Work Stew Podcast

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I find most career paths interesting, but I have a decidedly soft spot for stories that involve second acts. For example, you might remember my conversation with John Safkow, the longtime flight attendant who left the airlines to become a gorilla caretaker.

In this episode featuring author C. Hope Clark, I learned that the work Clark is doing these days—penning mysteries and mentoring other writers—follows a decades-long career with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In fact, Clark managed to take the darkest days of her time as a government employee—when a bribery attempt turned her life upside down—and convert that ordeal into page-turning fiction.

About C. Hope Clark: C. Hope Clark was a government employee for 25 years before turning her full attention to writing. As an Administrative Director within a federal agency, she managed budgets, loans, grants, human resources, and procurement—work that gave her a lifetime supply of story ideas. She is currently writing a mystery series; the first book in the series, Lowcountry Bribe, was published earlier this year by Bell Bridge Books. Clark also manages FundsforWriters.com, a website and newsletter service she founded in 2000 that now reaches over 45,000 subscribers. Writer’s Digest has recognized the site in its annual 101 Best Web Sites for Writers for a dozen years.

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Listen to the interview by clicking the arrow on the audio player below.

I recently saw a documentary called Heckler, which started out by focusing on the loudmouths who interrupt stand-up comics but then went on to paint film critics with the same brush. “No kid grows up wanting to be a critic,” said a filmmaker, suggesting that movie reviewers are invariably people who just couldn’t make it in the business themselves.

Not true, I thought. Some people do in fact aspire to be cultural commentators. USA Today film reporter Susan Wloszczyna is one such person: she loves her work, and she’d recommend it to others—with the cautionary note that it’s getting harder and harder to make a living at it.

About Susan Wloszczyna: In her 29 years at USA Today, Susan Wloszczyna has interviewed everyone from Vincent Price and Shirley Temple to Julia Roberts and Will Smith. Her roles at USA Today have included Life section copy desk chief for four years and a film reviewer for 12 years. Wloszczyna is currently a film reporter, focusing on trends and profiles. She previously worked as a feature editor at The Niagara Gazette in Niagara Falls, New York. A Buffalo native, she earned her bachelor’s degree in English at Canisius College and a master’s degree in journalism from Syracuse University.

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In this episode, I talk to researcher Evelyn Ch’ien. I connected with Ch’ien after publishing “Peeking into Academe,” a short post calling for more academics to weigh in at Work Stew. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called “Why Are Associate Professors So Unhappy?” suggested there was plenty to talk about, and Ch’ien—who got tenure and then decided to walk away from it—boldly answered the challenge.

About Evelyn Ch’ien: Evelyn Ch’ien is a researcher specializing in cultural and literary production in the 20th and 21st centuries. At the University of Minnesota as an associate professor, she won funding to outfit classrooms with 25 portable studios to compose hip hop music and taught courses on hip hop music composition in America and Europe. She has been a professor and invited researcher at the University of Hartford (Hartford, CT), the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN), the Universiteit van Amsterdam (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), Jean Moulin Université Lyon III (Lyon, France), and the Sun Yat Sen University (Guangzhou, China). She is currently a researcher at an institute based at the University of Lyon and she spent 2011-12 as a Fulbright senior research scholar in southern China, researching literature at the beginning of the republican era. Her book, Weird English (Harvard UP 2004),  proposed a new theory about how to analyze immigrant expression.

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As it happens, I’ve now interviewed three New Yorkers who made radical career changes after 9/11: Jane Viau left investment banking to become a high school math teacher; Hayes Slade co-founded an architectural firm with her husband; and Christine O’Connor (pictured here) decided to become a firefighter.

Of the roughly 10,000 firefighters in New York, only 28 are women. In this interview, Christine describes the moment she decided to take the FDNY’s entrance exam, the rigorous training involved, and what it takes to make it as one of the guys. Spoiler alert: a good sense of humor and a lot of time at the gym.

About Christine O’Connor: Christine O’Connor is a native New Yorker who worked as an administrative assistant for 12 years before applying to the Fire Department. At her FDNY graduation ceremony, she was the lone female among 274 newly-minted firefighters.

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After 9/11, Hayes Slade and her husband James (both pictured here) took stock of their lives and, like fellow New Yorker Jane Viau, they were moved to make some changes. After years of working in parallel, in a range of disciplines and industries, they resolved to go into business together.

In 2002, they co-founded Slade Architecture and, ten years later, their diverse portfolio includes the Barbie store in Shanghai, Virgin Atlantic’s upper class lounge at JFK, and this award-winning dog house. In the interview, Slade describes her life as “all work and all play, at the same time.”

About Hayes Slade: Hayes Slade is a licensed architect in New York. She has a Bachelor of Science in Civil and Structural Engineering and a Master of Engineering from Cornell University as well as a Master of Business Administration from the Wharton School of Business. Prior to co-founding Slade Architecture, Slade worked at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Arup Consulting Engineers, Boston Consulting Group and Organic, Inc. (Web Design). In 2010, Slade was selected by the Architectural League of New York for their Emerging Voices program. Slade is also a mother of four.

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Saying something funny every now and again is one thing. Being funny on demand—daily, for more than 16 years—is quite another. In this interview, Hilary Price explains how she came to make a living creating comics and what it takes to produce “gags” at a steady clip.

About Hilary Price: Hilary Price has been drawing and writing Rhymes With Orange, her daily newspaper comic strip, since 1995. It appears in 175 papers and has twice won “Best Newspaper Panel” from the National Cartoonists Society. Her work has also appeared in Parade Magazine, The Funny Times, People and Glamour. When she began drawing Rhymes With Orange, she was the youngest woman to ever have a syndicated strip.

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Listen to the interview by clicking the arrow on the audio player below.

Why would someone choose to be the one tasked with moving towards the bomb?

I asked a few other questions, but when it comes right down to it, that’s what I really wanted to know. Bomb Squad Commander Robert Conroy was ready with answers.

About Robert Conroy: Robert Conroy has been an active duty law enforcement officer with the Baltimore County, Maryland, Police Department for over 19 years and is presently the Bomb Squad Commander of the Hazardous Devices Team. His experience as a bomb technician began in 1999 after he completed his formal training at the FBI Hazardous Devices School located at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. In his tenure as a bomb technician, he has responded to and safely mediated over 2,200 calls for service relating to explosives, military ordnance, and/or hazardous devices. Conroy was in the United States Marine Corps for four years prior to his law enforcement career.

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Listen to the interview by clicking the arrow on the audio player below.

In this episode, I talk to Gerald Wong and Susan Hicks Wong, a husband-and-wife team who make their living as long-haul truckers—and the first thing I learned was that they don’t really use the term ‘long-haul.’ They’re OTR (over the the road) truckers.

About Gerald Wong and Susan Hicks Wong: Gerald Wong is a Vietnam veteran who came to trucking in 1990 after an extended period of unemployment. For more than 20 years, he lived what he describes in the interview as the lonely life of the solo trucker.

But these days he has constant companionship: after losing her job as a graphic designer, his wife Susan, whom he met on Match.com nine years ago, decided to get a Commercial Driver’s License (CDL) of her own. She was the only woman in her training class. Susan then joined Gerald on the road, and now they criss-cross the country together as owner-operators of “Iron Dragon,” their 2007 Volvo VNL780 (pictured here).

Gerald’s CB handle is Gizmo. You can find him on Facebook at Gizmo’s America.

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Listen to the interview by clicking the arrow on the audio player below.

The more people I interview, the more I realize that I’ve been harboring all sorts of false notions about job satisfaction. For example, I’ve had it in my head that people who grow up knowing exactly what they want to do for a living are happier with their work than those who have to cast around for a while looking for the right fit. I’ve also suspected that job happiness belongs almost exclusively to the “true believers”—people who have such conviction in what they do, such passion about their work, that (at least in my imagination) they operate free of doubt, untroubled by any inner conflict.

The process of listening to real people talk frankly about their careers has started to dismantle some of these ideas, and my interview with Lara Rosenthal was particularly powerful in this respect. In the course of our talk, Rosenthal explained that her work is profoundly satisfying—and yet the path she has taken was neither direct nor doubt-free. (Yee haw! There’s hope for us all.)

About Lara Rosenthal: Lara Rosenthal, L.Ac. is a licensed acupuncturist and board certified Chinese herbologist specializing in women’s health and fertility. She runs a private practice in Manhattan, is a faculty member at Pacific College of Oriental Medicine in New York, and a clinical supervisor at the NYU Hospital for Joint Diseases’ Initiative for Women with Disabilities. She has a B.S. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University, is fluent in Mandarin Chinese, and studied and worked in Taiwan for three years. Rosenthal regularly conducts lectures for both the general public and for practicing physicians on the uses of acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine to enhance fertility and treat common gynecologic issues. Her work on acupuncture and in vitro fertilization has been published in Fertility and Sterility, and the Journal of Chinese Medicine.

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Listen to the interview by clicking the arrow on the audio player below.

Back when Work Stew consisted of little more than my own inaugural essay, two friends of mine agreed to contribute essays of their own to what I assured them would eventually be a “collection.”

Ex-spy Lindsay Moran wrote a piece on the hazards of working while parenting and, in the days after the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden, she contributed a second essay reflecting on her decision to leave the CIA back in 2003.

Coincidentally, the Abbottabad raid also inspired Jeff Wenker’s contribution to Work Stew: in his essay “In Praise of Uncertainty,” he speculated that, even on a bad day, he was a better stay-at-home Dad than bin Laden ever was.

Several weeks ago, I learned that both Lindsay and Jeff have now turned their attentions to teaching: Lindsay recently completed a long-term substituting gig, and Jeff is currently working his way through a certification program.

In this interview, I talked to both Lindsay and Jeff about their reasons for wanting to teach after years in other roles; we also discussed the logistics involved in effecting such a major career transition. For anyone who liked the banker-turned-teacher interview but felt that it needed at least one Dick Hertz joke, this is for you.

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