And Also, I Write
The Fading Tradition of Writing as an Avocation

By Michael Depp

Given literature’s long history, it’s easy to forget that the professional writer – the full-time man or woman of letters ­– is a relatively recent development. Until the late 19th century and through the 20th, one’s writing usually emerged out of other activities, making that person a writer, de facto, though often as not he or she had some other more lucrative profession paying the bills and taking precedence – physician, insurance executive or sea captain, for instance.

American literature was no exception to this international dynamic. Look back to our earliest canonized writers and you will find them entrenched in other identities – poet Anne Bradstreet was a colonist, wife and mother of eight; William Bradford, a Pilgrim governor; Jonathan Edwards, a Calvinist preacher and systemic philosopher.

What began to change things was the emergence of the popular magazine in the marketplace by the late 19th century which, owing to more lucrative compensation for the written word, finally enabled some more successful writers to step away from their other ventures and professions to concentrate, in full, on their writing. Whereas writers like Edgar Allen Poe had tried, and failed, to earn a living in this fashion prior to the Civil War, a stronger magazine market thereafter enabled others, among them William Dean Howells, to thrive.

The emergence of the nation’s first creative writing programs in the early 20th century changed the writing-as-avocation tradition even further. For the first time, students began to train exclusively to become professionals at their craft. Many might still need to find other sustaining professions (often a related one in the teaching of writing), but that would be thought of as a temporary measure, a step to pass until they could reach their ultimate, and now feasible, ambition: to live off their writing.

Thus the 20th century saw a dwindling of those for whom writing was not a principal occupation. Though many could still claim the distinction – Herman Melville, Gertrude Stein, Joseph Conrad, William Carlos Williams and Walker Percy to count a few – they were becoming outnumbered, increasingly surrounded after World War II by those who could count themselves exclusively as writers.

For some who’ve been writing since then, this is a problem. Normal Mailer (who trained as an aeronautical engineer at Harvard and followed his WWII Army stint to become a successful novelist in 1948) recently lamented in the New Yorker that “as a matter to make one wistful, not one major American athlete, politician, engineer, trade-union official, surgeon, airline pilot, chess master, call girl, sea captain, bureaucrat, mafioso, pimp, recidivist, physicist, rabbi, movie star, clergyman, priest or nun has emerged as a major novelist since the Second World War.”

Jonathan Franzen had a variation on this complaint in his now-famous Harper’s essay on the decline of American fiction. Striking out at fiction writers “who take refuge in university creative-writing programs,” he laments the typical contemporary small literary magazine which “reliably contains variations on three generic short stories: ‘My Interesting Childhood,’ ‘My Interesting Life in a College Town,’ and ‘My Interesting Year Abroad.’”

Yet there are still those who write as a secondary occupation, those another profession distantly removed from their craft. Discounting the many doctors and lawyers who write thrillers set in their respective fields (who are not small in number), this small, eclectic and thriving breed now reflects an anomalous sensibility in the writing world: They have more than one professional perspective. Invariably, that has had some bearing on their writing from the discipline of their routine to their subject matter and the very texture of their work. And in a literary world crowded with talent, the sensibilities engendered by avocation may be a crucial factor in setting their work apart.

One the most well-known members of this breed today is Ethan Canin, a renowned novelist and short story writer who also happens to be a Harvard-trained physician with a specialty in internal medicine. Canin doesn’t practice medicine anymore – he left it as soon as his fiction took off – but he says the impact of his training resonates still.

“I think it made me less interested in trying to be new and to do something that’s never been done before and more interested in the important moments of a life,” he says. ‘I was working around decay, death and birth, and when you’re around that all of the time that seems like enough of a subject.”

Canin actually had duofold training. He took an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa’s Writing Workshop in the early-1980s and had published a few stories but was discouraged for want of making any money from them so he applied to medical school. “For me, medicine in a way was a failure of imagination,” he says. “I couldn’t think of what else to do, and I had always been good in science, so I panicked.”

He still found a way to write in med school by skipping lectures, saving the time by reading the better-written textbooks. “Writing then became something I wasn’t supposed to be doing which made it much more attractive and seductive,” he says. The Emperor of the Air, a collection of short stories, came out while he was still a resident in the late 80s, and in 1995 he left medicine permanently to write his second novel, For Kings and Planets.

Looking back on his brief career as a physician, he sees it as an “elaborate life safety net.” But he also says its impact helped to prioritize and focus his fiction writing. “To see the raggedness of the human species at its edges…” he says, “that’s a real privilege.”

Dean Paschal, an emergency room physician whose first collection of short stories, By the Light of the Jukebox, was published last year, agrees that his medical experience has impacted his writing consciousness. In fact, he calculated it to be so. Paschal had considered going to medical school since high school, but dropped out of college in his freshman year and went to live in a Memphis boardinghouse. He didn’t want to spend this sabbatical idly – rather, he took it as an exercise in self-discipline to prepare him for his later studies. An avid reader, he started writing that year because it was the thing he least liked to do at the time, yet the enterprise soon rose in his estimation.

“Very quickly that was what I became most serious about in life,” he says, having had his college years again interrupted by the draft and three years in the Navy. “So when I went back to college with the idea of going to medical school, the whole emphasis on medicine was different. I was going to do it to become a better writer.” He has since practiced for more than 15 years, writing during the entirety.

For Paschal, whose fiction is marked by a sometimes obsessive attention to mechanical details, his scientific training is always emerging in his prose (he also holds a degree in electronic engineering which he picked up in 1971). “I use it sometimes thematically and sometimes in the way that writers would classically use religion as a symbolic thing with some sort of deep keel to the story,” he says. He also appreciates that fiction, unlike science, is less stringent about accuracy. “A lot of times you can use something that has a scientific atmosphere,” he says, “but within the world of fiction it doesn’t have to be exactly right.”

Paschal rarely engages his ER experience head on in fiction, though it does form the basis for the most bracing story in the Jukebox collection, “Genesis,” which concerns an ER doctor treating a dying junkie who he’s hoping will die (he’s seen the patient under similar circumstances many times before). It would be hard to imagine this story coming from a writer without some firsthand experience, and Paschal says it has so far been the only one he has been compelled to write concerning his profession directly.

“I feel that physicians suffer from too much good press,” he says. “It’s an artificial view of the profession, and what most interests me about medicine is that often you will be upset or angry at a patient, and yet you’re still doing everything exactly correctly.”

And if he does pick up the story of a physician again, he feels his experience lends him another advantage – he won’t have to interview other doctors to get a sense of the profession, a practice he notes other writers often do to the detriment of veracity. “They don’t make so many factual errors, but they make a lot of errors of emphasis and they get the atmosphere wrong quite consistently,” he says.

Getting the atmosphere and the language right is critical to Anthony Bourdain, a chef turned essayist and crime novelist best known for his brutally frank behind-the-scenes accounts in Kitchen Confidential: Stories from the Culinary Underbelly. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America whose only writing training came from a five-week course with Gordon Lish, Bourdain says his background has served his authenticity as a writer well.

“This is the way I talk in the kitchen, and this is very easy, comfortable terrain for me,” he says. “I’m just part off an oral tradition going back hundreds of years with cooks standing around bullshitting and talking. I just started writing them down.’

After his first two crime novels were published to little reception, Bourdain struck an immediate chord with restaurant-going readers and cooks alike with the publication of his essay “From Our Kitchen to Your Table” in the New Yorker. Three books later, he still hesitates to classify himself as a writer, disdainful as he is about many of its trappings.

“After 28 years in a restaurant, I see the world through a cook’s eyes,” he says. “I know what real work is, so I don’t spend a lot of time agonizing over sentences or whining about my fate or griping about the rigors of a book tour.”

Not that he is so flippant about writing itself. Bourdain says his years in the kitchen lent him an enormous sense of discipline that has carried over to his writing life. He worked 17-hour days when writing Kitchen Confidential, bouncing between his desk and the kitchen of his New York brasserie.

“I’d wake up in the morning about five o’clock, light a cigarette, and I didn’t give myself any time to think of all the reasons why I shouldn’t work,” he says. “I’d start writing for as long as I could, and if I hit a wall, I didn’t struggle with it. I just went to work, and for the rest of the day I’d be solving the problem in the back of my head.”

On the contrary, Pulitzer Prize winning memoirist Frank McCourt looks back on his career as a high school teacher as an impediment to his development as a writer, at least in one sense. The tremendous volume of paperwork and grading, the long hours and the emotionally exhausting task of keeping teenagers engaged all took their toll. “I certainly didn’t have the time to write or the energy after a day of teenagers,” he says. “When you’re going into the classroom and facing those kids every day, your problem is keeping them in their seats.”

Yet the experience was also vital to his sensibility and training as a writer. “It wasn’t until I retired from teaching that I began to realize how much I’d learned,” he says. As he matured as a teacher, his development as a writer followed more slowly behind. “I didn’t have the ability or the knowledge that I should be able to think for myself,” he says. “That came slowly. That’s what I was teaching the kids and I should’ve been telling myself. I’m such a slow learner it appalls me.”

Teaching additionally helped him as a writer by developing his acumen as a reader. “If you read, as I did, millions of adolescent words week after week and year after year, you develop a kind of critical sensibility that has to include understanding, tolerance and compassion,” he says.

McCourt spent his teaching years on the periphery of the writing world in New York, epitomized by his time spent at the Lion’s Head Bar, a popular gathering place for writers and his own personal version of Gatsby’s green light. As he recounts in his second volume of memoirs, ‘Tis, he would frequently stare with longing and jealousy at the bar’s wall lined with the signed book jackets of its patrons. But he thinks the long deferral of his writing success was ultimately good for him.

“If it had happened to me too early, I don’t think I had the maturity to have been able to handle it,” he says.

Now still powered by the momentum and validation he received from Angela’s Ashes, McCourt’s next project will deal more explicitly with his profession of 30 years. Teacher Man, the third memoir he is writing, reveals an abiding interest in teaching as a subject matter. The book is especially important to him because he feels teaching is so often misrepresented in literature, most popularly in works like Goodbye, Mr. Chips and To Sir With Love. “Nobody so far has got it right in the classroom,” he says, aiming to rectify it with the heft of his own professional experience.

An even more misunderstood profession, undoubtedly, is funeral directing. But Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade and four other volumes, says his long experience in that career has, strangely enough, helped to win a broad audience for his essays and poems. “Oddity and celebrity are near enough in this culture that it gives me an entrance to a readership that other people mainly don’t have,” he says.

Lynch is a second-generation undertaker whose prose and poetry draw heavily from his day job. Therefore, he brings a level of experience to the subjects of mortality, loss and grieving that few of his contemporaries can match.

“I think just dealing with people when there has been a death in the family is a resource that brings to mind curiosities and questions, dilemmas of understanding and faith that wouldn’t come to mind if I were selling Buicks,” he says. “For me, it’s always been like being a witness to humanity in a way that I feel very fortunate about.”

Lynch’s two careers have had a kind of symbiotic relationship. Funeral directing has lent inexhaustible subject material and experience to his writing, while writing about undertaking has had its own benefits. “Writing maybe keeps it alive for me in a way that it doesn’t for other people,” he says, observing that it has kept him from burnout and worse fates. “I really think that it’s just a matter of staying sane.”

He also acknowledges that funeral directing has spoken to his structural sensibility as a writer, particularly in his poetry. “The emphasis in poetry is to get as much out of as little as possible, which is basically the idea of all ritual and ceremony,” he says. “I do see a connection between arranging funerals and making poems in the sense that you are determined to follow a certain economy.”

As they look at the droves of writers emerging from MFA programs now, both Lynch and McCourt acknowledge a minor apprehension. For Lynch, it’s that the graduates might succumb to a tendency for literary karaoke: “Having read that, I can do that or do it better.” McCourt sounds a similar caution: “It’s like television actors. Their only experience is television, so they all have the same gestures, the same mannerisms.”

But that said, neither, indeed any, of these writers feel a sense of crisis about it. They may be the endangered practitioners of writing as an avocation, but they look upon that status with little worry, only with a kind of abiding gratitude for how one profession has ineluctably helped to enrich the other.