Don't look away now

how to turn odd jobs into a creative career

This week was bone-chillingly cold and earth rattling. I didn’t get out much, but when I did it felt like the heat was ripped from my body, my clothes left stiff and cold.

a list of odd jobs i’ve had + how they turned into a freelance writing & photography career

me this monday on a little walk

I’ve been lucky enough to travel a lot. A lot around the Midwest, living and working in harbor towns, but also around the US. Here’s where I’ve worked, and how unglamorous jobs in the long run turned into a really fun freelancing career:

• Writing tutor at my university: I worked with English Language Learners, or students from other countries who spoke English, but had trouble writing fluently. I worked really closely with a couple of 18-year old Chinese women, who had come over alone to study in America for a chance at a better future. I remember one of them so well. She wrote an essay about her freshman year. The other girls on her floor laughed at her and told her she smelled. They went so far as to smear literal shit on her dorm door. She wrote about how it felt horrible, to be so viscerally rejected by this country she wanted so badly to be part of. How it felt horrible to realize the dream of America didn’t match up with her reality. And then, at the end, she wrote about how it didn’t matter; she would make her America, her experience here, different. She asked me what she should change to get an A on the paper; I told her nothing, not a damn thing. It was perfect, and I was so happy she was here.

• Kayak guide, round one: I didn’t get into the outdoors at all until after college. When I did, I wasn’t very good at it, but I loved it anyway. Working outside I felt happier than I’d ever felt before, and nothing made me more happy than sharing a place I thought was special with tourists, or people visiting. There is something so special about helping foster people’s relationship with nature in person, helping them see that there are beautiful places worth protecting not just up in the Arctic or in Yellowstone, but here, in your backyard.

• Content Writer. For a little while after college, I worked a marketing/content writer job where I dressed up. I didn’t hate it that much. I could’ve easily stayed, but I wanted to try other things.

• Peace Corps Volunteer/English Teacher, Armenia: In 2019, I left for Armenia, a small country bordered by Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Iran. It’s a whole, long story, but the gist of it is the blog I kept up there eventually turned into the newsletter you’re reading today. I wrote so much there—I wrote for hours every night. Never in my life will I be as diligent of a writer as I was there. I was evacuated due to COVID in 2020 on one days notice and it broke my heart. For the longest time, I felt as I was playing catch up, like my life had been shattered by that event. After, I watched from America as the Lemkin Institute, which studies and reports on the rhetoric around genocide with the aim of preventing future genocides, began to report on conflict in Armenia and genocide in Artsakh, the neighboring autonomous republic with an Armenian ethnic majority. I lived in Armenia for a year, and though I knew it was a politically volatile area, it was so similar to the United States in a lot of ways. I couldn’t imagine violence on that scale coming to the place I knew.

• Kayak guide, round two: No job, no home, sent back to the US in March 2020 I went back to guiding, and fell into it for real this time. I also started posting to Instagram for the first time, and getting into photography, since after coming back from Armenia I was very suddenly at a loss for words.

• Math Specialist through Americorps. Fall came, and I needed a job, anywhere. I found one in Grand Marais, an adorable little harbor town up in Northern Minnesota. I didn’t ask questions, found an apartment immediately, and started working in the school there. It was really lonely and a little miserable at first. I discovered I am not cut out for the classroom. I spent the evenings working on my photography and building a website from scratch. I’m going to do it. I’m going to be a writer, I decided.

• Outdoor Retail: Andy, my then boyfriend now fiancé, moved up and in with me and started working at an outdoors shop. I came to help fill in on the summer weekends when it was crazy busy. For all of the outdoor tourism I had come to love in guiding, I was now seeing the ugly other side of it; people were rude. You would work all day, sit for a second on a break, and a stranger would call you lazy. People complained about the town they were guests in, how the service was slow, there aren’t enough restaurants, it’s so busy they should widen the road, as if the town exists for the sake of tourists experiences alone.

• Sauna attendant: It was around this time I first started freelancing— small gigs at first, and more photography than writing. I worked at the sauna in town, which was a nice, low-stress job to help float me while writing wasn’t consistent. It was also, like many front-desk jobs, a job I could write or edit photos during, which I think is probably the best advice I can give to someone aspiring into a creative job: find a job you can practice during guilt-free. I used every scrap of my free time not working to hike and practice photography.

• Barista: Once, a woman came in and looked at my Michigan State University Neuroscience Department t-shirt and asked if I got it at a thrift store. I explained that no, I have a degree in Neuroscience, baristas can be smart you know. Truth be told, working in a cafe was one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever had. People are mean. About a latte. It’s fast-paced and physical and latte art is hard. But I really liked being involved in curating a space like that. Still, barista was hardest job to date— harder than sea kayak guiding, or teaching in a foreign country and learning the language while there, and certainly harder than my current cushy remote writing gigs.

• Kayak guide: I went back to guiding in the summers, mostly overnight trips. I was able to take a lot of photos and videos that I currently use as “content”. I’ve learned a lot about people though, in guiding. Mostly that everyone has really similar fears when it comes to getting out of their comfort zones, and also that all dads make the same jokes but think they’re original. Moreover though, I learned that people on overnight expedition trips are never what you expect them to be. The person who you think will likely crack under pressure will turn into the person you’d make your second in an emergency. The person who seemed really tough will not be able to handle it when their perception of that toughness in themselves is challenged. You truly cannot judge how a person will behave in the wilderness based on their exterior and their thirty-second pitch of themselves.

• Freelance writer and photographer: Now, I work mostly as a freelance writer and photographer, but still guide here and there in the summer, because I just can’t stay away. It’s a more comfortable job for sure, but I definitely learned more doing other things. Guiding is my favorite, and I’m unlikely to give it up for good.

the devolution of the media

Lately with current events one thing that I just can not get off the top of my mind is the absolute devolution of the media and rise of censorship with the new administration, and the amount of influence billionaires have on free speech. I’m thinking of the Bezos cartoon killed by the Washington Post. I’m thinking of the Big Brother-esque very specific pro-Trump messaging around the very brief TikTok ban, as if he were not the one responsible for the ban to begin with. I’m thinking of Meta moving to eliminate fact-checking, which never removed fake news content, rather simply offered a fact checked warning.

More and more, it’s starting to feel like our press isn’t so free, and our social media apps far from presenting objective truth. Lemkin Institute issued a red flag alert for genocide in the USA, which quite literally means in the past week the US has exhibited red flags for genocide. (Perhaps you remember Lemkin Institute from above? Remember what you thought of them when you read about them the first time? Now imagine my alarm to see that in the news this week knowing full well the weight and context of what that means.)

READ: Everyone who was supposed to protect you from this failed you miserably, Rolling Stone

To bypass the paywall on the article above, and to bypass any paywall on most news articles, use 12ft ladder to clean the webpage and access the text.

“don’t bring politics online we follow you for outdoors stuff”

Overall, it’s been a really tough week for a lot of Americans. Generally I like to keep things pretty light and fluffy online, because I’ve fashioned my newsletter/blog/social media primarily into an outdoor resource.

But of course, you cannot evade politics. Not when Hurricane Helene’s extreme rainfall, the Los Angles fires, and yes, even the more frequent polar vortexes have been attributed to climate change by scientists. Not when the Lemkin Institute has raised a red flag warning for Genocide in the United States, and not when shady, shady things are happening with social media platforms and free press.

The outdoors are political— there will not be trails left to hike on, or a Boundary Waters left to canoe in if the new administration strips away protections from mining. Sunday I’ll go back to light and fluffy hiking content, but today I wanted to share a little bit of my story, and the things I’ve experienced, and why I think the way I do about these things, and why I think what is happening is important to talk about.

Fundamentally though, I really have loved our country. Living in Armenia made me identify as American with a lot of pride, and there are so many things I love about our culture— I love pancake mornings and how obsessed we all are with National Parks and how we smile at each other a lot. I really do believe America is worth fighting for, worth understanding, and worth trying to fix, and I will keep working at it, bit by bit, whether it’s open conversations with neighbors or just showing people why our little slice of the outdoors matters.

I will not be plotting an escape plan, or leaving for Canada. I will be staying here, and trying every day to make it a better place, and no matter what happens I will not be looking away.

(also ps i wrote this in like an hour after i got off work and am firing it into the void with minimal proofreading, apologies)