Book Two: The Life of the Writer is Not Just About Writing

The contract from Harvard University Press got me a job at the University of Northern British Columbia, and when the book appeared a couple of years later it got me promoted to Associate Professor and then tenured.  By then I was hard at work on book two, which would be a comparative history of interpersonal violence in Canada and the U.S.

My idea was to compare Ontario and Michigan.  My wife's idea was that we would be spending our summers in Portland.  So when I wrote a grant for the Canadian government explaining why my comparative history would be based in the Pacific Northwest, I wanted to write: "because that's what my wife wants."  But I had to come up with a more scholarly rationale.  Academics are not supposed to have spouses or other responsibilities beyond the life of the mind.

Anyway, I was never that happy with the book, and it wasn't very well received.  I found some really detailed and intense accounts of assaults in the British Columbia Archives and Records Center in Victoria and scattered in the regional archives of Washington, including a harrowing and disgusting account of incest in rural British Columbia.  I remember spending day after day slogging through arrest records in Portland from the early twentieth century to establish that black men were fined about twice as much as white men for assault and battery.

I think the main problem was that I was in a hurry.  Academia is about production.  Even at a small university like UNBC, status derived from turning out scholarship.  I was on a schedule.  I had a three-year grant and research assistants.  Once the book appeared, I would duly be promoted to full Professor and get a raise.  Very few people were likely to read the book whether nor not it was mediocre, good, or excellent.  I wasn't sure that most readers would know the difference.  I wasn't sure that I knew the difference, truth be told.  I think the book would have been better if I had just let it sit for a couple of years and then came back to it with fresh eyes.  But that option was never on the table.

The prospect of spending many more long days at archives to keep writing books that very few people would read and that I wasn't too excited about led me to leave my tenured job to return to Portland.  It would be a better place for us to raise our son.  My plan was to move out of the mainstream of academia where, as the son of a commercial fisherman, I had always felt like an imposter,and to write for a broader audience.  It didn't quite turn out that way.