A lifetime ago — in the last millennium — I fell in love. When this happens to someone who is also studying literature as a susceptible undergraduate, the combination is a powerful one. It was almost inevitable: I became a poet.
I continued dabbling in this fatal enterprise over the next 10 years. Occasionally I would be brave enough to send poems to a magazine or journal in the hope of publication. For the most part, I expressed my poetic soul by hanging out at open mic evenings or going to book launches (these were better because there was free wine).
On such occasions, the shared gripe among all present was that nobody read poetry apart from other poets. Of course, if you spoke to the elders in attendance, especially those who were also editors or independent publishers, they would bemoan the fact that not even people writing poetry actually read much poetry.
Happily, poetry got a small boost in popularity — and, to a very limited degree, financial viability — from the resurgence of spoken word and slam poetry. Other literary forms, too, have been through modest booms in SA over the past couple of decades. At one point, short stories promised to be a good fit for an era of reduced attention spans. Crime novels were all the rage for a while.
Life writing and narrative non-fiction have always been a safer bet in this country, with book sales heavily skewed towards sports biographies and political exposés. But, here as elsewhere around the world, it was through long- or short-form journalism that writers typically made their money.
Then the decline of print, first steady and suddenly sharp, intersected with Covid-19-era commercial disruptions and changing patterns of media consumption. A little thing called ChatGPT came along. If your chosen vocation was writing words and then selling them, you were in trouble.
That was the touchy subject tackled by “Hunger Games: How Writers Survive”, a panel on the programme of the Easy Equities Skrywersfees at Woordfees in Stellenbosch this week. As its name suggests, Woordfees started out as a literary event before expanding into the major arts festival that it is today.
Arts funding — and income for artists — was a general conversational theme at Woordfees. It was the official agenda item at a separate panel discussion held in Stellenbosch under the aegis of the Festival Enterprise Catalyst (a combined project of arts organisations and festivals from around the country), exploring the creative sector in SA and “the future of the arts” more broadly.
This is a perennial topic of discussion. It will be revisited in a more academic framework at the fifth international conference to be held by the SA Cultural Observatory in Cape Town in November, addressing “the impact of artificial intelligence on human creativity, and the political, social and economic forces influencing creative practice and governance”.
Employability might be a concern for all artists, but it’s hard to argue with writers’ shared sense that they are now the poor cousins in the family. The consensus among the Hunger Games contributors seemed to be that visual and performing artists are in a less precarious position by comparison.
Panel moderator Ilse Salzwedel is perhaps best known as the host of the Skrywers en Boeke programme on radio station RSG. Like each of the panellists she introduced, however, Salzwedel is a reluctant pivoter: as writer-editor-broadcaster, she has to hustle and pitch and plead. Karin Schimke is a former journalist who works as a translator, an editor, a writing coach and, yes, a poet. Jolyn Phillips is also a poet, an author of short stories and a scholar. Leonie Joubert is a science writer and journalist who lives on the road looking for stories about climate change.
Each of them has dozens of anecdotes about underpayment, delayed payment and nonpayment; they have leapt from gig to gig, juggled writerly tasks, sold their possessions to make ends meet. Belgian visitor Frederik de Backer, the final panellist, had similar stories of pecuniary anxiety for freelancers in Europe.
When it comes to the jobbing writer, there does not seem to be greener grass anywhere — except, perhaps, in the past.
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