SOLD AMERICAN!David Harris-Gershon Puts His CareerOn The Auction Block
David Harris-Gershon & Friend
Would you invest in this man's future?
He'd like you to take a chance
by Wendel Potter
October 25, 2005
If you log on to the Internet site, Epier.com, and initiate a search using "future income" as a keyword, you'll land on Auction Lot #: 1312300, with this header:
"Buy My Future Income as a Writer"
"Starting Bid: $100,000.00"
Yes, the comma and the decimal are in their correct positions. And the moon is in its 7th House and Jupiter's aligned with Mars. At least that's what David Harris-Gershon is hoping.
Buy Mr. Harris-Gershon's income? What's all of this mean?
In the marketing text of his online auction, he explains:
"I am prepared to auction off a portion (20 %) of my future income as a published writer to the highest bidder as a way to fund my education. While this, for me, is not about becoming famous, I am confident that, given the space to focus on developing my writing, I will have an opportunity to be widely published in my career."
It's not that Mr. Harris-Gershon is particularly uneducated. He has studied at the University of Georgia and completed a two-year teacher training program at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
So, is he a serious writer, or is he just out to make a buck? If you suggest that David Harris-Gershon is selling out, he bristles.
So far, the auction has brought in zero bids, but publicity in the Washington, DC area where David teaches high school has been strong enough to catch the attention of a well-known newspaper columnist who emailed the writer and chided him for his auctioneering efforts, comparing him in a literary sense to Faust. That's akin to suggesting that Harris-Gershon would sell his soul to the devil.
That columnist has it all wrong, the budding writer says. So then, what is the 31-year old Georgia native selling exactly?
"I'm a writer," he tells me, "who, in a desperate attempt to put myself through graduate school while supporting my family, has come up with a unique scheme: I'm auctioning off my future income as a writer to the highest bidder."
He explains what he is doing and why:
"A high school teacher and father of one (with another child on the way), I now want to seriously pursue writing as a career, and the best way to deepen and expand my craft is to pursue an M.F.A. in creative writing. Unfortunately, the programs to which I have applied take three years to complete, and I'm not prepared to put my family deep into debt at this stage, despite my profound desire to focus on writing. So, I'm resorting to the web and my creativity in an attempt to solve our financial bind."
When I asked him if he would consider going into to debt to pursue this dream if the auction draws no bidders, he was quick to reply, "I simply refuse to put my family in that sort of situation with another baby expected in March. I take my responsibility too seriously as a parent to put my needs before my children."
So does David Harris-Gershon really want to be a writer?
Is it something you always wanted to do? I asked him.
"I always knew I was able to write well, but it was in high school that an English teacher of mine suggested I should pursue it seriously as a career option. She called me up to her desk while everyone was working, and whispered in my ear while pointing to an essay of mine she was grading, 'This is what you should do for the rest of your life.' "
But as David tells it, that suggestion may have fallen on his own slightly deaf ears. He did not pursue writing with any real fire in his belly, even at the University of Georgia, where he claims to have truly fallen in love with the art of writing when he studied Creative Non-Fiction and where his instructor, James Kilgo, encouraged him to continue writing.
From what he tells me, it appears that impatience won out over discipline. As he explains on his Website: "I thought it was all or nothing; you either had it immediately or you should hang it up."
Besides, he says, he was intimidated by the talent of those writers he admired and figured he could never aspire to their level.
As a matter of fact, Harris-Gershon didn't give a writing career much more thought until the summer of 2004. That's when he attended the Iowa Summer Writing Festival where he met "an incredibly talented author", Cecile Gording. David says Gording helped him "develop my voice and deepen my craft".
He became excited about that lost love of his, writing. Finally.
Now, once again, it appears it's all or nothing. Harris-Gershon says that he's "never had the opportunity to breathe and write, free from the day job/night shift shuffle."
He desperately wants that freedom and says graduate school would afford him the time and framework he needs to seriously pursue the writing that he "came to late in life".
"There are several writers with whom I desperately want to work," David contends, "and they teach at the schools to which I'm applying."
So is philanthropy still alive and well in literary America? It's not been unusual for a patron of the arts to believe enough in an aspiring author to help subsidize his or her career.
Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Jones are just three who leaned on the support of others during their struggling years. Their believers were correct in their assessment of these men's talents.
What would it take for someone to believe in David Harris-Gershon? If you check out his Website - www.mywritingfund.com - he will provide you with samples of his writing. Go there and judge for yourself.
So, could David Harris-Gershon, poet and Creative Non-Fiction writer, be the next Tom Wolfe or David Sedaris? Probably not, if he doesn't raise $100,000.
He may just hang it up again. That would be a shame if that high school teacher was right and a writer is what he was truly meant to be.
So where does he go from here? Is his future as a writer in the hands of a benefactor who's willing to bid it up?
Or is it up to David Harris-Gershon?
Copyright 2005 Wendel Potter
Photo of David Harris-Gershon used by permission
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