13 Years Ago I Came for Faculty Orientation as a Professor of the Practice Still Needing To Finish His Dissertation (and I Met These Two)

I was living on campus when I arrived to Fairfield (they said it was faculty housing, but it was a two floor townhouse with hard-as-a-rock mattresses. I survived (as I taught the teacher institute and by Fall I found a three-bedroom house to rent in northern Stratford (rent was three times as high as my mortgage in Syracuse). Welcome to Connecticut, they said.

During orientation, where mission and identity were highly encouraged, I heard a woman speak from across the room. She was a new hire in the MFA program and I realized quickly, "She's Brown School, super cool, and I'm going to be her friend." She made it to full professor several years before I did, but she also came in from another institution. I had to finished my doctorate, first. I did that (actually won a doctoral prize for outstanding research) and started my career as this POP thing. Two years in, the then Provost talked to me about taking a tenure track position, which I did (by reapplying and pretending I didn't know anyone) and then started the journey towards publication, teaching, and service. 

Throughout it all, I always had Sonya Huber and her husband Cliff as guiding lights...sunshine for the dark days and artists along a parochial landscape. We're all creative, definitely outside the box, fight for justice, and have radars that see through nonsense rather quickly (which makes us outliers where we work, so we have to be very careful...and it's probably one of the reasons we only see one another on occasions. If we're in the same vicinity we tend to explode as if an episode of Pee Wee's Playhouse. So we keep a loving distance, but not so much that we lose the oxygen we each provide.

Sonya is our new Faculty Welfare Committee President and I'm super happy for her leadership in protecting the rights of academic freedom, labor, and ethical deliberations. She is very deserving and I loved seeing her and Cliff at the afternoon picnic yesterday...so much so that I took their picture and realized how beautiful they both are.

I'm still not ready to admit that on Tuesday we're back in action, but we are and students begin arriving today. I'll stay home, thank you, as I've started a couple of writing projects and rally need deodorant and coffee. So, I'll likely go to the grocery store.

And in my next life I will have Cliff's hair...talk about hair model. Phew. it doesn't even look real. Here's to us and another year of persevering the impossible.