by Tim Waggoner
In the summer of 1999 I applied for a full-time tenure-track teaching position at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio. I was living in Columbus at the time – about an hour and half away from Dayton – with my future ex-wife, our four-year-old daughter, and another child on the way. The position was my dream job: teaching composition and creative writing, and coordinating the English department’s various creative activities, such as the literary magazine and the annual writers’ workshop. I’d been teaching English part-time ever since graduate school while I pounded out those first million practice words that every writer has to get through, but I was ready to find a full-time gig. I’d been selling short fiction to professional markets for a while, and I had a literary agent, though so far he hadn’t been able to place any of my novels with publishers. I was by no means giving up on writing, but I was thirty-five, with one daughter and a second waiting in the wings. I figured it was time to take one more step toward actual adulthood and get a job that provided the near-mythical treasure that all freelance writers dream of: healthcare benefits. Besides, I’d been teaching part-time for ten years, and I loved it. Teaching writing made me a better writer. Plus, it had the not-inconsiderable advantage of offering a steady – if often all-too meager – paycheck.
And, on a darker note, despite how hard I’d tried for years to make my marriage work, I was beginning to suspect it might not last much longer, which meant I’d need a good job with benefits so I could support myself and take care of my kids if I had to go it alone.
So . . . I applied, got the interview, worked my butt off to prepare for it, went in, nailed it, and got the job. (As my grandmother used to say, “Thank you, Jesus!”) And when September rolled around, I began commuting to work, driving a three-hour round trip to teach. I did that five days a week for seven months. I did the math once and discovered I’d spent the equivalent of seventeen full days on the road driving back and forth. That’s a lot of time not spent with your family – and a lot of time not spent writing.
We began planning the move to Dayton, but the process was hampered by the fact that my wife’s doctor ordered that she remain on bed rest as much as possible. Our first daughter had been born prematurely, and the doctor wanted to make sure this pregnancy went as smoothly as possible. This meant that I did the majority of house hunting alone.
Now I’m the first to admit that I don’t see the world the way most people do. Ever watch David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet? If you did, remember that shot where Lynch shows the happy suburban paradise, and the camera lowers to the level of the perfectly trimmed lawn, and then it moves even lower beneath the surface of the earth to show all the nasty writhing black beetles hidden underneath? I’m one of those people who always sees the beetles. Sometimes they’re all I see. So this explains why, after my job interview at Sinclair was over, when I drove around town to reacquaint myself with the area and saw a pierced and tatted-up woman in a black dress walking her pet rat on a leash, my first thought was I’m home!
Like I said, I don’t see the world the way most people do.
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Tim Waggoner’s novels include the Nekropolis series of urban fantasies and the Ghost Trackers series written in collaboration with Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson of the Ghost Hunters television show. In total, he’s published over twenty novels and two short story collections, and his articles on writing have appeared in Writer’s Digest and Writers’ Journal, among other publications. He teaches creative writing at Sinclair Community College and in Seton Hill University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing Popular Fiction program. Visit him on the web at www.timwaggoner.com.