Where is All the Writing About Our Work?

Alain de Botton in his Boston Globe article Portrait of the Artist as a Young Data-Entry Supervisor says, “It’s time for an ambitious new literature of the office[. . .]many contemporary writers are notably silent about a key area of our lives: our work. If a proverbial alien landed on earth and tried to figure out what human beings did with their time simply on the evidence of the literature sections of a typical bookstore, he or she would come away thinking that we devote ourselves almost exclusively to leading complex relationships, squabbling with our parents, and occasionally murdering people. What is too often missing is what we really get up to outside of catching up on sleep, which is going to work at the office, store, or factory.”

Though we readers of literary magazines and small press publications know that these stories are being written and published, you just may not find them on the chain bookstore best seller shelf or paid-for-promotional-space tables.

Two such examples of these pockets of publication include two upcoming collections:

Anthology. On the Clock: Contemporary Short Fiction of People and Their Work. Working Lives Series from Bottom Dog Press Inc. Oct 1

Anthology: Out Behind the Desk: Workplace Issues for LGBTQ Librarians (a working title), edited by Tracy Nectoux and published by Library Juice Press as part of the series Gender and Sexuality in Librarianship. Dec 31