One very exciting thing about keeping a blog is living in a state of discovery. A few weeks ago, I didn’t know Kate Klein, but now after interviewing her and reading from her stories and reviews from around the web, I have found a new writer I’m excited to hear more from.

Kate and Hendrix, the parrot

She has shared with me from her experience as writer, fundraiser “virtual forklift driver” , and person living in the real world.

What do you write? How do you write it? If someone in a theater ever yells, “Is there a fiction writer in the house?” I would truthfully be able to come to the rescue—I hold an MFA in the discipline and I’ve had short stories appear in print.  My great passion is writing novels.  One, my MFA thesis titled The Fifth Voice, is resting before a full re-write and another, Eternal Girl, is just about ready to emerge into the “publish me!” world.

I started my career as a journalist, working as a daily newspaper reporter and editor.  Lately, I’ve had a few magazine article assignments, which I’ve enjoyed a lot.

Every weekday morning, I get up early and write for two hours.  Morning has always been my best creative time. At 8:15 or so, I pry myself away from my desk and walk to Cornell University, where I work for the alumni affairs and development team for Johnson, the university’s business school.

Tell us about your day job and how you got there.  How does it challenge/influence/inspire your writing life? My title is “development assistant,” but that’s not very descriptive; at parties, I tell people I work as a ghost writer and spy, and they understand a lot faster.

My team’s job is to bring money in to fund the business school.  My colleagues go out on the road to ask alumni for generous donations.  They are awesome at what they do—my supervisor nabbed a $10 million gift this quarter. My particular job is to support the road warriors with my writing and research skills, and by manipulating an enormous database, a task akin to driving a virtual forklift through an online warehouse.  After five years in positions similar to this one at Cornell, I’m getting very good at driving the virtual forklift.  It brings out an analytical, problem-solving side I didn’t know I had when I chose English as a college major.

My day job started out supporting my writing life.  The best benefit Cornell offers employees is free classes.  Once hired, I took writing and literature classes that helped me get into an MFA program.  After I finished grad school, however, I went back  to work full time, partly for the money, but partly because I write best when I’m engaging with the world every day.  Right now, for me, “engaging with the world” means going to work, even on the days (and there are many) when I would rather keep working on my novel all morning.

When I get grumpy about a full day in an office, I look around at the other human beings in there with me.  They are by far the most beautiful, saddest, funniest things in the gray, windowless, fluorescent-lit office.

I certainly envy writers who can write full time, but the world needs fiction writers and poets with day jobs, too—especially day jobs that have nothing to do with writing or teaching writing. The world needs writers “embedded” in the medical field and Wall Street and insurance, I think. William Carlos Williams worked as a medical doctor.  Anthony Trollope worked for the postal service.  Charles Ives (a composer, not a writer) was an insurance executive who wrote amazing music, too.

What sources of inspiration do you return to? The people I know well inspire me—besides family and friends, this includes my work colleagues.  Spend enough hours in a small space with someone and soon I start wondering, “why does he do that?  What is she really thinking?” and often, a story is born.

Music and other art forms inspire my writing, as well, but not always directly, although my first novel is about a family of musicians.  Rather, I seldom come away from a live concert or an art exhibit without scribbling lots of notes, and often those notes turn into stories or enhance a story I’m already writing.

I want to write from life in the way visual artists draw from live models.  The more I observe, the better I know my species.  And the better I get to know my species the funnier we call look.  Life has a deep, rumbling laughter underneath it, which bubbles up in the work of Robertson Davies, Flannery O’Connor, Mozart, and Jennifer Egan, to name a few.  If I capture a little of that laughter or even hear it, it’s been a good writing day.

Do you ever go to specific places with the purpose of human observation in mind? 

I don’t go anywhere to specifically observe human behavior–I just see it everywhere! From the years-long tensions I observe playing out in my own family to random encounters in a shop or on the street, I see people operating in dissonance and harmony every day.  For instance, last weekend I walked through the supermarket produce section and saw two big college boys holding a five pound bag of organic carrots between them, one saying: “So that’s twelve carrots a day.”  I have no idea what they were talking about, but I scooted on to the frozen foods isle laughing to myself.  Sometimes I have to keep to myself on purpose because my observation deck goes into overdrive and I have to seclude myself to actually write anything down, let alone shape a story out of any of it.

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Follow up with Kate Klein on her blog, Zucchini Me.

Beth Navarro is a writer: she writes for her comic mom blog, Mother-naked. She writes picture books for kids. (Her debut picture book, Grambo, will available in less than a week!) She is writing a YA sci-fi novel. And she spends her job-time writing and editing marketing material. Originally from Illinois (currently the state I live in), she now lives in California (the state I’m originally from). Besides having the a few ideas about the work-life-balance thing figured out, Beth seems to have also figured out the optimal migration pattern. I still have a lot to figure. Luckily, she took a moment to share with us a few insights about how a full life has lead her to a more prolific and inspired writing life. So on to the the interview!

What do you write? How do you write it? 

I write children’s books, anything from picture books to the young adult manuscript that I’m working on right now.  I also write a blog, Mother-naked, about my adventures in parenting. My first picture book, Grambo, is out March 26th on Amazon! Grambo is about a boy who discovers his grandma is not your average grandma. She’s a secret agent! Grandmas rock.

I usually write in long stretches on the weekends. I set up camp on the couch. For some reason the couch is really my spot even though I have a desk that I love. My notes spread out on my left, my laptop on my lap and my tea and snacks on my right. Snacks are important. Working all day I rarely have the energy to write at night. I sneak in time when I can. Truthfully I don’t really let a day go by without writing something. My day does feel off if I don’t. Having less time (job, family, life) I think I am actually more prolific then when I had no kids and worked at a restaurant a few nights a week. Wow, all that time seems so luxurious now that I don’t have it. Since I have a finite amount of time, I really make the most of it.

What are sources of inspiration that you return to?
My two daughters provide endless amounts of inspiration. And books. I can always count on a good book to fill my imagination well. But the one thing that always drives me (and boy is this going to sound cheesy I think) is the idea of connection. It’s such a basic human need that I think we humans struggle with. It’s a theme that comes up in nearly everything I write.

Can you tell us a little bit about your day job and how you got there? How does it challenge/influence/inspire your writing life?

I write and edit Medicare marketing materials for a health care company. A friend of mine recommended me for the job and it’s been great! I must have an affinity for the senior community seeing that my first book is about a kick butt grandma and I work on medicare. I love that parallel. It is challenging having a day job, because I can’t devote every moment to writing. But I also think it’s a good thing. It forces me to dedicate certain time to writing. It helps me to really focus on one thing at time.

To learn more about Beth Navarro and where to find her work, check out her website. While there be sure to check out her logo, created by one of her daughters, and tell me that it is not one of the best logos ever.

Paula Carter and I met in Samrat Upadhyay‘s backyard; he had invited a handful of former students over for lunch to catch up and gossip about the affairs of the University. Samrat was feeling nostalgic, I believe, as most of his students move on from Bloomington every three years and just wanted to check in on us. Though Paula and I had both been students of Samrat’s at Indiana University’s MFA program, our tenures in Bloomington had not overlapped. Over lunch of delicious Nepali food, Paula and I discovered that not only did we both live in Chicago, we lived in the same neighborhood. We swapped contact info, and so started a new friendship…which often involves me picking Paula’s brain for good ideas. Beyond being a professional writer, fiction writer, and essayist, Paula is a master craftswoman (she makes jewelry and mobiles and refinishes tables) and is adventurer (she’s ready for a triathlon or to go Sup’ing in Lake Michigan or square dancing at Old Town School of Folk). I hope you will find her recent interview as inspiring for your creative life as I do.  To read some of her work head over to the Rumpus for a thrilling essay on margarine or check her professional website.

So what do you write?

Currently, I write both professionally and creatively.  As a professional writer, I freelance and work primarily with nonprofits to create development and fundraising pieces (think high-end grant writing).  I also work with a few magazines and marketing companies.  Creatively, I write narrative essays, short shorts, and fiction.  I’m currently working on a book of very short narrative nonfiction essays.

What are your sources of inspiration for your creative writing?

I have moved so many times in the last ten years and every time I pack up my many shelves of books and cart them along with me and wonder if I should let them go, or at least a chunk of them.  I know people who pass a book along as soon as they finish it, wanting it to find another reader and wanting to clear out the clutter in their lives.  I have the opposite problem: if you lend me a book, you may never see it again.  Most writers are book hoarders, I’m sure, and I am one of them.  Also, book klepto. There is something comforting about looking at a serious stack of books. My heart rate goes down.  Not long ago, I decided to stop feeling guilty about not cleaning out my book shelves and just accept that these books were going to travel with me through life.

I have not yet purchased an e-reader.  It is the physical object of the book that gives me joy; all the pretty colors and weighty titles lined up in a row waiting humbly.  I remember hearing Ray Bradbury talk about writing Fahrenheit 451 at the UCLA library at the 10 cent typewriters.  He would write for half an hour (that is how long 10 cents got him) then run up the stairs into the stacks, pull out an old book and take a deep whiff.  He said that old books smell like nutmeg and some foreign land.  Afterword he would return to the typewriter, put in another dime and keep going.

Theater is my other great love.  One of the things I appreciate about it is that it is collaborative.  Theater requires so many different people and ideas and creative minds to make it come to life.  I recently went to see The Little Prince at the Lookingglass Theater in Chicago.  The level of creativity and imagination at that theater is unbelievable.  If you aren’t familiar with the story, one of the main conflicts involves baobab trees which grow too big and threaten the Little Prince’s small planet.  Rather than use pieces of the set to represent the trees, each time a new tree sprouted an actor’s hand would shoot up through the floor of the stage. It was surprising, funny and fresh. I thought about it for days.  Who came up with that?  When did they decide it would work and who made the floor that allowed hands to break through it?  Being stuck inside my own mind and bumping up against my own limitations can be one of my biggest struggles when writing—in theater there is play and room to experiment before a decision is made.  It reminds me to let go more in my work, have fun, share it with others.

Just going to a show inspires me.  Here are these actors giving it their all for this one ephemeral moment, this one night with this one audience.  When it’s done, it’s done.  For it to come back to life, they have to start the work all over again.  There’s a lesson there somewhere.

Can you tell us a little bit about your day job and how you got there? How does it challenge/influence/inspire your writing life?

I have been reading Ann Patchett’s new collection of essays This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. The first paragraph of her introduction says:

“The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.  My short stories and novels have always filled my life with meaning, but, at least in the first decade of my career, they were no more capable of supporting me than my dog was. But part of what I love about both novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns.  We serve them, and in return they thrive.  It isn’t their responsibility to figure out where the rent is coming from.”

Oh, to be a novel or a dog.  Patchett puts her finger on what I think it is the biggest struggle for creative people. I have had periods in my life when I had plenty of time to write and usually during those same periods worried constantly about what I could and could not afford.  Then, I have had times when I made a good salary and all those worries were relieved only to be replaced with uneasy and unsatisfied feelings that quickly led to anxiety and disappointment in myself.  Not a good combo.

Most people struggle to find the right work/life balance.  But artists must struggle to find the right work/life/work balance—this seems wholly unfair to me. For Patchett, she tried waitressing and teaching, before settling on freelance writing to pay the bills while she wrote her first few novels.  I have had a similar path (minus the waitressing and the first few novels).

Currently, I am a freelance writer.  I’ve been freelancing fulltime for about three years.  I decided to freelance—rather than work 9 to 5—as a way to have more flexibility, so I could also work on my own writing.  In many ways this has been effective.  I do have considerable flexibility and have been able to focus on my own creative projects in the last few years, in addition to making a living.

However, it has not been without its challenges.  The first year I made $8,000 and lived with my parents. After a few years my income has increased but I have discovered other drawbacks.  All of my work—both my own and professional work—is solitary. At times, I greatly miss working with a team.  As a freelancer, you are primarily on the outside of the action, creating content for one event or article or report, submitting the piece, making some edits and then moving on.  Additionally, when I have deadlines that other people are relying on, it can be hard to continue to set time aside to work on my own projects. No one is depending on them.  It takes real effort to continue to make them a priority.

But, really, I can’t complain. Every job has its issues and every artist has their own struggle to figure out how to make it all fit together.  For the most part, I feel pretty lucky.  I have yet to finish my “first few novels,” but I have almost completed a nonfiction manuscript I have been slowly and steadily working on.  And my cat, oblivious to economic concerns, is in love with this way of life.  I am home all day.  

Geoffrey Hilsabeck

Geoffrey Hilsabeck is a poet and essayist and English teacher at boarding school on the East coast. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop for poetry, he has a chapbook published with Song Cave; it is sold out, but lucky for us, the press allows readers to download a copy and discover Geoffrey’s prosey and poetic investigation of “elegy to energy and back again” in Vaudeville (or as Geoffrey describes, a look at “how Americans entertained themselves before television.”)

I recently asked him a few questions about his writing life and teaching at a boarding school…

I teach English at a boarding school, which is a day and night job. Surprisingly, though, boarding school life does allow for some writing, since I don’t have to waste any time in the car commuting. I love teaching. I’m fascinated and frustrated by it in much the same way–or to the same degree–as writing; to me, they are very different but equally impossible pursuits. Writing is pretty solitary, of course, and so the intense sociality of teaching provides a nice complement to that. I don’t think I’d be happy doing only one or the other, although I do wish I had more time for both.

Boarding school…it certainly looks a lot like Dead Poets Society, but the demands on students these days make for a rather different lifestyle. Also, students seem a lot happier than the characters in Dead Poets Society and Catcher in the Rye. (Perhaps the two are related?)

I suppose I take inspiration from what I read, mostly, I think–but who knows, really–is it reading that moves me first to write. I am moved to write by, what, feelings maybe? Less happiness and sadness though than wonder and fear. And love, of course. Is curiosity a feeling?

I’m still very curious about how Americans entertained themselves before television (hence the essay “Vaudeville”). I’m curious about outer space. I’m curious where poetry can take me, psychologically and spiritually.

The View from Julia’s desk

So it’s been an embarrassing long time since my last installment of 5-9, but I’m happy to tell you, 5-9 is back! So look forward to more interviews from more writers in 2014!

Today’s guest: Julia Green. I met Julia at a library to discuss the nuances of English according to the College Ready Standards. We were both working at an academic company writing and editing curriculum. Since then Julia has moved away from the great city of Chicago to a warmer climate, but we still occasionally trade emails to debate SSF versus COU. For the record, WC 24-27.3 is my favorite to write. Before becoming a curriculum guru, an ACT & SAT tutor, and freelance writer, Julia was at Iowa Writer’s Workshop for fiction. She recently finished a novel that I’m looking forward to reading someday.

I asked Julia to participate in my survey of working writers and this is what she said:

I find that desperation is the greatest source of inspiration. If I haven’t written in a while, or if I find myself in a job or a place that bores me, I disappear into my work. Or if I’m short on time, I rush to work during what little free time I do have. Every night I look at my calendar and see when I can write the next day and then I do. Because if I don’t write enough, I turn into a monster. Writing is like breathing; when I don’t do it, it can be fatal (or homicidal, if you take into account my husband, who is at the whims of my days at the desk).

Tell us a little about your day job.

Day job? More like day jobs. “Freelance writer” is a phrase that some people consider with envy and optimism; five years out of grad school, I have cobbled together enough projects that most months I end up OK. The uncertainty of contract employment is both invigorating and terrifying. There are days when I think I should chuck it and get a full-time, salaried position, but I tend to wither under those circumstances. I’m at my most productive when I’m doing a million things. There’s a whole novel in all the random jobs I’ve had in the last ten years, which means for now I’ll keep that menagerie to myself. What I can say is learning when to say yes and when to say no is invaluable. I almost always say yes, and having made good friends and contacts along the way has been an incredible asset, but every once in a while something comes along that smells off, and you know to graciously decline. And yet even the crappiest jobs I’ve had have produced something valuable—a friendship, a character, a detail, etc. As an artist, it’s hard to win the moneymaking game—whatever you do will not pay enough nor give you enough time for your work, and yet you’ll nearly always say yes and hope for a different outcome.

Do you have a link to your work you’d like to share with our eager readers?

Unfortunately, I am next to nowhere on the internet; I recently completed a novel (presently seeking representation), which I would not have been able to do had I been immersed in social media and the like. I am the most boring person at the party to talk to because whatever thing you are discussing that you saw or read on the Internet, I can guarantee you I have never heard of, but this habit allows me to get a lot of work done. When I do look at the internet, I find it very dull. With the exception of cats. If I am having a particularly bad writing day, mere minutes of cat videos will soothe my soul and re-center me. It’s not as glamorous as having a drinking problem, but it’s a lot cheaper and safer. Now that I’ve established myself as a sanctimonious Luddite, I can say that if and when my book is preparing to go out into the world, I am committed to transforming myself into a hilarious, winning, responsive, admired Internet Voice. Just as soon as I find the book at the library that tells me how to do that.

So I just googled your name to see what I could find on you: turns out there are quite a few of you, some artists and writers, and even an elementary school with your name. The only You I could find was your tutor profile. It says you tutor math as well as English…how’d that come about?

There can be a tremendous beauty and satisfaction to tutoring math: there is always an answer. And I still feel the thrill I did as a 12 year old when I do a math problem correctly: “Huzzah! I know the answer!” We all need and love the shot of dopamine that accompanies ‘I got it right.’ There’s an elegance to math, to a clever problem and the process of unraveling it. Teaching math has made me a better person–it forces me to clearly analyze and ascertain all moving parts. You cannot fudge math the way you can fudge a scene ending or even a word choice. The numbers don’t lie, don’t allow you to lie to yourself and neither does the 16 year old kid across from you who needs a clear explanation. Part of writing is fighting to get to the truth. Math can be a relief that way–it’s easier to get to the truth with math. (And when it’s not, there’s usually a smarter person around who’ll explain it to you.)

While seeking representation, do you send out sections of your novel to literary magazines?

I don’t. When I was in grad school, I sent short stories to magazines, so I’m not averse to it, but it didn’t feel right for my novel. I learned a tremendous amount in graduate school, but I also came out a bit raw. To write this book, I wanted and needed to go to a very quiet and very private place — a place where there weren’t the voices and comments I received in grad school. So I kept it away from the world, which was truly the right decision for me. Now that my book is done, I doubt I will adapt it for submission in shorter parts to magazines. Now that I’ve written a novel, I look back and see I never was and never will be a short story writer–every story I conceive of is gaping and hardly containable. (My novel contains elements of just about every story I wrote in grad school.) I suppose I approach novels as I do human beings: none of them deserve to be reduced to or identified by their disparate parts. They are complex entities best swallowed whole.

Thanks Julia for sharing a snippet from your work and writing life. As with all past interviews, I feel rather inspired to get down to work.  Good luck placing your novel!

Poet Sarah Suksiri can be defined by grace–she crosses the street with grace, she offers insight into conversation with graceful, well-chosen words, and her poems are also grace- and wonder-filled. Once, I witnessed Sarah crash her car gently into an A/C unit with grace (which she also managed to un-dent with a swift kick). If you have not yet been graced with a Sarah Suksiri poem, you can listen to her read three poems here.

A little while ago, I asked her about her new job as a copywriter and her life as poet. This is what she said:

In the past two years I’ve started noticing a pattern. A lot happened — marriage, moving, graduating, moving again, several jobs. Whenever one of those changes occurred, there was a spike in my writing. So I think change and movement play an important role in writing, which, if you think about it, is usually either about revisiting the places we’ve left or trying to discover where we are now. For me, getting too comfortable generally kills my writing.

In those moments of change/realization, I write poems. Revision’s role in my writing is primarily manifested in the ever-present question, “Is this any good yet?” But beyond that, I don’t apply a very empirical revision method.

So, tell us about your new job

I have a job I love at a creative agency, where I write copy. Any full-time desk job presents a challenge at the end of the day when time and brainpower are running on reserve, but what I like about being a copywriter (besides being paid to play with language) is learning how to approach writing strategically. You sit down at your desk, and people expect results by the end of the day. It’s hard, sometimes, to expect that of myself. I read somewhere that Salman Rushdie credits his years as a copywriter for helping him develop good, professional writing habits.

You can follow Sarah on Twitter at @ahoysarah, and you can find more of Sarah’s work in lit mags in print and online– like this poem entitled “How to Write a Poem” that was published in Punchnel’s.