Just One Thing with Carol Quinn

Carol Quinn’s story “Cogs, Heart and Soul” examines a disruptive period at a university and the teachers tasked with keeping the status quo. Here, she shares just one thing about the piece:

I taught first-year writing at a very large public university for almost a decade; Spring 2020 was my last semester. Teaching my final class over Zoom, carefully angling my laptop on my knees to hide the fact that I was sitting on a bed, was not how I’d hoped to end that phase of my career. “Cogs, Heart and Soul” started as a way for me to explore that loss, to try to capture the rhythm of a time when every day brought fresh blows, and to offer a loving tribute to the wonderfully quirky community of contingent faculty, who work so hard even as so much crumbles around them.