It's an very odd coincidence. The first day of my retirement will be the twenty-fifth anniversary of the elimination of the Department of Textiles and Consumer Economics at the University of Maryland. The TXCE department was my home for my first sixteen years of my career at Maryland, first as an instructor on a one-year contract, then as a graduate student, and then as permanent faculty. My last year of the department was as acting department chair, or as I think of it, captain of the Titanic. My duties for the first half of the year were to try to convince a very fractured and contentious faculty to try to preserve some part of our programs. Having failed that, my job for the second half was to negotiate new placements for my sixteen colleagues and myself, and develop a plan for making sure all of our 500 undergraduate majors and 60 graduate students would finish their degrees. As I mentioned in one of my Story-a-Day posts, I have nursed a fantasy of turning the saga into a murder mystery.

What I did write, at the time, was a newsletter article for a professional organization setting out my thoughts on the process and the question of "surviving" departmental reorganization. I found it while cleaning out my office, and thought I would share, in case anyone out there is facing a similar situation. The advice has aged pretty well. Here it is, in PDF form.

As I explained in an earlier post, part of my retirement plan is "more writing, fewer citations". Participating in the Story A Day in May challenge was part of that plan. Despite the bad timing -- spanning the last weeks of my last semester before retiring -- I somehow managed to post something every day for thirty-one days. (To see the entire collection, click here.) What am I taking away from the experience?

• It helped me experiment with strategies for capturing and recording my writing, especially when I am on the go.
• It helped me establish a daily writing habit again. Getting words on paper no matter what is crucial. I am pretty good at doing this for academic articles and books, but needed to develop an approach that was more free-form, less goal-driven, and less linear.
• It helped me discover my imagination again. I had no idea, at the beginning, what kind of stories I would write. As it turns out, I have a bit of an inner H.H. Munro or Rod Serling -- a penchant for mysterious endings and creepy plot twists.
• I wrestled with many of the prompts, but also used them as often as I could. I also used my own old journals (over 50 years worth) and a tarot deck.
• I got more comfortable with dialog, and am now looking for ways to get better at creating voices for different characters.

What will June bring? July and beyond? More writing, and also editing. Lots of editing. (Yes, I saw all the typos.)