Staying on the F*cking Bus? But which one?

(Tram routes and bus stops in Helsinki, Finland.)

Some time ago, I came across an article describing a concept I found useful when looking back at my professional and creative career choices. The article was ‘This column will change your life: Helsinki Bus Station Theory’, published in The Guardian in 2013. The article described a career theory that was first articulated by the photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen in a graduation speech in 2004 and is based on the movements of buses from a bus station in Helsinki. Each bus travels the same route out of the city for a least a kilometre, stopping at the same bus stops before diverging and heading off to its own unique destination.

Minkkinen used this situation as a metaphor for explaining the choices photographers make in their career. They might follow one style for three years, go to a gallery in pursuit of an exhibition, and be told their work is like so-and-so’s. They then would decide to go back to the start and follow another style or technique, only to have the same thing happen. What they haven’t realised is that they’ve been on the same route as so-and-so for those first few kilometres and instead of continuing and finding their own direction, they’ve jumped off the bus, grabbed a taxi back to the bus station, and taken another bus, which also stops at the same stations on the way out of the city. If the photographer keeps doing this, they will never develop beyond the stage of duplicating what others have done before them. The solution? In Minkkinen’s words: ‘Stay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus.’ When you stay on the bus, you end up with a body of work: ‘the early (so-called) imitations, the breakthroughs, the peaks and valleys, the closing masterpieces, all with the stamp of your unique vision’. You’ve absorbed your influences and moved into a position of influence.

So, how has this theory helped me? I’m not completely sure, as I’m still thinking through its implications, but what follows is where I am at this moment.

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Different Buses

As some of you know, I have had a variety of professional jobs: mathematician, productivity manager, university administrator, and teacher. At first glance, these might be seen as the typical contemporary job trajectory, which has changed since the good ol’ days of a career for life. Certainly, when I landed my first job as a Graduate Clerk at the Australian Postmaster’s General department (PMG, which spilt into Telecom Australia, later Telstra, and Australia Post), I thought the PMG would be my lifelong employer, as it had been for my father. Yet, already I had been taking various buses in that other work trajectory, my creative life, which consequently affected my professional choices.

(Artist concept of a supermassive black hole.)

When I went to university to do a BSc, I developed an interest in cosmology and thought I would follow in Einstein’s footsteps. My honours thesis was on black holes, but when the time came for me to do a full-time MSc, I decided I was tired of not having any money. I went to work at the PMG and continued the MSc part-time. However, the topic I was given, the theoretical unpacking of an equation important to my supervisor, didn’t satisfy my curiosity and I decided to get off that bus and head back to the bus station.

Actually, I was riding several buses at once. During my time at university, I played in a garage band and, for a while, thought seriously of music as a full-time career. But another creative bus came along when I saw a martial arts exhibition and decided to leave the group and join the featured kung fu club. This decision was helped by some interpersonal issues with a band member, though maybe that was a rationalisation of my emotional decision to get off a bus that didn’t seem to be going anywhere fast and try another bus.

Then, during the writing of a research report for Telecom Australia, while working in its research department, I realised I liked seeing my own words on the page before me. I had been a reader all my life and had actually been writing awkward love poems when a teenager and dabbling in song lyrics while in the band. Here was another bus, although someone I was close to at the time once called it another one of my ‘fads’. It might have seemed so, especially for someone whose values were more materialistic than mine, but the strange thing is, of course, that I’ve stayed on this ‘fad’ bus for more than four decades.

Not that it hasn’t seemed like I have been continuing changing creative buses, as with Minkkinen’s analysis of a typical photographer’s career. When I started becoming serious about writing, I wrote science fiction and fantasy, the genres I had been reading for many years. I published some short stories and wrote several novels, though these projects remained unpublished. I then fell in love with poetry and wrote it, studied it, published it, for many years. Did I fall in love because I had been disappointed with my progress as a speculative fiction writer? Maybe. Or was I still searching for the right bus, the one that matched my own interests and abilities? I’m more inclined to the second observation, especially when I eventually realised that poetry for me, with its roots in the aural and musical, with its physical effects and textures, and with its pattern making, matched my interests in music, martial arts, and mathematics. Poetry was a bus I could ride to the end.

(Photo taken at the Guildford Reading, 2010)

During this period, I made several professional life choices. I left Telecom for a statistician’s job in private industry, mainly because I wanted a change of scenery, which came about after a change in my marital situation. This job morphed into a position as a manager of a profit-sharing scheme. When I was retrenched, I tried to write full-time, but ran out of money and subsequently joined Swinburne University as a post-graduate administrator. After four years there, I tried full-time writing again, before moving into the teaching profession to help with finances, a job I had never envisaged doing when I was at university. Here my two career buses joined forces: I was a practising poet and was also a teacher of writing, specialising in poetry and myths & symbols.

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Closer to the destination

Yet, my bus journey continued to change all through this, though certainly not into a new bus or a new fad. The journey, in fact, had continued to become clearer, because I had also gone back to narrative, with experiments in realist fiction and, during my MA and PhD, the combining of fiction/narrative and verse.  My themes, also, became clearer. So, at this current stage in my career and my life (now that I have retired from teaching), my bus features literary and speculative fiction and poetry (with some non-fiction on the side), all in the service of my interests in mythology, science, history, nature and the sacred.

I recall a conversation with a person who was major factor in my life choices years ago. She asked me what I intended to write and when I answered (being at the time under the influence of the poet Robert Graves), ‘Whatever the muse tells me’, she reproached me and said such an approach was not the way to build a successful literary career. The only way to get noticed is to specialise in one literary form, one genre. Maybe so, for I also remember one of Australia’s finest speculative fiction writers once telling me that you must find your niche and then work it. But that’s not the bus I boarded and on which I am still travelling. I continue to write whatever the muse (however you define it) asks me to write and I intend to continue learning my craft in those forms and genres the muse’s ‘givens’ require. Only after my bus journey has completed will I (but more than likely, others) know if I arrived at a worthwhile destination.

(Author photo, Afon Dulas, Corris, Wales)

I hope you have enjoyed this exploration of my various bus journeys and I wish you all the best with your own bus travels, whether in life or in your creative endeavours. May you arrive at your unique destination content with your choices and your achievements!

Stay safe, healthy, sane and inspired!

Cofion Cynnes (Warm Wishes)
Earl

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