{"id":84214,"date":"2015-03-30T17:32:10","date_gmt":"2015-03-30T21:32:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=84214"},"modified":"2015-03-30T17:32:10","modified_gmt":"2015-03-30T21:32:10","slug":"labors-of-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/30\/labors-of-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Labors of Love"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"jessa\"<\/a>

Jessamyn West<\/p><\/div>\n

To love classic children\u2019s books is to love heroines with literary ambitions. Harriet the Spy, Betsy Ray, Anne Shirley, Jo March\u2014so many beloved characters wanted to be writers at a time when their sex and circumstances made that hope seem remote and exciting. Not incidentally, many of these characters were based on their authors.<\/p>\n

In her 1977 Art of Fiction interview<\/a>, Jessamyn West\u2014who would go on to write Cress Delahanty<\/em>, featuring a young woman who dreams of writing\u2014recalls that her parents did not support her career choice: <\/p>\n

\n

It isn\u2019t the same as the young person who wants to play the piano, dance, or who is an obvious mimic. That child is seen to have particular talent, and he is encouraged, given lessons. But the poor kid who likes to read and write needs a vein of iron in him to keep at it.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The writing life today isn\u2019t generally perceived as the exotic unknown that West describes here\u2014when did it change? Granted, there are many American parents who want more security, more familiarity for their children than a professional writing career can provide. But for West, a writer is a downright foreign specimen:<\/p>\n

\n

I\u2019d never seen a living writer. I\u2019d never\u00a0met<\/em>\u00a0anyone who had seen a living writer. I thought that it was so God-given, so enormously strange and peculiar a thing that was visited upon a writer, that I surely couldn\u2019t be one of those persons.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Even if someone has never met a writer today, a lot of people have seen Carrie Bradshaw or even Jessica Fletcher, making good and seemingly effortless livings with no social cost whatsoever. Indeed, Sex and the City<\/em> in particular made writing an aspirational <\/em>career; even if one\u2019s dreams aren\u2019t colored by visions of shoes and real estate, one might find it easier to pursue a writer\u2019s existence than in ages past. Hannah Horvath\u2019s parents may be emblematic of a certain privileged milieu\u2019s encouragement of all artistic aspiration, but even outside the universe of Girls<\/em>\u2014even for those without support\u2014the aspiration no longer feels like an act of rash presumption. Maybe social media helps, in that it confers visibility.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting to imagine how many people were too timid or self-defeating ever to share their work, or how many never saw a writing career in progress, never had models: to imagine how much great writing never got done, or was never shared. Maybe what we have left is only the work of the toughest and the boldest\u2014those with West\u2019s vein of iron.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the interview, West shares some of her juvenilia: here\u2019s one of the many potential plots she recorded in a notebook as a young teenager.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

A hobo walking along a road in Autumn. The air is crisp. Hobos don\u2019t usually look happy. This one does. He is walking alone dreaming. He is going back to his only daughter. He has been away for a long time. He wonders if she is grown up now. It is almost evening when he reaches the town. A town of little homes. Their lights come on. He goes to the city directory and he casually asks about a girl named, blank, blank, blank. (I hadn\u2019t thought of a name yet.) He asks if they will tell him where she can be found. The hobo is in a hurry to find her now. It is now beginning to get even a little chill. The lights of the girl\u2019s house are all lit up. The hobo decides he had better look in the window. He does. He sees people and he realizes that his daughter is about to be married. This is a home of wealthy people. Then he looks at himself. He realizes that he is ill kempt, dirty, ill to look upon. The hobo stays to see his daughter come down the stairs. He thinks she would be ashamed to have a hobo enter and claim to be her father. So for her own good, before someone might recognize him (he has anticipated seeing her for years), with a muttered prayer for her he stumbles out into the gathering mist.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(She says she marked this one \u201cfair.\u201d)<\/p>\n

But even then, she tells the interviewer, \u201cI never thought of making money from writing. It never occurred to me.\u201d And later, \u201cI never saved a letter from a boyfriend under my pillow, but the first letter from an editor I kept there so I could wake up in the night to read it over again.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To love classic children\u2019s books is to love heroines with literary ambitions. Harriet the Spy, Betsy Ray, Anne Shirley, Jo March\u2014so many beloved characters wanted to be writers at a time when their sex and circumstances made that hope seem remote and exciting. Not incidentally, many of these characters were based on their authors. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[1016,17616,17614,17613,17615,1132,17612,16641,36,75],"class_list":["post-84214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-art-of-fiction","tag-careers","tag-carrie-bradshaw","tag-cress-delahanty","tag-hannah-horvath","tag-interviews","tag-jessamyn-west","tag-professionalism","tag-women","tag-writing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDemystifying Writing as a Career Choice<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein on Jessamyn West, who professed a curiosity about writing as a profession\u2014her sense of mystery might be impossible today.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/30\/labors-of-love\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Labors of Love by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 30, 2015 \u2013 To love classic children\u2019s books is to love heroines with literary ambitions. 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