Dear Governor Ducey,
I’m not sure you’re familiar with the FAAR. It’s short for
Faculty Annual Activity Report. Each year, college faculty complete a report on
what they’ve done for the last two semesters. These used to be reports compiled
into very large binders but most universities, I think, have gravitated to an
online system. NAU has been using it for a few years now. I like it because I
am not so good at copying paper or at three-hole punching, which is one of the
demands of the old binder system.
In the new system, you upload the classes you’ve taught, the
evaluations. You include your committee work and institutional work and any
grants and publications. This itemized list also provides a chance to reflect
on how you’ve succeeded and what you might do differently for the coming year.
Last semester, as you know, I was on sabbatical but in Fall
2014, I was not. I taught two classes and directed the MFA program. It was a
very busy year. We had four guest writers last fall. David Carlin and Robin Hemley,
with whom I’m chairing NonfictioNOW came to read and to help plan the
conference. Their reading was a great success—students were familiar with
Robin’s work—we read his literary guide on immersion writing in my nonfiction
class— but not David Carlin, who teaches and writes in Melbourne. His stories
were sad and funny and his new book, The Abyssinian Contortionist, is about a
woman acrobat emigrating from Ethiopia. I felt lucky to introduce students to a
well-known American writer as well as an exciting global one. Later that
semester, I hosted Melanie Bishop whose YA novel had just been published.
Students are very interested in writing young adult novels, and even young
adult nonfiction, so her visit was incredibly welcome. Meg Files read and invited
students up on the stage to read with her, making the stage less
ominous-seeming and their work more professional-sounding.
My classes went well. I just looked at the number of words I
wrote in response to grad student work. 45 single-spaced pages, one for each
essay students turned in. I had 15 students in my grad class, which is 3 more
than is recommended by the Associated Writing Program best-practices
guidelines, but isn’t the 18 it sometimes can be, so I am grateful. In student
evals, they were grateful to write so much but I think 3 essays per student may
be too much both for students and for the classroom—we had to set a timer to
make sure everyone got exactly 20 minutes per essay. As I begin to work on this
coming semester’s syllabus, I may ask for only 2 essays, plus a more critical
paper about structure and voice. I should work on that instead of this!
In my undergrad class evals, I got good comments—my favorite
being “This was the best class I’ve taken,” which is always my favorite
comment. I had one detractor who said we read too many other stories and that I
didn’t explain difficult concepts well. I tried to explain difficult concepts
well through the use of already-published essays but it is possible I need to
slow down and define terms more often. I’ll work on that.
The Lit Mag, Thin Air, for which I am the faculty advisor,
did a ton of great work last year. They made a calendar, hosted a fundraiser at
Karma, included local writers in the newest issue and made big waves at AWP—big
names published. We increased donations, subscriptions, and general funding by
a factor of two. Sadly, we were not one of the two projects chosen to apply by
our university to apply for arts council funding again because we asked for too
little money and spreading the word about NAU and Thin Air at the biggest
writers conference in the world was deemed to have “insufficient impact.”
Still, I will look for other grants for the mag this year.
This is getting boring so I’ll try to be quick in my final
analysis. For my sabbatical, I wrote and finished the “sustainability”
manuscript. I applied for two grants to support finishing them. Didn’t get
them. I published a bunch of essays online: The Rumpus, Hobart, Full Grown
People, Sundog Lit (thanks, Jill), and Better: Culture and Lit. I had a big
essay come out in Witness, which is one of my dream mags and another of my
dream mags, Black Warrior Review, published “Distracted Parents of the
Micromanagement Era” as a chapbook. I made a new category on my CV. I also
published in Orion, which is my dreamiest dream. It was just a short essay but
it’s about bees so it counts.
For most of my sabbatical, I worked on the conference. I’ll
write more about that soon. Let’s just say, there is about an email per hour
about the conference. I spent this morning looking at Tote Bags. I am very
close to people who work in NAU’s IT and Ebiz department. I have to pick some
hors d’ouevres soon. That will be fun.
Even though I was on sabbatical, I hosted a few guest
writers—Cynthia Hogue and Karen Brennan—who were excellent guests and spent
time talking to students after their reading about exploding traditional forms
and wrote a poem for the president’s installation. I wrote the final reports
for grants which is a lot like writing a FAAR report for the year in support. I
also wrote some new grants since even though I was on sabbatical, the grant
funding places were not—and now we can have guest writers again. Thanks ACA and FAC! I joined the Northern Arizona
Book Festival board and I taught at Pima’s Writer’s Workshop and visited Murray
State in Kentucky.
I revised a lot of books. I also started a new one. There’s
really no place to put this in-progress work on the FAAR Faculty 180 page but
since I imagine you’re counting words per minute as a sign of my worthiness to
take some start dollars for my salary, I thought I should post word counts
here:
Semi-permeable (novel revision)—added 13,000 words (probably
deleted as many).
New essay, forthcoming in Barrelhouse: revolution—3600 words
Published in Full Grown People: You Never Know Just How You
Look in Other Peopl’s Eyes (sorry if you have the song in your head now)—2000
words
Action for Sustainability—2000 words
Whales for Sustainability—4400 words
Wolves for Sustainability—2500 words
New project--Eggs: 19,000 total
More new project--Better Lettuce--3000
More new project--Nice Eggs—8000
More new project--Why we break Things—3700
More new project--Better—500
Buzzfeed quizzes (I didn’t just take them! I wrote about
them)—1500
Mohawk new
project—500
Smile new projet—1000
Glomski Log (film logging for Micro-film. Way hard)-4000
words
Letters to the governor—38500 words
Revision:
Old novel: Quicksand 83,200
New YA Novel: Hard Rain: 64,074 (but not all the way done
with this one).
My goals were to revise Microcosm, Salmon (which has a new
title: Processed Meats!), Quicksand, Semi-permeable, and Hard Rain and to
finish the Microfilm movie. The movie is hard. I had some serious near
successes with each of these books—especially, Quicksand (almost) and Microcosm
(almost). Horseshoes is not quite what we’re playing but there’s some feeling
of forward motion.
I don’t know if other state employees upload evidence of the
work they’ve done for the year or if they must provide links to work they’ve
published or to evaluations from their “clients” or “customers.” I don’t know
if writing this report instead of drafting an essay or working on my syllabus
or writing a grant is something other employees do, but I’m glad you find it
meaningful and that you now have a greater sense of where tax dollars go. I’m sure this report, if not the work I do, is
money well spent.