This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello and welcome. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School. We've been making this podcast more than 2000 days in a row. It's all about helping you make extra money without quitting your job by using a skill you already have and without going into debt.
Those are kind of our core values. We've got an amazing community of people all over the world who are putting these ideas into motion. And so I thank you for being part of that. If you've been around for a while and if you're totally new, you can just jump right in. It's meant to be very simple.
You can just learn something every single day. That's pretty much it. Learn it and hopefully put it into action. So with that in mind today is Throwback Thursday. Every week we take a quick look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them maybe a few hundred days ago, maybe a thousand or more days ago.
And last week we heard from the founder of Mantra Medallions. Mantra Medallions, Vincent, the founder he sells medallion keepsakes with inspirational messages. Pretty cool project. Today in our latest feature we're gonna hear from Brian Sonia Wallace in West Hollywood, California. Another cool project here.
He's the founder of Rent Poet. Rent Poet, I think it's just rentpoet.com offering typewriter poetry for events and custom commissions. So you can hire him to be a typewriter poet at your wedding or your corporate event. He does all kinds of stuff. So as I said, really fun.
What's happened since we first featured him, pre-pandemic I believe. Let's hear directly from Brian. I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap up. [Music]
My name is Brian Sonia Wallace. I'm in West Hollywood, California.
My side hustle is called Rent Poet and was featured on episode 1156. So we bring poets on typewriters out to events, everything from corporate parties to weddings, to write poems for the general public based on the stories and the words that they bring us. So I first wrote a poem for a stranger on the street back in 2012 and in 2014 launched the full business. Really by accident, I was trying to do a challenge where I was paying my rent for a month with poetry. And I thought it would be sort of an interesting performance art experiment and didn't realize that there was actually a market for it.
And at the end of that month, suddenly I had law firms and people throwing bridal showers and all of these folks who I'd written a poem for on the street coming to me and saying, would you actually come to our event? Do you have event rates? And I didn't at the time. And so I had to make it up and learn as I went. Since the last episode, we've had a pandemic and a quarantine.
And so all events, of course, for about two years were off. And so during the pandemic time, it really emerged from my side hustle. I worked as a poetry teacher. I worked with nonprofits and I worked with a university with UCLA teaching creative writing to folks over Zoom for the last two years. And it's really just in the last year and a half that the events portion of the business has started up again, which has been really exciting.
But my income kind of splits between teaching, event poetry and increasingly doing performances or doing larger projects that are grant funded. But all really emerging surprisingly from this side hustle. The side hustle isn't necessarily the only thing, but it's sort of established a credibility to be able to teach, to be able to do all of these other things that I don't have an MFA. I don't have, my undergraduate degree isn't even in creative writing. And so through doing this practice, it's built a base of credibility for myself as a writer to be able to, for instance, have a book come out with Harper Collins in 2020.
Having that book as a marker of credibility, obviously it came out at the height of the pandemic. And so it was an interesting moment to launch a new project and to launch in particular a conventional publishing career, but it's led to features in various places and really getting to do a lot of remote stuff over the pandemic, working with especially conferences to do keynote poems. So in the way that you'd have like a graphic reporter creating an art piece based on what was said at a conference, I would show up on the Zoom and be writing a poem based on that. The biggest challenge that I'm currently facing is butting up against my time being a finite resource and really starting to think about what it looks like to grow a team, particularly as a side hustle, as a small niche business. But there are always poets who are really excited about the practice and really wanting to get more involved and wanting to create opportunities for themselves that I just haven't necessarily had the opportunity to, for instance, create a residency at every farmer's market in the city.
That's something that could happen. And so I'm currently working with some of the folks from Pride Poets on putting out some of those feelers, working on really getting integrated with community organizations because most of the work that I've had is word of mouth. It's not something that people necessarily see an advertisement for on Facebook and say, oh, I want that. It's something that people are out in the world, they experience it, and then they go, oh, this would be amazing for my wedding. This would be perfect for my party.
I think the big advice that I would have for someone who wants to follow in my footsteps is just to get started, especially with this side hustle, there's a very low initial outlay of capital. You have to buy a typewriter and some paper and that's it. And I think that the biggest challenge that people face is that little specter of self-doubt, the inner critic that says, who are you to go out and tell people that your work, your words are worth money? And I think it's a really beautiful thing for writers of all stripes to attempt just because you get this immediate feedback as writers especially were often divorced from the people who are reading our work. We don't get to see their immediate reactions.
And to have someone in front of you and to get to see them react in real time to your work, a lot of the people who are part of Pride Poets are not primarily poets, they're screenwriters, they're journalists, they're novelists. And even if they don't consider themselves poets, having this practice of writing in short form for people to immediately digest has been really revolutionary for a lot of them in getting to think about their work and just building their confidence as writers. So I think there's something really special in that. [Music]
Thanks so much, Brian, for sharing those updates with us. Really appreciate that.
Listeners, check out his website, rentpoet.com. It's a pretty cool project. As I said, he is a typewriter poet. It's just like you'd expect. Also check out his book, "The Poetry of Strangers, What I Learned Traveling America with a Typewriter." Of course, he's also available for weddings, corporate events, parties, and more.
So let me know what you think of this episode and more. Let me know who you'd like to see featured from our archives with more than a thousand stories. We've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thanks for tuning in today. Hope you'll subscribe, follow.
Much more is coming up. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
