I love the word apprentice.
For some reason it always conjures up visions of Wart and Merlin swimming with trout (T.H. White’s The Once and Future KIng)
or Duny/Ged before he becomes Sparrowhawk (Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea). 
It’s sort of magical and appealing for a young student to learn at the knee of an elder. It seems appropriate.
It’s sort of magical and appealing for a young student to learn at the knee of an elder. It seems appropriate.I’ve always wanted to apprentice to a chair maker.
I love chairs. The perfect shape of them. So comforting to have something molded to your bottom, I guess.
I love chairs. The perfect shape of them. So comforting to have something molded to your bottom, I guess.Anyway, yesterday I was
hanging at the tattoo parlor getting the second half of my tattoo (Honeysuckle and Day Lilies in black and gray- I’ll post a picture when it heals) and Jen, the apprentice brought me a cup of coffee and a hershey’s bar.
She could tell that after three and a half hours under the needle, I needed chocolate and actually just a few minutes before this, Leonie (my superb tattoo artist friend) must have hit the accu-pressure point for chocolate desire because the thought had suddenly popped into my head that I wanted it.
Scientific aside: There is an accu-pressure point which controls choco cravings and apparently it is located on the upper arm.
Jen is a very good apprentice. She is an older woman who works in the school system and has many many tattoos, and also tenure. She answers the phone, she gets coffee, makes tea, brings chocolate, fills out paperwork and closely observes the art of tattooing.
Every tattoo artist apprentices at the beginning and they all gopher and take out the garbage. There’s a gentle slope. It’s not really that whole ‘wax on wax off’ method but I think it teaches patience and the realities of working in a shop. I mean, someone has take out the trash, right?
Often beginning writers just dive in thinking that every word they put down on paper is golden. Straight from the imagination to the page. A massive outpouring of prose. But writers should be apprentices too.
And the easiest and most accessible way to do this (and I’ve discovered from personal experience that Gaiman, Chabon, and Rowling don’t like being stalked while going about their daily lives) is to READ.
Every book you read will teach you something, even the badly written ones. (Just as you can learn from the experienced writer and, also, the inexperienced one).
Hopefully
if you want to write, you are already an avid reader. If not, then I would suggest you turn your attention to some other exceedingly difficult, often non-paying career with really bad hours. Like crab-fishing.
if you want to write, you are already an avid reader. If not, then I would suggest you turn your attention to some other exceedingly difficult, often non-paying career with really bad hours. Like crab-fishing.
Writers write, but writers also read. And how great is it that our homework is something that we all love so much?!
A lifetime spent reading and writing and dreaming is the perfect life as far as I am concerned. I think that like tattoo apprenticeships, writing apprenticeships last for life.
I can’t imagine ever closing a book (either one I’ve written or one I’ve read) and saying to myself, “Well that’s it, then. I’ve learned all I need to know.”
It’s an ongoing experience tempered by everything that touches our brains and our hearts- books, telling a story, LIFE.
We’re all students taking out the trash and getting chocolate if necessary.
Jo, you just lifted my heart. Thanks!
Well your comment lifted my heart. So thanks!
Chocolate, tattoos, writing and reading. Yep, all the important bases covered in one post!
Can't wait to see the new tat! I've been meaning to get one for years.
Donna,
I must say I used to get one every twelve years or so, starting when I was 18 but I love my new tattoo artist so much that I am feeling an addiction. Which of course I will fight with writing, reading, wine and chocolates.
I think it's a nice way to mark an occasion; like carrying a totem with you all the time.