Why Broke Writers: a Confession

I’m a broke writer. I’ll probably always be a broke writer. Thank god my husband’s university archivist job pays our mortgage. I pay for some things (and my coffee habit) through teaching. The most I’ll probably ever make per word on my writing is a $1500 prize I won for a 300 word flash piece in 2022 from Charlotte Lit. (Great org! Submit to their prizes!). That equals out to about $5 a word. I’d have to be paid $450k for a novel length book to make that kind of money again. 

My uncle Daniel is a big fan of psychologist Alfred Adler. One of Adler’s theories—I’m paraphrasing what Daniel told me here—is that we often get trapped in cycles defined by early experiences with money and class. Basically, if you grow up broke, you might always find yourself struggling, for systematic reasons, yes, but also psychological ones. Let’s say you were a scholarship kid like I was, attending a Catholic school your parents couldn’t afford, then you’d probably always be some kind of scholarship kid. For a large part of my childhood and college years, my father worked at gas stations and sold boiled peanuts on the side of the road. My friends’ fathers were lawyers and executives. We had different homes, different kinds of meals, different vacations.  

It’s been largely true that this pattern extended into my adult life. Whether I was in part-time graduate school at University of Louisville, paid for by a full-time job there, teaching privileged children at a Montessori school in Pawleys Island, SC or attending Bennington College on student loans (worth every penny, though I may never pay them all back). In each of these places, I had less money than the friends I made there. It was all worth it, but I realized at one point that I’d done exactly what Daniel told me about on the balcony he and my aunt call their lanai: fallen into one of Adler’s cycles. 

Somehow, I managed to land in two hierarchical professions, academia and the literary world. In both, there’s always someone doing better than you, someone with a bigger advance or better publications, someone with the superstar agent or cool kid press. Many in both these businesses come from privileged backgrounds. Back in 2022 when people were taking diversity in publishing seriously, I read an article stating one reason why New England campus novels like The Secret History were so popular: many editors and agents in publishing had gone to expensive liberal arts schools like the ones in their pages. (No shade against this classic book or any campus novel… I love them, too!)

What I realized during my MFA and later as I began to slowly publish and collect a few writerly accolades is that most writers aren’t living off their writing. A few are independently wealthy. Some, have to hustle. During one of the Bennington Writing Seminars residencies I attended, I sat at a table by myself reading at breakfast. I overheard a couple of faculty members at a table nearby discussing their numerous teaching gigs that paid the bills. Bennington faculty publish books regularly, yet many of them lived off teaching or other jobs. In my last Bennington workshop, we had extra time, so our workshop leaders, Alice Mattison and David Gates let us ask questions. Nothing was off the table. We asked them specific questions about how they made a living, how much they were paid for their books, how long those books had taken to write, how many they’d sold, etc… If any of us were getting into writing for the money (we weren’t), this conversation served as a wake up call. I don’t want to tell the world or this humble readership how much my teachers made or how many books they sold, but it was less than we all thought. 

The reason I wanted to start Broke Writers with Angelique is because over the years I’ve known her, I’ve found our conversations often circled back to an attempt at demystifying an industry we’re still learning to navigate. We are hustlers. We hustle. That’s what this newsletter and our podcast will be about, the different ways we’ve had to and still hustle, whether it’s connected to our writing, building literary community or submitting our work. We’ll be talking to other hustlers, too. 

Angelique was the first Bennington student I spoke to after I was accepted. She was chosen as my mentor for my first residency. We were literary babies then—middle aged babies, sure, but babies nonetheless. Broke Writers to me isn’t really about being broke, although I’ve been so often, especially now putting a kid through college with another on the way. Angelique and I want people like us to have resources we didn’t have when we were new to writing and just beginning to think of our work in a professional way. We’re speaking to our past selves in this space, those who dream of someday having a book in the world. That dream for both Angelique and I took years of hustle, building relationships, rejection—lots of rejection, learning a system with its own language and etiquette, and a little luck. 

Broke Writers is for dreamers ready to get to work. We hope you’ll join us!