Believing the Fairy Tale – Jobs After the MFA

There have been a LOT of articles around lately about the difficulty of acquiring work after your MFA. As if those students needed more to panic about, what with student loan debt, record high unemployment rates, shrinking tenure job pools, etc. Here is a link to just one of them from the Chronicle of Higher Education: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/potential-mfa-students-there-are-no-academic-jobs

Here’s another one, at my local alternative paper, The Stranger, about making ends meet while studying – FYI, in case you’re wondering about my way to doing that, I spent my MA in full-time work as a manager at AT&T, and my MFA doing freelance tech writing: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/how-i-supported-myself-while-getting-a-graduate-degree-in-poetry/Content?oid=20607991

So, I’m not telling MFA students (or recently graduated MFA-ers) to believe any fairy tales. Adjuncting does pay less than most fast food jobs, and you’ll work a lot harder – and those are, by some estimates, about 75 percent of the teaching work force at universities right now. One of my friends posted that the job pool for tenure-track jobs had shrunk so much since getting his pHd that he’s thinking of opening a food truck. That got me thinking: what are other jobs that MFA grads can get to pay off those student loans in a tight academic job market?

If you’re read my blog for any length of time, you know I’ve had a variety of jobs. I have a BS in biology, so I worked temp jobs in labs, for instance. I also ran a high-end perfume and makeup store for a while. I worked a dozen years as a technical writer and then as a tech writing manager, and also tried my hand at advertising copyediting, copywriting, PR, and various freelance-type gigs. I worked as an adjunct professor for MFA students for several years at National University. Freelance journalism, which I also did, is a shrinking field, which I kept in mind (and kept off the following list for that reason.) It used to be a good way to make a living for a writer, though!

So here are my suggestions, despairing MFA students!

–Go for the Mad Men approach. Advertising copywriting had to my one of my all-time favorite jobs. I lucked into a temp job copyediting at a cool slick Seattle advertising company, and they hired me as a part-time copywriter as soon as I had proven competent at writing as well as editing. This was fun work – I got to write about going on fancy train dinners, Microsoft stuff, some sports team rigamarole. I liked it, it paid well, the people I worked with were fun, and the company atmosphere was light and energetic.

–If you’re even a little geeky, consider technical writing. It is definitely where the money is. I made more money in this field than any other. I’m not a high-end coder, either, but I knew enough code to get by – a little XML, a little Visual Basic and ASP, a bunch of HTML. This kind of work will not only pay well, it is usually accompanied by excellent benefits. I loved working with smart programmers and engineers (my dad and my husband are both engineers, which attests to the fact that I get along quite well with that type) and I loved being paid well for relatively non-taxing work. Managing teams of tech writers, web designers and dev-types was a bit more strenuous, required a lot of hours and travel, so if you’re not up for that, be warned.

–If you’re an energetic cheerleader type, consider PR. I found it a bit exhausting (you can probably tell that by the way I write about trying to do PR for poetry books) but if you have the right personality type and a go-getting attitude, it can be fun work. You get invited out to drinks and parties a lot. You may or may not wind up with some cool swag. I’ll also just say here, apropos of nothing, a lot of the people in PR are young, very attractive and wear very short skirts. No judgement, just an observation. A newer version of this may be “social media consultant.” I’m not young enough to have had this job, and also, they may have a less-miniskirt oriented dress code.

–Teaching outside of the college arena. Some of my friends from my MA and MFA programs became high-school teachers. The ones that do it seem to love it, as the pay’s not terrible, they have a love of teaching kids, and they like having the summers off. Some of my friends are ESL teachers. They also really love the kids. Some of my friends took off for foreign countries to teach English overseas, which enabled them to visit some weird places and have lots of good stories to write later on. There are opportunities outside of slaving away for pennies as an adjunct, or fighting the fight for the several tenure track jobs that may or may not be pulled after they’ve collected several thousand CVs.

–Grant-writing. No personal experience with this one, but have several friends who have found this to pay well, be personally fulfilling, and use their writing skills! You can do this for non-profit foundations, which is nice if you have a “helping out the world” mentality!

So, you can point your spouse, parents, etc at this post when they ask what you’re going to do with a graduate English or creative writing degree. Of course, these are just a few of your possibilities; I also know English and CW grads who are programmers, engineers, doctors, life coaches, HR workers, nurses, chefs, and poet laureates of states.

Of course, I am still clinging to the dream: winning a Pulitzer prize, having several job offers of part-time low-residency MFA work, getting $10,000 a reading. Hey, it could happen. I still do believe in fairy tales, but I also believe in the bottom line. So don’t wait for the dream, prepare yourself while you’re still in school for a good job that uses your skill set!

This is my pumpkin coach. It’s my ticket out of here!

Serum Sickness, Good News and Bad News, When to Close the Screen

So, the last few days have been a bit of a daze, as I had a reaction – specifically, a kind of reaction called “serum sickness,” to the Xolair shot, which sounds wonderfully poetic, but you know, comes with things like a high fever, prickly rashes on your face that make you look like you dived head-first into poison ivy and some serious stomach aches and weird faint-yness. I was a little upset, seeing as how this shot was supposed to help the autoimmune problems, that I had an autoimmune type reaction to it, you know, sort of an ironic, terrible joke.

But then I thought about the things we let into our lives, our bodies, and the things we keep out. While I was woozy with antibiotics and steroids, I noticed the news being even more terrible than usual – terrorism and ebola and etc – and I thought – why is this always in our faces, this bad news, this terribly frightening and depressing set of things. But we can shut it off – we can turn the channel, close the internet explorer window, turn the radio off.

I mean, health care is sort of the same – it can be very frightening, like, weird reactions to weird shots, doctors want to run tests all of the time. But while we don’t necessarily have control over everything about our own bodies – I certainly find mine hilarious on occasion – we can take risks, but we can also shut down things we don’t want, add in things we do want. Even when I was in a wheelchair for a while a couple of years ago, we’d still go the zoo, go through the park, find the bluebirds hiding in the trees. Even when my diet shrank to about four foods, my husband Glenn tried to make the most of out of the limited ingredients. If we get sick – and I just got over a six week respiratory illness – we can stay in bed, and see it as a trial, or we can stay in bed, and see it as an opportunity to catch up on classic movies and novels. This is not Pollyanna-ing – it’s just that I’m frustrated with the bad news taking over the screen, including my own. I remember thinking while my fever was going up and up yesterday, that I felt resentful of the demands of the screen, the angry and resentful Facebook posts, e-mail, news stories. I thought – I have the power to turn these things off. This is one of those things you realize during high fevers – epiphanies like “Hey, I don’t have to respond to every e-mail or twitter the minute it comes in.” We can embrace the things we love, the people that make us happy, open the windows and let in fresh air, the changing seasons.

This is a set of sunflowers about five minutes from my doctor’s office.

Are you Burned Out? Or Just Tired?

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between mental, emotional, and physical states, and I’ve found this to be particularly true of poets. If we let ourselves go too long without sleep, or we (ahem) have been suffering from some kind of upper respiratory crap for a month or so, or we’ve just been pushing ourselves too hard – book tour, caretaking, job responsibilities –it can be hard to find that call to send out your work, apply for a grant, or write anything that feels (key word, feels) worthwhile.

Fall – and September in particular – is usually my energetic, submitting-full, writing-y zone – but this year, I’ve just been staring blankly, evening after evening, at my Excel spreadsheet. I know that usually this time of year I’m excited to get back to sending out work. But – maybe do to the fact that coughing spasms have been waking me up in the middle of the night, several times a night, for oh, five weeks, sometimes requiring an inhaler – I just feel “blah” about the whole thing. And I haven’t been writing much really, either. Reading, I can handle – this summer I’ve caught up on all the fiction reading I didn’t do the rest of the year, plus some non-fiction.

Someone was telling me that there is an energy of fall around change, a decrease in sunlight, in the length of days, and sometimes, a fall in mood and energy, too. Change of seasons, change in mood, change of creativity, too.

I think a little self-care (appropriate bedtimes, good nutrition, maybe a vitamin – in my case, resting as per doctor’s orders) can go a long way towards determining whether you’re going through a temporary confluence of sleep-deprivation, energy lowering and maybe a lot of recent rejections, or whether you are seriously feeling burned out, in a way that means you need to look again at your reasons for writing and trying to publish, maybe try to talk to people that help encourage you, and give yourself a break for a little while. Like me, maybe you need some time to rest and read, give yourself space to breathe and not always “produce.” Diane Lockward has a good post about downtime, and discusses Louise Gluck’s discoveries about downtime in her recent P&W interview. (It’s worth it to go pick up a copy of Poets & Writers in print!) I’m also really enjoying a new book of essays by women writers over 50 called A Story Larger Than My Own, including pieces by Alicia Ostriker, Maxine Kumin, and Margaret Atwood. There was a great piece in there too about writerly ambition – like I was talking about a few weeks ago – by Linda Pastan.

Tomorrow I’m off to my “experimental” first shot of Xolair, to see if it will help the asthma/allergies/inflammation issues, without debilitating side effects, hopefully! Wish me luck!

Elgin Award Winners and Book Soundtracks

Hey, a little good news that I had to post – Unexplained Fevers won second place in this year’s Elgin Awards for full-length poetry books! Here’s a list of all the Elgin Award Winners: http://sfpoetry.com/el/14elgin.html

Thanks to all the Sci-Fi Poetry Association members who voted! (And for those of you who didn’t know, yes, there is such a thing as a sci-fi poetry association!)

And, thanks to Sharon Suzuki-Martinez for featuring me on her Poet’s Playlist Tumblr. This playlist is for The Robot Scientist’s Daughter…upcoming in 2015 from Mayapple Press. Check it out to find out my weird (and admittedly schizophrenic) listening preferences while I was writing the book!

Update: Thanks to Lesley Wheeler for her discussion on her blog of what was cut from her Eliot-Waste Land essay in this month’s Poetry Magazine, where she discusses poems by Daisy Fried and my own persona-poem-as-Vivienne-Eliot, “Her Nerves,” from Becoming the Villainess. In fact, there are a ton of Eliot-inspired poems in the book, as I started investigating Philomel, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, because of “The Waste Land,” as well as the theory of the abject, Baudelaire, and Swinburne. Here’s the poem in its entirety:

Her Nerves

“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad.” – T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

I surrounded myself with the safe, with the sane.
“You know there’s a history of mental illness in my family.”
I devoted myself to botany, to mazes, to the infinitesimal.
I married you to challenge my inevitable end –
my human tranquilizer.

You like my “little poems” but
I scare you when I rock myself over and over
saying I dreamed I killed you again,
I dreamed you killed me again,
and you couldn’t stop the nightmares.
You liked it when I laughed at Plath,
sketched repeating uneven branches of starfish arms.

You are afraid–not just of me,
but what I see and hear that you don’t –
the crusts of blood, slippery dirt-gorged voices.
You like it when I curse creatively,
hate it when paper piles like excrement around me.

Afraid our sloppy physicality
will tear at your maintained monastic cubes,
our “Siren Song,” our red hair flaming into points.
You name our extremities as if decayed already,
the translucent hand,
the ankle frail as a twig.

The Poet Does an Art Walk – Some Poetry and Visual Art Collaboration News

All poetry book marketing talk and no fun make this blog too dull, right? So, onto a post on art for poets!

First of all, speaking of poet and artist collaborations: If you live in Redmond, be sure to come by this Friday afternoon between 5:30 and 7 PM for the VALA Voices in the Corridor Reception. Besides seeing some fantastic local art which interprets what “home” means in the Redmond corridor, I’ll be reading a bit of Redmond-oriented poetry, there will be music, and also a yoga demo. Read more about it here. This is the culmination of six months of poet (Kelly Davio and myself) and artists Jacqui Calladine, Jessica Lambert, Anna Macrae and Flora Ramirez Bustamante collaborating on this project, which is supposed to reflect the “voices” in the Redmond area.

So, I met up with some terrific artists in Pioneer Square this week (Mary Coss and Carol Milne) about doing a collaborative art-poetry piece for a January exhibition at METHOD. It was an inspiring time and both artists were full of fun ideas. (Can’t wait to see what Carol comes up with!)

Afterwards it happened to be the once-a-month Pioneer Square art walk. I’ve been on and off sick for the last month, so I had a lot of pent-up art energy built up! We must have visited at least twenty galleries. For an idea of what we saw, let me include a few images…

The image at the top of the post is Paul McKee’s new show at the METHOD Gallery. Terrific, right? I told him this is how I’d decorate my house…

Next, I fell in love with the work of Justin Gibbens, whose show at the Punch Gallery demonstrated his love of traditional Japanese art and training as a scientific illustrator. Here’s one of my favorites, “Egret as Berunda:”

Next, a trip to Roq la Rue, where the work of Casey Weldon and Femke Hemstra were featured. Roq la Rue never disappoints!

It’s a reminder that there are so many talented artists out there, each piece a wonderful inspiration for writing! I’m excited for my next artist collaboration – my first with a glass artist – and to work with METHOD, that gallery was so funky-gothic-cool and right in my art-wheelhouse.