👩‍🏫 FIELD GUIDE 35: Just don’t teach

Valorie Clark has joined us on many occasions. I wanted you to know her on a deeper level than what her Unruly Figures gives us. Valorie loves history, but her passion for history is so abundant she brings it to her audiences every week laced with enthusiasm, enjoyment, and education.

This week I encourage a little extra time spent doing or working with something you love, because it could be the next big thing for you. It could be your Unruly Figures. It could be your FFOREST. Pour into the things you love.

Name

Valorie Clark

Habitat

Los Angeles, California

Occupation

Historian, writer, podcaster

Soundtrack

My first job in high school was teaching swim lessons to kids. I often introduced toddlers to pools for the first time, showing them how to blow bubbles and put their heads under water–the necessary fears to overcome before real swimming can begin. The kiddos were cute and fun, but I really enjoyed working with the preteens who were getting ready for swim team try-outs–the detailed nitty-gritty challenge of getting a swim stroke just right was so satisfying. Somehow, I happened to be good at it. I sort of assumed back then that I would always teach in some form. 

Then, when I was 26-years-old and two months away from a Master’s Degree in history and literature, one of my professors sat me down and begged me not to teach. Well, she begged me not to become a professor. 

“Find a different way to teach the public,” she insisted instead. 

I was baffled by this–surely being a professor was great? Researching, writing, and teaching are three of the only things I enjoy doing. What else did I even have the skills for, I wondered. 

To show me what awaited on the other side of a PhD, she pulled back the curtain and taught me about the disastrous adjunctification of higher education in the US. She showed me how little professors were paid. She demonstrated how even the best schools in our country are so focused on making money that even Ivy Leagues are basically just degree mills now. 

It upended everything. I was ¾ of the way through PhD applications. I had found an advisor at a great school in England who was willing to take me on as one of his students. This was the next step everyone in my life expected from me. Getting a PhD had been half of the reason I applied to MA programs in the first place–I knew the program would be good in and of itself, but I also knew that I needed the stepping stone. I had arrived at graduate school with a professorial future in mind.   

Instead–I found myself shifting everything. 

That professor sent me off to Hollywood with a pat on the head and the vague hope of finding work on a History Channel TV show, or some sort of historical fiction show–think The Great or Reign. 

I did not find work on a historical fiction show. 

For a few years, I floundered. I worked in a museum for a while, as an assistant to the curators. I put my history degree to good use: I wrote about art history and the personal histories of those artists. It was a fun job and I loved my team, but then the pandemic hit and I got laid off. 

I started Unruly Figures in September 2021. Feeling lost, I had hired a coach to help me figure out what my next steps should be. She suggested that I make a podcast about queer people through history (my MA had focused partly on the establishment of LGBTQIA identity) which I ended up expanding into the guiding principle of Unruly Figures today: Celebrating history’s greatest rule-breakers and revolutionaries. 

The podcast was amazingly successful right off the bat. I was blown away by the response from people I’ve never met. The passion I felt for those historical figures came through, apparently, and I got to see new people finding and falling in love with cool people. 

If you ask how I keep the passion up – It’s a genuine love for these historical figures. I love underdog stories and redemption stories, and those ingredients tend to be in these stories. Before these people went down in history for being revolutionary in some way, they were usually shunned for being weird. But they persevered through that dismissal and I always love that. 

To be even more honest–I often feel like the black sheep in my family. Everyone else is a programmer or doctor or lawyer. There are no other creatives in my family. They’re wonderful people who bring creativity into their careers, but they all work quite traditional jobs and live quite traditional lives. Which is great for them! But I always dreamt of being a writer and living by the pen, so to speak. I think my entire family spent my twenties wondering when I would finally ‘grow up’ and get a ‘real’ job. They–like me–thought that me getting my Master’s was that moment.

So these stories of other rule-breakers inspired me to keep trying. It was only through knowing the histories of other creatives that I kept up my own will to keep going. It had been done before, it could be done again, you know? 

And it worked! The second episode I ever did, on Jean-Michel Basquiat, went modestly viral. An editor at PA Press heard it, loved it, and offered me a book deal based on it. Unruly Figures the book will come out in spring 2024!

Until then, I’m mostly working on growing the audience and growing an income stream from it. It’s important to me that well-researched information remains free. One of the big problems with our anti-science, anti-education culture is that reliable information can be hard to access. And as academic journals hide information behind expensive paywalls, getting accurate research into the world can be difficult. So I didn’t want to contribute to that by paywalling the podcast, but research is expensive for me. Each paying subscriber helps me maintain archive access to keep the podcast going. 

This winter, I’ve got episodes on Catherine de Medici, Mekatilili, Polly Adler, and more coming up. They’re all exciting and fascinating people, and I can’t wait for people to hear these episodes.