Monthly Archives: January 2012

January 29, 2012

Never a Day

By bethanyduvall
There’s a platitude that says if you find a way to make a living at what you love you’ll never work a day in your life.

It’s a nice thought, but, like a lot of the little maps that we like to draw for our lives, it’s also a bit naive.

Aside from the obvious administrative stuff that goes along with making a living, there is the fact that following this path turns what you love into work. Your passion becomes your obligation. I love painting murals. Years ago, before the nerve damage that now limits me as an artist, I would paint for 8-14 hours a day. I could transform a child’s room into a fairy-tale kingdom, white walls into stone. It was instant gratification: with every stroke of the brush, the space came closer to the vision. But, after three or four days on the same job, you stop feeling like an artist and start feeling like a day laborer. It was a learned skill, like fixing a car or plumbing a house. You know how to do it, you take pride in your work, but after a point, it’s only muscle memory. Would I have traded it for any other career? Probably not, if injury didn’t force that. But did I work a day in my life? Oh, yes. Oh yes, I did.

There’s something inherently playful in art making. You are constantly experimenting, seeing what will happen if…? Writing is a similar, although more cerebral, kind of quiet magic. Teaching… oh teaching! The energy that comes out of solving problems, answering questions, and redirecting behavior on the spot is incredible. But when one or more of these is my job, there is a certain standard, a certain obligation, that removes some of my childlike right to failure. When something is fun, you don’t really worry about the results. It is great fun to develop new techniques. Even if it takes five years to develop one that does what you want, that’s ok when you’re just playing. But if you have a mural job tomorrow, you’d better know what you’re doing.

For years I have been learning that once I switch a pursuit from casual enjoyment to a career path, I have to find new things to enjoy. It does not mean I stop loving my work. It means it is my work, and so I must find other ways to play. This isn’t always easy. I am an introvert, so while I care deeply for people, going out all the time can drain me. Left to myself, it’s easy to use my time alone to do my work instead of finding ways to play. But if I do this for too long, my life grinds to a halt. The work I love can take me over and own me if I let it become my job. Then, every move and every minute is under obligation.

When I sense this is happening, I will pick up one of my three loves–one that I am not trying to make my living out of–and play for a while. Yes, I’m the geek who will write a lesson plan, or a book, if my job is to paint. These three things have created a balance for me most of my life, when I have used them well.

Now… I am at the very beginning of letting my writing become my work. Today it turned the corner. Today I hit the hired-hand mentality. So I thought maybe I should paint. But that was too true. I should paint. I should do this because I have my first art show in years coming up in a month and need to get some work done. Nothing playful there on a day like today. Teaching? I am a teaching assistant as I go through school myself.

I felt completely boxed in by the musts.

For a while this immobilized me. I skulked about the house, sat here, moped there.

Finally, I decided to do some gardening. I went to Home Depot and bought a bunch of plants: shrubs and herbs and a topiary, and got home after dark. I don’t have the strength to plant more than one or two a day. This means I can get a week or two of good times out of them. And then there will be the watering and the pruning. Lots of opportunities to do something creative and quiet.

I feel a little sorry for these plants. As much as I will enjoy them, they are the one thing that I will be doing that is not an obligation. They may make it through the year. But they may not. I have gardened before with varrying success. I enjoy it enough that I will probably have an increasingly beautiful yard over the next several months. But there is an inherent selfishness to this: they are the one place in my life where I am allowed to fail. Of course, I may fail at anything at any time because I am human. But with the plants, I am allowed to let myself fail, and then to smile, forgive myself, and try again.

2 comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Creative Nonfiction, Writing Approaches

January 28, 2012

100 Pots

By bethanyduvall

Yogi. Peter Voulkos. 1997. Photo by Mary Harrsch.

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/rocor/5024143525/sizes/m/in/photostream/

A thousand years ago when I was an undergraduate student at New College of Florida, I had a quirky ceramics professor who lived in my backyard. The house I was renting with some other students had a guest house, and one day Bob and his wife showed up and moved in. Bob smoked mellow spiced cigars and did not let me into his 3-D design class, but asked me to join his ceramics class. I think it was an olive branch to be neighborly more than anything else. The design class had so much more to do with my work, and so many fewer seats than the ceramics class. I was mad, but, after all, he was my neighbor, so I accepted the invitation.

It turned out to be my most memorable college class. Bob gave his students the key code to the building, and a few of us would be there at all hours of the night. And he would be, too. We’d let the slippery clay spin between our fingers, rising, falling, a meditation. Then, if Bob was there, we’d join him outside for a break while thick cigar smoke fogged the night air between us. We learned how Peter Voulkos would turn a perfect plate and then slice it with wire and patch it back together, leaving messy cracks and sensual textures. We learned about Paul Soldner’s collaging clay together until it could be nothing but art, not a craft, not a cup you would drink from or a bowl you would eat from. Their work demanded new esteem for clay. Their work concentrated on the beauty of the flaw.

The beauty of the flaw translates to all art. If a writer writes a perfect character, it better be a villain because nobody wants to root for a perfect person. We love the underdog, the broken, the tragic flaw.

In one of our class meetings, Bob told us about a professor he’d once had. The professor divided the class into two groups. The first group had to make 100 pots. Over the course of a semester that’s about seven pots a week. That’s a LOT of pots. But the number was the only requirement. The pots could be any size or shape, symmetrical or lumpy, it didn’t matter. If they made their hundred, the members of this group would receive A’s. The second group had the entire semester to make only one pot. But the pot had to be perfect, flawless, without fingerprint, wabble, variation in wall thickness, or any other mark that a human being had anything to do with it. If they turned in one perfect pot, the members of this group would receive A’s.

Guess which group came closest to making the perfect pot?

So I’m writing my first blog post about the phrase that keeps me moving forward with my work when I’m afraid it won’t come out perfectly. I hear it in my head, in Bob’s lively round-voweled voice: “100 Pots! 100 Pots!”

They will never be perfect, these words, but the more of them I write, the closer they will get. Bob was right. The ceramics class was exactly what I needed.

8 comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Creative Nonfiction, Writing Approaches

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