BY JAMES FERRY

When I submitted my piece for the September-October issue of Academe, “How the Academy Saved My Soul—and Maybe My Life,” I figured that, at best, I might end up guest blogging. So being asked to blog about my feature article feels a bit…weird. I’d much rather blog about why I lacked “contributor confidence” to begin with. And why, hopefully, I’m getting over it.

I’m a person who writes. But my relationship with writing seems to me, sometimes, to be dysfunctional. It’s like a partner I’ve had for many years, a partner who once pulled me out of a stymying depression and gave me hope for the future. It was all bliss in the beginning. We didn’t fight, my words and I. We couldn’t care less what anyone else thought. I printed them and we paced around the room together, ogling each other. We were in love. But as time wore on we drifted apart. We still maintained a deep respect, but somehow we’d lost that…that spark.

This was, of course, my fault. I can hardly blame my innocent words for my crippling insecurity.

What had happened was that I’d become overwhelmingly concerned about what others thought of us. This is probably not so unusual for those who write personal narratives: the rejections from publishing platforms are at once a rejection of the writing and, seemingly, a rejection of the writer. One never quite knows for sure. The letters (the ones that aren’t canned) are deadening in their ambiguity. Your story is compelling. But editors just aren’t acquiring memoir at the moment. Okay, but, what if my name was Kardashian? Would they be acquiring then?

What I’m describing is a slow devolution from naiveté into jadedness. I realized that my inability to publish was having a detrimental effect on my willingness to write. But I couldn’t quit. It wasn’t pride or perseverance or (certainly not) positivity that fueled me in the end. It was attrition. I’d tried working straight jobs and I’d failed. I’d tried being an outlaw (see article), but that ended with a warrant, handcuffs, sniffer dog, et al. I was utterly unskilled, with a gap on my resume that a hummer could coast through. I could write my way into graduate school, passably, so I got an MFA, then an MA. Then when I got into a doctoral program, I figured I’d bought myself some shameless years. Tell people you’re working on a PhD and there’s an almost obligatory deference (even if only in the form of a cocked eyebrow and a muted hmm). It’s a hell of a lot better than telling people that you’re out on work release, which was a step up for me ten years ago. So that’s progress, I guess.

The problem with progress is that it tends to occur in mite-sized increments. By the time you begin experiencing success, you’ve already reevaluated what it means to succeed. There’s a moment in my piece where I describe waking up in jail and remembering where I am. To me in that moment, progress meant simply being free. Imagine that. To not be incarcerated—not such a lofty goal, granted, but it’s a start. So you can imagine how I feel now that I’ve completed two graduate programs and I’m a year into my third. I’ve published quietly in several literary journals. I was finally able to quit my night job (restaurant, kitchen) and take up teaching. One would think that I’d be vaguely content. But, admittedly, I still crave fulfillment from without.

I still want those publishing people to want us.

But it doesn’t get me down like it used to. I write my seminar papers and they’re generally well-received. Every now and then, though, I get the urge to, well, submit. So I (meekly) offered my guest blogging services to Academe, with my disreputable past as a hook. Maybe academics would find this interesting: how I had morphed from a miscreant into a fledgling scholar.

French critic and rhetorician Gérard Genette teaches us about a phenomenon called “final convergence,” whereby “the very length of the story gradually lessens the interval separating it from the moment of the narrating” (Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, 221). I sometimes feel like this is happening with my life. Recently I taught my first college writing class, at a medium security prison in Cranston, Rhode Island. Their faces when I mentioned how “credentialed” I was—they looked at me like they could hardly fathom it. Meanwhile I was mystified that I was in there without wearing a jumpsuit.

So the humble part I have down. Now, maybe, I credit myself, just a smidge.

Guest blogger James Ferry is a PhD candidate at the University of Rhode Island. His creative work has been published in several literary journals, and he currently teaches college writing to prisoners preparing to reenter society. His website is http://www.swirlsinthenegativespace.com.

Articles from the current and past issues of Academe are available online. AAUP members receive a subscription to the magazine, available both by mail and as a downloadable PDF, as a benefit of membership.