Posts Tagged ‘working from home’
Cindy on May 4th, 2009
“The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom.” — Henry Ward Beecher
With Mother’s Day approaching, I’ve been thinking about how my mother shaped my views on career, homemaking, and motherhood.
Like most children in the 1950s and ’60s, I took for granted that Mom would be waiting at home each afternoon when I returned from school. In those days, day-care providers were called baby-sitters, and their employment was limited to occasional Saturday evenings. The “average housewife” role, now a remnant of that mythical past, was as indigenous to middle-class suburbia as The Donna Reed Show.
Combining what she often dubbed âthe best of both worlds,â my mother earned a respectable paycheck while working at home. She didn’t realize it at the time, but she paved the way for the free-lance writing career I would begin years later after my son was born.
Trained as a commercial artist, Mom applied transparent oil tints to photographic portraits of brides and high school graduates. (This was long before portraiture was changed by the introduction of direct-color film and, ultimately, digital photography.) I remember coming home from school to find Mom working in her portable “studio,” which was a table pulled next to a window overlooking our backyard. Perched next to her in a small chair, I watched as she squeezed oil paints onto a glass palette and applied delicate washes of color to each sepia-toned portrait.
I chattered while she painted, occasionally cleaning her brushes in spirits of turpentine. With an ear tilted toward our conversation, Mom would follow my rambling grade-school chitchat — a daily litany of kids who had misbehaved on the playground, or the impossible words I’d misspelled on a test. During these intimate girl talks, problems were solved, opinions formed, hurts consoled.
I was always proud of her — proud to say, “My mom is an artist.” But until I started my own family, I never fully realized how hard she worked, or how much sleep she lost in order to meet her deadlines while keeping a home. Around the clock she painted her portraits and delivered them in bright yellow Kodak boxes to local photography studios, made meals for my father and me, decorated our home, volunteered at my school, and even found time to help lead a Girl Scout troop.
Somehow — from my childish perspective — she created the illusion that her time stretched infinitely and that she was always accessible. Like a good portrait, my relationship with her was never rushed, but rendered lovingly over time, layer upon layer.
Watching my mother today, I’ve learned that the art of living well has a lot to do with improvisation. You must continually find new ways to use the materials and circumstances at hand — and the process is rarely simple.
Shortly after my father’s sudden death 17 years ago, Mom had to sell our family home and move to a smaller place. Adjusting to her new identity as a widow was difficult, and I know she missed the home she and my dad had built together. Everyone we knew grieved the changes in our small family.
But surprisingly, even to me, Mom began transforming the new, blank walls of her condominium into a welcoming place of warmth and beauty. Once again, I saw the artist filling her rooms with silk flowers, family antiques, and photographs of favorite people. Working alone, she reinvented “home” for herself. Art critic John Ruskin once wrote, “When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.” Reading this maxim, I always think of my mother. — Cindy La Ferle
– A slightly different version of this piece originally appeared in The Christian Science Monitor; it is reprinted in my essay collection, Writing Home. Both paintings are by Mary Cassatt –
Writing Home is currently featured in Urbane Life’s “10 Last-minute Gifts for Mother’s Day.” Click here to read the full review and article on Urbane Life.
Cindy on March 10th, 2009
If you really want to write, you will do it anywhere: under trees, on the bus, in the bathroom, or in a booth at a noisy cafe.”
First published in 1929, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf has been reduced to a catchphrase for writers and architects who haven’t even read the book. Originally penned as two lectures, Woolf’s landmark essay asserts that every woman writer should have a substantial income and a room of her own if she is to produce literature worthy of publication and readership.
Furthermore, Woolf said, women who want to write ought to be given the freedom to travel — and they must have plenty of idle time for daydreaming and creating. That was very progressive talk for the 1920s.
And while it isn’t exactly earth shattering today, A Room of One’s Own is still considered a major milestone for women writers. Whenever I’m asked to name 10 books that changed my life, this one never fails to top the list.
Excuses, excuses!
Not surprisingly, the subject of finding privacy and “the perfect writing space” always comes up in the writing workshops I teach. In fact, not having a room of one’s own is the most popular excuse for not writing anything. I’ve met a few self-described procrastinators who do have an extra guest room but insist they can’t work there because it’s poorly lit, uninspiring, too small, too cluttered, too close to the neighbor’s window, or cursed with bad feng shui.
But sooner or later, every writer arrives at this truth: If you really want to write, you will do it anywhere: under trees, on the bus, in the bathroom, or in a booth at a noisy cafe. Serious writers need only a pen and a notebook to get started. And nothing — not even a bad view or ugly curtains — will stop us.
That said, I believe Virginia Woolf made an excellent point about the need for peace and privacy, and she didn’t even have kids to distract her.
Setting boundaries, closing doors
When my son was a toddler, I began freelancing in the damp basement of our 1920′s home. If you’re a younger parent who’s eager to combine writing with motherhood and housekeeping, setting up shop at a kid’s craft table next to the laundry room might sound convenient.
But I quickly discovered this was not what Virginia had in mind.
Working in a murky basement was actually a metaphor for the way I undervalued my career at the time. Aside from the fact that the ambiance was vaguely reminiscent of Freddy Krueger’s boiler room, my desk was typically littered with construction paper or my preschooler’s science experiments. Settling in to write, I’d find blue finger paint or Play-Doh oozing from my paper-clip container. My scissors and rolls of tape mysteriously disappeared. Meanwhile, the clothes dryer kept buzzing — which didn’t exactly impress the editors who phoned about assignments.
A year later, I moved my office upstairs to a small library with lots of windows overlooking the yard. Not long afterward, I began taking my work more seriously.
Most important of all, my home office has a glass door to establish my boundaries. Even though my essays and newspaper columns are read in public, I’ve never liked the sense of other people looking over my shoulder while I draft new material. So I usually keep the door closed while I work.
Clearing your own space
Every writer is different, so you’ll have to experiment until you find what works for you.
Not long ago, I met a parenting columnist who’s also the brave mother of four little boys. She rented cheap office space just ten minutes from her house, which seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. But after three months of commuting back and forth to work and trying to coordinate an awkward breast-feeding schedule, the columnist admitted her new office wasn’t so ideal. The clamor of family life is what kept her energized and motivated.
If you don’t have the luxury of a spare bedroom or an attic with a desk, claim a corner of the house where you can focus on your work. Use the area just for writing (or your other creative projects) and keep supplies within easy reach. Put up a folding screen for privacy while you work; or use it to conceal your works-in-progress. Creating an official space for your creative life will dignify your goals and intentions. You’ll find it easier to establish a routine — and harder to keep making excuses.
If you don’t already have a room of your own, can you describe your ideal space — right down to the supplies you’d need? What would you have to do to make it a reality? – Cindy La Ferle
Note: Part of this essay is excerpted from a previously published essay “Home Sweet Office” — which appears in full in my book, Writing Home.
Top photo: a detail from one of my altered art pieces inspired by Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Bottom photo: a glimpse of my recently remodeled home office in Royal Oak.
Cindy on November 11th, 2008
This essay appeared in slightly different form in the Christian Science Monitor and is included in my essay collection, Writing Home. Though I wrote the piece in 1997 when my son was young and I was working at home, I think its message still works today, given our current economic crisis…
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Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I now have a mind-boggling array of options. A mother who works as a journalist, I can choose to conduct my business in an office building or work at home on my computer while caring for my child. Without leaving the house, I can e-mail relatives in Scotland, read nearly any newspaper in the country, and order a complete fall wardrobe online.
Every day I have more choices than I can reasonably consider. And so, like other tired Americans, I carry the burden of complexity — a burden so overwhelming that there are times when I imagine trading places with Henry David Thoreau.
It’s only fitting that I rediscovered Thoreau the week I purged my home office with a dust rag and a vacuum cleaner. The autumn mornings felt ripe for pitching and sorting, for creating blank space where none existed before. Walden, Thoreau’s famous treatise on simple living, was jammed behind a pile of unread paperbacks on an overcrowded shelf.
Like other writers with good intentions, I’ve always admired Thoreau but hadn’t read Walden since it appeared many years ago on a required reading list at my state university. I’d retained only a few pithy quotes, and recalled only sketchy details of Thoreau’s Spartan cabin in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts. But suddenly, here was the book, whispering to me across the century — “Simplify, simplify”– and begging me to take another look.
Glancing through the pages, I realized Thoreau’s words had been wasted on me when I first read them. At the time I was a young college student living in a cramped dormitory, eager to graduate and buy enough furniture to fill a spacious suburban apartment.
“Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind,” Thoreau warned in the chapter titled “Economy.” Only an overworked adult — one who is drowning in the debris of modern life and pressed by the weight of too many commitments — could truly appreciate Thoreau’s genius, I mused as I kept reading.
Yet it also occurred to me that things were vastly different for Thoreau. The “comforts of life” in the 1840s were not exactly cushy by today’s standards. His concept of luxury might have been taking tea in his mother’s bone china saucers. So what had he given up to commune with nature?
Even before he moved to Walden Pond, Thoreau hadn’t accumulated three television sets or a closetful of designer clothes. He didn’t own several pairs of expensive athletic shoes for all those philosophical walks he took. He didn’t wonder where he’d store his blender or Tupperware while he roughed it in the woods. His cot in the cabin couldn’t have been lumpier than the straw-filled mattresses in most mid-19th-century homes. And Thoreau never had to trade a personal computer for a pencil.
So, how tough was Thoreau’s sabbatical with simplicity? Is it true that he occasionally walked from Walden Pond back to Concord, where Emerson’s wife had a home-cooked supper waiting for him?
As Andrew Delbanco notes in Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), reading Thoreau can make us feel âaccused of hoarding comforts.” We might even try to find holes in Thoreau’s impassioned pitch for the simple life. And yet Thoreau is, as Delbanco says, “an irresistible writer; to read him is to feel wrenched away from the customary world and delivered into a place we fear as much as we need.”
Just as Thoreau did, I’d like to weed out, pare down, live deliberately, be a resident philosopher. (Would the family miss me?) A life devoid of clutter sounds positively blissful, especially when there are no empty spaces on my calendar. But making this choice is so much more difficult in a culture fueled by sheer busyness and commercialism. There are few places, few wooded Waldens, where one can escape the incessant bombardment of to-do lists or product advertising.
Visiting the ârealâ Walden Pond in Concord for this first time this fall, I was amazed and disappointed to find the place overrun. Locals were strewn on its small beach. You couldn’t walk the path around the pond without rubbing shoulders with other curious sightseers; there wasn’t a spot left for solitary reflection.
If nothing else, my rendezvous with Thoreau got me thinking. What — and how much — do I really need? What price have I paid for modern technology and convenience? In which landfill will all my stuff end up?
And how would I fare if I were delivered into a place I fear as much as I need, as Delbanco put it? Could I survive in a one-room cabin with barely more than chair, a wooden table, a bowlful of raw vegetables, and my laptop? Honestly, I wish I could. – Cindy La Ferle
Cindy on June 21st, 2008
Yesterday I drove to a local printing press to speak to a Girl Scout troop on a field trip. I was one of several writers who’d been asked to talk to the girls about the writing life, to help fulfill their writing badge requirement. (I love kids and I’ll talk to them about anything.) I’ve spoken to several grade school classes about writing — often enough to know that at least one kid will wave a hand in the air and ask me to name my favorite assignment. Though I have lots of favorites, the time I interviewed Alan Gold, a premier “lion tamer” who was performing at the Shrine Circus, usually tops the list. This story tends to impress young kids more than, say, the time I interviewed Phil Donahue.
So, before the talk, I pulled out my yellowed copy of Gold’s story (published in 1985) and made 30 copies for the Girl Scouts. Re-reading the piece, which detailed how the animal trainer worked with “the big cats,” it suddenly hit me that there are some keen similarities between learning how to tame lions and learning how to deal with editors, agents, and publishers … and rejection letters.
Gold, who told me he enjoyed living on the edge, had been scratched, scarred, and mauled several times. Early in his career, for instance, he was “taken up in a tiger’s mouth.” The accident resulted in 300 stitches and confined him to a wheelchair for six months — but didn’t discourage his career plan.
“You get into this end of the business [working with lions] knowing that eventually you’re going to get hurt. But you realize what the risks are,” Gold said. “You have to be able to look at each cat and judge what its forte will be. If you try to teach an animal a trick that it’s not prone to do, it will take twice as much time to train it — and the animal won’t enjoy it.” Despite the risks, though, Gold said that his work was “a helluva rush.” Sort of like freelance writing. – Cindy La Ferle
Cindy on January 10th, 2008
“Self-respect is a matter of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.” – Joan Didion
“Is it unprofessional to write for free?“ is a question often asked in my writing workshops. And it’s tough one. Those of us who work from home — writers, accountants, and marketers included — often find it hard to establish boundaries between business and pleasure. Some of us are actually half serious when we joke about loving our work so much that we’d do it for free. But it’s all too easy to cheat ourselves out of a decent living if we’re not careful. Or if we don’t respect our worth.
Putting monetary value on freelance work is especially difficult for those in creative fields. In my writing workshops, for instance, I often meet new writers who’ve been encouraged to write for non-paying markets (or for ridiculously low rates) with the promise that gratis assignments help build portfolios. This logic often works because it is hard to get your work published if you haven’t already had something published. And there are hundreds of low-budget publications managed by editors who take full advantage of the fact.
Sadly, as every professional writer has learned, good content isn’t always fully valued by publishers. The lesson is simple: Don’t keep working for those people. A successful features writer points out that many of the freely distributed “new age” publications feature pieces on “attracting abundance and personal wealth” — yet typically expect their writers to provide copy for free. As the features writer puts it, “How ironic is that? If these publishers can afford to pay their printers, well, they could cough up a few face-saving bucks for their writers.”
The difference between “a professional” and a hard-working volunteer is often just a paycheck. If you’re just getting started in a freelance writing career, providing content for non-paying markets might be your only way to break in. In the early stages, that’s not a bad way to hone your skills or to see how the business works. But no matter how exciting it is to snag a byline or recognition of any kind, you must reach a point where you value your experience and talent, and charge an appropriate fee for it.
As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, nobody can take advantage of you without your permission. Whatever the work at hand, if you want to be treated like a professional, you must act like one. Expect to be paid what your work is worth. Nobody would dare ask an architect to design a house or a building for free. Nobody approaches a doctor and expects a thorough diagnosis without a bill. If you don’t value your time, talent, or expertise, who will? — Cindy La Ferle
P.S. Several writers left helpful comments on this topic. Please visit the comment section above, and feel free to add your own.
