Interview with a Freelancer: Elisabeth Higgins Null, Null Editorial Service
You can find Elizabeth at enul AT starpower DOT net.
DEE-ANN LEBLANC: Why did you choose to use your own name or start your own business to work under?
ELISABETH NULL: I chose to use my full name because the name I usually use, Lisa Null, is what I use in my other life as a folk performer. I wanted people who google me to come up with my articles and editorial work rather than the latest folk festival I've played at.
DEE-ANN LEBLANC: Do you sing? Play an instrument? Both? Perform plays?
ELISABETH NULL: I am a professional singer of traditional American, English, and Celtic song. I used to tour regularly through America, Canada, and England and played the largest folk festivals as well as Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion." Now, I perform mostly in the area around Washington D.C., though I still travel elsewhere to do concerts when asked. I used to work with Bill Shute, a well-known guitarist, but now I work mostly a cappella, which is how the songs I sing were meant to be performed. I play piano and guitar and was recently part of a piano trio that played Celtic, ragtime, and Americana music. A cappella is my favorite approach however because you can really focus on the words of a song as well as the many vernacular singing styles from which they come. I teach voice and have graduate degrees in folklore and history. My two albums with Bill Shute: American Primitive and the Feathered Maiden (all ballads) were recently reissued by Folk-Legacy Records. I also appear on a new tribute album of Utah Phillips songs ("Singing Through the Hard Times") available through Ani di Franco's label: Righteous Babe Records.
[Editorial note: Her next appearance is at the 29th Annual Washington Folk Festival.]
DEE-ANN LEBLANC: Are you paid for your folk appearances?
ELISABETH NULL: I used to earn much of my living from performing, though I also ran what eventually grew into America's largest Irish record company (Green Linnet). Now, I perform for money but do many more free community events. I am deeply involved with the Folklore Society of Greater Washington and do what I can to support its efforts to nourish traditional, ethnic, and roots music within our area while presenting masters of these various traditions to local audiences.
DEE-ANN LEBLANC: Have you learned anything through your folk performing that you've carried over to your other work?
ELISABETH NULL: Yes, a lot. First of all, I have stored up the life experiences of centuries converted into song and this has given me multiple perspectives for looking at the world. I do believe if more people would learn and exchange the old songs they would learn to travel back and forth through time, enlarging their own insights and developing a form of empathy for those outside of their own time and place. I do not regard these songs as mere entertainment but as messages and insights that those in the past wanted to pass on. The messages, grand and trivial, that were most enduring were those that got memorized. It's up to us to carry them on. Practically, I've learned to see genius within everyday life-- to connect with it, often to celebrate it. Vocationally, I research and write about traditional folk music and song whenever I can. I did Peggy Seeger's recent album notes and just published an article on shape-note singing, "Making a Joyful Noise" for the Singers Network, a website hosted by Chorus America.
DEE-ANN LEBLANC: What type of freelance work do you do?
ELISABETH NULL: I am a trained reference librarian who also taught folklore and history at the University level, so I like to do work that demands sophisticated qualitative research and relates to my interest in the social sciences, current affairs, ecology, or music and the folk arts. I need to believe in what I'm doing-- that can mean furthering an idea or furthering the work of an individual author. Variety is also important to me-- I try to have no more than one writing project going on at a time and try to combine that with editing, research, promotional work, or web and wiki administration.
DEE-ANN LEBLANC: What are a couple of reference librarian skills or practices that you think freelancers, especially those who need to do research, could benefit from?
ELISABETH NULL: I am an indefatigable google user but also urge other freelancers to utilize the online reference materials to be found their their local libraries. These can often be accessed from home. I did most of the research from public (versus private) documents for the journalist, John Dickerson's brilliant biographical memoir "On Her Trail: My Mother, Nancy Dickerson, TV News' First Woman Star
DEE-ANN LEBLANC: How long have you been freelancing?
ELISABETH NULL: I've been freelancing about 11 years.
DEE-ANN LEBLANC: Full time or part time?
ELISABETH NULL: I bill about 20 hours a week (if I'm lucky) though I am slow and may work a lot longer than that to do what I consider a proper 20 hours worth of work. I also spend a lot of time going after the next job and trying to stay current in my interests so that I can hit the ground running in one of several possible projects.
DEE-ANN LEBLANC: Can you describe a typical, or at least recent, project for us?
ELISABETH NULL: I've been working with Ira Chaleff, an author and executive coach, who wrote a seminal book: The Courageous Follower: Standing Up to and for Our Leaders. He wants to disseminate his ideas and insure their legacy and my job is to help him do that. I have built web sites, located and corresponded with kindred spirits, but the most interesting thing I have done is to build a wiki with Ira, hosted by the International Leadership Association. Usually wikis are used for collaborative writing, but in this case, we are building an interdisciplinary "community of learning" for academics and practitioners interested in leader/follower relations. People consult and contribute to our resources from all over the world as we are defining a field of inquiry where none has previously existed.
DEE-ANN LEBLANC: Can I have the URL for the Wiki, if it's public access?
ELISABETH NULL: It's called the Followership Exchange. It is not packaged to sell a project and the form is deliberately free of graphic and citation standards so that timid users will be tempted to contribute.
DEE-ANN LEBLANC: About how much of your time do you spend on the business side, and how much on creating?
ELISABETH NULL: 20 hours a week on my assigned work, 5 hours a week networking and looking for new clients, and 5 hours learning new internet skills or staying abreast of my fields of interest. Another 10 hours are on e-mail, social networking, doing my own writing, and gestating.
DEE-ANN LEBLANC: What is the most important piece of advice you could give to someone starting out or transitioning into your specialty?
ELISABETH NULL: Understand and accept the way your mind works and organize your life around its strengths and weaknesses. Don't do home-based freelancing unless you enjoy pacing yourself. Work and life are constantly intertwined so you have to live with the idea that you always have something pressing to do.
DEE-ANN LEBLANC: Any tips for handling that?
ELISABETH NULL: Well, one advantage of working at home is that I enjoy fusing the professional and the personal. Most of my clients have become friends over the years and their needs often intrude into the middle of my personal life. Although this can be overwhelming, I find it preferable to conducting sequestered, formal relationships with people whose brains and projects become as important to me as my own. Working online can be quite lonely without water cooler conversations so I work hard at developing a deep level of rapport with my clients. This enables me to "shadow" them-- I can capture their voice and predict their responses if I work hard enough at comprehending their ways. I am learning, however, only to accept work I really believe in and/or to collaborate with people I really care about. There comes a time with many clients when I confess to my partner Charlie, "help, I'm falling in love with this person." But Charlie knows me well. "I would expect you to settle for nothing less," he says. Still, there can be a let down when the job is finished, the piece is produced, the invoice is settled. That's when music becomes therapeutic as well as vocational.
I do have a fabulous support group of writers and editors who have helped me through and are perfectly willing to have passionate conversations about the uses of serial commas. Charlie himself is an editor and desktop publisher at the National Academy of Sciences. I admit, it helps to live with an editor-- much of the time, we just peck away at our computers side by side, late into the night.
Luckily my kids are grown.
DEE-ANN LEBLANC: What’s your favorite part of your work?
ELISABETH NULL: The intense pleasure of helping intelligent people realize their dreams. I particularly love the intense collaboration of working with authors on their manuscripts.
DEE-ANN LEBLANC: What would you rather farm off on someone else?
ELISABETH NULL: Anything to do with formatting, graphical precision, or numbers.
DEE-ANN LEBLANC: Anything else you’d like to share with Freelance Survivors?
ELISABETH NULL: Grow your business slowly and have a nest-egg or domestic partner to rely on. You can go from a surplus of work to no work at all quite rapidly. Freelancing is like riding a roller coaster.
[Editorial note: Amen.]
