New feature alert! I’m excited to introduce Keeping Up with the Janes. With this feature, we will revisit past See Jane Write Collective Members of the Month to see what they’re up to now.
To kick things off, we have Audrey Atkins. The last time we had a chat with Audrey, she had just released her book, They Call Me Orange Juice. She was also busy blogging. Later, Audrey would also start teaching non-fiction writing workshops and she eventually became a full-time freelance writer. Now Audrey has a new career working with the Alabama State Council on the Arts, she’s moved her blog musings to Substack and she’s launched People Reading Prose in Bars — which is exactly what it sounds like. On the second Sunday of each month, Audrey gathers Birmingham-area writers in a local bar to read short stories and essays. On average, her events draw more than 50 people, and the Alabama Writers Forum recently signed on as a sponsor.
Let’s learn more about what Audrey is up to these days!
What inspired the idea to start People Reading Prose in Bars?
Birmingham has a very strong and vibrant writing community, and I kept seeing opportunities for poets to share their work at different readings all over town. But I’m not a poet. I’m a prose writer. There are also storytelling nights for storytellers and open mics for musicians and comedians. Honestly, I felt a little left out! A few years ago, I published a zine that contained the work of some of my writing students, and we hosted a prose reading. Much to my surprise, it wound up being a standing-room-only event. The idea of hosting prose readings – not poetry or storytelling or stand-up, straight prose – stuck with me. So, much like you starting See Jane Write, I started People Reading Prose in Bars because it was something that I wanted to do that no one else was doing. Like A.G. Gaston famously said, “Find a need and fill it.”
How did your partnership with AWF come about?
I’d met their executive director, Richard Evans, on a few occasions, and he reached out to me about supporting it because there was nothing else like it going on in the state. He thought that the event resonated with their mission of cultivating Alabama’s literary culture. And although that wasn’t my original intent, in thinking about it, I have to agree!
Tell us more about your new job.
I am now the audio producer for the Alabama State Council on the Arts, and my job is to produce the Arts Fell on Alabama podcast. If there was ever a perfect job for me, this is it! In my personal life, not only do I write, but I paint, draw, crochet, and do other crafts. Plus, I love to talk to strangers (much to my mama’s chagrin). In this position with ASCA, I get to travel the state and interview artists, crafts people, and creatives about their work, whether it’s starting new methods of artistic expression or preserving our state’s folkways. Then I produce the two-minute podcast. The interviews in their entirety are also preserved at the Alabama Department of Archives and History. You can find episodes at Spotify.
Let’s talk Substack. What pushed you to move from blogging to Substack? How has doing so helped your writing?
I’ve been blogging in varying degrees of regularity for nearly 15 years. Back when I started, the major platforms were Blogger and WordPress. I moved over to Substack because it seemed like a great new platform for content creators with a new and different audience. Search engine and social media algorithms have changed, making it harder to share content, so I thought that it would be a good place for a refresh.
I’ve started writing about food and travel more, which seems to always be popular, and I have gotten new subscribers. I’ve also made a little money, which I never did before from blogging, so that’s nice.
I try to keep my writing tighter for Substack because there’s just a monumental amount of content out there, and a writer only has a limited amount of time to capture someone’s attention before they bounce on to the next thing. It’s harder to write shorter pieces because I want to tell every tiny detail, but I think it’s a worthwhile challenge that helps to engage one’s audience.
What’s next for you?
Who knows what’s next long term?! I really wasn’t looking for a job when this opportunity with ASCA came up, and now it’s changing my life, literally and figuratively. I’m learning new skills, traveling a lot more, and really getting to flex different creativity muscles. It was just like you’ve always said, if you build a solid reputation for hard work, creativity, and dependable performance, it will pay off – and it has. What’s next for me in the near term is sussing out who’s doing what around our state. I’m particularly interested in people who are not in the limelight but who are quietly doing amazing things, people who are preserving folk traditions, and people who are in our more rural counties, but if anyone knows of anything cool, send it my way, even if it doesn’t tick those boxes!
Anything you want to say about See Jane Write?
Speaking of things that have changed my life, you and SJW have definitely done that! Without you, this group, the instruction, and the inspiration, I would never have been able to even dream about publishing a book. I would have never had the courage or the knowledge to quit a toxic job and freelance full-time. And I don’t think that I would have been doing the work I’ve done for the last 15 years that built my reputation and brought me to where I am today. So what I want to say about See Jane Write is that if you put in the work and follow Javacia’s lead, success is almost guaranteed. And for that, I am deeply and profoundly grateful.
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