Interview with Alex Kudera, author of Fight for Your Long Day

I have known Alex Kudera since 1996 when he and I met in the café of Borders Bookstore in Center City, Philadelphia. A couple years later, Alex and I worked together as adjuncts at Temple University and at Drexel University. Alex has now written a novel, the just-published Fight for Your Long Day, and it is a bracing, painful, and sometimes funny look at the life of an adjunct college teacher in the early 2000’s.

Although Alex currently teaches full-time at Clemson University in South Carolina, he is quick to note that working full-time does not mean tenure. I recently interviewed him about Fight for Your Long Day, published by Atticus Books.

Below are some of the excerpts.

Robert Anthony Watts: What was your inspiration for Fight for Your Long Day?

Alex Kudera: My life as a nomad educator for ten years was the primary inspiration for Fight for Your Long Day. I began teaching in graduate school and found that I loved it, so I was eager to continue afterwards. But also, I saw people around me who were much older, fighting through a hodgepodge of bizarre commutes — for example, Temple U. morning classes followed by a Penn State, Abington class in the afternoon and capped off by a night class in Drexel University’s evening college.

I never planned on being an adjunct for the rest of my life. But what began as a temporary stage became a permanent rut and also a way to earn a living, even if it meant working six or seven days most weeks. The past few years, I have been fortunate to be working full-time, though it is on the basis of one-year contracts. There were so many frustrating and fascinating aspects of working as an adjunct that I was driven to write the novel.

Robert Anthony Watts: There is a distinctive, energetic voice to Fight for Your Long Day.  It’s written in the present tense, and it’s funny and descriptive. Can you speak to that?

Alex Kudera: I’m happy to hear you say that the book has energy. The first draft shot out of me in one summer in Seoul, South Korea. Maybe that frantic energy of the first draft fed its way into the book. I was trying to keep Cyrus moving on his long day. He is after all an adjunct teaching at several different schools, and rushing from campus to campus is not at all uncommon for teachers in Cyrus’s situation.

Robert Anthony Watts: Can we also read Fight for Your Long Day as a book about education in America?

Alex Kudera: Yes, absolutely. The novel certainly concerns education in America in general, and these issues were central to my childhood dinner conversation. My father’s first career was as a high school math teacher. My mother just retired a few years ago after from teaching middle and high school math for close to forty years in public schools.

So I was raised with the usual slogans about the importance of education, equality, etc., and seeing 40 to 60 year old women and men stumbling around Philadelphia in a mad effort to survive by grading as many freshmen essays as possible (or teaching other introductory classes) certainly opened my eyes. Although I knew middle-aged adjuncts in my childhood, it wasn’t until I began sharing offices with these people that I began to tune into how much work is required and how little protection is granted to the workers.

It seemed unfair and baffling to me that these adjuncts could slump over the desk in the middle of a lecture and have no way of paying for hospital bills. The overuse of adjuncts in undergraduate classes contradicted all that we were taught in school — that if you completed your education, you would be rewarded with middle-class American security.

Robert Anthony Watts: I appreciated how race conscious Cyrus Duffleman is throughout the book. So many white writers, it seems, to me, either pretend to ignore race or they create fictional worlds in which there is a distinct mention when a non-white character appears. The downside is that they end up making “white” the default position. White is “normal” and unspoken. But brother Cyrus notices everyone’s ethnicity.

Alex Kudera: A lot of popular novels just ignore race entirely although some of the more successful novels in recent years are “ethnic” immigrant stories. But yeah, Cyrus is hyper-aware of race, and he is scared of black teens and yet perhaps his closest friend — if he has one — is Wawa Ed, a middle-aged African American panhandler. He also has a lot of anxiety about his whiteness and his “Jewish percentage” too. It seemed impossible to write about Philadelphia without addressing race is some way, and it was also important to his working day because Cyrus teaches at multiple colleges with vastly different student populations. It has always seemed strange to me how utterly silent some white liberals are about race. To me, ignoring race is not the same as not being racist.

A reviewer on a website alleged that Cyrus is racist, but I think that’s unfair and superficial. Cyrus drifts in and away from uncomfortable racist thoughts to extremely conscientious and understanding views of race and difference in general. I think Cyrus’s anxieties about race are honest, realistic, and human. It’s, true, though, that at times Cyrus’s racial anxiety or the use of race in describing major and minor characters is greatly exaggerated. Including a lot of race also seemed important to understand the general hysteria and paranoia and absurdity of our lives during the “war on terror”; to an extent, these absurdities still dominate our times.

Robert Anthony Watts: You, if not Cyrus, grew up in University City, an extremely diverse community where the University of Pennsylvania is located. How did growing up in such a polyglot community affect your sensibility?

Alex Kudera: I think that’s the key to the whole thing — growing up on the periphery or outer edge of University City, which is just west of the University of Pennsylvania. On the edge, we had an academic elite and vibrant and multicultural middle and affluent classes on one side and working-class blacks with the destitute and forgotten mixed in on the other side. The ambiguous area between these polarities has even more texture and diversity now, but the polarity could be even more extreme if one looks at housing prices closer to the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University.

In my childhood, living on the periphery meant that in two minutes I could walk from a fully tenured professor’s house to a crack house. This kind of “normal” seems perplexing to me — and worth writing about.

Robert Anthony Watts: Who are some of your literary influences?

Alex Kudera: In the beginning of my life as a writer, as a recent college grad in the early nineties, “big” writers like Melville, Pynchon, Nabokov, and Rushdie were on my mind. I had a strong feeling that it had to be comic, weird, and at times difficult to understand for it to be writing that mattered.

For this novel in particular though, another big influence, I suppose, was Mickelsson’s Ghosts, a novel by John Gardner. It’s a novel set around academia in New York state, and reading it slowly one spring in the early 2000s helped me see that I could write a novel about academia, though from the bottom up, from the view of an adjunct teacher. I’d never read an academic novel told from the perspective of a pay-per-course worker at an American University.

Robert Anthony Watts: How did your experience as an adjunct instructor shape the writing of the book?

Alex Kudera: The book is fiction, and in its extreme emphasis on what can go wrong in an adjunct’s day, the book is not a replicate of any one person’s life, certainly not my own. Nevertheless, the book can be seen as a sum of my personal experiences although there is absolutely nothing in the book that actually happened to me in the exact way that the book describes it. And I’m not Cyrus and never have been although I began the book in 2004 and have found myself close in age to the main character right when I finally got it published. Again, for a novel to get published, it has to be engaging. You need a lot of conflict, a ton of tension, to keep a reader engaged. I love subtle novels where very little actually “happens,” but I have no idea of how anyone ever gets these accepted for publication.

An extremely realistic aspect of the book is that so many college instructors can’t visit the doctor if they are sick without risking a huge bill. Cyrus Duffleman has “catastrophic” health coverage, which means he can only get treatment in an emergency. He has to have colon cancer to be insured. (The colonoscopy would be out of his pocket!) I’m still somewhat hopeful that Obama’s healthcare plan will help adjuncts and the millions of other contract workers in America. We will see.

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