The Long Game: notes on creative livelihood, and why community matters
Life and writing colliding at my living room table
When I was a teenager, I announced that I wanted to be a writer. ‘Journalist’, my dad said, thinking practically. I spent two long weeks of work experience at my local newspaper, painstakingly typing up news reports about school fetes and traffic accidents with one finger, getting wolf-whistled when I walked to the loo in the smart suits I’d borrowed from my mum, navigating awkward encounters with the man opposite who began every conversation with ‘So, you’re on work experience then….’ and developing an embarrassing crush on the photographer — mostly because he seemed to want to treat me like an actual human being.
In my twenties I realised I wanted to be a poet, probably the least practical of all writing careers. But I didn’t really think of it as a career. ‘I write poems’ I’d admit, if pressed, as if it was something I did as a secret sideline, and not the lodestar of everything. I decided that the most practical option was to become a creative writing lecturer. That way I’d be part of a community of thinkers and writers, with paid time for research and writing. I couldn’t possibly imagine doing a PhD though, so I did a government-funded teacher training course in post-16 education and began teaching in further and adult education colleges. To cut a long story short, I found myself, in my early 40s, with a PGCE, a PhD, fifteen years of teaching experience, a pamphlet and two full-length poetry collections. Then I realised that the university lecturing dream just wasn’t going to work.
The university jobs I was seeing involved workloads and expectations that didn't seem compatible with the kind of family life I wanted — unless you had a wife or equivalent person able to absorb some of the slack. And this was in a university sector already under enormous pressure, where years of precarious and poorly paid work can precede a permanent post whose security is increasingly uncertain. As a new solo parent of a beautiful baby boy I’d moved from London to Stroud, a rural, family-friendly town with a brilliant arts scene but relatively little in the way of jobs.
Going completely freelance was the only option. I didn't particularly want to become a freelancer; I wanted to find a secure job that would somehow make all the different parts of my life fit together. Instead, I began trying to construct my ideal job myself.
