Just over five years ago, I started a new job for which I was grossly underqualified. I'd just finished submitting a handful of grad school applications and left my job as Senior Editor for an online education company which I despised with every fiber of my being. I had begun working there three years earlier as a writer and created the editorial division myself out of pure frustration over the lack of consistency and good grammar. But this new job: Communications Director. Writing articles every two weeks for a non-profit newsletter, mining papers for industry articles (not an industry I was particularly interested in), biding my time through the Texas Legislative Session after which I'd leave and start in some graduate program where I'd learn how to Save The World Through Documentary Photography. I was convinced that the key was having more time to work on a project and to learn how to write grants. Neither of which I ended up getting or figuring out.
What I did get, as
I've mentioned before, was the knowledge that I love teaching, and that I'm pretty good at it. And now I'm about five weeks away from having to turn in my thesis manuscript for this MFA writing program for which I've worked my ass off. And I've tried to take every opportunity available to me. I've introduced one of my favorite poets, I've organized readings, I took a head
editor position, I've written, I've been
published (just the once, man that takes time!), I've been sick, I've been sick again, and again. I taught my first workshop and it was so hard and so rewarding and I had students who came out of the class such better poets than they came in.
And it all matters. For me, the greatest work I can do in the world is
to promote understanding. My media are poetry and documentary photography. I think these media have the capacity to really access a depth that many other media just can't. I think they can also be particularly transformative for their creators. But what do you do when they are also the media that reach the fewest people? How do you get around that?
Last week, in response to some of the articles about Amazon's recent marketing ploy against independent book sellers, Poetry Magazine published an essay by a book publisher named Janaka Stucky entitled
"How to Survive in the Age of Amazon." In the essay, Stucky makes the case that poets and readers of poetry are the ones who will keep bookstores alive:
People who read poetry are the unsung customer base for independent bookstores: they are avid readers, they love books as physical objects, they will religiously attend author readings, they read books on a variety of subjects, and they buy more books annually than anyone else I know. By catering to the type of person who reads poetry, these successful bookstores have perhaps unwittingly remained focused on what devoted patrons of bookstores really value: variety over homogeneity, literature over media, humanity over technology, and community over price. By being the type of bookstore that poetry readers will go out of their way to visit, and by being a third place in our social lives that fosters community and human interaction, these stores have become—through the nuanced fact of their physical being—something that Amazon, by its very business model, is the antithesis of: a space where we experience history, and thus also time. At first glance, the idea of “catering to poetry” may seem like a hard sell. After all, “no one reads poetry anymore,” and the truth is no one ever really did.
But this is something I don't want to accept. People did read poetry. Or more people did, at least. And photography accomplished things. Dorothea Lange was not for naught. I see organizations like the
AJA Project or way back like
Appalshop, and this is the kind of work I want to do. My friend Tosh worked for the AJA project in San Diego and they did public displays: photos at
bus stations and the like. Or the kind of work that the
street photographer JR did in the Face 2 Face project to promote understanding between Israel and Palestine. I feel that public works (though I know nothing of this element) has to be the first part of the tie that binds it all together.The second is blending the photography and the writing together and show kids how to document their own lives and
communities.
And somehow in this crazy mixed-up world, my dearest friend Tarfia and I ended up coming to the same life's desire completely separately. But how to begin? Five years have passed since I started making my big changes and I am still so far from knowing how to get from A to B. I got off the road to gainful employment, regular health insurance, no debt, or student loans. How strange to come so far, to now have two Bachelor's degrees and two Master's degrees in my fields, only to find that I've been going to school for something that I won't be able to get a job in without first volunteering. One of the insights I came away with after finishing my Master's in Santa Cruz was that I could do any kind of documentary project I wanted if I was willing to put my own time and money into it. Which is a simple kind of revelation but somehow cost me $30,000 in student loans to get to.
So the question now is what do you do when you find once again that you are on the rink without training wheels? That in fact you haven't had training wheels for a very long time, but now they've also removed the walls from around the rink? What do you do when the summer comes and there is no more stipend check, no more job, no more health insurance. As both a writer and a photographer, I've already left the safe paths that were available to me. I don't want them. But I'm still trying to find somewhere to land, like most everyone else I know.
The strange thing is that when you get to the point where you start risking like this, and living your life according to what is important to you and not what is safe, you increasingly find yourself surrounded by people who are doing the same. A couple of weeks ago, my friend Natashia posted about a very distressing exchange she'd had with a former co-worker and friend. Natashia, like me, has many interests, and years ago left a more lucrative career choice in a particular field of law to pursue law that helped people, wasn't soul-sucking, and also to write (which she is absolutely amazing at). This person from her previous life had invited her to a gala but asked her that, if she went, not to talk about her writing life, and I was stunned that a so-called friend could make such a shameful request. That a friend could not understand that this was a core part of her person, of her passion
—especially when writing is such a hard thing to build a life on
—it made me deeply sad. Natashia decided pretty quickly that it wasn't worth going, that those were no longer her people.
Last year around this time I wrote a kind of tongue-in-cheek post about
how to rid yourself of bad friendships. It was a response to a prompt I'd gotten in my nonfiction writing class that had asked us to write a step-by-step guide to anything we wanted, and a friend of mine was having trouble with another friend, and this was what came out. Having had loads of experience with untethering myself from negative people, I set about it. Listing the signs that a person cares more for himself than you. How to get past a woman's envy.
And now so close to the end of this program, I find that I am on the rink without walls or training wheels, and fiercely tethered to those around me
—not falling, and knowing where I want to go. It is a tethering I trust, that I don't wish at all to break free from. How strange that this act of writing done in solitude forms such bonds between people, makes such a great, wide net. And I think, for now, that's the most that I can ask for.
