Bethany Chaney, MBA'93
If you’re looking for writers in North Carolina, just throw a rock. This state is crawling with them. I know—I’m one, too.
The North Carolina Writers Network counts 1,500 among its membership, enough to fill a small town. Icons of Southern literature like Reynolds Price, Alan Gurganus, Lee Smith, and Randall Kenan all write from the Tar Heel State. Ever see the movie Big Fish? Yeah, Daniel Wallace, who wrote the novel it was based on, haunts the local co-op in Carrboro, where I live.
Writers are revered here, cultivated and stewarded like natural resources—second in line only to basketball for the state’s cultural bragging rights. (Make no mistake, basketball is high art in North Carolina.)
Ten years ago—five, even—I would have ducked your rock. I thought of myself as a reader, not a writer.
I have loved books since I was a child growing up in North Carolina, the feel and smell of them, the dangerous places they take you, the amazing people you meet in them. I read constantly as a preteen, lugging home piles of books from the library every week, reading while nestled in a magnolia tree until it was too dark or the chiggers got the best of me.
As a young adult, I certainly flirted with the idea of becoming a writer. Kept a journal once, maybe wrote a letter to the editor or two. I even married a writer. But I never really plied the trade, at least not creatively.
In 2001, long after graduating from Northeastern with my MBA and well into my professional journey in the nonprofit sector, I found myself divorced, approaching middle age, and living alone in central Harlem. Maybe I needed something to do. More likely I needed something to feel, a way to understand and process all the change and perseverance I was experiencing as a single Southern woman in New York City.
I probably should have hired a therapist, but I took a class instead, a weekly three-hour writing workshop through a local continuing-ed program. It got me to write a short story about a young woman facing big losses and even bigger decisions. Write what you know, they say. So I did.
It was a horrible story—it really was. Part of my problem was that I wrote all the time for my job. As development director at a human service organization, I wrote funding proposals, reports, marketing content, and annual appeals. I enjoyed the challenges of messaging, of telling a story. But writing for a business purpose and creative writing are two wholly different exercises. The latter, while liberating, felt sort of selfish, like the guilty pleasures my mother always warned me about.
I took another class anyway. My instructor, Carol, lived in my building, proving that New York City is as small a town as Carrboro, just with lots more people. She liked something about my writing, but she also knew it lacked something, maybe confidence or focus. She encouraged me to pursue the craft more seriously. She told me it was okay to be selfish.
Carol became my personal writing coach. I paid her a reasonable sum to harass me for a half hour each week about what I was writing, when, and for how long. When I had good answers for those questions, I felt incredibly motivated. When I didn’t, I felt foolish and wasteful. A therapist might say I was shamed into adopting a writing discipline. My Northeastern professors might say I made an investment in one.
When it came time to leave New York City, I moved back home with my supportive partner, hung out my shingle as a freelance consultant to nonprofits, and gave up writing fiction. Instead, I concentrated on writing creative nonfiction. I started with an essay about ethnic identity in the South, something I think about a lot as a third-generation Arab American. Write what you know, they say. So I did.
Turns out the North Carolina Arts Council invests in local artists, supporting the state’s creative economy through a number of fellowship and grants programs. On a lark, I submitted my essay.
A year after I moved back home, I learned I was among a dozen writers to receive a 2007 fellowship award from the North Carolina Arts Council, quite an honor for someone who’d never before been recognized for her creative potential. When the check came, the cover letter said: Get back to it, hurry, before you turn forty. Or something like that.
The fellowship has provided me, an untested novice without an MFA, with the confidence and incentive to write purely for creative joy. There’s no trick to it, I’ve learned. Just write, and write some more. No coach necessary.
I’m not ready to give up my consulting practice—I’m not even published yet. I know I will always have to work for a living, and I imagine my work will always involve writing.
At least now, if you throw that rock in North Carolina, I will proudly take the hit.
Bethany Chaney is a resident of Carrboro, North Carolina, near Chapel Hill.