Earlier today I was having lunch with some of my colleagues, many of them, like me, recently dispossessed of a job. As I stood in line, I saw a familiar face behind the counter taking our orders. It was a young woman named Cory, who I had met just a couple of months ago at a workshop for journalism students at the University of Alabama. When we met, Cory was editor at a small local magazine. Now, her magazine having folded, as so many do these days, she works in a downtown restaurant.
She introduced herself, saying, "I'm a former journalist too." I corrected her. "We're still journalists," I said.
Times are tough in the magazine business, and in the print business in general. Many of us have been forced to do something else to make ends meet. Others may yet find a similar fortune awaits. Still, given those circumstances, it's important to remember that we don't stop being journalists, we don't stop being writers, just because something happens to our paying gig.
Journalists are journalists because we have a skill -sometimes a talent - and an inclination to write, to chronicle, to document, to tell stories, to inform. That inclination can be assaulted by economic forces, or by bean-counting bureaucrats who don't know a good story from a hole in the ground, but our God-given talents and hard-won skills remain inviolate.
They can't take that away. Sometimes we lose sight of the simple fact that we were hired because we had something to offer, something to give, something of value. Something intrinsic. We may mistakenly think, as I know some do, that our talents depend entirely upon the approval of others. That, as I say, is a mistake. The talent you walked in with goes with you when you leave. You remain fundamentally who and what you were before you had this job.
It's not the job that validates you as a writer. It's the work. And you can choose to keep writing.
Writing has always had a subjective element to it. One likes your work, another doesn't. Sometimes it's easy for an editor to mistake his opinion for Holy Writ - which it ain't. It's a preference for one word over another, one story format over the other, this sentence structure instead of that one. To some degree, we all write in the dark, hoping that something we put out for public consumption will find a receptive audience and resonate with someone. Sometimes we win in this effort, sometimes we don't.
Neither eventuality means that we should give up trying. Writers have to write because somebody needs to tell the stories. We have a duty to use what we have to give something of value to someone else. Through words that educate, that entertain, that enlighten, that enrage, that empathize, we can do just that.
So to any of my colleagues who are feeling down, I would say, get your chin up. Don't give up on yourself. Don't forget that you have something of value to offer. Don't let a misfortune of economy or shortsightedness make you forget who you are, and what you are.
They can take the job. They can kill the place you work. You may choose to stop writing, but don't let anybody tell you that you are less than what you know in your heart that you are - a writer. Period.
