Sincerely,
Ineed Advice

Ineed,

First let me say my what an interesting life you’ve led. You’ve packed in far more than your fair share of adventures for having only having had 31 years to squeeze them in.

Before I answer your questions, let me first get my fellow readers up to speed about the WK12 program.

12 is an experimental, creative ad school housed on the 4th floor of advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy’s Portland office. The program lasts roughly a year, and accepts only 13 students out of the hundreds that apply. As it’s a school, there is tuition.

The school is in it’s 8th year, and we’re currently recruiting for the 9th class. In fact, the application site is up, and we’ll be accepting applications until October 20th.

I say we because for the last going on three years I’ve been one of the directors of the program in addition to my copywriting responsibilities.

The basic philosophy of the school is learning by doing. We work with a handful of clients, usually local non-profits, creating ads and branding. Students answer real briefs, present work to real clients, and make real ads. There are also assignments, lectures, and all sorts of left and U turns. Ideally the students, who sit at one huge desk facing each other, function like a creative collective collaborating on art shows, phone apps, fonts, zines and whatever else they want to create.

The school is full-time. The expectation is students are in every morning, Monday through Friday, and work throughout the day to the end of it. There are late nights, and working weekends. Students get out of the program what they put into it. The more the better. Freelance is allowed, but not encouraged.

So as far your specific questions, let’s tackle higher education first.

There is no previous educational requirement. Certainly, a lot of students have college degrees, but not all. We want students who have interesting life experience like yourself. We want students who have critical thinking skills, and problem solving skills and have made awesome things. We want all kinds of different people who bring all kinds of different experiences to the table. That’s what makes it interesting.

As far as age goes, there is an age requirement. Students have be at least 21 years when the program begins, which will be sometime early next year. So you’re fine there. In fact, 31 is by no means old for a 12 student. Last year’s class had 4 students in their late 30s. Again, a mix of ages is nice.

So no worries as far as your education or age. Check and check.

You mentioned you have two daughters.

Kids give me pause. I have kids, and balancing kids and work is tough. And I’m one of the directors. I get to go home at a reasonable time. If the students work all weekend, I field emails, see the work on Monday morning, or come in on Sunday night if we have a Monday client presentation I absolutely have to see the night before.

I think we’ve had students with kids before. But it’s a tough, tough balance. Not impossible, but it’s a busy, busy year where you’re not going to see them as much as you like. So I’d give that some consideration.

The other piece of the puzzle is the tuition. It’s 13k. There is some scholarship money, but no one gets a full ride, much less a half ride. Plus there’s moving expenses and then living expenses like food and rent. So that’s a pretty big consideration too.

I should also point out that there’s no job waiting at the end of the program. A few folks usually get hired on at W+K, but most don’t. That said those who don’t usually end up at a great agency, assuming they’re still interested in advertising at the year’s end.

Really, it’s about having a year unlike you’re liable to have anywhere else doing anything else. It’s an amazing but at times brutal year. At least from what I can tell. After all, I don’t sit at the table, I sit a few yards away. But I can tell you most graduates would do it all over again in a heartbeat.

My advice, have a serious conversation with your wife. If she’s up for this, apply. See how far you get. You don’t get all the way, at least you can say you tried. If you get in, have another serious conversation with your wife, and your daughters. And take it from there.

Help Me.

Dear Help Me,

I did indeed spend a few years living in Los Angeles. And like you hope to do, I eventually returned here to Portland.

And while I was lucky enough to find people who were not fake and had finely attuned senses of irony, I also spent a lot more time talking about doing stuff, and pitching stuff, and trying to sell stuff, than actually making stuff.

So let’s address that first and foremost.

There are people in Los Angeles making stuff. Not just movies, but plays, and art and dance pieces, and all that other good stuff that sometimes you forget about in Los Angeles because everyone is talking about movies.

Find those people. Figure out how is making stuff that might inspire you and go to the places they are showing off what they make. Go to Chinatown the night all the galleries stay open late, look at the fliers in window of Skylight books for an interesting sounding theater premiere, and figure out when the hipster communes in East LA open their doors. Maybe you make friends, maybe not, but at least you confirm people are making stuff and start to get inspired.

Meanwhile, find some of the tens of thousands of other creative people in Los Angeles who aren’t making stuff but are similarly frustrated that they aren’t making stuff. You are not alone. This is a common refrain of people who came to Los Angeles to make stuff. So find some like-minded folks and start making.

Pick a night, find a place be it a café or your apartment and host a making night. Make zines, or greeting cards, or posters, or clothes, or costumes out of cardboard box. Start a writer’s group, create a low stakes improvisational dance collective, or organize a parade in the name of something ridiculous. Start by making a big sign for your first meeting “Talking about ideas you’re not actually going to do is strictly forbidden.”

You need to do these things with a sense of urgency. Why? Because you’re not staying there, that’s obvious. Los Angeles is a temporary situation for you, so live like it is.

Live every day like it might be one of your last in Los Angeles.

When I was in Los Angeles, I knew it was temporary, and yet I didn’t act it. I lived like I lived there. You should live like you’re on a working vacation. Yes you have a job to go to. But weekends and night should not be about establishing roots, getting into a routine, or relaxing with leftovers in front of the TV.

Because you’re leaving soon!

How soon, how knows? Maybe days, maybe months, maybe years, but you are leaving. Which means there are a lot of things you need to do before you leave.

You need to visit the Getty, LACMA, MOCA, and the Jurassic Museum of Technology. Visit them again if you already have, and then again in a few months, shows change often.

You need to go swimming on the roof of the Standard, visit Clifton’s and stroll down the oldest street in LA eating tacos.

You need to visit Griffith Observatory and explore every inch of the park. Ride the merry-go-round, visit the zoo, play tennis and hike the trails.

You need to get a pass at the farmer’s market to see a test screening of a movie on a studio lot where they strip search you and treat you like cattle.

You need to see a Dodger game, visit Santa Anita wearing your Sunday best, and crash a pick-up basketball game at Pepperdine University because that’s where all the celebrities who live nearby go to shoot hoops.

That just off the top of my head, and I barely scratched the surface of Los Angeles in my two years down there. There are all kinds of gems.

Have you been to the police academy diner? It’s awesome. You get awful service because you’re the only table there not full of officers in training, but the food is good and the experience one of a kind.

Have you been to the see the biggest painting in the world? It’s inside a museum inside the Glendale cemetery? Go see it. You sit in the dark for 20 minutes seeing bits of pieces of the painting as you hear the story of Jesus before the entire thing is revealed in all it’s glory at show’s end.

Have you gotten drunk playing par 3 golf at the course just half a mile away on your way back into Los Feliz? The one across the street from the Indian market that serves insanely huge lunch portions for five bucks?

The list goes on and on.

And that’s just inside Los Angeles.

Start thinking of the place you’re vacationing as anywhere within a few hours and you’re looking at Palm Springs, the thrift stores of Ventura, Catalina Island, Joshua Tree, Mexico and Vegas.

So make your list. Take out 4 pieces of paper and number each of them from 1 to 25 along the left side. And fill them in with stuff along these lines. If you get stuck reach out to your friends who live in and have lived in Los Angeles. I bet you can’t stop after you’ve filled up those 4 pages with 100 things you need to do.

Next, get cracking. We got a long weekend coming up so you should be able to knock 2 off at least.

You’re on working vacation! Act like it!

As someone who is on a working vacation you should spend at least an hour every Monday planning out the coming week and weekend. Bare minimum. Come up with a plan and invite people. Organize expeditions. Let those spread out old friends who are married with kids know you’re coming to their neck of the woods and they’re invited on the adventure you have planned.

Sure, people will cancel last minute. They’ll flake. You might eat the occasional theater ticket, or dine on sushi alone. But people in LA are so damn friendly you’ll end up having a spirited conversation with the person next to you about how their agent won’t send them out for parts ten years their junior.

Look, we’ll see you back up here eventually. We both know that. But have some fun in the meantime!

Concerned with Input/Output Ratio

Dear Concerned,

First off, ah to be 29 again. I spent the last few days of my twenties in Ashland where my parents graciously took my now wife and I to celebrate my 30th birthday. We stayed at a nice motel, ate great meals and saw several awe-inspiring plays. We had a fabulous time, but I could never quite forget that rent was due 3 days after the trip was slated to end and I had less than a $100 to my name.

I had never hesitated asking to borrow money from my parents before; I worked in the erratic freelance film community and I had a good track record of paying them back after the inevitable big job. But somehow turning 30 felt like it was time to stand on my own two feet. I held my tongue, and silently hoped my birthday card would contain a check. It didn’t, it was a pricey trip after all.

When we got back to Portland I turned to my go-to get rich quick scheme. There used to be a used bookstore on 30th and Killingsworth (where the restaurant DOC now stands) that bought whatever books Powell’s couldn’t sell for pennies on the dollar. It was packed to the rafters with their castoffs. I had a deal worked out with the owner where I could fill an entire box for $5. I filled six boxes. And I spent the next few days driving between the different Powell’s stores selling them back the very books they didn’t want anymore. I wore out my welcome with the Hawthorne store book buyers in particular, but I made rent.

All that’s to say it’s right to feel like you’re at a major threshold. I’m not very knowledgeable about astrology or anything else even vaguely in the new age universe, but I understand those that are believe there’s more to turning 30 or 40 then just changing the number at the front of your age.

But I might disagree that just because you’re on the verge of changing decades means an end to “guilt free philandering with ideologies as well as men.” If you want that sort of thinking and behavior to end, turning 30 is a great excuse, but don’t change just because you think you’re turning an arbitrary age, new age astrology aside.

I choose to stop borrowing money from my parents when I turned 30, but I didn’t really get my shit together to get more than a month or two ahead of my rent for another 3 or 4 years. And I did some of the work I’m proudest of in those short years. I would hate to think of where I’d be now if I hadn’t spent those few, extra crucial years making art before I took a real job.

You’ve got a lot on your mind right now. Whether or not to go into graduate school, and how to have better relationships are big questions in their own right. But your third query is the one maybe sums them all up. By “concerns regarding the greater implications of being an organism composed of specialized cells that are in and of themselves universes” I think you’re asking what does it all add up to. What’s the point, the meaning of it all? What does it mean not just to be happy in career, and relationships but in life?

Big fucking questions.

I’m not going to answer all your these questions one-by-one. I’m not even going to necessarily answer them head on, although let me address the doctoral program here and now.

Don’t go to graduate school, at least not this coming fall. You don’t sound particularly excited about it, especially the workload. I don’t think people who are ready to buckle down put it in quotes, as if they’re trying it on for size and don’t like the way it fits. Maybe you’ll be ready this winter, maybe next fall, but not immediately. You’ve got something else you need to do first.

So here’s my piece of curveball advice.

Get out of your comfort zone and do something that shakes up your world profoundly. Immerse yourself into something completely even dangerously new. Not physically dangerous, but something that might endanger how you’re thinking and living right now.

I’m not talking about a modern day Vision Quest you drive around the country alone or a motorcycle or live in the woods for a month trying to figure it out. Think too hard and you’ll just give yourself a headache. You’re leaning further towards your head versus your heart then I think you want to right now.

So throw yourself into experience that will keep you so busy and spin your head around so completely that you won’t have to think.

Go work on an organic goat farm. Jump in the van and be a roadie for a punk band. Reach out to your friend who moved to Romania and take them up on their offer to live in the squat and work under the table at the coffee shop. Follow whatever crazy dream you had 8 years ago that’s almost but not completely gone, be it going to New York to try out for Saturday Night Live, attending clown school or living in Las Cruces, New Mexico for a few months to paint landscapes of a sky never seems to end.

Have an adventure. It doesn’t have to be for two years. Go for few months. But be sure to get out of Portland.

If you’ve been doing crazy stuff like this for the last few years, well, never mind. But I suspect you haven’t. So if this sounds even slightly intriguing, do it. If this sounds completely terrifying, then you have to do it.

My theory is that going and doing something 180 degrees different from what you’re currently planning on doing is going to help you figure some of these big questions out. Not because you’re thinking about them all the time, but because you’ll be actively experiencing and experimenting with other kinds of living, meeting new kinds of people and having the same conversations and asking the same questions you are now but in completely new contexts.

Don’t worry so much about your output right now. I think you need more input. Fill your metaphorical well. You’ll have time and inspiration to put things out into the world once you’re out in it or when you get back.

So, decide what you’re going to do, set a deadline for going and have fun!

The buckle-less Portland lifestyle, doctorate programs, lab life, and the big questions will be waiting for you to get back. Men too.

Speaking of men, if you meet one during your adventure, as you inevitable will, give him the once over. If he’s an asshole, move on. Go through your mental rolodex of bottom of the blueberry box notes if you need extra inspiration. You deserve and want better. If he passes that test, ask him if he’s a feminist. That’s a sure way to get a good conversation about gender roles and compromise in relationships going. Assuming you’re reasonably sure he’s a good guy who doesn’t feel the need to wear the pants don’t analyze it to death. So what if he wants to move to Orlando after clown school and work at Disneyland and you want to move back to Portland. Enjoy each others company and see what happens. You never know what nice guy will do for a girl he falls in love with. Oh, and if you do find one of these actually not terribly uncommon men, try not make him feel dumber than you, even if he is.

Hope that helps!

You’re in a very interesting predicament, and one I find particularly
fascinating. My wife and father are both authors so I’ve watched from the
sidelines as traditional publishers have struggled to adapt to the digital
age while companies like Amazon are creating new opportunities that cut
publishers out of the picture entirely.

Why, for instance, in this day and age do authors still only get a royalty statement every 4 or 6 months with sales figures that are months old? Empowering authors to better track their sales seems like an obvious way for a publishing house to create a competitive edge.

And why aren’t authors and art directors working together instead of communicating through editors? We figured out how to make that partnership work in advertising right around the time the current season of Mad Man is set.

But I digress.

As far as your situation I’m not surprised it’s been a struggle. Any time you’re helping a traditional company figure out how to thrive online there is bound to be friction. This is true in publishing, advertising, medicine, education, and just about every other field. Changing an entire culture and breaking down decades-old patterns and institutional beliefs doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen in a year either.

So I’d say pretty mixed so far is actually pretty good for the one-year mark. I bet a lot of people trying to do what you’re doing have had a much harder time, as your hyperlink bears out.

It sounds as if you like and believe in your job, you just want the end products to turn out better. So let’s first dig in to try and make that work.

The mix bag is pretty easily sorted into good and bad. It goes well when you retain creative control and collaborate with the developers, and sours when a job is handed over to a vendor. So what’s the plan for the next few projects?

Are you and your team going to be able to own them from start to finish, or are they going to be handed over to vendors who aren’t going to play nice?

If it’s the former, hang in there. Things are looking up.

But if the problem isn’t going away are there some fixes you can push for or enact? Can you change the dynamic with the vendors? Hire better, more collaborative vendors?

I suspect it might be a matter of too much going on and not enough of you to go around. You’ve clearly earned some respect and accolades based on the successful project you closely oversaw. So see if you can’t leverage that to your advantage.

Have an honest conversation with your boss or bosses detailing the ways past projects have gone. If you’re the kind of person that gets a little flustered talking to the higher ups a simple PowerPoint or presentation deck might help. Maybe even throw some funny images in there to illustrate the success of the project you led, and the failure of the projects that were handed off.

Once you’ve made your point, level the boom and ask for what you want. Fewer projects so you can spend more time on the projects you think have the highest chance of success, or a budget to hire a developer or two on staff. Or more money to hire vendors that collaborate better and have a more refined design sense.

Or maybe something else entirely would make you happier. Time off to recharge, or permission to travel to conferences where you can meet new vendors and see what other companies are doing, or even a chance to fix some of the past projects that turned out terrible. If money is the problem ask for a raise.

It never hurts to ask. All they can say is no.

See how that goes. I suspect things will improve.

But if things look bad for the foreseeable future and the higher ups won’t empower you to improve the situation, then it’s time to move on.

I’d recommend lining up something else before you make your move. As freeing as quitting might feel, I’m going to assume you’re in living in New York if you’re in publishing, and not independently wealthy. Assuming I’m correct, throw some irons in the fire and let them heat up before you leap.

Maybe there are some other publishing companies that are further along, or struggling even worse, that could use your expertise. Or maybe you jump into a start-up or existing tech company wading into publishing that doesn’t have to shake off their old beliefs.

Or maybe there’s something else entirely out there that you suspect you’d love doing. PowerPoint art, perhaps? It worked for David Byrne. And me.

-Just Another Procrastinator?

First of all, know that you are not alone. Far from it. Almost everyone wrestles with deadlines, writers especially. Ralph Ellison and Katherine Dunn come to mind as writers who missed deadlines by years and still made out all right. So you’re in good company.

You’re also well aware of the problem and doing everything a cursory Internet search of how to avoid missing deadlines suggests. Dedicated work space, check. Internet blocking software, check. Setting goals, check. And meeting regularly with a study buddy to keep you accountable, check.

Which makes giving advice a little harder.

My instinct is: this is a tough-love situation. You need greater consequences for missing deadlines.

But the missed journal deadline complicates that theory. I’m assuming that was a potentially career affecting opportunity. Getting published would have helped your career, not getting published won’t. So consequences have been felt. Which brings us to now.

As far as the journal goes, you say you knew the turnaround was unreasonable, but you took it anyway. So moving forward, you need to be honest with your potential employers, publishers, editors, and most of all yourself about what you can do in a given amount of time. I suspect you’ve already planned to do so.

That said, I don’t think this is a non-starter for academic success. You say turning out quality work at the drop of a hat is integral to success in academics, but I think that’s partly your frustration talking. My professor friends have weeks, if not months, to write articles and make changes based on peer reviews, and years to write books. I understand expediency is a virtue, and the more you publish the less you perish, but this journal’s tight deadline sounds more like the exception than the rule.

So yes, there is hope for you. Plenty of it.

Nevertheless, less burn some sage. Finish the article. And send it to the editor with a note of apology and explanation. Doesn’t matter if it’s next week, next month or next year. Don’t do it with the expectation of getting it published in a later issue, although if it’s great, who knows. Do it because by finishing the piece you get to have the last say, not the deadline. And if this editor and journal might play a role in the rest of your career, it’s better to be known as someone who finishes, however late, than never finishes at all.

Moving forward, it would also behoove you to work on articles on your own, at your own pace. Pitch pieces after you’ve finished them, or at the least at a very solid rough draft status. You’ll meet deadlines, and maybe even turn in articles early. If a journal, magazine or website wants to see a proposal first, fair enough. They don’t have to know you already have the piece done. Worst-case scenario they accept your proposal but want you to take a different tack… and you still have a great finished draft to work off of.

Now let’s talk about your dissertation.

You’re getting tangled in the weeds. You set out with a single, simple mission and end up doing major rewrites. The reality is you’re putting the cart before the horse. If you’re still working through the major arguments of a chapter, it’s way too early to be line editing. If you change your argument, you’ll have to re-write the whole damn thing anyway, right? Never mind the fact that fabulous writing won’t save a lousy argument. You’re wasting your time by doing things in the wrong order.

What’s worse, you know you’re doing this, but you can’t stop yourself.

Again, know that you’re not alone. We all have our own idiosyncrasies and strange writing rituals, most of which slow us down rather than speed us up. My personal pitfall for a very long time was having to fix every single problem identified by Microsoft Word spell check. And I’m not a very good speller, so my screen gets filled up with little red dots underlining words an awful lot. Not to mention how often I use proper names or purposely write an incomplete sentence. I work in advertising after all, it doesn’t always have to be perfect English.

So right there in the middle of a great thought or idea, attacking the keys, I would stop short and correct the little mistake. Or correct Word that the mistake was in fact not a mistake. And then I would try to get back on the roll and remember where I was going with my thoughts. It wasted time and my writing suffered.

For a long time I fought this by getting really fast at making those red dotted lines disappear. It made the interruptions shorter, but they still came with the same regularity. Finally, I got very hard on myself. I began to admonish myself for stopping mid-stream to correct tiny errors that I could fix later during rewrites. I got mad at myself. I told myself I was an idiot. I got to the point where I was able to shame myself into continuing without fixing the misspelling because, I told myself, I was cheating myself out of a great sentence or thought if I stopped. Eventually it worked.

Doesn’t sound like telling yourself you’re an idiot is going to work for you. So I propose a system of rewards and punishments. For instance you get to screw around on the social network of your choice for half an hour if you complete your task on time and in order. But you have to unsubscribe from 3 friends if you don’t. Perhaps a bad example, but you get the picture.

Find something you care about and tie it to your writing. And stick with it. I wouldn’t recommend this for everyone, but given your commitment to color-coded calendars, I’m confident you can create and follow through on a system of rewards and punishments like that.

Hopefully this at least gets you taking care of the trees. Now for the forest. The dissertation deadline itself.

Since there’s no real deadline you need to come up with one on your own. Come up with a date. But think it through. Don’t give yourself until when you think you should be done. Give yourself until when you know you can get it done, and take into consideration the fact that you have a life outside of writing this dissertation.

I know there are a lot of jokes about 8-year grad students. A good friend of mine was one. He endured the jokes. Today he’s happily employed as a professor, and publishing like a madman.

So again, this is your deadline. Use your study buddy, mentors, friends, fellow grad students and professors you’re working with to help figure out the date. Use your parents. But come up with a deadline you can meet.

Now, how to meet it.

I’m tempted to say the same punishment-reward system might work, albeit a radical version. Say giving a trusted friend or relative 5 grand. If you meet your deadline, you get it back and buy something you’ve always wanted. (For me this would be a hot tub, and yes, I choose 5 grand because I’ve been led to believe 5 grand is about what it would take to get into a decent hot tub, installation and electric included). But if you miss your deadline, your trusted friend or relative donates the money to a non-profit. Maybe even one you really disagree with if you need the extra incentive of funding a group doing work you’re opposed to.

Or you choose a place you’ve always wanted to visit. As soon as you finish your dissertation you get to go there. But you can’t set foot there until you do. You get the idea. Choose something big, something scary, something life-changing.

Does that sound like it might work? If you got excited reading it, great. Try it.

If not, perhaps some other readers out there have some ideas. Anyone?

But if my idea, or any others that might fill the comment section, don’t resonate, let’s acknowledge this is an online advice column without a back and forth, back and forth and dedicated follow up, follow up. And follow up is probably what you need. More and better accountability.

Your study buddy is not enough. You should consider enlisting some paid professional help. Someone who specializes in helping their clients meet deadlines. I know there are life coaches that specialize in that, I suspect therapists as well. Either way, someone who has helped clients who are deadline-averse meet deadlines is not only going to have really good ideas, tailored to your personality and working style. They’ll also stick with you and make sure you finish.

Is it going to cost money? Hell yes it will. And it will be worth it. Because not only is getting this done on time worth paying for, actually paying someone to help you meet your deadline will make you more likely to meet your deadline. It sounds counter-intuitive, you’re paying them after all. But once you form a relationship with this person based on finishing your dissertation on time you won’t want to let them down. You might even feel worse disappointing them by not finishing than you feel letting yourself down. After all, if their business is helping people with deadlines, and you don’t finish on time (despite working with this person for months or even years), you end up hurting their business.

So, give it a think. Feel free to follow up with questions, thoughts, arguments, or counter ideas. Or just take some of these and run. But do let me know what you decide to do.

Archives are so lovely, quiet, sacred, ordered… so many things I cherish. But if I go that path will my art get abandoned, or stagnate? Will I regret not getting an MFA? If I get an MFA will I just feel super stressed and freaked out about participating in the rat race of the “art world” and trying to get a faculty job? Help! -Anonymous

First off, I have no idea how one becomes an archivist. But you know who would? An archivist. Why don’t you contact a few collections specialists and find out how they came to their jobs. Go far, go wide. Contact someone at a University, at a museum, at the Library of Congress, at a corporation. I’ve been to the Coke archives. Did you know they used to make Coke gum back in the 1900? They did. And an intact pack is work like 5k. They had a few of them.

But I digress. You seem to be going in a lot of directions at once, but if read between the lines and try to listen to what you really want, it’s archives. Lovely, quiet, sacred, ordered. While art can be any or all of those things, the art world is none of them.

So go, figure out how to be around the things you cherish and make sure subsequent generations can enjoy them too.

Assuming you go down that path, your art might be abandoned. Or stagnate.

But that’s okay. I’m not much a believer in making art for making art’s sake. If you need to make art, if it compels you, awesome. You will make art. But if you feel your art stagnating, don’t fight it. Let it fall by the wayside for awhile. You aren’t going to lose your capacity for coming up with ideas nor lose the skills to bring those ideas to life.

I hate to hear artists complain that they can’t make art because they can’t get inspired then force themselves to make art anyway. Bad idea! Great art doesn’t come from forcing yourself to make art because you think you have to make art because you tell everyone you’re an artist.

I’ve been on a kind of hiatus from making art for a few years. A project here and there, but no major shows. That’s okay. I’ve been doing my version of archiving. Inspiration hit recently. I’m doing a new project. This, you’ll either be happy or frightened to know, is part of it. I’m certain the world isn’t hurting for lack of the uninspired shows I didn’t bother making in the interim because I wasn’t inspired. And I didn’t lose my touch from a few years of stagnation. If anything I’m coming back to the table with a wealth of new talents, insights and experiences.

Which is to say becoming an archivist might make your art flourish. Maybe it’ll inspire you in new directions. Maybe you’ll need to do something not so lovely, loud, profane and chaotic after a long day archiving. Maybe that’s what the art world needs.

As far as regretting not getting your MFA, if after going to a special grad school with a library science type program and then going to work as an archivist you still want to get your MFA, it won’t be too late. Art MFA programs are full of older folks. And if teaching is more your eventual art goal as opposed to being the next Jeff Koons, having been an archivist with a library science degree will make it that much easier to get hired.

How does this all sit with you? Does it resonate? If so, great. Good luck. Go archive.

If not, scrap all that. Apply for MFAs and join the rat race!

You’re asking some great questions, so I’ll ask a few in return.

Is being a professor still all you want to do? If not, start praying on a new career path now.

But if it’s still your life calling, don’t let statistics and one year of searching sway you. Stay on the market until you get a tenure track job. Hopefully that takes less than 3 years, but you’re still young and tenure lasts a long time. Don’t give up. If it takes 10 years, so be it. It’s not like your dream is to host the Today show. Yours is attainable.

In the meantime, what is it about being a professor that you love, teaching or the research and publishing?

If it’s teaching, start teaching. Teach a few adjunct classes in Portland. Or create an experimental course or mini-school at a place like YU or at a facility appropriate to your field. Perhaps you could offer to teach a once a week class to a charter high school. Or see if that guy who quit Stanford to start an online university needs a course in your field. Or try something similar. These things won’t hurt your search. They might even make you more attractive. And you can still work paying job on the side if you need to. Especially since you might need to offer to teach for cheap or free to get started.

If research and publishing are where your passion lies, start writing articles and submitting them to journals. Or better yet try and sell a book to an academic press. Or go in the other direction and publish an academic Zine or start an online journal. If money is an issue, perhaps the first step is blanketing fellowship and grant applications far and wide. Point is a new piece in a journal, or even the news that you’re piece is being considered lets next year’s potential employers know the train has left the station, it’s just a matter of if they want it to stop at their town.

Ultimately, being a professor is about sharing wisdom. While the security of a tenure track job maximizes your ability to do so, it’s far from the only way to do what fulfills you. So don’t wait, start sharing.

As far as the eventuality that you get a job outside of Portland, most professors get the summer off. Which, it so happens, is the nicest time of year to spend a few months here in Oregon.