WHY write about work?

Why read about it?

Photo by Ferdinand Stöhr on Unsplash

In my story “Cutting,” a short story set in a hair salon, I question extricating one’s self from poison-spreading people, even when—maybe especially when—they’re family.

How does the “wish you’d never been born” work, too—even if unconscious? Or is that different from saying, “I hope your life path isn’t the same as mine,” mother to daughter… is another question.

I also wanted to express something of what goes into making people look pretty (or however it is they want to appear—to ascertain that, and then to strive for it) even in the midst of one’s own screaming bad day. People can want their hairdressers to be funny, entertaining, informative, creative. Therapists and plastic surgeons, too—there’s always that.

For many people, for those 8 to 12 to 16 hours a day, they’d prefer to be doing something else. Or they’d like to think they would—if they could come up with something else. But if you are brave enough to run from one workplace, you’re instantly obligated to find another. Very few people are free from “work.”

What do you do?

It’s one of the first questions people ask you when you meet: What do you do? They don’t really expect or want an answer to How do you do? But they want the answer to What do you do? And many opinions are birthed in that time of response.

Consider your own answer to the question. Is it your job you talk about? your work? or your labour? (Check out Lewis Hyde’s The Gift for his thoughts on the differences.)

How do you see the differences between these? Do you see distinctions? Does you mind immediately default to “paid work”?

With many people having to “do the (side) hustle” now (wish that we could hear a flute playing as we say that, once again, but maybe it led us all into a mountain… ) what do we talk about? Which side gig? What interests?

After my July first post, Georgia Patrick posted a comment and question:

Your prompts and questions are plenty for a book. I, too, wonder why there's not more on work stories or narratives about moving through a profession, from degree, to apprentice, to multiple promotions or lateral moves, to mastery, and then to mentoring the next generation wanting to be you--to go into the profession you chose and lived. My big question is what to do with all of this knowledge about 600 different professions? Who cares? What makes it a hot, great read?

I'm counting on your writing and articles for clues to that monster question, which is my elephant in the room.

I laugh at articles about "finding topics to write about" and instead deeply wonder why would anyone want to read about work stories when they stop their work on order to put attention to your articles for inspiration, awe, or whimsey?

Other than detective shows, can you think of any television with work-setting? There used to be shows about journalists and news, radio stations, taxi cab garages, emergency rooms, law offices, restaurants/diners/pubs…

Not so much now. (Correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t watch much.)

What does it mean that such shows no longer exist? (There’s a post for you, Georgia!)

At this point in time, it’s expected that we’ll have a half dozen distinct career changes over our life time. Is this progressive? or a breakdown of connection and continuity? Or…?

Do we no longer want to look at what buries us under the snow until we can’t breathe anymore? Or has work become so interiorized, detached/remote, and too often in multiple streams, that we can’t even talk about it? Maybe it’s more important than it ever was to bring this into the light.

These are all questions.

Human

It’s not so much the workplace that is the story: it’s still the human in the stories; the workplace is setting. Granted, setting is critical. Setting shapes characters, and plot. Setting shapes us. Always. Setting IS character and plot. Setting is the third part of the trinity that creates good story—and the often neglected piece as we battle over which comes first, character or plot. For me, in creating, very often setting has come first to my mind. Other elements shape to, and are shaped by, setting. Workplace creates not just “place” but good quagmire. Pull on those writer-hip-waders and get in. Because some of the ugliest and most pathetic and most enlivening and challenging stuff comes of what we do for those forty hours and more each week.

Each day has twists and roadblocks, moments of temptation, humiliation, exhilaration, celebration. It’s often the place of the worst of hierarchy and smallness of minds. It’s often the place we’re most likely to encounter creativity. For those who live alone, it’s often the place they’ll share meals with others, or birthdays.

It can be the place people grow and come to understand that growth, as well as who others are. It’s the place we butt up against others in order to see who we are.

We can try to be ambivalent about a workplace. Some jobs make that easier than others. A good boss, a human-skilled manager, is a gift. Sometimes you are that human-skilled individual, and the weight is on you. Then what?

Why do we stay in positions that eat us up? Is it analogous to a destructive marriage? Bosses can gaslight and abuse, too. We might work in a situation we see as temporary, a step to something else; we might be enacting a plan in our minds, with a scenario of “time” playing out, even as the day-to-day is demanding.

I did an elementary education degree when I was in my mid-40s. For my practicum, I had a sponsor teacher a number of years younger than I. I’d worked as a contract instructor at the post-secondary level, and she used the word “professor” often in conversation (I could not convince her otherwise), and she seemed determined to teach me something; part of this “lesson” for her was to put together a desk for me using a table very similar to the table-desks of her twelve year old students. It seemed odd to me at the time—particularly when I walked into the classroom of one of my cohort-mates, whose sponsor teacher had a second full-size teacher’s desk brought into the room for him.

The image is strong, and embodies the story, the character/s. For me it went beyond the immediate to years of working in education, and even to childhood classroom times. In that desk was a story that I needed to explore. We have such desks in our lives; we read to understand what the desk is about.

What I witnessed between this teacher and the creative and generous one in the next door classroom is another story…

So often employment is the area in our lives in which we do not have the control we might (or think we have) in other instances. We can work towards goals—we’re told to! But the reality is different.

Human

Will such stories become nothing more than kvetching? Ah—no, they will be more than kvetching; they’ll explore underneath, formation and growth. When a story is rich, it gives.

What about those times when you did get the big desk? Or gave the big desk to someone else?

What about a story created entirely of “what you wished you’d had a chance to say” to such co-workers and employers—words that create within them, through them, a character arc?

In a short story, there is no “mere detail.” As in all short forms, from picturebook to poetry, short fiction, flash and more, every word counts.

In “Cutting,” as I was re-typing, it was tempting to take out the word “always” in this line: “But there always is Corinne, eighteen and pregnant.”

But sometimes her name isn’t Corinne; I left the “always” untouched.

The next story I will post from my collection is one of trying to leave a workplace. Finding and leaving positions are stories.

If your work-stories aren’t eating into all of this stuff-of-being-human, then yes, they’re probably leaving a big Why in your mind.

Georgia’s question about why we don’t have stories of entire career paths is also interesting. Career paths are supposed to take particular shape; there’s that absurd question they ask in job interviews, about where you see yourself in five years. But often—especially now—that path looks more like a meandering trail with the odd cliff dive or scramble. Perhaps “work-stories” lend themselves more to short fiction or personal essays.

One of my favourite library book in my early teens was an anthology of “girl stories” about possible career choices. They were written as fiction, but each looked at a possible choice and work sphere. What would that look like in our current clime? They’d no longer be female-specific! I hope.

And human

Georgia’s final thought: I haven’t found the WHY for the reader. Oh, hell, I’m fascinated by all of this, but would anyone else be?

When my work towards an education degree all blew up, it was a revelation to me to hear others’ stories—and suddenly those stories did show up. I learned of so many thwarted attempts to drastically change careers in one’s mid-forties, and how others had adjusted, or not, to live with their own tale of this. I imagine that we could come up with a lengthy list of sub-“genres” within the area of “work story.” I had the distinct feeling that people were hungry for these stories, to share their own, to know that we’d gotten through, and gone on.

Why the fascination with any of this? Maybe it’s the “going on” piece. But the stories give us time to sit with what we need to for a spell, too. Every bit as important. Makes it possible to do the going on.

I hope this begins to answer this question. And I welcome further thoughts.

If you want a work-story posted in the workshop space, email it to me, please:

alison@alisonacheson.com