Writing Group Thread: Creative Labor v. Work
How do you understand your writing practice in relation to other forms of work?
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I’m starting my class Labors of Love tonight, and I’m really looking forward to it. In this class, we read essays by Silvia Federici, a feminist scholar, activist, and historian who argues that capitalism has been intentionally constructed to divide and disempower us. Federici also co-organized the Wages for Housework movement (this profile is a good primer on her work and its relevance today). In my my writing class, we use Federici’s ideas as doors into questions about creative practice, housework, mothering, care work, reproductive labor, sexuality, gender, and how different forms of labor interact.
(I think there are one or two spots left in the class, so if you want to join us tonight, you should still be able to sign up here.)
As I’m getting ready for what is probably the final session of this class—I love teaching this class, but I have done a few sessions already and I’m looking forward developing some new ones—I am of course thinking about the art of labor and the labor of making art. So I thought I would ask all of you a question we always discuss in the Federici class from many different angles:
How do you understand your creative practice in relation to other forms of work? Is writing, for you, an antidote to the kinds of work you perform for pay? If you are paid for your writing, do you find that alters how you relate to or understand your artistic practice? Do you believe that writing or artistic practice is or can be sheilded from the complicated politics of labor in this country— or do you find yourself at times (or always?) keenly aware of how literary practice and publishing are governed by economics and the larger world of work?