Finding Time, Making Space

Balancing the Work and Writing Life

The last few weeks have been wildly busy for me with work. Not Writing Work, but Work-Work–the one that pays my bills. I recently accepted a full-time role, with benefits, and the relief I feel is immense. Part of what has allowed me to exist in a freelance/contractor/writer space the last decade, is the Affordable Care Act. Unfortunately, the Current Administration has stripped back so much funding, my premium quadrupled in January. I’m not alone in this, my situation is not as dire as it is for millions of others. But still, it has impacted me and required a big life adjustment.

Over the years I’ve acquired a lot of different skills–admin, marketing, PR, copywriting, teaching, event planning, community engagement, etc. This is not because I can’t decide on a career, but because I had enough SFT (Shitty Full-Time) experiences that, for my mental and emotional health, I had to seriously prioritize where and who I could work for over salary. So, I ended up with a magpie kind of work life.

Finding work as an artist AND as a human, is very real right now. As someone who never regretted being an English Lit major, with two additional arts degrees, I have spent most of my adult life splitting Writing Work from Work-Work. The truth of it is that some of us metabolize the world differently, and have a, perhaps, egotistical need to reshape things and present them again to others as entertainment or insight. And, that is not only okay, it’s something that makes my life a lot more expansive and interesting. (I’m excited for this new book by Mason Currey, Making Art and Making a Living, which is all about exactly this quandary)

I work with a few art students, and I sense a rising panic with the choice to pursue an arts path. The familiar push-pull between making time for their art and figuring out how to survive is very real. It doesn’t help that we are experiencing the crumbling of liberal arts institutions in real time, and the forever debate still rages of a “useful degree” vs. a “non-useful” degree (whatever that means). My advice is always the same: find something you don’t totally hate that can support you, and make time for your art and community in a different space. However, protect that space (which we also call time) fiercely.

Writing is hard. Finding time to write is hard. Finding community is hard.

When I swap “finding” for “making,” that helps move the needle in a positive direction. It’s more fun to make something than find something (says the woman who just spent 10 minutes wandering around her cluttered apartment muttering “Where the hell are my glasses?” emphasis on the plural b/c I naively assumed buying more glasses would make them easier to find. It turns out glasses are excellent at finding one another and making community and disappearing in pairs).

Despite my Work-Work, Writing-Work imbalance this month, I made time for writing, just not my own. Tomorrow, I wrap up my first travel writing class at VisArts. Until a week before it started, I was nervous no one would sign-up. Coming up with an idea for a class and casting it out in the wide world of a course catalog with literally hundreds of other options, feels a lot like being one little book in a vast library. Will anyone find me or my ideas interesting?

As I gathered essays and short pieces and prompts to share, I felt a nervous pit in my stomach. I fretted that I hadn’t prepared enough, that there would be some dead air as the class stared at me wondering if I had ever left my own house, let alone the country.

Preparing for a class, especially one that people are taking of their own volition, not a requirement, feels like throwing a party. You prep and preen and put out a lovely spread of readings to share, and then for the terrifying 10 minutes before anyone arrives, you second guess everything you have ever read, and fear no one will show at all. Teaching has so many of the same vulnerabilities, highs and lows, as writing.

Reader, seven people found me! Six of whom had never taken a class at VisArts before. As everyone shared insights from essays and what resonated for them, I felt found. A little community that I made if only for four weeks. “Thank you for finding this class,” I kept saying.

Everyone in the class had Work-Work lives, a few were recently retired, but they all were looking for ways to come back to writing. Shepherding people who have not written for years is kind of a spiritual practice–finding the way to the page, making time, being in community.

---

Other Writerly Things:

Speaking of vast catalogs of writing classes, my friend April Sopkin is teaching some really cool ones this summer that focus on generating writing and/or building community at VisArts and at Quarry

Looking for more Literary events in Richmond? Here you go! RVA Literary Arts