Career Talk

Career Talk

by Cathy Day Higher Ed Teaching

My last blog post went up four years ago. Wow.

Remember when I was blogging all the time? Boy, I really had a lot to say.

Then I got caught up in administrative work and lost the digital sharing spark. I suppose I didn’t have enough fire left at the end of the day to share with you. And most days, I couldn’t talk about what I was working on.

The last four years of my professional life:

After serving as a Director of Undergraduate Studies in English for three years, I then served as an interim department chair for 18 months. During that period, I put together a proposal for my dean. “Here are the things that worked in my department re: recruitment, retention, and placement. Let me build this out for the humanities departments.” Amazingly, the dean said okay. This is what I’ve been working on.

Which brings us to Monday, Jan. 10, 2022, which will be my first day back in an actual classroom since March 9, 2020. I’m incredibly nervous about teaching face-to-face, but that’s not what I want to talk right now.

The Class “Career Talk”

The class I’m teaching in Spring 2022 is ENG 405 Special Topics in Creative Writing. My topic is “Writers at Work: The Business of Being a Writer.”

As the Director of Compass, I’m also in charge of career programming (and yes, I have a course release for this purpose), and so I inserted a weekly career series into my class. Basically, I’m turning the lecture/discussion portion of the class into a public virtual event.

This is the schedule for the first 8 weeks. Then, during the second eight weeks, the topics will turn more generally towards how to find a job.

I’m not telling you about this so that you can come, too. Sorry, but it’s for Ball State students, faculty, and staff only.

I’m showing you what I’m doing so that you can do it, too. 

Almost every English department faculty member I know incorporates at least one unit of “career talk” into certain classes. How to submit your work for publication. How to (or whether) to apply to graduate school. How to make time for writing. Maybe you bring someone from the Career Center in to talk about resumes or interviews.

Yay! Good for you.

The problem with this approach:

  • Only students who happen to be in your class are exposed to these really important and much-desired “beyond craft” or “off-the-course-topic” conversations.
  • These conversations could go a looooooooooooong way toward alleviating the anxiety of  humanities majors who are feeling the normal amount of “what am I going to do with my life?” stress times Covid times 1000.
  • These “professionalization-unit-within-the-class” conversations are completely invisible to prospective students checking out your website or the unhappy accounting major who loves to read who follows your department on social media.
  • Your colleagues down the hall don’t know about your professionalization unit within your class. They might be doing the exact same work as you. Or they might have students who desperately want the very information you just shared, but they don’t know you’ve got resources at the ready.

Making Your “Career Talk” More Visible and Accessible

Survey faculty in your area to find out how many incorporate professionalization units into their classes and what they’d feel comfortable presenting on.

Incorporate into your existing visiting writers series, just one or three or four more casual events. No one is flying in and you’re not paying anyone, so these events are candy compared to putting on readings or lectures. If that doesn’t work…

Create a series. Keep it simple, but aim for something more structured than an off-the-cuff chat. If one colleague has a powerpoint presentation, great. Another just has a handout? That’s fine.

Create takeaways. Make it your goal that for each event/presentation, attendees will get a “takeaway” handout with powerpoint slides and/or links to further resources. Put it all in a Google Drive or Box or OneDrive or Dropbox folder and share the link to that information during the presentation.

Incorporate the series into a class. If you can. That’s what I’m doing, and it means there will always be an audience–the students in the class!

If you can’t make it curricular, make it co-curricular. But you don’t have to do it alone.

Talk to potential co-sponsors to help with organization and promotion: a department administrator, a student organization, the career center, alumni affairs (esp. if the professionalization unit involves Zooming with an alum).

  • At Ball State, I’ve discovered that there are good resources in the “living/learning community” arm of residence life. There’s a new dorm for Humanities students with a really nice multipurpose room. There’s an Academic Peer Mentor–sort of like an RA, but just for academics–who is always looking for programming ideas. We’ve worked with them to co-sponsor a humanities activity fair in September and NaNoWriMo events in November.

Promote the hell out of it. Not just because you want a lot of students to come, but also because:

  • it’s good for morale (people like to know that there’s an active community they can plug into when they are ready).
  • it’s good for recruitment (obviously).
  • it’s good for alumni relations (an alum sees what you’re doing and gets in touch to say, Hey, I’d be happy to talk about X.)

But here’s the rub…

Promoting the hell out it means that you have to do more than send emails. People outside the department can’t read your emails. They also can’t see that cool poster you made and printed and hung in the hallways.

Does your school have a website calendar? Get these events on there.

Does your department have a blog or social media? Get on that.

Does your department have an alumni newsletter? Make sure that you mention that these events are going to happen or that they did happen in your newsletter.

Send an email to the student newspaper and see if they’ll promote or cover the event.

This is where your eyes glaze over. Because who has time to do all that? It’s just soooooooo much easier to talk about the topic in your class on a particular day and be done with it.

I don’t know if there’s anybody in your department who is in charge of making shit happen. Besides the chair. I don’t know if that person is resourced adequately. Probably not.

In the real world, community building and coordination and planning and promoting and getting shit on the internet is JOB ONE. Even at colleges and universities. But at the academic unit level–it’s the stuff no one wants to do. The invisible work. The stuff we delegate. Women’s work. Give it to the secretary, the intern, the GA. If you still have anyone to delegate to, if financial exigencies haven’t taken those resources away.

People outside the academy just don’t understand how difficult it is to make something new happen.

Look. Talk to your colleagues. Show them this schedule and ask, “Hey, can’t we put something like this together?” I’ll bet you can.

Then get the word out as best you can. Whatever you do, I promise it will make a difference.

Circus in Winter is 10 Years Old

Circus in Winter is 10 Years Old

by Cathy Day The Circus in Winter

It’s July 5th, P.T. Barnum’s birthday, the 10-year anniversary of the publication of my first book, The Circus in Winter.

I. Circus back then

In 2004, I was teaching at The College of New Jersey. I was 35 years old.

That was the summer my sister got married. The first time I saw the book on a bookstore shelf was on June 17. We were on our way to her wedding rehearsal, which was near a Borders. I asked my dad to stop so I could go inside and see if the book was on the shelf yet. It was! I took a picture.

I wondered why my pub date was July 5th if the book was available in a bookstore on June 17?

My agent called me on July 5 to say congratulations and asked “What are you doing right now?” and the answer was that I was shucking corn.

Me and my sister, June 2004
Me and my sister, June 2004

That was a fantastic summer, full of happiness and starred book reviews and wedding receptions and a book tour.

I didn’t realize at the time how special that summer was, that sometimes a book pops and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s been hard to write my third book with this knowledge in the back of my mind. Here’s something I said to Bryan Furness when he asked me how a writer gets past moments like that.

In late July 2004, during my town’s annual circus festival, I did a signing in my hometown historical museum and many, many people came. Ex-boyfriends. Former teachers. Former circus people. Former babysitters. Childhood friends. It was completely overwhelming in a good way. I sat next to the skull of the elephant that killed my great-great uncle, the artifact that started my writing journey.

July, 2004
July, 2004

The next morning, I got to ride in a convertible in my hometown’s annual circus parade and wave at people. My brother and sister walked alongside the car and threw candy at the crowds lining the streets. The sign on the side of the car said: Guest “Author” Cathy Day.

Ah, the unnecessary quotation marks of the Midwest!

In my life thus far, these are the four greatest moments (in chronological order):

  1. Returning to my hometown as a published author and riding in the parade
  2. The morning a few months later when I was solving the New York Times Magazine acrostic and realized that the answer was a quotation from Circus.
  3. The day I got married.
  4. The day in 2010 when I returned to Peru with a group of students from Ball State who had adapted Circus into a musical. They performed in a circus tent on the same ground where the real circus had performed a hundred years earlier. I wrote about that day here.

II. Circus today

I’m incredibly fortunate that people are still reading The Circus in Winter. It was selected as the 2014 Common Reader at Hanover College. The other day, I got an email from a young woman who had just finished it.

I am attending Hanover College in the fall and I was required to read The Circus In Winter. I just finished reading it. While I was reading I didn’t know how I felt about the book. I kind of liked it and I kind of didn’t until the very end when Jenny talks about hometowns and how no matter what you can always go back. Just those very last paragraphs really got to me and it helped me appreciate the book so much more. Besides that I love the little bits of the book that actually happened. I understand some details were changed and so were names but it’s amazing for me to think something exciting has happened in Indiana.

Back in 2004, I sent a postcard to every county library in the state of Indiana asking them to add Circus to their collection. Someone asked me why I’d done that. Why focus on getting the word out about the book in Indiana rather than New York or Los Angeles? The answer is contained in that email.

III. Circus tomorrow

I’m visiting Hanover College on Aug 25 and 26th.

In September, I’ll be in Connecticut for two events with Ben Clark, who wrote the music for Circus. We’ve actually never done an event together where we trace the evolution of a story into song. I’ll let you know more about those events as details are finalized, but one of them will be at the Mark Twain House and Museum. Very excited about that!

And then from October 23-November 16, Goodspeed Musicals is mounting a full production of Circus. I’ll be there, although I’m not yet sure which date.

Will you do me a favor today? Will you like the Facebook page for The Circus in Winter? If things go well with the musical, I hope that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will reprint Circus, and those likes might help me make my case.

I’m writing this on the porch of my house in Muncie, Indiana. If you’d told me 10 years ago that I’d be back home in Indiana or that I’d be blogging  or that there’d be something called “Facebook” or that there would no longer be a thing called “Borders” or that my book would be a musical, I wouldn’t have believed you.

Thank you very much. Today I’m filled with so much gratitude for the blessings this book has brought me.

Most Words Drafted–Fall 2013

by Cathy Day Teaching

Here are the winners of the Most Words Drafted competition in my novel-writing class. The whole semester of this course is archived here.

First place: Liz Winks

LizLiz wrote 64,309 words this semester. Her satirical novel is entitled The Grand War: or, How We Screwed Over the World to Get What We Wanted. She plans to keep writing during the break and the spring semester until she’s got a first draft–and given her amazing productivity, I have no doubt that she’ll do it, too.

You can follow Liz’s main character Otto von Visscher on Twitter. He’s a scientist.

I asked Liz to talk about how she got all this writing done this semester. Here’s what she said. Continue reading →

When and how do students write?

When and how do students write?

by Cathy Day Teaching

I found this great article the other day, “Seven Effing Great Ways to Build Your Writing Routine.”  The author encourages us to find our writing “sweet spots” in order to maximize our daily/weekly output.

Consider the following questions:

  • How long does your typical writing session tend to last?
  • How frequently do you sit down to write?
  • On average, how many words do you write per session?
  • At what time of the day do you do your writing?

Back when I taught novel writing as a “writeshop,” my students wrote in class and we talked a lot about writing process. I’ve moved away from that model over time, but next year, I need to be more explicit and deliberate about talking to students about WHEN and HOW they write. I’ll share this article with them. Continue reading →

Last Lecture: What matters more: Story or Sentence?

Last Lecture: What matters more: Story or Sentence?

by Cathy Day Teaching Writing

Every time I teach novel writing, I end the semester with a “Last Lecture” on a topic that’s been on my mind all semester long. Last spring, I wrote about learning to self-identify as a writer; this post, “Am I Writer?” has been viewed about 1,500 times. And Google Analytics tells me that people spend an average of eight minutes on this post–which is not that surprising when you consider how urgently people need an answer to that question. This semester, I’ve decided to write about whether a novelist should focus more on The Story or The Sentence.

Kameron and Kayla won my “Most Words Drafted Contest”? Why? What set them apart? 

Both wrote scene-driven fiction with lots of dialogue. They took my advice and “sketched” their novels, temporarily suspending concern for “good writing” at the sentence level and focused on “getting the story down.” Continue reading →

“I can’t do this anymore.”

“I can’t do this anymore.”

by Cathy Day Teaching

I’m having a real crisis.

I’m starting to wonder if teaching a novel-writing class with 15 students can really be done.

Let me explain.

This semester, I taught Advanced Fiction, a 400-level course at Ball State which I teach as a novel writing class. The course is capped at 15, and so, because I was assigned two sections, I had 30 students writing novels for me this semester.

Let’s do the math.

Continue reading →

My Next Big Thing: Literary Citizenship

My Next Big Thing: Literary Citizenship

by Cathy Day Literary Citizenship Teaching

For the last few years, I’ve ended my classes with a presentation/pep talk on Literary Citizenship (basically this post as a Power Point). But next semester, I’m going to teach a whole class on Literary Citizenship.

Course descriptions are due this week, so I just wrote this up:

A literary citizen is an aspiring writer who understands that you have to contribute to, not just expect things from, the publishing world. This course will teach you how to take advantage of the opportunities offered by your campus, regional and national literary communities and how you can contribute to those communities given your particular talents and interests. It will also help you begin to professionalize yourself as a writer. You will learn how to 1.) create your own professional blog or website, 2.) use social media to build your writing community, 3.) interview writers and publish those interviews, 4.) review books and publish those reviews, 5.) submit poems, stories, and essays to literary magazines, 6.) query agents and editors regarding book manuscripts, 7.) apply to graduate programs and write an effective statement of purpose, 8.) deliver an effective public reading of your work, 9.) pitch to an agent, 10.) craft a professional résumé. Students who complete the course in an exemplary fashion will be eligible to apply for internship positions as Social Media Tutors at the Midwest Writers Workshop in Muncie July 25-27, 2013. 

Continue reading →

10 Things You Should Know about the Midwest Writers Workshop

10 Things You Should Know about the Midwest Writers Workshop

by Cathy Day Writing

1.  The Midwest Writers Workshop, or MWW for short, happens in my town! A few miles from my house! Muncie, Indiana, July 26-28, 2012.

2.  MWW’s faculty this year includes a Pulitzer finalist, a paranormal romance YA author, four literary agents, a best-selling author of cozy mysteries, a poet/memoirist/indie publisher, and quite a few long-time editors and publishing professionals. Including Jane Friedman, who I’ve been following for three years (long before I moved to Muncie) and who I credit with saving my writerly butt from literary oblivion.

3.  MWW has been around for a long time: 39 years! Last year, I was on the faculty. This year, I’m the newest member of the Planning Committee. Some of the committee members have been working to make this conference happen for over 35 years. You can read more about the history here.

The Ball State Alumni Center.

4.  MWW is the only writers conference I know of that offers on-site, totally free “social media consulting”—a drop-in tutoring center where you can get your Facebook/Twitter/blogging act together.

5.  Veronica Roth, author of the best-selling, dystopian YA novel Divergent (which is really, really good) got her start at MWW. My fellow committee member Kelsey Timmerman also got his start at MWW. He attended a few years ago, pitched his idea to an agent, and thus his book became a reality: Where Am I Wearing: A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People That Make Our Clothes. There are many other success stories.  

6.  Remember when I wrote about how anxiety-inducing AWP is? Anxiety + Community = AWP. MWW, on the other hand, is small, intimate, encouraging—nothing at all like AWP. It’s open to anyone. You don’t have to apply to get in or secure a letter of recommendation.

7.  Remember when I wrote this post about how much I hate it when people ask me “How do I get published?” Well, here is your answer: Expand your circles! Get thyself to a writers’ conference! Here are a few other good reasons to go to a writer’s conference.

Jane Friedman, middle, and MWW director Jama Bigger, right

8.  If you read this blog because you teach creative writing, listen up. If you have strong students, don’t think that sending them to an MFA program is the only way to help them pursue their dream. Send them to MWW. Remember a few months ago, I asked, Should we make it our business to teach the business of creative writing? The response to that post was a resounding, Yes. Writers conferences are one way we can teach our students about the “biz.”

9.  If you read this blog because you’re an aspiring writer, listen up: I know you write and read and edit alone. You go online to find community and advice about what comes next. But you need to find community IRL. You need to stop Googling “How do I publish a book?” You need to fork out some dollars, because believe me, there’s nothing like spending some money to help you start taking yourself a little more seriously. You need to actually show up to an actual brick and mortar building where others like yourself have also shown up.

10.  I know I said this already, but this conference is in Indiana. Not in Boston or New York or even the bucolic Florida Keys. It’s in Muncie, Indiana. One reason why I left Indiana 20 years ago is that I believed you HAD to leave Indiana in order to be a writer (or an artist of any kind), but I came back two years ago because I wanted to help the next generation of Hoosier artists realize their dreams and become the people they want to be. When you’re poor or working class or live in a place where there isn’t a lot of literary activity, it’s not that easy to imagine yourself “becoming a writer.” That’s why bringing the publishing world to Indiana matters. A lot.

Will I see you there? This summer? Next summer for the 40th anniversary? I hope so. And do you know someone in the Midwest who wants to be a writer? Send them this link. Thank you. 

My Students: Writing as Fast as They Can

by Cathy Day Teaching

I want to introduce the two students who won the Total Word Count Challenge in my novel-writing classes: Sarah Chaney and Kayla Weiss. Each of these young women wrote over 42,000 words this semester, or about 3,500 words a week for 12 weeks. What’s significant about this is that they were only required to turn in 2,250 words per week—an assignment called “Weekly Words” which I talk about in detail here—but they both exceeded that amount…and then some.

Observations

I’d say that half of the students who took my class this semester walked in the door with a definite idea for a novel they very much wanted to write, and Sarah and Kayla were certainly in that group.

Continue reading →