Don’t Quit Your Day Job

Sonny Brewer’s Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit began as a misunderstanding in a conversation with John Evans about the memoir he was writing—but quickly took on a life of its own. These 23 essays by Southern writers are mostly humorous and always inspiring in their depiction of what we all do to get by on our way to fulfillment.

John Grisham and Winston Groom write about the legal and military careers that informed their most famous books, but the revelation is that they were also an underwear and an encyclopedia salesman, respectively. Rick Bragg’s dangerous, dirty “real work” for his Uncle Ed’s crew started when he was 11 years old and convinced him to get a “necktie job.” Connie May Fowler was literally allergic to her short-term job smearing stucco, but she kept at it long enough to save money for her return home. Daniel Wallace’s essay about working at a vet clinic cleaning up after dogs includes illustrations. Janis Owens writes about being a “kept woman,” one of what she calls the “dying breed” of housewives, and Cassandra King’s essay is a spy tale. Tom Franklin delivered pizzas as a grad student, and Tim Gautreaux was a radio announcer on an AM station that someone told him was “just noise that keeps the house from being empty.” Several writers mention jobs in construction fields, but perhaps none more eloquently than New Orleans’ Barb Johnson in an essay about her 30 years as “carpenter chick.”

The anthology is a who’s who of Southern writers, including contributions by Howard Bahr, Larry Brown, Pat Conroy, William Gay, Silas House, Suzanne Hudson, Joshilyn Jackson, Michelle Redmond, Clay Risen, George Singleton, Matthew Teague, Brad Watson and Steve Yarbrough.

While the essays are about their one-time day jobs, the real story almost every writer ends up telling is how he or she became a writer—and more importantly, why. Don’t Quit Your Day Job includes a Contributor’s Works list, and like a sampler box of chocolates, it showcases the unique voices of nearly two dozen stellar Southern writers.