Catching Up
I’ve had a couple of people ask if I dropped them, accidentally or on purpose, off my Ordinary Time list. In truth there has been very little of the ordinary to my time recently - or I haven’t been sure what the real ordinary is.
The last time I sent out a broadcast email with blog links was after the entry on September 14, "Chiropractic" about my friend Nancy's clinic visit. “ Going Down” (a story which is economic, not erotic, but at least I got your attention) followed, and then “ American Zombie” - a pre-election Halloween story about watching Night of the Living Dead with my Crisis Connection colleagues while passing out candy to future voters: little Spidermen and Hannah Montanas. As I hand them Snickers to keep them satisfied, I wonder if their parents have dental, and if I am liable for root canals.
On my hard drive recently I found an aborted fragment of an Epiphany letter - essentially my version of a story of Maggie’s that gripped me so powerfully I never got beyond it to talk about the rest of the family. I posted that as a blog entry. The next entry is the story I performed for the Spirit in the House festival, “ Two Falling Voices,’ in late February and early March. And then silence.
Not the way to make your fame and fortune blogging.
But creative writing has never been about either for me. Although I certainly wouldn’t mind getting paid for it. Maggie even got me signed up for my first course at the Loft that was actually about trying to sell a piece of writing, though this week we switched to a course on travel writing because the time worked better for her. Still, the essential purpose is insight, not income. There is a process of making myself aware, and then sharing that awareness with others, that is lifegiving. Of recognizing beauty in the texture and complexity of life Of transmuting suffering. One of my friends, Rose Arrowsmith DeCoux, a very talented young storyteller and writer, calls her business Alchemy StoryWorks. There is more than Harry Potter chic to such a moniker. Those of us who know this secret have found the Philosopher’s Stone.
Trust the practice. Trust the creative process. Trust yourself. Then there’s nothing to fear. That mantra, paraphrased from John Daido Loori's The Zen of Creativity, has been my touchstone - my tool for finding gold, if not creating it - for the last two years. Creative writing is something I find I must do, like eating and drinking, or my spirit wastes away. I would say it is like breathing - that would be very Zen - but I am certain I cannot hold my breath as long as I have gone without writing. I could probably not go without water that long either. If I stopped eating as long as I’ve stopped writing… well, I would certainly not be facing that extra twenty pounds on the scale again. This is worth considering.
Storytelling allows me an outlet that does not depend upon connections with publishers. It gives me a audience - not to gratify my vanity so much (though this can be a pleasant side effect) - but to teach me - with an immediacy that the written page cannot - how to shape a piece so that it means something to someone other than me. And blogging allows me to share my writing with you. Right now, that is enough. Because I have found right livelihood through another kind of writing. At least for the time being.
Since the beginning of the year I have been a full time freelance grantwriter - a move I chose with intention in August of 2008, a month before the economy crashed. Great timing, huh.
Most people do not go to school to be grantwriters. I’m no exception. I’m one of Garrison Keillor’s English majors in supersaturated form - I have a Ph.D. in Victorian religious literature, having written a thesis with the impressively esoteric title Reconstructing the Bible: Fantasy and the Revelatory Hermeneutic of George MacDonald - but I tell people that I’ve always gotten a job in spite of that. First technical writing for the automotive industry - for which Victorian literature is interesting preparation - then grantwriting and organizational development.
I finished the draft of my thesis a week before Maggie was born in Port Huron, Michigan, and defended it at the University of Minnesota six months later while Paul walked back and forth with her in a front pack at Coffman Union, hoping they would finish grilling me before she needed to nurse. The full sized, bound copy with the title and my name in gold letters ended up on one of the shelves of patio bricks and boards that served as our bookcase as students. They were mine originally - I stained the boards, and the bricks are green, not gray, a rare element of style back then - and we lugged the damn things from Minneapolis to Chicago to Port Huron to Dearborn to Nashville to Sewanee and to Nashville again before bringing them back up with us to the house we bought in Eden Prairie. Post-divorce, they are once again mine. The fruit of my scholarship sits upon them, between an oversized copy of Dante’s Inferno, with the illustrations by Gustave Doré, and volume 9 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The latter contains the only article I ever published under my maiden name, back when I was not a Victorian scholar, but an Americanist - the entry on Edna Ferber. For anyone out there who can tell me one thing she wrote without doing a Google search, the drink’s on me.
I take that back. The Inferno apparently stayed with Paul.
When I first began working for the Institute for New Americans in 1999 - can this really have been a decade ago? - it was because of two grants I had written almost twenty years before while a research assistant for Don Ross in the Program in Composition and Communication. That research got me to my first and only Modern Language Association convention in 1982, while I was still ABD - all but dissertation. I had three job interviews there, all of them composition and computer related, none of them for a position in Victorian literature. I should have known then that academia was not my destiny. Perhaps I did, and didn’t care. The dissertation was, at that time, my way of doing what creative nonfiction does for me now. It served as a focus for awareness, for insight, and growth. The faith and doubt crisis of the Victorian era mirrored my own adolescent angst over religion. What they learned - MacDonald’s mythopoeic resolution of that crisis in particular - I needed to know.
Setting up a new business is time-consuming, and in some ways frightening in this economy. In other ways, it is the most secure option. Tina Brown in The Daily Beast in January coined the term “gig” economy - and then the phrase was everywhere. Project-by-project work is something artists and other freelancers have always understood, but the economy is now producing what Michelle Goodman, author of The Anti-9 to 5 Guide, has called the "accidental freelancer." Another blogger, Marci Alboher, has coined the term "slash" career to describe the entrepreneur that applies her skills in multiple markets, and claims this sort of flexibility is the only real job security to be had in any economy. (I cannot help but think of slash fiction, which is something quite different - unless Marci is also a Harry Potter fan.) We are seeing a lot of new terms coined these days - perhaps more than we are seeing coinage. But in truth I feel a lot better about working for several clients and paying for my own health insurance than putting all my eggs in one employee basket these days.
And it was a choice, not an accident.
There have been a couple of months, especially at the beginning of the year, when cash flow has been pretty scary. The mortgage and association fees are high, and my house is now worth less than when I bought it. The loans I have taken out while both kids have been in school have been coming due. And there are running credit card balances - always anathema to me - acquired during those few months of unemployment in late 2006 and early 2007, that I just don’t seem to be able to pay down. Apparently Suze Orman doesn’t want me to till I have six months of emergency savings, which is some consolation. Still, I have yet to figure out how to do that. When my dad learned what I could charge on an hourly rate, he multiplied that by forty hours and fifty weeks and came up with $170,000 a year. If I could really do that well writing grants, he said, my money problems would be over.
I can’t, of course. At least I don’t know any grantwriters who do. You actually have to spend about a third of your time prospecting for new business - networking, staying up to date on current issues, attending meetings. Few of these things are billable to other people, but they take up time. Then there are the leads that don’t lead anywhere, the clients who for one reason or another take more time than you are authorized to charge them for, and the jobs that, for whatever reason, do not go as planned. Sometimes you can bill for them, and sometimes you can’t.
At any rate, it will be awhile before I find myself with a six figure income.
There is also the feast or famine phenomenon. In the early part of the year I had few new opportunities - now there are often more than I can handle, and on short notice. Recovery Act requests for proposals have been coming out fast and thick the last few months, with increasing urgency now so that proposals can be reviewed and money can allocated before the end of the federal fiscal year on September 30. A lot of nonprofits who have never applied for federal funding before are trying to do so now. Often they think they can handle the very complicated process themselves, in their spare time, and only realize two weeks before the grant is due that they need help. This is the type of job established grantwriters run screaming from. I’m not established, so I take the job. And scream silently.
In truth I am not a person who likes deadlines. I can handle them, unless they bunch up like fabric beneath the foot of a sewing machine. But I don’t like to. I am chronically late these days, trying desperately to get “just one more thing done,” and would prefer to have been born before the invention of train schedules. Deadlines are good motivators, and helpful in some ways for perfectionists. But when I find my life lurching from one to another with little time for sleep or leisure, to nurture relationships, or do to that daydreaming Brenda Ueland says is so necessary to the creative life, I become tense, anxious, and depressed. There were a few weeks recently when the days were for gathering information and making appointments, and the nights were for writing. Sleep found room where it could. I would like fewer deadlines, less often. But for now, the trick is learning how to choose among options, and find balance.
I do love the freedom of being my own boss, and working at home. And I love the days without deadlines, when I can go into fugue state if I want to, and spend all day on a single project -like catching up on my blog. And I love the variety of this work. I love learning about the issues, and the ways in which compassionate and talented people strive to address them, to serve the public good. Most of all I love the fact that my writing can provide the resources to make change happen in the world. Preparing a strong case for an organization and getting them funding is a gratifying, heady, powerful high. And it feels a lot more like a real contribution than a dissertation on microfiche sitting on a dusty shelf on Zeeb Road in Ann Arbor. Though it is fun, after a few drinks at cocktail parties, to take out the large volume bound in black with my name in gold letters, and make guests Touch the Book.
Perhaps I will have to have my avant garde artist friend Tom Cassidy illustrate it someday. I do not believe he has ever defaced a dissertation.
Up until now my business has been focused on grantwriting, and the name and tagline I have used for that business, which has never been formally incorporated, has reflected that. Formula 501c3: We Make Nonprofits Shine. The old brochure and price sheet, which I hardly ever needed, used 1950s retro clipart of a housewife in high heels and a housedress, spiffing up the lampshade with a feather duster.
Then a mysterious thing happened. As an introvert, organizational life often saps my creativity, and leaves me starving for solitude. Though the original Ordinary Time began as a column in a church newsletter, the first piece was written on a Sunday morning, in the reprieve from service given by a sick child. Much of my time as a clergy wife reflects this paradox.
But for reasons I do not entirely understand, when I work to grow capacity in Northstar, the Little Storytelling Organization That Could, my personal creativity and my productivity flourish. It seems that my private creativity is tied in some tangible way to the creative capacity of all. This means something.
So it is time to rethink my earlier approach, to create an artistic vision statement and a business plan simultaneously, and have them inform each other. To bring my whole self to the work. When that is done, I think I will know again - in both the secular and the sacred sense - the meaning of ordinary time. Because this, as the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield says, is my path with heart.