Writerly Accounts
How one writer makes a living
The next To a Green Thought Book Club will be Sunday, June 29. We’ll be discussing Han Kang’s We Do Not Part. Discussions are held by Zoom, and are open to all Founding Members of this newsletter. I’d love for you to join us; just click on the Subscribe button below. (You can read more about the book club in this post.) We’ve decided to start recording these meetings, starting with this session, so that you can take part even if you’re unable to join us synchronously.
I’m doing some events in June, and would love to see you at one of them. Small Rain is coming out in Spain at the end of this month (Lluvia pequeña!), and I’ll be at Librería Rafael Alberti for a Madrid event on June 4, in conversation with Andrea Aguilar. On June 11 I’ll be in Barcelona at Libreria Finestres, in conversation with Pol Guasch. Also in June, date TBA, I’ll be speaking at the Lorca Foundation in Granada. I’ll also be taking part in two events at the Madrid Book Festival: on June 6 I’ll be chatting with Catherine Lacey, moderated by Brenda Navarro (two writers I hugely admire), and on June 8 I’ll be on a panel about James Baldwin. Finally, later in the month I’ll be in Saratoga Springs, NY to give a reading with Binnie Kirshenbaum at the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute. That’s on Tuesday, June 24. Come say hi before I disappear for the rest of the summer, resting up for more events in the fall. Full info for all events is (or will be) available at my website.
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I hate money, everything about it. I was raised in the South, so I hate talking about it—my only response when the topic comes up is silence, charged with absolute maximum discomfort; but also I hate the stuff itself. It ruins everything, dries up all joy on contact; there’s never enough of it, even when there is: the minute you have a little bit of it you need more. It warps every value. I don’t understand how it works, or what to do with it, other than buy books. I’ve never had any investments, and I wouldn’t have a retirement account except that a nice lady at H&R Block made me start one. I couldn’t make a budget to save my life. My only financial strategies are panic and prayer.
I’m not the guy to give advice about money, is what I’m saying, and that’s not what this post will do. But it’s true that I’ve been “making a living” as a writer for going on a decade now, and somehow, so far, the pieces have held together. A couple of weeks ago I taught, for the first time, a class on the practicalities of the writer’s life, and there were a lot of questions about money.1 Plenty of them I couldn’t answer—“Should I start an LLC,” for instance; I barely know what an LLC is—but the main drift was more general. Most of the participants were asking some variation of the same question: Is it possible to make a living as a writer? And, if so, what does that look like?