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Autobiography:
Trying to Relate a Life
A
Slave in the Paper Mines: The Diary of a Contract
Professor
Perhaps
because my career is drawing to a close, and I've
persisted in an industry while many of my compatriots
have long since abandoned their studies or left for
the private sector, I am re-examining what has inadvertently
become a career. I never intended to be a permanent
contract professor, any more than a child expects
mortgages or dental work, but the joy of teaching,
the students' interests and needs, as well as a life-long
academic curiosity kept me in a field which has not
always welcomed me or my kind.
In
some ways this is a familiar conversation about precarious
labour in a university system which led many of my
colleagues to niche instructional work with international
students, adult learners, or non-governmental organizations.
Upon pondering academic privilege, the privation of
contract labour, and the myriad ways that venerable
institutions work to install, sanction, and capitalize
on long-standing class boundaries, however, it occurs
to me that I have my own story to tell.
While
many academics immediately slam the door on the new
arrivals once they have found a seat at the table-unless
the supplicant is appropriately deferential or useful-I
have always thought of myself as someone who crept
in when the door was left ajar. Therefore, I have
spent my career prying that door open so that others
might follow me. The profound benefits of the university
experience are difficult to define, but I am certainly
not the same person who first attended the University
of New Brunswick in 1984.
This
book intends to examine those benefits even while
it describes the pitfalls of working inside the two-tiered
professorial system. Contract work is increasingly
how instruction happens in the North American university,
and for a cog in that vast machine, this is how the
gears grind against a person's self-esteem, how often
grease is applied and to whom, and ultimately what
maintenance looks like when wear draws attention to
the mechanism.
The
Abyss of the Tortured Self: Narcissism and the Loss
of the Other
This
analysis of narcissism and the resultant breakdown of relationships
begins with a working definition, includes the myth of Narcissus,
as well as its more relevant implications, and makes a detour
into the history of narcissism's presentation on American
television. Beginning with television's profound penetration
into the American home, the project then details the shifting
face of narcissism until reality television and the construction
of the reality TV celebrity brought the viewing audience
into contemporaneous times.
Once
the narrative is thoroughly awash with celebrities, a brief
foray into Sigmund Freud's description of the Superego,
Ego, and Id, and the startling findings of those who work
with split brain patients, shows the implications both structures
hold for an evaluation of narcissism.
The
case study which shortly takes over the text follows a relationship
from its inception to its end, details the signs of narcissism
along the way, such as prostitution, extra-marital affairs,
hypochondria, mendaciousness, and greed, and provides a
context for those interpretations. Some time is also spent
on the fellow inhabitants of the narcissist's space, those
enablers who provide the safe harbour from which the narcissist
may venture forth to have a place in this story.
Crushing
All Hope: Trying to be a Foster Parent for Manitoba Child
and Family Services
Telling
the other side of the adoption and fostering process in
Manitoba perhaps inevitably ends up questioning the failures
of the government child care system. In this study, I itemize
the difficulties dealing with the foster care system that
ultimately led to my unsuccessful attempt to become a Manitoba
foster parent.
Like
the impoverished child in the candy store window, both systemic
and personal barriers prevented me from becoming a parent.
Although I began this journey innocently enough by applying
for both adoption services and foster parenthood, I was
soon confronted by a deep-seated prejudice against single
men as fathers, a strange subtle ignorance masquerading
as professionalism, and ultimately what I interpreted to
be a profound conservatism and institutional mendacity.
This
book ended up being unusually well documented, for I thought
I would be writing about a developing bond between a parent
and a child. Instead, I ended up with a five-year record
of governmental bungling and CFS' transparent attempts to
undermine my efforts.
The
Return of the Sword: A Tale of Betrayal and Loss
When I was
holding the sword in my hand again, I could only guess where it
had been. Its faded, cracked sheath and rusty blade told a story
of neglect, but beyond that was another tale of how it had disappeared,
how its absence had been explained, and how its return undermined
that version of events. When I told my friends the story about
the sword's disappearance, they consistently pled that it was
merely a material item and its absence shouldn't matter. They
needed background.
Invariably
I would find myself explaining how a foster child's life is different
than theirs, how our grasp on the few material items we have is
more desperate, and that our lives are more about loss than replacement.
The story of the sword goes back further than its disappearance,
however, and like our lives, it is best explained from the beginning,
by going through the middle, and stopping at the end.
In order to
find out what the sword means to me, or to those around me, we
need to dip in and out of my life and theirs. Like any drama,
it's a story with multiple players, and to come to a full understanding
of what role the piece of metal plays we have to do more than
run a wire wheel over its blade.
The
Wish to Live Deliberately: Building a Cabin and its Consequences
The last few
years I've been spending my summers and, as you read below, one
Christmas, in the forest in central New Brunswick. I bought a
large wooded acreage, built a cabin over a summer, and since then
I've returned every year, discarding the attraction of the phone
and the internet, and immersing myself in the forest.
I first lived
on the land in a shack I built in a handful of days, although
it was November and below freezing every night. By the following
summer, I built the main cabin, and I've added to it considerably
in the intervening years. I recorded those early days by candlelight;
even while I was sleeping in my car in the late fall I was scratching
a pencil across a diary of building, living in, and then insulating
a shack. I survived hurricanes blowing through the province, sub-zero
temperatures, and high water that stranded me on the wrong side
of the creek. Later, in slightly more commodious circumstances,
I brought fingers stiffened by construction to journaling how
I built the cabin that came to replace that temporary shack.
A number of
years later the cabin is nearly done. Although I can always find
a project to work on-such as adding to the functionality of my
ever-evolving solar electrical system-I've spent much of my time
writing, reveling in the chance to read, gardening, and appreciating
the animal life around me. I've stayed in the cabin in both summer
and winter, and because the experience changes with the seasons,
I've maintained a record of those times as well. As if it were
the child I detail in my examination of adoption films, this journal
collection covers two very different timelines and overall just
over nine months. In that way, it is a story about the conception
of an idea, the gestation of its building, and the squalling much-anticipated
delivery which is the final product of the cabin. Those two timelines
are bookends of both a life alone in the woods and a grand adventure
in living.
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