Elizabeth Bales Frank
Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit, edited by Sonny Brewer
Jobs have been much on everyone’s mind this year – losing them, finding them, wishing some would be created, while wishing others would succumb to a quiet unlamented death. Lots of us, for better or worse, have had the opportunity to meditate on the difference between making a good living and making a good life and just in time to help us along these meditations comes a collection of essays called "Don't Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit."
He has compiled a book that is “a picture of work in America. Untold sums of people have worked at all the jobs these writers have. And here were the best storytellers in the country giving voice to the dynamics of that work, of trading their time to get coffee and rent and keep a car going.”
These are all Southern writers, and the South has a tradition of storytelling. Wanting to be a writer, writing, becoming a writer -- all these stages of development in a writer’s life are too often regarded as elitist, fancy-pants ambitions and I think the word “Southern” throws a dose of humility into the presentation. Because humility is here aplenty. John Grisham's is the biggest name (other well-known ones are Rick Bragg, Pat Conroy, Winston Groom and Connie May Fowler) and he is the only one to have left behind what is considered a “profession” to become a full-time writer.
Others in the collection served as a high school guidance counselor, a mail carrier, a telemarketer. Many of the jobs are tedious and difficult, but all are recounted with respect. Some jobs involved daily encounters with dung, danger and death: A factory worker is made high and sick by the fumes of the lacquer into which he dips boat paddle oars all through the night shift. A railroad lineman picks bodies of dead animals off the tracks. A Seaman First Class steams across the Pacific towards Vietnam. A pulpwooder wades through the cottonmouth-laden debris left behind by a bulldozer to salvage the remains because “To leave the pulpwood piled on the land would be like burning money on the ground.” Even though, Rick Bragg adds, “I had never met a pulpwooder who had all his fingers and his toes.”
Carpenter Barb Johnson also lost a piece of a finger. But that was perhaps the least of her losses.
"Then Hurricane Katrina ate my carpentry shop and everything in it,” she writes in her piece “For the Good Lies,” “and I got a new story, that's for sure. That new story was almost about how I threw myself into rebuilding my business, working ceaselessly to regain the ground I'd lost. It eventually became clear that would be impossible. So it didn't happen in an instant. Not like you see in the movies, where ta-da! someone has an instantaneous transformation. It was a long, slow, wave goodbye. Letting go of the idea of something is much more difficult than letting go of the thing itself. But once I had cleared out the notion that I was always going to be a carpenter, the new story was perfectly obvious to me. I threw myself into writing ...”
Housewife and mother Janis Owens also threw herself into writing: “From '83 till '96, I wrote at least four hours a day, and sometimes round the clock, if the plot was cooking and [her young daughters] otherwise occupied. My college typewriter had died a natural death and I had no means to replace it, and for the first few years wrote in long hand, on yellow legal pads, from the first page to the cardboard, then flipped it and wrote on the back.”
So unassuming (“from the first page to the cardboard”) and quiet is Owens that throughout her long apprenticeship to the craft, no one in her modest, small-town life understands or cares that she is writing. On the long-awaited day when she finally is able to tell a neighbor that she sold her book, her neighbor’s reply is “You mean, like, at a garage sale?”
Similar to this is Tim Gautreaux’s account of his “short stint as an AM radio announcer on a little south Louisiana 500 watt station back in the mid-1960s.” The loneliness of the “dead stop” Sunday afternoons gnaws at him. For the sake of someone to talk to, he offers a free Beatles album, a gift certificate to a local café, and finally the cash in his own wallet to “the next caller.” No one ever calls.
But, as he writes as the conclusion of his piece “When Nobody Listens,” that job prepared him for the reality of his true calling, the “revising and revising, mailing a story dozens of times, figuring out the art of writing, making what I wanted to say into what people consented to hear, and failing again and again. But I was used to that. Being ignored was like announcing on small-town radio, and I never gave up, because I’d realized on a Sunday afternoon a long time ago that failure is not a problem. Not trying is.”
Agreed.
Treat yourselves to these stories. They are gems of gratitude. They are testimonies to resilience. And as for the difference between making a good living and making a good life, they overwhelming favor life.
Labels: day jobs, Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me, writing
posted by Elizabeth at
10:39 AM
1 Comments:
The most famous resignation I know, also by a Southern writer, was the time Faulkner quit his job in the post office of a small Southern college to write full-time, even though he wasn't yet an established writer and had no income.
When somebody asked him why he'd given up his job, he answered: "I'll be damned if I'll be at the beck and call of any sonufabitch who can afford a two-cent stamp."
I think of that often.
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