My family and I are renting a house in Maine for the week. It’s a cottage that sits on the property of a working farm. On the first morning of our visit, we met Shep, the border collie who lives at the farmhouse and on most days moves the sheep from one paddock to another. The farmers told us that on the days he doesn’t get to herd the sheep, the dog can be a handful. He’s just a year old, and has a puppy’s silliness mixed with an adult’s sense of purpose.

We discovered both traits on the morning of our first day here. Shep showed up at the door of the cottage with a stick in his mouth, his intension clear. The kids threw the stick over and over again, then swapped it out for the Wiffle ball they’d brought, the one they’d covered in electrical tape so that it would go farther. Shep chased it and chased it. Our own beloved dog died about a month ago, and so I knew how much the kids needed to shower this eager dog with attention. When we walked down to the pond for a swim, he came along, carrying the mangled ball in his mouth. The kids jumped into the pond and so did Shep. They swam the 100 feet to the dock and so did Shep, the breath whistling through his nose as he paddled. At the dock, the kids climbed up, and so did Shep, with some help. He shook himself, then he barked at the kids, gave them a little scolding that only intensified when they jumped back into the water. He jumped in after them and swam around them in a circle, herding them back to the dock.

My husband and I looked at each other. “Is it okay that he’s out here?” Larry asked. “He’s not going to drown, is he?”

I didn’t have an answer. It seemed okay, and the kids were calling to him, helping him onto the dock, laughing when he jumped in with them. Laughing as he barked at them.

This went on for two hours. Shep mostly ignored the adults and dutifully herded the kids back to the dock again and again. When I rubbed his snout, he would lick my face, but then spin around to check on the kids. He seemed maniacally focused and yet happy. Even at the end of the day, when he was standing sodden on the dock, visibly quaking with cold, he wouldn’t stop doing the job he had assigned himself. Maybe he couldn’t. Larry and I found this behavior funny, endearing and a little unsettling. I wanted to tell the dog to take a break. These kids know how to swim. They’ll be okay.

And here is where I turn that sweet dog into a forced metaphor about how I’m taking a break from teaching this fall. When I told my Memoir in Progress class last week, one student asked what I’d be doing instead. One asked if I was burned out. No, I said. Not burned out. Not at all.

Almost all working writers also teach. We do it because we love our students. We worry about them and about their stories, their book projects, and their ambitions. This work can be so engaging and so meaningful that we forget to make time for anything else. But for me at least, after a number of days have gone by when I didn’t get to do my own writing, I can be a handful.

Instructors should allow themselves to take a term off now and then, if possible. Our students will be okay. They know how fragile that balance is between doing the writing and doing all the other tasks we set ourselves.

At the end of this month my Memoir in Progress students will each hand me 20 pages of their work to read and comment on.

“Then you’ll really worry about us,” said one.

“No. Miss you,” I said. Until January, I’ll miss you.

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