A Blog Post by Jada Gordon
In the past month, veteran actor and former Cosby Show star Geoffrey Owens was photographed working in a local Trader Joe’s bagging groceries, and with the social media-centric world we live in, the picture found its home on the internet for the world to see. When I first saw the picture, it was on Twitter and Fox News had shared it with the caption “‘Cosby Show’ actor Geoffrey Owens spotted bagging groceries at NJ Trader Joe’s.” The article went on to talk about his stints on The Cosby Show and other shows and the person who took the pictures. However, that’s all that was discussed, practically “job shaming” him for bagging groceries; he was painted as an actor who went into obscurity. After this, people began not only to condemn Fox News and others for their “job shaming” of Geoffrey Owens, but also to question our perceptions of artists and their lifestyles. This leads me to think about the stereotypes we hold about writers’ lifestyles. We as a culture have an inability to see creatives in all fields as laborers as well. Is it our fault? Is it society’s fault? People have their dated stereotypes of writer’s lifestyles that we must slowly but surely dismantle.
I remember sitting in my Intro to Literary Studies class reading Madame Bovary for the first time. I was enraptured by this book that spoke to the wives stuck in boring rural village life who flexed their imaginations through romance novels. The main character, Emma, lives beyond her means to achieve a luxury lifestyle of wanderlust, adventure, and passion. I saw myself in Emma, a young woman looking for a way out. Like Emma, I was fixated on an image of what my life should be. I, however, fixated on achieving the typical “writers’ lifestyle” that was portrayed on TV: that of someone who is educated, has famous connections, spends their ample free time writing in cafes, and lives in a loft in the “artsy” part of town. My favorite part of the image is that money is often scarce but the writer manages miraculously to live alone.
Much of this imagery of a writer’s lifestyle is rooted in the twentieth century and further back in time. The writer lives in times of turmoil or the aftermath of chaos and war, like The Great Depression, the World Wars, or the Vietnam War, and has to leave America for Europe for cheaper rent and greater artistic freedom. This image has a massive influence on American ideas and perceptions of literature, and it’s inaccurate and dated.
The writers I automatically think of when I think of the “writers’ lifestyle” are James Baldwin and Ernest Hemingway—Both writers who seem to fit into the quintessential lifestyle and aesthetics of the perceptions of writers. Both were wildly popular twentieth-century writers who went to Europe and wrote excellent works of art, both fiction and nonfiction. However, Baldwin left America for completely different reasons than Hemingway. Baldwin left because of the constant discrimination he was facing as a black man in America. As a writer, he was respected, but because he was black, he faced the threat of racism and prejudice in even the typically liberal New York City. He escaped to France (as many Black artists did) to write freely without the looming threat of racial prejudice over his head. In a discussion of his life, Baldwin said he didn’t want to be read as “merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer.” Baldwin would go on to join a radical movement in France, live, write, and eventually pass away in the south of France in 1987.
Hemingway, along with his first wife, left for Europe to be a foreign correspondent and fell into the modernists’ movement of writers and artists in the 1920s. This movement was called the “Lost Generation” and was a collective of the expatriate community. One could go on for days about the experiences he went through to create his classic pieces of literature. Hemingway lead a life that I thought writers were supposed to lead. The fact that I couldn’t do the same created a wave of envy in me. As a writer, I wanted to get out and explore life to create effectively like Baldwin, Hemingway, and many other writers. I chased the idea of the lifestyle I thought I needed to live. However, I was stuck in college and a retail job that I felt didn’t allow me to exercise my thoughts or challenge me. I also had to realize that these times in which Baldwin and Hemingway were exploring themselves and their artistry in France were different from the present. Traveling wasn’t as expensive, the culture was different, and the counterculture existed (arguably).
Writers, poets, and artists are laborers, whether it’s working within your artistic medium for compensation or working an outside job. Today more than ever, writers need multiple jobs to make ends meet just like everyone else in different artistic fields. Every writer’s lifestyle is not the spot-on depiction of the typical writers’ lifestyle. Very rarely today can a writer live solely on the income provided by their writing—as opposed to writers in the 20th century and before, who could live off book sales and articles published in newspapers. It’s a constant hustle—more now than it was back then. Unless your book is turned into a movie or miniseries, it takes a lot of work to get writing off the ground and into publication. We juggle paying the bills, creating, and handling life’s various curveballs as anyone else would.
Realizing that I’m not a writer who can whisk themselves off to different lands to create, I had to reevaluate my perspective and why I actually write. As a writer, I must create worlds and characters with my imagination. This comes from experience and applying them in a creative light. Putting thoughts, emotions, and perspectives into a cohesive and creative poem or story is what makes a writer, no matter what life you lead or the lifestyle you maintain. I write because it’s therapeutic and pleasing to my soul. Writing challenges me to break things down and build them into a new idea or way of seeing things. All of the experiences I go through make for poems, stories, and ideas I can build. As a writer, I must use all experiences and travels to inspire me. It all circles back to creativity—Working is what keeps the lights on, but it shouldn’t define life. Writers all live different lives that inspire their work, and that’s been true as long as people have been writing.
Jada Gordon is a writer, editor, and poet from the Bronx, NY. She won BMCC’s 2017 James Tolan Student Writer Award and published and edited the magazine for BMCC’s Writing Club, The Writers’ Guild. She’s also been published on WordPress and in Sula Magazine, and coedits What Rough Beast for Indolent Books.