I was reading a personal essay by a writer with her debut about to drop. She’d always dreamed of a purely literary life as a college professor, perhaps, who wrote in the evenings and weekends, during the breaks between terms. It was the lifestyle she thought she wanted. Instead, she had worked during recent years in a grocery store. She didn’t mind the work and interacted daily with dozens of other people. When she clocked out of work, she moved straight on to the writing and finished her memoir.

She still envied friends and fellow MFA graduates with work teaching at universities and colleges. Then she noted that they were badly paid, poorly treated, worked for hours past their “workday” and often between jobs. They struggled to find time and energy to write.

John Gardner specifically warned creative writers against writing-adjacent occupations such as education. Teaching writing, he asserted, drew from the same pool of energy and creativity that our writing draws from. I was teaching English in a public high school when I first read that, and my workdays began before 8am and didn’t end until after that hour at night. Weekends too were busy with planning, reading, and grading essays. I read; I wrote, but it was a squeeze. I completed my MFA at Pacific University while still teaching full time. How did I do that? It had taken me years to train myself to write and teach simultaneously, and I do not recommend that life to anyone. Even when I was only teaching college classes as an adjunct, I battled for energy.

My husband was a grocer for many years, but anthropology remains his private passion. [Earned Honors and Phi Beta Kappa with his 1974 BA in Anthro from the U-Dub. He has shelves of books on philosophy, the Romani, Native cultures, a dictionary for a language he once spoke almost fluently when there were hardly any native-speakers left in the world. Now it’s taught in public schools.] In the years that he worked hourly, I envied how he could come home and be done, just done for the day. Once he entered management his beginning-and-ending was lost. During those years I did everything at home; when he retired he promptly took over more than half that work.

Make no mistake, keeping house and raising children, caring for aging relatives and being an active citizen is work. Good work, but work.

Writers work and most have had “day jobs.” They might teach or write journalism, or for nonprofits or a corporation. I suspect those writers are as torn as I was. Think of the many more poets and novelists and visual artists who worked in shipping or as doctors or postal clerks, the ones who sold insurance or did office work, the many who had spouses who supported them. [I was advised early on to marry an income.] Don’t forget those [women] who supported their spouses while also struggling with their own writing, the women and children actually blamed for getting in the way of the husbands’ creative life. [Where did those children come from? Remind me how that works.] Writing is creatively exhausting work. You probably have already guessed what that writer I mention above suspects: she’d be wise to continue working a 9-5 in order to have time and energy left over for writing.

When I am writing, the words absorb me entirely. National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo or just NaNo is gone now) used to suggest writers have a playlist, but I find I disengage from music, even from most other writing, when I am in the throes of creation. [Toni Morrison was asked in an interview what music she listened to while writing Jazz. She paused, looking confused, and said she didn’t ever listen to music while writing. That was reassuring to me.] I was a confirmed 8-hours-of-sleep person until I began my MFA program, when necessity required an extra hour. I wish, now, I could have that hour of nightly sleep. I write in a rush, even now that there doesn’t need to rush. I have no other work waiting for my attention. Retirement should have altered my habits, opened me to a regular schedule to eight hours sleep and taking my time. It hasn’t.

As a runner, I have two paces: race and sprint. I should have two more: steady state and conversation pace. As a writer, I sprint.

I have worked on only one novel since I retired from teaching. I feel it is original, suggestive of connection to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and Ursula K Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, but in many ways unlike either of those novels. Mine is a post-apocalyptic novel, but the goal in post-apocalyptic novels is to recover what has been lost, a seeking of freedom and safety and justice as defined by the old world. In Herland, the all-female society is eager to reintroduce men. Le Guin, with her anthropological connections, created a feminist society where men did not dominate. I went seeking something else.

I found the imagined experiences of those women, first finding themselves alone and then birthing asexually. Without men or any threat beyond carelessness, the imperative of competition is gone. Absolutely. None of them recreate the world they were born to. Why should they? No one is competing for mates or food or opportunity or career advancement or anything else. “Winning” is not a concept their Daughters understand. Strength is measured by usefulness, compassion, cooperation, and collaboration. Everyone is valued. No one is set aside.

Early readers objected to the characters’ birthing not as “unprovoked” but as “non-consensual.” When I first heard that concern about non-consensual pregnancy, I laughed. Apparently they were offended. Whoops. Perhaps it is my old age. Perhaps it is their youth? Most pregnancies in the United States are not planned, which is a sad truth. Many pregnancies, including those that are not brought to term, are actually unwelcome, unwanted. But my disrespectful response of laughter offended, though it might be grounded on broader understanding of choice and choosing. Was my birth consensual? My periods? Where I was born? The culture that defines me? Menopause? Illness? My eventual, not-so-very-distant dying? I do what I can. I had and have no choice about many things. The notion that I have control over my own life, that we all have control over, is one of the comforting notions I see differently as I age.

Changing what I cannot accept.

I composed my story deliberately in a way that challenged me and the world that I did not choose and which has often failed to choose me. My characters are from Pakistan and Brazil, Wales and Canada, Korea and Peru, the U.S. and Nigeria, China and Liberia. Editors suggested my new daughters should display anger or jealousy, that one of the surviving should abort her unplanned pregnancy, that the only white character should have a larger role, and that the racism experienced by a Black American was unrealistic.

I was given a great deal of good advice too.

When clicking boxes to define the genre of my work, I dither when “speculative” is not on offer. I don’t submit to agents who list “chick lit” as one of their chosen genres. I hesitate over those who list “women’s fiction” because I’m not sure what that means. I look for “literary” and “science fiction” and “fantasy” but not “horror.” I look for people interested in pushing boundaries, feminism, and multi-cultural perspectives.

On good authority, my novel is not science fiction. It certainly isn’t what most people would label fantasy. I am uncomfortable with the label “speculative fiction” but have nothing better. I have called it “Utopian” though that seems too obvious. And despite the urgency of these women finding themselves alone on an Earth denuded of all life with a spine—despite a very real struggle with loneliness and survival—I might not have much of a plot. [And that is a problem.] I am submitting to agents without success and to small presses awash in fine manuscripts; I have accepted that my book may have no place—no, that’s a lie. I don’t accept that. I give it another year before I self-publish.

So while I wait for responses, while I let the manuscript of my novel sit for a time before rereading and revising yet again, I try to be a good literary citizen. I volunteer and serve on panels. I write reviews of others’ books. I write short stories. I consider what counts as AI—where to draw the line between Spellchecker and asking a computer to write my entire story? I read. I post here and elsewhere.

I knot silk cord between pearl beads I’ve kept since the last century.

I wait for the next story to present itself, probably as a question.