AcademFic

 I’m a recovering academic, as my bio makes clear (I hope).  Earning a Ph.D. is a long, expensive way to get a license to write.  Or to be taken seriously, take your choice.  My academic career, sickly to start, never thrived.  Although I still write nonfiction (four books and counting), my real interest is here, in fiction-land.

A friend recently pointed out to me a new journal AcademFic (which no spell-checker will accept), run out of Butler University, for publishing fiction by academics.  You may not have known that many of your professors were aspiring novelists, but let me assure you that many were.

Of course, aspiring writers aren’t necessarily good writers.  I have a friend who’s an editor with an academic press.  He tells me that few academic writers are even fluent in academese.  Writers, however, sometimes end up trapped in academe.

Back when I was in my master’s program, I was working on a novel.  I showed it to a friend whose father-in-law was an English professor with a newly published collection of stories to his credit.  He told me, “Nobody writes like that.  You’ll never get it published.”  He may have been write.

The thing about academics inspired to fiction is that their work is often intelligent.  Sure, some of them don’t read enough novels to pull it off, but there’s a profundity there.  So it was that my current friend (I’ve lost track of the critical one) asked me to submit to AcademFic.

I’m always torn about contributing to new journals.  To break into publishing you need to get recognition.  That comes only with high circulation journals.  You need to work your way up to them., however.  My stories have won contests and nominations, but still, many editors simply don’t get what I’m trying to do.  Academics likely would.

So I submitted my story “January Thaw,” and it was accepted.  Will an agent notice?  Not likely.  Will it get read by hundreds?  Probably not.  Publication is, however, publication.  And if you wasted many years and thousands of dollars on a doctorate, well, who’s to say no to trying somewhere new?