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 ...
Blog of a struggling writer.