My Tenure Tattoo

I wanted to mark it in a significant way, not just let it happen and move on to the next task.

Hi Friends,

The day I got tenure my dad went to the ER with pain and shortness of breath and was diagnosed with acute leukemia. A little over a month later, I took a day away from the hospital, where I was spending almost all my time, to get my first tattoo.

Here are some notes on all of this that kept circling my mind on walks or in the shower.

---

“What did they give you when you got tenure?” Dad asked. We were walking the halls of the cancer ward again. He expected a plaque, I suppose, or a medal, maybe a little Oscar-style statue in full academic regalia.

“Oh, nothing tangible,” I said. “But I get to, uh, update my email signature.”

I knew there wouldn’t be anything tangible. And I knew I wanted to mark the change myself somehow.

In the past few years, two major milestones had passed almost unmarked. I’d turned 40 in high Covid in a place I’d just moved with no close friends nearby. My first poetry collection was published with unsatisfying attempts at Zoom launch cheer.

“You know, you don’t need tenure to get a tattoo,” my friend Austen said when I showed them Instagram pictures of an artist I liked.

“I know,” I said. “It’s not that. It’s more that I’ve been working toward this goal for so long. I want to mark it in a significant way, not just let it happen and move on to the next task.”

Why was this important? As is clear to anyone with a passing connection to academia, especially in the arts/humanities, tenure is increasingly rare. It feels like a big fucking deal because it is.

But also, a lot had to go right and a lot had to go wrong to get me to this particular point.

I spent seven years completing a Ph.D., during which I had multiple miscarriages and then my first child. I spent another three years doing a post-doc, during which my second child was born, and I taught during the day and cared for toddler and baby alone many evenings and most weekends while my husband waited tables up the street. During the last years of the Ph.D. and throughout the post-doc, I applied to literally hundreds of jobs.

I applied for jobs in literature and creative writing and composition at big universities, community colleges, and small liberal arts colleges all over the US and beyond. For years.

In the final year of my post-doc, I got a single job offer from Marlboro, a tiny liberal arts college in Vermont. This job was tenure track, but ultimately turned out to be more like “the weirdest post-doc ever,” (as I put it to a colleague) as the college went from financial crisis to merger negotiations (now is as good a time as any to say that I’m working on a book about this truly wild experience).

In the end, I flew to UBC to interview for my current job in February 2020, received the job offer the day lockdowns went into place in Vermont, and in August, I drove across the US, entered Canada (and two weeks of strict quarantine) and then started teaching.

As cursed as this meandering path has felt at certain moments, what I mostly feel now is gratitude. For the Marlboro colleagues who wrote recommendation letters for me even as they hoped I wouldn’t leave. For

Jillian Hess

, Bridget,

Hannah Doherty Hudson

, and Becky, my PhD writing group friends, who read my job materials on Saturdays and kept me laughing with phone walks when all I could see ahead of me was uncertainty. For all of my students over the years (many of whom are subscribers. Say hi! I miss you!), who reminded me over and over why I loved this work, even when it felt like peak insanity to keep trying to pursue it.

Gratitude was also what I felt when I walked into Wonderland Tattoo (slogan: tattooing your mom since 2014) where Emi Stone inked strawberries and flowers onto my arm in two epic sessions. These two days in August were almost the only time I took “for myself” amidst days of leaving for the hospital at 6:15 am to beat traffic, evenings making soups I desperately hoped would “work” for Dad, whose ability to tolerate food shifted day by day as the leukemia-induced putty-taste that made him want spicy food shifted to chemo-induced mouth sores that made even the acidity of tomatoes unbearable.

I perched in the padded tattoo chair grateful for the lymph, the healthy white blood cells rising up to the surface that allowed my skin to take the needle and the ink. I ate a strawberry in the name of sympathetic magic and texted a picture to a few friends. I talked with the women around me. A tattoo artist was caring for her dad in California who’d had a stroke. A woman getting tulips inked on her arm told me about her father’s medically assisted death after his cancer took a turn. There we were, sad daughters with our pain and our flowers.

In the days that followed, the need to wash and lotion the healing tattoo each morning and evening became an anchor of my own embodiment and need for tending even as so much of my attention was focused on my dad, from obsessive reading of his morning labs to scrutinizing his swollen nodes to charting calorie counts on a whiteboard as his weight dropped.

Now, the half-ripe strawberry peaking down from my sleeve in the lecture hall, the peony shoulder naked in the cold ocean, remind me that I worked very hard and got very lucky (along with somewhat unlucky). They speak to me of sweetness, abundance, beauty. Remind me I can choose to adorn and care for my stretch-marked and aging body as it changes and sometimes grows strange to me. That I’m perishable, like the berries and the flowers. Here now.

In Inciting Joy, Ross Gay writes, “And when we say a plant takes, we really mean it’s going to give” (99).¹ By “takes” he means roots, thrives, digs in. And by “give,” he means flower and fruit and feed us. While uncertainty is always with us, this tenure is a degree of stability I haven’t had before, one that not a lot of people are accorded. I commit to using this rootedness to give. The strawberries are there to remind me of that too.

Yours,

Bronwen

PS: If you liked this post, please hit the heart to let me know! You can also support this newsletter by subscribing, sharing, or commenting.

1. Thanks, Commonplace Book, for helping me find that one when I needed it.