My Memoir: More About Me
A guest post from Jenn Zuko
Exploring Life through the Written Word
Dear friends,
Jenn Zuko is back again. She is the first two-time guest post writer I have hosted here at Beyond the Bookshelf. That means she is either really good or I am getting desperate!
Please enjoy this essay where she shares about writing her memoir.
My Memoir: More About Me
or, Trust the Process
or, Next Time—a strong woman under the gaslight
~the MAKING OF~
I am delighted to be back, to slap a big ol’ ‘mess’ay1 onto Beyond the Bookshelf again! This time I shall be rambling about the process of writing my memoir, Next Time. I thought it’d be fun if I were to summarize for you how I came up with the idea of doing the thing to begin with, how I got through all the writing (both beginning and continuation), confess my hangups, and revisit my quitting at That Faculty Meeting* as an unexpected (but welcome) conclusion to the manuscript. Join me, won’t you? Perhaps picture this journey as taking place on that scary boat from the 1971 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory film. What could go wrong? ‘There’s no knowing where we’re going…’
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Feel free to go on over to Saturday Morning Serial on Zuko’s Musings and check out the GLOSSes for some more deep dive details on my memoir, and for the polished finished product, chapter by chapter, if you haven’t gotten around to reading that yet. It’s all free to read, but I do still honor and depend on support for all this nonsense, too.
The Idea
As I recounted in Saturday Morning Serial’s introductory post titled Quit Lit, I first got the idea to write a sort of research paper-cum-memoir after having read the inspiring (and rage-inducing, and vindicating) book called The Adjunct Underclass. The book details the plight of adjunct faculty (especially in the humanities, but across the board), detailing the history of the role in universities and how it has changed over the years, as well as how dire the adjunct situation is today. Well, ‘today’ meaning 2018-2019, when the book came out. I’d be interested to learn if the author has any new insights into how it’s gotten worse since the Plague hit and since Trump 2.0 fell upon us like another global disease.2
“The Adjunct Underclass—I don’t remember who suggested this book to me, but I read it with interest, and *devoured* that last chapter, where Childress equates adjuncting to being in a cult, or! (and this is where I perked my ears and the rest of me up) an abusive relationship.
Holy cow! I thought, there was 20 years of my own life there with a gaslighting husband and an exploitative adjuncting job and oh my god they did the same thing to me! and so I posted the book cover on my socials and said OMG WHAT IF I WRITE ABOUT THE PARALLEL ABUSE I WENT THROUGH BY MY JOB AND HUSBAND, INSPIRED BY THIS BOOK? WOULD YOU WANT TO READ IT IF I DID and my most famousest friend (one Emily Flake) said Well, I know Herb Childress…”
~(from ‘Quit Lit,’ Saturday Morning Serial, Zuko’s Musings)
And this ecstatic social media post is what led to my subsequent writing agreement with Herb Childress himself: how many of us can boast that the author of the book which inspired and catalyzed our own work then became our writing coach on that very project? I can’t thank him enough, and can’t emphasize how important his work with me was to the quality of the final draft.
The Writing
And so began our system of me sending work to Herb weekly. Each week, he’d receive a chapter in a 2nd or 3rd draft state, and he’d respond with in-depth and involved feedback. I don’t remember how I came up with the main events and topics for each chapter, for the life of me…but I do know I’d already written some seeds of what we’d later nickname Chapter-Like Objects in other places like my Wordpress blog. For example, the rant I wrote about National Adjunct Walkout Day, back in 2015 when that was still a thing.3
Herb also shared several genius published personal essays on similar topics for inspiration of both subject matter and craft, which was super helpful too (see below for a mini-bibliography of such).
The Revision
Of course, my main revision practice centered on using Herb’s extensive feedback. That was my main guide, along with a darling little old tome called The Craft of Revision by Donald M. Murray. I also am often assigned memoir and creative nonfiction writing courses to teach within my ‘day job’ and those texts and textbooks (as well as the practice of helping Masters level students revise their own work toward publishability) added to my own revision process hugely.
Herb and I ended our revision back and forths and concluded his work on this book with me right after That Faculty Meeting* was over with. We decided we were done not only because the book was finished and good, but to avoid ‘MFAing it’ which. Is fair.4
So I've read the whole enchilada.
It's good.
It's really good.
… I hope you're proud of the work you've done. It's a terrific, complicated, messy story with no artificial resolutions. It's really good. (did I say? It's really good.)
~(from personal email with Herb Childress)
My Hangups
Chapter 1 is all about my hangups as a memoirist: my intense discomfort of writing about myself. I wasn’t sure this was a strong way to begin, but now that I’ve looked back on my manuscript with a bit more distance, I realize it’s totally on brand, and makes complete sense, as a woman and an academic who’s still shaking off the weights of gaslighting abuse on several fronts. The kind of abuse that crushes you into oblivion, while promising the world, while blaming you for not achieving anything, while plumping up your false hope that well maybe Next Time, while…
My biggest bad habit when it comes to personal writing has to with how often I interrupt my own narrative with irony and snark, or even with research and facts. Sometimes this was a way to skirt painful issues, sometimes it was simply because I underestimated the entertainment value of my own wit. I am not fully cured of this problem, but I have gotten worlds better at catching myself at it.
Solutions to Same:
One of the most helpful treatments to the writerly illness described above was the constant haranguing of both Herb and my spouse. To wit: MORE ABOUT YOU! FFS WILL YOU STOP PUSSYFOOTING AROUND AND WRITE LIKE 3 MORE PAGES ON YOUR FEELINGS! GAHH!
At the time I started the first drafts of this project, I also happened to be teaching a course over at DU’s Professional Writing program called Writing & Healing—the required textbook for that course was a fantastic source for me as I worked through what was at the time an unfamiliar genre.
Finally, Finding the Nut was a refrain that Herb and I coined during the drafting process that taught me how to get to the important stuff on my own more readily. What would happen is: Herb would give me feedback on a Chapter-Like Object and pick out one or two small mentions of something that he’d exclaim needed WAY more fleshing out. I’d always be surprised: really? More about that thing? I thought that thing was so boring... So the image we came up with was of cracking the hard inedible shell of a nut and discarding it, so to get to the good stuff inside that’s worth eating. This became a sort of second-draft practice for me: once the raw first draft was complete and basically without mechanical issues, I’d go through again and do two things: 1) I’d look at every em dash and set of parentheses, and cut all those self-interruptions that weren’t necessary; and 2) I’d Find the Nut. Sometimes I was right about what the Nut was, sometimes I wasn’t, but I got better at finding it on my own the more Herb showed me what he thought the Nuts were. This is an ongoing evolution in my personal writing, and I’m sure you can see the difference in my current unhinged memoir-y work on Zuko’s Musings as compared to in Next Time. I’ve learned much since then, and I continue to learn about what Nuts are essential5 as I continue to write.
Monday at *That Faculty Meeting
The faculty meeting bomb drop happened right as I was plodding my way through something leaning towards hopefully a conclusion to my memoir (I’m famously terrible at conclusions). Right at this time, the crushing events I recount in the Open Letter chapter (which I also ended up including as a Postscript) happened all within a few weeks. My spouse and I sat down and discussed, and decided together that I should quit that university, and stay at the other one where I’m still teaching today. Now that I had his support, he said, I no longer had to take that department’s bad treatment, and I of course saw the writing on the wall anyway. Walk away on your own terms, with your head held high, he said: don’t wait around for them to fire you. Walk away, with pride and strength and integrity.
After this decision, I met with Friend Tenured Jim6 who was a fellow theatre professor at that department as well as a locally well known actor. Over lunch, I told him what I planned to do. I’d thought he was on my side (and he certainly talked like he was at that lunch). Doesn’t look like it, however, based on his craven (in)actions at the meeting itself.
I remember when I first met Jim a few years before this—he’d gotten the tenure-track position I had applied for twice already, and one of his first assignments as a new full time faculty member was to observe one of my classes. I was like OH YEAH GREAT this n00b is going to come in and tell me how I’m doing after (at that point) almost 20 years of experience. Yeah. Cool. To be fair, he gave me a stellar evaluation and we had some nice chats about teaching, theatre, and the politics of the department. When I sat as adjunct rep in the Faculty Senate, too, we had more talks and I really was fooled into thinking he was on my side; at least a friendly work acquaintance if not a close friend. That’s why his silence during That Meeting was more deafening than that of the rest of the room. The ear-filling silent echo of betrayal.
Herb had excitedly given me cheerleading support to execute this big deal of a bomb drop of a quit, and after the meeting, he sent me an email with a litany of enthusiastic questions about what had happened, but especially about my feelings about what happened. My answers to those email questions became a short writeup, and from there I made it into a Chapter-Like Object, per his suggestion.
So. Mic drop. Here's your first draft of history. What did you say? What did they say? Did they protest—"NO, this cannot be! We shall surely run aground without your august navigation?" Or did they say "Oh. Um, gosh, that's too bad. Let's have a drink sometime..."
What did it feel like to leave the table? To leave the room? To leave the building? To leave the campus?
What did you do for the rest of the day, and was it colored by loss or by freedom or by the kaleidoscopic array of both?
What did you say when you got home? What did [Spouse] and the kids say to you?
How do you feel this morning, on your first day of release?
I'm grateful that you've taken this step. You can't become new when you hold the broken past.
~(from personal email with Herb Childress)
~
I was going to make the whole event description into the Epilogue, since it was the most recent of all the chronology of everything I’d written already, and the whole enchilada is in rough chronological order. But then my spouse suggested I split it in two: include the first part as a Prologue: a sort of cold open with a cliffhanger, and then conclude with the …well, conclusion. The idea was to start off with the bomb dropping and then go back in time to hopefully have the reader be like: holy cow how did we get to this?? and then the book builds up to the end.
And this pro/epilogue got the attention of Recovering Academic Joshua Doležal and he very generously posted the first part to his own newsletter right when I first joined Substack, which was right at this same time, in 2022.
To Conclude:
I’ve joined many an adjunct support group and researched not only full-time and tenured positions but unions as well, throughout the more than 20 years I’ve been in academia as a career (as an adjunct). I’ve tried many times to improve my station. No dice. It’s a dead career, and it’s getting deader. Sometimes I can’t help but think that it’s a me thing, but it’s not. Clearly. The only potentially just-as-dead job I can think of (which I’m also deep into and striving for success in) is getting (traditionally) published. Complete dead ends, both. And now that AI is proliferating, both are increasingly difficult in new and not usually good ways.
Where Am I Now?
Well, if you’ve read my memoir and are curious as far as what (or how) I’ve been doing since 2022 when it was finished, you could do worse than to go on over to Saturday Morning Serial and check out all of my GLOSSes on each chapter—I do go a little into my current opinions on the events therein, and relate a little but about how my life in 2025 is even more different than it was just 3 years ago. But mainly? I’m reaching out to agents, inquiring into small presses, and working on other projects, like my ongoing Popinations and whipping the Problematic Tropes series into something resembling a book-like shape. I’ve gotten one chapter of Next Time published in t’Art online, and have gotten either rejected or ghosted by about 25 agents so far (but usually it’s ghosted). I’m still proud of the final product, and am planning on completely refurbishing the Appendix before I submit the whole to more ghosts, er, agents. I want to make that section more into a kaleidoscope of personal essay than an annotated bibliography, which is what it’s like right now. So.
Anyway. That’s how it happened. Wanna publish this thing? hmu, as the kids say.7
~
Next Time: mini proposal
The exploitation of adjunct faculty is one of academia’s nastiest little secrets. And it wasn’t until twenty years of hard teaching labor had passed that I began to realize: in my career there was no next time, like I’d been promised. No promotions, no raises, no opportunities. No health insurance. It also hit me at this same time that my husband had been doing the exact same thing to me that my academic and theatrical careers had been: expecting me to give everything, returning nothing but empty promises of a Next Time that never existed.
Next Time—a strong woman under the gaslight is a memoir or series of personal essays and reflections on my life in the threefold gaslighting worlds of academia, theatre, and a marriage to a narcissist. It’s a little over 62,000 words.
Next Time draws parallels between the gaslighting abuse I’ve survived through the same twenty years by a husband, the theatre world, and a career in academia. Throughout the dozen sections of this book, I weave together the abuses of these three powerful forces in my life, draw out the common themes that unite them, and reflect on how this sort of thing can happen even to a strong, interesting woman. I then tell the story of my own emergence from these abusive systems, and offer a narrative of hope for other people caught in similar, intertwined cycles of personal and institutional abuse.
Mini Bibliography
Here’s a handful of essays that were my inspirations of the form during my writing process. These 5 essays in particular echoed throughout my drafting, some of them having been shared with me by Herb as I started, others I found myself as I plucked cuttings from the garden that’s the world of the personal essay. All of these are well worth a read, and some of them are so good I actually get pissed off. In a good way.
~
Brogan, Jacob. “Why Pursue a Career in the Humanities?” The Washington Post Magazine, March 2022. Available: https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/03/14/modern-language-association-convention/
Dolezal, Joshua. “The Big Quit.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2022. Available: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-big-quit
Kay, Andrew. “Academe’s Extinction Event,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2019. Available: https://www.chronicle.com/article/academes-extinction-event-failure-whiskey-and-professional-collapse-at-the-mla/
Kay, Andrew. “Pilgrim at Tinder Creek,” The Point, February 2017, Issue 13. Available: https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/pilgrim-tinder-creek/
Tevis, Joni. “Warp and Weft,” Places Journal, May 2015. Available: https://doi.org/10.22269/150511
You can read more of Jenn’s wonderful writing at her publication, Zuko’s Musings.
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Until next time,
This is one of many cheeky terms that Herb Childress and I coined during this writing process.
I believe Mr. Childress reads my newsletter. Whaddya think, Herb?
Blogs, as well as NAWD.
Also I love this use of MFA as a verb. Any of you who have any degree in creative writing, let alone an MFA, will totally understand what ‘MFAing’ something is.
If you thought ‘deez nuts’ when you read this, then we can be friends.
Not his real name.
The kids still say that, don’t they?
This is so good. I especially loved the 'Find the Nut' metaphor. It's the perfect blend of wit, wisdom, and writerly courage for sure. Great read.