Category Archives: academic writing

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writing goals for 2024

As I think about my goals for the new year, I’m considering how I want writing to fit into my life in 2024. I have always seen myself as a writer, but after a few highly productive years leading up to the completion of a novel in 2019, I’ve been in a dry spell, at least by comparison. I do a lot of writing for my work–mainly emails and grading feedback–but in this post, I’m thinking about writing that is both more enjoyable and less ephemeral than those, important as they may be. So here are some writing goals I’d like to focus on in the new year.

  1. Get back into the habit of writing in my notebook for 15 minutes a day. I started doing this in September after I read Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and wanted to rediscover the joy of writing, especially in longhand (a practice Goldberg speaks highly of). Throughout that month, I wrote for 15 minutes every morning. Most of what I wrote will never be shown to the world (though this post was a result of one particularly productive day), but it was a good practice, and I’d like to get back into it consistently in 2024.
  2. Research and revise two short stories based on incidents in the life of Christ that I drafted in 2023. These stories resulted from my daily writing practice. They are quick sketches that need research give them accuracy and authenticity. I may use my research and revision process to help me develop some resources for my students (I wrote about this idea here), but even if I don’t end up doing that, I would like to get these stories into a state that I’m happy with.
  3. Reread Sam’s Town to help me decide whether I want to work on the sequel. Sam’s Town is the novel I self-published in 2019. Soon after I completed it, while still riding a writing high, I started the sequel, Sam’s Home. But then I got married, moved, and lived through the pandemic, and the few brief attempts I’ve made to pick the manuscript back up haven’t really gone anywhere. So in 2024, I’d like to reread Sam’s Town in hopes of recapturing some of that excitement. Even if I ultimately decide not to make writing the sequel one of my goals for this year, I think I’ll enjoy revisiting those characters who played such an important role in my life for several years.

Three is a magic number when it comes to goal-setting, so I’ll stop there. What are some of your goals for 2024, writing-related or otherwise?

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a quick bite of food for thought about grading time

Yesterday, I was watching a video about creating a teaching calendar (which I can’t share here because it’s part of a paid professional development package one of my universities subscribes to), and I heard some research findings that caught my attention. The study was conducted by the video presenter, B. Jean Mandernach, Executive Director of the Center for Innovation in Research and Teaching at Grand Canyon University, and her colleagues.

Here’s a summary: The research team approached a group of doctoral-level faculty who taught writing-heavy courses and asked them how long it took them, on average, to grade a paper. They monitored their grading time and came up with an average of one hour per paper. The researchers asked if they could lower this to 30 minutes. The faculty expressed doubt, but limited themselves to 30 minutes per paper. In a third round of grading, the faculty then limited themselves to 20 minutes per paper. Next, an objective rater scored the quality of the professors’ feedback, and there was no qualitative difference between the three sets of papers.

I’m just going to leave you with that. I think the data speaks for itself. I’ll simply say that as English professor who tends to reflexively equate more feedback with better teaching–but who feels overwhelmed by the volume of writing I have to respond to each week–I found these results to be encouraging. Let me know what you think! And if you’re not a teacher, could these findings apply to other areas of life?

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Don’t ask your students to do anything you haven’t done yourself.

This post is part of a series on bringing a human touch to online education. See the series introduction here.

I recently wrote a rough draft of a story, provisionally titled “Sunrise at the Sea of Tiberias,” and I know it needs some historical research. So I have an idea: I’m going to do the Writing in Your Field Project, the major multi-step assignment in my graduate writing class, along with my students.

I have never done the project, and I know that’s a classic teacher mistake: expect my students to do something I haven’t done myself. I know what some of the common challenges of the project are based on student feedback, but as I often tell my students regarding their research, there’s no substitute for firsthand experience.

I’m thinking of taking notes on my experience as I go through it (maybe using a combo of written and voice notes), then creating some supplemental videos/documents I can share with students and maybe eventually make an official part of the course. I would also like to write about this experience, with a teacher audience in mind, on the blog!

I hope to start this project soon, when (I’m hopeful) some extra space will be opening up in my grading schedule. Stay tuned for details!

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lessons from Hogwarts for teachers

Today, I’m wearing my new t-shirt that says, “Hogwarts wasn’t hiring so I teach Muggles instead.” (You can read about the shirt I was wearing last Thursday here.) But I’ve often wondered whether I’d actually want to teach at Hogwarts, considering all the danger and distractions from a consistent learning environment, not to mention the governmental interference in the person of Dolores Umbridge that plagued the school during Harry Potter’s fifth year. I read an interesting scene in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix yesterday afternoon, and I thought I’d share it here. I won’t provide any commentary afterward because I want you to be able to draw your own conclusions; I’ll simply hint that this scene touches on a lot of the issues I worry about as a teacher: the subjectivity of grades, the place of politics and other personal commitments in the learning environment, anxiety over whether administration really has my back, and perhaps most importantly, the extent to which a teacher can really make a difference in a student’s life, present and future.

Context: Harry is in a required career consultation with his head of house, Professor McGonagall, and overbearing Headmistress Umbridge (who is also the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor) is unwelcomely sitting in. Harry has just said that he might want to pursue a career as an Auror, and Umbridge keeps trying to interrupt McGonagall’s advice about what classes Harry should take.

Professor Umbridge gave her most pronounced cough yet.

“May I offer you a cough drop, Dolores?” Professor McGonagall asked curtly, without looking at Professor Umbridge.

“Oh, no, thank you very much,” said Umbridge, with that simpering laugh Harry hated so much. “I just wondered whether I could make the teensiest interruption, Minerva?”

“I daresay you’ll find you can,” said Professor McGonagall through tightly gritted teeth.

“I was just wondering whether Mr. Potter has quite the temperament for an Auror?” said Professor Umbridge sweetly.

“Were you?” said Professor McGonagall haughtily. “Well, Potter,” she continued, as though there had been no interruption, “if you are serious in this ambition, I would advise you to concentrate hard on bringing your Transfiguration and Potions up to scratch. I see Professor Flitwick has graded you between ‘Acceptable’ and ‘Exceeds Expectations’ for the last two years, so your Charmwork seems satisfactory. As for Defense Against the Dark Arts, your marks have been generally high, Professor Lupin in particular thought you–are you quite sure you wouldn’t like a cough drop, Dolores?“

“Oh, no need, thank you, Minerva,” simpered Professor Umbridge, who had just coughed her loudest yet. “I was just concerned that you might not have Harry’s most recent Defense Against the Dark Arts marks in front of you. I’m quite sure I slipped in a note.”

“What, this thing?” said Professor McGonagall in a tone of revulsion, as she pulled out a sheet of pink parchment from between the leaves of Harry’s folder. She glanced down it, her eyebrows slightly raise, then placed it back into the folder without comment.

“Yes, as I was saying, Potter, Professor Lupin thought you showed a pronounced aptitude for the subject, and obviously for an Auror–“

“Did you not understand my note, Minerva?” asked Professor Umbridge in honeyed tones, quite forgetting to cough.

“Of course I understood it,” said Professor McGonagall, her teeth clenched so tightly the words came out a little muffled.

“Well, then, I am confused . . . I’m afraid I don’t quite understand how you can give Mr. Potter false hope that–“

“False hope?” repeated Professor McGonagall, still refusing to look round at Professor Umbridge. “He has achieved high marks in all his Defense Against the Dark Arts tests–“

“I’m terribly sorry to have to contradict you, Minerva, but as you will see from my note, Harry has been achieving very poor results in his classes with me–“

“I should have made my meaning plainer,” said Professor McGonagall, turning at last to look Umbridge directly in the eyes. “He has achieved high marks in all Defense Against the Dark Arts tests set by a competent teacher.”

Professor Umbridge’s smile vanished as suddenly as a light bulb blowing. She said back in her chair, turned a sheet on her clipboard and began scribbling very fast indeed…

[Now that you get the idea of the conversation, I’m skipping a section for brevity’s sake. Notice that Harry didn’t speak once during the passage above. McGonagall at least tries to direct her comments toward him, but this is primarily an argument between the professors, raising interesting questions about student agency. Harry does get a word in during the part I’m skipping, but the main interaction continues to be between the professors.]

“Potter has a criminal record,” said Umbridge loudly.

“Potter has been cleared of all charges, “said McGonagall, even more loudly.

Professor Umbridge stood up. She was so short that this did not make a great deal of difference, but her fussy, simpering demeanor had given place to a hard fury that made her broad, flabby face look oddly sinister.

“Potter has no chance whatsoever of becoming an Auror!”

Professor McGonagall got to her feet, too, and in her case this was a much more impressive move; she towered over Professor Umbridge.

“Potter,” she said in ringing tones, “I will assist you to become an Auror if it is the last thing I do! If I have to coach you nightly, I will make sure you achieve the required results!”

“The Minister for Magic will never employ Harry Potter!” said Umbridge, her voice rising furiously.

“There may well be a new Minister for Magic by the time Potter is ready to join!” shouted Professor McGonagall.

“Aha!” shrieked Professor Umbridge, pointing a stubby finger at McGonagall. “Yes! Yes, yes, yes! Of course! That’s what you want, isn’t it, Minerva McGonagall? You want Cornelius Fudge replaced by Albus Dumbledore! You think you’ll be where I am, don’t you: Senior Under-secretary to the Minister and Headmistress to boot!”

“You are raving,” said Professor McGonagall, superbly disdainful. “Potter, that concludes our careers consultation.”

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Scholastic, 2003.

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teacher or tech support?

This post is part of a series on bringing a human touch to online education. See the series introduction here.

I try to keep abreast of ideas in my field by reading scholarly journals. Often, it’s a difficult slog to get through the articles, both because I’m not familiar with the concepts of all the many subfields of the very broad discipline of language and literature and because academics are not always the best at writing clear prose (and I’m pointing at myself here too). But occasionally, I get to spend a few hours of sheer intellectual pleasure as I’m doing my professional development reading, and yesterday I had one of those times.

I sat down with the latest Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, a special issue on how the pandemic has changed how we teach English. I was drawn to several articles (which I’ll cite at the end of this post) about teaching online, since that’s currently the only modality in which I teach. Although these articles were written by faculty who had to rapidly shift to online teaching due to the pandemic, whereas I teach for programs that were developed to be online and that have existed since long before spring 2020, I assumed I would find some relevance in them, and I wasn’t disappointed. Though they were written independently of each other (albeit responding to the same special issue prompt), the three articles formed a conversation about the deeper philosophical issues of online education, such as how it is subtly shifting the definition of learning to something that can be measured by metrics like frequency of log-ins and number of discussion posts. All of the authors readily acknowledged the benefits and possibilities of online education, but all of them pointed to trends and assumptions that could be pernicious if unquestioned and offered ways to push back against them.

One of the moments in my reading when I found myself agreeing aloud was in Mark Brenden’s article on learning management systems (LMS)–websites like Blackboard and Canvas where students and faculty conduct the business of online courses. Something Brenden said struck me so profoundly that I want to quote it at length here:

[the LMS] directs students’ interactions to mostly take place with the LMS itself, rather than with their peers or their instructor. Learning is presented as a digital maze–at the end of which apparently lies knowledge-in-waiting–that students must navigate. The teacher often functions more as a technician, or customer-service agent, who gets contacted if something goes awry with the students’ interaction with the LMS.

In other words, one of the most meaningful aspects of the college adventure–the encounter with other humans–is sidelined into an option to be avoided except when necessary. I mean no disrespect to people who work in tech support positions (their role is different, not less valuable) when I say that as a professor, I hope my relationship with students is deeper, longer-lasting, and less one-sided than a quick phone call or text chat with a troubleshooter.

We can get information from a website, but we can only get transformative, life-defining conversations (whether real-time or asynchronous) from real people. I believe we can get those in an online education setting, but this requires professors who are willing to be authentic and available. And that’s what this blog post series is about.

Back to more practical tips next time! Here are the articles I mentioned. All are from Pedagogy vol. 23, no. 2:

Bezio, Kelly L. “How to Subvert the Banking Concept of Education in Neoliberal Times.” pp. 263-274.

Brenden, Mark. “Learning and Management during and after the Pandemic: Reading Student Resistance to LMS.” pp. 297-310

Tidwell, Christy. “In Defense of Facelessness: Not In-Person but Not Impersonal.” pp. 321-332.

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Let them hear your voice.

This post is part of a series on bringing a human touch (cue the Bruce Springsteen song) to online education. See the series introduction here.

Today I have a simple tip to offer you, yet I’ve received more positive student feedback in response to this practice than almost anything else I’ve ever done as a professor. I would like to invite you to consider making videos for your students. And I don’t mean scripted lectures shot in multiple takes with official-looking title cards provided by your institution (though there can be a place for those). I mean short, personal, off-the-cuff video responses to students’ assignments. Here is a short account of my experiences with this practice.

I teach two research classes in which students submit a major project in several steps, the first being a proposal. Though the assignment instructions for the proposal are relatively formal and lead students to take it seriously, I treat it as a formative assessment–that is, not a finished product but a stepping stone. So instead of making corrections and deducting points from the rubric, I read each student’s proposal, then use the recording feature embedded in our learning management system (Canvas) to make a short video (2-5 minutes) expressing enthusiasm for their projects and giving them some advice about things like the scope of the project (students often start out a little too ambitious), pitfalls to avoid, and sources that might be helpful. The videos tend to be longer if I know something about the topic and have specific source recommendations to make or if the student seems to have had a little trouble understanding the assignment. But in all cases, I try to project excitement about their ideas and let them know that I’m a helpful resource.

The videos don’t take long to create because I shoot them in one take, without doing any editing and without even writing down notes first. I am pretty good at speaking ad lib–others might want to jot some notes first (and I do sometimes miss important things I meant to say or should have said!). Video grading gives me a break from writing, which constitutes the bulk of my work, and it allows students to see my face and hear my voice, letting them know I’m a real person who’s invested in them and their writing. The students love these videos–I get more positive feedback on them in my course evaluations than on anything else. Often the videos initiate a warm and enthusiastic exchange of questions and ideas that continues throughout the course.

Next week, it will be time for me to make proposal feedback videos for my new set of students, and I am genuinely excited to make them–not something I can normally say about grading. I encourage you, if you are a teacher or any type of communicator (aren’t we all?), to find ways to let the people you work with hear your voice. It will lay the foundation for trusting relationships and make your future written communication less likely to be misunderstood. Try it out and let me know what you learn!

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online education for humans

Sometimes I wonder if my students realize I’m a real human being, not a machine who grades their work. When students are surprised that I answer a pretty reasonable request in the affirmative, or that I reply to their messages at all–that’s when I really wonder. But I can’t be too critical of my students’ assumptions, because there have been times when I’ve forgotten that my students are real human beings and not machines composing assignments. When all you see of a person is a) their writing (which may or may not sound like something that came from a real human being–we’ll talk more about that in a later post) and b) a tiny, low-quality profile picture, seeing that person’s humanity can be a struggle.

This will be the topic of my next few posts. We’ll talk about strategies that online faculty and students can use to remember and respect each other’s humanity. And as always, I hope these posts will have a wider application, offering useful advice for all of us who live in this world where so much of our human interaction is mediated by screens.

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Work Places: Florida in winter

Yesterday, when Jordan and I made it inside the South Bend airport after a bitter, biting trek across the parking lot (I’m talking about the snow and cold, by the way–we weren’t being mean to each other), I said that we couldn’t be flying to Florida at a better time. Jordan agreed. “It kind of makes me understand snowbirds,” he said, and I knew what he meant. Maybe the weather in northern Indiana is part of why I sometimes fantasize about retirement.

I took off my hat and gloves in Atlanta, where it was 57 degrees as we crossed the jet bridge, and finally got rid of my coat in Orlando, where it was still in the 70s when we landed around 9 pm. Yes, it was humid, but what a lovely respite from the dry, chill wind back home. My skin drank in the moisture gratefully.

We are here in Orlando for a work conference Jordan is attending at the Doubletree by Hilton Hotel Orlando at Sea World. After the conference, we are extending our trip with several days of vacation, including some beach time near Melbourne, a visit to the Kennedy Space Center, and a day at Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter back here in Orlando before we fly home. But for the next few days, I’ll be hanging out here at the hotel while Jordan schmoozes with other nerds in the magnetics industry. Fortunately, the Doubletree has an extensive outdoor seating area (collectively called the Pavilion, Terrace, and Veranda) that happens to be right outside our room. I went out there early this morning to work on my Bible study and sat on a low-slung couch in front of a coffee table, lit by gentle but sufficient light from the fixtures that dot the area. There are also tables, small clusters of chairs, and a pretty water feature. Under the pavilion, fans keep things cool, and I noticed an outlet near my couch. Right now, I’m working in our room (which has good Wi-Fi, a decent-sized desk and ergonomic chair, and an adequate coffee maker), but later I think I’ll take my work outside. After all, what’s the point of getting a taste of the snowbird life if I’m not absorbing as much Vitamin D as possible?

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what “adjunct faculty” means

This summer I took a seven-week break from teaching for my main institution, and I’m finally getting around to writing a blog post about it, largely as a way to reflectively journal about the experience. But as I thought about what I wanted to say, I realized that, since other people will be reading this journal entry, it might be productive for me to spend some time explaining how I was able to take a seven-week break (not normal in most industries!) and, more broadly, how I get compensated for my work. I hope some of you will find this information interesting in its own right, but also–full disclosure–I have a point I want to make at the end of the post.

Let me start by evoking what many people likely picture when they hear the job title “college professor.” I live near an old and prestigious university, and there’s a part of town I sometimes drive through where, I’m told, a lot of the professors live–and where there are some truly palatial homes. I won’t make a blanket statement about all faculty at this university, but I think it’s safe to assume that some of them are being compensated very generously. This makes sense–the university has been there for a long time, and it has a lot of donors. The professors who live in these homes have earned advanced degrees; many of them have probably published books and articles in prestigious publications, and they likely spend a lot of time producing and supervising important research. This is probably the kind of person most people picture when they hear the phrase “college professor.” (And I want to be clear that those professors work hard for their paychecks! Even those who have graders or teaching assistants do a lot of behind-the-scenes work that most people don’t think about–lesson planning, keeping up with new research in their field, serving on committees, answering emails, and perhaps doing administrative work for the university. College professors work hard, just like people in any industry.)

The professors I’ve just been describing are generally on a full-time contract with their university, meaning that they know ahead of time how much they’ll be paid each year, and they receive benefits (health insurance, retirement plan matching, etc.) from their employer. (Many of them may also benefit from the academic job security mechanism known as tenure, but I won’t get into that in this post–it’s a complicated system, and I’m no expert on it.) But there’s a whole category of college faculty, known as adjuncts, who aren’t on full-time contracts. Instead of receiving a salary, adjuncts get paid per class. This means that their compensation can vary from semester to semester (or term to term), depending on the courses that are available for them to teach. While they may be doing forty hours (or more) of work per week, adjuncts usually do not receive full-time employment benefits.

Every college has different ways of assigning classes to adjuncts, and the adjunct experience can vary widely from school to school. For example, at some institutions (like the ones I serve at), adjuncts–at least on-campus ones, and many universities are doing more to include online adjuncts–are invited to events like faculty orientation, can request supplies from the department budget, and can even serve on committees (which allows them to give input that may affect their working conditions and teaching satisfaction), while at other institutions, adjuncts struggle to receive any kind of professional support. The pay scale can also vary widely for adjuncts, depending on factors like number of students in a class, the adjunct’s level of education, and the institution’s budget.

Until summer 2020, I taught on a university campus on a full-time faculty contract. Since then, I have been teaching online as an adjunct for two different universities. (Side note 1: It was marriage and moving, not the pandemic, that caused this shift. Moving to online adjunct work was a free choice I gladly made. I point this out because some adjuncts are in their position because it’s the only one their school can offer them, or because they’ve been demoted from full-time positions due to budget cuts or other factors. Side note 2: While adjuncts can teach either online or in person–some people do both–the number of people employed as adjunct faculty has risen dramatically with the growing popularity of online education.) Let me briefly describe what my adjunct experience has been, being careful to clarify that this is just my experience. I would be interested to hear from other adjuncts about their own work!

I teach a graduate and an undergraduate course at each of my two universities, for a total of four courses I teach regularly (four “preps” to use a common teacher expression). At any given time, I’m usually teaching two to five classes total. (Side note: One of my schools has eight-week terms, while the other has six-week terms for grad classes and five-week terms for undergrad. I find it confusing to keep track of what week each of my classes is on, so I have to use my planner carefully, and occasionally I turn down teaching offers because I don’t want to deal with all the overlap!) For two of the classes, I’m the “subject matter expert,” or SME. A SME is the person responsible for maintaining and updating the course content (and sometimes, creating it in the first place, which was my experience–meaning that students get to see my face in the video lectures and therefore get to know me better than a lot of online students get to know their faculty) and providing support and advice to other faculty teaching the course. Each term that I teach one of the courses I’m SME of (which is almost every term for me), I get a SME stipend, which is a pretty significant amount. I make more money from my grad classes than my undergrad ones, since teaching them requires more specialized knowledge (but is not necessarily harder!), and I get paid more than someone who does not have a terminal degree–a PhD in my case. I’m not going to tell you my total pay, but when you combine all my classes and add other income sources like serving on master’s thesis committees (not very lucrative, but one of the most rewarding parts of my work), I make roughly the equivalent of what my husband makes as an engineer with a full-time salaried position. But while he gets paid every week, I get paid every five to eight weeks, making it really hard to incorporate my pay into our budget!*

This is turning into an incredibly long post, so I’ll wrap it up with a couple of things I hope people will learn from this post. First, if you’re considering an academic career (as I know many of my students are), keep adjuncting in mind as a possibility, but also be aware of the potential challenges of this type of work. And remember that the description I’ve given here is just one person’s experience! Second, in our busy, hyper-connected culture, the stereotype of the leisured professor is not true anymore, if it ever was. Despite what some politicians may want you to think, universities are not paying faculty big bucks to do nothing. The work of teaching at the college level can be rewarding and delightful, but it is hard work—and important work. Yes, we all have all the information in the world at our fingertips, but the job of professors (and of teachers at all levels) is not merely to convey information but to help students learn how to interpret that information, to think deeply, to have meaningful and respectful discussions with others, and to love learning. I’m grateful to be able to do that work and to be compensated well for it, and I hope universities will continue to see adjuncts as a crucial partners in that work and give them the support they need and deserve.

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Creative writing tip: Find your Inklings

There’s a lot of talk these days about finding one’s “tribe” or one’s “people.” If taken to extremes or left unexamined, this attitude can worsen the polarization that plagues our society by excusing us from spending time with and listening to people who are different from us. But underlying this idea is a good impulse: the desire to connect with people who share our interests and joys.

Earlier this summer, I read Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings, which is a collective biography of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams, but even more than that, a fascinating account of an unusual group of men who “found their people.” The Inklings, as many of my readers will probably know, were an informal club of friends–mostly Oxford and Cambridge academics, mostly Christians–who met for years, twice a week, to eat, drink, have intellectually rich discussions, and–most famously–read aloud from their works in progress, some of which turned out to be genre-defining sagas like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. The atmosphere of the group, as well as some weird ideas that floated around during their intense discussions (Carpenter doesn’t shy away from these), was shaped by the group’s demographics (almost exclusively middle-aged white Englishmen) and the times in which they lived. But within their similarity, they were a remarkably diverse group in their marital status, politics, religious expressions, and philosophies on all sorts of things (e.g., how a fantasy world should be constructed). And, by all accounts, their strongly-held, often opposing opinions made the group exciting, not threatening. They were fans of each other’s work (even when they criticized it), and most importantly, they were friends.

In the decades since the Inklings met, aspiring writers (especially fantasy nerds) have been trying to recapture the heady atmosphere of their meetings. I was once part of a creative writing group called, unabashedly, the Inklings, which held long, food-fueled sessions in which we read aloud from our works in progress and received gracious yet detailed feedback from our peers. Like the original Inklings, we were brought together not only by our love of stories but also (for most of us) by our Christian faith, which deeply informed our group’s philosophy even though hardly any of us were writing explicitly Christian literature. And like the original Inklings, many of us developed close, trusting friendships.

If you are a writer–or if you don’t write yourself, but you enjoy a good story and know how to give helpful feedback (or are willing to learn how)*–I encourage you to join a creative writing group. Don’t try too hard to recapture the atmosphere of the original Inklings; you’re not them. You don’t have to wear tweed or meet every week or even meet in person. (My old group moved to Zoom during the pandemic.) Not all creative writing groups even involve critique of works in progress; some focus on support, encouragement, learning new techniques, or even writing silently in each other’s presence. The greatest gift of a creative writing group is not the activities that happen during the meeting or even the works of literature that its members produce, but that feeling of belonging, of being understood by other people who also have stories in their heads. Or, as C.S. Lewis put it, “the moment when one man says to another ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .'”

Subscribe to get notified of upcoming posts: an ode to my grandparents’ cabin in the western Maryland mountains and an explanation of how adjunct faculty get paid (much more interesting than it sounds!). Also, if you’re a fan of the Inklings, subscribe to my podcast, It’s Lit Time!, for an upcoming series on rereading J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth saga.

*Several of the original Inklings weren’t writers; they just enjoyed hanging out with their friends and hearing their stories.