"What do you do with a BA in English?"

Well, make that a BA in Literature and that little puppet is singing my song (Avenue Q, guys - Google it!)  With the news that I passed the big, bad comprehensive exam I was bitching about a month ago, I'm suddenly realizing that my graduation in December is looming very close.  For the past two years, after declaring my major, I've been willfully ignorant of the odd looks I get when I happily claim I am majoring in Literature and that, no, I'm not 100% sure what I want to be when I "grow up."  


But now, the impracticality of my degree is weighing somewhat heavily.  What does one do with a knowledge of Virgil to Woolf, Marxist criticism, and the proper way to format a paper according to MLA guidelines?  The most obvious answer would be to teach, though my days of wanting to school insolent teenagers on comma splices has passed.  The next obvious would be to continue education, go to grad school, work my way towards a doctorate, and teach hungover college students.  Again, the prospect of even more higher education right now is quite unappetizing.  

I feel like my years of scoffing at Philosophy students and frequent remarks of "the only thing you can do with a degree in philosophy is teach philosophy" are coming back to bite me in the ass.  I love literature - getting intimate with the classics, tearing apart the modernists, making historical connections.  But right now, at 23, the idea of teaching it makes me want to gouge my eyes out.  

My dream is to own a book store - something that does not require a degree.  The scary decrease in purchase of physical books in favor of digital copies puts a damper on that, as does the economy, which is currently unfriendly to small business.  Never mind the lack of start-up money, we're ignoring that right now.  My dream stays safe and warm in my back pocket.


A very appealing option to me is editing and publishing.  There are a couple major downsides.  The first being the fact that you need a few years editing/publishing experience under your belt, which you cannot receive if all the openings require said experience.  It is a vicious cycle.  So, chances are you must start at the very bottom, reading castoff manuscripts in between fetching someone's coffee.  The second downside is that Asheville, though a lovely little up-and-comer, is not the home to any great publishing houses and I do not fancy moving to a larger city.  There are options here, but my love is fiction and the appeal of arts and crafts publishing is minimal, though not nonexistent.  


So, for now, I think I'm going to ignore the future and work under the assumption that, with pretty little degree in hand, in two months everything will come together and I shall live happily ever after.  Naive?  You betcha.  Comforting?  Totally.