I have stepped down from my position as one of the two vice presidents of my faculty union–a decision I made in order to pursue a writing opportunity that I would almost certainly have had to let pass otherwise–and that choice has allowed me the mental space I did not have before to reflect on what I want my writing life to be.
I began working for my union about ten years ago, and I don’t regret a single minute, but the fact is that doing that work meant setting my own writing largely aside. Not that I’ve been completely inactive. I published my second book of poems, Words For What Those Men Have Done, during that time, as well as assorted other poems and essays, including “Attar’s Tale of Marhuma: The Woman With a Manly Heart,” my first ever peer reviewed publication, but most of those publications were rooted in work I did before I became the union’s Communications Coordinator, a job that I incorporated into my duties as union secretary when I was elected to that position in 2015.
Writing and managing the union blog, writing and managing almost all communications with our members, not to mention all the other duties I performed as a union officer, left me less and less time for my own writing, and when I became our Vice President of Classroom Faculty in the summer of 2020, what little time I did have shrunk even more. I didn’t realize how heavily that weighed on me, though, till the end of the 2020-2021 academic year when circumstances that are neither appropriate nor worth going into here conspired to make me very unhappy in my position as Vice President. Had those circumstances been different, I might have tried to find a way to achieve more of a balance between the writing I wanted to do and the demands of being a union officer, but they weren’t different, and so I stepped down.
I have mixed feelings, of course. The past 10 years have been personally very fulfilling; I know I made a real difference in the lives of some union members; and I know that much of the union as a whole supported the work I did. At the same time, I would be lying if I said that stepping down hasn’t also been liberating. I’m looking forward to focusing at work pretty much solely on my classes and to not having the demands of the union interfere with my writing, which, along with doing the writing, includes promoting it; staying in touch through my newsletter with people who have shown interest in my work; and figuring out what I want my online presence as a writer to be.
For the past couple of years, I’ve been splitting my online presence between the site I have on Blot at richardjnewman.com, which I think of as my writer’s website, and my blog here on Micro.blog, where I’ve been dipping in and out in a way that is far less consistent than I would like. I know that inconsistency has been rooted in no small measure in the time constraints imposed by the union work, but it’s also a result of trying to manage two separate sites and figuring out what kind of content belongs where. So I am thinking of following Rob van Vliet’s example and using Blot as the front end of my website, while moving all my blogging, long and short form, over to Micro.blog.
I’m still at the very early, and messy, conceptual stages of all this, but I’m looking forward to the process. Verbalizing what I want to do as specifically and concretely as I’ve done here is an important first step. I’m glad I’ve taken it.