Category Archives: Storytelling and Career

A troubling convergence today: The US government announced this morning that 598,000 more jobs were lost in January; for the first time in this crisis, I learned of a friend who was just laid off (not counting a number of my former students who have not found appropriate work since … Continue reading →

Back in September, I blogged about Daniel Pink’s manga-style quintessential convergence of story and career, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need. As I noted back then, Pink was running a contest at the Johnny Bunko Web site. The premise of the book is that … Continue reading →

It’s great when other career gurus tout storytelling in the job search. I feel like I’m not the only voice crying out in the wilderness. This one is from my colleague Barb Safani via Ezine Articles. Barb and I both serve on the executive board of the Career Management Alliance, … Continue reading →

Barbara Winter tells an envy-provoking story of becoming a “gypsy teacher and seminar leader.” She always wanted to travel, doubted her career choice, and was bored in her early jobs. So …. she became Joyfully Jobless: I was afraid something was terribly wrong with me, that I might be a … Continue reading →

A Storied Career seeks your story of the current financial meltdown and how it has affected you. We seek both stories about negative effects on your job/career and positive stories about how you are being proactive regarding your job or career in the face of the current climate. I’ll publish … Continue reading →

Harley King is my new friend and a recent commenter to A Storied Career. He shared with me his wonderful career story, which appeared in the alumni magazine of his college, Goshen College. Though Harley is a few years older than I am, I remember many of the landmark events he talks about — the pivotal 1968 election, the Poor People’s March.

I love helping to tell people’s career stories and would love to tell more. Here’s Harley’s:

What do I want to be when I grow up? Or how I found myself!

By Harley King ’71

When I graduated from GC with a degree in English, I had some vague ideas about being a writer but fewer ideas about how to make my dream a reality. My college years were challenging — largely because of political distractions outside my studies.

My first year, I flunked German because I was more concerned about fighting racism and protesting the Vietnam War and rarely attended class. In January 1968, the beginning of my second semester, I walked through Arlington National Cemetery with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and hundreds of others to protest military action in Vietnam. I turned 19 the day King was shot outside his hotel room in Memphis and the streets in our cities burned.

I also went “Clean for Gene” and shaved my beard. My father worried I was campaigning for the infamous Joe McCarthy who held the anti-communist hearings in Washington, D.C., but I laughed, because I only knew the liberal Democrat, Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota, who had pledged to end the war. I cheered when Lyndon Johnson chose not to run for a second term, booed when Bobby Kennedy tossed his hat into the ring and was shocked when he, too, was killed.

In June 1968, my friend Dean and I boarded a bus in Peoria, Ill., to go to the nation’s capital for the Poor People’s March. Not fully understanding what we were doing, we saw ourselves as part of that Mennonite protest heritage dating back to the Protestant Reformation. We had been raised to believe that it was more important to die a martyr for one’s faith than to violate one’s principles.

Salvation came in the form of Study-Service Term. If I had stayed in the U.S., I am sure I would have been pulled deeper into the radical politics of the time. But instead, I boarded a plane in Miami and flew to Kingston, Jamaica, with S.A. Yoder and a group of students not nearly as radical as I had been.

Slowly, U.S. politics became less important. We did not watch the 6 o’clock news or read the newspaper. Instead, we discovered a culture that had been heavily influenced by Britain — even driving on the “wrong” side of the road! I fell in love with Jamaica and suffered culture shock when I returned to the U.S. a short 13 weeks later.

SST was a pivotal point in my college career. Instead of dropping out of school to save the world, I focused most of my attention on my studies, with occasional excursions into politics. I sought redemption in the creative spirit. I wrote poetry and gave readings, edited literary journals and Pinchpenny Press, had the role of Zeus in the Greek play, “Trojan Women,” and absorbed the genius of Nick Lindsay. I even found reason to hope for a better world in the summer of 1969, walking across campus with my first love while Neil Armstrong took a “giant leap for mankind” onto the moon.

I was the first in my parents’ families to graduate from college. I had outgrown the farm, but where did I belong? Poets were not in high demand, and neither was anybody else. In the midst of a recession, there were few jobs to be found. The war in Vietnam was still going full throttle. Even though I was in no immediate danger of being drafted, I began voluntary service at Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio. I was no closer to achieving my dream of being a writer — I was an orderly on a psychiatric unit. Continue reading →