Jobless: Making a Living or Making a Life

The new article on the lasting effects of joblessness is sobering. Much of it resonated with me since my husband was laid off in 2009, and I have friends who have been unemployed for more than a year. I am also leaving a perfectly good job in order to write and draw full time, as well as beef up my creative and technical skills–am I completely nuts?

Atlantic Monthly: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America

NY Books: Publishing: The Revolutionary Future

I have other people in my circle who are busy as freelancers now. The major downside is obvious–no health insurance or expensive health insurance–but they have learned to adapt as best they can. I refuse to say “in these economic times” or the similar cliche phrases because I believe that our financial system has fundamentally altered for the foreseeable future.

Nobody wants to talk about it, but the system is so broken that we are in new territory, and the people that we typically turn to for fixes don’t know the answers. Institutions that we depended on–such as banks–are no longer reliable or stable. Political leaders have proven unable to devise, and are sometimes uninterested in, solutions to entrenched public problems. It’s easy to feel successful when money is rolling in. We had the illusion of being clever. Instead, we learned that there are certain basic principles that have to be honored in order for any system to sustain itself. You can over-fish the oceans to the point that the habitats do not replenish; you can bankrupt an entire financial system and bring major corporations to their knees.

Meanwhile, the shows on TV are desperately trying to tell us that fashion and perfect hair really really really matter–OK, nice things are fun, but vital? The worse our actual situation gets, the more TV seems to go into bizarre denial.

So where does an artist fit in?

Most of the artists that I know have had a rough couple of years. We can talk all day about the essential nature of beauty–which I believe in–but art is one of the first things to go when personal spending is limited. You are not going to buy an $800 painting if you are worried about paying a medical bill.

I was also discouraged in a recent conversation with a new chairwoman of a local university art department. I described how I wanted to improve my drawing and painting fundamentals, and how hard it’s been to find a good teacher, someone who is rigorous about craft. She said “but the students don’t want that,” meaning that they demand easy classes.

My college professors would never have relaxed their standards because I whined.

I also know that most writers, even if they have published several books, are scraping by, or making a living from a variety of work. Their books don’t sustain them financially, which is particularly scary for fiction writers. The book is the product, unlike an individual who writes non-fiction with the goal of garnering speaking fees.

So…is the advice to “follow your passion” now a silly aphorism? Or, with the right combination of skills and moxie, can writers and artists make the most of this new economy and publishing venues?

I think it’s about to be a new Golden Age for books, which is why I am devoting myself to building a new career with all my time and energy. Sometimes chaos is the best time to gamble, especially when tried-and-true institutions begin to crumble. If you can’t rely on them, you can depend on yourself.

E-publishing and the Holy Grail

I love the idea of adding animations, not just illustrations, to children’s books. I’d would prefer not to have the text integrated with the other types of media, but layered, so that each piece adds to the other, but the story rests upon the text. Why?

Preservation

Integrating stories in various types of media sounds like fun, but it limits the audience and the survival of the piece. File types and versions do go stale sometimes, or there are such leaps in quality that something made five years ago looks quaint. How do you preserve it all? Can such as thing be checked out from a library for free?

Accessibility

Working in a public library for the last two years has vastly altered my view about the ubiquity and level of understanding of technology and literacy.

• Public libraries today still have customers walk in and ask how much the books cost. They have no idea what a library is or what it’s for. This situation will continue as immigrants arrive from countries without libraries. They have to be introduced to them.
• Many librarians are on the front lines of teaching basic computer skills to people who have had blue-collar jobs that did not require any computer knowledge, and now those same people have to apply for jobs online. Librarians have to explain, for example, that moving the mouse also moves the cursor on the screen. It’s not intuitive that those things are connected, not if you have zero experience with computers. Many librarians help these people apply for jobs by typing in the information for them, because it’s easier.
• And it’s not just people in jobs that depend on physical labor. Lots of people, roughly fifty years old and older, know just enough about technology to squeak by. When they are laid off, they are face with acquiring new skills quickly, and it may be challenging for many of them to learn these skills. They have never warmed to computers and the Web.
• Lots of kids are bussed to faraway schools–so they are tired at the day’s end–and they come home to a locked house because they are not trusted to be home alone.
• Last summer, many children were dropped off at the library, all day, without food or money for food. Do you think they were worried about their reading level?

So, sure. Let’s make more ways to deliver books, especially e-books. But pages glued inside cardboard–that old-style book–are the perfect machine and, in many cases, the only method of delivery that many people can use.