sight. It threatened to be my undoing, but I won out in the end. I’ve necked bottles of booze, been so high I could have floated, but nothing nudged the block out of place. Writer’s block. How well it was named. Mine sat on my shoulders, cold, hard, immoveable. A block of Michelangelo’s finest marble, all white and implacable, crushing me. I don’t dwell on it any more. I used to, used to let days roll by without leaving the first shoebox I rented. I witnessed drug deals on the street, saw two shootings, countless carjacks, all from my desk by the window where I sat, willing the words to come.
And when they didn’t, I forced myself to leave it behind. I had to, or I would have turned to salt at that desk. After that, academic writing was easy. While pursuing my PhD here in Dublin my undergraduate students had irritated me, partly because of their simplicity, but also because I saw them as little more than a barrier to my poetry. Teaching was part of my doctoral studies, but I did it with little grace. I was impatient then, too eager to get to whatever place I’d planned out for myself, too busy writing poetry to be worried about explaining Chaucer or Dickinson to kids who doodled hearts and names on their folders and kept checking their watches to see when they’d finally be free. I watched my students live their lives around me, applying lip gloss, fretting over match results, worrying over essays and deadlines. From a great distance I observed them, endured the tutorials and the banality, their lack of ability to see beyond the words on any page. I let them slip away, ran red markers over their essays and then gave them grades they didn’t deserve because I simply didn’t want to fight. I know it’s not the ideal way to liberate minds at third level, but I was young, messed up, moving on. Shelving booze for most of my doctorate didn’t add to my good humour, but it got me through. I’d never have made it while drinking.
I buy three novels and two essay collections. A book for Maude is a last-minute addition, something colourful and breezy. She’s nearly 90. She’s earned the right to easy reading. I haven’t yet.
Outside, the afternoon is still bright and warm. The teachers are somewhere nearby, tucked away in a dark pub, dissecting their students, their classes. Adam is among them. Adam. The last thing I need. The absolute last thing I need is another affair – sorry, Isaac, relationship – with a colleague.
Isaac is a professor of English at New York University, where I work. We’d first met when I arrived in New York to interview for a junior teaching assistant position in a community college, where he was the external interviewer for the day. It was a favour from my thesis supervisor in Dublin, pity-edged, and in my desperation to go somewhere, anywhere, I took it. Junior teaching assistant on the Introduction to Poetry course. It saved my life. Flailing around in my mid-twenties I was a wreck, still wounded by my brother’s suicide, ignored by my mother, heading in the same direction as my uncle. I’d started drinking again once my thesis was handed in, and had thrown myself into alcohol with a fervour previously unknown even to me. Two months into it, dwelling under that dome of booze, enveloped, womb-like, in its tentacled clutches, a phone call came through. Junior teaching assistant. Community college. My university sensitivities bristled, as my thesis supervisor had known they would. Take it, Eva, she urged. At least go and see them.
I saw the possibilities this position held for me, the tunnel I could escape through. It was a clean break with home. No association with Andrew, no way my mother could trail her loathing in front of me.
‘You’re Irish, correct?’ His diction clipped, almost English. His eyes, coloured like moths, met mine, then resumed their perusal of my résumé.
‘Yes.’
He didn’t offer his family line. No Murphys or O’Briens there to be held up to the
And when they didn’t, I forced myself to leave it behind. I had to, or I would have turned to salt at that desk. After that, academic writing was easy. While pursuing my PhD here in Dublin my undergraduate students had irritated me, partly because of their simplicity, but also because I saw them as little more than a barrier to my poetry. Teaching was part of my doctoral studies, but I did it with little grace. I was impatient then, too eager to get to whatever place I’d planned out for myself, too busy writing poetry to be worried about explaining Chaucer or Dickinson to kids who doodled hearts and names on their folders and kept checking their watches to see when they’d finally be free. I watched my students live their lives around me, applying lip gloss, fretting over match results, worrying over essays and deadlines. From a great distance I observed them, endured the tutorials and the banality, their lack of ability to see beyond the words on any page. I let them slip away, ran red markers over their essays and then gave them grades they didn’t deserve because I simply didn’t want to fight. I know it’s not the ideal way to liberate minds at third level, but I was young, messed up, moving on. Shelving booze for most of my doctorate didn’t add to my good humour, but it got me through. I’d never have made it while drinking.
I buy three novels and two essay collections. A book for Maude is a last-minute addition, something colourful and breezy. She’s nearly 90. She’s earned the right to easy reading. I haven’t yet.
Outside, the afternoon is still bright and warm. The teachers are somewhere nearby, tucked away in a dark pub, dissecting their students, their classes. Adam is among them. Adam. The last thing I need. The absolute last thing I need is another affair – sorry, Isaac, relationship – with a colleague.
Isaac is a professor of English at New York University, where I work. We’d first met when I arrived in New York to interview for a junior teaching assistant position in a community college, where he was the external interviewer for the day. It was a favour from my thesis supervisor in Dublin, pity-edged, and in my desperation to go somewhere, anywhere, I took it. Junior teaching assistant on the Introduction to Poetry course. It saved my life. Flailing around in my mid-twenties I was a wreck, still wounded by my brother’s suicide, ignored by my mother, heading in the same direction as my uncle. I’d started drinking again once my thesis was handed in, and had thrown myself into alcohol with a fervour previously unknown even to me. Two months into it, dwelling under that dome of booze, enveloped, womb-like, in its tentacled clutches, a phone call came through. Junior teaching assistant. Community college. My university sensitivities bristled, as my thesis supervisor had known they would. Take it, Eva, she urged. At least go and see them.
I saw the possibilities this position held for me, the tunnel I could escape through. It was a clean break with home. No association with Andrew, no way my mother could trail her loathing in front of me.
‘You’re Irish, correct?’ His diction clipped, almost English. His eyes, coloured like moths, met mine, then resumed their perusal of my résumé.
‘Yes.’
He didn’t offer his family line. No Murphys or O’Briens there to be held up to the
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