The Job Interview & Willa Cather

I had an job interview today.  20 minutes prior to the interview, I was feeling more hopeless than nervous.  I wondered if the interview would lead me toward a job choice, that would only move me further away from joy.  I knew the answer.  As I aimlessly searched the web, I came across the NY Times online Book Review section and found an article about Willa Cather's correspondences.  I came across the below excerpt and suddenly felt, well...less alone.  One of the beauties of literature: it brings us closer to knowing we often have many of the same experiences, be that a woman in front of her computer in the 21st Century, or a woman named Willa Cather with her writing tablet in 1908.  When bathing in self-doubt, we tend to forget that others have not only felt that too, but moved beyond it.  The jury's still out on the results of the interview, but my head is much clearer. 

In 1906, Cather moved from Pittsburgh, where she had been working as a journalist, to New York City, where she quickly established herself as a powerful literary editor at the journal McClure’s. In this letter to the Maine writer Sarah Orne Jewett written on Dec. 19, 1908, Cather describes her frustrations with journalism and her desire to remake herself as an artist.

"Mr. McClure tells me that he does not think I will ever be able to do much at writing stories, that I am a good executive and I had better let it go at that. I sometimes, indeed I very often think that he is right. If I have been going forward at all in the last five years, [i]t has been progress of the head and not of the hand. At thirty-four one ought to have some sureness in their pen point and some facility in turning out a story. In other matters — things about the office — I can usually do what I set out to do and I can learn by experience, but when it comes to writing I’m a new-born baby every time — always come into it naked and shivery and without any bones. I never learn anything about it at all. I sometimes wonder whether one can possibly be meant to do the thing at which they are more blind and inept and blundering than at anything else in the world ...

I have to lend a hand at home now and then, and a good salary is a good thing. Still, if I stopped working next summer I would have money enough to live very simply for three or four years. ...I would write a little — “and save the soul besides.”

For full NY Times article and excerpts read: O Revelations! Letters, Once Banned, Flesh Out Willa Cather http://nyti.ms/Yv80G7