Issue 1: Notes on Sharing Work
Welcome,
Since this is the first issue, I thought I’d start with some thoughts about sharing writing and the reasoning behind this project.
For most of my career, my writing has been bound by publication guidelines. Part of this had to do with economics. While other folks wrote blogs or submitted to literary journals, I chose journalism early on because it was the only kind of writing I could do that paid right away. I wasn’t raised to look too far into the future or to see the worth of my creative work as intrinsic. I was fighting to survive, splitting my attention between 2 or 3 jobs and school. If I was going to put time and effort into writing, I needed to know that it would find a reader, and I needed to know it would make me money.
When you’re a freelance writer (as I have been off and on for more than 20 years), you have an idea, then you go looking for a publication that will pay you to write that idea. It can take months, sometimes years, for work to find its way into the world. There are editors and fact-checkers there to make sure the work fits the standards and style of the publication. It’s comforting to know that there are teams of people working alongside you to make sure the writing is as good as possible, but it can be frustrating to always wait through the long approval process before you share anything at all. And it means that everything you share has to fit into the purview of the publication–it has to be the right voice, the right topic, the right level of newsiness and include the right kind of research.
The result of my economic relationship to writing has been a certain reluctance to share my work. There are so many topics that ignite me, but they aren’t always what’s selling at the moment. What I do instead is write great swaths of material that never sees the light of day because I’m waiting for the support and permission of a publication. If I give it away, I worry, who will buy it? (And don’t even get me started about lit mags—I may just have “this piece isn’t right for us but we love your voice and hope you submit in the future” engraved on my tombstone.)
But it isn’t just the money—what I’m attached to is the feeling that selling work means I have someone’s permission to write. It means that someone else has signed off on what I have to say. I’m always looking outward for approval when the kind of writing I want to do requires a deep internal trust in both my subject and my voice.
Poets don’t seem to work this way. They share brazenly. In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg writes with such joy of times that she has shared her work with strangers. She describes reading whole fresh pages to a rapt audience at a cafe or setting up a writing booth and selling poems to thrilled strangers for a few dollars. I find this fascinating because it’s the opposite of the way I’ve carried out my career.
The closest I’ve come to the speed and audacity of Goldberg’s poetry booth was when I was reviewing shows for daily newspapers. It was a gruelling process. For plays, I would see the show in the evening, kick out a first draft as soon as I got home, then file my best edit by noon the next day. Stadium rock shows were even tighter—for them, I filed the first draft by 10, the second by 11:30, whether or not the show was over. The draft would be posted online as-is, and I’d only have a chance to clean it up the next day. I had to get my thoughts out as quickly as possible. Try to spell all the names right. Send it on its way.
For all the exhilaration of that process, it didn’t feel creatively satisfying. There was no time to evaluate my reasoning or ask myself difficult questions. Besides, the style of daily newspapers doesn’t offer a lot of room to play. Part of me misses the thrill of just getting the words out in the world, but I want to do it on my own terms. I want to take the terrifying chance of sounding like myself.
I’m inspired by the students I’ve worked with over the last eight years at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. They draw constantly and share that unfinished work with pride. They do it because they know there will always be more. It doesn’t matter if you give away this rough sketch–you’ll do another one tomorrow and it’ll probably be better. The process matters more than the product.
I’ve been stuck in the capitalist mindset that writing is a finite resource and that sharing it will devalue it somehow, but I realize now that’s not true. Sharing these thoughts with you doesn’t diminish them anymore than planting diminishes a seed. I tell my students these things because I know them to be true, but I struggle to put them into practice.
So that’s what this newsletter will be—a regular place to share half-formed thoughts that might grow into something over time. I do this not to distract from the larger projects I’m working on, but to feed them. I’ll probably write about writing and creativity, but I’ll also write about art and culture and life. If you ask me questions, I might answer them. There will probably be typos—but more about that later.
Thank you for joining me
~Erika