Advice for Faculty: Do Your Thing

I received my MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 2006. Since that time I have written a full-length play, completed a textbook about diagramming sentences, wrote a supplemental text, and published six chapbooks of poetry for other poets.

I've spent the last 8 years as an English Professor, teaching first year Composition and remediation.  I started this blog and wrote essay after essay after essay. I judged writing competitions and served on editorial boards.  I created online courses.

Today, for the first time in almost 6 years, I wrote a poem.

Without getting into how uninspired I have been for a very long time, and how that lack of inspiration has affected every aspect of my life, I want to use this short post to offer a simple piece of advice to my fellow faculty members and creative souls: Do your thing.  Whatever it is you do, you must make time to do it and "fill your own cup" before it, in absentia, makes you forget why you became a teacher in the first place.

Ending this exceptionally short blog post abruptly, I now release you from the Internet so you can go do your thing.

-Amy