Quamvis

Thanks for the responses. To answer the point about difficulty writing-- I have taken steps to remedy that, making myself write (or expand old papers) in my leisure time to practice, and have been reworking parts of my thesis into an article to submit to a journal. Perhaps, however, I should be more realistic about what getting a B at all says about me-- although in reality much of that was due to plain out laze/procrastination + the inevitable grad school depression/burnout. The main reason I feel so invested in going on for a PhD is that I have put in so many hours at this point with the languages, as well as the fact that in undergrad I was told I could get into a very good PhD program straight out of undergrad, but then due to family circumstances which led to my depression and the PhD application deadline passing I ended up at Arizona for two years instead. I enjoy high school teaching, but in no way can it be as rewarding as teaching on the university level (not that the job market makes getting a job at the university that realistic of a shot for many people).

Hi all,
I ended up doing a terminal masters (philology) at Arizona rather than going straight into a PhD program from undergrad, despite the fact that I had enough credits to do the latter (various stressors came up my senior year of undergrad which resulted in me not meeting PhD deadlines and I was encouraged to just apply for the MA so I wouldn't go outside the field too long), and I am now teaching Latin on the secondary level in New York. Does anyone know, barring recommenders dying or something, whether time off from grad school, as long as it is spent teaching and reading on one's own (I am making my way through the whole Harvard reading list while off, and my eventual goal is to read all of classical pagan poetry in the original and before I die the whole corpus-- lofty, I know!) is detrimental to getting back into academia between the MA and PhD? Also, more embarrassingly, due to unwisely taking on a way heavier load than I was prepared for at Arizona (I took four classes and TA'ed or taught almost every semester, including the one I was writing my thesis) I made two B's solely due to papers being slightly shorter than they should have been-- my recommenders all know I am very well-grounded in the languages, but I do struggle time to time with cranking out large amounts of academic prose under overloaded conditions-- does that destroy my chances almost everywhere? Me pudet hoc fateri, but, as I said, I unwisely took on a lot, but I nonetheless have made myself read very large amounts of both Greek and Latin (Aeneid straight through eight or nine times, all of Lucan, all of the Metamorphoses, all of the Odyssey, most of Statius, most of the elegiac corpus, + all the stuff on AZ's reading list). I am also editing my thesis to try to publish it so my name is out there.
Thanks for your thoughts/help!