When it rains

Well, it’s not really raining, much less pouring, but there is a definite sprinkle over my head in the scholarly realm. I came home from San Diego to a letter from the MLA telling me that they are going to publish an article I wrote for the new collection Approaches to Teaching Claire de Duras’s Ourika. The editors of the volume had accepted the article long ago, but you never can tell with the muckety mucks in the publishing arm of the MLA, so I wasn’t counting on it. I’ve now signed a contract, which says that they will pay me a one-time honorarium of $50, plus 50% of the net proceeds of the sale of the article. Given that the article is likely 1 out of 15 essays in an anthology that only libraries will purchase, that will probably add up to a whole lot of nothing. Still, though, $50! Whoever heard of earning money for scholarly writing? For publication credit, for tenure dossiers, sure, but… moulah? I’m astonished.

But I’m pleased too that the article will see daylight. It grew out of a course I developed and taught at F&M, and writing the essay was the last scholarly thing I did as a tenure-track professor, in that crazy month of May 06 when we decided to move to California.