Sharing Work
The different shapes of sharing, and making in community.
Recently I’ve been exploring the concept of “sharing work” and I keep finding new facets to it.
It started with marketing and selling, and thinking about how to make it a normal practice to tell people about what I’m making and doing, again and again. I forget sometimes that other people don’t know what I’m spending all my time working on and thinking about if I don’t tell them—it can feel like old news even as the people around me have no idea.
At the end of May, I decided I wanted to have a poetry summer. For a few years, poetry was one of the central axes of my life and social circle, but in 2019 it started to feel like the fit was off1 and then… well 2020, etc etc. I’ve been to eight open mics since then and written more poems in a few weeks than in the entire last year.2
There are some poems that I don’t know if they’re working until I perform them. It might be different for page poets, but I am always writing toward a particular sound. I can read it to myself over and over again but will the wording land in front of a crowd or will I stumble on the phrase? Do people laugh when I want them to? Does one stanza lead me into another or do I lose my place in a break? An open mic is where the rubber meets the road.
I love performing (I spent my formative years in community theater), but I also love being surrounded by other people’s work. It’s fun and weird and occasionally awkward. In a couple of hours I can hear poems of every style and tone, things that make me feel seen and things that take me outside of my own experience. It’s a microcosm of great work that I would probably never find otherwise.3 One thing that is true across the board about open mic regulars is that they are trying! They are making things and putting them into the world, even if it’s just three minutes at a time.
I’m thinking also of work shared in the sense of being done together, even when it’s not collaborative. Co-working has become a regular presence in my life in the last several years, and other people have kept me company while I did care tasks or made scary phone calls or edited podcast episodes.4 I feel particularly grateful that for the last two years I’ve been part of a writing group that meets every Sunday morning. I’ve missed a few weekends if I was traveling or someone was visiting, but for the most part I show up week after week and so do my friends.
Sometimes those Sunday mornings were the only time I wrote (and sometimes I showed up and didn’t write anything at all).
I love the consistency, and seeing my friends every week5, but I particularly love the permission I get from other people who are also trying. Making things can be so weird and vulnerable and embarrassing. I think it’s cool when other people care, but even as a grown ass adult I sometimes feel the teenage desire to be perceived as effortless and disinvested. Earnestly making things is the opposite of apathetic chill.
In June of this year I hosted a group called Rec Room, which I’ve been describing as co-working but for recreation! Or, body doubling for fun! A dedicated container for the hobbies and play that can be hard to prioritize— particularly the things we might want to do but avoid because they require us to be willing to be bad at something.
When I was working a full-time job, time felt like the constraint keeping me from the interests and practices I wanted to have. I was using my free time for writing and podcasting and recovering and socializing—I couldn’t possibly learn something new or take up a craft that I would probably be bad at. And then I left my job, time stretched out in front of me, and it still felt kind of impossible… So I turned to the things that had worked for writing and so many other things—shared space and earnestly trying.
I’m planning another Rec Room session for the fall, and if you’re interested I would love to have you there. To get an update when registration opens, join the waitlist.
Here are a few things that people spent time on in the last session: embroidery; reading; collage; poetry; sewing; planning a D&D campaign; diamond painting; mind-mapping; puzzling.
I think now that it’s because I was ready to stop telling certain stories about myself but didn’t know what to do instead.
Honestly, probably more than the last several years, because there wasn’t much happening.
I find open mics incredibly generative. A lot of my poetry has been written sitting in my car after a mic, frantically trying to catch a fully formed idea before it gets away.
To be meta: I’m editing this essay at a coffee shop co-working session right now!
It feels worth noting that we did not know each other that well when we started! But 100+ consecutive weeks together will change that
Rec Room is a brilliant idea!