Just because you love doing something doesn’t mean it’s wise to do it all day long. I love coaching but the intensity of personal connection also makes it quite draining for me. I find writing extremely fulfilling but, as an extrovert, I need to balance it with human interaction and external stimulation. Workshops, speeches, and interviews are a joy, but after a certain number of hours on stage I have nothing left! I couldn’t do any one of these as a solitary endeavor, but when I combine them in the right proportions, each enables the others.
—Michael Melcher, career coach/writer/speaker
Lauri Grossman, fifty, has spoken to scores of audiences over the past ten years—from a small group of teachers, to an audience of hundreds of medical professionals at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital and medical conferences around the world. She teaches a semester-long class for doctors and nurses at two schools and has written numerous articles for magazines and trade journals. She is working on a book as well as a number of personal essays, and in the fall of 2005 she was preparing to join the faculty of a new college. She dedicates at least twenty hours a week to these activities. Yet if you ask her what she does, she will say that she’s a homeopath, a doctor focused on holistic healing.
“Basically, I was aware of something that could ease people’s suffering and could help them feel better in so many different ways. I thought it was just criminal that people didn’t know this,” she told me. “I was compelled to get the word out, and I would do that using any means possible. If a group of monkeys was having a monkey session, I would have gone to speak to them. It all comes down to the main mission. I’m someone who wants to expose as many people as possible to these ideas, so if I can speak to the doctors and nurses who train others, each of them will then reach hundreds or thousands of others. It’s exponential growth.”
The speaking, teaching, and writing are all gratifying to Grossman—but they are means to an end. She would do anything to spread the word about homeopathy, so she has identified numerous ways to do that.
In the beginning, she rarely got paid for those lectures, but over time, as her profile grew, a few things changed. First, rather than her knocking on doors asking to be heard, people asked her to speak. Next, an increasing number of those speaking engagements involved a fee.
It helped that public speaking came easily to Grossman, which is why she began with that medium. “I’ve never had to pick up a book that says how to be a public speaker or a teacher. It’s just fun,” she said. “If someone told me ‘I want you to speak on such and such a topic in front of two thousand people tomorrow morning,’ I’d have a restful sleep.”
Learning how to be a writer, however, was anything but easy. After 9/11, she was consulted by doctors and nurses to help treat trauma patients. The husband of one of her patients was a writer. “He was so blown away by how well his wife did in the treatment,” she said, “that he approached me and asked if I’d be interested in writing a book together.”
That book project never got off the ground, but Grossman liked the idea of publishing her ideas, so she decided to work on improving her writing skills. Getting comfortable as a writer required overcoming some longstanding personal demons. “In my freshman seminar at Cornell, a professor singled me out and said, ‘I’ll do you a favor and tell you never to pick up a pen,’ and it took me quite a few years to recover from that,” she explained. “But anyone who knows me knows how determined I am. So I went on a quest to find the right teachers. After a few misses, I found an editor who loved me through the process and gave me the confidence to get started.” (Full disclosure: after working with that editor for a while, Grossman found her way to me and I then became her private writing instructor.)
Grossman’s journey into teaching, speaking, and writing is a common one—the kind that begins when you have a message to tell and you want to take advantage of all the available avenues with which to do so. It’s also common for people to find that one medium or another comes more easily. Grossman conquered her fear of writing and found that publishing articles allowed her to reach audiences she’d never have reached had she stuck to her teaching and speaking. She also learned that certain kinds of writing (personal essays and writing about her patients, for example) came easier to her than others (explanatory pieces about medical subjects). Still, she now says she can competently write on most subjects she is asked to write about—a huge leap from where she was when she first heard that jarring comment from her freshman-year professor.
Writing, teaching, speaking, and consulting are four slashes that go with any other kind of work. Think of them as the black pants of a slash wardrobe. Many slash careers have one or more of these activities as part of the mix. The stories that follow explore how different people have given these four modes of expression their own twist and should give you some ideas for how you can add or develop your own skills in these areas.
Mary Mazzio, the Olympic rower-turned-lawyer/filmmaker, says she was flooded with requests to speak after she made her first film, A Hero for Daisy, a documentary about a revolt by female athletes at Yale University in 1976. “At first, people asked for Chris Ernst, one of the rowers whose story is depicted in the film,” she explained. “But Chris is a recluse, so I started to go.” Similar to Grossman’s experience, Mazzio’s public appearances started small—visits to schools to speak with groups of female athletes—and offered little or no pay. But soon she was being booked by larger entities with bigger budgets. In fact, the growth in speaking requests helped Mazzio realize that people were interested enough in her ideas that she had the makings of a film business rather than just one well-received film.
Still, Mazzio does not see speaking as a separate career. “It’s really how I promote my films. It’s communicating in a nonvisual way. If it’s not exactly the same, it’s very complementary.” Mazzio speaks on a range of topics, usually with a connection to women, sports, and the subjects of her films. She controls the quantity of appearances by keeping her fees high. “When you charge a lot, the people who hire you really want you and put a lot of energy into having you there. If you don’t charge for what you do, people don’t value it.”
Writing books could serve the same purpose—delivering her message in another medium—but Mazzio hasn’t wanted to commit to a book project, even though requests have been coming in. “I’m dragging my feet because I just can’t get excited about it. Writing screenplays [which she did earlier in her career] was so solitary and I really loved it, but I didn’t have kids at the time. You have to have an expanse of time to write. If I were exclusively a writer, I’d carve it out. But I don’t want to be a triple slash.”
Mazzio’s experience shows the importance of saying no to adding a slash when it makes sense. Filmmaking is Mazzio’s passion, and she is happy to do public speaking now and then in support of that. But she is self-aware enough to know that writing about the subjects of her film, for a medium other than film, would just take her away from making films. The fact that an opportunity presents itself isn’t enough of a reason to take it on. It has to fit in with the rest of what you want to be doing. At that moment.
Elizabeth Freedman, thirty-four, stumbled into a career as a public speaker. When she was laid off from a prestigious management consulting job at twenty-nine, Freedman had the first signal that the rosy career she had planned for as an MBA student at Thunderbird in Arizona might not be so easy to achieve. “I was at the company maybe a year. Things were going along beautifully. And then suddenly they weren’t,” she told me. “I wish I could have seen the writing on the wall. A lot of work. Then less work. Then no work. I survived a couple of rounds, but then it was my turn.” The layoff proved financially disastrous for Freedman when her ex-employer went bankrupt before reimbursing expenses. She even had trouble getting her COBRA health insurance benefits. “I began to get seriously pissed off, thinking this is what happens when you put all your eggs in the corporate America basket.” Her husband was in graduate school at the time and they relied on her income. At first, she was relaxed, even taking a little trip to Paris, thinking the job search could wait a bit. But when she returned, getting another job was not easy.
In the midst of her search, she and her husband moved from Chicago to Boston, where he got a job. They settled into their new city in July 2001, just before the attacks of 9/11, which further damaged her already disastrous job search. “I just knew that, along with all the other tragedies, there would be the very small but personal tragedy that I wouldn’t find work,” she explained in her trademark self-deprecating tone. “I continued to network and get job interviews, but the whole process took on a bizarre quality. I had one interview where I was literally offered a job and it was retracted within the same interview. In another, the guy was taking calls from a car dealer selling him a truck. He kept screaming, ‘No fuckin’ way’ into the phone and I’d say, ‘This really seems like a bad time. Would you like to reschedule?’ Needless to say, no one ever offered me a job. I was fortunate in that I had a spouse with a job, but I did need to work. Oh, and did I mention I gained twenty pounds during this time?”
The weight gain proved fortuitous. Freedman joined Weight Watchers, shed the pounds in five months, and found a community where she felt comfortable. “I always had something to share at the meetings. They called me Chatty Patty. And when it was over, everyone told me I should come and work for the company as a trainer.” She thought, “Why not? At the very least, I’d keep the weight off.” Around that same time, she also began to work as a personal trainer, teaching spinning classes and weight lifting at a local health club. “Because I had this MBA, I had some pride issues. But I actually loved it all. It was the first time in my life I liked working. I’ve always struggled with keeping my weight off, so it meant a lot to me to be able to motivate and help people in this way.” Still, she continued to go on interviews for “real jobs,” convinced that the Weight Watchers and health club gigs were temporary. “But month after month, crazy interview after weird situation, nothing happened. After a while that can get to you. It’s a lot of rejection. I was embarrassed; here I am this well-educated person and I cannot get a job. At the same time, I started meeting other people in the same boat. It started to feel like a story.”
To lift her spirits Freedman took an acting class at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. “The class emphasized performing original material and the goal was to come up with a show in which each person performed as an individual as well as in a few ensemble numbers. I felt like I was at summer camp and couldn’t have been happier. The teacher suggested I do a mini one-woman show and I chose to make it about my unemployment saga. I called it ‘Made Redundant,’ because that’s what the British called it. It was completely autobiographical. I wrote and wrote and rehearsed and rehearsed, tapping into talents I hadn’t used since college. Then, the big night came. My part was only six minutes, but the feedback was really positive. And that was the best feedback I had gotten in over a year.”
Based on that feedback, Freedman decided to lengthen her show and work toward performing it before a live audience. Her teacher agreed to help her stage it and she set to work at expanding it to a one-hour show. “The momentum and energy just came from doing something I liked and feeling good about it. Over the next six months I wrote the show in the evenings and on weekends. Around the same time, I became pregnant. And when it was time to do the show, which we did for real in a real theater, I was six months pregnant (great for the parts about gaining all that weight). I wrote a press release, got a few articles in the paper, and the show was sold out for its two-night run. I finally had the glimmer of ‘I can do this.’” She wasn’t exactly sure what “this” was, but she knew it was something that involved performing in front of an audience. Soon, it became more clear.
The next week, Freedman got her first request for a repeat performance. Based on the local press she received, she got a call from an organization asking if she’d speak in front of a group of 200 unemployed white-collar professionals. She modified the show into a format that worked better for the setting, and it was a hit. Speeches on college and business school campuses followed. Today, she’s delivering keynote addresses and doing all sorts of training for young professionals on career issues. (Ironically, a lot of her workshops focus on interview skills.)
It’s still a young business so she holds on to the Weight Watchers gig to compensate for dry spells in bookings for speeches. “It’s actually a one hundred percent fit for me,” said Freedman. “Getting before audiences on a regular basis keeps my skills sharp and I have a lot of flexibility. They send me out to corporate clients where I run their meetings for them. It’s exactly what I like to do, talking about something I’ve experienced. Why we gain and lose weight is something I can literally talk about all day. And weight loss is such a good metaphor for the career stuff. ‘You didn’t gain it in a day, you won’t lose it in a day.’ ‘You’ve had a bad day, get back on the horse.’ There are even days when I can test out some material I’m going to use in a keynote. I’m a speaker, and if I haven’t had a gig in two months I start to miss it. So this keeps me out there, standing up in front of people week after week.”
Freedman has built a career out of a bundle of slashes that involves speaking and coaching. Whether she’s lecturing to a Weight Watchers group, training a client at the gym, or giving workshops to young professionals, she is using her knack for persuading, teaching, and encouraging people to meet their goals. But, just as other people find balance in pursuing different occupations, Freedman has found balance by using her talent for speaking in different arenas. She has also come up with a combination that provides that desirable mix of a solid foundation (the Weight Watchers meetings and personal training) paired with some activities that are high-risk/high-return (the keynote speeches and career workshops). Most important, she’s figured out that she has a versatile gift—something that will serve her well the next time she wants to shake things up.
Freedman is the type of person who comes alive when she gets before an audience. And that is true for so many people who are drawn to public speaking. But even for those who fit that mold, a heavy calendar of speeches can take a toll on the body, especially because professional speaking involves a lot of travel. Freedman has only been in the business for a few years, and is at the point where she is eager for more bookings, so getting burned out is not really a concern for her at the moment.
Freedman says her slash setup has some added benefits in the way she cares for her son. She takes him to a daycare center on the days she meets with clients, gives speeches, or leads her Weight Watchers groups. When she travels and on the weekends, her husband, who works full-time in an office outside the home, is in charge of childcare drop off and pickup. In the end, not getting a full-time office job has left Freedman with a lot more flexibility, a lot more time with her son, and the cost savings of not using day care full-time. It’s no surprise then, that many journalists, teachers, consultant-experts, and entrepreneurs do some public speaking when they get the opportunity.
Janelle Elms has trained thousands of individuals and companies on how to build or improve an eBay business. It all started with one of those hobbies that evolves first to an obsession, then to a career.
Back in the early 1990s, Elms, now thirty-nine, worked in corporate marketing in a series of fairly uninspiring jobs in Seattle, Washington. In her free time, she discovered eBay, mostly because it was a way to add to her collection of late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century valentines with a cowboy theme. By visiting antiques shops, she was able to find the occasional treasure, but once she discovered eBay, the supply seemed endless.
As Elms cruised eBay buying her valentines, she instantly saw a forum where her marketing background could set her apart from other sellers. When she auctioned off a set of collectible patches she thought were worth thirty dollars for over two hundred dollars, she was hooked. During breaks at work and at lunch, she’d run to the computer, posting new items for sale and watching her auctions. In a matter of months, she noticed all kinds of opportunities to build a business on eBay—products she wanted to sell, ways to distinguish herself as a seller, ideas for improving the customer experience. In less than a year, she left her corporate job, replacing it with a series of odd jobs that she juggled for about three years while figuring out how to build a successful business as an eBay seller.
That’s when the teaching began. Friends knew she was reveling in her newfound independence as an entrepreneur, and they started asking for advice about breaking into eBay. Elms started running little eBay groups in her home. Around the same time, she attended a lecture at a local university on growing an eBay business. “I knew more than the expert and realized that most of what she was saying was wrong. But until that point, I didn’t realize how much I knew,” she says. “After the class, I went up to her and asked how she got into teaching. She told me that she was actually thinking of giving it up and asked me if I’d be interested in taking it over. I’d never taught before, never even spoke publicly, but I said yes.”
She spent weeks preparing for that first three-hour class, a one-shot lecture the school had given her to test her out. She called it “Don’t Throw It Away, Sell It on eBay,” and from the minute she stood before the audience, she was lit up by the experience. “I was on a natural high for three days afterwards,” she told me. That class was so popular that she was hired to teach another. Then she was hired to teach an advanced class. The classes paid well enough, but Elms was hoping to earn more money, so she decided to put some of her best advice in writing so that she would have something to sell at her lectures. She basically typed up her notes, photocopied them at Kinko’s, and month after month sold out every single copy of the homemade book she prepared.
I wasn’t surprised to hear any of this because I had seen Elms in action. She was the instructor at a class I took through eBay University, the company’s training arm. Elms, in her sensible shoes and sweatshirt, strolled the room where hundreds of established eBay business owners had come to hear her tips for ways to eke more money out of every eBay transaction—how to improve the look of an online storefront; how to avoid payment problems; how to boost international sales. With each revelation, Elms was evangelical about the results business owners could see. And she had data to back it all up. At the end, she was bombarded by audience members rushing to get one of her business cards before she left the room. Along with her eBay advice, she was also sending a message about empowerment through entrepreneurship.
Today Elms lectures around the country for eBay University, does private consulting to the many people who call her after hearing her speak, and writes book after book revealing the secrets to eBay success. Even her volunteer work has an eBay component—she runs three free meetings every month in Seattle for beginners and women’s groups. Elms says she enjoys the speaking and teaching much more than the writing, but she makes the time to write books because it’s another way to reach people. “There’s just so much bad information out there about eBay,” she said.
Elms still offers her self-published guides (now packaged as binders so that she can send out updated pages) through eBay and her Web site. In addition, she’s published three eBay books for McGraw-Hill, which approached her upon learning about her reputation as an eBay guru. In her free time, she trolls eBay, buying and selling, mostly to make sure that the information she’s disseminating is current. “I could never get rid of the selling,” she explained. “If I stopped, there’d be no more books, no teaching, and no consulting. Sometimes I’m so busy that I really miss the selling, the highs of the auction. Then, I’ll get right back into it, generating ten to twenty thousand dollars in a month. When I’m touring, it can be as low as a thousand a month. But whatever the amount, I need to stay in it. To keep in touch with the community and my values system.”
If Freedman, the Weight Watchers coach/trainer/career speaker, is an example of using speaking skills on a variety of different subjects, Elms has made a career out of the inverse—delivering content on one subject in a variety of formats. Elms shares the eBay expertise she’s amassed through private consulting, public lectures, and instructional books. This approach makes sense for anyone who is building a name for themselves as an expert.
Elms’s career is also a model of what I call the teaching/speaking/writing/consulting cycle, in which each slash fuels the others. Once you develop a body of knowledge, it’s only natural to deliver that expertise to students, clients, and the public—and to do that means to take on these various labels. Deborah Epstein Henry, the work/life expert first introduced in chapter 2, is another one of those people who has become adept at delivering her expertise in whatever medium is called for. Henry’s expert status grew out of Flex-Time Lawyers, the networking and support group she founded in New York and Philadelphia for lawyers balancing their careers with raising a family. Out of that came her consulting practice.
Henry is frequently asked to sit on panel discussions, to deliver keynote speeches, and to author articles on subjects related to her expertise. “It’s all been by invitation,” she explained. “And once you do a lot of speaking, you’re invited to write, and writing is an important way to get the word out to a larger audience. Through the writing, I end up getting more speaking engagements. And when people see me speak, I get more consulting work.”
Among experts in any given field, there is a prevailing feeling that at some point you need to write a book to establish your expertise. Henry says she has arrived at that spot. She doesn’t have a book yet, but she is feeling the desire to write one. For Henry, it’s just a matter of finding the time. “A book is really a wonderful credential,” she said. “For me, it’s just really a question of when and how I can work it into the repertoire. Often, when you have a book, it’s synonymous with the credential. If you don’t have a book, you have to have another means to the visibility or platform. If you don’t have it, it doesn’t mean that you’re not an expert, but if you do, it’s an obvious way to demonstrate the expertise. It’s a wonderful takeaway for people who want to learn from you. I have smaller example of that—like with the articles I write—but I know that a larger example will have even more credibility.”
Sally Hogshead, the advertising and branding expert, says she felt this way when she decided to write Radical Careering, her first book. The book was critical to relaunching her own career reinvention and to introducing herself to the world in the way she wanted to be seen. For her, being an author is part of a bigger strategy: “The author slash is nestled among others. I had no intent to be author for the sake of being an author. It’s a springboard. I’m getting much more involved in being a keynote speaker on a higher level. A book is a calling card for that. Each slash feeds off each other. It’s a career ecosystem.”
In the summer of 2004, Robert Sudaley, the teacher/real estate developer from chapter 3, was ready to write a book. As a middle school teacher who had cultivated a thriving slash career in real estate, he wanted to write a self-help book for teachers and others on a fixed income about how to create wealth through the purchase and sale of real estate. He researched a bit about how nonfiction books were sold and learned that he would need to find an agent and write a proposal to sell his book to a traditional publisher. In the best of possible worlds, he imagined finishing his proposal, finding an agent, and getting a book contract. He also understood that his book would likely be published at least a year after he began the entire process and that he probably wouldn’t be paid a lot of money to write this kind of a guide.
Rather than go through that process, Sudaley decided to publish it himself. He knew he would miss out on the editorial and marketing support a publisher could provide, but he just wanted to get his book out. And he believed that he could do a good job marketing the book to his target audience, other teachers.
Sudaley enlisted the services of Booksurge, a self-publishing company owned by Amazon.com. After four months and an investment of about $2,000 (which included the services of an editor), his book was ready to go. Booksurge prints and ships the books as Sudaley gets orders for them, charging him $5 per copy. He plans to market the book through organizations that cater to teachers.
Sudaley’s experience as a first-time author is one way to go. So-called vanity publishing used to be how people who thought of themselves as authors but couldn’t convince anyone else of that got their books published. Would-be authors answered ads in the back of literary magazines and bought themselves a bound souvenir copy of their manuscript. In some cases, this still happens. But in many cases, authors are choosing to self-publish and distribute their books instead of trying to work with traditional publishers. Like Sudaley, they do it because they have their own ideas for how to spread the word and sell their books and they want to get a book out quickly.
The vanity publishing industry has undergone a makeover in recent years; in fact, the term “vanity publishing” is rarely used today. Most people (even mainstream publishers) now commonly refer to it as self-publishing. Reputable companies like Booksurge.com, Xlibris, AuthorHouse, and iUniverse have sprouted up in the past few years to help people self-publish. Self-published books rarely make it to the bestseller lists, but there are occasional success stories. In fact, one of the most successful business best-sellers of all time, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, was originally self-published by author Robert Kiyosaki.
When Sudaley told me his story, he referenced the self-publishing story of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, well-known among readers of business self-help books. Sudaley says he’d be thrilled if a major publisher contacted him after seeing his book, a` la Rich Dad, Poor Dad’s Kiyosaki, but even if that doesn’t happen, he’s accomplished his goal of creating a vehicle to share his passion.
The preceding examples all show people who figured out a way to teach something connected to their primary vocation. But many people are drawn to teach something that stems from an avocation or passion. Consider the story of Alex von Bidder. He has done both.
Von Bidder, one of the two partners of the world-renowned Four Seasons Restaurant in Manhattan, likes to be identified with several pursuits that barely produce any income—writing, modeling, and yoga. After more than twenty years as a restaurateur, von Bidder, fifty-five, was drawn to yoga practice—as so many people are—to get peace of mind in an increasingly hectic world. As he told me, when I met him in his restaurant one late afternoon between the lunch and dinner rushes, “You don’t have to go into a cave and withdraw from activity to find peace of mind, if you know how to access it.”
Yoga was so helpful to him that his daily practice became a sacred ritual. And its effects have infused his management style at the Four Seasons, where he says he believes in giving his staff as much freedom as possible and the capacity to make decisions. He also believes that because he is open about his yoga practice and his commitment to meditation, it creates an atmosphere in which others feel that all of their various dimensions are welcome too. So why become a teacher? Why not just engage in a committed yoga practice? Von Bidder said he wasn’t really interested in teaching but the studio encouraged him to do it. “I did it for a couple of reasons. One is, I believe, that you really study harder when you teach a subject because then you really have to go deeper. So it helped my practice. And the other is that I’m coming to a stage in my life when teaching what I know has become more important.” Von Bidder feels that yoga has changed his life, and he wanted to share that with others.
Von Bidder’s comments touch on themes echoed by so many teachers I talked to—the idea that teaching makes you better at what you teach and that once you’re settled into your career, it is fulfilling to share your experience with others. Though people can find joy in teaching when they’re young, this struck me as an appealing way to look at the prospect of growing older. People often focus on the challenges of aging, but this attitude puts aging in a new and very positive light.
Von Bidder teaches business as well. He has been an adjunct professor at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, and he was also a guest speaker in Professor Srikumar Rao’s Creativity and Personal Mastery class at Columbia Business School, which he jokingly refers to as “yoga for MBAs.” That class had a huge impact on him and he plans to do it again. As von Bidder put it, “Rao was specifically looking for someone who lives the lessons of yoga in the businessplace, so what I did in my first lecture . . . which was called ‘Warrior Wisdom from Yogic Tradition and the U.S. Army,’ was meant to elicit the spirit of the ancient disclipine applied to today’s life and to dance with it, rather than say ‘yes, sir.’” Von Bidder got those MBA students to dance, literally. “Pretty good considering it was a Friday morning 10:00 a.m.-to-noon class and they were all a bit hungover. Classes like that allow me to connect with young and brilliant people, so I really need to stretch, going to the edge of my knowledge and my experience to step through and show them something else. They are so used to business leaders lecturing them on how to make money, but I really believe if you live according to your passions, the money follows automatically.”
Von Bidder has also taught a class on manners at New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies, focusing on general issues and restaurants in particular. “Manners are really about listening to other people, not about what fork to use,” he said. “To be gentle in life. To allow other people the space. To avoid surprises. To make things easy. It’s all about making it come alive for the class and having fun with it.”
Whether he’s teaching yoga, creativity in business, management, or manners, von Bidder says it’s all the same for him: “It’s all about how to live, have fun, and dance with your life.”
Because teaching can be done in so many different ways, it fits well with nearly anything else you might do. People teach for so many reasons. Like von Bidder, they teach to pass on knowledge, to give back, and to deepen their own learning. They teach for the extra income. They teach in areas related to their main vocation or in something they consider secondary. They teach because it uses different muscles than the ones they use in other parts of their life. They teach because it just feels good.
Depending on the format they use to pass on knowledge, people who teach take on different titles. They call themselves consultants, lecturers, educators, coaches, tutors. They do it in private workshops, one-on-one sessions, seminar rooms, packed auditoriums, and health clubs. They do it over the Internet and through teleseminars. They do it by writing articles, books, or blogs. They teach what they’ve studied or what they’ve learned through life experience. Whatever the reasons and the labels, most teachers find it to be among the most rewarding things they do.
The teaching/writing coupling is so common that it deserves a mention of its own. Only a tiny portion of doctors teach medical students; but somehow the number of writers who also teach is huge. Why is that? First, writing—even for the most accomplished writers—is often not economically viable on its own. Second, teaching others to write tends to improve one’s own writing. Finally, writing can often be a lonely existence; for writers who have a social side, teaching is a natural outlet. I asked two veteran author/teachers—and two of my mentors—why they taught and why so intensely.
Susan Shapiro, forty-four and a memoirist, has been dividing her time between writing and teaching for more than fifteen years. She was one of my first writing teachers and she helped me figure out why the combination is so magical. Shapiro says it’s so hard to make a living that you really couldn’t come up with a better combination for a writer, especially a fiction writer or poet. “They just work beautifully together. I wake up, do all my writing, and then, with my second energy, I grade papers. I’m going all day alone writing, fighting to put stuff on the computer, and then I go out at night for the human interaction. With the writing, I reach into myself and throw it out there,” she said. “When I go out to teach, it’s all about getting it back. The smiles. The hugs. The good energy.”
All writers complain that teaching takes them away from their writing. But as Charles Salzberg likes to say, “Everything I do takes me away from my writing and I’m always trying to avoid it.” A prolific author who teaches about four different classes a semester, Salzberg, fifty-eight, says that around the time of his twentieth book, the thrill of seeing his name in print diminished. “It’s old hat to me,” he told me. But through his students he gets to experience that thrill again and again. “The best part is when I see someone improve as a writer, even someone who will probably never get published. I get a bigger kick out of a student publishing a book, an article, or an essay than anything I write.” Salzberg also finds teaching to be a social outlet. “So much of my social life has to do with people I’ve met through class. They become friends. It’s a sense of a community.”
