What’s Trauman Working On?
“What are you working on?”
Friends should ask each other this question more often. Harley asked it of me about four months ago. In hindsight, the first thing I should have said was, “My friendship with you, Buddy.” We had just recently started reconnecting after a very long stretch of barely keeping up with each other. For the record, that’s entirely on me. But like I said, I’m working on it.
We asked each other this question, and to tell you the truth, I don’t remember who asked first. I suppose it doesn’t matter. What I do remember is sitting in a big red chair surrounded by half-unpacked boxes in the living room of my new apartment. It was the only real piece of furniture I had. My tiny bedroom upstairs was empty except for a free mattress I picked up on Craigslist. And I was using some plywood shelves for a desk in my office with a broken armchair. I was 46 years old. (Still am.) And I was ecstatic to have a place of my own, even if I had almost nothing with which to furnish it.
In the last couple of years, I was laid off from my teaching job in academia and spun my wheels freelancing while failing to land a full-time job outside academia. In the span of my last week in Chicago, I lost my apartment, almost everything in it, my two dogs, and my old, beat-up Ford Ranger. Only through the grace of an incredibly generous invitation, I wound up living in a tiny, crumbling room in the corner of my best friends’ basement, broke, and looking for work.
But a year later, I find myself living in the best apartment I’ve ever rented. I’m driving around in an old Honda van that I love. I’m working full-time as a copywriter for a kick-ass startup company here in Denver. I’ve got pots, pans, dishes, and food in the kitchen. I snagged a few more pieces of furniture. And I bought a shower curtain. Hell, yes. My own damn shower curtain.
When Harley asked me the question, what I should have said was, “I’m working on rebuilding my life. And it was the best work I’ve ever done.” But of course, I didn’t say that either.
So what else am I working on?
Copywriting for mcSquares
My full-time gig. My sugar-momma, rent-paying, insurance providing, J-O-B. And I LOVE it.
It demands more of my creativity than all the other creative endeavors in my life combined. Every day there’s a blank page. Most days, I start from scratch a few times. Blog posts, ad copy, email campaigns, social media posts, e-commerce descriptions, press releases, naming products, and fundraising copy.
It’s not art. It’s not poetry or prose. It’s not oil on canvas or idly picking away on a banjo. But it is creating ideas and language from scratch, within a system of guidelines and constraints, to solve a problem with a novel solution. Sometimes I’m proud of it. Sometimes it’s even fun.
Copywriting is creative in the same way that Architecture, Industrial Design, or Photography are creative. Sometimes it’s banal; sometimes it’s beautiful.
Fools In Wonderland Podcast
Creating this podcast with Harley is my most significant non-professional creative investment right now. Come to think of it, it’s my only one right now. That’ll change soon enough.
Getting a podcast off the ground can be a pretty heavy lift. Our plan: develop a theme, name it, map out series of episodes, create a bunch of social media profiles, put together a website, create a logo, write a theme song, record three episodes, edit them, transcribe them, put together a marketing and engagement strategy, release the episodes. Market the podcast. See what happens.
Instead, we could have taken a very lightweight approach, but the podcast wouldn’t accomplish what we want it to in our personal lives. On the one hand, we want to explore and foster a more creative daily life for ourselves and others. On the other hand, we want to fashion a well-wrought urn. Something we can point to and be proud of.
Podcasting Workshop Development and Teaching for StoryCenter
This project allows me to combine two of my great loves: podcasts and teaching. I’ve only produced one other podcast, so I’m not sure I can say the process of podcasting is one of my great loves, but it might be. Working with Ames Hawkins on Masters of Text was a blast and extremely rewarding.
And my teaching career ended two years ago, but it’s still the most rewarding profession I could have imagined for myself. Building and teaching this podcasting workshop for StoryCenter lets me stretch those instructional design and facilitation muscles.
This past year, I developed StoryCenter’s Podcast Storytelling Workshop with Amanda Peckler’s assistance and the direction of Allison Myers. Seven two-hour sessions. Lectures. Handouts. Tutorials. And I’ll be teaching it as a contractor for StoryCenter for the foreseeable future. Pretty sweet gig.
With the first workshop’s success, StoryCenter has asked for a second podcasting workshop focusing on production, publishing, and marketing. Now that I know what I’m doing, this should be less work than the first. I’ll be collaborating with Harley on this one, and Allison will still be directing.
Instructional Modules for Digital Storytelling
This project is winding down, so I won’t spend much time on it here.
I put together seven discrete teaching modules for a local university for use in their first-year writing program.
I drew on my two decades of experience as a college writing instructor to create assignments, lesson plans, and resources for each module.
Each module had at least one custom video asset detailing an assignment or digital storytelling concept. Writing scripts, recording, and producing each of those videos was probably my favorite part of the project. Those are the elements that I can look back on, point to, and say, “These are actually pretty good!”
So maybe that sounds like I’m doing a lot. I suppose I am. Then I think about other people’s lives with children, partners, gaming hobbies, athletic hobbies, and other commitments that I don’t have. And I’m reminded that people simply fill up their lives with things to do. And that puts me a little more at ease. I feel less like a workaholic. Less like an outlier. More like a guy just trying to make a living, be creative, and enjoy myself as much as I possibly can.
[Here’s something we didn’t expect. Harley and I wrote these blog posts and recorded our first couple of episodes almost eight months ago when life was, well, different. At that time, I was a full-time copywriter for M.C. Squares, but I’ve since moved into a new position with StoryCenter. The posts are what Harley and I shared with each other when we recorded the episode, so we’re leaving the post as-is for the sake of transparency. We apologize for the confusion.]
(“Map” by Alyson Hurt is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0)
