Gordon Square Review Hiring!

Gordon Square Review is hiring a paid Poetry Editor and a volunteer Social Media Editor. If you live in Northeast Ohio, you may apply by July 10.

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Paid $1,000 Internships with Literary Cleveland

Literary Cleveland is now accepting applications for two $1,000 internships for spring 2022.

Interns will have the opportunity to assist with literary arts programs and events, support Gordon Square Review literary journal, and develop their own project.

These internship opportunities are intended for members of historically underrepresented groups in the writing and publishing industry. Our goal is to provide skills training, career advancement opportunities, and support to these writers to help address the longstanding lack of diversity in the writing community.

Internships are 5-10 hours per week, and each intern will be compensated $1,000 for 10 weeks of work from February through April 2022. Most of the work will be done remotely via Zoom.
 
Application deadline: December 20.

Learn more and apply here.

What's the ideal day job for a poet?

In the Atlantic, Win Bassett interviews Amy Woolard, asking What's the ideal day job for a poet?  Well, she should be able to answer that: she's been a bartender, a restaurant manager, a teacher, and a lawyer.
"I think whenever you have to perform a couple of different identities within your life, each is affected by the other in some way. My job provides a nice counter-balance to the anything-goes world of poems—it’s still a persuasion-based job, but definitely in a rational, intellectual, responsible, real-world sort of way. This may sound terrible, but in my day job, I have to be a good person—and don’t get me wrong: I want to be and like being a good person, but poems give me a path to wrestle with the terrifying, difficult, absurd, imperfect, uncontrollable parts of the world in a much different but incredibly important way."

Some other people addressing the question:

• The Millions: Working the Double Shift:

"Most novelists have day jobs, even the published ones whose books get good reviews. Writing is my second career, and one of the very few things that it has in common with my first career—contemporary dance—is the necessity of maintaining secondary employment."

• Ploughshares: Writers and their Day Jobs:

"Enter the day job. For some, this is a job teaching writing, but for others it can range from office work to running hydration stations for runners training for marathons. As Chekhov wrote 'Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other.'"

• Try to be anything else
• Day Jobs of the Poets
• What's your Day Job?

Try to be Anything Else

First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age--say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire... 
  -- How to Become a Writer -- Lorrie Moore



Holden’s History of the United States
R.I.P.  J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) & Howard Zinn (1922–2010)

What's Your Day Job?

On NPR, David Orr points out that, since (mostly) poetry doesn't pay the bills, poets have day jobs. 

"No man but a blockhead," Samuel Johnson famously observed, "ever wrote, except for money." This is tough news for poets, since the writing they do is often less immediately profitable than a second-grader's math homework (the kid gets a cookie or a hug; the poet gets a rejection letter from The Kenyon Review). Poetry itself is tremendously valuable, of course, but that value is often realized many years after a poem's composition, and sometimes long after the end of its author's life.
In the meantime, everyone has to eat. So unless you win the lottery, being a poet means finding a job that can support the writing of poems.

From banker (T.S. Eliot) to undertaker (Thomas Lynch), working at a job has in one way or another influenced their poetry, for some quite obviously, and for others more subtly.

• David Orr, "From Dissections To Depositions, Poets' Second Jobs."

"Day Jobs of the Poets"
from Incidental Comics:
words and pictures by
Grant Snider