Small art business musings.
We’re almost at the end of the Shops season — tomorrow, and then I’ll be there next weekend, and then it’s done, and closed for the rest of winter. The rest of the class will graduate — since I came in as a sub, I haven’t been doing the full incubator program with them, but the organizers said I could apply for next year, and I’m planning to.
I have to write a business plan, gah. If accepted, I’d start with the new crew in May (right around when the semester ends), and then run my shop through to December 2025. I’m tentatively thinking I’ll stop my booth at Sprout if I start at the Shops in May; I haven’t really had time to do both well.
At the holiday fair today, one of the other vendors asked me why I was doing all this work, when I had a good job already, and my life seemed pretty set financially.
It’s a good question. I don’t have to do this — we don’t have a lot of extra money, but we have enough for everything we need to do, so far, anyway. (It’s America, so catastrophic medical stuff could still bankrupt us despite all our budgeting and planning.) I could just teach at UIC until retirement (I’m 53, and I could theoretically retire at 55 with significantly reduced benefits, but I think regular retirement age is 62? Something like that).
I could keep writing and publishing if I wanted, but I’m now senior faculty, and if my writing / published trickled off to a few little things here and there, I doubt there’d be any career consequences on the teaching front. My course evaluations are generally pretty good, and some of my students even adore me, all of which makes me feel like me teaching is still worthwhile.
Of course, I do have four (!) completed books sitting on my computer that I should be trying to sell, and why I’m not is mostly the subject of a whole other post, but the part that’s relevant here is that I’m pretty frustrated with my writing career at the moment. For the last several months, I’ve not really wanted to write at all, even when I have editors actively soliciting stories and essays from me. I couldn’t make myself do it.
That’s starting to change — this last week, I’ve started feeling the itch to write again. Which is a little surprising, but I think maybe it’s in part because I just stopped trying for a while, which let a lot of pressure and anxiety dissipate.
Art is weird that way. You can’t always treat it like a mechanical thing, and expect that showing up to the computer and trying to do the work will result in anything good, or much of anything at all. At least I can’t.
But even if I do want to write again (and sell those four finished books), the main reason I’ve been doing the Shops, and Sprout before that, and little art fairs for the last few years around the holidays, and selling things online since before the pandemic, is because making things makes me happier.
That’s what I told the other vendor, that I liked doing the work, that it was peaceful and meditative, and I could watch a LOT of TV while making art (which I can’t do while writing!).
(That would be true even if I never tried to sell any of it, I suspect, but selling it has its own rewards, which probably deserves a post of its own. Why work so hard, exhausting myself on the regular, to try to make money off of this whole art thing, this second career? Another post. Put a pin in that.)
When one source of creative satisfaction gets stuck, it helps to have an alternate. Otherwise, I start to get a little nutty.
(That might be a little pathological: why do I feel the need to make things, in order to be calm? is it tied to some sense of needing to produce to be seen as worthwhile in this capitalist society? maybe I need to interrogate that a little bit more… For tonight, I’m going to stop poking at it. It’s late, and I didn’t get enough sleep last night because I was compulsively making candy for today’s fair.)
Making makes me happier. That’s a good answer, even if it’s incomplete. It’ll do for now. 🙂
Late night ramblings, but at some point, these little posts about the whole shop, etc. process may turn into an essay or two, or even a book. I could imagine a couple of different books that could come out of this, actually.
One might be a more practical guide to starting this kind of small business — there are lots out there, of course, but mine would be personal, and maybe interesting for that.
Another would be about domesticity, and what’s traditionally seen as women’s work, done in the interstices of raising children and keeping the home, and monetizing that domestic labor (for good and ill).
A third, and a book I actually started eight years ago, when Trump was first elected, would be about domesticity as a tool of resistance, how it can serve as a wellspring of peace and creativity and joy and community, in the midst of community upheaval and trauma.
I don’t know if any of those books will happen, but when I write you little posts about the business here, I’m also keeping notes for myself. So thanks for listening, and your thoughts are welcome — they help me figure out what I think, and give me angles I wouldn’t have considered on my own. I hope all of this is helpful, or at least interesting / entertaining.
Notes to self for future posts:
• why sell the art?
• why do I have to be productive all the time to be calm?
• what do I like about the Shops / what don’t I like? (realized today that I like doing fairs fine, but I HATE packing and loading and setting up, and breaking down and taking it home and unpacking it all again — if I do more fairs, need to think about whether I can afford to have someone else do that part for me)
• what’s the effect on the family? (and also, how much am I comfortable asking the family for help, given that we don’t actually need this for our basic living expenses?)
• why do I do so many different art things?
• how do I decide what to work on?
• what have I not made that I really want to make (and have even bought the supplies for)?
• positive energy from interactions with people, filling socializing need
• introvert exhaustion from needing to talk to people at times when I’d really rather not
• physical exhaustion of the work / health benefits of the active nature of the work (vs. writing)
• how to react when people comment on how much they’d love to do something like this
• love teaching, helping folks through the fear of trying new things
• artistic aspirations
• what will a future iteration of the sBerwyn ShopseBerwyn Sprout other handmade artisans?Berwyn ShopsaBerwyn Sprout Big enough for teaching workshops in? Including a makerspace? How about a performance space? Event space rental in the downtime?
• what else would you like me to talk about? 🙂
