The media/PR world of Vancouver can be a very small place. Recently I attended the opening event at Edible Canada, the hot new place on Granville Island. It’s a pretty cool concept with all Canadian food products, a restaurant/bar and demo kitchen where guests will be able to eat a five-course meal while learning and interacting with the chefs making it.
I saw most of the same travel writers that I saw at the event last week and the ones I’ll probably see next week at whatever opening will be happening then. I quite like meeting all the usual suspects because it’s a great way to catch up while checking out all the great new venues in Vancouver.
But this time I saw a very well-established travel writer who doesn’t usually attend these things. I quite love this guy. We spent the first little bit commiserating with another writer about the crappy paying markets and the negligible return of the writing business. But then the senior writer asked me the same questions we all tend to ask each other, “Where have you been?” and “Where are you off to next?”
I told him that I was just back from Montana but that had been my first trip since December. “What’s going on?” he said. So I explained that I’d taken a bit of a break from travel writing to work on a novel.
He raised an exaggerated eyebrow, “What the hell? You decided to leave the lucrative world of travel writing to write a novel? Are you nuts? What’s next? Poetry?”
We had a good laugh. Clearly writing doesn’t bring home the bacon.
Why would anyone keep doing something that shows no real return? I know I’ve written about this conundrum before but I think it’s because I’m continually trying to wrap my head around my motivation. And I come back to the same answer each time.
Maybe it’s a bit like whistling in the dark or arranging flowers in a vase or any other death-defying artistic endeavor. It is the act of creation; bringing something into being that previously did not exist. None of it is permanent, but for those moments, while we’re arranging and creating and trying to make something beautiful, we are affirming life.
Perhaps too, with every act of creation, we create ourselves anew.
Of course, it would be nice to get paid for it as well…
But meanwhile, I think I just might go write a poem.
Hey Laurie,
I read recently that what we admire in others is the very thing we ourselves possess…in this case, I’m talking about ‘voice’, because boy-oh-boy you’ve got it in spades…in a very very good way.
So let’s keep shouting with our voices and letting ourselves be heard! Wahoo!
That venue on Granville Island sounds wonderful. What a great idea.
You have inspired me to do a lot more writing, and the more I write, the more I love my business, my clients, my life on the Sunshine Coast. I find myself wishing I had written a journal every day, so many things I was sure i would remember forever are tumbling back in the wake of my life in a mishmash of half-recalled vignettes or the faintest of mind-sketches.
I also appreciate your ‘voice’. Sometimes I find myself reading something when I haven’t checked out the source or the author, and I think, ‘that sounds so much like Colleen’. And true enough, it is Colleen. I’ve come to depend on your ever evolving tableau of stories – the mix of daily reflection, the busy life of a writer (as poorly paying as it is it’s nonetheless busy), the adventures and travels.
Oh, and as a poet, I think you SHOULD go write a poem now.
All of us who write struggle with that conundrum. But as you say, there is something intrinsically rewarding about creating, so we keep doing it and look for our monetary necessities somewhere else.
You’re right Becca. I know I am very fortunate that I don’t have to rely on my writing income to live…it would be a pretty grim existence if that was the case 🙂