In May 2013, after a fruitless search for my first academic job, I flailed about, in my apartment and my mind. Days that began with earnest dissertating dissipated into frantic Internet searches for late-season job announcements, get-rich-quick editing or tutoring schemes, and loopholes that would allow me to keep my grad-school affiliation without paying tuition. Slouching more theatrically by the hour, I scrolled through the web’s vast trove of “don’t go to grad school in the humanities” advice columns. In an especially desperate moment, I Googled “What is my future?” I would hum “Try to Remember” and hear the refrain as “Wallow, wallow, wallow, wallow, wallow, wallow, wallow, wallow, waaa-llow. … “
Then, at the end of the month, I received an email awarding me a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University. Someone who had accepted the position had just taken a tenure-track job elsewhere, and I was first on the waitlist. I promptly started dissertating earnestly enough to graduate before the contract began on August 1.
The past academic year at McGill has been wonderful. I’ve taught one class each term, in subjects I love and to students I learn from. I’ve revised past writing and begun a new project. I enjoy a great library, good health care, a paycheck, and a lively and welcoming community. I feel grateful and lucky—and apprehensive. Moving once from waitlist to workplace is no charm against another season of droopy consultations with the Google oracle.
I wish the days would go more slowly, because what follows the postdoc gig is a blank.
A postdoc appointment offers a joyful purgatory, an antechamber at once prestigious and precarious. The 2013 Canadian Postdoc Survey reports: “Assuming that there is no significant change in either the number of openings for new faculty or the number of postdoc appointments, the majority of postdocs will not obtain faculty positions.” The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation designed its American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellows program, a postdoc program similar to mine that ran for four years, to “address the dire situation of newly minted Ph.D.’s in the humanities and related social sciences who are now confronting an increasingly ‘jobless market.’” Allocating more postdocs gives more young scholars a chance to stay in the game, even as it stiffens the competition.
So, what’s a plucky postdoc to do? The Canadian survey recommends that postdocs “be encouraged to explore nonacademic career options and to acquire the requisite training and skills.” Sure, why not? But the great advantage of a postdoc position is time to research, publish, and teach; it’s time-consuming and distracting to hone nonacademic skills just when you are especially well positioned to join academe for the long term.
Further, the job market is tough wherever you look, particularly for those with interest in the arts. All of my writerly or artistic peers outside academe are making it up as they go. A playwright lived paycheck-to-paycheck at temp jobs for years until he got into an M.F.A. program that would pay his way. A journalist wriggled by in Williamsburg until taking off for Phnom Penh, where she is now the executive editor of The Cambodia Daily. A winner of the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism has spent the bulk of her 20s living in her parents’ Manhattan apartment. Everyone’s situation feels like a one-off. The difference between these friends’ paths and my own is that the Ph.D. is a terminal degree that supposedly leads to a tenure-track position. Well, isn’t it pretty to think so?
In my more anxious moments, two phrases compete to comfort me: “Do what you love” and “You are not your work.” The former justifies road bumps as the small cost of an ardent journey. The latter diminishes road bumps and the road itself and figures me as hovering high above the map, sufficient without a path and free to choose any given one. Neither phrase completely comforts because each gets only something right; as in a dream, I am at the same time on the road and in the sky.
Recent media attention to “Do what you love” has confirmed its limits. A January article in Jacobin, “In the Name of Love,” argues, thoughtfully, that a “Do what you love” culture ignores “unlovable but socially necessary work” and inhibits those in “lovable” but unstable jobs (such as unpaid internships and adjuncting posts) from asking for due compensation and benefits. And a May article in The New York Times, “A Life Beyond ‘Do What You Love,’” points out that seeking to do only what you love sidelines communal values, such as “justice and equality.”
Recognizing that “Do what you love” reinforces exploitation and self-absorption, I consider my other adage, “You are not your work.” I first heard this phrase from my high-school English teacher. Kaylene Brummett—generous of spirit, rigorous of grade, as sensitive to Hamlet and “Prufrock” as she was to a student’s faltering voice or eager but tangled speech—seemed born for her job. We were all in love with her. Then she quit teaching and became a doula. I was shocked. Despite her protestations to the contrary, I had indeed thought she was her work. And I had thought she was doing what she loved—which she was, but then her love shifted, as love can do.
I have since quoted Ms. Brummett’s wise words many times—to friends, to my husband. At dinner parties, I try not to ask “What do you do?” but instead the mild “What are your interests?” or the more awkward “What do you think about?” or “How do you spend your days?” But, though I try not to identify others with their work, I still identify myself with my work, very much so. No particular article or lecture conveys my whole self, of course, but the sum of what I do reflects what I care about—reading, writing, teaching, devoting sustained time and thought to words and to people.
For that identification I blame, in part, my beloved writers. In their writing, they both do what they love and are their work. I don’t mean that all art is transparently autobiographical, but that all art draws on an artist’s approach to the world. Biographical reading is often suspect, but the biography remains something to regard and set aside, or to reconcile with the work—but not, since the New Critics or Roland Barthes, to reject.
Yet here I am identifying writers with the work of their creation and not with the work that paid for their pen and paper. Most of my favorites earned their living at day jobs or night shifts—Chaucer at the court, Hawthorne at the customhouse, Woolf at the Hogarth Press, Stevens at the insurance office. They often didn’t do only what they loved, and they both were and were not their work. What these writers offer is, in fact, a melding of “Do what you love” and “You are not your work.” They prove the wisdom, and the foolishness, of each maxim.
In this happy way station, between fates, between phrases, I industriously bide my time. The days pass quickly because I am absorbed in my work, even as I wish they’d go more slowly because what follows the postdoc gig is a blank. I want to clutch each day but feel carried quickly ahead to an uncertain future. So it goes for a postdoc—and, on contented days, for a person.
