I have spent this summer trying on my new administrative wings (and webbed feet) as one of three assistant directors of the writing program (expository, not creative). My official appointment began July 1, but I’ve been working on and off since late May. So far, so good. I’ll still be teaching half time, so it’ll be interesting learning to balance the roles of teacher and administrator when the school year begins. Moving from full-time faculty to part of an administrative staff is like being allowed backstage or in the kitchen of a busy restaurant. Whether you’re hired as a sous-chef or the head chef, you’re now privy to a lot of information that is inaccessible to the front of the house. This is especially true in our program, where faculty positions, though renewable, are not on the tenure-track, so there isn’t a service component that would involve faculty members in the regular administrative tasks, like hiring, of a traditional department.

To continue the restaurant analogy, being a faculty member in the writing program, then, is a bit like being in the house band. You come in and play your weekly gigs, and then you get to leave at the end of your set. You don’t need to concern yourself with the massive coordination efforts needed to keep the seats filled, or the constant chaos of the kitchen where you’re always racing against the clock to plate the dishes, and occasionally a grease fire flares up, requiring immediate attention. Unless you’re interested in that kind of madness, of course, and you stick around after the show, which is what I did. But pitching in now and then in an unofficial capacity, I now realize, is nothing compared to taking on the job that comes with the title, and being responsible for my part of the whole operation. Suddenly, teaching—which had been the center of my working life up to now—is just one of several on-going projects I need to keep track of, and as the hours and days around my teaching schedule get filled up with workshops and meetings, and more meetings, teaching recedes ever further from the horizon of my attention. I’ll be lucky if I remember to grade my students’ essays! So, on the one hand, I’m apprehensive, bracing myself for the multi-tasking marathon that will commence on Aug. 31. I haven’t had any of my anxiety dreams in a while, but I expect to any minute—one of them involves big bodies of water, sometimes big waves, and the threat of drowning. (Not terribly imaginative of my unconscious, but there you have it.) On the other hand, I’m discovering that certain proclivities that I’d taken for granted, or thought were simply cognitive quirks, actually qualify as job skills. Being “detail oriented,” it turns out, is a real and useful quality, and not just office-speak for “control freak,” though the two things are most certainly related. And with sixteen new faculty members joining us, and the much wider circle of university personnel I’ll have to interact with, my talent for remembering names, dates, and isolated facts is good for much more than keeping abreast of celebrity gossip. I used to be much better at remembering names and faces without really trying; in fact, it wasn’t so much remembering as recording, an unconscious, almost effortless imprinting. Once I heard a name, it stuck. I could pick a face out of a crowd, after having met the person just once. Convenient at cocktail parties, and my husband, who can recite whole scenes of dialogue or lines of poetry but regularly blanks on names, was always suitably impressed. But I found, often enough, that it made some people uncomfortable when, on meeting them again after some time, I knew their names as if I’d made a point of remembering them. It was especially awkward if I could identify them, but they couldn’t place me at all. So, sometimes I’d pretend I didn’t know someone’s name or pretend to recall it quite hesitantly so as not to seem obsessive or stalker-ish. Now, as my brain ages, I regret not having kept my memory for names as sharp as I could have; I’m convinced that all that pretending had a dulling effect. Still, it’s not hard for me to keep all the new names and faces straight, and I suppose that’s something to be grateful for. I already feel that I’m coming up against the limits of my “organizational skills”—the files! the files! How many sub-folders can I have in “My Documents” before the computer shuts down in a huff? I’ll let you know in a month or so, when the school year really begins. By the time you read this, I’ll be off on my 2 ½-week vacation. I’ll be taking some work with me, you know, to stay limber, so I can come back and jump right in. When I return, this duck better be ready to swim (and fly, and quack, and fish . . . ).

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