On Monday February 6, 2023 Andy and I announced we will be retiring, me as of the end of the Fall 2023 semester and Andy as of the end of the Spring 2024 semester, from UW-Eau Claire, and then moving to live, upon retirement, in San Diego, California as of the start of August 2024.
These are two monumental, milestone changes in our lives and therefore I am going to share a series of successive posts further comments about this decision and our plans.
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Andy and I are extremely grateful to have got to know and to share and collaborate closely with a vast number of amazing and wonderful people here in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, throughout the time since we first moved here in 1997. We are extremely grateful to have become actively involved with so many vital organizations on campus and in the larger Eau Claire/Chippewa Valley Communtiy, including many where we have been able to participate in initiating the work of these organizations and to take on leadership roles. Eau Claire will always be part of us; we will always treasure our time in Eau Claire. Everyone who has been such a huge part of our lives and done so much with and for us, during our years in Eau Claire, will always be a part of us and we will always treasure you as well.
So much about Eau Claire we will never forget, and always remember with great fondness. Long walks all over and about Eau Claire. Favorite restaurants in Eau Claire for lunch, dinner, and snacks. Coffee houses in Eau Claire. The places we regularly shop weekly in Eau Claire for groceries and routine household supplies. Running in and runs about Eau Claire. The Chippewa Valley Trail. Phoenix Park. Carson Park. Lowe’s Creek Park. People who have helped us with repairs and renovations at our house. Pharmacies and pharmacists. Our next door neighbors Emily and Greg, and Mary and Dan. Places we visited and stopped, in the course of long walks, for ice cream. Festivals in Eau Claire. The Pablo Center. Fitness centers Andy in particular has worked out at regularly.
A big shout out to organizations that have been central to our lives and meant the world to us. The Unitarian Universalist Congregation. WHYS Community Radio. The Eau Claire Progressive Film Festival. The LGBTQ Community Center. The Chippewa Valley ACLU. United Faculty and Academic Staff of UW-Eau Claire. Progressive Students Association/Progressive Students and Alumni. The National Alliance on Mental Illness. And so many more.
A big shout out as well to Mayo Clinic Health Systems Eau Claire, and so many exceptionally dedicated, caring, talented, and helpful doctors, nurses, and other medical staff, that we have counted on and needed. And to Visionary Eye Center and Maple Ridge Dental. And to the places where we have regular gone for massage therapy treatment, from Body Focus to La Belle Vita to Da Vinci, and beyond. Oakwood Hills Animal Hospital. Paws and Claws.
I am sure I am forgetting or neglecting indelible contributors to the quality and enrichment of our life-experience, here in Eau Claire and the Chippewa Valley, but I will have time, we will have time, to make sure we don’t forget to pay tribute to many more yet to come. We will never forget.
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Here's my announcement to administrators of our plans on the morning of Monday 6 February 2023.
Dear UW-Eau Claire Administrative Friends and Colleagues,
I am writing to announce, officially, that my husband, Andy Swanson, in Mathematics, and I, in English, will be retiring, me as of the end of the Fall 2023 semester and Andy as of the end of the Spring 2024 semester. We are ready to begin the official process of taking care of all of what needs to be done in the course of so doing.
Upon our retirement we will be moving, as of the start of August 2024, to live in San Diego, California. We have long sought to live in a large, major city, upon retirement, and after years of careful investigation and reflection we have determined that San Diego has everything we are seeking–and more. We plan to be active, engaged, and contributing members of multiple communities, in San Diego, even as we also plan to take life more easily and not lead as highly structured lives as we have led throughout our careers working as university faculty members.
Even though I will be retiring, and moving across country, I will always be interested in and care about UW-Eau Claire. I am tremendously grateful for the opportunity I have enjoyed to work here, since 1997, and especially to teach so many wonderful classes and amazing students. I know Andy feels the same as me. We thank colleagues across the university, in our departments and beyond, for showing us so much welcome, support, kindness, collegiality, solidarity, and friendship throughout these years.
I have been teaching and working as a university level faculty member since the spring semester of 1985. It has been a fantastic life. I have loved it. It has been my passion, and indeed my calling. But it is time. Throughout more than thirty years I have dealt with seriously disabling chronic illness, and even though I have met that challenge, the cumulative effects are real. These have been compounded by my recently developing lupus, as of August 2022; even though the treatment is going well and I am confident that I will win this fight, such that my lupus will be in complete remission in two to three years, this has a significant impact upon me, and us, as well.
Andy and I will be in touch with the UW-Eau Claire Foundation soon concerning a prospective major donation we would like to make to UW-Eau Claire. We are happy to do this. We appreciate this institution and everyone who is and has been a part of making it the best that it is and has been.
Sincerely yours,
Bob Nowlan, Professor, English, UW-Eau Claire
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Here's my announcement of our decision and plans to friends and colleagues in the UW-Eau Claire Department of English Monday evening 6 February 2023.
Dear Friends and Colleagues, English Department,
I am sharing with you my announcement of my husband, Andy Swanson’s, and my retirement, me as of the end of the Fall 2023 semester and Andy as of the end of the Spring 2024 semester, and that we will be moving in the summer of 2024 to live in San Diego upon retirement.
I will add a few comments, in addition to what I write to administrators. I am grateful to be one of you and to have been one of you since 1997. I thank all of you for being the colleagues, friends, and great people you are. I appreciate you–and I appreciate the many colleagues of mine who have retired or otherwise moved on elsewhere over the years since I came here.
Andy and I have been talking about and aiming to live in a large, major city upon retirement since before we were married (in 2000). We have wanted a city that will challenge us, and provide us ample opportunity, incentive, and indeed provocation to continue to learn and grow. San Diego offers all of that for us.
We don’t yet maintain many ‘connections’ in San Diego, but we are starting to make them. We have each identified multiple organizations and activities we plan to explore, where we will be meeting and interacting with many other people.
We will buy a house in San Diego this summer. We are already working with realtors. During a recent trip, this past winter break, we identified many houses that would suit us, in many areas that would suit us, that we can readily afford.
Once I retire and upon living in San Diego, no, I do not want to teach at any college and university. I have loved teaching, and I will have taught classes for close to 40 years running, but I am ready not to face the significant structuring constraints or heavy burden of responsibility and duty of care that teaching requires. I expect instead to be more involved in community organizations and activities, especially of the kinds I have not been readily able to pursue as a full-time university faculty member, and as someone living with seriously disabling chronic illness.
We think San Diego is a fine city and we like it a lot. But we are well aware San Diego faces its share of major problems. I aim to find ways to help out, as I can, in contributing to addressing some of these problems. Homelessness is the most prominent major issue in San Diego at present, and I have been studying ways in which I can help out in working toward reducing and ending homelessness in the city and the region. I expect I will volunteer to help out in several areas where I can offer something of use. For me this will be a return full circle. My commitment to social justice organizing and activism precedes my aspiration to be a professor.
I expect to continue to write. I am working on a prospective multi-volume series of books, _21st Century British TV Crime Drama: a Critical Guide_. And I may expand beyond British TV crime drama after one to two more volumes in that series to write about TV crime dramas from other countries and regions. I will also transition from doing a weekly music show on community radio to doing a regular music podcast.
Doctors here at Mayo Clinic Health Systems Eau Claire are fully supportive of this move, and in fact believe it will prove helpful to my health and well-being. They assure me that I can readily make a seamless transition from coverage here to coverage by a comparable provider in San Diego. If anything, they would like me to retire and move sooner 🙂
Finally, I welcome staying in touch with any and all who would like to do so. If and when you are in San Diego, feel free to contact us, and we will be happy to meet you for breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee, snacks, drinks, or to walk about, talk, and catch up; we will be happy as well to pay for your meal or refreshments.
All best regards,
Bob Nowlan
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Two more points. I will take the first in this comment and the second in the next.
We have been talking about and planning this decision and especially where we will live upon retirement for quite some time. As Andy affirms, in talking about this just yesterday, we have talked and planned _a lot_. Not only have we been discussing seriously, since before we married, back in 2000, our intent to move to live in a large, major city, upon retirement, and persistently so ever since, but we zeroed in on San Diego approximately a year ago as our choice. When we visited San Diego for ten days over the past winter break this was to confirm our decision and to continue to advance our plans as well as to learn steadily more about San Diego. I have been subscribing to a host of digital publications and reports that I receive daily, from and about San Diego, throughout this time as well as investigating and making contact with numerous sources of information and perspective about San Diego, life in San Diego, and opportunities in San Diego, throughout this past year. We have learned and been learning a great deal. We expect to learn a tremendous amount more. In fact we expect our entire first year living in San Diego will be principally all about exploration, discovery, and learning. But, in sum, we have been highly ‘intentional’ in this decision and in this plan.
I wish we could have shared about what we planned sooner, but we needed to be absolutely certain before we did, and the timing had to be right. We have worked hard to insure we could afford what we plan and to put everything in place so we could. I consulted with Human Resources about the best moment to announce and share our decision and our plans, before doing so. We have been determined to do this right. Yes, I hinted about our plans, extensively on Facebook in particular, but I also felt we needed to hold off on being explicit until the right moment was at hand. It was hard to ‘keep a secret’ like this; that’s not easy for someone like me. But I am pleased the right moment to share is now.
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Second, my last extended comment on our decision of when to retire and our plans upon retirement for the present moment is as follows.
Andy and I are making this decision and planning our future as we are for largely positive reasons, and we feel happy about where we are at and where we are headed. We are, indeed, incredibly excited. We don’t have regrets. However, yes, certainly this decision, especially the timing, has much to do with the fact that the job of a full-time faculty member, in English at UW-Eau Claire, at the present time, has become too much for me, at the same time as I live with the cumulative effects of long-term seriously disabling chronic illness that has been greatly compounded over the past six months.
Even before the pandemic, and even before I sought out and secured external grant funding for two years’ scholarly leave, I recognized the job had become too much for me, and it was time to plan and prepare for this soon to end. In my part memoir, _Ian Curtis, Joy Division, and Critical Theory_, I am doing everything I possibly can to try to help others understand and appreciate what life is like, living long-term with seriously disabling, albeit largely non-visibly disabling, chronic illnesses, cumulative effects of chronic illnesses, and compounding chronic illness, as well as with long-term and persistent major mental health complications and challenges. I have been striving for a good number of years now to make doing so a major focus of my life-practice, not for me and my benefit alone, but rather for all those in positions like me. This is and has been far from an easy life. So much people who are not chronically ill or seriously disabled take for granted I cannot and do not. So much people not in my position are able to experience and pursue in their lives, relatively easily, I cannot and do not. And I haven’t been able to do so, throughout my time in Eau Claire. I spent far too long denying and hiding how severe the shaping impact has been, from myself as much as everyone else. It has been liberating to stop doing so, and to refuse ever to do so again.
As the years here in Eau Claire have proceeded I have needed to draw back steadily further, from more and more, simply so I could continue to do the best I possibly could as a teacher and otherwise by and for my students. For many years now, regular semesters in which I work full-time mean the vast amount of my time and energy is devoted simply in two directions: teaching and working with students, one, and attending to and taking care of my health, two. Very little more is available, is left over, including for institutional, community, and professional service; certainly not for sustained research, scholarship, and creative activity; and certainly not for much if any leisure and recreational activity, including attending events, performances, presentations, exhibitions, games, and so on, right here, in Eau Claire and the Chippewa Valley. This kind of life is unsustainable, long-term.
During my two years’ scholarly leave I recognized I have a lot of value to share, in writing–and otherwise, beyond just teaching and attending to and taking care of my health. In my book _Ian Curtis, Joy Division, and Critical Theory_ I am doing work with not only Ian Curtis and Joy Division, but also with popular music, that no one else has ever done anything at all like, previously and otherwise. And my story, my memoir, I think will be of interest and value to others. I hoped to finish writing this book before returning full-time last fall semester. I came close, but did not. Since then I have recognized it will be hard for me to finish this writing as long as I am working full-time, but I am totally committed to doing so before we move to San Diego.
Likewise, with _21st Century British TV Crime Drama: a Critical Guide_ I am making sense of TV crime drama in ways no one else has ever done, or come close to doing. My approach is a critical criminological, zemiological, Marxist, abolitionist, and anti-racist/Black Lives Matter synthesis. I think this work will be of interest and value to many, and I am determined to get this out there, to share it with others.
I hope, and Andy and I hope, that we will be able to lead long, active, engaged lives yet ahead, in San Diego. I hope that I have at least one-third of my life still ahead of me. If I am fortunate this will be the case. But I know, and we know, that given my health history that is far from guaranteed, and that we need to be prepared for the prospect it will not turn out to be so. We need to think and plan carefully about what we want to do, together, in the time we yet have. We are and have been doing precisely that.
At the end of this past week, the first week of the Spring 2023 semester, by Friday, I felt more tired than I can ever remember at the end of the first week of a semester, by far. And it had been an exceedingly good week. Great students and great classes. Then what did I do, of necessity, this past weekend? I spent the bulk of my time and energy preparing for this week’s classes and attending and responding to student concerns. Little time to rest and recover. That’s what I always do. It takes a lot out of me–even before the point in the semester is at hand when I need to respond to and evaluate a vast amount of student work, in the form of papers, projects, and more besides. It is exhausting. It is immensely valuable work, it is an extraordinary honor to be able to do it, I love and have loved doing it, but the time does arrive when it is necessary to stop. That time has arrived.
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In conclusion, Andy and I are happy and we are excited. We are feeling good. No need to feel at all sorry or sad for us. As I wrote and shared here last week I am pleased to be retiring ‘at the top of my game'. We have each done everything we have wanted to do at UW-Eau Claire and in Eau Claire, and as university faculty members. We are ready for our next life ahead, which we relish taking on and experiencing for all it will bring. We expect San Diego will be a fantastic place to live.
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Andy and I thank everyone for your many lovely responses so far to our announcement of our upcoming retirement and plans to move and live in San Diego. We appreciate being appreciated 🙂
It is rewarding to know we have made a difference and left an impact, for the good. Neither Andy nor I ever assume this, or take it all for granted; if anything we are more likely not to imagine that we have made such a difference and left such an impact. So thank you!
Throughout this process I have been reminded yet again what a great partnership, and great team, Andy and I represent, how well we compliment and support and enable each other. Andy is most happy for me to take the lead in announcing, describing, and explaining our retirement and plans to move and live in San Diego, and lots of other things like this, as I have, because that kind of thing I do well. But I consult Andy closely in the process, and Andy as always is most helpful. I have been concerned to make sure people won't feel that we are in any way saddened by our impending retirement, let alone our impending move to San Diego, and won't feel sad, or sorry, for us on this account. Because we are not sad at all! We are happy. We are excited and eager and ready. We have had a long time to come to terms with and accept this decision and our future plans with equanimity. Andy assures me that people won't feel that way, they won't imagine we are retiring primarily because ‘we have to do so' ‘on account of my health', and insofar as they express ‘care' for us, in response to this announcement, it is simply in recognition that these are major life changes and that ‘care' is entirely appropriate as a response to the same. I really don't want anyone to feel at all sad, or sorry, for us. I recognize I cannot prevent people from feeling sad because they will miss us, and miss what we have contributed, but don't feel sad _for us_. Feel happy for us. We are happy. Tired, but happy. And we know life post-retirement, and in San Diego, is almost certain to be reinvigorating and rejuvenating, in numerous ways. I can't wait to be much more persistently and diversely physically active, every day, outdoors, and I know Aidan will love walking about San Diego, as well as what an exceedingly dog-friendly and dog-inclusive city San Diego is; I have never come across a city that comes close to matching San Diego in this respect. Andy is excited about so many prospects as well.
Thank you all again, most sincerely.
Bob Nowlan