Juggling Flaming Chain Saws

Challenges of work-life balance in the academy stem from policies and practices which remain from the time when highereducation was populated mostly by married White male faculty. Those faculty were successful in their academic workbecause they depended upon the support of their wives to manage many of the not-work aspects of their lives. Imagine atweedy middle-aged white man coming home from the university to greet his wife and children and eat the dinner she's prepared for him and then disappearing into hisstudy for the rest of the evening with his pipe to write and think great thoughts. If that professor ever existed he is now emeritus.Juggling Flaming Chainsaws is the first book in a new series with Information Age Publishing on these challenges of managing academic work and not-work. It uses themethodology of autoethnography to introduce the work-life issues faced by scholars in educational leadership. While the experiences of scholars in this volume areechoed across other fields in higher education educational leadership is unique because of its emphasis on preparing people for leadership roles within higher educationand for preK-12 schools. Authors include people at different places on their career and life course trajectory people who are partnered and single gay and straight withchildren and without caring for elders and managing illness. They hail from different geographic areas of the nation different ethnic backgrounds and different types ofinstitutions. What all have in common is commitment to engaging with this topic to reflecting deeply upon their own experience and to sharing that experience with therest of us.