such a happy thing for me speaks to something I think I have addressed before: the need for approval.  Most people have it, I think, the need to have someone else offer an upraised thumb or a nod of the head; we are social animals, and indications of approval are indications that we belong.  (I am aware of the song.  I do not know that it applies here).  Given the opprobrium that attaches itself to the work of the mind, particularly the work of the mind in humanistic study, opportunities for approval are more eagerly sought by I and those like me than by others, I think.

The question will doubtlessly arise about my publication as to whether or not I am going to get paid for the work.  The answer is "probably not."  At best, the publication will help me to be able to get other paying work.  It denotes that I am capable of conducting work outside my area of specialty, that I can handle other parts of English studies than the late medieval Arthurian literature in Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur upon which I focus.  As such, I am more able to see connections among ideas and, presumably, to present those connections in ways that others can see--a useful thing for both research and teaching.

There is also this to consider: in being published as a creative writer, I can demonstrate that Shaw's adage about teachers is not quite as applicable as people like to believe.  When I teach poetry, as I have discussed doing before, I do so from the position of having written it, and written it in a way that has gotten out into the world through the agency of another.  I do, and I teach...and I suppose that part of why I maintain this webspace is in the same vein.  I write here and elsewhere, occasionally in more formal publication, to demonstrate that I am capable, that I can do the things I ask of my students term after term.  And even as they presumably hope to earn approval through their efforts, I seek to earn approval through mine.

This is the beginning of exam week at my current institution; my students will be seeking approval from me, and I have the hope that some of them will find it as I have found approval from my peers today.