About Me

My name’s Ian M. Rogers, and when I was young I knew I wanted to create things—I just didn’t know what those things were or how to go about making them.

I also worked a lot when I was younger, first at summer jobs in middle school, then at after-school jobs in high school and work-study jobs in college. In college I realized that writing was the best way for me to create things that people liked, but I didn’t know what I wanted to write yet and still didn’t know how people actually became writers. This led to my working a lot of odd jobs after college to (barely) keep my student loans and other bills paid. This was a crazy time, but it taught me a lot about being self-reliant and pursuing different opportunities.

My first full-time, salaried job after college was teaching English in Japan at an eikaiwa (conversation school) where I taught grammar and conversation lessons to adults. This involved both talking to Japanese students about their lives and more complicated stuff like explaining the difference between whether and if.  I worked a lot during those two years, but I also navigated the entirely new and unexpected world that is Japan and experienced how the Japanese divide their work and home lives in a way much differently Westerners do, which became the basis for my first novel.

After I came back, I had a novel manuscript in progress but also more bills that needed paying. Unfortunately, I had trouble finding full-time work because my new resume narrowly pinned me as an uncertified English teacher, so I went back to doing odd jobs. When I finally found full-time work it was in a busy office with lots of unpaid overtime and a long commute, which sent my stress level up more often than not. Meanwhile, I was also trying to finish my novel draft in the evenings and on weekends—which I did, eventually.

I’d somehow heard (or maybe just assumed) that everyone who wants to be a writer goes to grad school, which sounded a whole lot better than working in an office. This led to my applying to a lot of writing programs (also in the evenings and on weekends) and getting a teaching assistantship at the University of Nebraska. In plain English, this meant that in exchange for teaching first-year writing classes, the university paid my grad tuition and gave me a living stipend so I wouldn’t have to take out loans. It was a good enough deal that I packed up my Volvo and moved to the Midwest.

 

Grad school was pretty helpful in that it gave me a lot of guidance for improving my writing and let me structure my days mostly how I wanted (i.e., writing in the mornings instead of spending those mornings at a Day Job), but stressful in that it required fitting into an academic world that I wasn’t sure was for me. Plus, well-paying jobs in academia aren’t too easy to get right now, and the struggle to get those jobs is, to put it mildly, fierce.

The biggest things I got out of academia were inspiration for MFA Thesis Novel, which is being published by Vine Leaves Press in April 2022.  It also brought me a lot of contacts, and tons of opportunities: a job in a greenhouse that gave me lots of time for writing, editing work that brings in extra cash, and a (formerly secret!) work-from-home job as an online test-grader that kept me afloat for a long time. Grad school also showed me that I get about the same amount of writing done as a grad student as I do when I work full time—though not as much as when I work part time.

Somewhere along the line I picked up another office job to save some money…though after a few months I realized that my boss was committing tax fraud, breaking labor laws, and abusing his power in all kinds of uncool ways. Things got so bad that I eventually called him out and took a stand to make things better, which I wrote all about in the My Boss Was Crooked! series.

The experience helped me realize that spending so much of my time doing work I didn’t care about just to pay the bills wasn’t productive, so I thought more about the non-creative work I really wanted to do to pay those bills, which brought me back to Japan teaching with the JET program and later to a job teaching university English in Yokohama. Living abroad brings new challenges every day, my job pushes me to do meaningful things, and I still have plenty of time to spend on creative work ;-)

All of these experiences inspired this website. I wanted to explore how creative people make their way in the world, the challenges they face, and the way they keep the bills paid, especially in the 21st century, and especially when they’re just starting out.  (SPOILER: There’s no one way to make your life work as a creative person.)

So check out the Day Job blog, my super-cool new author website, or my awesome novel, MFA Thesis Novel. I hope you find something that inspires you—or helps you get your shit done.

And as always, if you like what you see or just want to reach out, drop me a line at rogers.ian.m@gmail.com or tweet me @IantheRoge.

 

(Last updated May 2022)