thomas leverett weblog

retirement

Ten years ago, when I left southern Illinois to live in Texas, I had my first retirement party. At 58, I quit eighteen years of teaching at Southern Illinois to be kind of a spousal hire; I taught three-quarters time at Texas Tech, started writing more seriously, and played a lot of really hot bluegrass music.

My wife had accepted a job as chair of a department of Texas Tech, and the university never quite fulfilled its promise of a PhD program in Sociology; in fact, her chair experience almost killed her, so four years later we moved to New Mexico, where she was able to ride a horse and we thought we could raise our remaining children in a remote mountain town.

That worked well for a while, especially through the pandemic, because the kids thought it was a huge deal to go into this tiny town; it was like going to the city for them. But now, for a variety of reasons, it is not so good, and one is that they are special and they are high-school age. So we are moving back to Illinois.

My official retirement party is on a Texas Tech zoom on Tuesday. I have continued working for Tech, although not three-quarters time, for ten years. It has been a successful arrangement, in that I love Tech, and I learned a lot from the experience, and kept current on academic issues. For the time I've been in New Mexico, mostly I was a writing tutor for Tech's Writing Center, but I also did some substitute teaching down in Alamogordo and developed my writing even more. Nevertheless it's Tech I am presently retiring from; the subbing is long gone. I'm ready to say I'm happily retired.

But when I finally published my novel last March, I got serious about marketing, and learned that I could work to increase my readership through various methods. Now I am fully absorbed in this process. I'm becoming better known as a short-story writer and am slowly widening my audience. How else can you do it?

I will enjoy my zoom on Tuesday as I made a number of close friends in Lubbock and I still feel like part of the wider Tech family. I guess Tech considers New Mexico to be a western province of Texas so my living in New Mexico isn't a problem for them, but once I move to Illinois I'm out of here, and have to fend for myself. But I say that withouut bitterness because I had a good time at Tech and they can make whatever rules they want. Also, I'm no longer as dependent on the income as I used to be.

Of my working life, thirty years of it was ESL directly, ending when I left Lubbock to come out here. The six I've been out here have been teaching, but not ESL. OK I was tired of ESL anyway, I could say, but in a sense I'm retiring from the entire higher education scene, and I'm both proud to be a part of it, and, happy to be free. Consider this a mortar board (?) thrown in the air.

posted by tom @ 12:58 PM