Megan Sears
Staff Writer
Senior Adjunct Professor Gary Westfahl presented his work on tackling 315 professions through the eras to a group of roughly 10 faculty members and students noon in the President’s Dining Room.
Westfahl is a science fiction writer who got pulled into writing “Tackling 300 Jobs in Two Years, or, 700 Days in a Working Life” not because he had any interest in the subject or would make a huge profit, but because he would receive more money than writing another science fiction piece.
When making the decision to write the book he remembered a conversation he had once overheard.
“If you want to be a writer, you want to write whatever someone will pay you to write,” Westfahl said. “I remembered his words over two decades later when I received a pretentious email from an editor.”
Westfahl wrote 315 essays each about 1,500 words, in addition to 100 word sidebars to accompany each essay and another 60,000 words for introductions to each section and document. Altogether Westfahl wrote more than 600,000 words for his book.
The book covered 11 to 20 professions in each era. He chose professions based on universal relevance.
“I wanted to set up some type of system for choosing appropriate and significant professions in each era,” Westfahl said. “I concluded that there were six categories of professions that had always been essential.”
The six types of essential professions included: farmers, artisans, warriors, leaders, religious leaders and entertainers.
“As one obvious consequence of all the priorities I established, I ended up learning more about the history of farming that any man should ever have to absorb,” Westfahl said.
He spoke of the profession of an executioner.
He told a story of a woman becoming an executioner after being in line to executed, but offering to execute everyone else in line after the executioner did not show up.
“I thought the mini stories about all the jobs were interesting,” sophomore business administration major Elmeera Nosrati said. “I would have never known females were executioners, so all the random little facts were cool to learn about.”
Later he discussed how research and writing about some subjects were unpleasant, such as slave traders.
Westfahl finished his lecture by explaining all the extra work he put into writing his book. He wrote all the documents, sidebars, introductions, bibliography’s, captions and found most of the documents.
Since his book, Westfahl has decided to stick to science fiction.
He came to this decision after his wife noticed his work was being considered reliable sources for major universities.
“The man is a writing machine about the world that isn’t here,” Professor of English William Cook said.
He said writing can be rewarding without all the money, sometimes an ego boost is just as satisfying.
Megan Sears can be reached at megan.sears@laverne.edu.
Megan Sears