A job of work
Dearest Nancy:
A long, snow-filled day here in Maryland, and I’m at last sitting down to write you. I always get your letters and think I’ll plunge right in, answer immediately, say my piece right away. What I’ve done instead is what I usually do—walk around with you in my head, figuring out what I want to say and how. This time, I kept coming back to that one beautiful moment that you described, how “one morning, slinking across the road, [you] saw a coyote, his spine so wild it seemed like a garden hose. [You] heard a great horned owl, and watched a fox sniff his way across a frosted field [and] could not have been more empty and open.” With school looming soon and books to read and syllabi to write and this unending novel revision, I longed for just what you describe. Open. Empty.
But in the end what I’ve decided I most I want to write to you about is your question for us all. “My question,” you say, “is this. Do you think a career in the arts is a threat to the requirements of the creative process? If so, how do I manage both?”
I like the variety of answers you got to your post on Facebook. Such a good discussion. People had something to say about moving houses. About when to write, whether morning time or late at night. About finding stillness even in the midst of a faculty meeting. About money. And about the audience one chooses for a work, be it public or family or friends or fame or ad infinitum.
All week I’ve been moving toward my own response to your question about that balance. Career and emptiness and openness. What kept coming back to me again and again was another discussion from years and years back, in some religion and literature class I was taking. We were reading works by Flannery O’Connor, by Walker Percy, and also by Thomas Merton, a small book of essays called Raids on the Unspeakable. What I remember most about that latter book are the Sumi paintings that come between each piece, something Merton called “brush marks of infinity.” I used to keep a quote from that book above my writing desk. Kept it in every house I lived in for years and years. Here it is. “In the modern world,” Merton says, “only the marketable has meaning. Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By ‘they’ I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival and who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain.”
When I took that class so long ago, it was with this curmudgeonly man named Jim Holloway. He’d teach with what looked like a chaw of tobacco in one cheek and his muddy boots propped up on the desk. He’d teach staring out the window, hands in his pockets, never looking at us for whole minutes and minutes of class time. He’d rant at us about the novel Wiseblood. And somewhere in the mix, he taught me two words. Vocation. Profession. This was big news for me. In my own mountain vernacular, a job is a job. A job of work. A job of the hands. Something made. Something earned. Nevertheless, all these years later, I still think about it. What a vocation is. What a job is.
Flash forward. A couple years back. At some writer’s conference. Some big to-do. Someone was introducing somebody who’d written a book. “This book,” it was said, “earned her a job as professor at so and so,” and etc. I wondered. Is that what the book did?
Yes, it did. I am lucky as hell to live in a culture where there are fine writing programs. Where people study The Word, craft the words, summon the words, and get paid to do so. How just frigging amazing.
But I also wonder about jobs. About vocation. If I look that word up now, I find this definition most appealing. Vocation. A summons or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action; especially: a divine call to the religious life.
What I think is that I’ve spent years and years struggling to get the best job of work. To make the most money. Get the best lines on my vita. Get ahead in all the ways I think are powerful and possible in this wonderful culture of ours that has such things as writing programs and mentors and publication and books and readings and conferences and panels and, and, and. But in my heart of hearts, I think about vocation. About the call to write. The summons. I even risk saying that, for me, it is a divine calling. That sacred of an act.
And when I say that, take the risk here in this letter to say just that, I honestly don’t know how to answer your question, the question with which this letter to you began. Is a career a threat to creative process? Sometimes, for me, it is. For me, I believe I have not harbored my vocation as I ought to have done. I’ve worked on the job of work, the career, sometimes and often to the detriment of the gift. But how not to do that? That’s where I want to hear more from you, and from all of you out there who will meet us and say more, in whatever way you can.
I know this. Sometimes I forget the sound of the rain. Sometimes I forget the sound of my own heart, the heartwood, the place from which words come. And then, I laugh at myself. Don’t we all do that, girl, I say to myself. Don’t we all?
Yours, with much love,
Karen
