It’s that time of year when Ph.D.s whose hopes have been dashed — either on the job market or on the tenure track — have to start thinking about next year. Should you try again or is it time to give up on faculty life? Harriet Scott Chessman is one hopeful model for people who need to reimagine their lives after being forced out of academe.
I met her at Yale University when I was an undergraduate and she was teaching English 125. From her I learned to love Milton and Wallace Stevens and to see possibilities for myself as a writer. Denied tenure at Yale in 1990, she pivoted to become a fiction writer and a librettist. She has since written five novels (translated into seven languages) and two opera librettos. Her newest opera, Sycorax, will be performed in Switzerland in September. I reached out to ask about her career path for the Scholars Talk Writing series (or in this case, a former scholar).
Let’s start by talking about what you refer to as your “tumble” off the tenure ladder at Yale.
Chessman: Oh, the power of metaphor! I love the word tumble because it sounds so playful and acrobatic. The truth is, the tenure decision felt more like a crash or a miscarriage. I was 39 years old that spring of 1990, and had been at Yale since 1973, first as a graduate student in English, and then as an assistant and associate professor of English and women’s studies. I had two young children and had created a life of teaching and scholarship. I felt so thrown off balance, I couldn’t even contemplate applying for full-time positions at other universities.
Luckily, I also sensed the freedom to do something new with my life. One of the best choices I made was to join a children’s-book-writing group. Within a couple of years, the idea for a novel came to me.
What was the climate at Yale then?
Chessman: In the 1970s and 80s, Yale was pretty inhospitable to women, and even more so for people of color. A certain amount has changed, yet clearly so much more needs to change. I could only watch one episode of The Chair, because it made me squirm with recognition.
I went back to teaching when my first child was 8 weeks old. If I had given birth during the year, I think the university would have granted me a few weeks off, but my baby came in the summer. It sounds ridiculous to me now, but I remember not wanting to look as if I was dropping the ball by taking a maternity leave without pay. It felt like an acknowledgment of difficulty, and I wanted to look as if handling motherhood and my career was a piece of cake.
Most women professors I knew — especially tenured women — had either one child or no children. The idea was to wait to start a family until you had tenure — if for some odd reason you couldn’t resist having kids.
You grew up as an academic kid and your husband, Bryan Wolf, was a professor in art history [he retired in 2014]. How did it feel to no longer be a faculty member?
Chessman: Oh, it was hard at first. I felt I’d been ousted from the special circle. I continued to teach part time but was sensitive to the sense of hierarchy I’d absorbed in all those years at an elite institution.
It both helped and didn’t help that my spouse was so happy at Yale. I remember arguments about whether I would attend some event or other, connected to Yale. I would say I had no wish to go, and Bryan would say, passionately, “But this is my world!” and I would say, “Well, it’s not mine!”
Yet I landed on my feet. My friends and family were so supportive of me. And I continued to meet fellow writers and artists who opened up a whole new world for me. Soon I realized I was simply living my life in a new way, closer to my own wishes.
What did it take to move from doing scholarship to producing fiction?
Chessman: I always had an interest in becoming a writer. Many of the writers I knew taught at Bread Loaf School of English, where I spent a few fun and creative summers. I loved the feeling of being a scholar-writer in the midst of a literary community as I started my book about Gertrude Stein’s experimental poems and operas. Stein’s wonderfully playful language nudged me to find a more personal voice for my own writing style, something the atmosphere of Bread Loaf encouraged.
About 15 years later, I went back to Bread Loaf to teach creative writing and immerse myself again in that inspiring community.
Let’s hear about your writing career.
Chessman: At first, I tried to preserve a few hours each day for my writing, as I taught part time to earn money. I looked for agents. I had the third child I’d always wished for. I published a couple of children’s stories in magazines. Five years after I had started to write, I landed an agent for my first novel, Ohio Angels, which was published by Permanent Press. That gave me tons of encouragement. I gathered new focus for my second novel, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper. And then my third, Someone Not Really Her Mother. I felt launched.
The path hasn’t been straightforward or easy. It’s always a wrestling match with each book — to find its form and voice. Each book presents you with a new impossible problem. In addition, the publishing landscape has changed, and it is not simple to find publishers for lyrical novels devoted to character and story. But I am here to say: It can be done.
You have to bully your way through and be obstinate. You have to believe in yourself up, down, and sideways. You have to persevere. You have to listen to good editors and other readers, who can help you make your work better. And of course, what everyone says is true: You have to love the writing itself. You have to relish the search for a story, the conception, the first steps, and then you have to give yourself permission to make a thousand mistakes — because writing has to make so many mistakes before it can find the form that’s right for it.
What did your years in academe do for you as a writer?
Chessman: I learned how to listen carefully to language — to hear voice and understand the beauties and intricacies of how stories unfold. I feel lucky to have had those days in the classroom or in my study, bent over a poem or story, thinking about it, wondering about it. This attentiveness and curiosity are still part of me and go into my own writing.
My research into the art of Mary Cassatt found new life in fictional form. While I was still at Yale, I received a contract for my second scholarly book, Mary Cassatt and the Maternal Body. Once I started writing fiction, I discovered that her beautiful, mesmerizing paintings could open out into fiction instead. This subject of Cassatt and her mentor Degas lingered in my imagination and led me to write my most recent novel, The Lost Sketchbook of Edgar Degas.
I am also a freelance developmental editor. I love reading other people’s work, and I’m sure that years of responding to student essays have helped me become a thoughtful editor. First, I listen carefully to a piece, and figure out what the writer wishes to say, and then I help the writer say it. The genres may be different, but the effort to encourage good writing is the same.
What did you have to unlearn?
Chessman: A few things come to mind:
- I had to unlearn my own hesitancy and shyness about my wishes and my strengths.
- I had to unlearn the idea that you either were or weren’t “a writer.” I had to discover that, in fact, you could grow into your writing, follow it, revise it, see where it took you.
- I had to unlearn the odd habit of thinking scholarship was more honorable and justified as an activity than creative writing.
- I had to unlearn the idea that you had to know what your subject was before you started to write something.
What advice about writing do you have for academics?
Chessman: If you love a certain kind of writing, move toward it, read all you can, notice who publishes it, and carve out time to see what comes out of your heart, soul, and engagement. Seek out poems, books, stories, plays, TV shows, films, and music that give you something new. Reach out to other writers, of all kinds. Go to readings and participate in conversations. Join writing groups that are nourishing and encouraging.
Grow a very thick skin. Cut out the voices of anyone who discourages you. Believe that something you desire is possible for you.
What advice can you offer to folks who have either tumbled off the tenure track or never managed to get on it?
Chessman: You have to become your own best supporter. Look carefully and with curiosity at your own expertise and gifts, and think about how you can find new ways of bringing them into the world. If you wish to continue to apply for tenure-track jobs, go for it, but don’t let the success or failure of your applications go to your heart’s core. Think about how you can keep doing what you love, possibly in a new form.
In all my years of daydreaming about writing, creating a libretto was never even part of the dream. So I guess one more piece of advice is: Hold the door open for possibilities you couldn’t even have imagined. They will come.
