Creative Writing as Antidote to Hustle Culture

Right-sized living has been one of my core principles for the last decade or so. My awareness of it certainly preceded the pandemic, although it’s hard to say by how much, since Covid congealed the once clearly demarcated years into the foggy Before Times. I found home supervision of two elementary school children whose school closed for 11 months while being on a writing “leave” from the university to be so numbingly difficult that I sought several escapes. One was a new (home-based) project: decluttering with a goal of (gentle) minimalism. My home at that time had 1100 sq ft and two bedrooms, and it housed three people and too much of everything except space. Each item had a spare. Half of the items were for “in case” unlikely events or opportunities. I was ready for every eventuality, every revived hobby. Each item in my home dripped with meaning, memory, or nagging for not achieving an ideal self. My work files were the same; materials for a dozen unfinished projects cried out for my attention, and in all truth, decluttering them has meant coming to terms with the fact that they will never be completed. Since my office in that home was also my bedroom, my couch was my bed, and my desk was my nightstand, there was no escaping the amplitude of my imagination or my belongings. Young kids and their constant clutter added another layer to this challenge; where in the world did all those plastic and paper pieces come from, and could we reuse them for another project? Sheltering in place during Covid was the perfect opportunity to right-size my home. First to go was the redundant furniture, the bigger the better, including the pieces needing restoration with time and knowledge I never acquired. Then the clothes, some so old I recalled dancing in them in downtown Manhattan in the 1990s (like the ankle-length aubergine silk sari and its constant companion, the sleeveless black turtleneck), others too formal or too small for my post-tenure, perimenopausal, parenting body.

 As I pared down my belongings, space opened up, both literally and figuratively. I dropped half of the belongings in my home, and even more when I moved my family up to another town along Lake Michigan 18 months into the pandemic. Two large cabinets were the last to go when my old home was empty and my sons and I already slept at the new house. I had acquired both cabinets from the Chelsea Flea Market in 1992. One was a leaded red-painted “primitive” jelly cabinet from a 19th c. Pennsylvania farm, which served as my only kitchen cabinet in my Charles Street walkup in the West Village. The other was a fragrant cedar armoire with a secret crafted inner storage unit. Its cedar saved my club clothes then my assistant professor uniforms from moth and dust for thirty years. The image of buying and transporting these cabinets is seared into my memory. Each of two lumberjack-strong men strapped a cabinet onto his back and carried it up the five former tenement floors. Each deposited a cabinet in the location where it would substitute for absent built-in storage and closets. Three decades and three moves later, the home I was selling was empty but for these cabinets, and I needed to get them out before the real estate photographer arrived. These cabinets were not just storage; they were storied and hard to release, but they had served their purpose, and it was time to regime them. The red jelly cabinet left me on a flatbed truck with Georgia license plates, where the buyer had an antiques store. The cedar armoire got loaded into a van headed to a dapper elderly gentleman’s home where, he told me, it would hold his leather coats. How many coats can a person have? was all I could think as this object transitioned from mine to his when he handed over a set of $20 bills. Any sadness in separating from my Charles Street apartment of the early 1990s New York City washed away in the delighted faces of both buyers. “Now that I see it in real life,” the antique dealer told me, looking at her girlfriend, “I think I want to keep it for myself.” “Have you got that skeleton key for me, the one with the orange tassel from the photo?” the debonair buyer inquired. “I gotta lock up my leather!” I handed the key to him and he put it in the pocket of his jacket that was too warm for September, but too good-looking to stay home.

 I felt unsettled letting these cabinets go, but one thing was crystal clear: the more objects I passed along, the more heart space I found and the easier I breathed. The challenge invigorated me, and I daresay it led me to creative writing. I needed “wide open spaces, room to make a big mistake,” as the Dixie Chicks sing. I needed to slow down amidst fewer things and especially their nagging voices. When I did, I came more fully into the present, and that writing – non-academic writing – became urgent in a way it had not since I was 19 years old and journaled faithfully. I have always said that I went into anthropology as a profession because I was fascinated by the everyday and the minutiae of people’s lives (others’ lives, not mine), especially people in places far from my own. My happiest writing moments as an academic have been when I’ve treaded deep in the weeds, into the forest, observing and describing the trees, forgetting about the forest. But in my adult life, as pleasure writing slipped away and analytic writing barged in, the space for creative writing became harder and harder to find. Creativity and imagination became strangers. I was deeply mired in social science, even while retaining quick flashes of the aesthetics of creative writing. Three decades of constant, pervasive, multimodal analysis drained joy from the once invigorating practice of observation. During the pandemic, staying home and turning inward, my craving for creative space turned to a ravenous hunger. I thought I purged my home so I could free my mind, but that was precisely the problem: the constant dwelling in thought. It took a year or so before creativity strolled back into my life, marked its territory, and lay down roots. Creativity said, “I’m back from your young adulthood, and I’m not leaving again. Bring me to your table, nourish me, and I will show you abundance.”

 What does all of this have to do with hustle culture? Storytelling requires us to slow down and notice what and who is around us. We have to listen to our inner dialogues of our multiple selves, and shoo the unhelpful ones away. We get to listen to these voices and memories. We get to play with our imaginations, and to try new ways of hearing, writing, and feeling. We come back to our bodies and get out of our heads. We get out of our own way. And the stories flood back at the slightest prompt. Analytical academic writing comes from the head. Live in it and practice it for too many years and it becomes second nature. But there’s nothing natural about living in constant critique, and it takes conscious effort to notice heart and gut. Heart and gut don’t fit into “publish or perish,” a phrase too trite to write, and too despised to be anyone’s mantra. Critique edges out creation.

The book The Slow Professor purported to critique this academic way-of-being, yet its authors offered no structural solutions. There are none, possibly. Unlike the Italian Slow Food movement, once you declare yourself a slow professor who recognizes that quality scholarship takes time, there’s no path to change the way academia operates. I had embraced Slow Food as a young adult, possibly as the result of so much living in places where growing and buying fresh seasonal food and cooking it at home was everyday practice. At some point in this neoliberal era, academia succumbed to Hustle Culture, despite the loud protests of some of its practitioners. It is an empty existence, being seated on the throne of analysis, in a tower whose “ivory” had been replaced with plastic -- and not the sturdy kind. For the person committed to right-sized living, a life with space for creativity and play, where does the academic expectation of “deliverables” fit in? For the person who has spent her adult life in her head, creative writing – for publication or no monetized purpose whatsoever – breaks us free from the gluttony of the cerebral, and dares us into the gut’s intuition and the heart’s connection. Neither of these bodily locations articulate with Publish or Perish culture. For the creative writer, the gut and the heart must exist alongside the head. For the slow academic, the head shakes free its hubris when confronted by the clarity of the gut and the heart.