Saturday, February 10th, 2024

Live Seminar via Zoom from 11:00AM - 1:00PM CST

Now Enrolling!

Instructor Lillian Stone is an author, humor writer, freelance reporter and perennial day-job keeper. She juggles gainful employment while working as a regular contributor to outlets including Slate, BBC Worklife, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and The Onion. She sold her first book, EVERYBODY’S FAVORITE, to a Big Five publisher (Dey Street Books, a HarperCollins imprint) in 2021; over the next two years, she wrote it while working full-time and enduring the tribulations of beagle ownership. Today, the book has garnered acclaim from Publisher’s Weekly, Glamour, Vulture, the Chicago Reader and, weirdly, Bob Odenkirk.

Learn more about Lillian in our Meet the Teaching Artist series.

Some great artists have wealthy benefactors. The rest of us? We’ve got day jobs. And screaming children. And a funky left knee that requires health insurance.

“Don’t Quit Your Day Job” teaches students a framework for achieving a clear creative goal amid life’s various plagues and kerfuffles. In this virtual two-hour class, we’ll discuss creative boundaries in work and life, define our goals, and make a year-long template to maximize your creative practice.

The class lecture will include a discussion about artists who maintained day jobs well into their periods of creative success—folks like Samantha Irby, who kept her job at a veterinary clinic even after the $250,000 sale of her second book, and Mark Rothko, who taught pesky art students for more than 20 years—and explore strategies for leaning into creativity before, during, and after the nine-to-five grind.

If you're looking to make progress on a creative project alongside the demands of your boss, then this is for you.

• Intro: Why constraints on creative living can actually be… good!
  
• Step 1: Intention
  
• Step 2: Discipline
  
• Step 3: Grace
  
• Step 4: Action