How a mom of two finds time to write both day and night.
Who are you?
Dianne Turgeon Richardson. I am a full-time technical/proposal writer for a government services contractor in the Orlando, FL area, and I occasionally take on freelance writing and editing work. In my spare time, I write creatively: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction/personal essay.
What do you write?
I started writing when I was seven with my own version of a Babysitters’ Club novel. Today, we’d call it fan fiction, but at the time, I really just thought, “This doesn’t look so hard. I bet I can do it.” It was all downhill from there. An English degree. Rhetoric coursework. A masters of fine art in creative writing. Now performances at spoken word events and poetry slams. I’m a hopeless case.
Professionally, I write proposals for government contract work. Agencies and offices associated with the Executive Branch of the federal government release requests for proposals (RFPs), and I work with my company’s Business Development department to craft an acquisition strategy. What will we write about? What key skills and capabilities will we highlight? How will we organize the information so that our response is not only compliant to the RFP’s directions, but also tells the story we want to share about our company? We work with groups like the Department of Defense, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Energy, so my work as a writer is part technical/scientific information and part marketing/PR. I’m also the go-to person in my office for what we call “sanity checks,” which is essentially proofreading for grammar, clarity, etc. It’s satisfying work in that I bring a specialized skill set to a space where those skills are needed and appreciated and am an integral member of a team with many moving parts. While the dream, of course, would be to stay home and write novels all day, it’s really nice to be writing anything for money and benefits, especially since I have kids that expect to eat every day. More than once.
Personally, my creative writing is largely tied to key themes that are important and compelling to me. My fiction is often set in the Deep South, which is where I grew up and which is also a bizarre, terrible, amazing, mystical, wonderful place. I’ve been heavily influenced by the Southern Gothic writers, particularly Faulkner and O’Connor. Like Faulkner, I am very interested in exploring and unpacking the extremely dark and extremely painful history of the South, which in many ways is simply the extremely dark and extremely painful history of America, and how that history has resulted in many of our current problems and collective traumas. Like O’Connor, I’m very interested in asking difficult faith-based questions. And if I’m writing about the South, that pretty much drops me right in the middle of themes like class, race, The War (you know the one), societal rules, various forms of Christianity, and landscape/place.
Currently, though, I am working on a poetry collection because that is where the Muse has been calling me, and the poetry collection is overtly political because…well, obviously. Still, even my poems are grappling with matters of faith, particularly the current incarnation of American Nationalistic Christianity, race, class, and confronting the unsavory aspects of American history, which certainly color our present.
However, poetry doesn’t pay the bills; hence, proposal writing and office life.
Where do you write?
At my day job, I am thrilled to report that I have my own actual office with real walls and a door — as opposed to a cubicle — which is certainly a statement about current worker drone life, isn’t it? I spend an inordinate amount of time in Microsoft Word, and you can usually find me typing away or conducting research with my headphones on. I can’t listen to music with English lyrics when I’m writing because my brain just starts singing along, making it nigh impossible to write my own words. So I listen to a lot of instrumental music. Lately I’ve been on a kick with Pandora’s Contemporary Bollywood station because the songs are really upbeat (need that energy to get through the slow afternoons) and the lyrics are in Hindi, which I do not speak.