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Poets Getting Day Jobs

by Paul Austin

Since I'm neither an academic or a poet, one could question my qualifications to speak to John Barr's idea that poets should "live broadly, write boldly." Unqualified? I didn't even know what they meant by "the academy" the first time I read the e-mail from Sara Pennington, the Southeast Review's editor, inviting me to contribute. "Sally," I yelled out to my wife, "they've got a poets academy somewhere, but they're making all the teachers get day jobs." I re-read the e-mail. "No, wait," I called out. "It's not a real, actual place." She looked up from her paperback, nodded, and went back to reading. She was fascinated, I could tell.

I don't know what classified ads the job-hunting academics might circle with those blue ballpoint pens they're always using, and I have little insight into "the academy." But I do know about getting jobs and quitting them. After I dropped out of college the first go-round, I worked for Pizza Hut, then Mayflower Van Lines. I drove nails, poured concrete, and picked up trash on the side of the road. The list of "real jobs" I've had is much longer than the list of my publications. Probably true for a lot of us.

I think the best job for a poet, or anyone else for that matter, would be as a firefighter. I did it for the City of High Point for five years. Yellow hat, red truck, blaring sirens and flashing lights. I kicked in doors, crawled into burning houses with a canvas hose, searching for the fire. On TV you always see flames dancing yellow and bright, but in real life the smoke's thick, you're nervous about screwing up, and the air-pack's face-piece is criss-crossed with fine scratches from some other dumbass wiping it with his gritty leather glove. You can't see, so you wipe your face-piece with your gritty leather glove and keep crawling around on the floor, hoping you don't screw up. Afterwards, you take a shower and wash your hair and it smells like smoke and you blow dark soot from your nose.

Riding a diesel truck towards a building that's on fire is fun. So is twirling the brass coupling of the supply line onto the steel threads of the hydrant, or dragging a canvas hose towards a house with flames busting through the roof. Sitting around the kitchen table at the fire-house was almost, but not quite, as enjoyable as fighting the fire. I listened to more stories than Homer did before he wrote that long poem about the guy who kept getting lost on his way home from work. Being a firefighter was a great job: I got to jump out of windows into nets, got to spray water from a deck gun that put out a thousand gallons a minute, and I got to listen to stories that had been polished for years. On top of all that, the job gave me more time to read than any job before or since.

I'm now a doctor in an emergency room. The pay is better but the hours are worse. The rotating shifts bounce me around the clock until my life becomes a sleep-deprived blur. It sounds okay to a medical student, but after you turn fifty, working from 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM four nights in a row gets harder and harder. I've had to develop very careful sleep and exercise habits. The schedule sucks, but the tradeoff is that I get days off during the week, so I can write while the kids are in school. Of course, every injury has a story, and every illness has a beginning, a middle, and end. So, as a prose writer, I'm in the cat-bird seat when it comes to getting good material. And in the course of a shift I touch people – I palpate their bellies and listen to hearts. I peer into their ears and eyes. The job can get stressful, but even that helps my writing. When I sit down at the word processor, I work with the same intensity and focus that I bring to the work in the ER.

Writers like to pretend that the words flow onto the page in a hot red stream from a vein they've open in their wrists. But we all know it's not like that. We blunder across a blank page like a fireman lost in smoke, hoping to find the fire. And we should thank god there are people in the academy who are willing to teach us. When I was a firefighter, we spent hours in the training center, practicing. And I spent years in medical school and residency, learning how to move people through the ER safely and quickly. I am grateful for the training officers, attending physicians, and academic writers who have taught me how to do these things I've loved. Day jobs for academics? I guess it's up to them. But what they're doing now, teaching people to write, is noble work and I'm glad we've got them doing it.

Paul Austin has worked in emergencies for thirty years, first as a firefighter, and now as a physician. His essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Ascent Magazine, and turnrow. One of his essays, "Tucker Put His Gun to His Head," was listed as a notable essay in The Best American Essays of 2006. He lives in Durham, NC.

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