My first MFA was in poetry, and it was very much part of a professional trajectory leading to life as a professor. But in my second and third years at Harvard, I realized I didn't want an academic life.
I think history is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.
The academy is an incredibly sheltered world, and I do think it's important for writers to get out from under that shelter, at least for a while, to see what the world looks like from outside it.
Writing the novel felt so private to me! I think publishing a novel is quite public and exposing, and what's a little frightening to me right now is the fact that it feels so entirely opposed to the privacy that is writing.