Special Feature: “Interviewing with a Creative-Writing Program about How I Can Increase Their Profit Margins” by Heather Lanier

Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: We’re just a month or so away from the unofficial beginning of the academic-job-search season, when colleges and universities will post positions that start in fall 2023. Having participated in the gauntlet of the “market” (the term makes me think of customers examining tomatoes on a Saturday morning farmers market), I was fascinated when I read Heather Lanier’s masterful microessay, “Interviewing with a Creative-Writing Program about How I Can Increase Their Profit Margins.” Like most applicants, I have my own horror stories from my time looking for academic teaching jobs (one is below!), but Lanier helped me see the experience from a different perspective. I asked her a few questions about her motivations, which follow the essay itself.

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Interviewing with a Creative-Writing Program

about How I Can Increase Their Profit Margins

The eight-story buildings here in DC stand like giant children’s blocks, plopped on the letter and number streets as though our nation’s capital were in love with preschool. Which it isn’t. On the buildings are the names of the giant dot orgs that mail us financial solicitations filled with the gift of return-address stickers. Words like conservation and education are suitcases stuffed with nouns: Arctic wolves and No. 2 pencils.

Do you want to know, Search Committee, what nouns I stuffed into my carry-on luggage to come here? An entire mug of chamomile tea, for calming purposes, and a book about Jesus. The tea scalded the pages of the book, and the book I won’t talk about because Jesus was confiscated by climate deniers. You’re asking me to make you more money. You’re asking for growth, although the globe never grows, stays the same spherical rock, looks like a blue pinprick of light from a spacecraft at the edge of the solar system. You want to know how the internet age can solve our isolation. You inquire about how I can facilitate the cartography of people’s hearts using only email. You want me to teach art in an office building and market it as fame. 

I have reservations about viability. For the first ten weeks of my pregnancies, I called each of my kids a “test run,” tucked into some fold in my womb, statistically likely to hit eject and bleed out like parachuters with reverse motivation. Go into the darkness, I tell my students. Dive into the abyss. But the truth is my syllabi can’t guarantee a rip cord. You have to save yourself.

On the flight here, the stewardess asked for verbal confirmation that I was able and willing to help in the event of an emergency. I nodded and envisioned taking the hands of people as, one by one, they leaped out the door. But everybody knows most people like those exit seats for the legroom. We want what we want.

I want, Search Committee, your strangest dreams to play on the TVs of the Greek restaurant we’ll later visit for lunch. I want the waitress to say, “Not everything we have here is good.” I want her to lean in and say, “I can declare nothing about the hummus that won’t become a sales pitch for the hummus. Instead, I will feed you, and you will pay what it costs.” On the flat-screen TV, your mothers will spoon-feed your baby selves the petals of irises, of tiger lilies, of flowers that year after year rebloom without anyone fertilizing them.

Q & A about the Essay

I feel like anyone who’s participated in the academic job market ends up with unusual stories about interviews—mine involves a Megabus fire on my way to the MLA conference. In this microessay, though, you use surrealism to approach the subject. I’d love to hear more about how that came about.

Ugh, a Megabus fire—God bless you. The academic job market is indeed surreal. (It would probably make terribly great reality TV.) While it’s obvious that this interview takes place in DC, it’s not obvious that it occurred in 2016. Actually, the first interview for this particular job happened the morning after the 2016 election. I went to sleep at 4 a.m. horrified like half the country, and by 10 a.m., I had to wear a blazer in front of my laptop camera and pretend the world was sensible and I was a competent contributor to it. When I was brought to DC weeks later for a campus visit, rafters and barricades were erected around the future site of the inauguration. It all felt unthinkable. I didn’t polish and submit this piece until recently, but I wrote the first scrappy draft immediately after that second interview. Surrealism was one of the first choices my subconscious made, and the political context probably had a lot to do with it.

One key motif here is altruism, the giving of one’s self. What made you interested in having that concept prominent in a piece about an academic job interview?

Hmm, I think because art is about the giving of one’s self. When I make art, I try to commune with something greater than myself, and then offer the results to the world. I didn’t come across Lewis Hyde’s The Gift or Makoto Fujimura’s Art and Faith until years after the interview, but I was—and continue to be—deeply troubled by the expectation that art needs to be commoditized in order to be of value. And that was an expectation I heard in this particular interview.

Why is this piece a microessay, rather than something longer? What about that genre seemed right for this content?

My first instinct is to say that I’m not sure the academic job market is a subject that can sustain a longer form. But why not? Like you said, any of us who’s done time “on the market” has an arsenal of absurdist stories. Maybe there’s space for a whole memoir—or better, an anthology—about the academic job market. I think the combination of surrealism and nonfiction, though, dictated that this piece stay short. If I were writing an actual argument against commoditizing art, I could get lengthy. But I didn’t want to write an argument. I wanted to overthrow capitalist expectations of art with art itself. And brevity seemed right for that intent.

Does answering these questions cause flashbacks about being interviewed? 😄

Hah! No, the beloved editors at The Cincinnati Review could never be mistaken for a profit-driven search committee in a windowless room!

Heather Lanier is the author of the memoir Raising a Rare Girl (Penguin, 2020), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her third poetry chapbook, Erasing the Book of Pregnancy, is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press. She teaches creative writing at Rowan University, and her TED talk has been viewed over two million times.