“When do you have time to write”

I recently met with two women who are planning to write a book together. Like me, they are both pastors. Like me, they are both mothers. Like me, they want to write. They asked me, “how do you write?” which I took to mean “when do you write?” Women ask me this question often. Men do not. For women, finding time to write seems impossible and I agree.

This week I am on vacation, and I am spending some of those days in New York City. This is a recommendation of my therapist to whom I admitted that I spend the week when my children and spouse are visiting grandparents in Iowa cleaning. I hate clutter and during this week away I mercilessly rid the house of whatever has accumulated over the previous year. Last summer I painted base boards and caulked bathrooms.

I receive no joy from these tasks. I do them because I do not like to live in chaos and this calm week gives me free range over the house. No one asks me to find their missing shirt/computer cord/book/water bottle. There is one to drive to the skatepark/friend’s house/pool/practice/rehearsal.

I am here to force myself not to clean my house. I have somethings I want to write, a book that’s been growing in me that I vowed, during a writer’s workshop last December, I would complete this year. Half the year is gone, and the manuscript has not changed. Instead, I’ve written chapters for other people’s books, endorsements, sermons, and articles. These smaller projects take less time and require less than the work of sitting with the hundreds of pages in a book project.

This year I went as far as to investigate hiring a cleaner to clean my house, perhaps just once during this week I typically set to cleaning. The quote came back at $450. I realized that this was likely what a fair wage looked like, but not one I could afford. If I went lower, was I investing in someone’s desperation, bilking them to get a week of leisure? Was I ready to ask someone to clean my toilets so I could have space for creative labor? I couldn’t answer the questions, so I abandoned the idea.

What if you left? My therapist asked. And so I did, to the Mennonite guest house in Manhattan where there is no attic tempting me to unload its contents.

On the subway I listened to Terry Eagleton give a lecture called “where does culture come from?” I’ve recommended it on this substack before. I wanted to hear it this time in Eagleton’s own voice, especially this line, which was on my mind in my escape from housekeeping:

The only good reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you don’t like, is that you don’t like to work. For Oscar Wilde, who was closer in this respect to Marx than to Morris, communism was the condition in which we would lie around all day in various interesting postures of jouissance, dressed in loose crimson garments, reciting Homer to one another and sipping absinthe. And that was just the working day.

Eagleton’s essay is about the material conditions that create culture. He is a Marxist so the answer is labor. “You can’t have culture in the sense of galleries and museums and publishing houses,” he reminds us, “unless society has evolved to the point where it can produce an economic surplus.” An artist gets to make art because someone else (Monsanto) is feeding us.

Another development: we live in a world where art is a commodity, a shift from a time when gentry created salaried position for painters, jesters, musicians, sculptors. There are few writers today who make a living as a writer, even fewer sponsoring patrons. Amazon’s book ventures assured that our work is now available at rock bottom price. Marketing gave way to influencing and assured that virality would precede (and is required for) the kind of contracts that can afford a writer time to actually write. The rest of us think and write in the cracks of our labor in and out of the home.

It worked. I wrote while I was here, and one of the book sections I worked on is about the Diggers, the proto-communist movement that followed the English Revolution. Owners of the manors had recently developed a system of enclosure to shift common land rights to private land rights. During this period, over half the land in England was turned from common to private property through the consolidation of lots and acts of Parliament. Prior to this change, commoners farmed, fished, gathered fuel and water off the common land rather than entering into a tenant relationship with the owner. These were ancient land right claims, thousands of years old. The formed their own courts, governing by consensus of the community.

The landowners who held rights to the land grew unhappy with the arrangement. In reading about the Diggers, I can trace the early lines of capitalism in the arguments for enclosure. One of the primary objections to this arrangement from the lords of the manors was idleness. Commoners grew only what they needed and then “busied themselves with a dizzying calendar of saint’s days, solstices, and pagan cultural festivals.”[1] They worked roughly half the year – “the festival calendar discouraged excess production.”

The prior system ended and now we have capitalism. You work because your time is money. If you want to have leisure, you pay for it. If you want to write, you pay for it. My friend is a professor and she explained to me the process of “buying back” classes through grants to write her books. I had once thought that this was an expected part of the job – you produce writing on the clock. That seemed like the beauty of the system. Instead, I learned you can only meet the requirement if you do the additional work to pay the university to have someone else teach your classes. It was a dizzying discovery.

Someone I know recently sent me information about a grant that offers something like this to pastors. Here is a grant to study, to write, to learn, funds which can be applied to pay other people to preach your sermons, or to take what would otherwise be unpaid leave, to pay for childcare. I wondered if they would pay for housekeeping.

I appreciate the effort, but I know this isn’t compatible with church work as I know it where pastoral presence and conflict and community organizing blur the lines of work and person over and over again, often with egregious effect (although I can’t think of what can be done about it, or if I would want something done about it if I am honest with myself).

Today I am reading about Virginia Woolf in a book by Eula Bliss. Woolf once wrote, “how any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom.” Indeed. I learn that once when Woolf’s cook was in the hospital, she wrote nothing for two weeks. For centuries the world was organized along service: either you were a servant or you were served. Woolf, who is white and wealthy, managed to make it work. I don’t know if Woolf made a living through her writing, but I know it didn’t matter. She didn’t need to.

And then there is Zora Neale Hurston. I first read Their Eyes Were Watching God when I studied at a university in Kenya. The class was African American and Caribbean literature, and it was taught by a Fulbright Scholar. I wondered if Hurston could ever have imagined this scenario as she was dying of heart disease in St Lucie County Welfare Home in 1960.

Hurston was immensely accomplished: an anthropologist and writer, attended Howard University and graduated from Barnard. She was friends with Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. She taught at NC Central College and established the school of arts at Bethune-Cookman College. She was remarkable and vastly underpaid. Her largest royalty was $943.75. She spent her final years cleaning hotels in Florida. You either were a servant or you were served.

I am going home soon, and the house will be a mess. But there won’t be time for anything beyond the normal routine of herding children through chores and washing dishes while the other adult starts bedtime routine. I’ll have to forgo my hopes for more. Time is money and I’ve used up what I own.

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[1] https://globalcapitalism.history.ox.ac.uk/files/case26-enclosingtheenglishcommonspdf#:~:text=Before%20enclosure%2C%20common%20land%20was,as%20they%20pleased%20with%20it.