I’m Not a Cool, Best-Selling Author or on TikTok, But I Still Keep on Writing
Why I go on when I can’t go on.
For many years I made the claim that my career as a marketing executive supported this little habit I had on the side. I made writing seem illicit, as if it was heroin and here I was taking jobs, making money, all in an effort to feed my habit. A habit whose thirst was never quenched, whose hunger was never satiated. It occurs to me now that it should’ve been the other way around—I’ve always been an artist and I’ve been lucky enough to have a head for business to get the jobs that supplemented my art.
It’s a nuanced understanding, but a powerful one. You can either say you’re an artist and all the work you do is just a means to fuel the work. Or, you’re someone with a vocation who supports their habit on the side. It’s the way in which we elevate or dismiss the art that is relevant.
Last week, I returned to interviews I listened to years ago. Specifically, one of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in 1961. I’ve written a lot about Plath lately, a writer I haven’t read in years, but a writer that intrigues me because the lines between art and life were porous, that, in fact, the life informed the art and vice versa. No great poems could have existed without the specter of death hovering. I admire her because she…
