Freelancing Book

In this collection of essays from his column for the Times (of London) Literary Supplement, self-proclaimed freelance poet Hugo Williams is by turns wry and self-effacing, witty and tender. Accustomed to "being entertained for a living" as a television, theater, and film critic, Williams finds writing a regular column to be "like having a small excitable dog to look after. At first it is sweet. Gradually it develops a life of its own. It gets hungry. It gets sick. It gets bored. Sometimes it's all too much." Williams's accounts of the freelance life, combined with that of the itinerant academic (he teaches a writing workshop in the Dordogne one week, reads at the Jerusalem Poetry Festival another, makes a pilgrimage to Rupert Brooke's grave on the island of Skyros yet another), are highly amusing. "Coffee," writes Williams, "is the drug of the chronic freelance. It reproduces, for money, the state of anxious chaos that exists in his room, his brain, his work schedule, his bank account, and his love-life." On deadlines: "You have a little affair with them," says Williams, "fraught with betrayals, recriminations and brinkmanship." When he's not pondering freelancing, creative writing, or book signings ("you sign everything in sight," his brother recommends, "that way they can't remainder them"), Williams tries his hand at cross-dressing, modeling, archaeology, and retrieving his love letters from his first girlfriend. After all, "everyone knows poets will go anywhere and do anything to get out of the house."Read More