Post-Tenure Life, Entry 1 – The Joy of Reading and Writing for PURE FUN AGAIN

Growing up, I loved writing fiction. My Portuguese teacher encouraged my creativity and celebrated the way I thought outside the box. A few times, she even invited me to read my short stories to the entire class—something I felt both proud of and slightly embarrassed by. I remember one particular story vividly: I was upset with that same teacher, so I wrote a tale about a vampire schoolteacher who tormented students… and who (spoiler alert) ultimately met her end with a fork driven through her tongue. Not exactly subtle, right?

But that’s what writing allowed me to do—even back then. It gave me a safe outlet to explore disruption, defiance, and dark humor. I’ve always been drawn to the idea of pushing boundaries, challenging expectations, and imagining alternate worlds. Writing fiction—especially horror and speculative fiction—let me do all of that on my own terms. It was joyful, freeing, and deeply satisfying.

Then came academia.

As a sociologist, I found myself reading and writing fiction less and less. Reading became something I did for efficiency: reading quickly, reading strategically, reading to cite. And writing? It became about formatting, structure, and meeting the expectations of peer-reviewed journals. I wasn’t bending genre anymore—I was bending myself to fit submission guidelines. Imagination was still there, but it was often channeled into crafting theoretical frameworks or analyzing data. Valuable work, yes. But it didn’t leave much space for creative mischief.

Being on the tenure-track only intensified this. So much of the focus was on “deliverables”—what counts toward tenure. Which article got accepted. Which grant got funded. It’s a pressure cooker, and for a while, it sapped the pleasure out of reading and writing.

But something has shifted.

Now that I’ve received tenure, I’ve found myself returning to the kinds of stories that once thrilled me. I’m writing fiction again, especially horror stories that embrace the strange, the eerie, and the deeply human. And bedtime? It’s no longer for catching up on academic reading. It’s my time to devour books that just fascinate me—accounts of alien abductions, encounters with serial killers, demonology texts, explorations of non-Christian religions. I don’t read these because they “count.” I read them because they grip me.

The joy of reading and writing is slowly reemerging. And not for productivity. Not for citation. Just for me. Just for fun.

And that feels like a small kind of liberation.