The Giraldi-Ohlin brouhaha and why I left academia

Many of the posts and twitterings that met William Giraldi’s NYT review of books by Alix Ohlin, a professor at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, sound a note of hysteria. Like all such kerfuffles, the responses have quickly moved from concrete talk about style and story to accusations of misogyny, jealousy, and viciousness. I am distant and obscure enough, here in the rural hills, to remain unruffled and at times amused. But it has made me think about my choices in life, and now to write with frankness about them for the first time.

Long ago I quit academia after five years of teaching, gaining my tenure two years early and promptly saying good-by. I have never explained here or elsewhere why I left my secure perch because I have so many friends who teach and write. The foremost reason for me was that I found tenure and full-time teaching to be a bad idea for a writer.

Ten books and three forthcoming books later—poetry, novels, and several fantasies for children--I can say that I do not regret my decision. I lost a good deal of security and salary, and I fell from the academic realm of writers, but I gained freedom to do exactly as I liked in words. No book I wrote would be needed for promotion or merit pay. I could strive as I liked, and could spend months in a way that might seem wasteful to others but was the path forward for me. I had no need to throw myself into print. As a young poet, and later as a poet and writer of stories and novels, I had no need to think better of my work than it deserved at the time.

Sudden mad desires that might result in no publication at all could be fulfilled. I could write a book that started with a vivid dream (Catherwood, FSG, 1996.) I could write a post-apocalyptic epic in blank verse (Thaliad, CA: Phoenicia, 2012). I could write a novel set entirely in and on trees (Val/Orson, UK: PS, 2009). My daughter's request for fantasies could lead me to write two Southern fantasies combining Cherokee and Scots-Irish lore (The Curse of the Raven Mocker and Ingledove, FSG 2003 and FSG 2005.) Would A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Mercer, 2012) be what it is--perhaps my best novel--if hurry and an academic calendar had governed my decisions?

Nor did I have to pour out my creativity (as I certainly once did) on planning classes in detail, rereading where duty led, or putting on a class performance that would draw in those who were not lured by the assigned reading. I saved all that hard work and verve for my writing and for my three children; both in turn nourished the desire to create and the joy of arranging words in fresh shapes.

Like any life, mine is smeared and marked by what I unfashionably admit to be sin and error and wrong choices. But I have been true to words. Book after book, I have made new worlds as I wished and as my joy in words led. I have in great part ignored the world’s view and clung to my own, whether that was the “smart” thing to do or not. In these matters, to paraphrase Anne Bradstreet, Vie with me if you can.