Exercise: Defining The Great Work (I)

Exercise:  Defining The Great Work

In the first exercise in the workbook, I am asked to define:

1. Great work (doing "high impact work in a timely fashion")
2. How close I am to achieving great work (and what might complicate achieving great work)
3. Great life (achieving a moderate level of satisfaction in life in the short and long term)
4. How close I am to achieving great life (and what might complicate achieving great life)
5. What are my biggest concerns as I think about achieving these things?

1.  Great work

I like doing work that creates space for new voices to find full expression within fundamentally closed or restrictive contexts.  

• As an undergraduate teacher of writing, I like working with students to develop their own voice, as writers and (through teaching practical writing classes, like grant writing) to teach the skills that give them the economic security that will enable them to use those voices.   
• As a graduate instructor, I try to create space within the academic community for students to write theses and to have co-curricular experiences that allow them to express the full range of their interests. 
• As a McNair advisor, I value cracking open the life of the university for the new voices of first generation and under-represented students.
• As a grant reviewer, I like advocating for nontraditional artists and outstate (non-metro) artists, ensuring a wide array of voices in the arts.
• I love attending conferences outside the norm, to hear voices outside the norm.  DOCAM, Widening the Circle Conference on Displaced Indigenous Communities, Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric, and so on.
• As a reader of scholarly work, I have always valued the alternative voices -- the independent publishers (like Parlor Press), the independent journals (JAC, Pre/Text), the online journals (Harlot, etc.).  
• As an editor, I value integrating new voices -- graduate students, junior faculty -- into my projects.
• As a writer, I value integrating new voices into disciplinary communities -- integrating very heterogeneous bodies of theory and integrating novel objects of study into disciplinary discourse.

What would it mean to make this goal more explicit in my intellectual work, in the classroom, in my service? 

2.  How close I am to achieving great work (and what might complicate achieving great work)

Each of these projects are integrated, in a certain way, under this broad objective.  But they are dispersed.  They don't cumulate.  Like the way I plated dinners at the nursing home, by placing parsley on every plate, but parsley was not the core of the work, I can find the parsley on the side of each of these projects, but the meat and potatoes is elsewhere...  But I am not there, yet, in a genuine integration.