Scanning Glacier Bay for humpback whales and sea lions
Travel writing is no way to earn a living. (That’s why I also write about everything else under the sun.) But it’s a darn good way to see the world in a way you might not otherwise see it. Why? Well, mainly because serious travel journalists don’t typically sign up for “Norway in a Nutshell” tours or consider seeing Glacier Bay by sailing past icebergs on a gigantic cruise ship.
Travel writing takes a certain amount of courage. Not the writing part. But the being part. If you want to write something people want to read, you’ve got to be willing to put yourself out there and do wild and crazy things, strike up conversations with complete strangers, and remain perfectly placid when a random Frenchman sticks his finger in your stinky cheese.
Of course, you don’t have to be a travel writer to do any of this. If you want to see the world with new eyes, just act like a travel writer. Skip the “See Europe in 12 Days” tours and forget the drive-by sightings of grizzly bears in Yellowstone. Instead, immerse yourself. Rent an Italian villa for a week and drink wine with every meal, and instead of peeking at that grizzly through a telescope, take a hike up Mount Washburn. The key is to get dirty. Here’s how to get started….
The picturesque Rue St. Antoine in the old quarter of Cannes
1) Explore the back streets. Yes, so it seems obvious. Get off the main tourist strips. But if it’s so obvious, how come no one is doing it? If you really want to get to know a place, leave the madding crowd and hit the back streets. A case in point: when I was in Cannes, France, last fall the Boulevard de la Croisette—the hip (and expensive) shopping street lined with boutiques and department stores—was jam packed with tourists. It’s not like I could afford to buy anything in a place like Alexandra where all the movie stars and “ladies who lunch” shop anyway. So I just started wandering down the side streets. Not only did I find myself taking in views of the entire city and long stretches of the French Riviera from the Musée de la Castre on a high hill overlooking the Mediterranean, but I also found some delightful (and less expensive) shops and restaurants patronized by locals along curving back alleys. When my friend, Dorothy, and I sat down for lunch at a tiny outdoor cafe in Le Suqet behind the more heavily traveled Rue Georges Clemenceau, we not only spent our meal enjoying the sounds of French-speaking natives all around us but had the delight of drawing the attention of locals walking to work, one of whom stopped to show us how to eat our artisanal cheese plate, poking our cheese with one rotund finger and advising us to start with the mild chevre before moving onto a French version of Stilton. And did I mention our French waiter, who got a kick out of Dorothy’s accidental thank you’s in Spanish, also gave us complimentary shots of what he gleefully termed “fruit juice” at the end of our meal? And that was on top of the house wine at only $2 a glass.
Unexpected drama climbing the Kotor Fortress
2) Don’t make any plans. That was how Dorothy and I took on the lovely medieval city of Kotor, Montenegro, on the Adriatic Sea. The result? A fantastic and unplanned hike up the side of a fjord to explore the city’s centuries-old fortress, restored with money from American citizens. We stumbled upon the trail when walking down back streets in the old city, looked up the steep steps curling up the mountainside, shrugged, and said, “what the heck?” An hour or so later, we were enjoying the most magnificent view of our entire trek through southern Europe. Not as good as Norway, of course, but still pretty damn good. 3) Or make a ridiculous plan, and see if it works. Sometimes, however, more fun than winging it is trying to navigate your way through another country (or two or three) via the Internet. That’s what I did when my former husband and I decided to visit Northern Europe two years ago. Trying to figure out how to get us from Sandefjord, Norway, to Kiel, Germany, in a way that would be far more interesting than a flight to Hamburg, I planned the most absurd 24-hour journey from Point A to Point B ever. My husband was convinced it could never work. It began with a short train trip from the Sandefjord airport to city center, a long walk to the wrong ferry terminal, followed by a wild taxi ride to the correct one 30 kilometers away in Larvik, and a four-hour journey by ferry across the Black Sea. (Did I mention Color Line offers a fantastic Norwegian buffet of cold fish, cheese, salads, flatbread, and Scandinavian pastries?)
Sandefjord, Norway: Jumping off point for a 24-hour plane, train, and boat ride to Kiel, Germany
Once in Hirtshals, Denmark with the sun setting, we hopped on a train, making countless middle of the night connections, including a startling encounter with college students participating in Carnival (one of whom sat in my husband’s lap and another of whom sat on the table in front of my seat with her scantily covered thighs just inches from my nose) and a four-hour stopover in an outdoor station at Fredericia, where I spent hours dancing on cement to keep warm (And no, no one was there at 3 a.m. to watch.) The next morning we arrived in Kiel, exhausted and amazed that we had made it. “I gotta hand it to you,” my husband said, “I never thought this plan of yours would work.” Truth be told, I never thought it would work either.
Wandering the back streets of Barcelona
4) Talk to the wait staff. They live here, you know, so don’t treat them like background music. Strike up a conversation. You might be surprised at what you’ll experience and what you’ll learn. In Barcelona, I chatted with a bartender who knew no English and a smattering of French. I, on the other hand, knew almost no Spanish and spoke only passable French. Somehow we managed to communicate in a fascinating mixture of three languages. And then there was the cruise ship waiter from Honduras who happily answered all questions on the inner workings of the dining room and staff life on a giant ship. Plus, he offered nightly demonstrations on how to balance forks on wine bottles using toothpicks (and who couldn’t use a new parlor trick every now and then?). Meanwhile the Serbian sommelier offered the inside scoop on what and what not to drink in Montenegro as well as insight on the economics of being in the culinary industry in Eastern Europe in the wake of civil war. A darkly handsome man with a thick and decadent Serbian accent pouring me wine while giving an up close and personal history lesson…I’m sold!
No map, no problem: happily lost in Pompeii
5) Be open and approachable. Wear a smile, and almost everyone will want to be your friend and help you, even if you don’t ask for it. Like the conductor on a train Dorothy and I took from Naples to Pompeii. He could speak no English but knew we had taken the wrong train (even though we ourselves did not know) and began to offer us aid with hand signals and requests for help from other English-speaking passengers…of which there were none. But we smiled and made our best efforts to communicate in our pathetic and miniscule Italian vocabulary (and, by the way, never visit Italy if you don’t speak the language because if anyone there speaks English, they’re not letting on). He eventually enabled us to shift to another train to get us to the ancient ruins of Pompeii instead of Sorrento, saving us what could have been an hour or more of wasted time backtracking in a region of Italy that is none too safe anyway. (Did I mention we were nearly mugged at the train stationin Naples and escaped the situation with some very fast walking?) Thank you, Neopolitan conductor, for saving two semi-clueless Americans from further trouble….
I’ll admit it. I’ve done a few crazy things for men. Like pretending to enjoy watching a boyfriend participate in some bizarre World War I re-enactment that actually involved mud and trenches but really looked like a bunch of grown men playing dress-up in the great outdoors.
Then there was the boyfriend who tried to teach me fly fishing. (Why I agreed I’ll never know, as I consider standing in a stream or at lake’s edge with a fishing pole about as exciting as watching paint dry.) But I tried it nevertheless. I wasn’t at it five minutes before I had my line tangled in a crabapple tree.
And I must not fail to include hanging out in the pit at a race track, the dirt from the track flying so thick that it later took two showers to get all the grit out of my ears and several flossings to get it out of my teeth. Not to mention the two beer guzzling guys who walked past me, saying, “Dude, I bet we’ll find some hot women here tonight.” (I should probably mention my S.O. at the time was a race car driver, not a spectator, which basically means he did not own a T-shirt with a Confederate flag on it with the sleeve rolled up on one side to show off the tattoo of his mother’s first name.)
True, I’m not very P.C. I can’t help it. I call it like I see it.
Which is why I feel compelled to point out that I quickly learned we should all have our limits. Mine was one re-enactment and two dirt track races. (I liked the second guy better.) And I’m inclined to think, now that I’m older and wiser, that my limits might be even more stringent these days. A guy would have to be Mr. Wonderful for sure to get me to bungee jump off a bridge in New Zealand. Basically, he’d half to be flawless. And I’m still not sure I’d do it.
So I kind of wonder why women do so many crazy things for men. Are we really that desperate? So desperate to hold their interest and affection that we take up their crazy hobbies or at least stand on the sidelines watching them with enough regularity that we start to look a little bit…well…desperate.
Learning archery in the Ozarks
It hit home with me the second (and last) race I attended. Somehow I had convinced myself I was being supportive by spending a lovely spring weekend driving God knows how many hours through central North Carolina (the armpit of the state, in my opinion, with all its look-alike cities, interstates, and giant junk outlets) to the dirt track in Gastonia in a really big pick-up towing a sprint car (which if you don’t know what that is, ladies, it’s the one with the really big rear wheels and the Orville Wright-esque roof that makes it looks like a cross between an airplane and a go-cart). I spent most of the day in the pit sitting on a tailgate reading a biography of William Faulkner for an article I was writing while the wives and girlfriends of the other race car drivers dished out elaborate buffets of fried chicken and biscuits, tested all their video recording equipment, and began climbing up on the roofs of their S.O.’s six-figure price tag towing vehicles to see if they could videotape the races from there. When race time rolled around, each one of those ladies lined up alongside her husband’s car, his helmet in hand like a squire waiting to tend to a knight. That was the point at which I started to feel weird and decided the so-called fine line between being supportive and being pathetic was actually not so fine after all.
After that episode, I showed my support by not raising hell on the weekends my boyfriend decided to spend at the track and stayed home where there were much more interesting things to do than fawn over a weekend warrior race car driver.
But I’m not alone in having made some ridiculous efforts to impress a man with my supportiveness. A friend of a friend who was planning a romantic getaway to Hawaii with her fiancé recently relented when he suggested they go camping in Utah instead…in a Winnebago…a very old Winnebago. Driving cross-country for three days, camping for five, then driving back. And in the interim, their meals would be tuna out of a can and the romance would be lovemaking in the back of a van. Sure, it’s a little reminiscent of the teenage years in a way, but who wants to make out in a stinky van at age 40? I’m personally all for the luxury hotel mattress.
I’m sure the lady in question is, too, so why won’t she admit it, hold firm, and buy those plane tickets to Hawaii?
Yeah, you guessed it. For some reason, she feels that in order to hang onto the guy she has to sacrifice her sanity…and her precious vacation time. You might be desperate if you do this, ladies.
The view from my kayak along Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore
Another friend of mine has an even more interesting track record. In the course of her relationship career, she has purchased a bass boat, a motorcycle, and a kayak. She still has the kayak, and I think she actually uses it, but the bass boat and the motorcycle have long since hit the pavement. I’m not even sure she actually ever got on the motorcycle. The purchase, I think, was a gesture of intent.
And apparently good intentions work, as she did marry the guy. He goes duck hunting and motorcycling without her these days, much to her relief, no doubt.
Women may claim that men, once married, suddenly forget how to cook, dance, and kiss, but women are guilty, too. Our “tactics of desperation,” as I like to call them, suddenly cease once we feel we have the guy cornered. We magically lose interest in skeet shooting, football, and black lingerie. (Well, some of us do anyway. Personally, I would never want to be caught in Grandma panties by an EMT following a traumatic car accident, and I do know a woman who makes cupcakes with her husband’s picked team’s logo emblazoned in the frosting for the Super Bowl each year.)
A friend of mine actually asked me to write this post after deciding a couple of her women friends were acting a little too “desperate.” At the time, I agreed with her that there are just some things you don’t do for a man, any man.
But then I got to thinking about it and, pathetic Super Bowl cupcakes aside, all this stretching of ourselves beyond normal limits isn’t necessarily a bad thing, not always. Sometimes acts of desperation turn out all right. I would never have discovered a love of sea kayaking had my former husband not goaded me into trying it out off a sandy beach in St. Croix. Nor would I have learned how to shoot had a boyfriend not introduced me to the sport more than a decade ago and enticed me to at least learn how to blast a rabid skunk…or a rabid neighbor…if I needed to. And frankly, I think if I’d been permitted a spin around the racetrack (instead of standing on the sidelines), I might have found that a little bit more interesting, too.
This is not to say I’m encouraging acts of female desperation, which seem to be most common in the unknowing years of the early 20s and the “oh, my god, I am never gonna get married unless I take up skydiving with this guy” years post 40. It’s okay to get your feet wet in something new, just so long as you’re not sacrificing your own sense of self to do so or stretching limits that you’ve put in place for very good reasons. Moving in with an S.O. who owns 12 indoor dogs when you are a stickler for cleanliness is not likely to do anything for expanding your horizons or enhancing your relationship. This is a guy it’s even questionable whether or not you should be dating him much less marrying him (I mean does he ever show up without dog hair on his pants?). Nor should you drink tuna water in the back of a Winnebago if every part of your being is screaming for a relaxing, luxurious getaway on a Pacific beach. Resentment isn’t something you want to cultivate in a relationship either.
But you do want to cultivate growth.
Rest assured, however, the line between growing and being desperate is very thick and very black. You can’t miss it.
Growth feels like a rush. Desperation feels like anxiety. (Given how few men are willing to learn ballroom dancing and yoga, however, I’m guessing they feel a lot more anxiety about trying new things than we do.)
I’ve found as I grow older, I don’t really need the goading of a romantic partner to incline me to try something new…unless it’s squid. Not really inclined to try that on my own, though I did recently eat some wild boar. I’ll gladly make a vain attempt at doing yoga on a paddleboard in the Tennessee River or see how much I can embarrass myself on an archery range in the Ozarks just because I can (and because an editor is paying me to do it). It seems appropriate, once mid-life starts its heavy approach, to be up for anything.
With a couple of exceptions….
I still don’t plan to bungee jump off the New River Bridge anytime soon. Nor will I go ZORBing. Something about intentionally cramming one’s self into a rubber ball and then having someone push it down a hill at breakneck speed just seems…well…stupid. And I really don’t feel either activity is going to promote any personal or spiritual growth…unless we’re talking a very quick trip to heaven.
But there are definitely experiences that you shouldn’t pass up. Years ago when a friend of mine went horseback riding in the snow in Iceland with her boyfriend, I thought she had lost her mind. Today she’s married to the guy and has, with his encouragement, hit five continents in the last decade and a half. Talk about “desperation” paying off. Maybe fly fishing isn’t your thing. But I bet, even if it’s not, that standing in the middle of the Madison River in northwestern Wyoming with a moose grazing nearby and the Rockies rising in the distance has the potential to float your boat…even if next time you come armed with a camera instead of a fishing rod.
“That is what entrepreneurs do: they pair imagination with action and move boldly and often joyfully in the direction of a vision only they can see.” –Meg Cadoux Hirshberg
Heidi, age 1 1/2, growing up in the home office
When one of my editors at SUCCESS magazine asked me to review Meg Cadoux Hirshberg’s new book, For Better or For Work: A Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs and Their Families, I really had no idea what I was getting into. I’ve read some life-changing books as a result of my work as a reviewer, but this one wasn’t so much life-changing as life-enlightening. I literally spent the first 20 pages or so weeping.
In case you only know Hirshberg as a columnist for Inc. Magazine, let me enlighten you. She is also the wife of Stonyfield Farm yogurt founder Gary Hirshberg, the man who singlehandedly swept Meg and their three children through almost a decade of chaos because of his pursuit of a dream—to bring organic yogurt to the world. (Yes, they’re still married.)
What got me weeping over Hirshberg’s book was how hard it hit home, as in hit me right in the gut with all the not so polite things I’ve done to the people I was supposed to love while building a career as a writer. Granted, I’m no Gary Hirshberg and never will be. I have only one employee and a handful of sometime freelance designers and writers who work when I need them (or when I can afford them). But the smallness of my entrepreneurial ventures belies the brutality of my pursuit of them.
I came by my workaholism honestly enough. It’s in the family bloodline. Both of my grandfathers were entrepreneurs, as were their fathers before them. My dad and my uncle were small business owners, too. And none of us have ever stood authority well. It’s just plain safer for us to be self-employed. So I don’t think it was really any great surprise to anyone (regardless of how crazy they thought I was) when I decided to dump life in the corporate world to pursue a career as a freelance writer. And, at the time, I was young and single. There’s really nothing wrong with being a workaholic in those circumstances because the only person you’re going to hurt is yourself.
But in walked my husband-to-be about two years into this grand venture of mine. You would have thought, when he asked me to marry him, and I replied matter-of-factly, “Okay, but realize my work will always come first,” that he would have taken a quick hike for the hills. Why he didn’t I’ll never know. I can only guess that he perhaps did not believe me.
"On assignment" with Mommy at Antietam National Battlefield
All was well the first few years. He was in the military, was overseas through much of the early years of our marriage, and I continued on with my work and my life, almost as if I was still single. I worked 80-hour weeks, stayed up till the wee hours of the morning, fielded phone calls from West Coast and overseas clients, publicists, and reporters at all hours of the night. I lived and breathed my work. It was like a drug to me. I admit it: I inhaled. And as my income doubled year after year after year, the addiction grew ever stronger. But it really wasn’t the money, as many an entrepreneur will tell you. It was the adrenaline rush of getting up every day to do something I truly loved doing and being able to pay the bills doing it.
Work-life balance was not something I worried about. And it didn’t even really occur to me that I needed any such balance until I became pregnant five years ago. That was the beginning of the wake-up call. I started to feel I might have a bit of a problem on my hands when doing phone conferences with mock enthusiasm while trying to stem my nausea by sucking on ginger candy and drinking peppermint tea. Then a month-long bout of bronchitis hit. But still I plowed through, grateful for that first pregnancy advantage of not really showing, at least not until I hit eight months. I told no one, fearful clients and publishers would drop me if they knew I was expecting, figuring I would be one of those mothers who gave up her career after childbirth.
At six months, I installed fence line on my farm alone in the heat of summer, shoveled gravel on a flood torn driveway, kept hiking and practicing yoga up until (I kid you not) the very day I went into labor. And yes, I took off early that day, at 4 p.m., because I felt a little funny. Once I realized I was having contractions, ever the perfectionist, I got in the shower, shaved my legs while timing the contractions with a stopwatch, and had my husband (who had scheduled a brief leave around my due date) drive me to the hospital at the close of the workday. I was in labor for 31 hours, and 72 hours later was back at my desk again, trying to schedule interviews around my newborn daughter’s nursing schedule.
The perks of being the travel writer's daughter: luxury hotel living
Within three months, despite the foresight I had exercised in hiring an assistant, I was half crazy from trying to do it all without missing a beat. My husband was overseas, my business was running at tilt neck speed, and I was discovering that, despite the admonitions from the home nurse who came to visit after Heidi was born, that spending 12 hours a day breastfeeding as a self-employed mother on deadline was just not feasible.
“You realize if you keep this up, you are going to kill yourself,” my doula told me about two months after Heidi’s birth.
Yep, I realized it. The workaholic was going to have to give some ground.
My retreat from super woman to the woman who admitted that having it all was slightly impossible began with hiring a babysitter, giving up breastfeeding, and asking for help, including a desperate phone call to a neighbor late one night after having been awake three days straight with my daughter who was suffering from the diaper rash case from hell. That was the night I briefly and seriously considered leaving my daughter in a basket on someone’s doorstep and driving my car into a tree. Sleep deprivation does that to a person. My neighbor arrived in 10 minutes with a steaming hot supper of lamb, rice, and homemade muffins, rocked my little one to sleep, and told me I could go take a shower. A shower! A shower without setting Heidi outside the glass shower door in her bouncy seat so I could watch her all the while. A real, self-indulgent steaming hot shower!
So this was motherhood….
I was overworked and under-prepared. And I thought relief would come when my husband retired from the military eight months after our daughter was born. And it did to some degree. Finally there was someone with whom to share the late night feedings, someone who could take morning duty and let me sleep in once in awhile. And it worked…for awhile.
Hiking through Milam Gap with contributing outdoors editor "Mommy"
But you see, my husband had forgotten that pre-marriage admonition that work comes first, and like Meg Hirshberg and countless other entrepreneurs’ spouses, he began to feel like the stepchild to some half-mad person’s crazy dream. He didn’t understand why, when he would come into my office, I would shoo him away with a wave of my hand while on the phone, act disgruntled when he interrupted my train of thought while writing an article, or fail to fully appreciate the lunch he brought me in the middle of the day because he had learned I would just keep working and forget all the body’s basic needs in the process. I was aggravated that he expected me to stop and chat with him when I passed through the kitchen on the way from the office to the bathroom. I had two minutes before my next phone call after all. For him, however, it was rejection on a grand scale. It never occurred to him that he enjoyed this access to me only because my office was connected to my home. I resented the fact that he took advantage of the access, threatened many times to rent office space in town to get away from all the interruptions.
When the ever evolving media world began to demand my time 24-7, and I realized I was going to have to do a better job of being on call at night, on vacation, everywhere, I broke down and bought a Blackberry. Now everyone could reach me by phone and e-mail all the time. I’d never miss an assignment or contract opportunity again. It also meant that while my husband and daughter played in the waves on the beach, I was answering e-mails. I was relatively okay with this. I was, after all, sitting on a nearly vacant beach with the sun going down behind me, my toes pressed into wet sand. But my spouse didn’t quite see it that way. Every time my phone went off (and it went off pretty much constantly), he would grumble. I tried to soothe him by saying, “it’s the sound of money, dear, remember that.”
He threatened to heave my smartphone out the car window. Meanwhile, I saw the Blackberry, among other things, as an investment not just in my business but in my family’s future—pay off the mortgage, send Heidi to college, take fantastic family vacations, enjoy a superb retirement.
Like the Hirshbergs, we were misinterpreting each other left and right. I felt my space as a businessperson was being disrespected. He thought his role as caregiver to two thankless females was being taken for granted.
No one was going to win this battle because, in the end, both of us were wrong.
But I was wrong first, and I knew it. Because the reality is if you put work before everything else, including your own sanity, you will, eventually, crash and burn, and you might even take a few onlookers with you.
I realized I needed an intervention. And it started with closing my office door, even though it was right there next to the kitchen, at 5 p.m. Sometimes I could hear the phone ringing, but I learned to ignore it (with a few relapses involving me tiptoeing into the office to check my voicemail “just in case”). I programmed my Blackberry so that my most crucial editors and clients had their own individual ring tones, as did my closest friends. Unless I heard those ring tones, if I was on vacation, playing with my daughter, sitting in a whirlpool bath, I ignored the persistent “bling, bling, bling.” Sometimes I even dared to turn the sound off completely.
A moment of silliness at Dukes Creek Falls while on assignment for Disney's FamilyFun
Then I began taking dance classes, taking on cardio combined with camaraderie. In the last four years, the women I have met in those classes have become like a second family to me, as have their daughters to my daughter. Twice a week, I pummel my stress with intense dancing and laughter, and I do not pick up my phone. In fact, I cannot even hear it in the midst of the music and tom foolery.
I’ve still not learned to turn off the phone when on vacation. I don’t really feel I can. As a writer, my business is me. But I check it less. I sometimes even turn it off completely at night or at least put it on “silent.” I keep it tucked away in my purse when out with friends, generally cut if off completely between 5:30 and 7:30 each weeknight, the two hours I try to devote to Heidi with attention undivided.
But I am not cured, by any means.
I realize that having arrived as a writer has won me some space from my business. Most of my editors will wait for me. They will not give up and hand assignments to someone else just because I don’t answer their e-mails in two minutes. I am close enough to the best of them that they respect my time when I say I’m going on vacation and do not bother me. Some even admonish me when they see me responding to work e-mails on weekends. And because I’m not engaged so much in business building these days as business maintaining, it’s not a tragedy if I do indeed miss some project because my phone was turned off.
I don’t know as my husband ever really understood the Siren Song that lured me (and continues to lure me) to work sometimes ridiculous hours and to travel as often as twice a month to places ranging from the wilds of Alaska to the islands of the Pacific. He learned, after a time, to accept it all, perhaps gave into the role of second or third best. My daughter, on the other hand, has grown up in the throes of the business, understands, even at age four, many of the strange complexities of her mother’s life. “When I am big, will you take me on adventures with you?” she asks. “When do we get to go on an airplane together again?” For her, my world is one of excitement. And she longs to join in on the fun.
This is not to say, however, the road with her has not been rocky. Through a strange twist of circumstance, my business was at its most demanding level in the years surrounding her birth. She was three years old before I felt I had bonded with her. And sometimes she still cries when I work on Saturdays, out of necessity to meet Monday morning news deadlines, and leave her to play with her LEGOs and Thomas the Train alone. But on some level, because she has grown up with it, she gets its.
As I hurry to prepare for a morning meeting, she stands like a soldier next to the shower, my skirt in hand, ready to hand it over once I’ve pulled on my pantyhose. My phone goes off, and she grabs it, rushes it to me like a trained personal assistant, watches as I scroll through e-mails, then takes it back, and scrolls through them herself.
Have I brought her into some ill landscape where deadlines reign supreme? Perhaps. Only time will tell. But on some level, she knows, since she was born into the world of the entrepreneur, that life and work, for me, conjoin and separate like waves pressing the beach. It’s all jumbled together at times. And that is, in the end, what makes my world so incredibly lovely—that my work and my life are one. I do not watch the clock, live for Fridays at 5 p.m., or dread Monday mornings like an Egyptian plague. No, I catch the wake of a ship with my kayak and ride it as the sun settles, being at one and the same time at work and at play. I will write about this afternoon on Lake Superior with a storm drifting in, but I will also remember it as a moment of living—living my life and living my dream…and teaching my daughter, by example, the art of working, not for money, but for love.
I have a life now, separate from work. But it took me many years to get it. And I often wonder, as I lie awake at night thinking about the week’s deadlines, if I’d have it had I not finally figured out how to fit 80 hours of work into 25 or 30. Am I really cured after all? Or has success just dampened my thirst?
It is, perhaps, hard to say, but I do know that if work demanded of me now what it demanded of me years ago–to give up (or at least set aside for a time) the people I loved most in the world, the leisure time I had envisioned all this work earning me to begin with, or the freedom to live my life on my own terms–I’d be a damn sight less inclined to take it on. Because while I do indeed work for love, I also work for a living. And right now, I’m pretty darn busy living.
Reprinted from the Dec. 2010 issue of The ASJA Monthly.
When I first moved to the small mountain community where I currently reside, my neighbors were exceedingly curious about my source of income. Young and single at the time, as far as they could tell, I stayed home all day, never went to work, yet somehow continued to pay the mortgage. Finally, at a Ruritan Club meeting, a local teacher gathered enough gumption to ask me the question we freelance writers often dread: “So what do you do for a living?”
“I’m a writer,” I replied.
She smiled, “Yes, but what do you do for a living?”
I have often wondered if that general notion that one cannot seriously be a writer is not an unconscious force behind the troubles freelancers frequently have with getting paid, particularly with getting paid on time. How many times when checks from publishers have failed to arrive promptly have I been tempted to pick up the phone, call my editor, and ask her how she would feel if her employer decided not to pay her one month? Countless times.
But after a decade of earning my bread as a writer, I’ve learned a few things about getting paid, one of which involves never losing my cool and telling that editor what I really think of her persistent “misplacement” of my invoice.
As a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors’ grievance committee, I am all too well aware of the most common payment issues affecting freelance writers—the publications that withhold payment till “acceptance” and then draw out the process of acceptance by six months (and sometimes even years); the magazines that happily accept your assigned article and then ask you to, “oh by the way,” sign their newly developed work-for-hire contract before they can process your check; and then the ones who are in tight financial circumstances and try to get off without paying you…ever.
Whether you’re a writer or entrepreneur of any stripe, some of this probably sounds familiar.
Over my career, I’ve experienced all three scenarios and then some. The good news, however, is that I have never not been paid. Perhaps you are shaking your head in disbelief at this point. But it’s true, and the secret is actually quite simple: I’ve always acted like a businessperson. No matter how passionate you are about the work you do, whether it’s writing or custom embroidery, you can’t lose yourself in the joy of the work to the degree that you set yourself up for grief in your pocketbook.
The concept of “how to get paid on time” begins long before you submit your invoice to your editor or client. It starts with knowing the financial stability (and payment history) of a market before you sign that contract and then negotiating clear payment terms as well as kill fee clauses that won’t leave you in the lurch if things go horribly wrong. And if things do go wrong and that check hasn’t arrived within 30 days of your article or project submittal, follow up promptly, not six months later. The longer you wait to pursue payment, the less professional you look as a writer, the more likely the publication will try to take advantage of you, and the more certain they will feel you won’t pursue legal action against them.
Nine out of ten times I’ve experienced an overdue invoice, a quick reminder to my editor at the 31-day mark has done the trick. How much grief can be avoided just by running a tight ship. And if that simple action fails, prompt escalation of the matter will often work wonders. Sometimes something as simple as carbon copying my lawyer on a request for payment will turn the situation around in a week or less. How, you may ask? It’s simple: if you take yourself seriously as a businessperson, so will your editors, publishers, and clients.
I didn’t become a writer because I like doing accounting. Bookkeeping is my least favorite part of the job. But doing it well has kept me afloat when plenty of other freelancers have found themselves sinking.
A case in point: two years ago a freelance photographer with whom I worked on a project for a high profile regional magazine called me up in a state of concern. The publication was long overdue on paying both of us. For me, it was a contract dispute. The new editor of the magazine was trying to force me to sign a work-for-hire contract ipso facto and withholding payment until I’d done so. I rarely give away all the rights to my work, and I wasn’t about to start for a relatively small fee of $1,000. Knowing the magazine had planned my article for the next issue and that the press deadline was less than a month away, I chose to hold my ground, telling the editor I felt I could easily withdraw my article and sell it elsewhere. The photographer didn’t feel so lucky and when I advised him of my strategy, he said, “That’s great if you can afford to hold on like that.”
Since both of us had been due payment almost nine months earlier, I replied,
“I can’t afford not to.”
And it’s true. Too often we writers, fearful of where that next paycheck is coming from, allow ourselves to be abused for the sake of money that might come at some indefinite future point. How much better it is, however, to work for markets that value their contributors, pay them well and in timely fashion, and continue to provide more work. Why continue to give your precious efforts to a market that doesn’t honor them? It doesn’t make economic sense.
I don’t know if that freelance photographer ever got his due. I hope he did because his beautiful photography was published two months later alongside my article, and it was done without me having to sign a work-for-hire contract and within two weeks of me sending a polite but firm letter to the magazine’s publisher. Needless to say, it’s not a market with which I choose to work anymore.
I devote my time to markets that respect me as a professional and pay their bills on time. How did I find these wonderful publishers and clients? By process of elimination, of course. It’s an ongoing process, however. Stop paying me on time and treating me with the respect due to a professional who acts like a professional, and I’ll stop writing for you. Simple, yes, but it’s something we writers need to remember the next time we’re inclined to take an assignment with that major national magazine just because we want the byline…without doing our homework on the magazine’s financial health, payment history, and treatment of freelancers.
Of course, it’s also important to return the favor to the people for whom we work: meet deadline with clean and accurate copy, be courteous and professional, and do it all with relentless consistency. Do those things, and the best editors of the best paying publications will beat a path to your door…guaranteed. And they’ll remember just how much they liked you (and want to earn your continued contributions) when that bill comes, too.
“Perfect isn’t that interesting to watch. In fact, it can be both boring and exhausting. What we like to see is human.” –Frances Cole Jones
In a book I had to review recently, the author wrote, and not necessarily with contempt, that social media has made us all exhibitionists and opened the way for everyone to make public confessionals. There is truth in this. And the result is a lot of noise in a world already overflowing with information.
When I asked some women friends and acquaintances to help contribute to this blog, they balked (even the two who are currently contributing). The idea of flinging their personal lives onto the Internet for their parents, their friends, their neighbors to read…and judge…seemed a little bit scary. “What if I offend someone? What if I make someone mad?” Of course, having been a journalist and columnist for many years, I know that stirring up the pot is often the whole point. If you’re not offending someone or making someone mad at least some of the time, you probably don’t stand for much, and you’re probably not making much of a difference in anyone’s life either.
But is it all, in the end, just self-serving and self-magnifying noise? Well, it depends. There is a place for the public confessional. I think of Brooke Shields’ book Down Came the Rain, where she talked about her own struggle with postpartum depression. I think of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, which chronicled her trials with recovering from divorce, lost love, and daring to love again. I think of Isabel Gillies’ It Happens Every Day, where she acknowledged her own responsibility in her ex-husband’s extramarital affair. And I think of Youngme Moon’s Difference, where she talked about the day she decided to stop teaching the way everyone else was teaching and how it changed her life and the lives of her students. These books fit the category of public confessional, and how glad am I these women confessed.
Their confessions have made me (and others, too, no doubt) feel less alone on this journey called life. And they have taught me new ways of thinking about and approaching my own existence. Knowing someone else has tried and failed and tried again…differently…gives me hope in moments when hope seems hard to come by.
Some of my friends and acquaintances will be surprised–those who think I limit myself to great, dead literary authors like William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Elizabeth Gaskell. But all these books, literary fiction and popular memoir, have something critical in common. Perhaps no one can set a scene like Thomas Hardy. And perhaps no one can jar our senses with “hit that nail on the head” meaning like Faulkner. But they are, in the end, all public confessionals–cutting open the writer’s view of the heart of life, whether achieved through fact or fiction. And these confessionals change us.
So let me confess….
I started this blog because I realized I had it too good in some ways.
Trained by experience to establish rapport with sources by finding that rock of shared experience that would make them trust me, I have been the recipient of more than a few confessionals over the years. And what I discovered from that and from the tools of journalism that I have transferred over to my relationships with friends and colleagues is that everyone has a story, many stories most likely, that they are dying to tell, need to tell. They are just waiting for the audience…the audience that often never comes. They want someone to walk into their lives who gives a damn, really, honestly gives a damn. Because life is hard, and life is scary, and isolation is the surest path to eternal torment.
I have received confessionals on a scale far deeper than any Catholic priest’s. And it has not, as you might imagine, given me a front row seat to the hidden melodrama of people’s lives. Rather, having that window into people’s souls has given me a window into my own. It has given me the courage to acknowledge my own failures, learn from them, and pass the lessons on.
The assistant instructor at the dance studio where I take lessons twice a week often remarks when teaching choreography she has just learned herself, “Let me act like I know what I’m doing here.” And we chuckle with some relief, glad perhaps to know that someone else is “winging it” besides ourselves.
I can recall having done the same as a young Humanities professor, teaching the history of early Western Culture, a subject well outside my area of expertise, a subject in which I struggled to stay a step ahead of my students. They thought I was the expert. How wrong they were. Yet I never let on that I had about as much expertise in the origins of Islam as the Walmart greeter.
But I grew up, as many of us do, with the idea that perfection is the goal. After all, the Bible (a centerpiece of western culture whether you are Christian or not) enjoins us to “be perfect as thy Father in heaven is perfect.” I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but this world we live in is far from perfect, and if you think God created it, then I guess you also have to figure He wasn’t perfect or that He was intentionally imperfect. So I think it’s probably perfectly okay and well within your rights if you are religious to perform imperfectly in this world. It might even be you were meant to do so.
That’s not an easy idea to get used to, however. Some of my most well-educated and seemingly level-headed friends still strive for perfection, still attempt to hide imperfection even from the people they love most in the world. How many times have you watched yourself go through the motions of cheerfulness when you did not truly feel it? How many times have you told your boss you can handle that project, no problem, when on the inside you’re terrified that you have no idea what you’re doing?
We all lie to each other…and sometimes to ourselves for the sake of civility. But where does civility stop and honesty begin? It is a difficult question.
I have a lifetime of experience in “acting like I know what I’m doing here.” I write articles that people trust to be accurate and true even when I myself am sleep deprived and pulling through with the aid of caffeine alone. I write columns that are supposed to inspire people to get off their rears and do something with their lives even when I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m doing with mine half the time. A friend of mine remarked to me not long after I’d returned from three consecutive trips that had me zooming through seven different time zones in the course of a month, “I wish I could live your life for a day.”
Really?
Perhaps it looks grand from where she is sitting. From where I am sitting, it often looks downright ridiculous.
There was a time, not too terribly long ago, when I felt some not entirely sane obligation to offer the appearance at least of the perfect life. I thought that, by virtue of the fact I had followed a childhood dream to fruition, it was my duty to inspire others to do the same—to make it look rewarding and wonderful to follow one’s heart. And it is. But not all the time. Not by a long stretch. Sometimes I feel like I am hanging onto my dreams with a tiny piece of thread that is slowly fraying.
We all feel that way, of course, at one time or another. But rarely will you find a person willing to admit it, unless you are interviewing her for an article on overcoming doubt. Most of us, for the most part, still hide behind our carefully constructed and often ridiculously transparent veils of perfection.
An acquaintance of mine said this is necessary, that we cannot bare our souls to the world. What an awkward place it would be. He has a point. You know those people on Facebook who announce to the world when they’re having a nervous breakdown? Yep, that’s a little creepy, I have to acknowledge. I’ve “unfriended” a few of those. It can be uncomfortable, at times, to have a front row seat to imperfection.
But maybe that’s only because we are not used to it. My jury is still out on that.
And though I’ve never given much heed to New Year’s resolutions, I might give it a go this year. My new purpose in life will be to be an inspiration, not by being perfect, but by being human…and being very good at it.
My assistant tells me I curse too much. She has advised me that perhaps I should make a New Year’s resolution to curse less. Even my husband says there are times when my language could rival any sailor’s.
Are you surprised?
If you know me in my professional incarnation, perhaps you are. I am calm and cool as can be when on the phone or in an interview with an editor, publisher, or client—the epitome of professionalism and courtesy. And it’s not an act. No, it feels perfectly natural to be accommodating and kind to the people who pay my bills.
But once the phone is hung up, the deadlines are looming eerily, and the wireless office network has decided yet again to go on strike, the four-letter words start pouring out like spilled coffee. And pretty soon, the office is resounding with phrases that would make my mother cower in shame and which, fortunately, make my assistant devolve into giggles.
However, there is one four-letter word that is off limits, a word I never speak, a word I never allow anyone I care about to speak. And that’s can’t. If you want to get me really fired up, just say “I can’t” within earshot.
Even my four-year-old daughter knows this word is taboo. She knows if she makes the error of saying it while trying to put a floor puzzle together, she’ll be the recipient of Mommy’s so-called “look of death” and will receive no empathy whatsoever, just a tirade on how there is no such thing as “I can’t,” that she can put that puzzle together all by herself, that she will put it together, and that she will do so without any help from mommy. Silence and diligence ensue. 20 minutes later…Disney princess puzzle completed, and a delighted, “Look, Mommy, I did it!”
I’m not sure where my aversion to can’t came from. My mother would likely contend I’ve hated the word since at least age 2 since my common response to her telling me, “No, you can’t do that,” would be to do it anyway. And I’m afraid my husband would agree with her on that point. Both have since learned that “you can’t” is like giving me a call to action—some sort of weird reverse psychology phenomena that makes me dig my heels in and pursue whatever action I’m being told I cannot pursue.
But what can you expect? I come by this honestly enough. Raised by Midwestern Lutherans of Scandinavian descent, I have to say that bullheadedness is part of my cultural inheritance. You can’t live in a part of the country where the announcement that it’s 20 degrees below zero with the wind chill factored in results in a response like, “Well, I sure am glad it’s warmed up today,” without being stubborn. Stubborn is the key to survival, as is doing the seemingly impossible—like hauling your truck out of a half frozen lake after an ice fishing expedition gone bad or shoveling the front walk with diligence despite the fact the snow is shoulder-high.
Yet there were times in my life when I was tempted to succumb to the words “you can’t” and almost did—like when some of my most admired college professors scoffed at the idea I wanted to be a writer, thinking I’d be far better off pursuing an academic career instead, or when I decided to build a house on a shoulder of the appropriately named “Snowy Mountain” with a near mile-long driveway with a 300 ft. elevation gain. I didn’t listen, and that willfulness has made all the difference in my life.
Perhaps that’s why, when I hear people I love say, “I can’t,” I get all fired up. To me, those words speak grief. They say that what we want or need is impossible to have. They say, “I’ve given up. I’m not capable. I don’t believe. The opportunity has passed me by.”
Yet listen, and you’ll hear these words spoken all the time, and you never hear them in the context of anything good.
A friend of mine said to me recently, “My job is high stress, exhausting. I’d love to do something else, but it pays well, so I can’t quit. I have to provide for my family.”
Then an editor acquaintance told me she and her husband dream of selling all their possessions and moving to Paris, “but we can’t,” she lamented. “We have a toddler.”
I find myself scratching my head at these statements, wondering what they mean. Is caring for one’s family incompatible with a rewarding and happy career? Does living in Paris mean one can’t have a child under age four? I don’t think so. I don’t really think it’s an issue of “I can’t.” I think it’s an issue of, boy, it would be a big change and a lot of trouble, and what if it’s not worth it in the end? Better just to stay here with what I’m doing where it’s nice and safe.
“I can’t” has nothing to do with ability or even guilt. It’s all about fear.
I’d be lying like crazy if I ever said I wasn’t afraid. I’m afraid a lot. I find myself facing fear on an almost daily basis on things ranging from terror of falling off that paddleboard into an icy cold river once I finally get the gumption to get off my knees and stand up to near paralyzing anxiety at the thought of overhauling my life for a better chance at happiness. And while, “I’m afraid!” will creep into my head, “I can’t” doesn’t.
Because it’s perfectly okay to be afraid.
The problem arises when we let fear keep us from living the lives we’re meant to live. We love to say we can’t do this or that because we don’t have enough money, don’t have enough time, because we’re too old, because it will disrupt the lives of our children or will make our friends and neighbors raise their eyebrows. Well, I have to report the following: You will never have enough money or time. You are never too old. And you will disrupt your children’s lives despite your best efforts not to. Plus, your friends and neighbors are always going to find something to raise their eyebrows over whether you give them cause or not.
Don’t wait until the time is right…because it never will be. There is always a ready excuse for failing to move to Paris, failing to start your own business, failing to leave that hateful job. Because living life is a bit like falling in love. You’re going to get burned a lot before you get it right, most likely, and the longer you wait to live the next chapter, the less time you have to make the climax, the conclusion your own.
Sometimes my 70-year-old father will lament that he’s never traveled to Alaska (though he’s always wanted to), that he’s never hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon (despite the fact it’s been on his bucket list for years), that he’ll never see a Norwegian fjord (even though he’s dreamed of it). When I ask him why, he’ll often say, “I’m too old,” or “your mother wouldn’t come,” or any other of a long list of excuses that really don’t suit the man who made me believe I really could understand trigonometry and, much later, was the only supporter of my biggest, wildest childhood dreams.
And I have to remind him, in reverse parent role, that his age is all the more reason to go and to go now. Because time is slipping, health is temporary, and the world is big. Don’t waste it living a life that isn’t yours.
A few weeks ago when I was visiting my family and was seated at the dinner table with my parents, my grandmother, and my daughter, my four-year-old pointed to my plate where I had left some of my mother’s very good but far too calorie-laden lasagna and said, “Mommy, you didn’t finish your dinner.”
She saw the injustice, as I was requiring her to finish hers. I smiled at her and replied, “I know, sweetie, but I’m all grown up, so I can do what I want, and when you’re all grown up you can do exactly what you want to do, too.”
My mother shot me a glance and said quickly, “No, you can’t.”
I looked back at her, the woman I’d willfully defied since childhood, not because I wanted to make her crazy but because I had a very definite vision of what I wanted from my life that she did not always share, and then turned to my daughter, and said, “Heidi, you can do whatever you want when you’re grown up, and don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.”
My mother, wisely, said nothing. She and I had been down this road a thousand times before. And to be fair, I’ve had my doubts at times about what I can do. I always knew I’d be a writer, but I never dreamed in a million years I’d ever be able to buy a farm on it, build a house on it, support a family on it. That I’ve been able to I can only credit to one thing, and it’s neither ability nor intelligence—it’s a high dose of bullheadedness.
And perhaps it’s that bullheadedness that turns me into a spastic ball of adrenaline when the stakes are high, the deadlines are looming, and the life I want is so close I can taste it. I think my assistant knows this, so she tolerates it when the four-letter words come rolling off my tongue on one of those days when there is so much to accomplish in so little time. One four-letter word she knows she won’t hear is “can’t.”
Instead, I release my anxiety in a string of epithets and then get down to the business of doing what needs to be done. Because no matter how crazy, tragic, or overwhelming life becomes, I can meet it with strength, if not always grace, as long as I keep the end goal in mind. And when the time comes to take a wild leap of faith, I may not feel ready, but I’ll be damned if I’ll say, “I can’t.” Nope. The only valid response to meeting a challenge, an opportunity, a dream head-on is to say, “I can.” And then do it.
You’ve heard the old adage, “Listen to your mother.” Well, when your mother is a teacher accustomed to having other people listen to her and bend to her will, you learn pretty quickly that listening is in your best interest, at least when your car is still on her insurance policy….
The same goes for a grandmother who has been at one and the same time a factory worker, farmer, homemaker, and mother and who can churn out hundreds of lefse in one day (and yes, because it’s a Scandinavian food, you can only make one at a time), get 20 different bowls of food hot and steaming on the dinner table all at the same time, and chop an invasive black snake’s head off in one fell swoop with a kitchen knife without compunction.
I grew up under the example of these stern women, influenced by their relentless stoicism in the face of adversity, their insistence on getting what they want, and their dedication to seeing that the world bend as much as possible to what is right and good…or at least what they believed to be right and good.
Perhaps it was their stoical Scandinavian ancestry and the sense of personal responsibility that comes of being Lutheran that made them the unyielding, witty, and fearsome creatures that they are.
It was my grandmother who taught me how to sew, how to make things grow, and how to laugh at the absurdity of everyday life. She passed on to me old family recipes, showed me how to kill bugs with soap and water, how to stop the itch of a mosquito bite, and instilled in me the usefulness of knowing how to drive a tractor.
And then there was my mother, who, after four decades of reading, studying, and teaching the eternal truths of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens and watching the careful interactions of young people dancing in that netherworld between childhood and freedom, tried to pass onto me her, at one time, nearly flawless understanding of human nature. Better informed than a psychologist on what made people tick, she gave the soundest advice on how to handle human interactions. It was advice I rarely followed but always learned I should have.
From these two women came practical life lessons that I have often taken for granted as much as washing one’s hands before dinner. But their simple advice, both spoken and demonstrated, has often been my guidebook through the twisting path of life:
Ignore negative criticism; accept constructive criticism and compliments graciously.
Never send form Christmas letters. The only person who cares that your two-year-old has an IQ of 160, that your daughter just got accepted to Harvard, and that you and your husband spent three months last summer flying around the world in a hot air balloon is you.
Do send personal, handwritten thank you notes, especially after weddings and funerals.
Have the willpower to walk away when you don’t get your asking price from a salesperson. This is especially true when shopping for cars or buying homes. You’ll likely get a call in the morning….
Buy 12 five-piece place settings, even if your dining room table only seats eight. Despite the china salesman’s demonstration, you can only stand on a teacup so many times before it breaks.
Turn off the television. You’ll find you have a lot more time on your hands than you think.
Keep a garden. You never know when it might come in handy to know how to produce and preserve your own food.
Pick your battles carefully. Nobody listens to the person who always complains and criticizes.
Learn how to do your own taxes and home repair or marry somebody who can do them for you.
Never say anything you wouldn’t want repeated.
Always say “please” and “thank you,” especially to your spouse, your children, your employees, and wait staff.
Avoid airing your political and religious views in public.
Remember that skepticism is your best defense against salesmen, politicians, lawyers, doctors, and the media.
Maintain high standards. Others will emulate your example.
Always remember and recognize the birthdays and special holidays of your friends and family, even if you think it’s just an excuse for Hallmark to make more money.
Wear high heels to church, even when you’re 80. How you dress reflects how you feel about what you’re doing.
Never stop doing anything you love, even when you’re 90. You are as young as you act, no matter how it feels.
Don’t go to sleep when passing through the Grand Tetons. That might be the day a grizzly bear crosses the road.
Friends are people who call you when you’re troubled, not just when they are.
Remember that happiness comes from living up to your own expectations, not other people’s.
My husband said to me recently, after a disagreement about how I operate my professional and personal life, “You know I really admire the way you fling yourself blindly into life. It’s one of the reasons I fell in love with you. But it’s just not smart.”
You’ve probably heard statements like this dozens of times: “I love you, but….” We all hear them. They are the bane of happy relationships. If you love somebody, but this or that, maybe you shouldn’t be with him or her…unless, of course, you have to be. You have to look after your kids, your parents, that dog you adopted from the SPCA.
This post isn’t about loving some but not all of a person, however. It’s about living, not blindly, but, as I prefer to argue, openly.
And I’m not talking about hopping out of the proverbial closet if you’re gay or letting your grown children know you’ve divorced…six months after it has happened. I’m talking about being open to life, to the opportunities it offers at every turn, the opportunities we often miss because we’re afraid, afraid of trying something new, striking up a conversation with a stranger, saying “yes” when our self-protective instinct wants to say “no.”
Everything extraordinary that has ever happened in my life has happened because I took a massive leap of faith, defied the naysayers, hoped, believed, and closed my eyes and jumped. When I told an acquaintance of mine once that much as I enjoyed sea kayaking, I didn’t know if I was up for whitewater, he said, “Whitewater kayaking is all about fear management.”
So is life. Conquer your fear, and the thing you thought you couldn’t do becomes possible, manageable, maybe even smart.
For those of you who have been reading my columns in newspapers and magazines for the past decade, you have heard all of this, to some degree or another, many times before. But I think it bears repeating. It is probably why my dad, from the time I was a teenager until deep into my adult life, would tell me every time I left home to go on a date, return to college, go back to my apartment in the city, “Drive fast, and take chances.” He wasn’t talking about how to drive my car (though I’ve been lead-footed, I’ll admit, since age 16); he was talking about how to live my life.
Overcome fear. No matter what. Overcome it.
As many a philosopher has pointed out over the centuries, it is beyond fear that we find the true meaning of our lives.
When I was a child, I was incredibly afraid. Everything from piano recitals to going away for a weeklong church summer camp terrified me. They pushed me outside my comfort zone. It was one thing to play the piano in my parents’ living room, quite another to play it in front of an auditorium full of people. And it was one thing to have a sleepover at a best friend’s house, but to bunk in a cabin in the woods with girls I hardly knew? Now that was scary.
But as I grew older, I slowly began testing my own limits, learned to say “yes” to crazy, nerve-wracking things like singing the “Star Spangled Banner” at the opening of every high school basketball game and leading discussions on comparative religion in the college Humanities classes I started teaching at age 23, finding myself, on many occasions, younger than my students.
These small dares led to ever bigger ones because I had begun to discover that saying “yes” to things that terrified me taught me, little by little, to push through fear. And the amazing thing about fear is that once you push through it, it disappears. You’re not only never afraid of that particular thing again, you find yourself a little less afraid of the next scary thing because you’ve proved, after all, you can handle fear.
By the time I was in my mid-twenties, my fear management had grown to a whole new level. I was willing to drop a full-time, good-paying job at an ad agency, give up my penthouse apartment, and take a wild risk becoming a freelance writer in the isolated mountain reaches of western Virginia. Everyone, except my dad, told me I had lost my mind, and even my dad admitted, years later, that he thought I had lost my mind, too, but was smart enough to keep his mouth shut.
A lot of people will chastise themselves, when they are young anyway, for taking a risk and falling flat on their faces. After all, it’s pretty darn embarrassing when a girl turns down your request for a dance, so why on earth would you ever risk yourself by asking a woman to marry you? You see how this reasoning against risk-taking can get out of hand. Pretty soon, you’ll be avoiding everything that makes life worth living.
Consider instead, if you’re feeling a little fearful, of twisting your thinking. Learn to regret the risk not taken, and pretty soon it will become habit to put yourself out there. So strong a habit, in fact, that you’ll kick yourself until you’re black and blue every time you fail to take an opportunity and see where it leads.
I’m still beating up on myself for failing to get the business card of a Belgian businessman I met on an airplane a couple of weeks ago who sought me out because he wanted to talk to an American who could speak French. I was afraid he might think I was hitting on him. When I told my husband about this failure on my part later, he said, ironically enough, after I had described the gentleman, “I bet he’s in the diamond trade. You could have had a new client. You’re an idiot.”
Hmmm. I thought so, too.
I should have just flung myself blindly into the possible opportunity. But then, I don’t really see staying open to possibilities as a blind leap of faith. Rather, it is a calculated sense of foresight. Life is too short for giving into fear. Sure, you might embarrass yourself, offend someone, maybe even lose your shirt (metaphorically speaking). But that’s the beauty of risk…and of life. You really, truly never know what’s around that next corner. And if you operate from a place of opportunity instead of a place of fear, chances are whatever is around the bend is pretty darn grand.
More than a decade ago, when I was just beginning to launch my career as a full-time freelance writer, I remember driving through Goshen Pass in western Virginia, pulling off the road periodically to frame scarlet sugar maples and golden poplars in my camera lens for a fall getaway article I was writing. Still giddy at the idea I was actually pursuing this crazy dream of mine to live by the written word, I turned to my travel companion, a friend who had accompanied me on so many of these writing journeys, and said, “You know what? I’m a writer. I’m actually a writer.”
He regarded me with understandable puzzlement and said, “Well, of course, you’re a writer.”
“No, really,” I insisted, as if daylight had suddenly shattered through the sodden tree limbs overhanging Route 42, “I’m a writer. I’m actually making a living by writing.”
Of course, this was not news to my friend. But somehow it was news to me. Through late nights at the computer and endless prospecting for freelance work, I had somehow been so caught up in the business of making a living by my craft that I had failed to notice the point at which I actually became a professional writer.
But then the question remains, what exactly is a writer? And have I, for the past 30 years, been selling myself short because I was not, for nearly 20 of those years, earning a living wage as a writer? How many writers, after all, can earn a consistent living wage by their craft? After all, it took me two decades to figure it out.
You see, I was not suddenly a writer while photographing autumn foliage in Goshen Pass. Nor was I suddenly a writer when I published my first newspaper article or my first short story. If we want to talk about writing and what it means to be a writer, well then, I have to go back much farther, to a period that doesn’t appear on my resume. Because I have been a writer almost since I could hold a pen, quite literally.
I wrote my first short story when I was six years old. I was no child prodigy. I had been reading biographies of famous Americans written for young children and had loved them so much I wanted to write my own. So I wrote a story (though I probably considered the effort great enough at the time to be called a book) about a pioneer girl named Ellen Kay Brown. And I illustrated it, too, with pencil sketches of girls in bonnets and fathers with grisly beards.
I handed the notebook-paper story to my mother, a high school English teacher, for my first critical review. She didn’t paste it to the refrigerator with a magnet or smile and exclaim how proud she was of my effort. She took it in her hands quite seriously, as she would a research paper on Hamlet or Macbeth, and, red pen in hand, proceeded to critique my first attempt at literature, circling my childish “enuff” and changing it to “enough,” capitalizing proper nouns, inserting punctuation.
Was this some cruelty on her part? I never for once thought so, but perhaps some more indulging parent might. This was par for the course in a household where books lined shelves in rooms upstairs and down and where anyone of blood relation would know the difference between “can” and “may” as well as “lie” and “lay.”
I took my little manuscript back, absorbing her red corrections, recording their sense for the next effort, and thus began a ritual between us that lasted until I left home for college. I wrote; she critiqued quietly with her red pen. By the time I graduated from high school, I was one of only a select few in the world who knew, as if by second nature, when and when not to use commas as well as how to give stylistic flair to an exam essay (though my mother claims no responsibility for the latter skill).
Today my mother keeps all these carefully reviewed manuscripts—penciled short stories, illustrated poems, carefully typed essays—in a cabinet in the library. They are small treasures to her, the woman who said, when I declared at six years of age that I was going to be a writer, “It’s never wise to count your chickens before they hatch.”
But I’ve always been counting chickens, hatched and unhatched, and I’ve never assumed anything other than success. That has been my way. It would have to be my way. Only a dreamer could ever believe it possible to make a career out of language.
But still the question—when did I become a writer? My first sense that I might be one actually came when I was a senior in college and my mentor and three-time history professor said upon reading my senior thesis, “There’s nothing I can tell you about writing. I wouldn’t know how to critique you.” My mother never said this, but on the infrequent occasions when I showed her a college or graduate research paper, she would read it, first page to last, hand it back, and say only, “Looks fine to me.” Flipping through the paper, I scanned the pages for the familiar red ink—nothing. Full circle at last, I thought.
Yet no writer who is a good writer ever thinks his or her work is good enough. I read articles I wrote only months ago and think today they look horrible. I have become my mother minus the red pen. All things can be improved upon.
Yet all writers know this, and all writers know, deep down, that it is not so much the paycheck that justifies them as authors. It is the constant development, the constant effort. I have been a writer since I was six. An editor might be intrigued to know that I have more than three decades of experience. But would that intrigue persist if she knew the whole truth?
Probably not.
And that is the sad reality of the writing life. Until you have a paycheck from a publisher, and preferably several, you are not a writer. Your skill level, your decades of practice, your passion are irrelevant . . . at least to most editors.
Did you ever notice that the editor who constantly sent you rejections of your pitches suddenly changed his tune when one of his colleagues took a chance and published your work . . . with success? Yes, once you have a few publishing credits behind you, the rejections trickle to a minimum. Which makes you wonder—does good writing count for anything? Or are editors, like movie producers, tied to the tried and true?
Well, yes and no. Good writing does count for something. After all, it’s easier to publish good writing than bad. But getting good writing noticed, in the end, is a matter of luck. For myself, I ran into an overwhelmed newspaper editor willing to take a chance on me and the editor of a start-up lifestyle magazine with a dearth of authors. After that, everything began to fall into place. Just ask Nicholas Sparks how he became a best-selling author overnight. His answer, like that of so many other wildly successful writers, will make you dream like the daily players of the lottery and gnash your teeth at the same time.
It is luck.
But it’s also persistence. Beat the statistics by flooding the market.
I guess my mother, my original editor, knew a thing or two. I kept passing her the notebook paper, and one day it came back without red ink. Was it talent, or did I beat the odds? Perhaps a little of both . . . but maybe it’s time I started playing the lottery.
The following essay was originally published in the March/April 2011 issue of Cooperative Living magazine.
Spring comes late to my home in Virginia’s Blue Grass Valley, this otherworldly place of high-elevation pastures and undulating ridgelines, with winter often extending into April. But when that last bit of snow slips down through the soil to rejoin the limestone earth and the whole valley flames fresh green from the swales of the creek beds to the tops of the sugar maples that crown Lantz and Monterey mountains, it seems no great thing to have waded through six months of winter if this rebirth is the reward.
View from the author's Blue Grass Valley farm
We humans are not so unlike the landscape that surrounds us. Like yellow jonquils and redheaded tulips that press forth through thaw-softened earth after their annual slumber, we sometimes lie dormant as winter for years until the opportunity comes for us to throw off the mantle of our former selves and transform into something akin to spring. Like the grass beneath our feet, we find ourselves changing and expanding with the seasons of our lives, often imperceptibly but occasionally with great force like the reinvented course of a mountain stream after a flood.
Last May, as Highland County was bursting into bloom, I crossed the ocean to revisit the land of my not-so-long-ago ancestors, those who had come here only a century before, to carve a life out of the black soil of the American Midwest, daring to leave life as the children of Norwegian cotters for the prospect of becoming landowner farmers in a landscape far different from the sidelong pastures of the Tresfjord where they were born with the smell of the sea always peppering the breeze.
Standing in the churchyard in western Norway where my great-great-grandfather was baptized, reading the family names across the gravestones — Naerem, Sylte, and Knutson — was to me a vivid reminder of the transformation my ancestors undertook all those years ago, hoping that by transitioning from one landscape to another, from the hardscrabble slopes of the Norwegian fjords to the thick black soil of the American prairie, they would transform their destinies.
And so they did, making a way for themselves, and for those of us who would follow, in a world without abject poverty, without the press of landlords, without the hardship of carving a living out of mountainsides more rock than soil.
When I came home again, America looked different, transformed. But it was I who had changed. I had witnessed the power of place in changing destiny. I had seen firsthand how impossible it would have been for me to be who I am or do what I have done had my great-great-grandparents not been brave enough to change their lives forever. And I began to comprehend at last what my college mentor had meant all those years ago when he talked of “the right to rise,” our American birthright.
He, too, knew the transformative power of leaving one landscape to join another, having come of age in a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Budapest as a Hungarian Jew. It was his father who enjoined him after the Communists came to power to risk a border crossing and find his way to America. And so he did, landing in New York City with $1 in his pocket. He read the speeches and writings of Abraham Lincoln to teach himself English and is today, more than half a century later, one of the world’s foremost Lincoln scholars.
I do not know, given his hopes I would become a historian, too, if he would understand my less-dramatic change of setting — why I emptied all my savings almost a decade ago to purchase a house and land in Highland County with no immediate prospect of employment, only the hope that I could do as I had long dreamed of doing, to make my way in the world as a writer in a landscape I had loved since childhood. Certainly no one else in my life understood.
But I had already learned, by that point in my life, that change, transformation, rebirth, do not come without risk, and rarely do they come without suffering. And when, at age 26, I came to Highland with the first carload of my life packed in boxes to find my driveway flooded by the snowmelt of early spring, the creek overflowing its banks, and coursing a foot or more over the dry ford, I laughed, rolled up my pants legs, and proceeded to carry my life, box by box, across that stream to my new home, the first of many challenges that would face me in the years to come.
And since that spring almost a decade ago, I have found my life transformed many times, frequently by landscapes, sometimes by people, and occasionally by pain. All the world’s major religions refer to these journeys of transformation and rebirth, how they are little removed from the journeys of the grass and trees that die back each winter to be reborn again in spring. But if you are not in tune to these cycles, as the farmer is to the character of the soil, it is easy enough to miss the opportunities they provide. It is not every seed that finds its way through the topsoil to become a walnut tree.
Did my great-great-grandfather know when he boarded that ship in Molde, Norway, that he was changing the course of history for all his progeny? Did Gabor Boritt know when he ran across the heavily guarded Hungarian border into Austria that he would one day receive the National Humanities Medal from an American President? Do any of us know when the chance comes to change where that change will lead?
We do not, of course. And sometimes we do not even recognize the chance, or we fail to embrace it out of fear, forgetting this is the natural cycle of things — change and rebirth, like the re-greening of the landscape in spring. But imagine if the snowdrops and crocuses failed to break through those last patches of snow, if the maples did not uncurl their new springtime leaves, if the pear and crabapple blossoms did not spray the hillsides in white and pink. Each year they return, a little more brilliant than the year before.
And so must we, remembering always how like brown grass and winter tree limbs we would be if we did not have the courage to embrace our own opportunities for renewal, whether those transformations come through the power of place, through love lost or gained, through pain overcome, or through the simple daring to be fully present in this — the lovely landscape of our own human lives.