In the final installment of our series about how library and archives workers can improve their chances (and spirits) as they look for jobs, join us to learn more about the recent book Search Work: A Collective Inquiry Into The Job Hunt during this discussion with its editor, Rachel Meade Smith, and two contributors: Janelle Rebel and Whelan Tennant.
Search Work asks what we uncover when we pause and examine the textures of something as mundane and tedious as the job hunt. In this anthology, made up of personal essays, archival job ads, labor research, and even a playscript, more than fifty contributors reflect on the rituals, cultural artifacts, and emotional turbulence of looking for work. Their collective inquiry shows how and why the quest for a paycheck almost always morphs into something deeper—a search for belonging, a referendum on identity, a macro view of the systemic forces that govern our lives. Through a variety of formats and voices, Search Work shows how the labor of looking does more than land us a new job; it reshapes desire and alters our sense of self, sometimes for good.
The book was inspired by a free weekly newsletter that editor Rachel Meade Smith started ten years ago, Words of Mouth, which shares curated jobs and opportunities with an engaged community of over seventy thousand. From this community, Search Work brings together a diverse group of contributors—writers, artists, public servants, researchers, service workers, career changers, recent grads—to defang one of life’s loneliest activities through an act of collaborative creation.
As entry-level paths vanish and AI redraws the labor map, Search Work offers a timely, refreshingly critical inquiry into the isolating and often absurd experience of job hunting.
About our panelists:
Rachel Meade Smith is a writer, editor, researcher, and civic design worker. Since 2016, she’s run Words of Mouth, a free newsletter connecting tens of thousands of job seekers to “humane” work in the creative fields, and is the editor of Search Work: A Collective Inquiry Into The Job Hunt (OR Books, 2026). She is also an artist and textile mender who has taught repair skills to hundreds of people around the world. Threaded through her work is a desire to cultivate public spaces that connect people to information, opportunity, and each other.
Janelle Rebel is an artist, curator, and bibliographer whose embodied research practices include experimental bibliography, artist’s publications, theoretical writing, critical graphic design, performance, and inclusive exhibition making. She is the Seymour Adelman Director of Special Collections at Bryn Mawr College. Her artist’s projects have been collected and shown by institutions in the US, Germany, and Korea.
Whelan Tennant is a writer and librarian from South Carolina. Their writing has appeared in Redivider And Prairie Schooner, and they are an alum of the McCormack Writing Center Oregon Summer Workshop, formerly known as the Tin House Summer Workshop. They serve as a public reference librarian in their home state, and they are working on their first novel.
Please note: This webinar will not be recorded.