Wall Street Reflections on a Lake

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photo by Christopher Aloi

photo by Christo­pher Aloi

Writer and social media con­sul­tant Anora McGaha gra­ciously shares her past work lives and how val­ues around which we make our “liv­ing” linger, some­times emerg­ing decades later. Her fas­ci­nat­ing work his­tory and her poem remind me that art does not con­form to a lin­ear path… it’s more like water.

In the late 1980s, I was fresh out of grad­u­ate school and made it through the eye of the nee­dle to a bank­ing job on Wall Street with the best and the bright­est. An 8-month credit  train­ing pro­gram. Merg­ers and acqui­si­tions the lat­est rage. We dressed very nicely and worked like we were pos­sessed. With 12-month leases to live in NYC, we had to keep our jobs.

A friend from my year in China was in the city work­ing for an invest­ment banker, research­ing annual reports for oppor­tu­ni­ties on com­pa­nies’ spread­sheets. After only a few years she was able to retire to a coun­try farm. Another NYC acquain­tance was writ­ten up in a major US mag­a­zine after mak­ing a small for­tune in invest­ment banking.

One day on my morn­ing com­mute to Man­hat­tan from Queens, I heard two well-dressed busi­ness­men in front of me. “I couldn’t believe it. The offi­cers slapped hand­cuffs on the VP, and walked him out. Noth­ing like that’s ever hap­pened before. It was insider trad­ing.” I’d seen it in the paper, and now, stand­ing in front of me, some­one who had seen it per­son­ally. I shud­dered, remem­ber­ing a 7th grade his­tory les­son about rob­ber barons and corruption.

A few years later at my son’s doctor’s office in Mass­a­chu­setts, a woman told me her hus­band was laid off within a year of get­ting his retire­ment and pen­sion. They now had noth­ing. I felt a pow­er­less­ness, a strange, awful, hol­low feel­ing of know­ing a wrong was hap­pen­ing, with no recourse.

Fast for­ward to 2003 when I vis­ited Kan­napo­lis, North Car­olina, where a huge tex­tile mill became a shell after an investor bought it, liq­ui­dated every pen­sion fund of thou­sands of work­ers and closed the mill. Only a few artists had stu­dios nearby; a hand­ful of fur­ni­ture stores were sell­ing sec­onds, hop­ing to bring in visitors.

In 2006 I was let go in a large lay­off that was never named as such. But I knew hun­dreds had been jet­ti­soned at the same time. I was dis­ori­ented a few years later when a CNN report listed my for­mer com­pany as never hav­ing had a layoff.

In writ­ing poetry, ideas and images emerge and take shape in ways that sur­prise. I’d for­got­ten about the 1980s. About NYC. I’d for­got­ten that glow I felt about Amer­ica — our amber waves of grain and pur­ple moun­tain majesties. All I was doing was try­ing to cap­ture the most beau­ti­ful sub­tle pur­ple sky and bril­liant clouds I’d seen in years, and the sur­prise of see­ing nor­mally placid waters on Lake Jor­dan, white with caps. The vision was so beau­ti­ful I leaned back on my car and typed this in my smart phone with my index finger.

Laven­der sky at dusk
Peri­win­kle clouds, shades of blues and grays
Cold winds slap­ping cheeks pink
Top­ping Jordan’s waters white with caps

Danc­ing fast as we can, we are
To see through this change in our for­tunes
Already in the ‘80s the cof­fers were raided
Con­tin­u­ing still to make mil­lions poorer

Mov­ing now towards the 2020s
The signs bleak and bleak­en­ing
What­ever inven­tions will free our peo­ple again
Have not shown their heads high enough to see

The stock mar­ket rises like a hot air bal­loon
No other invest­ment deigns a return
The num­bers confuse

We are not God’s golden coun­try
The dis­as­ters of other peo­ples
have now come our way
We’re too proud to see it
Can’t believe it
Won’t

We were blessed
pro­tected
unlike the rest

But God does not save
Only offers love and grace

Cold winds slap cheeks from pink to blue
Top­ping hope with fear

Under the grays
orange glows
before night’s cloak
ends day

The sun’s return
mere hours away
isn’t soon enough

Some­thing has got to change

Relearning Happiness from Oliver Burkeman

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I had the plea­sure of inter­view­ing Oliver Burke­man in Brook­lyn three weeks ago. Burke­man is author of The Anti­dote, Hap­pi­ness for peo­ple who can’t stand pos­i­tive think­ing and a colum­nist for the Guardian. Hap­pily and con­trary to his book’s sub­ti­tle, Burke­man is not the slight­est cur­mud­geon, nor does he have a grudge against opti­mists. He’s actu­ally ebul­lient, funny and thoughtful.

Oliver Burke­man

When talk­ing with him over cof­fee near Prospect Park, I couldn’t help but remem­ber that my first pro­fes­sional job was a jour­nal­ist. My career was short-lived, not because I didn’t love writ­ing or got my feel­ings hurt when my sto­ries dripped bloody edit marks. I couldn’t find full-time work in a reces­sion (long, long ago in a land far away). I did what any other col­lege grad would do when offered a merit schol­ar­ship and a stipend: I went to grad­u­ate school–but in a dif­fer­ent field.

Burke­man is the kind of jour­nal­ist, I’ll go so far to say the kind of journalist-person, I would aspire to be. He’s inter­est­ing because he has so many inter­ests. He is curi­ous and because he’s intelligent–cognitively and emotionally–he puts peo­ple at ease and finds things out. He’s inter­viewed Studs Terkel, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clin­ton, Woody Allen and Sarah Sil­ver­man (to name a few). He’s done a lot in his 30-something years, but he doesn’t wear it. Unex­pect­edly but I sup­pose under­stand­ably, I envied his success.

One of the things Burke­man found out on his travelogue–a nice metaphor for his happiness-search project–is that there are cul­tural, social, philo­soph­i­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cal, even spir­i­tual rea­sons why some­thing he calls the neg­a­tive path works sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter than pos­i­tive think­ing (e.g., moti­va­tional sem­i­nars, most self-help books, affir­ma­tions, relent­lessly spe­cific end goals).

The neg­a­tive path is not as neg­a­tive as it sounds. It’s a blend of sto­icism, bud­dhism, mod­ern social research and logic. Burke­man takes us to the slums of Kib­era, Mex­i­can vil­lages, the UK, San Anto­nio, Detroit and New York. We talk to Albert Ellis (before he dies), Eckart Tolle, and social sci­en­tists like Carol Dweck and Christo­pher Kayes. We attend Get Moti­vated! sem­i­nars, pay our respects to Saint Death and visit a museum of failed products.

Not sur­pris­ingly, we learn that secu­rity is illusory–even at the most secure air­ports; that set­ting spe­cific, mea­sur­able, attain­able, real­is­tic and time-bound (SMART) goals–a fun­da­men­tal truth in busi­ness schools–is not nec­es­sary for pro­duc­tiv­ity and many times runs counter to a happy, sane life. That fail­ure is good AND nec­es­sary; and that envi­sion­ing worst-case sce­nar­ios, includ­ing our own death and the deaths of those we love, can give us greater appre­ci­a­tion and joy in the moment.

When I got back home to North Car­olina, I tran­scribed my 1.5 hours, cring­ing through some of my longer, ram­bling ques­tions but flog­ging myself, twice, for talk­ing over him. I’ve not been a jour­nal­ist since 1983 but I’m pretty sure that’s the sign of an ama­teur, a non-professional, and a totally un-Burkemaneske thing to do.

It only took me a few days to get over it. I picked up The Anti­dote, read it a third time, this time for me–not as an inter­viewer but as a per­son who wants to change, to be a bit hap­pier. I’d done some things right: I boldly asked for an inter­view, flew to New York, talked to a smart, gen­er­ous and inter­est­ing per­son. I got to prac­tice a lit­tle suc­cess and a lit­tle fail­ure in how I did that. I’m now open to expand­ing what Carol Dweck would call my “fixed mind­set.” Soon, I will begin short bursts (10–15 min­utes) of meditation.

I’ve sent the inter­view to two mag­a­zines: One senior edi­tor wrote me to say her mag­a­zine just con­tracted with Burke­man as a guest blog­ger (on their site) but she was grate­ful that I’d reached out. I’m still wait­ing for an answer from the other mag­a­zine. But, what’s the worst that could hap­pen? My inter­view with Oliver Burke­man will not be pub­lished — anywhere.

I’m still here, still learn­ing. Pretty happy. It’s all good.

 

 

Ron Jackson’s Thanksgiving on Labor Day

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cour­tesy of guardian.co.uk

This beau­ti­ful lit­tle essay from Ron Jack­son was an unex­pected gift–the best kind. It began with a face­book post: what does Labor Day mean to you? 

A Work­ing Life

by Ron Jackson

Work. Like life or love. Means noth­ing on a bad day, every­thing on a good one.

First taste of it: Sixth grade, up at 5:30, dead of win­ter. Down to a cold cel­lar. Grate the ash down, shovel coal in, light the fire, stoke the fur­nace. Then off to deliver the Philly morn­ing paper, crust the first tracks into the deep snow. Force storm doors open through foot-high drifts. Deposit the Inky safe and dry.

First sum­mer job: 60 hours a week at the Com­mis­sary Gro­cery, in the high-rise that tow­ered over our two– and three-story, working-class rows. Sweep­ing floors, wip­ing out the fish case, wire-brushing dried blood off the meat block, deliv­er­ing gro­ceries to coifed ladies, men in poly­ester and gold chains, judges, rich shut-ins. By August I was run­ning the reg­is­ter. All that for 50 cents an hour. With tips, one dollar.

In the Air Force I fixed radios and radar, so peo­ple could talk and know who was out there and where. Mostly, I sat around with the guys and shot the shit. Did my job when I had to.

At the big com­puter com­pany, you know the one, I slipped into large banks, sci­en­tific asso­ci­a­tions, uni­ver­si­ties, like I knew what I was doing, could actu­ally fix a com­puter. Can’t tell you how many times just being con­cerned and col­lab­o­ra­tive got me through a befud­dled day.

In grad school they made me head of the Writ­ing Clinic at Tem­ple U., in charge of the writ­ing lives of “the tired, the poor, the hud­dled masses yearn­ing to breathe free”— kids who got into col­lege con­di­tion­ally. That’s where the Viet­namese girl who labored to grasp Eng­lish syn­tax wrote shaky but hon­est about her for­mer job: to crawl-carry water from the river to her hut, while Viet Cong sprayed machine gun fire at any­thing that bobbed over the tall grass. All told as if she were off to the cor­ner store for milk and cig­a­rettes. From her, my best teacher, I learned what writ­ing really was.

A quar­ter cen­tury in high-tech mar­ket­ing: brochures, speeches, arti­cles, Web copy. That went quick. Made some money for some­one. Some for myself too, raised two fam­i­lies, three kids, now four grand­kids and count­ing. Some suc­cesses, poorly noted by the world, but a few peo­ple along the way that I would jump into the river for.

Now what’s left of that money goes to retire­ment. And by that I mean my real career, my true life’s work, the job I come to with a life­time of fears and fantasies—to be a writer of the cre­ative sort—to spin sto­ries, poems, and essays from some deeper place than my wallet.

In my life, it’s always been a fight between work as duty and work as ful­fill­ment. The lat­ter was a pipe dream as I plod­ded from one month to the next, one year to the next, to earn a liv­ing. Don’t get me wrong, there were many rewards dur­ing that jour­ney, but I always knew I was tak­ing a detour to the bath­room on my way to the kitchen.

I like the story of the third-grade girl who approached the desk as the teacher was open­ing her pay­check. Child: “What’s that?” Teacher: “That’s my pay­check.” Child: “You have a job?” That child is in a state of grace about work, a state the schools will likely pound out of her, unless she is one of the blessed of mind and spirit. I want to be the per­son that child envi­sions in her teacher, one who sweats and labors for the pure thrill, the moment of magic, the grace, the pres­ence of chil­dren before you—young ones or grown up ones.

Today my work is words, as I toil through drafts to advance my craft. As with my for­mer life, my friends, old and new, make all the difference—above all, the spe­cial ones who share the love, the life, the work.

So many peo­ple wanted the chance to do what I’m doing and never got it.

Won’t You Pretty Please Like My Stoic Writer Page?

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My hus­band bought Oliver Burkeman’s new book The Anti­dote (Canon­gate Books Ltd, 2012) and in two days, it was on my night­stand – our sig­nal for “you gotta read this.” Burkeman’s the­sis is that Pos­i­tive Think­ing  – not to be mis­taken for pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy – actu­ally makes us less happy.

Burkeman’s research, art­fully woven from var­i­ous dis­ci­pli­nary strands, leads to the ben­e­fits (i.e., tran­quil­ity, even hap­pi­ness) of Sto­icism.  Remem­ber those guys, Mar­cus Aure­lius, Seneca and Zeno, who were all about logic and over­com­ing destruc­tive emo­tions? Con­trary to gloomy mod­ern usage, a Stoic faces real­i­ties in ways that help her live more fully in the moment and with joy. Yep, the ancient Sto­ics were pretty con­tent with what­ever life threw at them, even as many were led to their executions.

Writ­ers and artists are some­times per­ceived as tor­mented in some way. Why else would we choose to work so hard for so lit­tle? Answer­ing only for me, I am com­pelled to write because writ­ing sat­is­fies me like noth­ing else can. It makes me happy—at least hap­pier than when I’m not able to write.

So this choos­ing to write despite mea­ger or absent extrin­sic rewards like money and sta­tus sounds pretty Stoic. Right?

Nope. The more I read about Sto­icism from Burke­man and in William B. Irvine’s: A Guide to the Good Life: The ancient art of stoic joy (Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2008),  I real­ized how unStoic I am – espe­cially as a writer.

Sto­ics are in tune with their values—what’s most impor­tant in liv­ing one’s life—and they try to act in con­so­nance with them. Noth­ing out­side of this “virtue” really mat­ters. Cer­tainly not oth­ers’ opin­ions of who they are, of what they write and whether they get 5000 friends, fans or likes.

I imag­ine the irrel­e­vance of accep­tance or ado­ra­tion as the sole domain of ultra-famous writ­ers toward the end of their lives. But then Dorothy Parker, Gore Vidal and Kurt Von­negut come to mind. Did they ever care?

I want to not care (so much, any­way) about pub­li­ca­tion accep­tance and what oth­ers think, and, yes, whether they’ll some­day express their accep­tance of my work with their wal­lets, but none of those things is true.

I care. I worry that I’m not keep­ing up the Jone­ses. I’m not sub­mit­ting enough. I’m send­ing my work to the wrong places. I have no MFA so I’m not in the inner cir­cle. I will never get an invi­ta­tion. I am jeal­ous of those whose work I find lack­ing. I am jeal­ous of those whose work I admire. I resent their celebrity sta­tuses and their super­cool tweets. I hit the like but­ton any­way, like a narcotic-fed rat. I, I, I am the duplic­i­tous, mis­er­able anti-Stoic.

I once heard that aware­ness is the first step to last­ing change. So I’m hang­ing on to that.

Given my self-awareness and a gen­uine desire to incor­po­rate Sto­icism into my life, can I have it both ways? Is it pos­si­ble to be a com­mit­ted writer and a prac­tic­ing stoic?

To become the lat­ter, I’ve listed some prac­tices I gleaned from Burke­man and Irvine. (And I’m going to use sec­ond per­son, because I like it. But know it’s not you I’m lec­tur­ing, it’s me.)

  1. Stop try­ing so hard. Don’t pump your­self full of pos­i­tiv­ity and affir­ma­tions, don’t fake it ‘til you make it, no mirror-gazing with cheesy smiles. Don’t spend money on social and polit­i­cal ingra­ti­a­tion. This includes most con­fer­ences. Don’t spend money on moti­va­tional down­loads, books and seminars.
  2. Focus on mat­ters within your con­trol. For you the writer, the very act of sub­mit­ting work is a focus out­side your con­trol. Pos­i­tive think­ing – hope­ful­ness – seems as nec­es­sary as your craft. Whether you send your work to Podunkville Press or The Paris Review doesn’t (the­o­ret­i­cally) mat­ter. Either is an act of hope. The goal: to be pub­lished. Although the qual­ity of writ­ing osten­si­bly mat­ters (espe­cially in TPR), pub­lish­ing deci­sions are almost never within your con­trol. So don’t set your­self up for dis­ap­point­ment, resent­ment, anx­i­ety, depres­sion and all the affec­tive mon­sters attached to unin­vited submissions.
  3. If you want to avoid all these neg­a­tive emo­tions and thoughts, don’t set goals that aren’t fully within your con­trol. Eschew goal-setting unless you have all the influ­ence. (Remem­ber SMART–specific, mea­sured, ambi­tious, reach­able, timely–goals?) Unless you alone can deter­mine a goal’s suc­cess, for­get about it.
  4. Take time to visu­al­ize worst-case sce­nar­ios. Neg­a­tive visu­al­iza­tion will help you appre­ci­ate what you have right now and to remem­ber the tem­po­ral nature of every­thing. Besides writ­ing, what is most impor­tant in your life? Ancient Sto­ics said that virtue was not chastity and purity, but liv­ing one’s own phi­los­o­phy. What makes your life worth liv­ing? What hap­pens if an early death comes to you, a loved one, even your child? Can you envi­sion this and appre­ci­ate at your core how pre­cious life is? Also, what about your writ­ing life might be sud­denly taken? The use of your hands, your mem­ory and other cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties? Acknowl­edge and appre­ci­ate your faculties.
  5. Do not waste your time on fame. Sto­ics define fame as the want or need to be liked. Extend this to your work, your writ­ing. Face­book. The acqui­si­tion of friends, com­ments, responses and likes, sub­mis­sions, and fans. It includes face-to-face read­ings, open mics, rejec­tion let­ters and emails, snubs, slights, endorse­ment blurbs, rec­om­men­da­tions. Don’t focus on pop­u­lar­ity. Be respect­ful and gra­cious, but remain most faith­ful to who you are and what your life means. As a writer, the only ques­tion is: why am I writing? 
  6. Do not waste your time on for­tune. Because most writ­ers prob­a­bly don’t count on becom­ing the next Stephen King, you prob­a­bly aren’t writ­ing in order to retire at 40. But even writ­ers want to live com­fort­ably. For­tune, as described by ancient Sto­ics, had to do with any pos­ses­sion or means. Appre­ci­ate the envi­ron­ment you now have (whether you own where you live or not), your clothes, fur­ni­ture. These could be sud­denly taken away. As for future earn­ings, money from your writ­ing could be a good thing – the Sto­ics were not anti-wealth like the Cynics—unless the money (or fame) becomes your goal. Nei­ther is a fea­si­ble life phi­los­o­phy because nei­ther fame nor for­tune can lend intrin­sic mean­ing to someone’s life.

I think I can prac­tice most of these except that I’ll con­tinue to sub­mit my work to oth­ers who make pub­li­ca­tion deci­sions. While the tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing model is imper­fect, good edi­tors help main­tain cer­tain stan­dards of qual­ity, are tuned into reader sen­si­bil­i­ties and con­nect themes. I’ll be selec­tive about where I send my work, but my ego still has an evo­lu­tion­ary bent:  it wants my writ­ing in as many good mag­a­zines and jour­nals as pos­si­ble. As long as I can sep­a­rate me from my work (see how I con­ve­niently sep­a­rated myself from my ego?), I may be occa­sion­ally dis­ap­pointed, but not angst-ridden.

Also, I will more care­fully explore self-publishing which seems a per­fectly Stoic solu­tion for writers.

I real­ize that embrac­ing Sto­icism may seem odd in this bur­geon­ing tech­no­log­i­cal era. A writer must write, edit, mar­ket, design, sell and con­tin­u­ously acquire new tech­ni­cal skills. Above all, she must “put her­self out there” – which can con­fuse human being with artifact.

But an age-old truth remains: When things hap­pen out­side our con­trol, we can­not change any­thing except for our reac­tions. It’s easy to be part of just about any­thing now. While we have more access and input than ever, we (still) rarely have com­plete control.

When I for­get this truth, I’m bound by frus­tra­tion, anx­i­ety, jeal­ousy, pet­ti­ness, resent­ment and even anger some­times.  And some­times is too often. Although I’m try­ing not to set goals, anymore.

 

 

 

Finding your audacious remains

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Try to remem­ber how you felt as a child on a Sat­ur­day morn­ing. Every­thing seemed pos­si­ble. What could hap­pen at any moment was any­thing. Kids run on hope and pos­i­tiv­ity with no aware­ness of these affec­tive states and how impor­tant they are to become a con­fi­dent, happy person.

I don’t con­sider myself a neg­a­tive per­son, but the loss of wak­ing in that oh, boy, what’s going to hap­pen today? state left me many years ago.  I don’t think that I’m depressed or if I am, I’ve been less enthused for a long while. Occa­sion­ally, I look for­ward to cer­tain days more than oth­ers; but I no longer hop out of bed, eager to build a space­ship or put on a play.

This hope, the child­like kind that’s wrapped in audac­ity, is–for me–the great­est loss of get­ting older. Although I’d like bet­ter eye­sight and more elas­tic skin, they mat­ter noth­ing com­pared to the bold con­fi­dence I once car­ried inside me.

Now I want it back.

A lit­tle knowl­edge is a ter­ri­ble thing

I think I know what hap­pens. Over time, we become aware of grown-up con­structs like money, odds, obsta­cles and the prac­ti­cal dif­fi­cul­ties of chang­ing where and how we live, but espe­cially who we are accord­ing to our fam­i­lies and other social iden­ti­ties (class, gen­der, race). Plus, doing some­thing dif­fer­ent than every­one else takes a lot of work.

We begin to accept a smaller world of pos­si­ble and, sadly, believe we’re matur­ing by being real­is­tic: exclud­ing what may be less prob­a­ble, accord­ing to research.

But sta­tis­tics are known liars.

We see excep­tions every­where: A mixed-race Pres­i­dent, the grammy-winner born a  crack baby, J.K. Rowling’s rags to riches.

We give far too much cre­dence to what we don’t know.

One thing seems cer­tain. We don’t sim­ply choose, “Hey, today I’m not going to hop out of bed.”  Aches and pains that some of us deal with don’t devour our auda­cious hope over night. My guess is that over time we inter­nal­ize the belief that the great­est pre­dic­tor of future behav­ior is what peo­ple have done in the past. See­ing how oth­ers’ sto­ries, espe­cially the sad ones, pre­dictably play out val­i­dates our belief.

At a cer­tain point, we begin to live as if our story is in final type­set, the presses are rolling and No changes are pos­si­ble! froths some fic­ti­tious publisher.

Any hope for hope­less rut-dwellers?

Although it’s fully man­i­fest when we are kids, audac­ity doesn’t stop when we’re teenagers. It tends to evolve into excite­ment about sex or how to start a band. In time, grind of high school is replaced with what col­lege or travel or a new job might offer. We’ve begun to under­stand what adults call a rut but we believe (and this is good) that this rut won’t hap­pen to us.

If we’re really dili­gent, it doesn’t. Not for a while. Espe­cially if we’re allowed to con­tinue to learn and we get oppor­tu­ni­ties to prac­tice what we like to do.

I switched majors three times in my first three semes­ter at Illi­nois State Uni­ver­sity, but I found jour­nal­ism. I liked it so much that I wanted to be a reporter for ISU’s daily paper. Next, I wanted to be news edi­tor. I didn’t know that I couldn’t do these things and I’m sure I didn’t do them well. But I did them anyway.

My senior year I mar­ried some­one from whom I’d been learn­ing all along. He’d been a reporter, news edi­tor, mag­a­zine edi­tor, and editor-in-chief. I think he’d even cre­ated a new adviser posi­tion on the paper’s edi­to­r­ial board so he could occupy it dur­ing his last semes­ter. A few months before he grad­u­ated, he was hired to report for the Bloomington-Normal daily, The Pan­ta­graph. This was the early and reces­sion­ary ‘80s. Most of the rest of us were out of luck. It was either grad school or a pub­lic rela­tions job. I bought more books.

Instead of heads-down, invest­ing years as the best damned cub reporter The Pan­ta­graph could ask for, my young hus­band looked around. He got curi­ous, maybe a lit­tle bored and a lot auda­cious. He began to notice other things that he could learn to help make a good  news­pa­per a great news­pa­per. We’d been mar­ried a year, maybe two when he told me about a new posi­tion the man­ag­ing edi­tor had agreed to give him.

“If you want a job badly enough, write your own job descrip­tion,” he smiled.

Fake it ’til you make it

That was 30 years ago. He is no longer my hus­band, but a good friend. He may not have the degree of audac­ity he once had, but thanks to his advice, I called on what­ever traces of the stuff that might remain my blood­stream today.

There’s a job I’ve seen posted for the last six weeks at a mag­a­zine I’ve loved for the last 25 years. I want this job but I know I don’t have recent enough expe­ri­ence. I am not young. I have no MFA. But I love this pub­li­ca­tion and I want to work there in some capacity.

Although I didn’t write my own job descrip­tion, I felt a bit lighter–maybe it was hope despite grown-up odds–as I took my enve­lope to the post office today.

 

 

 

 

Creating More Than The Floor He Walks On

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Stephane Magloire is tall. At first I don’t notice. It’s his smile that takes me in, as if he is inter­view­ing me, and some­thing else I can’t quite define. Some­thing organic that I iden­tify all at once early into the inter­view: his open­ness to the moment.

Stephane is Amer­i­can, born in Haiti. I hear no accent, but a rich and gen­er­ous voice inter­spersed with laughter.

“I con­sider myself an actor/singer actu­ally. I started out as a singer, always singing, pre­dom­i­nantly at (South Orange-Maplewood, NJ) high school. I grew up hear­ing mom sing and picked up on it.”

His mother, a Hait­ian physi­cian who came to the U.S. to take licens­ing exams before bring­ing her young chil­dren over, was “not into me being an artist.” I press lightly for details. “A mix­ture of things: I was a tenor; I sing high. I was born in Haiti…(his voice drops into a lower reg­is­ter) this is what a man should do.” And, one other ingre­di­ent: his com­ing out at around age 17.

“Even in col­lege, I had this high range, then a space where there is air and what they call squeaks.” He tells me a the­ory: the squeaks come from trauma. He was told by a voice teacher that he’d had access to a very diverse vocal range (think of a door creak). “But some­thing hap­pens that no longer lets you access that range. I remem­ber when I was really young, Mariah Carey’s Emo­tions was on in the car. And she does the, like, (he sings very high falsetto) and I was doing it and my mom turns around and says ‘if you ever do that again’… and I like froze: what? ‘It’s high singing and you’re a boy and boys should not sing high.’ I will always remem­ber that! The minute the voice teacher said that, I said, “I know the moment, I know it!” he laughs.

“Any time she was in the room, I’d bring my voice down.” I ask for clar­i­fi­ca­tion on his cur­rent vocal range. He still sings tenor but the really high notes, he says, are squeaks. I ask him how he feels about that.

“Always two things: I love my mom and appre­ci­ate every­thing she’s done for me. Every­thing she’s gone through to bring me here now to be in this room with you. I will always thank her. (And) there was always that feel­ing of fol­low­ing in her foot­steps and being a doc­tor… She’s so dri­ven. She wanted that for us… But I always had artis­tic out­lets; I played vio­lin, I sang and danced.”

So, she sup­ported those artis­tic endeavors?

“No. Except the violin—”

Help me under­stand, then, how you persevered —

“I just did it.”

Was there any­one in your life, a men­tor or a guide who said, Hey you need to be at NYU. How did you get from mid­dle school to–

“Governor’s School (at the Col­lege of New Jersey).”

She was okay with you going there?

“NO! I almost didn’t go to Governor’s School!” He laughs.

I almost yell, This is the story I want!

So, he tells me about his junior year in high school, unaware of the Governor’s School (GS). “I had a best friend at the time who was also a singer. We did regional and all-state cho­rus together.” She was nom­i­nated for GS; he wasn’t.  After she told him about the pro­gram, an arts-intensive four weeks of col­lege train­ing between junior and senior year, “I told her, ‘you’ll totally get in’ because she’s a phe­nom­e­nal singer.”

Stephane didn’t think much about GS until his guid­ance coun­selor asked him if he was nom­i­nated, assum­ing that he would be. Based on the size of their high school, Stephane learned, two could be nom­i­nated. “I went back to my cho­rus teacher who put me through all these hoops, rings… Hey, I should be nom­i­nated!… you… (laughs) crazy per­son.” Although Stephane laughs, he notices the ques­tion in my eyes. “Still to this day, I’m so angry with him because he kept try­ing to… ‘I’m going to nom­i­nate this per­son, this per­son’… I was like, No, I’m phe­nom­e­nal,” he says emphat­i­cally. “Even­tu­ally I got nominated.”

Stephane and his friend Suzanne worked on their appli­ca­tions, helped each other with audi­tion tapes. Nei­ther imag­ined that he would get a call­back and she wouldn’t. I said, Mom, I need to go to the Col­lege of New Jer­sey. This is a big deal. She said, ‘I don’t know what this is for. Singing? I’m busy.’ I was like NO, No!”

“I fought with her tooth and nail. She got in the car, drove me down there. But she said I can’t bring you back. I said what­ever; I will walk home. I audi­tioned. I felt good about it. I was still try­ing to fig­ure out me as a singer. And being so baf­fled I was there. The whole time (think­ing) Suzanne should be here… I ended up get­ting a ride from one of my friends. I found out (he was accepted) three weeks after. This time I got an enve­lope. Not big. (I thought) oh, no! he laughs. I left it there for a day.”

Sounds like Billy Elliot.

“I didn’t see Billy Elliot. (He sees my eyes widen.) I know I know! Another friend said she’d got­ten a thin let­ter. I ripped it open. It began, “It is …” I thought it would read with regret, but it said with great plea­sure…”

Obvi­ously that was a piv­otal time in your life. After those four weeks (at GS) did you know that was your path?

“Yes. I went to GS not know­ing any­thing about the artist world (except for cho­rus in high school). But this was a com­mu­nity of artists… we talked about the arts, yes, but at the same time we were real peo­ple. It wasn’t fright­en­ing or scary. Cof­fee shops, par­ing with peo­ple, a small ver­sion of what hap­pened in col­lege… (GS) started the whole idea of net­work­ing. I’m still close friends with my GS boyfriend at the time. (He’s) in law school, one of my best friends. He did cre­ative writ­ing. He still finds ways of bring­ing his art into what he’s doing now.”

At the end of a suc­cess­ful sum­mer, Stephane was asked by the GS fac­ulty if he’d con­sid­ered the­atre. “I’d done high school plays but never thought I’d be in a school for act­ing. They said, ‘You need to be an actor.’” He was 17.

Stephane chose New York Uni­ver­sity “because if I didn’t want a con­ser­va­tory, I could switch over to aca­d­e­mics.” He chose a dou­ble major where he could grad­u­ate in three years from Tisch’s (arts) pro­gram and dou­ble major in psychology.

Stephane did musi­cal the­ater stu­dio, then called CAP (Col­lab­o­ra­tive Arts Project) 21. He explains all seven NYU stu­dios as sep­a­rate, requir­ing a two-year com­mit­ment from the stu­dent before switch­ing stu­dios. Gen­eral the­ater courses and audi­tions for all-school plays/musicals were the only oppor­tu­ni­ties for stu­dents across stu­dios to integrate.

He loved his first year: Dreams of a Tony, he had a boyfriend. “Every­thing would be great. What I appre­ci­ated was they got me, as a dancer, to own myself, my height.”

“The bad thing about it (was) mak­ing me into one thing. For me, singing, danc­ing, act­ing (as a pack­age) is not it. I wanted to explore each of them indi­vid­u­ally instead of together. They wanted me to keep those three together. Also (it became) way too catty, too dramatic.

“My sec­ond year, I hated it.  I was so against how they were teach­ing me…  dis­re­gard­ing my needs. After that I didn’t think I wanted to be an actor.” Stephane pokes fun of his younger self: ‘I don’t want to do this any­more… this sucks,’” he whines, smiling.

“So, I booked a flight to Dublin.”

Why Dublin?

“It was the cheap­est ticket I could find. Back­packed 10 weeks by myself. I came back, just want­ing to be a stu­dent. Third year, no the­ater. At fall semes­ter, I added to the psy­chol­ogy degree, also (learned) sign lan­guage. I decided to study abroad, go to Ghana (where) I could do com­mu­nity ser­vice. When I was younger, I’d learned the (Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage) alpha­bet when mom was work­ing with the deaf.”

So, sec­ond semes­ter junior year, Stephane went to Ghana. “I learned dance. Deaf stu­dents use drums to feel vibra­tions. While being there, trav­el­ing in Africa… so many sto­ries. (It) sounds cliché but you’re get­ting all these images and while I like to feel that in my the­ater, (there were) so many out­lets to do that.”

Stephane applied for the exper­i­men­tal the­ater track, back at NYU. Exper­i­men­tal included  Gro­towski, an “out-of-the book/box direc­tor.” He did physical-based work; the premise that words and emo­tions will come out of movement.

“Peo­ple make fun or it, but lay on the floor, roll around and feel your body. You rarely get the chance to do that. (You may be think­ing) I’m tired. Just had lunch… (but) how do you feel? What’s affect­ing me? Why am I cry­ing? You self-explore that through move­ment. You add script to it. Then add song to it.”

Stephane was able to take “a bunch of dif­fer­ent classes: move­ment, yoga, chore­og­ra­phy, music. Also an inde­pen­dent project. I didn’t write any­thing other than this one email back-and-forth with my friend. It was called Speak (and became) a whole dance project, eight girls who danced to dif­fer­ent songs/emotions. Through the whole thing there’s only one piece where one girl is danc­ing and another is read­ing the text back and forth between my friend and I. All just… really, just…something about the female form that’s so dif­fer­ent from male form.”

That 2007 sum­mer after NYU grad­u­a­tion, Stephane took advan­tage of the Inter­na­tional The­ater Work­shop (ITW) pro­gram in Ams­ter­dam. He took clown­ing and self-scripting. “You write more. You really just sit there and what­ever stream of thought, (you) track it, every time you revisit it you add to it. (You) can take things off. What you thought as ran­dom stream of con­scious­ness to a piece of work, like all these things inside of you. I was like okay. I think I want to do this writ­ing thing.”

But “that whole year (after return­ing), I didn’t do much of it,” he laughs. “I did a lot of off-Broadway shows, help­ing teach­ers at NYU; it wasn’t really ful­fill­ing. When I was at NYU I audi­tioned for things out­side the school” (which he points out, he wasn’t sup­posed to do). He audi­tioned for STOMP, got into finals, but couldn’t do it “because I was still a stu­dent.” He also audi­tioned for Fuerza Bruta, “a sort of physical-base thing. I got into it, but my height was an issue.” He explains that most males in the cast are the same height because they must switch roles. “They would have had to alter every­thing for me. (But) those two were the best audi­tion expe­ri­ences I’ve ever had in my entire life. All phys­i­cal move­ment and like doing things… it was great!”

Because he wasn’t able to do “these crazy cool off-the-cuff things, “ Stephane audi­tioned for more con­ven­tional fare. He had friends who had intern­ships with dif­fer­ent cast­ing places. “So I got called in for some great work. I didn’t like how the proc­tor (per­son call­ing out names dur­ing audi­tions) … they’re so mean. If you’re not equity (Actor’s Equity Asso­ci­a­tion, a labor union for actors), you might as well be… like… less than human. If you have equity peo­ple walk in… I had the priv­i­lege of still being put with equity peo­ple but you see peo­ple you’re friends with treat non-equity/other peo­ple less than human. This indus­try is… (he recalls his thoughts at that time) I don’t like how I’m feel­ing right now just being in the whole audi­tion process. So I’ll go to grad­u­ate school.”

Stephane audi­tioned for Jul­liard. “The first year, I didn’t get in. I was really upset. It all had to do with a breakup. I dated this guy and it didn’t go well and I was like, I’m going to show him! Yeah, you’re out of school. You being a big fish in high school and col­lege and then go into real world: Where am I right now? (he rhetor­i­cally asks). You’re just sort of a fish, really.”

We’re all fishes.

He laughs. “I needed to do some­thing.  And audi­tion­ing for NYU was great. But I watched all my other friends audi­tion for like 10 schools and that seemed stress­ful but also like a lot of fun.”

He audi­tioned for Jul­liard and Yale. At Yale he real­ized “I didn’t want to be in New Haven (CT). There’s noth­ing there that’s stim­u­lat­ing. I told them I was tak­ing myself out of the audi­tion process. I went back to Jul­liard and that audi­tion process is cool in a way that’s not expected. Peo­ple think Jul­liard is so stress­ful. They are so wel­com­ing! They just want to see you do your thing.”

(I’m con­fused.) But you didn’t go to Julliard…?

“No. I didn’t. If I would have got­ten in that first year, I would have done it. I have this thing that I do. If I don’t get some­thing, I give myself two days to be upset about it. Just two days. I found out on Fri­day. I had Fri­day and Sat­ur­day to be upset. I woke up on Sun­day. I was like, ‘Oh I really wanted to go! (He con­tin­ues his inner mono­logue.) Gosh, if you’re going to be that upset about it, then just kill your­self.’ It was this flip­pant thing that I just said.

“But then I lay in bed… huh?… what would I do, if I actu­ally decided today’s the day, I gave myself 24 hours before I killed myself? This story came out. I pulled out my lap­top. What are all the things you’d do? Why you’d do it? What’s the bucket list? Here’s the baby idea. A screen­play. It stayed there. Then for the next year, I’d over­hear some­thing and write it down. All the things peo­ple were say­ing. I don’t know why that hap­pened. This one ran­dom idea came up: I’m going to write about this.

“That’s what led me to audi­tion (at Jul­liard) again. I got in, but it’s four years!” (He men­tions that Jul­liard just started a master’s program.)

So you were going for another BFA?

“No. If you already have a BFA, (it would be) a cer­tifi­cate.  That sec­ond year, I felt more lucid with decision-making skills. It’s like I’m not going to get a full ride, num­ber one. It’s four years of me doing this. I have all these what seem­ingly look like ran­dom things I want to do. (And) you have three times to audi­tion so if I say no, I can always audi­tion again. There’s oppor­tu­nity. My drive to go that first year was not my drive to go the sec­ond year. So, I’ve been writ­ing ever since.”

This really pro­pelled you as writer, what year?

“2009. Yeah. This was baby project. Ever since then, I would wake up, go to a cof­fee shop and start writing.“

You’re talk­ing short sto­ries, screenwriting?

“Screen­writ­ing. Then from there, meet­ing other writ­ers. A friend of mine intro­duced me to a girl’s blog I found really inter­est­ing (part of Effa­ble Arts); they were doing blog­ger plays. I had a blog at the time.”  One of his friends described it as “mad ram­blings of Vir­ginia Wolff … I was sort of detox­ing from like, what­ever. From blog entries, (I) started work­ing on one-act plays.  Then, con­tin­u­ally putting myself into the writ­ing com­mu­nity. Then some other friends at NYU, one is a graphic designer and some­one who’s work­ing with Ryan Mur­phy at Glee… send­ing them pieces of it because those are peo­ple I trusted. I’d write a scene and I’d send it. They’re like “this is really cool… throw­ing in other sides of it.

“Essen­tially what I have now are really cool con­tents of a pack­age to give some­one. When a screen­play is ready, here it is in writ­ing form, here is some­one who has direc­to­r­ial notes for it, here is some­one with graphic notes for it, and my boyfriend is a pho­tog, so he does a lot of story-boarding for me. Instead of pay­ing all this money to film a trailer, take pho­tos and story-board it; an eas­ier way to do it, it’s cheaper. (It’s) essen­tially what I’m doing now.”

Where is this lead­ing, do you think?

“I’m doing this because, and this is a life goal of mine, I don’t know if this is actu­ally going to hap­pen but one thing I’ve always got­ten since I was young is that I look like, (kind of laughs) it’s always after I’ve done some­thing the­atri­cal, they’re like, ‘You remind me of a young Sid­ney Poitier.’ I’ve got­ten that a lot. So I want to play Sid­ney Poitier.”

That’s your goal.

“That would be me, like, ‘I have done some­thing suc­cess­ful. Me play­ing Sid­ney Poitier.’”

Huge Hait­ian influence.

“I kept sit­ting there say­ing I’ll wait. Finally I said fuck it. Why don’t I write the screen­play? There’s…”

So you did that?

“Essen­tially I’m work­ing towards going there. My goal is to use my writ­ing to bring me back to into what I love, which is per­form­ing, which is act­ing. It’s okay to wait for that. I read Mea­sure of a Man, which is Poitier’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy. I’ve seen a lot of inter­views with actors I really respect. I think Cate Blanchett shits gold. (laughs) She’s like amaz­ing. So it’s like all the things I walk away from when I see inter­views, hear them speak. These actors that you see on awards shows, they’re all friends, knew each other when they were noth­ing, (just) appre­ci­at­ing each other’s art.

“You’re wound up. In high school and col­lege you’re wound up like this lit­tle toy. They throw you into the world and you’re freak­ing out, bang­ing drums and every­thing. It’s frus­trat­ing, it’s upset­ting but at same time it’s nec­es­sary. If you real­ize that it’s okay.”

What’s okay?

“The wait and the not know­ing. I want to say 75% of the peo­ple I went to NYU with that I’m still friends with are no longer actors. They couldn’t wait. I don’t know if it was fear, I don’t know if it’s frus­tra­tion, but they went back to school to do nurs­ing or they are doing… they are pulled into all these other facets in life. Or they can still be an artist in some way, shape, form… I have a friend who is in law school, still going to be an actor, (he’s) just going to be in a courtroom.”

This really dove­tails with what Ro (Ro Bod­die is another actor I’d inter­viewed) was talk­ing about, too. He said it in a dif­fer­ent way, but I like the con­sis­tency of what I’m hear­ing. As a writer, peo­ple talk about rejec­tion let­ters… most of the time you don’t get one. I like the way you put that.

“It’s patience, one. But also tak­ing the small wins and being appre­cia­tive of them. But not mak­ing them into a big thing. I recently optioned off a script. It’s like, Yah! But doing that until the moment they actu­ally roll film? Any­where from 3–5 years.”

Con­grat­u­la­tions!

“Thank you. That leads me to so many more things: net­work­ing, meet­ing new peo­ple. I real­ize that’s also equally impor­tant. You can’t just sit there and wait for things to hap­pen, but be aware of what’s around you. In a way, I’ve never stopped being an actor because I still think like an actor in my writ­ing. Even now, this one (his) script is cool and dra­matic… but I real­ize as an actor, when you go into the audi­tion room you do this one mono­logue: ‘I like that. Do you have some­thing else?’ If you say no, you’re done. You never say no. Like, never. When I went into Jul­liard I had seven mono­logues ready to go. They kept ask­ing you. ‘Oh, wow. You’re versatile.’

“Now I’m work­ing on a sci-fi type of screen­play: What if our ini­tial idea of guardian angels were not really that… what if they, before, were the beings who helped you move onto the other side ver­sus the ones who helped save you? And a series of things that hap­pened that switched it to make it now that they save your life. A series of other things: what would be other things peo­ple would ask me? I watch a shi–/ton of movies that makes me seem like I’m not doing any­thing with my life. But I turn to my friends and I go, ‘You’re in law school. You’re sit­ting in a library. You’re doing your home­work the same way I’m doing mine.’

Being okay with what I’m doing. It’s been a great strength because at the end of the day, I’ll get in front of my com­puter and stare at it, it’s star­ing back at me and I don’t write a word for an hour. And I could get really frustrated…‘forget this, I don’t want to do this any­more.’ But it’s… you’re learn­ing. You’re building.”

Your mom is brave, smart… you have that as foun­da­tion. But she was not an artist, right? To ben­e­fit these kids who don’t know where to begin? Just a love of singing or dance. What kind of advice would you give some­one think­ing about or dream­ing about the arts?

“My ini­tial thought is so cliché: You make the floor you walk on. At end of day there will be some­one to help you if you just ask for it. There’ll be some­one on your side even if you didn’t real­ize they’re on your side. My exam­ple from GS is that I’d got­ten in and the day I was sup­posed to go, I went into the city, to go with a friend of mine to get her tongue pierced. Mom said you need to be home at this time or I won’t take you to GS. I got home five min­utes late. She said I’m not bring­ing you. Every­one I knew at GS had already gone.  A friend of mine… I ran­domly I called her and her mom said she had time and drove me to GS. There are always peo­ple, it seems a ran­dom act of kind­ness, and all you have to do is ask. Really.

“The thing is with my mom, I think any­one who’s going through this, you start to under­stand your par­ents the older you get. It wasn’t that she wasn’t sup­port­ing me. She didn’t under­stand how to sup­port me because she had no con­cept of what I was really doing. It was like we were speak­ing two dif­fer­ent languages.”

Con­se­quences are impor­tant to her.

“Right.”

Regard­less (of the lack of under­stand­ing) maybe?

“Essen­tially I needed that because I felt that the kind of per­son I am, if I had that con­stant push to do some­thing, I prob­a­bly wouldn’t do it.  I need to fig­ure things out myself. It’s also that other side of know­ing what you need and how to apply that to what­ever you want. But just do it. At the end of the day, just fuckin’ do it. The worst thing that could hap­pen is that you end up real­iz­ing you don’t want to do it. My junior year at NYU I was like ‘I don’t want to do the­ater. I never want to do it ever again.’ But that whole time I said I didn’t want to do it, I was doing it. And finally I woke up and (under­stood) ‘actu­ally, you want to do this. Do it!’  I could go to law school. I could do any other thing, I could go back to school and get a grad­u­ate degree in psy­chol­ogy and be a shrink or what­ever; I don’t want to do that, though.”

What do you want to do?

“I want to act. I want to, I want to—”

Play Sid­ney?

(whis­pers) “Yeah.  I, oh, man, that would be… wonderful.”

 

 

 

 

When Student Becomes Master

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One fea­ture I love about Zen Bud­dhism (as well as Star Wars and The Karate Kid) is that a begin­ner can — and will, with prac­tice — become the expert. When I inter­viewed Sara Seger in Man­hat­tan back in Feb­ru­ary, I was not think­ing about phi­los­o­phy or film.

My daugh­ter Ali Bill knows Sara from Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina School of the Arts (UNCSA) where Sara danced through high school and Ali com­pleted a BFA in drama. “Sara has to be some­one you inter­view,” Ali told me before I arrived in the city. I believed her, and that was all I knew.

This is what I learned:

Sara is 20. As a dancer, her com­port­ment didn’t sur­prise me but her con­fi­dence did. Straight, unpre­ten­tious and none of her answers weak­ened by like, yeah, uh, so.  Sara is aware of her advan­tages: a suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neur­ial mother, her father an elec­tri­cal engi­neer, a full-time nanny for nine years. She got these facts out of the way, unapolo­get­i­cally and astutely, after I explained the aim of my project: a resource for mid­dle– and high-school stu­dents who are inter­ested in an arts career but don’t have artist friends or fam­ily to ask what that path might look like. It seemed a good idea to ask work­ing artists, aged 19–29, to share their stories.

Within the first two min­utes, I learned that Sara’s day job is a full-time dancer with Rioult (pro­nouned ree-you), a New York City-based mod­ern dance com­pany that pays com­pet­i­tively and includes health insur­ance benefits.

I was dying to hear the back­story. When did she know she wanted to be a dancer?

In sec­ond grade, she said, she knew.

With the excep­tion of 4-year-old Sara’s refusal to attend her YMCA dance recital (“the pink and white polka dot cos­tumes were hor­ri­ble”), Sara fell in love with dance at 7 — at first, tap — then jazz and sev­eral oth­ers fol­lowed, includ­ing bal­let. “By 10 or 11, it was obvi­ous that I wanted more.”

The owner of the New Jer­sey stu­dio where she danced sug­gested that she go to Man­hat­tan for jazz, hiphop — “all the things I couldn’t get enough of” — and con­tinue bal­let in New Jer­sey. “My mother, bless her heart, drove me in (to Broad­way Dance Cen­ter) every Sat­ur­day and Sunday.”

Even at nine Sara couldn’t wait to change into her dance clothes after (Catholic) school. “I would rather dance than watch TV.” By 12: “They were say­ing, she’s not a nor­mal 12-year-old, far more accom­plished than the other kids.” Even then, Sara real­ized she couldn’t keep doing the same cir­cuit “and feel like I was get­ting enough out of it. I sat down with my par­ents at 12, maybe 13″ after dili­gently research­ing con­ser­va­to­ries. “I told them, ‘I want to go to UNCSA.’”

Sara audi­tioned for her fresh­man high school year. “My big secret now: I never really got into what I wanted,” not directly. “I got into the mod­ern pro­gram but I was only in eighth grade; they only took sopho­mores.” Sean Sul­li­van, who became her men­tor, sug­gested Sara talk to the head of bal­let. If Sara could talk her way into the bal­let pro­gram for fresh­man year and switch to mod­ern, prob­lem solved.

Of course she could.

At this point in the inter­view, I remem­ber won­der­ing: Is a per­son born with this much tenac­ity? Is it nature, nur­ture or just plain luck: know­ing what the hell you want and not let­ting any­one or any­thing stand in your way?

Before grad­u­at­ing high school at UNCSA two years ago, Sara’s par­ents were adamant about col­lege. Sara told them, “I’m kind of over it. I mean I lived in a dorm and did a lot of my work with col­lege stu­dents who became close friends.” She offered com­pro­mise: “I only want to go to Jul­liard, I told them. But I didn’t get in.” So she signed up for com­mu­nity col­lege classes (the alter­na­tive com­pro­mise) in marketing.

Despite well-meaning advice she got from almost every­one, even dance instruc­tors at UNCSA who reminded her that dreams don’t come true imme­di­ately, Sara danced with Allen Ailey at City Cen­ter and at the Lin­coln Cen­ter,  join­ing Rioult in 2011.

Sara’s excite­ment is pal­pa­ble still, again, as I lis­ten to her dig­i­tal voice three months later: her descrip­tion of Rioult’s upcom­ing Euro­pean tour (from which she returned in April). “School’s really not an issue at this time,” and I remem­ber I’d half expected her to wink. But she was earnest and grate­ful. Her day job a “seri­ous bless­ing.  I knew at 11 or so I was going to (dance pro­fes­sion­ally). I just didn’t know it would hap­pen this quickly.”

While tran­scrib­ing her voice to text, I recall a moment: sit­ting across from Sara at The Chelsea Pines Inn, inspired, the real­iza­tion that she could enlighten a wider demo­graphic than the teens for whom this project is intended. So, my last ques­tion: What advice would you give any­one who thinks they might want to pur­sue a career in the arts?

She lays it out as if she’s known for decades the secrets of success:

1. Trust your­self. Peo­ple will tell you scary things like ‘You won’t make it.’ If you want to make it, you can. If you have two peo­ple (not nec­es­sar­ily par­ents) who are sup­port­ive, you can do it. Hav­ing a lot to learn never stopped me from learn­ing. I’m never going to stop learn­ing. I’m alive.

2. A major­ity of suc­cess has to do with peo­ple you choose to sur­round your­self with. My dance friends under­stood me. Thank God I never had to go to high school with–I hate to say it but–nor­mal high school kids, cause I never would have made it. My friends (from early dance classes and UNCSA) accepted and encour­aged me.

3. Read. I spent so much time at the (UNCSA) library. Every­thing. I love com­edy; it relieves stress. I enjoy poetry, plays. (I sug­gest she might pur­sue act­ing at some point. She laughs.) Maybe when my body isn’t able to do what it does now. But it’s a mis­take to pin­point one area of the arts and only focus on that. Be open to lots of things to suc­ceed.

If I hadn’t sat across from this beau­ti­ful, lithe 20-year-old woman, I might believe the per­son behind this voice is toward the end of her career, maybe on the lec­ture cir­cuit — a mas­ter inspir­ing eager grasshop­pers. But I was there, grate­ful to hear some of her story, unaware that Sara Seger was teach­ing me some­thing: Nature, nur­ture, and priv­i­lege don’t account for every­thing. Sara prac­tices hard. But that isn’t all: When she fell in love in sec­ond grade, she was brave enough to fully com­mit to it. And that kind of com­mit­ment to mas­tery has noth­ing to do with age, every­thing to do with tenacity.

 

 

 

 

 

Cutting Fabric in Measured Time

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When Susan Woodring, author of Goliath (St. Martin’s Press) told me she wanted to con­tribute to work­er­writes, I was thrilled. In addi­tion to Susan’s deft char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Goliath’s work­ing class, Susan is a long-time fan of Studs Terkel. Here Susan shares a per­sonal story that Studs would have have loved. I hope you do, too.

The sum­mer between grad­u­at­ing high school and leav­ing for col­lege, I worked two part-time jobs. One I loved. I was a floater at a day­care, fill­ing in wher­ever and when­ever an extra hand was needed. I spent my days play­ing hide-and-go-seek with the 18-month-olds, dia­per­ing infants, and keep­ing order on the 4-year-old bus on its weekly excur­sions to the movies or the park.

My other job was at a fab­ric store, mea­sur­ing and cut­ting cloth for cus­tomers. This job I hated. The cus­tomers were exact­ing—fussy—in a way that made 18-year-old me want to roll my eyes. I han­dled enor­mous bolts of uphol­stery cloth. I stood on a concrete-beneath-rubber-tile floor until my legs ached and my feet swelled. There I was, me in my last few months of ado­les­cence, wear­ing a company-issue poly­ester smock with a pair of scis­sors and a mea­sur­ing tape tucked into the pocket. I knew noth­ing about sewing, or about the fab­ric I was mea­sur­ing. I couldn’t read a But­t­er­ick pat­tern to save my life. Me, ho-hum, lean­ing against my fabric-cutting counter, wait­ing, wait­ing, wait­ing for my shift to be over.

I was young and ener­getic and ide­al­is­tic in ways that both hearten me now, look­ing back, and make me want to roll my much older eyes. I can remem­ber quite clearly think­ing, as I willed those long hours to pass, that I should never do what I was doing. I should never will time to pass. Even at that young age I real­ized the stuff—time—was finite. That time is life. And so after a few weeks, I quit.

I didn’t mind hard work—my job at the day­care was exhausting—but I believed, with­out say­ing so, that I had a right to a job that chal­lenged me…at least a lit­tle. Deal­ing with defi­ant two-year-olds and a mini chicken-pox epi­demic was no pic­nic, but at least there was the sat­is­fac­tion of sooth­ing the infant back to sleep or bro­ker­ing peace between two war­ring three-year-olds. Yes, I had to mop dried-up peanut-butter off the floor while the tod­dlers slept, and yes, I dealt with more than my share of tiny people’s var­i­ous unsightly bod­ily expul­sions, but I was happy with the vari­ety my job offered me. Every day was dif­fer­ent, and I loved that.

Five years later, I’d earned a Bach­e­lors of Edu­ca­tion degree, worked a year abroad teach­ing Eng­lish as a For­eign Lan­guage, and was set­tling into a full-time mid­dle school teach­ing job in Cald­well County, a small fur­ni­ture– and textile-producing county in the foothills of North Car­olina. There, I learned a tru­ism about the teach­ing life that extends to my cur­rent job as a home­school­ing mom: the days were long but the peri­ods flew by much too quickly.

Each day felt like a mini-lifetime, as if I’d hatched there, in my before-students class­room, the light through the win­dow still weak, a very strong and very bad cup of cof­fee in my hand. I hus­tled through my days, rush­ing to get all the paper­work done, the lessons planned, my copies made. I left late each after­noon with blue and green vis-à-vis ink stain­ing my fin­gers, my bones and mind and patience wea­ried, my feet throb­bing with a pain sim­i­lar to that of my fabric-store days.

And yet, the dif­fer­ence was that I hadn’t felt the pain accu­mu­lat­ing over the day as I stood on the hard show­room floor, watch­ing the clock. Instead, the aching came at the end of the day when my class­room had emp­tied, all my rau­cous lit­tle thirteen-year-olds tum­bling out into the halls, onto the buses. When I could go ahead and put my feet up and dive into a pile of eighth-grade essays on what they had learned about life from a Ray Brad­bury story we’d read in class.

I had been raised to believe teach­ing was some­thing of a martyr’s job. That the pay wasn’t good, that this career demands a lot from you and doesn’t con­fer the kind of respect and esteem other equally-demanding pro­fes­sions offer. I’d heard these things from my teach­ers and  my par­ents. I was deemed some­thing of a saint, going into edu­ca­tion. This was dur­ing a time when my state suf­fered from a teacher short­age. “Espe­cially good teach­ers,” peo­ple were always saying.

With the excep­tion of my being a saint, all of this is true. Teach­ing is tough. You are expected to work mir­a­cles with lim­ited resources and often insuf­fi­cient sup­port from par­ents, admin­is­tra­tors, and state– and local-level decision-makers. The kids are often dis­re­spect­ful and some­times, very, very rough. Teach­ing can be an extremely dan­ger­ous job. But, I was work­ing in a fac­tory town. Teach­ers were among the best-educated, best-paid seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion. Most of my stu­dents’ par­ents worked in those fac­to­ries. They would come to after-school meet­ings with tired, red-rimmed eyes. I imag­ined their sore feet hadn’t come on them sud­denly at the end of the day as mine did. I imag­ined they’d felt their exhaus­tion build­ing all day long—something like my long-ago fabric-cutting days.

But worse, of course. The exhaus­tion my stu­dents’ par­ents felt was much worse. I had had worked at my cut­ting table a few days a week for about a month. These peo­ple had worked on one fac­tory line or another for years, and there was no end in sight. Except that they never knew when their job at the fac­tory, the fur­ni­ture indus­try dwin­dling away, would van­ish altogether.

I was merely twenty-three and only then really think­ing about what work is like for so many peo­ple in this world. For my stu­dents’ par­ents, work meant a floor man­ager watch­ing over you, much like the fussy ladies I used to cut cloth for. It meant bend­ing your back over a hot, cranky machine for hours on end. It meant push­ing a piece of rough wood through a mas­sive cut­ter. It meant the smell of var­nish and fur­ni­ture glue always in your hair. It meant count­ing wash­ers and bolts and han­dles to slide into a dresser drawer inside a bureau on its way to mar­ket. It meant doing these things day after day, year after year, and not hav­ing the lux­ury of rep­ri­mand­ing one­self: I shouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t be wast­ing time–life.

Work, at its best, edi­fies the worker. It chal­lenges. It gives pur­pose, a sense of accom­plish­ment. It feeds us, both phys­i­cally and psy­cho­log­i­cally. It pro­vides for that life I once stood in a fab­ric store and worried—naively but also rightly, in a way, too—about squandering.

(Please read more about Susan Woodring and her work on Guest Blog­ger Bios page.)

Somebody Built the Pyramids: The wisdom of Mike Lefevre

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This is my small trib­ute to Mike Lefevre who spoke to Studs Terkel more than 40 years ago and whose words grace the first few pages of Work­ing:

It’s not just the work. Some­body built the pyra­mids. Somebody’s going to build some­thing. Pyra­mids. Empire State Building–these things just don’t hap­pen. There’s hard work behind it. I would like to see a build­ing, say, the Empire State, I would like to see on one side of it a foot-wide strip from top to bot­tom with the name of every brick­layer, the name of every elec­tri­cian, with all the names. So when a guy walked by, he could take his son and say, “See, that’s me over there on the forty-fifth floor. I put the steel beam in.” Picasso can point to a paint­ing. What can I point to? A writer can point to a book. Every­body should have some­thing to point to.

Mike, a (then) 37-year-old steel­worker from Cicero, IL, gives the first inter­view under Pref­ace I: Who Built the Pyra­mids? in Terkel’s tome. Because I’ve read Lefevre’s inter­view at least 10 times, because he never dis­ap­points me and espe­cially because I con­tinue to find new oh-my-god-this-man-is-a-philosopher/poet/policy-maker insights, I wanted to share a few more quotes with you and get your responses. (I bolded the words that made the most impact on me.) Please take a moment to post your comments!

A mule, an old mule, that’s the way I feel. Oh yeah. See. (Shows black and blue marks on arms and legs, burns.) You know what I heard from more than one guy at work? “If my kid wants to work in a fac­tory, I am going to kick the hell out of him.” I want my kid to be an effete snob. Yeah, mm-hmm. (Laughs.) I want him to be able to quote Walt Whit­man, to be proud of it.

I don’t think of Mon­day. You know what I’m think­ing about on Sun­day night? Next Sunday. 

If I had a twenty-hour work­week [which he main­tains is fully pos­si­ble], I’d get to know my kids bet­ter, my wife bet­ter. Some kid invited me to go on a col­lege cam­pus. On a Sat­ur­day. It was sum­mer­time. Hell, if I have a choice to tak­ing my wife and kids to a pic­nic or going to a col­lege cam­pus, It’s gonna be the pic­nic. But if I worked a twenty-hour week, I could go do both. Don’t you think with that extra twenty hours peo­ple could really expand? Who’s to say? There are some peo­ple in fac­to­ries just by force of cir­cum­stance. I’m just like the col­ored peo­ple. Poten­tial Ein­steins don’t have to be white. They could be in cot­ton fields, they could be in factories. 

The intel­lec­tu­als always say there are poten­tial Lord Byrons, Walt Whit­mans, Roo­sevelts, Pisas­sos work­ing in con­struc­tion or steel mills or fac­to­ries. But I don’t think they believe it. I think what they’re afraid of is the poten­tial Hitlers and Stal­ins that are there, too. The peo­ple in power fear the leisure man.

It isn’t that the aver­age work­ing guy is dumb. He’s tired, that’s all. 

When I hear a col­lege kid say, “I’m oppressed,” I don’t believe him. You know what I’d like to do for one year? Live like a col­lege kid. Just for one year. I’d love to. Wow! (Whis­pers) Wow! Sports car! Mar­i­juana! (Laughs.) Wild, sexy broads. I’d love that, hell yes, I would. 

If my kid ever goes to col­lege, I just want him to have a lit­tle respect, to real­ize that his dad is one of those some­bod­ies. This is why even on–(muses) yeah, I guess, sure–on the black thing … (Sighs heav­ily.) I can’t really hate the col­ored fella that’s work­ing with me all day. The black intel­lec­tual I got no respect for. The white intel­lec­tual I got no use for. I got no use for the black mil­i­tant who’s gonna scream three hun­dred years of slav­ery to me while I’m bust­ing my ass. You know what I mean? (Laughs.) I have one answer for that guy: go see Rock­er­feller. See Har­ri­man. Don’t bother me. We’re in the same cot­ton field. So just don’t bug me. (Laughs.)

Some­times, out of pure mean­ness, when I make some­thing I put a lit­tle dent in it… to make it really unique… I delib­er­ately fuck it up to see if it’ll get by,  just so I can say I did it.

If I were hir­ing peo­ple to work, I’d try nat­u­rally to pay them a decent wage. I’d try to find out their first names, their last names, keep the com­pany as small as pos­si­ble, so I could per­son­al­ize the whole thing. All I would ask a man is a hand­shake, see you in the morn­ing. No appli­ca­tions, noth­ing. I wouldn’t be inter­ested in the guy’s past. Nobody ever checks the pedi­gree on a mule, do they? But they do on a man. Can you pic­ture walk­ing up to a mule and say­ing, “I’d like to know who his grand­daddy was?” 

When I come home…I fake it. I put on a smile. I got a kid three years old. Some­times she says, “Daddy, where’ve you been?” What’s work to a three-year-old? If I feel bad, I can’t take it out on the kids. This is why you go to a tav­ern. You want to release it there rather than do it at home. What does an actor do when he’s got a bad movie? I got a bad movie every day. 

 

Ode for Mr. Philip Levine (p.s. I love you)

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I am in love with Philip Levine but there is noth­ing between us except for his words.

I know they are not enough to hold us together, but I don’t care. Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words, Emer­son once said. Mr. Levine moves me because he’s real as metal and provoca­tive as min­eral. The ways he tells a poem: ore stripped to pure song before rock was formed.

In his inter­views, Mr. Levine says he appre­ci­ates those who con­nect to his work. I have con­nected past engage­ment. I’m wear­ing his ring. I don’t know how to emo­tion­ally extri­cate myself. It’s a bit embarrassing.

Sadly, I’ve been down this road before. First it was Studs Terkel. Some­times I pre­tend he is alive. Meet­ing him in Chicago remains on my bucket list. Before our ren­dezvous, he died.

Work­ing made me fall in love with him and real peo­ple who do real work. In the very first chap­ter, a stone­ma­son tells him: Every one of my dreams, it has a lit­tle piece of rock in it. How could I not fall for that? Sure, my feel­ings for Mr. Terkel have prob­a­bly trans­ferred to Mr. Levine. Even so, had Studs never writ­ten a word, it’s hard to imag­ine feel­ing any less in love with Philip.

If I ever meet our Mr. P.L., I will pre­pare myself: he will not fall in love with me. Instead I will work hard to choose words he might be will­ing, in time, to like. For now, this is all I have:

 

Ode for Mr. Philip Levine

 

I read another inter­view today.

This time you were a fierce poet—

like that’s news. I smiled

at your use of fuck and fuck­ing.

Laughed even harder that you,

accord­ing to another interviewer,

go out of your way to tell us

who you are, essen­tially a peas­ant,

that you return again and again

to your pre-academic life

as a man­ual laborer. But your

true iden­tity, the you down to

the ser­ifs of each let­ter in each word

of every poem looks noth­ing like

an aca­d­e­mic but a poet—

even on the first day you stood

wait­ing for a job in Detroit rain.

This is who you are to me, for what

it’s worth, fuck and fuck­ing are nice

when they work. I resigned

an aca­d­e­mic life to labor on poems.

I feel Jew­ish but my fam­ily tells me

I’m not. They mock my identities

I fab­ri­cate most religiously,

wear them as uni­forms. Some things

we know before we’re told,

like Mrs. William Set­tle was a dancer.

And truth and beauty sing together

through your work, although as one—

like us—

they are never meant to be.

Living proof that April can be kind

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T.S. Eliot said April is the cru­elest month. I sup­pose it is for the dead, those who can no longer enjoy the lilacs. But most of us aren’t like Eliot. We don’t sym­pa­thize with the dead. We choose to stay in our own shoes, glued to one per­spec­tive, and maybe in that regard we resem­ble the inanimate.

This past week­end, I got to spend three lively days with artists, musi­cians, and writ­ers at a place called the Rens­ing Cen­ter in Pick­ens, SC.

Because I’d expe­ri­enced a few early-month stres­sors, I didn’t know how much help I could be — I was going to be voted in as a new board mem­ber — and when I left for the 5-hour trip on Thurs­day, I wasn’t eager to go. Yet, as soon as I got out of my lit­tle car and onto the farm porch of a sis­ter board mem­ber and close friend, I knew I would be fine. After a glass of wine and a long con­ver­sa­tion, a few tears and a lot laugh­ter, I real­ized the week­end would barter hon­or­ably: It would give me what I gave.

I tried to give it my best with­out forced enthu­si­asm.  In return, I met and fell in love with a dozen peo­ple, from 10 months to 92 years old. An artist com­mu­nity is what we are pas­sion­ate about build­ing, with res­i­den­cies and work­shops among other events, but we  are an artist com­mu­nity already as evi­denced by our three-day com­mune where we cooked local food, talked about our art, hugged babies, cleaned a lot of dishes, moved a stu­dio, drank, dis­cussed the envi­ron­ment, books, film, love, the­ater, pol­i­tics, houses, reli­gion, and music.

We made plans that didn’t hap­pen. We didn’t have time to make a bon­fire down in the pas­ture or play a game that Mari cre­ated as a clever spin on Pic­tionary. We didn’t hike to the water­fall and we didn’t weed the gar­den.  In those ways we inad­ver­tently empathized with the dead.

But we did smell flow­ers, chop veg­eta­bles, sing, laugh (even at my mis­er­able lit­tle stres­sors), stayed in the moment and did a lit­tle planning–mainly for meals and dur­ing the board meet­ing. For my non-heroic “best” I received per­spec­tives from a Chicago pho­tog­ra­pher, two Port­land sculp­tors, a writer from Boul­der, a Charleston com­poser and an Atlantan wood­worker who makes the occa­sional boat.

Like an excit­ing spring­time affair after a lover long gone, I came back feel­ing alive, cre­ative and ready to take on this month that began with unem­ploy­ment and a patch of skin can­cer — each of which can be fixed and soon forgotten.

Spring is kind when you’ve traded your wor­ries for a red pair of Toms or some­thing dif­fer­ent you find in the new grass. They don’t even have to fit.

A Degree of Joy at Work

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The fact that Philip Levine is our new Poet Lau­re­ate tends to reas­sure me that not all is bro­ken in Amer­ica. Through (despite?) his expe­ri­ences as a working-class, phys­i­cal laborer in Detroit, he wrote.

In ref­er­ence to his many poems about the grit and grief of fac­tory work, Levine has said: “I believed even then that if I could trans­form my expe­ri­ence into poetry I would give it the value and dig­nity it did not begin to pos­sess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to under­stand it; I believed that if I could under­stand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an ele­ment con­spic­u­ously miss­ing from my life.”

It is in this spirit that I share with you a beau­ti­ful poem by Jo Taylor.

 

WORKDAY DREAMS

by Jo Taylor

 

The bell shrieks, announces

the end of her shift. Carmen

steps out of the stiff gray uniform

into her skirt, a fiesta

of swirl and pri­mary colors.

 

She aban­dons the belch­ing machine

for the clat­ter of fla­menco heels

on an oak floor. After a night

of danc­ing, salsa glances,

and the twitch of her skirt,

 

Car­men is doomed to the starch

of the next day’s shift,

her only conversation

with belts and oily gears,

dia­logue in an intri­cate plot.

 

Each morn­ing the fac­tory clock

blurts cha-chunk—swal­lows

her time like greasy food

for hun­gry cogs and wheels.

She dons the gray trousers

 

of the uni­form, slogs within the steel

music of the work­day, dreams

the twirl of her har­le­quin skirt,

gui­tar and cas­tanets, tapping,

clap­ping, Olé! Olé!

 

 

 

 

 

Rethinking Us Versus Them This Labor Day

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A cou­ple days ago I read What’s the Mean­ing of Labor Day? Its author, Leslie Hendry, is not the first to sug­gest that there’s noth­ing to cel­e­brate and much to lament nowadays.

It’s easy to explain the obso­les­cence of Labor Day by point­ing out how dif­fer­ent our world was then. When Labor Day became a fed­eral hol­i­day in 1894, New York had been cel­e­brat­ing it for twelve years and more than half of the states that then con­sti­tuted our coun­try already embraced an offi­cial Labor Day. Labor unions were still fight­ing for legit­i­macy; there were no labor laws, no equal pay act, no Title VII, for exam­ple. The Pull­man Strike had crip­pled the rail­roads in 1894, but busi­ness and gov­ern­ment quickly worked together to put a stop to strikes and boy­cotts by thou­sands of workers.

But what is eerily sim­i­lar between these two dates — 117 years apart — is that the unem­ploy­ment rate in 1894 was around 10 per­cent… and ris­ing. The depres­sion of 1893 was one of the worst on record (save The Depres­sion), fol­lowed by another one two years later. Unem­ploy­ment got as high as 12 per­cent that decade, accord­ing to one source. Oh, yes, and Europe was in bad eco­nomic shape. Sounds sort of familiar.

I guess I want to know why Labor Day is not more impor­tant in 2011. Amer­i­cans have been known to inno­vate, change with the times. We have a day that rec­og­nizes us as work­ers and although most of us are not union­ized, don’t con­sider our­selves labor­ers (those blue-collar or immi­grant types), the truth is we do labor. Most of us work damn hard to have some qual­ity of life after our 40 to 70 hours of work each week.

Unem­ploy­ment remains some­where just under 10 per­cent. This fig­ure doesn’t count the under­em­ployed and those who have decided to quit try­ing. Var­i­ous stim­u­lus pack­ages don’t seem to be turn­ing the cor­po­rate body on or maybe it’s tit­il­lated but hold­ing on to its cash like a stingy patron at a strip club. Unfor­tu­nately labor and employ­ment laws intended to give us humane treat­ment and a level play­ing field do not guar­an­tee us jobs that will put fresh food on the table or pay for depre­ci­at­ing houses, help us send our kids to even a mediocre col­lege or retire, hope­fully, someday.

Regard­less of what you think about labor unions, there should be more of us ask­ing the ques­tion: Is this it? Is this what we work for? Is this what we want to work for (when we don’t have work)? My hus­band and I were talk­ing about the achieve­ment gap in schools a cou­ple weeks ago. He said some­thing that I con­tinue to think about. “You know, even if we could do it, if we had the solu­tion to give every kid what he or she needed to do well in school, do we want them to end up like us?”

Labor Day was ded­i­cated to the social and eco­nomic achieve­ments of Amer­i­can work­ers, accord­ing to the U.S. Depart­ment of Labor. About one per­cent of us is doing quite well, eco­nom­i­cally. A very, very large major­ity of us is not.

Labor unions have some­how become anti-American. I don’t agree with this, but labor unions can’t save us. I don’t have a solu­tion, but here’s a start: Think about work today. Thanks to the Labor Day Sales extrav­a­gan­zas, many of you are work­ing. What do you do that adds value to the econ­omy and/or soci­ety? If you stay home with your kids, you add value. If you clean toi­lets, bal­ance accounts, man­age projects, draw blood, sell hot dogs, you add value. Through our work as human beings we are con­nected. That’s a huge net­work of brains and brawn, energy and innovation.

Hendry points out: Most work­ers are dis­mayed by what hap­pened on Wall Street and how it affected their lives…Now income dis­par­i­ties are at an unprece­dented gap and work­ers are out of work. Employ­ees left stand­ing are doing jobs of two or three peo­ple, stretched thin and paid noth­ing more. Teach­ers, fire­men, and other work­ers haven’t had proper raises in pay. The Amer­i­can worker has learned how not to enter­tain progress.

How did we get here? National hol­i­days should hold some sig­nif­i­cance for the unity of its cit­i­zens. At best, peo­ple orga­nize bar­be­ques and get-togethers to eat, drink and for­get about going to work the next day. Since the aver­age Amer­i­can has lit­tle to spend, we’ve even lost the con­sumer edge so preva­lent in our recent past. What does this say about our country?

Regard­less of the jobs we do, our eth­nic­ity, edu­ca­tion, race, reli­gion, we live within this Amer­i­can sys­tem, as bro­ken as it is. Maybe if we could get over an ingrained, imag­i­nary class dis­tinc­tion, more of us “non-laborers” would rec­og­nize that we share way more in com­mon with “labor­ers” (and vice versa) than we pretend.

Then imag­ine what’s possible.

The work of terrorists, madmen and Amy Winehouse

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I wake up this morn­ing to remem­ber that Amy Wine­house has died. The head­line con­firm­ing the end of her 27 years—she’s one year younger than my old­est daughter—is beside the Oslo Nor­way bomb­ing and labor youth camp slaugh­ter on Utoeya Island: at least 95 peo­ple killed by at least one right-wing, “anti-multicultural” extremist.

Huff­post World quotes an offi­cial who says the attack “is prob­a­bly more Norway’s Okla­homa City than it is Norway’s World Trade Cen­ter.” This sound bite smacks of a fee­ble spin to stall the other side (mul­ti­cul­tural extrem­ists?) from pos­si­ble revenge.

I don’t know much about Tim­o­thy McVeigh’s life and I know noth­ing about a 32-year-old named Anders Behring Breivik who is being held for the Nor­way mur­ders. Easy com­par­isons are noted, namely: “a madman’s work.”

Two unre­lated thoughts, simul­ta­ne­ously, nag at me:

  1. I’m not con­vinced that either McVeigh or Breivik is a mad­man – not in the psy­chotic sense. (I am con­vinced, how­ever, that I should call my friends Shani and Sandee to res­ur­rect some form of study cir­cles on race and eth­nic­ity in the Wake county schools.)
  2. It’s too bad that peo­ple who are look­ing to end their lives, prob­a­bly Amy Wine­house was among them, can’t vol­un­teer as tar­gets for the McVeighs and Breiviks of the world.

I’m sur­prised by these thoughts, because I believe that life is the only sacred thing we have. But I also know there’s dan­ger in mis­la­bel­ing all mur­der­ers as “mad men” and the folly of believ­ing we can stop those who are deter­mined to take their own lives.

Last week, I returned from my aunt’s memo­r­ial ser­vice in Indi­ana. She fought can­cer for three years. She’d have the hell zapped out of it, allowed poi­son into her veins, and refused to feel the least bit sorry for her­self. When it hid in remis­sion, we cel­e­brated, briefly, before the moth­er­fucker came back for more. Almost every­one I know has a story like this. Which makes me con­tin­u­ously won­der why peo­ple try to kill them­selves and/or oth­ers when so many of us are try­ing so des­per­ately to stay alive.

If my per­spec­tive is naïve, I could give a damn.

When my hus­band and I watch war doc­u­men­taries or cre­ative non-fiction like The Tudors, a well-worn con­ver­sa­tion ensues as soon as I absent­mind­edly mut­ter why?– often with tears drip­ping onto the sofa, but some­times I’m too angry for tears. My hus­band seems gen­uinely wor­ried about my dis­tress. He’ll say, I don’t think you’re ask­ing ‘why’ but you are say­ing that you hate vio­lence and mur­der. You know that power cor­rupts and that killing in the name of God is not new. Right? And then we have a long dis­cus­sion that cen­ters around whether hominids have evolved at all.

The easy answer is that we are ani­mals. Ani­mals have instincts and emo­tions and bio-evolutionary research about why we do the won­der­ful and stu­pid things we do is pretty con­vinc­ing. I’m a believer in evo­lu­tion and an agnos­tic when some­one needs to put me in a box, but I’m also a paci­fist who believes in mir­a­cles, the great­est being being alive. It’s a hell of a lot of bio­log­i­cal work and tim­ing and luck (and many would say God’s will) just to be here and to grow into a viable organ­ism that makes its own choices.

Why would any of us want to kill a miracle?

I return to the news. The politi­cians and police repeat the “men­tal ill­ness” the­ory to make us feel bet­ter. But there are prob­a­bly mil­lions of McVeighs and Breiviks, peo­ple who firmly believe that the only way to stop an ide­ol­ogy or a pol­icy is to kill oth­ers, even if it’s 19 chil­dren on the sec­ond floor of an Okla­homa City fed­eral build­ing. These mad men don’t hear voices, they’re not strung out on drugs and they know exactly what they’re doing.

As McVeigh once said: “To these peo­ple in Okla­homa who have lost a loved one, I’m sorry but it hap­pens every day. You’re not the first mother to lose a kid, or the first grand­par­ent to lose a grand­son or a grand­daugh­ter. It hap­pens every day, some­where in the world. I’m not going to go into that court­room, curl into a fetal ball and cry just because the vic­tims want me to do that.”

Among the self-enders, so many are smart and tal­ented peo­ple who built the impos­si­ble, crafted the exquis­ite, solved the arcane, and cast light on a once-dark mys­tery about our human con­di­tion. I think about Amy and I feel sad­ness for those who loved her. I wish that she hadn’t killed her­self, but she did. If she’d been one of the 95 in Nor­way, one per­son who didn’t want to die would still be here.

Where there’s free will, there’s always trou­ble. Chris­tians and I can agree on that.  What Amy Wine­house or Ernest Hem­ing­way was think­ing at the end died inside of them or is now between them and their maker.

“Mad­men” aka reli­gious or anti-religious fanat­ics who end oth­ers’ lives should be made to serve the fam­i­lies of those they killed. If they would rather take their own lives than this kind of rec­om­pense would be their choice. Naïve or not, I could give a damn.

 

 

The Hardest Job

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In 1977, I thought I knew what hard work was. In rural Illi­nois, corn detas­sel­ing, mow­ing grass and shov­el­ing snow were not odd jobs—they were necessary.

Going to col­lege was not nec­es­sary. But I was deter­mined to go and nec­es­sary became less about mother nature or buy­ing a car and more about the green I’d need to become some­one new.

I applied to all of the sum­mer jobs listed in the Decatur Her­ald. The most important-sounding one at Tay­lor Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals was the one I was lucky enough to get. Min­i­mum wage was $2.30 and this job paid $3 an hour. Forty hours a week. With my stu­dent loans, I would be rich enough to attend Illi­nois State by the end of the summer.

I don’t remem­ber the require­ment of a uni­form. Just to be there before my 7 a.m. shift, which I knew would be the hard­est part. But it wasn’t.

My high school had two study car­rels, both reserved for juniors and seniors who could lis­ten to either John Den­ver or Bach­man Turner Over­drive on head­phones. At Tay­lor, about 100 mostly middle-aged women didn’t lis­ten to any­thing but the clinks of glass vials as we lifted them from their cor­ru­gated nests stacked in boxes, inches from our right arms.

These car­rels’ inte­rior walls were painted white and black. A naked light bulb lit up the box so that we could detect “for­eign par­ti­cles” in each vial’s sus­pen­sion. How ani­mal, veg­etable or min­eral ended up in a tube of tetra­cy­cline was the most inter­est­ing thing about the job, but we were not to ask.

The job required noth­ing but decent eye­sight, which was not tested. You picked up a vial, shook it and held it up to the light against the white wall and then the black one. If you could see a chunk of some­thing float­ing around, you put it in the reject pile. If the specks were small enough, it passed.

My future col­lege room­mate Mary and I worked the same shift, and expe­ri­enced that first morning’s 15-minute break together. As we watched all the women walk out into the sun­shine, pulling Marl­boro and Salem packs out of their pock­ets, we looked at each other. One of the women came over: “Well, was it what you thought?”  She chuck­led, but the skin around her grey eyes didn’t crin­kle. Her eye­balls just sat in their nests of dark cir­cles. Mary and I must have smiled and said no or that it was alright. The last thing I wanted, I thought, was to be seen as an uppity col­lege girl.

When the woman walked away, a con­ver­sa­tion between my room­mate and me seemed redun­dant. We stood together under a tree for what could have been an hour or 10 more min­utes.  In the dis­tance, I watched a farmer mow a pas­ture. I thought I heard Takin’ Care of Busi­ness on his tractor’s radio. Mary said some­thing about remem­ber­ing to bring cig­a­rettes tomor­row as we slowly walked back inside to what was now required.

 

Work Identity: Always Come Back to Class

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When we find a career we think we’ll enjoy, per­haps invest­ing years of edu­ca­tion and train­ing to do it, that work role soon becomes a part of us. When we decide or are forced to change careers, who we per­ceive our­selves to be can get fuzzy. Work iden­tity (how much someone’s per­cep­tion of who they are is tied to what they do) doesn’t neatly end or sud­denly trans­form into a new one.

Work iden­tity research fas­ci­nated me in grad­u­ate school. Over that last few years, work iden­tity has become per­sonal. I’m not a uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor any longer, I’m a writer, I tell myself. But it’s not that sim­ple. I’m still inter­ested in much of the con­tent that I once taught. When­ever friends or acquain­tances tell me about their work, ask for advice about approach­ing their boss about a new idea, a pay raise, a dif­fi­cult co-worker, tips on change man­age­ment, diver­sity… I’m all ears and eager to share my views. I some­times won­der if my work iden­tity has its own split per­son­al­ity or atten­tion deficit disorder.

Enter a new, help­ful voice: Jo Bar­bara Tay­lor gra­ciously sent me this short piece about her work expe­ri­ence last week. And I fell in love with it. I hope you will, too.

Class Iden­tity

The year I left my class­room at Phillips High School, my junior stu­dents flat­tered me by sug­gest­ing that I come back just one more year. Seniors said they expected me to be there when their own kids came to school. For the last half of my 21-year teach­ing career in pub­lic school, I was com­pletely set­tled into the role. I knew my mis­sion, I knew my pur­pose. I so iden­ti­fied with my work, that teacher was always the first word I used to describe myself. Leav­ing the class­room was a scary prospect. Would I find my place in the world, a place to fit in? Would I be able to sup­port myself? What would I do when I grew up? The most wor­ri­some thing was this: What would I call myself when I was no longer the teacher?

I left because I knew it was time to write poems, paint flow­ers on fur­ni­ture, and read all the best books twice. I wanted to go to school, be the stu­dent, not the teacher. All my ques­tions have not yet been answered, but (always a teacher), to the many won­der­ful stu­dents I have known, I have penned a few famil­iar max­ims: When you are there, remem­ber, “All the most impor­tant peo­ple are here.” When you do the wrong thing, “Be sorry enough to stop.” When you are dis­rup­tive or dis­tracted, “Come back to class.”  Always come back to class…

Jo Bar­bara Tay­lor grew up in Indi­ana and now lives out­side of Raleigh, NC. She taught Eng­lish in pub­lic school for 21 years. Her poems and aca­d­e­mic writ­ing have appeared in jour­nals, mag­a­zines and antholo­gies. Her book One or Two Feath­ers was pub­lished by PlanB Press in fall 2010.

Learning on the Job by Joe Mills

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In my neigh­bor­hood, when you were young and wanted money, you looked to the sky. Sum­mer rains meant lawns to mow, and when snow came down, it looked like dol­lar bills.

One win­ter, after years of watch­ing my older brother go out in the morn­ing and come back at night with a roll of bills, I decided to scoop up some cash myself.  I got up early, buck­led my boots, grabbed the coal shovel from the garage, and tramped into the work­ing world.  Only three houses down the block, I found my first cus­tomer, an old lady who agreed to my rate of two dol­lars if I would do the dri­ve­way as well.

I started the job enthused, but soon slowed.  The snow was thick, the dri­ve­way was long, and hours later, only halfway done, I was try­ing not to cry.  At one point, I looked up and saw my brother and mother car­ry­ing shov­els; I assumed that they were going to earn their own money, but they were com­ing to help.  Real­iz­ing that, I did cry.  After we fin­ished, my brother told me that he charged two dol­lars for a side­walk and ten dol­lars for a dri­ve­way, and more if the snow­fall had been heavy.

I should have learned some­thing about nego­ti­a­tions from that expe­ri­ence, but I didn’t.  I con­tin­ued to make bad deals.  I agreed to keep a neighbor’s dri­ve­way cleared for ten bucks a week; that win­ter, 1979, had the largest snow­falls on record.  I took babysit­ting jobs with­out set­ting a rate in advance.  I helped friends rake leaves and do chores, and after­wards real­ized they were get­ting paid for my labor.

Clearly, I was never going to be one of those Junior Achieve­ment phe­noms who pay for col­lege with a busi­ness run from a bed­room.  I needed to be on someone’s pay­roll, so, at four­teen, I sub­mit­ted an appli­ca­tion to a local donut shop.  You could work that young with parental per­mis­sion which mine were happy to give.  They had started work­ing even ear­lier, and this way at least they would know where I was.

I learned a lot at this job, includ­ing how to make donuts and cof­fee, how to run a cash reg­is­ter, and how to deal with drunks who would stag­ger over from the neigh­bor­ing bar, squint at the huge sign that said “DONUTS,” look at the trays of donuts in the win­dow, and then ask, “You got any­thing to eat here?”  When the bar closed at 2 am, they would come over in groups and indis­crim­i­nately buy sack­fuls, some of which they left on the side­walk as they wan­dered into the night.

I was there at 2 am because my boss also taught me how to keep two sets of time cards: one for him and one for the state which had child labor laws pro­hibit­ing a minor from work­ing in the mid­dle of the night.

The shop did well enough for the owner to drive a new white Porsche which he called a Por-sha, insist­ing the name had two syl­la­bles.  Some­times we would announce our inten­tion to mop the “Floor-sha” or that work­ing there made us feel like “Whore-shas,” but we were care­ful to do this when his son wasn’t around.  Although he often would rip into his father, he didn’t like it when we did.  Some­how the son also man­aged to drive a new car, even though employ­ees made less than min­i­mum wage.  The owner could pay us this way since tech­ni­cally the store was a restau­rant and the­o­ret­i­cally we received tips. No one, how­ever, ever tips a donut coun­ter­per­son, no mat­ter how drunk they are.

One morn­ing, after I’d done a clos­ing shift, the boss called and told me to come in imme­di­ately.  When I got there, he asked why I had left the register’s change sack forty dol­lars short.  I hadn’t.  I had sorted out the usual hun­dred in change, writ­ten “$100,” as I always did, then locked it in the floor safe.  He showed me the sack.  Across from the date, it said, “$60,” but it wasn’t in my handwriting.

“Look,” I said, “the num­ber has been erased.  You can see the smudge.”

“No,” he said, “It hasn’t.  This is a warn­ing.  Don’t do it again.”

I couldn’t believe he couldn’t see the obvi­ous dis­col­oration, but, going home, I real­ized why.  If I had done it, it was a mis­take.  If the num­ber had been changed, it was theft, and that meant it had to be one of only a few who knew the com­bi­na­tion, includ­ing his son. And, of course, it couldn’t be him.  It couldn’t be the son who I had seen giv­ing away dozens of free donuts and, who, more than once, had given friends a twenty with their change when they had paid with a ten.  It couldn’t be the son who never had to close or work the late shift deal­ing with drunks.

I wasn’t sur­prised.  That first time work­ing, try­ing to earn money shov­el­ing snow, I learned that fam­ily mem­bers pro­tect each other.

There was, how­ever, another valu­able les­son here.

At work, write with pen.

 

In addi­tion to a donut shop, Joe Mills has worked in pizze­rias, cof­fee shops, a chem­i­cal waste facil­ity in the Utah desert, a lab­o­ra­tory devoted to cli­mate research, an Indi­ana state park, and numer­ous non-descript offices.  He now teaches at the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina School of the Arts.

www.josephrobertmills.com

 

 

Nothing new under the LED office lights

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There’s noth­ing new under the sun.  Whether you first heard it from the bible, Shake­speare or from your grand­mother, it has power. I remem­ber try­ing to refute it in my head when my mom would say it, off-hand, sort of like “Ka sera sera.”

We tend to think of work as some­thing for­ever changed and made “new” by tech­nol­ogy. And we’ve been pro­grammed in our metric-dependent cul­ture to hitch our tech­no­log­i­cal advances to the upward slope-star of productivity.

I’ve been read­ing David Mont­gomery lately. He’s not on the Times best-seller list, but his books about US labor his­tory, Cit­i­zen Worker,  Work­ers’ Con­trol in Amer­ica, and The Fall of the House of Labor, remind me that with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of the tools we use to do today’s work — the what work looks like and to some extent how it’s done — maybe not that much has changed for the Amer­i­can worker.

Did you know that skilled and to some extent unskilled labor in the 19th cen­tury were moti­vated to union­ize, to give up their indi­vid­ual voices for a col­lec­tive one, in order to direct them­selves? Work rules, the autonomous way that crafts­men did their thing and their very work ethic, was leg­is­lated by union mem­bers within their own unions. Super­vi­sors didn’t know how to do highly skilled jobs and both crafts­men and their super­vi­sors knew it.

With the advent of sci­en­tific man­age­ment — even before Fred­er­ick Taylor’s hol­low “one best way”  – employ­ers enforced stan­dard­iza­tion and con­trol of work and worker alike. It’s not hard to imag­ine resis­tance from men who’d appren­ticed, jour­neyed and mas­tered their crafts, men who were now being told what to do, where to stand, when, how and how often their bod­ies would move, accord­ing to schedule.

Today, we tend to think of labor unions as the antithe­sis of progress, block­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity, hurt­ing free mar­kets and help­ing slack­ers. We grit our teeth when we read that a mere fac­tory worker makes $60 grand plus over­time. We can’t believe that many teach­ers still have a tenure sys­tem that restricts employ­ment at will. And Hoffa’s bloody Team­sters, those com­mie Indus­trial Work­ers of the World… there’s enough “evi­dence” out there to fuel out­rage for another indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion and then some.

But here’s the inter­est­ing thing: so many unions (for­merly called guilds) were eagerly founded, vol­un­tar­ily joined and more active than churches in the nine­teenth cen­tury, despite throngs of immi­grants ready to replace any worker on the spot (unions had not been given legal sta­tus until 1935).  Doesn’t this say some­thing about our human nature? Unless that’s com­pletely changed.

For me it says, “Hey, I get that you (com­pany) want to make the most money you can. But my health and the work I do are not going to suf­fer for it. I won’t kill myself for you. And in return I’ll give you a good product/service, espe­cially if you give me credit: let me use my brain to help decide what, where, when, how and why, then pay me a decent wage to do it.”

Today, auton­omy to estab­lish work rules might include estab­lish­ing your own work week (if Tues­days are not good for you, work on Sat­ur­day; or work 11 hours on Mon­day, 4 hours Tues­day, 12 hours Wednes­day, 13 hours Thurs­day).  Or, auton­omy to pro­tect your mar­riage or your health. Another 6-month project in Los Ange­les? Mmm, no, not now. (No offense LA.) Or, the right to rest: expec­ta­tions to answer calls, text or email at any hour?

Could Labor Move­ment 2.0 be on its way?

 

 

 

Trading Places with the One Percent

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It’s hard to imag­ine being one of the 1% that takes in about 25% of the nation’s income, the same 1% that con­trols 40 per­cent of our nation’s wealth. I can­not imag­ine wealth of this mag­ni­tude: the cash, land, stock, bonds, dwellings, trans­porta­tion, designer cloth­ing, pet charities—like the House and Senate.

Van­ity Fair puts these fun facts into a longer, even more lop­sided per­spec­tive: Twenty five years ago that 1% took in 12% of U.S. income and owned a third of America’s wealth.  The 1% has seen an 18% rise over the past 10 years.

We in the mid­dle have only seen our incomes fall. Men with high school degrees have lost 12% in the same 25 years. I can only imag­ine what the losses are for more mar­gin­al­ized work­ers like women, immi­grants, African Amer­i­cans, His­pan­ics, for­mer inmates, the over-50-somethings.

I try not to speak for oth­ers, but I’d like to take a stab at col­lec­tive sen­ti­ment right now. Money and cars, bling and crap that super­fi­cially says “I’m some­body” is nice and all, but what the rich have that we REALLY want is:

1. Enough

2. Choice

3. Influence/power

Enough: I have enough. I don’t go hun­gry and I am part owner of a house. I have my own trans­porta­tion and most impor­tantly, my husband’s and my debts are not lever­aged. We keep debt low, except for a mort­gage, because we choose to live the way we do. But I know that many, many peo­ple a) either don’t have enough income to have a decent qual­ity of life or b) are so in debt to have a qual­ity of life that the stres­sors of that qual­ity of life have eroded any sem­blance of a qual­ity of life. I believe that most peo­ple in the lat­ter cat­e­gory want to down­size and live more sus­tain­ably if they had the chance. But they didn’t get any of the bailout money. Their houses are worth less than their orig­i­nal appraisals, their health care costs have sky­rock­eted (along with higher edu­ca­tion for their kids), and their wages have lost a lot of ground. Many of these peo­ple are un– or underemployed.

Choice: Related to “enough,” but dif­fer­ent. I am look­ing for work, but I still can choose not to work for King Burger (although I’d love to say, We do it your way, but don’t get crazy). Back in the day, even with­out a dime of my par­ents’ money, I could choose to go to col­lege. I had decent grades, got accepted to two schools I applied for and received stu­dent loans at rel­a­tively low inter­est rates. Today, the mid­dle class doesn’t have these choices.

Influence/power: You cer­tainly don’t have to be rich to have influ­ence, but if you are rich, you are auto­mat­i­cally influ­en­tial and pos­sess power should you choose to wield it. I don’t have cable, but I’ve heard of a new show about bil­lion­aires who live among the very poor, then sur­prise them with a check at the end of the show. The sad thing is that the 1% have been writ­ing the same checks to gov­ern­ment offi­cials for decades. I guess see­ing the CEO of Cargill give money to a sen­a­tor wouldn’t give us the same warm and fuzzies.

Do you remem­ber Trad­ing Places? It was a bril­liant re-write of the Prince and the Pau­per. Billy Ray Valen­tine (Eddie Mur­phy) and Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd) trade lives. Winthorpe says: I had the most absurd night­mare. I was poor and no one liked me. I lost my job, I lost my house, Pene­lope hated me and it was all because of this ter­ri­ble, awful Negro.

I won­der who we’re gonna blame for an Amer­i­can Dream that’s not merely elu­sive, any­more; it’s vir­tu­ally extinct. And there are no poor, lower-class, peo­ple of color to scape­goat.  Because if there were, you’d bet­ter believe that the 1% and most of us in the shrink­ing mid­dle class would be cer­tain they paid for it.

 

 

People, data and things in the land of cars

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Last Fri­day I knew that I would trade in my car, eight-years-old, for some­thing more reli­able and eco­nom­i­cal. But I didn’t know that yes­ter­day I would drive a new car into my dri­ve­way around 8 p.m.

A lot can hap­pen in the land of car deal­ing — at the cross­roads of data, peo­ple and things — that you can’t antic­i­pate. First, I didn’t “buy” the shiny Honda Civic in my dri­ve­way but leased it for about a third of what it would have cost to buy. Sec­ond, I didn’t think I would get a new car. Now I’m its care­taker for 35 more pay­ments or three years.

In my grad school days at The Uni­ver­sity of Geor­gia, I learned more than any­one needs to know about job analy­sis – a sys­tem­atic way to research what work­ers do. One tech­nique still taught today is Func­tional Job Analy­sis: Work­ers are inter­viewed and observed about their tasks in three domains: peo­ple, data and things.

As I sit all day in two show­rooms with two sales­men, I real­ize (all over again) the absur­dity of the car-buying/leasing game. These men are pleas­ant enough and I know they are try­ing to make their num­bers; I have enough cus­tomer expe­ri­ence to dis­cern what they must say – what their deal­er­ship has deemed the way to pin down my level of com­mit­ment. The peo­ple part of their job.

The thing is, though, I’m not com­mit­ted to any car. The thing IS that a car is a thing that I need, a thing that I lament need­ing, but a real­ity due to how and where I live. I don’t know how to help them with their yes/no ques­tions while remain­ing hon­est and not slip­ping into my right­eous per­sonal phi­los­o­phy: it’s always peo­ple above things or data so try not to place me into a lit­tle demo­graphic box, okay?

And yet, clearly, I’m here to buy or rent or lease or obtain a frickin vehi­cle. Not to find out that the Elantra guy has a daugh­ter my youngest daughter’s age who wants to be a psy­chol­o­gist and go to col­lege in Hawaii, where she was born. But for some rea­son, these data are what stick with me.

The data for god sakes, the data is what I have to pay atten­tion to. THE BOTTOM LINE. Every­thing else –the nice sales guy and the space-age dash­boards with their ipod charg­ers, the smell of dough­nuts and Star­bucks – is a distraction.

But I can’t help but think about what they do and why they do it. How could I pre­tend to be nice to strangers, espe­cially the mean or stu­pid ones, take them test-driving and run num­bers, and be patient then dis­ap­pointed if not angry when they walk across the road and buy from some­one else — like I will do to one of them.

I drive three cars all day. I go back to the first deal­er­ship toward the end of the day, now that I know for what amount I can buy or lease the Elantra. I’m not too enthused, just exhausted. The first sales­per­son gives me the best deal on the car I “get.” But as I look at what’s avail­able on the lot, a red one with black inte­rior reminds me of a place I miss: Athens, GA.

Is that red one the same price? I ask.

Of course not. It’s the LX-S: $600 more, but it shouldn’t be but 12 dol­lars more a month. Look at the supe­rior alloy wheels, the leather-wrapped steer­ing wheel and the ultra-comfortable “sporty” seats, he says and adds that I’ll appre­ci­ate the extra comfort.

Pay­ing to bor­row a car, for basic depre­ci­a­tion, doesn’t bother me. Walk­ing away from it in spring of 2014 will be easy and if I love the car, I can buy it for around 11 grand.  If I love the car? I almost laugh. How will I be able to love this car no longer sur­rounded by the other sparkling car­riages, the bal­loons, 0% sig­nage, pop­corn, smiles and bot­tled water offered to me as all these things coa­lesce into a promised land of shiny happy people?

Maybe car sales is a career worth look­ing into.

 

 

 

 

 

Uploading the truth

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After months of job searches with key­words like HR, change man­age­ment and orga­ni­za­tional devel­op­ment, I’ve noticed that these jobs are no longer peo­ple–focused. Instead, SAP, Peo­ple­Soft and cer­ti­fi­ca­tions in PMP, six sigma, GMP and dozens of other sys­tems and best prac­tices define the sought human inter­face between employer and worker.

I’m not anti-technology, but I believe that peo­ple need peo­ple with human-relating skills —  not merely rela­tional data­base skills. So, in my some­what frus­trat­ing search today, here’s the resume I really wanted to upload:

Jodi Barnes, PhD (I went to school for 24 years and learned a lot, but I wouldn’t judge a person’s com­pe­tence or worth on the basis of for­mal edu­ca­tion if I were you.)

Objec­tive: If I can’t play a role in chang­ing your company’s cul­ture so that it’s more inclu­sive, par­tic­i­pa­tive, inno­v­a­tive and open-minded, then my heart and soul won’t be in a job you might offer. But I might take it for a year if it comes with a decent wage and you don’t expect me to work over 45 hours a week, ever.

Edu­ca­tion: Four higher edu­ca­tion degrees. Detailed info avail­able, but see what I wrote after my name, above.

Tech­no­log­i­cal skills: You know the drill (Microsoft’s monop­oly). Two major brands of sta­tis­ti­cal soft­ware when I was in grad­u­ate school, the years I prob­a­bly shouldn’t reveal in case you want some­one younger.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills: I am a good writer and edi­tor. I have writ­ten for all cor­po­rate stake­hold­ers, as a jour­nal­ist and in var­i­ous research and lit­er­ary jour­nals.  As for spo­ken com­mu­ni­ca­tion, I speak to every­one, espe­cially work­ers who are paid the least and have the shit­ti­est hours. Their per­spec­tives tend to be the most accu­rate and help­ful, given they have the most to lose and the least to gain from lying.

Teaching/training skills: Almost 25 years (please don’t do the math) in com­bined fields. I’ve con­sulted or taught: change man­age­ment, per­for­mance sys­tems, man­age­r­ial com­mu­ni­ca­tion, diver­sity, lead­er­ship, ethics, career change, con­flict man­age­ment, cul­ture change and other tra­di­tional HR areas. I could go back to uni­ver­sity or do online teach­ing, but I don’t like spoon-feeding peo­ple slides and grad­ing what they purge. This is the prob­lem I have with higher edu­ca­tion and com­pa­nies that think mem­o­riza­tion, mul­ti­ple choice and writ­ing what’s desired will change behavior.

Ombuds­man skills: I’ll guess that you either don’t know what this term means or you know and think I’m snobby. I put it here because it’s prob­a­bly the thing that I do best, besides com­mu­ni­cat­ing. I’ve helped com­pa­nies avert law suits (e.g., legit­i­mate sex­ual harass­ment, gen­der, race and reli­gion dis­crim­i­na­tion claims) by help­ing peo­ple fig­ure out the equi­table and just thing to do. My con­cil­i­a­tion and medi­a­tion skills are very good. You should know, though: I won’t lie to employ­ees to save your company’s ass because unlike the Supreme Court, I don’t view cor­po­ra­tions as people.

Expe­ri­ence: Assis­tant pro­fes­sor, HR man­ager, short-order cook, adviser, trainer, cock­tail wait­ress, con­sul­tant, jour­nal­ist, bak­ery sales, coach, men­tor, mul­ti­cul­tural edu­ca­tion advo­cate, pro­gram devel­oper, poet, mother to three daugh­ters and two pup­pies, wife, grandmother.

Values/beliefs: Respect­ful­ness, hon­esty, lit­er­acy, equal­ity, high-protein/low-carbs, (80%) open mind with (20%) closed mouth, civil­ity, libraries, agnos­ti­cism, “say what you mean, mean what you say and don’t say it in a mean way,” 4-day work­week, love is the ulti­mate out­law, health care and edu­ca­tion for all.

Low-tech love to you all.

I’d be thrilled if you spilled what drives you

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One of my daugh­ters posted a video clip on Dan Pink’s book Drive. My hus­band bought the book a year ago and I’d read about half of it. My aca­d­e­mic head (why didn’t he ref­er­ence so and so? How can he make such blan­ket state­ments?) got in the way of appre­ci­at­ing the book for what it is (no snobby sar­casm intended, BTW).

Pink’s book is a good way to moti­vate peo­ple who haven’t spent years study­ing moti­va­tion to think about what moti­vates them and the peo­ple they work with. If you haven’t read it, Pink high­lights three motivators:

Auton­omy (self direction)

Mas­tery (learn­ing to do bet­ter the things that mat­ter to us)

Pur­pose (doing some­thing mean­ing­ful out­side of ourselves)

He also warns against the dan­gers of throw­ing pay at peo­ple to make them more cre­ative and pro­duc­tive. Of course, if he or any­one else knew how to make GDP or Gross National Hap­pi­ness (yes, there is such a thing, thanks to Bhutan) increase among all of us, then the moti­va­tion indus­try might join the ranks of 8-track tapes and small pox.

But moti­va­tion is an inter­est­ing hard nut because it’s about us. Col­lec­tively and indi­vid­u­ally. How many times have you won­dered: Why does she stay there? He could make so much more some­where else. I guess he’s just sat­is­fied doing the same thing over and over. If I were her, I’d quit that job. Look at how the boss treats her. He’s so unhappy!

Because moti­va­tion is about us, you can’t pin it down. We’re all dif­fer­ent with some ten­den­cies to act and react sim­i­larly most of the time within sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances. And how we love to prove researchers wrong.

A brief exam­ple: I worked part-time for a bak­ery for four months last year. Very low pay, deal­ings with man­age­ment nonex­is­tent or poor much of the time, not enough hours (spread among too many employ­ees). What moti­vated me? I liked the peo­ple I worked with. I liked (most of) the cus­tomers. And I liked work­ing with my hands, learn­ing and being help­ful. The food was high qual­ity; I believed in what I was selling.

Quit­ting was very hard for me, but I didn’t work enough hours to pay for our monthly health insur­ance. I had the lux­ury of mak­ing just over min­i­mum wage because my spouse had a decent job. My bak­ery job told me that I need peo­ple and to be part of some­thing out­side of me. As a writer, I have auton­omy, mas­tery and pur­pose but lit­tle money. I’m also alone much of the time, although that’s part of the job.

What dri­ves you? Why do you do (or don’t do) what you do?  And as Count Rugen says in The Princess Bride: and remem­ber, this is for pos­ter­ity, so be honest.

Whispers from WI: It’s about the voice, stupid

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I’m always sur­prised at how com­plex issues become fences with two sides: Pro or anti, right and wrong, with us or against us, Repub­li­can and Demo­c­rat. Regard­less of where you stand on Wisconsin’s vir­tual ban of col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing for its pub­lic sec­tor work­ers, there’s one thing we might agree on: we’re bom­barded with sound bites from bleeding-heart lib­er­als and heart­less conservatives.

If col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing were strictly an eco­nomic issue, it might be eas­ier to decide whether Scott Walker is a fame-hungry union ball-buster or a dude who’s will­ing to take an unpop­u­lar stand because unions pre­vent gov­ern­ment and busi­ness from mak­ing uni­lat­eral deci­sions about wages, hours and other work­ing conditions.

But col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing is first and fore­most about voice. A right to be heard. (Cue God Bless Amer­ica in back­ground.) Yes, I know it sounds quaint to have a right to any­thing except com­pen­sa­tion for the work you do. Work has become, again (doesn’t his­tory repeat itself unless we’ve learned any­thing?), merely an eco­nomic transaction.

I could tell you how many cen­turies it took for Amer­ica to pass the Wag­ner Act and for Kennedy to give a watered-down ver­sion to fed­eral work­ers in 1962; you can look up pho­tos of kids in fac­to­ries, mill work­ers’ miss­ing fin­gers, The Lud­low Mas­sacre of Col­orado min­ers. Pathos is an effec­tive tool.

But we all know that things have changed. OSHA pro­tects worker health and safety, Title VII and its amend­ments pre­vent dis­crim­i­na­tion and focus on job-related cri­te­ria. No more child labor and min­i­mum wage thanks to the Fair Labor Stan­dards Act. We don’t need unions, any­more! Right?

If a worker were just a resource to be fed, shel­tered and main­tained, maybe.  But there’s some­thing infi­nitely inter­est­ing and irri­tat­ing about humans: they have brains and they have a voice. Both need reg­u­lar exercise.

I’m not a gov­er­nor or an employer. I can relate to the fears of Wisconsin’s teach­ers, fire fight­ers, police and san­i­ta­tion work­ers. To vil­lanize them into over-paid, enti­tled tax teat-suckers is to reduce them and the mean­ing of work to the lower rungs of Maslow’s hier­ar­chy. Maybe their ben­e­fits are cost­ing the state a small for­tune (whose are afford­able?), but health ben­e­fits and even pay are not the main rea­sons work­ers seek union representation.

Work­ers’ num­ber one rea­son for want­ing a col­lec­tive voice is that they per­ceive their employer as unfair. Employ­ers whose work­ers want a union deserve a union.

When pub­lic and pri­vate employ­ers rec­og­nize that one size does not fit all work­ers, that voice and equity are just as impor­tant as good wages and ben­e­fits, and that most of us under­stand that with voice comes respon­si­bil­ity – we seek to make our jobs bet­ter to do a bet­ter job – only then will unions or their threat become quaint memories.

Sure the states’ tax bases are bleed­ing. Unions and employ­ers are in bed with politi­cians at every level. Cam­paign reform needs reformed. But as I used to tell my stu­dents: There’s only an oblig­a­tion to bar­gain in good faith, NOT an oblig­a­tion to give a union what it asks for. There’s always some­one on the other side of the table who agreed to an unaf­ford­able demand.

And, Scott, dude, you may have cut their rights, but you didn’t remove their lar­ynx or their brains.

If it’s about the journey, I’m in trouble

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As I open the back door for our black lab pup­pies this morn­ing, I hear the cars and trucks. Zoom­ing, fast brak­ing, occa­sional honks. We live just off of a main street, close to a high school where speed is posted 25 miles per hour, max. Few dri­vers obey the signs. They are on their way to make their liv­ing, some already late, some try­ing not to be, oth­ers just speed­ing out of habit.

I don’t like it but I under­stand, remem­ber the anx­i­ety of get­ting kids to school, load­ing up a brief­case, remind­ing myself that once I got to my office, my stress would ease. That was a good morn­ing for me. If I crawled on the belt­line for more than 10 min­utes, anx­i­ety turned to anger, some­times rage.

Although I knew it was no one’s fault, not even the idiot who kept weav­ing into and out of my lane, I couldn’t let it go until I was in a park­ing garage that was occa­sion­ally full, and my anger would well up all over again. When I began teach­ing classes at our RTP cam­pus at 6 p.m. I got worse. I knew bet­ter, left ear­lier, but my atti­tude didn’t change.

I didn’t leave my job because of the com­mutes, expen­sive gas, my car­bon monox­ide con­tri­bu­tion, cli­mate change and the wasted time – although I thought about all of these behind the wheel, mak­ing me even more unpleas­ant. I’d once had a job that required a good bit of air travel.  And, as my hus­band would remind me, “We could live in Atlanta.” Didn’t I have a rel­a­tively good situation?

Work in the age of telecom­mut­ing, web con­fer­enc­ing, instant mes­sag­ing and being strapped to var­i­ous tech life­lines hasn’t seemed to free many of us from high­way or air­port hell.  Although, even in North Car­olina, there are alter­na­tives. One of my friends takes pub­lic trans­porta­tion from Durham to down­town Raleigh sev­eral days a week. (She is my role model.) Two other peo­ple I know bike to work about eight months of the year.

How much of get­ting there and back taints what might oth­er­wise be a good thing? In my search to hear about your search for mean­ing, I real­ize the intrin­sic value of work (the nature of the work, itself) is not our only source of sat­is­fac­tion or com­plaint. So please spill: what’s your jour­ney like? Have you found a bet­ter way there and back or sim­ply a bet­ter way to cope?

Oh, and a friendly reminder: I’ll take your com­ments off-road.

When there’s no meaning

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A few days ago, a good friend of my teenaged daugh­ter died. Sense­less that it hap­pened, even more sense­less why. I’ve not been able to think of any­thing except his face, his laugh, his par­ents, and the many high school friends who mourn him.

This sense­less loss of a won­der­ful boy mat­ters. It has and will always have mean­ing for us who knew him although no one can explain it.

I’ve not posted any­thing for sev­eral days because my blog, as impor­tant as it is to me, was not that impor­tant. Some­times due to tragedy, we’re reminded of some hier­ar­chy of impor­tant, of mean­ing­ful. Being kind, lis­ten­ing to each other (regard­less of age, sta­tus, power), not tak­ing life or our abil­ity to make a dif­fer­ence for granted, among other benev­o­lent thoughts and acts, are what matters.

We don’t have to be social work­ers or ther­a­pists, coun­selors or have a sav­ior com­plex to do good work. Work doesn’t have to be paid to give mean­ing. Work doesn’t even have to feel like work. When we’re relat­ing to some­one, help­ing them in some way, we’re mean­ing­ful. Even if we tried and failed to help, we did some­thing out­side of our needy, myopic selves.

If you have a paid job, regard­less or whether it gives you mean­ing, be kind today. Maybe in the kind­ness extended to some­one, even some­one least deserv­ing, you can find mean­ing. For those of us who want work but can’t find it, remem­ber the lack of paid work does not trans­late into lack of mean­ing in our lives. (I con­fess this has been dif­fi­cult for me at times.)

If we all found the job or entre­pre­neur­ial ven­ture of our dreams, we’d still be left with the one thing that mat­ters: each other. Human beings are not resources. Not inter­change­able parts. Not mea­sured by wage or salary. Work has mean­ing because as long as we live, we are mean­ing­ful. And if your life doesn’t feel mean­ing­ful, reach out. Be self­ish and grab it by being kind.

Stepping out, getting dirty

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Even if step­ping out doesn’t offer imme­di­ate rewards – maybe you trip and fall, in fact – it pro­vides feed­back and some­times, oppor­tu­nity. I was reminded of this when a friend from my Uni­ver­sity of Geor­gia grad school days mes­saged me. He liked the blog and was inter­ested in how I might help him grow a man­age­ment pro­gram on the west coast.

The next day I drove to Char­lotte to see a close friend, an artist, who has made her liv­ing from step­ping out. Although I’d seen Ellen Kochan­sky just weeks ago in South Car­olina; I intu­ited that she could give me some­thing I needed. For­tu­nately, I lis­tened to myself.

At the McColl Cen­ter, Ellen teaches exec­u­tives how to frame inno­va­tion while dis­man­tling the box of what we’ve assumed cre­ativ­ity is and what it’s not.  I saw this on her class­room wall:

A bit of advice given to a young Native Amer­i­can at the time of his ini­ti­a­tion: As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think. – Joseph Camp­bell

On the tables were organic found objects – fungi, pods, feath­ers, hemp, flow­ers. A cou­ple CEOs told me about an empty lot behind the cen­ter where the class had spent part of the day dis­cov­er­ing sculp­ture a local artist had cre­ated with decon­struc­tion debris.

Over a drink, din­ner and a reli­gious expe­ri­ence watch­ing MOMIX Botan­ica at Knight The­ater, con­nec­tions began to form around what might be my sole con­vic­tion about work and life, in gen­eral — any last­ing, intrin­sic change is organic. Peter Senge in The Dance of Change describes change as a sig­moidal (S-curve) pat­tern found in biol­ogy, not the lin­ear slope (always for­ward, upward!) used in busi­ness and acad­e­mia as evi­dence of suc­cess. When I used that book in my change man­age­ment courses, I’d believed it. Why wasn’t I acknowl­edg­ing an organic model in my search for mean­ing­ful work?

The dancers were rocks and bees, pri­mor­dial aquatic crea­tures and flo­res­cent DNA. I remem­bered what my friend from UGA had said in a follow-up call, “The busi­ness model we still insist on using today is com­pletely unsus­tain­able,” that we had to work within the con­text of our ecol­ogy, our biol­ogy and the human issues of the world. I knew that! I’d wanted to say, but was ecsta­tic he’d declared it so sincerely.

Before I headed home the next morn­ing, I told Ellen about my dream that night: I’d cheer­fully helped a vir­tual enemy, the only per­son I’ve held a grudge against since leav­ing the uni­ver­sity over two years ago. She told me I had light­ened my step.

The last thing we talked about was what is our doing and what is divine. I told her that if there is One who can tell us the mean­ing of life when we die, we’d laugh because it would be SO obvi­ous! She laughed, “You know, I’ve heard the the­ory of the divine as dirt. We’re made of it and return to it. Think about it: we depend on dirt for just about everything.”

Will you share how you’ve tried to jump what you thought was a great chasm? If you haven’t jumped yet, are you step­ping out? And, um, how dirty are your feet?