One of the most enjoyable ways I
meet other writers is at small conferences, often over a meal, and one topic
that often comes up is how we all make a living while chasing writing goals.
That’s how I met Jane Paffenbarger Butler and learned about her unique
job—which I’ve invited her to write about here.
Jane has degrees in pharmacy and health
systems management and worked in clinical research. While raising three
children, she wrote in fits and starts, but then got serious, joining the
Brandywine Valley Writers Group and Main Line Writers Group. She’s at work on a
memoir, You’ll Get Over It, Jane Ellen.
An excerpt placed second in nonfiction at the 2017 Philadelphia Writers
Conference. Her work has also appeared in the anthology Unclaimed
Baggage, and in the Philadelphia
Inquirer. She’s the 2016 and 2014 winner of the West Chester Story Slam.
Please welcome Jane Paffenbarger
Butler.
Most days, I adore my job. I am
talking about the one where I get to go to my local high school and hang around
the English classes talking to kids about their writing. Today, for example, a
steady stream of students visited me; some wanted to discuss what to write in their
comparative papers on Wuthering Heights
and Dante’s Inferno, others needed
help proving a point made in Merchant of
Venice. It may sound pretty high brow I know, believe me it is not,
especially for someone like me who is a pharmacist by training. But the same
dynamic occurs whether the students and I are talking about Shakespeare or the
Sunday comics. The focus is on art and on the act of responding to it.
Other days, in other classes, I work
my way around the room asking each student to tell me their ideas for assigned
poetry, memoir, or short story projects. I tell them that ideas mellow and age
and do not usually spring to the page fully formed. I tell them that it’s okay,
in fact it’s preferable, to get started by just writing in stream of
consciousness.
My title is Theme Reader, and I
support the work of a high school English teacher by reading and commenting on each student’s
writing assignments. Yes, it is a support role, and it is a peach job for
someone like me, an aspiring author. This is a teaching job with none of the
strings attached. I meet no parents, give no formal grades, and discipline no
one. Instead I am a writing coach, and my time is spent reading teenage students’
work and talking to them about the craft of writing.
I
am also paid to sit in on the viewing of classic films and TED talks, and get
to stay in tune with young people who gladly explain to me such mysteries as gifs
and K-pop. And what could be better than sitting in on a discussion of Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying or Twain’s Huck Finn? Or reading twenty-five papers
from the AP Literature students who each select, from a lengthy list, a
different classic novel to analyze? Often, the students’ detailed breakdown of
each book is so complete, by the time I review and offer comments on their
projects, it feels as if I’ve just read the book myself.
Sometimes,
in classes where students are not as motivated, it is my duty to inform them of
the power of words. That words can be a tool by which we get what we want out
of life. I help them see that learning to use words to their advantage could be
a way to get out of bad circumstances, a way to rise above people who make life
difficult, and a way to work through issues that are hard to manage. Words are
power. I love helping them learn how to understand, harness, and wield that
power.
In
Creative Writing, an elective class, students arrive not as hostages but as
volunteers, open to my crazy suggestion that we daydream a little about what it
means to be human. With the whole world as fodder for topic, I help students
zero in on what their own voice yearns to say. This year I am meeting with an
independent study student weekly to work on her novel. The notes I took recently
on Robert McKee’s Story, Blake
Snyder’s Save the Cat, and Stephen
King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft,
while trying to elevate my own
projects, have become perfect resources for our work together. Sharing such
material conveniently reinforces my personal goals, too.
When
I was a Clinical Research Monitor at a pharmaceutical company, among my many tasks
were study reports and protocols, and I excelled at ensuring the internal
consistency between tables and charts and between statistical facts and stated
conclusions. I yielded the red pen as editor for a 400-page New Drug
Application Summary submitted to the FDA, based on data from hundreds of
patients. At my interview for the Theme Reader job, I explained that although I
wasn’t a certified teacher and had no degree related to language or English or
anything one might suspect relevant (and which the job specs listed), I love
teaching and students and the English language. I handed over the bound New Drug
Application Summary, the thin manuscript of my memoir, mentioned my membership
in local writing groups and my participation in writing conferences. They hired
me on the spot. That was ten years ago.
 |
| One of Jane's six word memoirs. |
The
best part about my job is that I must show up every week and pay attention in
class. This time around I am personally interested in what makes for a good
story and what constitutes a rhetorical device. My job requires me to say out
loud the facts I know to be true about writing, to sit alongside students and reconsider
the masters, to teach patience and taking risks on the page, and to learn,
learn, learn.
To
top it all off, I even get a paycheck.
Get
to know more about Jane at her website
and blog.
