From part-time to full-time to my time.

It wasn't until I attained my advanced degree that I learned that English professors like me are truly the proverbial "dime a dozen."

I was just a baby, in my very early 20s, straight out of grad school when I received my first paycheck for adjunct work. Yep, it was just loose change. I had worked in metro areas that often paid less than $2,000 a course. I remember those days so clearly, where I worked all the different corners of the city. One day was especially significant: As I left the subway turnstile, I noticed that I was in the right place with the right books at the right time--but on the wrong day.

Back then not only was my workday chaotic, but artistically I was totally ungrounded. I was bouncing between poetry and playwriting and fiction, while navigating though all the courses I was teaching.

Part-time?

Anyone who writes will tell you that there's no such thing as a part-time writer. Even if you write as little as 15 minutes a day, those words have been worked out from the other 23 hours and 45 minutes.

Edward Albee suggested to writers that if you have to keep a job, make sure that it doesn't use your mind. I wonder how my teaching six sections of English 101 in one term figured into his suggestion.

Though I embraced each school I was at and tried to get into its culture, I soon learned that whether I felt like a temp or not, I was to be treated like one.