Hi Friends,
As I mentioned last week, I’m in Incline Village at the moment, teaching in the UNR-Tahoe MFA creative writing program. This side of the lake is in Nevada and bit fancier than my side in South Lake Tahoe, unless of course you’re staying on a bare-bones dorm room like I am. But that’s okay—it’s reminding me of my recent time in hostels and albergues on the Camino de Santiago, which I wrote about last month.
Part of my job here is to sit on student thesis committees, which I love. It’s so fun to see the culmination of a student’s two years in our creative writing program. One of my student’s memoir projects this time included a chapter about working at Disneyland. We don’t get to read about working at Disney much because they lock down pretty much everything that’s said about them, so I was utterly fascinated by the details: the way sanitation is stealthily collected, the way “cast members” must point to things with two fingers (rather than one). I read along and wanted to know everything. Though not all jobs are shrouded in the same kind of secrecy as working at Disneyland is, most jobs include interesting details (and rules) most of us outsiders don’t know.
I have had so many writing students who have told me that they have never had an interesting job. They will say something like this: “I’m just a Black Jack dealer, or a farmer, or a wilderness park ranger.”
Because jobs become part of our everyday life, they might start to seem boring to us, but I can assure you, they are not boring to other people. Clare Frank, who is one of my brilliant former students, just published a memoir of her life fighting fire. It’s called Burnt, and it’s an incredible book. One of the things I most loved about it was learning what the everyday work life of a firefighter is like—everything from the harrowing calls to the fire station antics.
A few months ago, my friend and the novelist Rebecca Makkai wrote in a New York Times By the Book interview that she wished more people would write about their jobs in their novels, and I agree with her. I also wish more people would include their jobs and their work in memoirs and poetry. For some inspiration, check out this Ruth Stone poem about her father’s work.
Before my life teaching writing, I taught skiing in Colorado for many years, and I have often thought about writing a memoir from that wild period in my life. For a long time, I thought that would make a boring book, because that life was so familiar to me, and as an avid skier, it still is. But I’ve learned enough about writing to know that