This post is about another resolution, one I made some thirty-three years ago, at a real turning point in my life. My older son was six and the younger one just toddling around the coffee table. This would have been the cusp of 1986. My husband and I had been out of graduate school for a couple of years-he'd finished a Ph.D. in psychology, and I'd completed an MA in English/Creative Writing. We were in the thick of things, and the dream I'd nurtured for most of my adult life-publishing a book of short stories and then a novel, teaching creative writing at the college level-seemed entirely out of reach.
Newly ensconced in Ames, Iowa, both of us were teaching semester to semester at Iowa State University. Noses to the grindstone, we were paying our dues and eking out a monthly payment on school loans. Foremost in our minds were our responsibilities to others: first family then students. Lots of students. I was teaching four classes of composition and professional writing a semester, and every spare moment went to grading an endless round of papers. Other people's writing always took precedence over mine. Something had to give.
