Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: As we’ve been featuring various writers with day jobs that don’t focus on college-level teaching, I’ve heard from others who appreciate what we’re doing. “As a poet who works in the corporate world myself, I’m always curious to hear what other writers do for a living,” Matthew Thorburn said to me online after the first post of the series. Here’s his experience, for those who are also curious!
How would you describe what you do for your day job?
I work in marketing communications for a leading global law firm. That means I help tell our story by creating all kinds of content—from email marketing, digital brochures, and website content to videos and podcasts—and work with my teammates to share that content with clients, prospects, our alumni, and prospective new joiners. I help promote our client successes and our talented lawyers out in the marketplace, as well as internally.
What do you enjoy about that job?
I enjoy collaborating with my teammates across the US, Asia, and Europe. I’m lucky to work with smart, talented, and fun people, and to be part of an organization that encourages us to bring our whole selves to work and prioritizes creative thinking and trying new things. Naturally, I love the writing that comes with my job. I also really enjoy helping to create videos and podcasts—from thinking about how we can tell engaging stories through those mediums to interviewing our lawyers. Hosting podcasts is a lot of fun.
How, if at all, does your day job inform—or relate to—your writing life?
I would say most importantly my day job enables me to have a writing life—by providing the financial support, health benefits, and so on for my family and me to lead a comfortable, secure life. That’s a big deal. While most of my writer friends teach for a living, I’ve always worked in the corporate world. I like and feel at home with the way Seamus Heaney once described Philip Larkin: “A nine-to-five man who had seen poetry.” Beyond that, I can’t say any of my poems have been inspired by my day job in recent years—though once during my first job out of college, I assisted with a photo shoot in downtown Detroit that led me to write a poem about getting up very, very early to get the good light we needed.
What creative projects are you working on right now?
Currently I’m working slowly but steadily on two different projects: one is a book-length sequence of poems about a teenage boy’s experiences during a war and its aftermath. He loses everyone he loves and cares for, but lives to tell his story. As I tried to imagine my way into his mind (the poems are written in the voice of this damaged narrator), I thought this project would be an escape for me, a work of pure imagination. But these are poems about being a son, and about losing loved ones, and of course those are themes close to my own heart.
My other project is a collection of poems about family relationships, again about being a son and being a father, about losing people you love. It’s a book of elegies, and in certain ways it feels like the more clearly autobiographical cousin of the first project. These are the themes that preoccupy us in our forties, I suppose, as the older generation begins to disappear. As an offshoot of this book, I’ve also put together a chapbook manuscript of poems that take place over the course of the past year—poems shadowed by the pandemic but more immediately about being a son and a father.
Matthew Thorburn is the author of seven books and chapbooks, including The Grace of Distance (LSU Press, 2020), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Dear Almost (LSU Press, 2016), which won the Lascaux Prize. His work has been recognized with a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, as well as fellowships from the Bronx and New Jersey arts councils. He lives with his wife and son in a small town near Princeton, New Jersey.
