In Praise of a WORKING Writer

By almost any writer’s standards, Terry Teachout is having a very good year. 

To wit, in reverse order: Duke, his biography of Duke Ellington, was published October 17^th to generally great reviews.  The previous week, on October 11^th, The King’s Man, his third collaboration with composer Paul Moravec, premiered at the Kentucky Opera in Louisville. On September 18^th, Duke was included on the non-fiction long list for the National Book Award, a month before its official pub date. 

A sequence of events like this is what many a writer’s dreams are made of. This past spring wasn’t too shabby, either, with Satchmo at the Waldorf, the stage adaptation of his bio on Louis Armstrong, garnering two nominations and one win (for the lead actor) at the Connecticut Theatre Awards. And mind you, this was all produced in the midst of the deadlines required by his ‘day job’ as a critic.

Now, to be clear, I do not actually know Mr. Teachout, but I have known of him for quite some time. He first beeped onto my radar screen in the mid-90s when I was directing the marketing and press activities involved in introducing Berlin Classics, a then-new German classical label, to the American audience.  Teachout was on my monthly press and radio list, which numbered a few hundred at that time. (I wince to think of how few of those classical-format radio stations survive and how few of those press contacts are with publications that still feature professional – or, indeed, any – arts criticism.)

When my days with the label were over, I would occasionally see Teachout’s distinctive name pop up here and there, but he was off my radar until I read his lovely tribute to the irascible and charming lyricist Gene Lees (best known for Yesterday I Heard the Rain and Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars), whom I’d known from one my first jobs in music publishing. Reading his column on Lee’s passing in the spring of 2010, I learned Teachout had made quite a leap and was now the drama critic for The Wall Street Journal.  Not long after that, I joined Twitter and his was one of the first accounts I followed. That’s when my real awareness of and admiration for him as a writer began. 

Over the course of 2011, I noticed the demanding travel schedule he kept, and then began to get a handle on the extra-curricular work he was producing.  That year we Twitter followers read of the premiere of his second opera, Danse Russe, and his work on adapting to theatrical form his acclaimed 2009 book Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, which would become Satchmo at the Waldorf. And at some point he announced that the Ellington biography was his next book.

In the spring of 2012, he shared on Twitter his elation at receiving a MacDowell Colony residency for the coming summer. (That was a happy note in an otherwise difficult spring, marked by the death of his beloved mother after a months-long illness.) We followers were able to track the breakthroughs he achieved on Duke at MacDowell, and when he returned to his real-life schedule, we were witness to his triumph at getting to the final draft later in the year, his delivery of the manuscript, his relief when his editor accepted it, his (muted) appreciation for the copy editor’s notes, and then, earlier this year, his unvarnished appreciation for the cover design and the work of the book designer. Somewhere in that mix, he also worked on the revision of the Satchmo play, which opened at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre in October, 2012.

This body of worked produced over a few years is substantial enough, but it becomes utterly astonishing when you realize that he has accomplished all this while carrying a work load that would have most people curled into a fetal position.  Teachout is perhaps the only drama critic in America who considers the entire country his beat, so he is not only covering New York theatre, but Chicago, Boston, Washington, Los Angeles and regional theatres across the country.  In addition to his reviews, he also writes a weekly column for the WSJ, blogs regularly at his Arts Journal post, and keeps his hand in the music world with liner notes on the side.

Now, to the uninformed eye, a critic’s job seems like a walk in the park.  You get to watch/listen to stuff you like – for free! –and then all you have to do is write about it.  Having known a number of critics over the years (mostly music critics, of course, but a few film critics, an art critic, and even a television critic), I can tell you that whole for free! thing goes out the window when you see the foot-high pile of discs that comprise the assignment due tomorrow, or the slumped shoulders of a film critic heading off to his third film in two days, or a music critic trying to figure out how to cover three far-flung performances of a weekend. 

The fact that Mr. Teachout has been able to meet his deadlines and achieve all that he has with his own books and libretti is admirable enough, but doing it with the kind of soul-sapping travel schedule he maintains puts him in the ranks of cultural super-heroes as far as I’m concerned.

Amidst all this, he has done an enormous service to writers by sharing on Twitter the joy of writing on those days when the words and ideas just flow – sometimes like Niagara Falls, sometimes like a burbling creek – the days we all dream of.  But he’s also shared the frustration of those days when the words just don’t come. No matter how far you open the spigot, there’s not a drop. But the most indispensable thing I have learned from Mr. Teachout, especially when he tweets about his to-do list or the mountain of due dates he is facing of a week, is this: get the butt in the chair.  

In fact, that’s the greatest lesson writers can take away from any experienced writer:  Apply generous amounts of butt glue when necessary, but get the butt in the chair. 

I’ll be reading Duke later this week, or maybe early next. It’ll be my reward for meeting one of my own editing due dates. And when I go out to buy it, I’m also going to stop by my local art supply store to see how much they charge for the big containers of butt glue, because I’m going to need a lot in the coming weeks.  And I think I’ll write on the top of the container – in big Magic Marker letters – Teachout Success Formula. 

Thanks for the inspiration, Mr. T.

 Jeanne McCafferty is an editor, writer and book designer.  

You can see samples of her work and learn how to contact her at www.jeannemccafferty.com.  
She is on Twitter @IrishCabrini.