Writer or Hack?

The prompt today from StoryADay.org is to write a piece as if you were preparing to submit it to a particular journal. It strikes me that last year this prompt would have worked for me marvelously because I was trying to get away from academic writing and experiment with creative work. A  year later, I find myself feeling more creatively pulled by academic work even as the academic milieu sometimes leaves me feeling put off.

A lot of people tell me that academic work is stifling and has to fit a particular formula. A lot of people used to tell me the same thing about journalism. As a journalist, I used to react to this commentary with a sense of humiliation and shame. Embedded in the comments was a line, it seemed, between the "real writers" and the "hacks", with the hacks being the journalists like myself who had to resort to formulas and editors in order to get published. As a result, it was interesting to discover when I finally summoned up the nerve -- after working for a decade as a daily newspaper journalist -- to take a creative writing class that so many of my classmates were envious of the fact that I had been "published." It was even more insightful to discover another decade or so later that creative writers would love to have had jobs as journalists and were mildly shocked when I divulged that I found academic writing more freeing and intellectually inspiring. They couldn't understand why I did not want to go back to work as a journalist. Whereas I was puzzled: why work as a journalist when one can work as a professor instead?

After three decades of writing for a living -- as a newspaper journalist, as an academician, and as a creative writer -- I just shrug when people make claims about what is and what is not creative writing. But I do continue to ponder the point myself, and wonder what it is that constitutes the writer. In short, I try to figure out: am I a writer or am I a hack?

By some definitions, I never should have taken up writing. I don't fit the profile for a number of reasons: I didn't keep a diary as a child; I didn't write poetry  late at night; I didn't worship famous writers; and I didn't want to spend all of my spare time curled up with a good book. I found used bookstores to be slightly eerie, though I have come to acknowledge that they can be exciting and innovative sites of discovery. And, well, if truth be told, I like reading, but I don't love it. I see it as a job, a job that's not unpleasant, but a job. So what do I do when I'm not reading or writing? Well, scores of other things: I garden. I cook. I eat. I work out. I train for marathons and triathlons. I volunteer with the local farmers and with a number of other community groups. I pet my cats, and dream about the endless number of ways that I can prolong the lives of my potted arugula and cilantro plants. I husk beans. I dehydrate garlic. And I write.

In the spirit of keeping with StoryADay.org's prompt, I did search for a potential publication -- and happily I found one. Not for this story, but for another piece to come -- featuring tarot and poetry. The site reminded me of my fondness for reading tarot (God-fearing Christians cover your ears), and it also reminded me of where I first discovered my own skills with reading tarot: at the Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, Iowa, during the Iowa Summer Writers Festival in 2003. A few months earlier, several psychics had suggested that I try acquiring a divination tool so when I found a kit at that bookstore, I decided to give it a try. I found that tarot stimulated my creative impulses in a number of ways, and I liked using it as a way to read into my heart and soul and to offer suggestions as to what might be going on in the lives of others, as well. The use of tarot seemed to pair well with a story that another participant at the summer writers festival shared, which was about her way of using dreams not to analyze reality but to round out the lives of her created characters and to make the real increasingly surreal. I look forward to creating a story about tarot that might find a home in this particular publication sometime in the future.

But for now, it seems that my mind, body, and spirit are traveling a different path. Life is full and it is cluttered. Writing is a practice in a sense of making sense of the mess. Whether that's creative, journalistic, academic, or merely the mark of being the hack, it's useful to remind one's self that one doesn't always write for the purposes of being published.