Writers have all kinds of ways to measure success. We count it in minutes at our computers, in pages revised. We count it in publishing credits and books sold, in the rent paid, whether through those book sales or some other job that allows us the time and emotional space to write. None of these metrics of success are easy to achieve, but the path toward some is clearer than others. It’s easy to understand the process of committing to a daily practice or sharing your work with a critique group. The process of querying agents, submitting work to literary magazines, or getting paid as a freelance writer is not so simple.
Barriers to Accessing Career Support
Liz Eslinger is the executive director of Write Around Portland, an organization that facilitates writing workshops in social service settings. She describes publishing as a wall writers in her community need to break through. “The onus is really on the individual writer to do a lot of the work. And if that’s the case, for people who already experience barriers, it’s that much more challenging for them to take on the additional burden and labor that it takes to break into a world where you don’t have connections and you don’t have the keys to get to that inner circle.”
Our conversation with Liz is part of a six-month community engagement project funded by the Regional Arts and Culture Council. We’re learning from writers, publishers, teachers, and staff at literary organizations in the Portland-metro area about the needs of writers and barriers to accessing career support including a lack of transportation, inaccessible venues, and cost.
The Importance of Identity
Writers have also spoken to the importance of accessing support from within a literary community that reflects their identities, backgrounds, experiences, and writing pursuits. “When I first tried to get into the writing community in Portland, I did not fit. I did not belong. I didn’t see anybody who looked like me,” says Domi Shoemaker, writer, editor, and co-founder of Corporeal Writing. Similarly, author Neil Cochrane describes his struggle to find a community of queer writers working within his genre.
We are continuing to benefit from the generosity and wisdom of writers in our community who have joined Elisa and me in conversations over the course of the past couple of months, offering their insights into the types of questions about career development they hear most frequently and the approaches to programming that may best meet our community’s needs.
These conversations have revealed the extent to which writers seek informal career support in spaces where they are already working on craft, complicating our thinking about how or whether to separate these types of professional development. Is it easier for people to ask their career-related questions of the writers they’ve come to know and trust by writing alongside them? If we take career support out of the context of these relationships, how can we create spaces that engender the feelings of safety and trust necessary for writers to ask for the information they really need?
Our work engaging with and learning from writers within our community has just begun. Next month, we’ll begin distributing an online survey that asks writers to share their experiences and insights around career development. We hope to better understand the community’s areas of expertise, their needs and questions around publishing and promoting their work, and their existing barriers to accessing career support.