A Labor of Gratitude
Several years back I got a birds-eye view of Dancing with the Stars, one of the perks of having a daughter who worked for the show at the time. If it’s a little like being in a glitzy ballroom at a bar mitzvah or wedding, that’s probably the point. This was Season 8, which should have gone to sexy, limber Gilles Marini (a natural, if ever there was one) but the gymnast (Shawn Johnson) took home the grand prize.
Anyway, while the TV world is taking in commercials and contestant back stories, someone engaged with the task of entertaining the live audience with light banter takes over. Intertwined with some chit-chat about the show is his give-and-take with audience members he singles out and addresses with a basic repertoire of questions — What’s your name/where are you from/what do you do?
It’s that last question that somehow gives me the jitters and my hope is that, despite how up close and personal I am, the mic would not find its way to me, so unpoised as I am to answer the dreaded question.
What do you do?
It would seem straightforward enough — I write — except for one thing, the implied phrase that’s missing: what do you do for a living? To say, ‘I’m a writer’ invites curiosity, yes, but more often than not the follow-up questions I’m asked by strangers speak to whether or not I’ve had my fifteen minutes in the spotlight: Would I have heard of you? What have you written? My dread of being asked what would seem a simple question, especially in a public forum where answers are expected to be concise, speaks to how programmed we are to define ourselves by what we do, maybe even by how much we earn. Riddled into the equation is the degree to which our sense of self is colored by how others perceive us.
If insecurity is a bitch, self-judgment is an out-and-out three-headed monster.
At the time I had one published book, a short story collection. The publisher was a small, independent press. I had high hopes for a collection aimed at getting beneath the trivial associations of everyday symbols associated with femaleness — hopes dashed when the publisher went belly up not long after my book saw the light of day. Years later would come a novel that brought more attention, more readers, but a feeling akin to failure still nagged at me.
What do you do . . . for a living?
The irony of experiencing a moment of truth about my work life at a taping of a popular TV show aimed at reviving careers is not lost on me.
Is there a message here?
I sometimes ask friends to read my work. Friends want to love your work but that isn’t why I ask. I expect a certain degree of detached evaluation that allows me to determine if a manuscript is ready to be submitted for publication. One friend’s response when I made her promise to be honest in her criticism still makes me smile. “You mean tell you to stop writing and take up dancing?”she quipped.
Years ago another friend gave me a copy of The Gift, Lewis Hyde’s brilliant work exploring the place of creativity in a market-oriented society. I still have the original copy, now falling apart. Her inscription touched me: “For a philosophical boost — and a reminder of why you began writing in the first place. Naturally to share your special gift . . .”
It’s not for me to judge whether I’m truly gifted as a writer. It is for me to say that I take my messages as they come and so often there’s an uncanny timeliness to them. Whatever compelled me to reread Hyde’s book in its fresh 25th anniversary edition has managed to set me back on course, the gift to myself I needed. Insights are even more resonant than when I first read it in my twenties.
Hyde’s use of the term is multifaceted. Works of art are gifts by virtue of the way they’re conceptualized and received. Writers, myself included, are forever surprised by those moments when a character takes on a life of her own or a poem almost seems to write itself. Working in what Hyde calls a gifted state is what makes this happen. Disbursing the gifts without (too much) thought to capitalizing on them, nourishes the spirit of both the artist and audience that sees the work of art for what it really is.
“In a market society,” he writes, “a disquieting sense of triviality will nag the man or woman who labors in the service of a gift and whose products are not adequately described as commodities.”
Negotiating the two spheres has always been the conundrum.
“The artist who hopes to market work that is the realization of his gifts cannot begin with the market. He must create for himself that gift-sphere in which the work is made, and only when he knows the work to be the faithful realization of his gift should he turn to see if it has currency in that other economy. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.”
Along comes Virginia Woolf into the mix: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” A Room of One’s Own encompasses much more than the space to work in solitude but Woolf makes it clear from the outset: there’s no taking up residence in that room without financial resources, via earned income or patronage.
Like the artists Hyde singles out for the ‘other’ work they did before gaining attention, I know what it means to spend the better part of my professional life feeding the impulse to write fiction with jobs as an editor and writer for magazines, conducting workshops in schools.
He quotes Allen Ginsberg: “You really have to make a resolution just to write for yourself . . ., in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying.”
He points out that Pablo Neruda did not consider his Nobel Prize the “laurel crown” of his poetry. Rather it was a coal miner, dusty and disfigured, emerging from a mine who stretched his hand out to Neruda and said, “I have known you for a long time, my brother.”
I take heart from the trials and tribulations of writers who humble and inspire me in the way they spin words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs and stories and poems. Not to mention the musicians and composers and painters and photographers who inform the spirit of my work and move me. The work I do may not earn me a living wage but calling it a labor of love doesn’t quite cut it. Laboring in the service of an art or craft that gives purpose and meaning to your days, infuses you with ideas that surface from below the level of conscious thought, is not about love. Labor of gratitude, on the other hand, speaks to me. Again Hyde: “We come to painting, to poetry, to the stage, hoping to revive our soul. And any artist whose work touches us earns our gratitude.”
From that gratitude comes the awakening of something within, nudging me along through the passing years, with all the ups and downs, moments of doubt playing leapfrog with moments of gratification. One story is reworked over and over without finding the right tone and voice, another rewards me with the conviction that the finished story is indeed the one I intended to tell. In the way that a gift given is complete only when it’s received, a book isn’t truly finished until it’s read. One reader. Two readers. Two hundred. Two thousand. Whatever it takes to allow some satisfaction that brings gratitude full circle, no critical self getting in the way to make me question my work in terms that have little to do with its true worth.
