Author Notes: Jenna Jarvis

Jenna Jarvis, Puritan authorJenna Jarvis published her poem, “Entry #1: syndical not synecdochal,” in The Puritan Issue 27. In the following post, she writes about her experience as a striking academic that led to the writing of her poem.I wish my writing life weren’t so motivated by rage. I wish I could let go of that boxer mentality, that champion-of-the-college, champion-of-the-self thing.When I entered the Thomas Morton contest, I was glowering down my first fall spent outside of school. My ego needed assessing and subsequent bolstering. I used to be a graduate student at Carleton University, before personal circumstances and well-meaning regulations forced me to withdraw. I want to prove that I was the best English-lit dropout since Margaret Atwood, I sneered to myself, by winning The Puritan’s prize and Atwood’s own admiration. I am not very particular or subtle about choosing my battles.As a graduate student, I worked as a teaching assistant. As one does. I took my job as a teaching assistant mostly seriously. I completed two training certificates for teaching assistants. An entourage of my students accompanied me to a reception for a poetry contest that I had won. I fucked up on grading once, but this happened in the aftermath of a literal train wreck. I might have spent some of my SSHRC funding on a shrink, but, at that point, I wasn’t accustomed to spending money on myself. Poor habits die hard. I was 22 and I was outearning my parents, as well as some of my professors.I took my union participation seriously, too. I might have deferred entering grad school and waited for a term that wasn’t designated a bargaining year, but I needed that SSHRC money, or I’d have been stuck without health insurance and struggling to find work to pay off a minuscule student loan from undergrad. I admit that part of me—the part that thought “syndical not synecdochal” was my hill to die on—hoped that there would be a strike so that I could sort out the train wreck feelings and catch up on my coursework while being righteously angry about something besides my circumstances.Around the time when the employer and our union’s negotiating team were duking it out in the lead up to the strike deadline, I found myself jammed into an elevator with a bunch of business students and the contract instructor whose courses I’d taken in first and fourth year. He, by the by, helped introduce me to Atwood’s oeuvre. He was wearing a Beau’s Brewery scarf, which, inexplicably, but for its red colour and indie sensibility, delighted me. For once in my damn life, I wrote a poem that began with something heartwarming (and, well, neckwarming). I didn’t turn the scarf into a gallows knot for the tyrants of the university—and, inevitably, for myself.On my way to a library paper-writing session—or maybe it was to a union meeting, I’m not sure—I was stopped by a fellow whom I recognized as a poli sci major. (Sometimes, I wish there were a moratorium on white guys majoring in political science.) When our campus’s student-worker show of solidarity had found itself locked out of the President’s office, he rammed a bullhorn against my ear to chant about the workers united never being defeated. Evidently, he didn’t recognize me, because he thrust a flyer at me and invited me “to help prevent a strike.” In response, I made female presence and sexual joking even louder in “syndical not synecdochal.” I was really grappling with the prospect that this dude’s band of manarchists were more visible than the union’s caucuses for LGBTQ+ members and for members who identify as female.In Carleton’s case, the university admins indicated that they would rather listen to their undergraduate students (so, the people whom the university treats like paying customers) than their TA, CI, and safety/security workers (that is, the people whom they treat like expendables). Undergraduate students might pay a lot of money to attend university, but those who struggle most with paying tuition seem to be rather strongly (if respectfully) on the workers’ side. Accordingly, the most radical things that overzealous undergrads might do would be to deploy strategic phone calls and/or emails to their President; to bring Tim Hortons coffees in winning Roll Up the Rim to Win cups to workers on the picket line; and, to a certain degree, to let the workers fight their own fight and win it for themselves.I don’t know if the labour disputes in Toronto fall under the purview of my own fight, regardless of my registration status. When the teaching assistants’ unit of Carleton’s contract workers’ union voted on whether or not we would ratify a new agreement with the employer—a tentative agreement that bore many similarities with the one that drove teaching assistants at the University of Toronto to strike—another TA pointed out that the contract instructors had won their health and dental benefits. I was being paid to read and talk about Milton. I voted against ratification, but I trusted that I would be in the minority. I was right, and we did not strike.I continue to write “we” in reference to this union of precarious university employees in part for writing clarity, and in part because I have a lot to teach my union siblings. For instance, I think that universities will stop eating their offspring only once the horses upend the cart without scorching their own ass-hairs; that is, once we let go of the toxic insistence that contract-teaching PhDs—in the synecdochal sense—in any discipline are inherently more valuable than other low-income workers. It’s not very closet-Marxist to reify knowledge in suggesting that a doctorate should entitle its holder to a cushy job, nor is it politely academic-Marxist to avoid exposing this sort of tacit pro-neoliberal argument.By the same token, I admit that my poem has risked appropriating the voice of those industrial workers to whom the labour movement owes its existence. It was the security workers alone who rejected the university’s initial offer and who, in a first for any special constables unit in Ontario, went on strike at Carleton. Meanwhile, I upbraid myself for committing to memory the time that a picketer told a pair of female students that they would be sexually assaulted on the unprotected campus if they crossed the picket line. I don’t trust that middle-class collegiate guys will not attempt to rape me, but I don’t need anyone to hold this Damocles threat over my head. All the same, after passing in the academy—I mean, class-wise—ha—I mean, social-class-wise—I don’t trust that my perception of non-academic workers is accurate.Andrew Robinson’s account of his scant working conditions—and by extension, students’ learning conditions—at Carleton University spurred me to, at long last, reflect critically about my own poetry. The last time I appeared in The Puritan’s pages, I wrote about a car accident. A picketer was hit by a car during the safety workers’ strike at Carleton. She remained on the line with her colleagues. I would do well to try the same—that is, to strive for resilience and tenderness, even when this effort exhausts me.(Many thanks to Morgan Rooney for his expert editorial advice on this piece.)Jenna Jarvis lives in Ottawa. Her poetry has appeared in such publications as In/Words, Bywords, and Keep This Bag Away From Children. Jenna received the John Newlove Award from Bywords in 2012; her chapbook The Tiger with the Crooked Mouth was released to commemorate this win in October 2013.