The Profession That Does Not Exist | Baffler Symposium

I teach my department’s career planning courses. English majors have many valuable skills, and I encourage them all to publish in any venue that interests them.  An important part of my job involves encouraging students to seek out classroom, internship and part-time experiences that will help them pay the bills while they wait for Netflix to buy the rights to their trilogy-in-progress. Elbow grease matters.

I wish more people had the courage to be as honest with me then as the contributors to the forum are now in relaying their own side hustles. The writers here and in the accompanying online material include a celebrated novelist with a major publisher who has worked in New Jersey factories for twenty years; a current MFA student at Columbia (in fact, one of my students whom I met in the course of one of my other side hustles) who is paid to cuddle strangers; and a Pulitzer Prize winner who wound up waiting tables in New Orleans’s French Quarter before becoming homeless.

The accounts here describe the financial compromises, the emotional costs, the physical exhaustion, the moral injury, and the drain on the imaginative reserves that are the costs of a side gig. They describe the way that writing itself can serve as a form of spiritual recovery from the labor that funded it. They also detail the satisfactions of service work and manual toil, employment outside the cosmopolis, and mastering skill sets more material than putting words to paper. The forum, I hope, serves as a partial history of the hidden labor that makes possible the poems, stories, essays, books, and periodicals you read—including the magazine you currently hold in your hands. –Wes Enzinna, “The Profession That Does Not Exist | Baffler Symposium“