Contingent: We Keep On

Part III: November 17, Fall 2025

By November, our house had turned “shabby-chic,” a euphemism I tried to sell my younger son, who looked at the house like it was naked as we pulled in the driveway. Our horse chestnut was no longer there to distract from our home’s imperfections. Our 1851 house had been scraped of the peeling paint that hung off in sheets. From any distance, spots of wood siding stood out against cream paint meant to protect from the elements. Our house leans to the right, slowly slinks into its foundation. I told my teenage son that come spring, a fresh coat of cream paint with purple and green trim will restore its youthful glow, at least on the surface.

Our family has lived here for twelve years. My husband and I have been married eighteen, since the year I started teaching. We’re both in our forties, one of the hardest decades of life, says the social media “story” my father shared with me last week, reminding me to buckle up for the decade.

The Pottery Barn quilt we received for our wedding has long earned its holes; the handle has suddenly separated from our microwave; our refrigerator grunts and groans, struggles to hold all the food required for two teenage boys; the furnace hums over our evening television. I plead for not everything to go at once. Security comes from many places—the body, the home we’ve made for our family, a bank account, a sense of self-worth. A dependable reality.

Weeks ago, I had a desperate, though not the only, conversation with my creative writing students about AI use in the classroom. This semester, more frequently than the past couple years, I’ve noticed tell-tale phrasing, vague storytelling, and grammatical perfection. Stories unlike the wonderfully strange, clumsy, strong drafts I’d read from earlier students. Maybe in hindsight, I romanticize them. Suspicious stories resemble each other in tone with quaint particulars, satisfy the rubric exactly, hang together in a formulaic set of paragraphs that march on algorithmically, feature lines with tidy epiphanies. The towns in these stories have the names Silver Glen, Willowbrook, and Briar Meadow. I didn’t make those up—AI did. Students can “humanize” stories in specific voices. ChatGPT disrupts the writing process, replaces critical thinking when humans need to think critically more than ever, when we’ve stopped looking each other in the eye.

When approached, some students quietly accepted my offer to write new pieces themselves (no questions asked), but not all, and I’ve graded (alleged!) AI submissions for what they were, ultimately realizing I couldn’t be sure anymore, what’s real in this space.

“Please don’t give up your voices,” I begged my students. “I don’t want perfection. I want you to give me the mess.” Give me run-ons and comma splices and a character resembling the woman who drove your school bus.

I never thought I’d wish for a poorly-punctuated sentence.

This has made my decision to leave teaching easier. There were several reasons I taught for eighteen years without a living wage, but the real reason: the creative writing classroom had always been a sacred space to me.

As therapy, I cleared books from the shelves in my campus office and added them to the English department’s free book table. I emptied my files of readings and prompts from their particle-board drawers and plunked them into recycling bins.

No more fresh faces each fall and spring. Days no longer bookended by colleagues I’ve taught alongside for years. Students and I will no longer rearrange the desks in our classroom from lecture seating to discussion circles.

Also: I will not have that little paycheck every two weeks. But. I will not have that paycheck every two weeks.

Or that “Cadillac healthcare,” as my dad calls it. Last week, my MRI showed demyelination after years of stable scans. I rushed to schedule the follow-up MRI before my healthcare discontinued.

Who am I now? I wondered in my office before class. I held my breath in the anticlimax of transition, clients scheduled for the first month, and then worry worry worry, a compulsive family tradition that spiraled with thoughts from, What if I no longer can contribute what little I had for so many years? to, What if art is outsourced to machines? And then the small bit of the world I knew blew apart in my mind. To smithereens.

Get a grip. I tried, and failed, to box breathe. I kept running out of breath.

Probably hours later, what freed me: I’ll no longer give this bulk of my time and energy to a campus where I grew complacent and complicit in uncomfortable security. Where I convinced myself to be grateful for opportunities instead of pay when there was no path forward. Where I felt like I was playing pretend, but didn’t register it was for pretend. Dressing up in adult clothing. Professor Lite. (I was never really a professor, just a lecturer, though even that has an asterisk.) There are departments full of adjuncts with their own reasons for staying. Or leaving.

“You can always come back,” colleagues have said. I won’t. Never in that position.

“What do we say now when our friends ask what you do?” my oldest son has asked.

You’re a writer and editor, I told my impatient self. You’ll help writers who’ve toiled over stories they’re compelled to tell, who tell stories as a way to keep on. You will help people work toward humanity when a draft feels unrealized, unwieldy, or off-course.

This past week, I read from my collection of short stories, The Grand Scheme of Things, for The Writers Forum at my alma-mater. I was grateful for the colleagues who joined us, the live-streamed audience, the friends that were there, and the students, especially, who read the stories and asked thoughtful questions. It was bittersweet, like most things are at this age.

At the reading, I read “The Wash,” a story inspired by true events about a mother whose son was (allegedly!) drowned (“murdered”) by a dog in the Erie Canal in 1936. Idaho the Dog was put on trial and regularly sat in the courtroom. I wrote the story when I was a new mother, to explore a parent’s worst fear, how that’s complicated when justice is impossible. I’d never read the story aloud before, and as I practiced reading it that morning on my couch, I fucking cried, feeling a hard, fuzzy pull in my heart that I think of now as letting go.

In my backyard last week, I wrestled the husks of tomato plants from their cages, lamented the unharvested hard bubbles gathered in the soil.

I scooped the dog piles before the snow fell—a chore I long depended on for satisfaction with its clear sense of achievement.

Everything is a metaphor and not everything is a metaphor. We keep on through the shabby-chic.