This Week in Reading
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth is Kevin Wilson’s first book, a collection of surreal, funny short stories. In the titular story, a group of friends begin digging a hole after graduating from college with degrees in things like Gender Studies and Canadian History and Morse Code. They start digging a hole and then they keep digging, deeper and deeper and then sideways, a city of tunnels beneath the city they grew up in. When the protagonist’s mom passes bags of snacks down to them, they wear sunglasses— the light from above blinding their eyes. They sleep in sleeping bags under the earth, finding jars of coins and time capsules long past their expiration date. We put things in the ground for safekeeping, but also for forgetting—is there anything safer than forgetting? The inoculation of lost memory.
“Amy took a big handful of dirt and held it close to her face, took deep breaths of it. “It smells like a museum,” she said, “like something from the past.”
When archeologists or geologists dig into the earth they are digging for history, digging to find evidence of the past. When these college graduates are digging into the earth, they are digging towards something, towards a tunnel that will be revealed with the edge of their shovel. Digging gives them a future, but it also gives them the present, a way of passing days, weeks, months. They are digging a tunnel towards the center of the earth because what else would they do.
I got my current job right when I moved to LA at the end of 2016. I was a year and a half out of school, coming off a series of seasonal jobs: a gallery in a gated community in western New York, a lesbian sheep farm in rural Vermont, a sushi restaurant in Seattle, a Girl Scout camp in Alaska. I had an interdisciplinary degree in History and Art (but not Art History! I would chirp each time I moved to a new place and introduced myself to a new person.)
I had interviewed to be a truck driver for an art handling company. I didn’t get the job, primarily due to my absolute lack of truck driving experience, but they had a position opening up in the crate shop and my resume said I had four years of woodshop experience. This was, at best, a technicality—a campus job monitoring the deserted art department woodshop that was mainly appealing for the hefty ring of keys that came with the position. I mostly used the table saw as a surface to do my calculus problem sets on, and occasionally yelled at a freshman to take their earbuds out while using power tools. This apparently was enough to leverage a full time job building wooden crates.
I clock in at 8:45 and clock out at 5. Everyday, I build a crate. They are different sizes and shapes, different arrangements of different kinds of foam. It’s a job, not a career. I didn’t want a career; I already had one of those, albeit not one that supported me financially. My career was art, and later— writing: cutting ovals out of paper in my studio, casting concrete frames, taking photos of other people’s parking tickets, and writing dozens of dozens of tinyletters that I dutifully sent out to my mailing list. I made art and occasionally I sold the art I made, and even more occasionally I would exhibit my art in a show somewhere. My career was small, but it was not nothing. I tended to it, watched it grow slowly, slowly. In 2016 I sold a piece of art that took me months to make for $100. A few years later I was renting a studio space for $365 a month, and sold enough to almost cover my overhead. Last year I turned a profit for the first time.
I enjoy having a job where my work isn’t a reflection of my identity or ego. Every day I build a crate—it doesn’t mean anything. I have had jobs where I sit in an office and organize spreadsheets, spend eight hours performing a sort of nebulous imaginary labor in exchange for a paycheck. I appreciate how straightforwardly transactional this job has been. What is my role within capitalism? I turn wood into crates, like Rumpelstiltskin if Rumpelstiltskin was a lesbian. My personal tunnel to the center of the earth.
Mainly, I have always been grateful for the mental space this job has granted me. To only be a body, stapling sheets of plywood to pine battens, screwing 2x4 skids to the bottom of wooden boxes. The company paid me for my physical labor, but my mind was all mine. I could listen to audiobooks, think about art, draft paragraphs in my brain while the staple gun thwacked away in the background. I would get home promptly at 5:15 with my brain as fresh and unwilted as it had been at 7:45 am.
My job supports my art practice by conserving my creative energy for something more worthwhile, and it supports it financially. It pays my bills, gives me dental insurance. Some of my peers have chosen less steady routes, bouncing between freelance gigs and part time jobs and residencies and the endless cycles of academia. Those people have more time to make art than I do, but they also have less money than me. It is not wrong to prioritize one over the other, but I know myself, and I know that if I had to choose it all over again, I would choose the same— choose to be able to afford to live in a more expensive city and go to a Korean restaurant when I want. My creative practice flourishes best within structure and stability. That is what the crate shop affords me—just enough to not need to think about everything else.
I thought this would be another anecdote on my wildly disparate resume—a year to figure out the woodshop and master the basic craftsmanship art school failed to impart on me, before moving on to some other bizarre job. One year passed and then two, and then somehow we were here, four years later, still building crates. I’m going to get a new job this year, I would tell my friends every year, before continuing to bury myself deeper into the earth.
I don’t think it is necessary for your job to be your passion—and furthermore I think that having your dream job makes you more vulnerable to workplace exploitation. And yet! I spend nearly half of my waking hours at work, sometimes I feel like it might be good if I cared about it? It feels like a choice between living a life of cohesion and a life of compartmentalization, each with their own specific pros and cons.
I applied to MFA programs a year and a half ago—a peek above ground. I made it to the final round at two schools before ultimately being rejected, only a few weeks before a global pandemic shut down college campuses across the country—a generous bit of foresight from the universe. I had wanted an MFA since before I finished my undergraduate degree. There aren’t a lot of things to do with an interdisciplinary degree in art and history (but not art history!), but you can get an MFA, and maybe if you are lucky, a teaching position. Faced with the terrifying possibility of actually getting into a program, and the demoralizing reality of being rejected, I was forced to question if I even wanted it at all. What is an MFA good for these days? A foot into a rapidly eroding art world? A chance to compete for a dwindling number of faculty positions in the increasingly political field of academia? I still think I would get a lot out of the MFA experience, but I also have harder boundaries of what I am willing to sacrifice in exchange for one. If and when I do, it will be for me, not for my career.
Meanwhile, I continue on in the present, one crate at a time. Here is the thing with this job: it never changes. I’ve cycled through a range of emotions, a series of bosses and coworkers who were various levels of chill and irritating. There are moments at which I have found my apathy towards my day job peaceful, and moments where I deemed that same apathy depressing. It is hard to parse what part of my desire to leave is a genuine need for growth, and what part is an external assumption that a girl as smart as me shouldn’t still be working here for as long as I have.
In white-collar, college educated circles, there is an assumption that one’s career should follow an orderly trajectory: a steady, regular ladder of promotions and raises, transitions to incrementally prestigious companies. As if each of us is an individual start-up annually increasing our market share. The MFA felt like the obvious rung on one of the only ladders offered by the art world. Denied it, I am meandering along a less linear trajectory. This year I monetized this newsletter with the goal of taking two days off a month to devote to my creative practice. I surpassed that goal quickly and began plotting what it would look like to expand, maybe even drop down to a four-day work week down the road. My career is growing in its own way, in its own time—but more importantly, it would be okay if it wasn’t. It would be okay if I kept building crates indefinitely because it was what I did, and it supported me, and I didn’t mind doing it.
I thought I would leave the crate shop, and then I didn’t, and then seemingly out of the blue I got promoted. It was shocking, not because I didn’t feel qualified after four whole years at the company, but because I assumed there was no where to go—it is a small company with a limited number of management roles, and my direct supervisor had been his position since the company was a four person team with a truck that they didn’t even own. But suddenly, unexpectedly, he was moving to Northern California and I was to be the crating manager of the LA branch. I’ll admit it, I was a bit of a baby when faced with a promotion. My slow burn plot to drop down to part-time and spend more time in the studio was snuffed out. I tried and failed to convince them to let me do it four days a week, or to at least keep me hourly to maintain the flexibility I so valued. Instead, I have a salary, and a work email, and PTO (I did negotiate for a more flexible understanding of the official policy), and more interesting day to day responsibilities. Now I go to artist studios and museums to take measurements, estimate and design crates, manage employees, get paid more. Despite all of my protestations, I have stumbled into an accidental career in crating and moreover, I think it is good for me.
Sometimes a career is just a job you do for long enough that it becomes a profession.
In other personal news: we…..bought a house! It is Extremely Ugly but it is 12% ours, 88% the bank’s, and I’m really excited to transform into a space that is very us. I am picking up the keys today and we are moving late June after we rip out the horrible carpet and wood paneling currently covering every surface.
I think talking about money is so interesting and important, and I’m planning on putting together a full newsletter for paid subscribers about how much our house cost, the nightmarish process of trying to buy real estate in Los Angeles that isn’t 1 million dollars, what closing costs ~even are~, and how exactly we are paying for it. I want to wait until after we nail down our pre-move renovation costs (we are doing a lot of the work, including moving a wall, ourselves—please pray for us) so this will probably be July’s paid newsletter, but if you are feeling nosy about my personal finances, you should sign up for a paid subscription:
I’m still figuring out how I want to balance my studio time now that I’ve moved out of my previous hourly position, and thus, how I want to allocate my earnings from Substack. Instead of paying myself to take time off from my day job to spend on my studio practice, I will probably start paying myself a small monthly salary out of my business account. This is still an evolving situation as I feel out the realities of my new role and house payments. Regardless, my goal is to hit 100 paid subscribers and 1000 free sign ups before my birthday on June 19th. I am very very close— if you are interested in taking the plunge, or would even just forward this to a friend, I would really appreciate it.
Further Reading:
Kevin Wilson’s books are so good I’m consistently shocked they were written by a man. I highly endorse both Nothing to See Here and The Family Fang— both are bizarre and fun and funny.