Coming Home

I left a perfectly good, but dull, job as a writer/editor/webmaster at Iowa State University’s Institute for Transportation in July 2009 to return to teaching. I needed to do work that I found worthwhile and that mattered to me personally, so I accepted a job teaching English at Nicolet Area Technical College in Rhinelander, Wis.

Northern Wisconsin is dotted with small lakes and covered in trees, glorious trees — birches, oaks, maples, tamaracks, pines. I was thrilled to trade corn and bean fields for all those trees.

For the first couple of years I was giddy. I was having so much fun teaching and finding ways to reach my students, nearly all first-generation and high-need, ranging in age from 17 to 65. I was teaching five classes each semester, usually with three different preparations. It was manageable because I didn’t have other obligations, like advising students or publishing research, and I had summers off to pursue my own writing projects.

However, when public employees in Wisconsin lost collective bargaining rights, our teaching loads increased. For me that meant teaching six classes per semester with up to four different preparations. Most of these classes were writing courses, which are time-intensive for grading. Innovation was out the door. I was in survival mode.

On my best teaching days, I’d give myself a B+. I was never going to be a great teacher. That would require more of me than I was willing or able to give, even under the best circumstances. At my core, I’m a writer.

When an opportunity arose to write full time for Grinnell College’s Office of Communications, I took it. It would put writing back at the center of my work and allow me to write for and about a place I value.

Transitioning back to Iowa has been smooth; it’s familiar and comfortable. Transitioning to the College has been fascinating. It’s been 25 years since I graduated, but my memories of being a student here are still fresh.

I was a first-generation, high-need student from Nashua, Iowa, and Grinnell scared the bejeebers out of me. In my First-Year Tutorial about Mexico, I got a D- on my first paper. Used to easy A’s on high school papers, I nearly had a heart attack. In professor Elizabeth Dobbs’ course in literary analysis, I had no idea what she meant by analyzing a poem. Was it some kind of secret code I was supposed to crack?

During a paper conference with professor Ira Strauber for Introduction to Political Science, he wondered why I’d used so many extra words in a particular sentence. I said, as though it should have been obvious, “To make the paper longer.” The only course I felt any confidence in that first semester was French with professor Vic Verrette.

I slowly got the hang of my classwork, sort of. In a sociology class, professor Chris Hunter used my paper as an example — because I was the only student who followed all the assignment’s instructions. I got a B.

As a student, I was very quiet. I avoided participating in class discussions whenever possible. My professors, many of whom have now retired or moved to senior faculty status, have no reason to remember me. Nor do my classmates.

I was kind of an oddball in a way that literally separated me from my peers. Officially I lived on campus for the first semester my freshman year, but practically, it amounted to eight weeks. I moved in with my fiancé during fall break, and we married during winter break.

And since I am deeply introverted, my attempts at meeting other students were not exactly vigorous. I was on campus for several hours a day to go to class, have lunch in the Forum Grill by myself, study/nap in Burling Library, and then go to work at Hardee’s or Pizza Hut before heading home to Brooklyn, 15 miles east on U.S. Highway 6.

Fast-forward to 2014 when I began working at Grinnell as a staff writer. I’ve already interviewed many alumni, students, staff, and faculty for Web and magazine stories. I’m seeing Grinnell now through many different lenses, not just my own memories as a student. Through these interactions, I’ve discovered a feeling of connection to Grinnell and Grinnellians. I suspect it was always there, ready to welcome me home.