After Five
I ask a bunch of creatives "how do you balance a creative life with a day job?"
TL;DR After Five is a series where I interview creatives and ask them:
“how do you balance a creative life with your day job?”
“what does your 5-9pm look like after your 9-5?”
AFTER FIVE
What on earth are you doing Ange?
After Five is a fortnightly series where I interview a bunch of creatives and ask :
HOW DO YOU BALANCE YOUR CREATIVE LIFE WITH YOUR DAY JOB
(aka is it even possible?)
Details in slidepack below.
THE DETAILS
When will it come out?
Every fortnight. Sunday.1
Details in slidepack below.
Who am I keen to interview?
Anyone who is a creative and is balancing their creative pursuits with a day ‘job’.
….and before you dismiss yourself please note when I say:
Creatives: anything! writing, dance, theatre, poetry, mixed media, modelling, film, yodelling, cooking classes - I’m looking for you. Whether you’re just starting out or are doing the frantic juggle. Or maybe you’ve done the juggle and have now moved to full-time creative work!
‘Job’: by this I mean ‘other responsibilities’ (it just ain’t as punchy as ‘job’). Paid work. Unpaid work. Part time, full time, casual, seasonal.
Don’t limit yourself to the conventional/ capitalist/ corporate definition of job - I want to hear from parents, those with caring responsibilities (family, the sandwich generation), people who are studying etc.
…basically I want to hear from creatives who are balancing their time with their creative project with something else (related or not-related).
Get involved! Please!
Wanna be interviewed?
Please FILL OUT THIS FORM.
I would love if you could spread the word.
If you know anyone who would be keen to be interviewed (but wouldn’t personally put themselves forward)please:
(Send them the form) Send them a link to the form!
(DMs) feel free to slide into the Substack DMs with their best contact details.
Why are you doing this?
I love this project.
The “can you balance a creative career with a day job” question has plagued me for a long time.
And it kept coming up in my conversations with friends.
But specifically, I’m thankful and grateful to the team at the Centre for Stories who awarded me a hot-desk fellowship.
Because it was during that hot-desk that I had the time, funding and space to pull together this interview series.
And when I started looking into the STATS2 it was an eye-opener.
Things like:
Only 9% of artists work full-time on their creative practice, down from 23% in the 2016 survey. This has been trending downwards since 2009, which showed 55% of artists worked full-time on their creative practice.
Artists say their own savings (78%), public and private grants and in-kind support (68% and 61% respectively) and their partner or spouse’s income (48%) are important sources of income to support their creative work.
Among artists who have had children in their care at some point during their career, a far greater proportion of women felt their caring duties significantly restricted their creative practice (47% compared to only 17% of men). These results confirm that childcare responsibilities are still predominantly affecting women.3
See slides below for the short version + stats.
But the long story is:
Because in an industry that is criminally underfunded, overlooked and underappreciated, the reality is that a majority of creatives (specifically writers) do not have the privilege of pursuing their craft full-time.
Usually, writers are balancing their craft with a paid job, family responsibilities, caring responsibilities…and just life.
This is the reality of ‘writing’ for many.
Throw away instagram/pintrest/tiktok ‘writer’ aesthetics. The journals, the wooden cosy desks, the calm cups of tea as you look out the window as the sunlight dapples in and pursue your muse for the day.
Majority of us are writing in notes apps on public transport.
Some of us are writing in our notes app while we’re taking a dump.
(No judgment. I’ve been told Metamucil is a life hack?)
Em Meller put it better than I ever could in her essay Painfully Fragmented on Kill Your Darlings:
Each morning, I have two hours—or six turns. Later, as the train rushes into the tunnel, into the dark beneath the city, I repeat lines to myself, trying to hold it all in my head as I get some version into my phone notes, which I will transfer to a document, and then, finally, when it feels ready, into the real document. There are hundreds of notes in my phone. Some of them whole paragraphs; some just a word, misspelled. Some no longer make sense by the time I transfer them to the working draft. They are hasty and shallow. And I can tell when a text I read has been made in this way, as a series of notes, fragments composed on trains or in breaks. You can feel it. In the internet novels, the Carver-pilled fiction, the fragmented ‘experimental’ essays. Like Gatsby, I think, if he snorted Ritalin recreationally. Hasty, shallow…
How does the precarious nature of work does that affect the type of creative work we get to see?
How does the demands of basic living (e.g. food water shelter bills utilities) affect the type of creative work we can create?
And how does this financial reality determine WHO gets to pursue art full-time.
More slides and stats in the slides below.
THE SLIDE PACK
…for those so inclined. This was my project pitch that I developed at Centre for Stories during my hot-desk fellowship.
Final word
Please get involved!
Spread the word on DMs, auntie-whatsapps, stories (whatever the kids use these days).
(i’m writing this while I’m heading to a meeting :( but will come back an update. Done is better than perfect, will fix links and typos later)
If you’ve made it this far thank you! Here’s a little BTS on how this all started - in a rage google doc on a random Tuesday afternoon at Centre for Stories:
Subject to the push and pull of life. For your sunday scaries.
Ok the fact that I’m quoting numbers is HUGE for me. I despise numbers. Spreadsheets are my kryptonite. And here I was looking up STATS. in a REPORT. WHO IS THIS.
David Throsby and Katya Petetskaya, ‘Artists as Workers: an economic study of professional artists in Australia’, Creative Australia’ (accessed online), May 2024. ; Katherine Power, ‘The Crisis of a Career in Culture: why sustaining a livelihood in the arts is so hard’, The Conversation (online), 6 December 2021.