“So, do you want to be a teacher?”
13/11/2022
This question has literally haunted me for years. Honestly, I wake up at night in a cold sweat, thinking about teaching 11-year-olds the difference between ‘their’, ‘they’re’ and ‘there’. If you are reading this as an English teacher, I applaud you, because I’d be out of there after a week because I’d made a pre-pubescent child cry.
When I left school to study English, and then decided to go on and study an MA in Poetry, I had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life; I just liked sitting in the library looking mysterious with my Waterstones' tote bag and a dog-eared copy of The Bell Jar.
This all changed when I took a module on Contemporary Literature, as in, literature written with the world we live in in mind, literature that I could fully relate to and that changed the way I think about things. For me, this was a pivotal moment when I became fully aware of the power writing can actually have.
That's great... but what's next? I finally felt like I had found something that I cared about (enough to go to every 9am lecture), but, I also had to accept that I was not choosing an easy career path.
Throughout my MA I worked with a lot of inspirational people, people who had made real waves in the poetry world and it was great to have them read my work and help me hone my craft enough that I had the confidence to start looking into having my work published. Trust me, nothing tests your confidence in your own writing more than having a room of people dissect your deeply personal poetry. During this year, I really felt like I had developed my own way of thinking critically about everything and was able to use my work to find universality in the specific, which is, for me, what poetry is all about. I had poetry published by my university’s lit mag, and then by an indie online newspaper in Belfast, and I kept chipping away like this until I was published by a LGBTQIA+ poetry series that I'd admired the whole time I’d been writing.
This was a massive moment for me in my creative trajectory, and something I was so proud of. But, I was also wholly aware that anybody who isn’t a poet (or my poor girlfriend who has to listen to me 24/7) wouldn’t give two sh*ts. The poetry world is great, but it's not easy to make a living out of; and I like buying things. I had to get into writing that was palatable for the everyday reader, and I had to learn to write in a way that I could forge a career out of.
I read a lot of blogs and tips on how to work LinkedIn, and I built this portfolio and started writing copy that would get me where I wanted to be, with a full-time career in writing. (Unless you don't like what you see, then I didn't write it, it was my friend.)
Spoiler Alert: I’m not quite there yet. But… I do have a freelance writing job where I write for around 6 clients every day and get feedback about my work very frequently, which is a great way to test out something new, and immediately get very honest feedback. The gig is a little out-there, and something that always leaves people saying, “you write for what?!?” And I also am working two jobs whilst trying to get into full-time writing. But honestly, I couldn’t be happier, because I can tell people that I’m a writer and feel proud of my work (and I didn’t ever have to teach GCSE students what a simile is.)