Since 1994, Michelle Goodman has been thumbing her nose at people who tell her to get a job. Now the Seattle-based writer and editor has become an evangelical freelancer — not that she has abandoned her Jewish background and converted — she is proselytizing her “Anti-9 to 5″ lifestyle.
“I was a sort of rebellious kid, as my parents would attest to, starting with the “˜No, I don’t want to be a doctor’ thing,” Goodman admitted to JTNews.
That rebellious attitude has now resulted in a book (The Anti 9-to-5 Guide: Practical Career Advice for Women Who Think Outside the Cube — Seal Press, February 2007), a companion Web site (www.anti9to5guide.com/) and public events in Seattle and San Francisco, where we caught up with her.
“I lived here during most of the ‘90 s so it’s kind of giving me the California withdrawals and making me wonder if there’s any way I can move back,” she said, adding that there’s no immediate prospect of that happening.
Goodman was born in Newark, and grew up in nearby Livingston, New Jersey, which she describes as “a pretty suburb that I couldn’t wait to get out of when I was a teenager.”
Growing up on the East Coast, she was used to a much larger Jewish community.
“It’s kind of like going from 33 percent Jewish to less than 3 percent in Seattle. There’s a bit of a larger Jewish population in San Francisco. Everywhere I went it got smaller and smaller,” she said. “We lived in that culture where it wasn’t even a question that you went to temple and you had a Bat Mitzvah. I remember fondly the big family holidays with all the cousins and aunts and uncles,” she said.
Goodman attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C. She wanted to major in English, but being practical, she studied journalism instead. After college she worked as a reporter for a year-and-a-half, then as a publicist for a New York book publishing company for a year-and-a-half.
At 24 she swore off staff jobs. She said she enjoys the lack of a fixed time schedule she has to keep and the variety of work that keeps her afloat.
“People ask what I’m working on at any given point in time and it’s never really the same on any two weeks,” Goodman said. “It might be an article for the Seattle Times and maybe a couple of corporate papers, or an editing job. Maybe I’m editing a book for Sasquatch Books in Seattle. So it’s always a combination.
The search for an autonomous career started way back in Michelle’s life with the ambition to be a visual artist starting in early childhood. She said she faced just one problem:
“I was really bad,” she said. “I would always draw the same thing — I would draw a sunset oceanscape-seascape scene with those pastels that get on your hands and onto your clothes.”
She guessed that unless “they were good at throwing them away when I wasn’t looking,” her parents still have a couple hundred of these pictures.
“Eventually, when I was in college taking those drawing classes, I realized that I really enjoyed it but I was terrible, so that wasn’t going to be an occupational choice for me.”
Fortunately, Goodman also wanted to be a writer ever since a 3rd Grade teacher paid her a compliment on a paper. She wanted to write a book about being a 6th Grader and did publish one short story, called “6th Grade,” right after she graduated from college, which she recalls being “terrible.” It was her only published work of fiction.
“I’m not a hard news kind of person. You’ll see me writing more about business, personal finance, pop culture, lifestyle. Anything quirky that strikes my fancy,” Goodman said. “I think I do the nonfiction and the journalism as a way to have that instant gratification of “˜Yes I’m creating something’ and it’s going to be something I can point to out there in the world, more quickly than if I was holed up in my hidey-hole writing 40 poems.”
The notice has come, too. Michelle Goodman’s byline has appeared in the online magazine Salon, on guru.com, techies.com, in the Seattle Times, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Playboy.com, and seattle24x7.com. She has also written for Microsoft Press.
Her essays have been anthologized in The Moment of Truth: Women’s Funniest Romantic Catastrophes and Single State of the Union: Single Women Speak Out on Life, Love, and the Pursuit of Happiness. She was recently a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook, a Washington State women’s writing retreat as well.
Michelle’s been on panels about freelancing at Northwest Bookfest, Richard Hugo House and the University of Washington. She also teaches classes locally through Media Bistro and the Editorial Freelancers Association. Still, it’s not quite what her parents raised her to do.
“I was told the more professional the better and the more letters after my name, the better their brag could be at dinner parties,” she joked. “But they got over it.”
Enough of the 9-to-5
